Dragon born 3 the shifte.., p.1
Dragon Born 3: The Shifter's Hoard, page 1
Dragon Born 3
The Shifter’s Hoard
Dante King
Copyright © 2021 by Dante King
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
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Contents
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Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
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Immortal Swordslinger
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About the Author
Chapter 1
The man’s body lay at the mouth of the alleyway, face down in a puddle of rainwater. Paper lanterns hanging from the streetlamps of K-Town’s business district cast a dim light over the scene, making his already pale skin look milky. From the way the man was dressed, he’d been out for an evening jog when he’d been attacked.
Not a smart choice in this neighborhood.
I studied the body with a frown, then turned him over. I’d almost gotten used to finding people in this condition—but the one thing I couldn’t stomach was the expression on their faces. This man didn’t look as if he’d gone down fighting, struggling against an attacker trying to kill him. A placid, blank half-smile rested on his beatific face, as if he’d agreed to hand over all the blood in his body the way you might give an extra cigarette to a stranger on the street.
A pair of vicious looking puncture wounds adorned his neck. The cause of death seemed self-explanatory, to say the very least.
“Shit,” Tallulah whispered from behind me. “This is the third victim we’ve found this week. We have to catch this monster, Derek. Tonight.”
I couldn’t agree more. A creature stalked the streets of K-Town, attacking humans—people whom my mate Carli Weber referred to as ‘normies’—and supernatural creatures alike. Over the last week, it had drained a half-dozen innocent victims of their blood, leaving them just like the poor jogger in the alleyway. We had to do something.
“Call it in,” I told Tallulah over my shoulder. While she did that, I’d be making a very different kind of call.
My fingers brushed over the black earpiece nudged against my lobe. It practically never left me these days. “Soojin?” I asked, tapping the device as static hissed. “Are you there?”
While I waited for a response, I watched Tallulah Binesi at work. The copper-skinned shifter hadn’t been to a salon or stylist since she’d joined our clan, and her midnight-black hair trailed down her back in shimmering waves almost all the way down to her ass. Tiny turquoise charms and beads from other precious metals had been weaved into her hair, making her look the way I imagined the princesses did in those old John Carter books I read as a kid. Like a savage queen, presiding over a barbarian tribe.
I’d saved the thunderbird shifter, winning her loyalty, and added her to my menagerie of powerful, gorgeous women not long after.
The static trailed off, and the warm voice of Soojin, my oldest mate, filled the line. “I’m here, Derek,” she purred, a slight giggle in her voice as if she’d been joking around just before she got my call. “Carli and Riley need you to hit the grocery store on the way home, by the way. Carli wants some pickles, and Riley is craving for barbeque sauce of all things.”
Despite the cooling body on the ground in front of me, I grinned. Neither Carli nor Riley had left our hideout in the last few weeks—this close to their due dates, it was too much of a risk. Both of my women were heavily pregnant. Thanks to the magic of being a Dragon shifter, women I impregnated didn’t have pregnancies like regular humans. The whole timing was thrown out of whack, which meant the babies were coming a whole lot earlier than was normal. Now, it looked like the two women were about to pop any day now, which meant they had the weirdest cravings. Dealing with them was as fun as it was frustrating—especially when I was out on the hunt.
Don’t be hard on them, a little voice whispered in the back of my head. They both wish they could be there with you.
“They’re going to have to wait a little bit longer, I’m afraid,” I told Soojin. “We’ve got another victim. Human male, looks to be in his mid-thirties or so. Dragged into an alley and drained during his nightly jog, from the looks of things.”
Soojin swore. “Tallulah—”
“Tallulah’s not coming home until she catches this guy,” I said, straightening up. “And neither am I. Can you track down the interloper?”
Interloper was the term supernatural citizens had once used to describe fantastic creatures who invaded the mundane world. Carli Weber made a career out of tracking them down, and Soojin had helped her by keeping an ear on the hunterwave: a kind of police scanner for supernatural crimes.
No one used the term much anymore, as ‘interlopers’ had become so commonplace in the last four months it no longer felt as if they were interloping at all.
“Tracking the energy signature now,” Soojin said, her voice turning professional, the way it did when we were on the hunt. “If the interloper has set up a Zone somewhere in the area, I should be able to spot it for you.”
I glanced over my shoulder as I waited. Tallulah had finished calling in the body to the authorities and was watching me, one hand on her hip. “What’s Soojin saying?”
“She’s on it,” I assured her. “We’re gonna catch this bastard. He can’t have gone far.”
Tallulah’s face set with grim determination. She was potentially the only person in our clan more intense about tracking down interlopers than I was, and for an entirely different reason. I hunted monsters for gold and rewards, to expand our hideout and purchase upgrades for our clan. My girls and I hunted during regular hours, with wealth as our goal.
Tallulah, on the other hand, patrolled K-Town day and night—because she never wanted what happened to her to happen to any other shifter, mage, or human. She’d suffered during her time captured by ape shifters, and she’d suffered even more by being sold off to the highest bidder during the Silent Auction. The physical wounds she’d taken healed quickly—but the mental scars remained.
I loved the hell out of her, same as all my mates, but she could be so fierce that it got scary sometimes.
Fortunately, I was saved from further excuses by Soojin. “I’ve got a bead on the signal,” she said. “You’ll want to head south, into the center of the city. Once you’re closer, I can track the monster with a greater degree of accuracy.”
I pictured the glow on her mature Asian face from the bank of computers she used to track monsters through the city. Soojin’s office was more like an old-school switchboard than the broom closet it had been back when I’d met her. Like the rest of my clan, she’d gotten a major upgrade.
“Sounds great,” I said, turning to Tallulah. “Soojin’s got the scent. We’re flying. You want to be the Thunderbird tonight, or would you rather ride me?”
Tallulah wasn’t so focused on the goal that she failed to give me a naughty look at that double entendre. “I most definitely want to ride you, Alpha,” she said, her arms beneath her breasts making her cleavage look even better than usual. “But not until we make these streets safe again.”
I nodded. “Kill the bad guy first. Celebrate after.”
“Exactly.”
Glad we’re on the same wavelength, I thought.
“Derek?” Soojin’s voice came over the line. “The body—did it have the marks again?”
I paused, midway through opening myself to the energy of the Dragon. The wail of an ambulance echoed through the air, though it was far too late to do anything to save this poor guy. The fang marks on his neck had bled him dry.
“He does,” I said, shocked at the vehemence in my own voice.
Soojin hesitated. “It doesn’t mean it’s the Nightlords,” she whispered, giving vent to my own fear. “However desperate you made them after defeating Ivan Grozny, they can’t have stooped to attacking strangers in alleyways for sustenance—”
“We’ll see,” I said, cutting her off. “Let me know when Tallulah and me are close. And don’t worry—I won’t fo rget treats for my girls. Let them know they’ve both been very good by staying home and on bedrest.”
Soojin snickered. “It’s no great sacrifice,” she said, lowering her voice so any other mates nearby in the hideout couldn’t hear. “All those two do all day is eat, sleep, and masturbate. Honestly, Derek, they remind me of you.”
I laughed. “Except I can’t remember the last time I masturbated,” I said, shaking my head. Tallulah, who wasn’t privy to the other half of the conversation, gave me a confused look. “Any time I get hard, I just sink myself nice and deep into one of you girls.”
“Uh huh,” Soojin said. I could almost hear her rolling her eyes. “Come home safe, Derek, and I’ll give you something to masturbate to. It’s been way too long since the last time I had you to myself…”
“Now that, I agree with,” I said. “Talk to you soon.”
“What was that about?” Tallulah asked as the line clicked.
Now I’ve got two women who want first dibs on me when we get back to the hideout, I thought, looking her gorgeous body up and down. Unlike the Derek I’d been a few short months ago, who never would have been this bold with a partner, I had no trouble reminding Tallulah at every turn exactly how she made me feel—and what I wanted to do to and with her.
“Just flirting,” I said, glancing up at the sky. The light rain had finally stopped falling, and the clouds parted. A dark canvas covered in twinkling stars greeted me. “Let’s go!”
Before Tallulah could ask any other questions, I transformed. The energy of the Dragon, never far from the surface of my skin, burst through my body, replacing my skin with scales. The dragon tattoo across my chest writhed like a living thing as I took flight, wide red wings ripping from the space between my shoulder blades as I lifted into the night. Beneath me, Tallulah gave a shrug and embraced her Thunderbird nature, rising into the air a step or two behind me.
Not long ago, I never would have been this bold. The winding, narrow streets of K-Town stretched beneath me like a hand-drawn maze as I took wing, sailing through the night in the direction Soojin had indicated. Lights flickered beneath me as I got a panoramic view of the city—but not as many as would have been there four months ago, that night the world changed forever.
More and more often these days, I found my thoughts being cast back there. To when I’d fought the Nightlord Ivan Grozny and his second-in-command, the vampiric Richard Enfield, and won. I’d beaten the King of the Nightlords so badly that he’d had to transform into a bat and fly away—and I’d done it all before a live audience. Thousands of photographs and dozens of videos circulated the Internet after that ‘incident,’ so many that even Tomas Karkosa and the Council couldn’t squash them all.
Up until then, supernatural citizens like mages and shifters had been forced to hide their existence from the world. The emergence of the Dragon in all his glory changed that, forcing Tomas Karkosa to appear before the human press two days later and make what was known in supernatural circles as the Announcement. People like me and my clan lived life out in the open now, and some of us were treated like celebrities by ordinary people. I had my fair share of human groupies who’d tried throwing themselves at me after watching me fight a Nightlord shirtless.
Not everyone in human society had been cool with the Announcement, however. A lot of people hadn’t had the best reaction to discovering all the things that went bump in the night had real names and faces.
That by itself probably wouldn’t have been enough to make ordinary humans abandon the cities. But the sudden rise in interlopers—combined with the subsequent increase in monster-on-human attacks—freaked out the ‘normies’ and the media to the point that it became front-page news. Some humans still lived shoulder-to-shoulder with supernaturals, especially in places like K-Town where a clan like mine had stepped in to make the city safer. But most fled, turning some of Earth’s biggest cities into relative ghost towns overnight.
Case in point, the K-Town markets. On a bustling evening, the heart of the city in which I’d grown up would be as packed as a herd of sheep in a chute, with huge lines for the most highly sought-after stalls. Tonight, only a small crowd roamed the marketplace: shifters, mages, and brave humans out for a night on the town.
Until we caught the interloper draining people’s blood, no one was safe.
Soojin’s words came back to me as I flew, dropping a bit in altitude to let the crowd get a better look at me. That doesn’t mean it’s the Nightlords. No, but I hoped it did.
Because after that night four months ago when I beat the shit out of Ivan Grozny and revealed my own dark powers, the Nightlords vanished. It was like every single one of them got the message along with Grozny and Enfield, retreating from both the mundane and the supernatural world. No one had seen their hide or hair since.
Drained blood, puncture wounds, I thought, blowing a stream of fire from my mouth as we reached the market. It’s got to be them. The Nightlords are still working in the shadows, picking people off one by one. We KNOW they need blood—and they’ve got to be getting real low by now…
As my shadow covered the market, the crowd looked up and began to cheer. Even from this distance, I caught the flashes of cameras and the little red lights that showed people making videos of Tallulah and me in flight. It felt nice to not have to hide who I was any longer—but celebrity was something I still hadn’t found a way to be comfortable with.
A group of young women near one of the stalls hooted at me, louder than the rest, and when I looked down, they’d all pulled up their shirts. They wiggled back and forth, showing off their tits like they were at a rock concert and were hoping the lead singer might call them backstage after the show for a little one-on-one fan time.
I shook my massive reptilian head with a chuckle. Groupies, I thought. God, some women are so shameless…
No doubt they all fantasized about becoming my mate. I hadn’t taken any new women into my clan since the Announcement, and the rumor on the street was that I was waiting for my first two mates to give birth before expanding the clan with any new blood. Once Carli and Riley had my babies, people figured I’d open the floodgates. Every day brought a sack of fan mail to our parcel locker, and women had filled online porn sites with their solo ‘audition videos’ for the Dragon’s Hoard. Sometimes Carli or Soojin would browse, and joke with me whether this one or that one would get an invite to the clan.
I’m starting to get hard, I realized. Popping a boner in dragon form would have been a hassle, to say the least, so to get my mind off the thought of sex, I focused on the mission. A movement of my neck flipped the earpiece still attached to my head from OFF to ON.
“Are you getting anything, Soojin?” I rumbled, steam pouring from my mouth as my draconic maw distorted my words. “We’re over the market now.”
There was a pause, then I heard Soojin humming as she scanned the city. “You’re closer than you were before,” she said, her voice tinged with effort. Separating the signal from the noise could be a major endeavor where interlopers were concerned, and few operators were better at it than Soojin. “If I were you, I’d land and get a closer look at some of the market buildings. The target’s almost certainly taken refuge in one of them—but the interference in the area is keeping me from figuring out which.”
“Sounds like a plan,” I said, nodding over at Tallulah. Conversation had proved difficult during a flight, so the earpieces tuned to a different frequency helped a ton. “It’s time to land,” I said to her over the earpiece.
The crowd parted for us as we landed. It never ceased to amuse me how the same spectators who went crazy filming me or taking pictures from a distance got intimidated the moment they saw me up close. Only the group of young women—who I now realized were roaring drunk and out for some sorority event—looked like they still wanted a piece of me. The rest of the people in the market stayed back, fear in their eyes.
“That’s better,” I said, cracking my neck as my human form reasserted itself. Next to me, Tallulah shimmered as her feathers faded, the thick coat replaced with the smooth fabric of her clingy gown. “Any ideas where we should start the search?”
Tallulah took a look around the square, then yawned. It was so unexpected I almost laughed in response. The sorority girls looked from the copper-skinned beauty to me and back again, as if to ask why I was rolling with a girl who couldn’t party all night long.
