Chapter Nine

 

Riyah had never been to these mountains. Vyr had talked about them before, and she’d tried to imagine them, but never had she come close to the real thing.

Oregon was beautiful. They’d taken winding roads through logging territory to get to Grim’s Mountains. Entire forests had been cut and re-planted in sections, each with signs telling passersby the date the trees were replanted. On the way, they’d passed two lumberyards with towering stacks of logs that reminded her of home.

Vyr turned and offered Riyah his hand on the last ridge. The parking area was farther down the mountain, and they’d had to follow a trail to the Rogue Pride Crew’s trailer park.

The woods they were hiking through were covered in pine and ferns, moss and wild grasses. Evergreen needles blanketed the earth, and the woods smelled of rich, wet dirt, tree sap, and…smoke.

Something zinged past Vyr and slammed into the tree right beside him.

Riyah gasped as the fire-tipped arrow smoked and vibrated from the force of hitting the tree.

“You missed,” Vyr said in a bored voice to a tall, lanky man with Rockstar hair and gold eyes.

He was standing in the middle of the clearing, dipping the tip of another arrow into the firepit. “It was a purposeful miss, Dragon,” he said. “The first was a warning. The next will be a skull shot. I hear your healing is faster than us normie shifters. We’ll see if you can re-grow a face.”

“Vyr?” Ashlynn Kane asked, stepping down a set of porch stairs toward them.

Beaston Novak’s daughter, Remington, and Brighton Beck’s daughter, Juno, stepped out of the trailer behind Ashlynn, the one with the numbers 1010 beside the door. The women were all wearing sweater dresses and boots.

Riyah had met the girls in this Crew during holidays in Damon’s Mountains. Before the Sons of Beasts had gone to war with the Daughters of Beasts.

All three of them looked utterly stunned as they made their way slowly toward Riyah and the boys.

“We have a good thing here,” Juno said. “If you’re here to take it away, we aren’t going down quietly.”

“He’s good,” Ash said in a soft voice. “Vyr is good. I can tell. He’s been messing up, but he’s still Vyr.”

Riyah slid her hands up his bicep as Torren and Nox came to stand on either side of them. “We aren’t here for trouble,” Riyah said.

“Then why are you here?” a woman with long silver hair asked from where she stood on the porch of the last singlewide mobile home.

“Rose,” Vyr greeted her with a nod.

“Red Dragon,” she said formally. “My grandson is working near here with Kamp. He’s close.”

Riyah didn’t miss the warning in the woman’s voice.

“If I wanted Grim or any of you dead, you wouldn’t be standing here,” Vyr said simply. “Grim is safe from me.”

“Ya damn right, he is,” said the man loading a fiery arrow.

“Rhett,” Juno whispered with a frown.

Rose spoke up, “Did you buy my plane ticket here so that I would be safely away from Tarian Pride territory when you took it over? I’ve been wondering that for the last week. I think you care about Grim and his people. I think.” She frowned. “You’re hard to figure out. You burned half of my home mountains, and then you paid for me to be with my grandson and his Crew for the holidays. Was it out of guilt? Or are you planning more war?”

Vyr smiled wickedly. “Clever Rose. The thought did cross my mind to take the territory while you are here. Grim and all of you would’ve stayed out of it if you were safely away.”

“Because you don’t want to hurt us,” Ash said. “You smile like you got the devil in you, but you’re trying to make your wicked deeds less wicked, Vyr. You’re trying to get your people out of the way before your dragon is bad again, aren’t you?”

Vyr’s smirk fell from his face, and he composed it like his father so often did into an unreadable mask. He placed his hands behind his back and asked, “When will Grim be back?”

“Grim? Not for a while,” Rhett said, leaning on the hip-height compound bow. “The Reaper, though, he’s here right now.”

And right at that moment, a monstrous, black-maned, golden-eyed, scarred-up lion came barreling out of the woods straight for them. His muscles rippled as he charged, and his lips were curled back to expose long, curved canines. He looked terrifying.

One moment was all it took for Vyr to lose control.

One moment, and Riyah could see it so clearly in his head. That loss of himself wasn’t because the Reaper was coming for Vyr. It was because he was aiming his hostility in the general direction of Riyah, Nox, and Torren. And the Red Dragon, for all his faults, loved his Crew as much as a monster could love. And he would burn anyone who threatened them.

Vyr gritted out a pained noise, then bunched his muscles and jumped impossibly high into the air. The ground around his feet had sunk in and cracked from the force. The dragon exploded from his body at the height of his leap, near the top of the forest canopy. Wind whooshed down upon them all, flattening them against the ground.

He beat his scarred and ripped red wings hard, aiming for the clouds, and when he reached them, he twisted in the air and dove, circling back for them. The Reaper had been pushed to the side with the force of Vyr’s Change, but began his charge again for Nox and Torren and Riyah. Another lion, Kamp, she guessed, came fast from the woods and slammed into the side of the Reaper just as Nox and Torren Changed.

The Red Dragon was coming for the Reaper. His eyes were narrowed on the lion, and she could hear his Firestarter clicking deep in his throat. The sound echoed through the mountains.

“Vyr!” she screamed. “Don’t!”

Everything happened at once. Juno, Remington, and Ash Changed into grizzlies, Rhett and Rose into lions, and all of them headed straight for the Reaper. They weren’t coming for war on the Sons of Beasts. They were coming to the aid of their Alpha…or perhaps to stop him. Or fight him. Yes, they were definitely going to fight him.

Riyah’s inner bear roared to be released, and her skin tingled with the first signs of the Change, but she wouldn’t be fast enough to do anything. She couldn’t Change and get to the Reaper fast enough to protect them.

“Stop his fire,” Torren’s gorilla growled out before he bolted right for the divebombing dragon.

On the verge of a Change, Riyah lifted her hands, palms up, and focused every bit of her energy on Vyr and the Rogue Pride Crew. Her powers weren’t an exact science, though, and the bear was feeding her power too fast. The adrenaline was doing something bad to her, and waves of sick power pulsed from her. When Vyr opened his mouth and blew fire, Riyah screamed and diverted it upward to keep the fire from the ground. He was so low to the ground. Time slowed as Torren blasted toward him, leapt off the ground with his arms outstretched, and gripped onto one of the small red spikes that lined the Red Dragon’s jaw. Torren almost lost his grip when Vyr was catapulted upward with the force of her blast.

Nox roared as he stood protectively beside Riyah, but there was nothing to be done. Torren could hold on or fall. His destiny was completely up to his grip strength and the Red Dragon’s reaction to the gorilla.

Torren held on with one hand as Vyr arched his long back and pulled up toward the sky again.

He was going to fall. She could see it in Torren’s eyes that he was losing his grip. Red Dragon, it’s Torren. Take care of him. He’s yours!

Riyah cast another pulse of power from her hands, but it didn’t just go up. It levelled trees to her right with a deafening crash, but she couldn’t worry about that right now. She was focused on pushing Torren upward to help him get a better grip. Gravity was not a friend to the silverback right now.

As Vyr turned sharply, she lost sight of the gorilla and waited on baited breath for him to fall. Nox was running in that direction as though he would try to catch him when he did, but Torren never fell off the Red Dragon. As seconds went on and nothing fell from the sky, she searched Vyr desperately, hoping he would turn enough so she could see Torren and make sure he was okay.

And when he did give her a glimpse of the gorilla still clinging to his face spikes, Torren was yelling something into the Red Dragon’s ear hole.

Holy shit, he was doing it. The Red Dragon wasn’t circling back. Whatever Torren was telling him, it was working. Riyah could feel the Red Dragon listening to him.

Nox Changed back into a very naked, very angry man. “Are you fucking kidding me? I can’t ride him, but Torren can?”

If anything about this situation was funny, Riyah would’ve laughed. As it stood, though, Vyr was now burning a line in the valley between the mountains, the Reaper was still fighting his entire Crew, the girls’ pretty dresses lay in tatters where they’d Changed, Nox was jamming both middle fingers at the sky, and Riyah’s power had destroyed a good thirty yards of forest down the side of the mountain.

All they’d wanted to do was come here and apologize, and now look at this chaos.

Freakin’ C-Teams.

But she was a bright side kind of shifter-witch, and on a positive note, the Red Dragon had gone protective over his Crew. He’d also listened to whatever reasoning Torren was screaming into his ear and hadn’t burned down the trailer park and all its inhabitants. Those felt like small victories.

And with dragons, any victory, no matter how small, counted for a lot.

Good Alpha.