Shadow dragon shifter ag.., p.1
Shadow Dragon (Shifter Agents), page 1
SHADOW DRAGON
SHIFTER AGENTS #5
LAUREN ESKER
Shadow Dragon
Shifter Agents #5
Copyright © 2024 by Lauren Esker/Layla Lawlor
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.
The series so far:
Handcuffed to the Bear
Guard Wolf
Dragon’s Luck
Tiger in the Hot Zone
Shadow Dragon
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
Chapter 27
Author’s Note
Writing as Lauren Esker
Writing as Zoe Chant
Preview: Bodyguard Shifters Collection 1
CHAPTER 1
By the time Azarias Caine saw that his boss’s door was open, it was too late.
“Caine! Come on in.”
Caine stifled the urge to curse. He didn’t want to deal with Costa right now. He had stopped by the office to drop off some paperwork before he headed home, hoping to miss actually having to talk to anyone. That was why he’d skipped the bullpen and went to leave the file in Costa’s inbox.
Unfortunately, the chief was an unrepentant early riser, the sort of person who jogged five miles before breakfast and bounded into work an hour early just because he was that fired up about getting started on his day.
Caine thought about slinking out, but it would only lead to even more awkward conversations down the road. So he slouched inside instead, every line of his body radiating don’t-talk-to-me vibes.
Cesar Quinn Costa, head of the Arizona SCB, was standing with his arms crossed, contemplating a taxidermied bass on the wall. His office was spacious and bright, with Southwest-patterned rugs on the floor and huge picture windows behind his desk that drenched the room in silvery-gold morning sun. Caine resisted the urge to rub his temples. Even through his dark shades, the bright light was giving him a headache.
“Good morning, Azarias,” Costa said. “Is that the Hernandez report? Just three weeks late, not too bad by your standards. Glad to see you actually in the office for a change.”
“I’m not in it, I’m leaving it,” Caine said. He dropped the file on the edge of the heavy wooden credenza along the wall, among a clutter of folders, binders, and fishing trophies.
“You know, Caine, I give you more leeway and less supervision than most of my agents. Do you know why that is?” Costa turned to fix Caine with his infamous piercing stare. Or at least he tried to. Caine, a master of the creepily unsettling stare himself, merely gazed back from behind his sunglasses.
“Because of my winning personality and sunny smile.” No smile accompanied the words; he kept his face perfectly blank.
“Because you get the job done. And trying to keep you on a tight leash doesn’t make you more effective, it only makes you harder to deal with.”
Caine sat on the leather couch beside the credenza, picking a place where the sun wasn’t in his eyes. “If there’s a point, then get to it. I’ve been out all night and I’d like to catch some sleep.”
He worked nights by choice. There wasn’t much competition in the office for late shifts. Most of his co-workers would rather spend time with their families or catch up on extra sleep. Caine preferred to work in the dark for many reasons, the least of which was that he didn’t have to deal with people getting in his way.
Costa leaned a hip on the edge of his desk. He was a big, athletic man with a deep tan and dark red hair. The gentle buzz that allowed shifters to recognize each other jangled at Caine’s nerves, getting under his skin.
“The point is that you’ve always been a bit of a maverick. A rogue. And that’s fine, you do your own thing and you’re damn good at it. But since everything this past year—since Thiessen died—”
Caine could feel every muscle in his body tense as if he’d touched an electrical cable. He had been lounging on the couch with a deliberate air of casual indifference, one ankle crossed over the knee of his black jeans. Now he sat forward sharply, bringing both feet to the floor.
“If you have a problem with my performance on the job, just say so,” he snapped. “No need to bring anything else into it.”
Costa crossed his arms over his broad chest. He didn’t flinch, let alone retreat. Caine knew that nearly everyone in the office was intimidated by him, even downright afraid of him—but not the chief. There were times when he appreciated it, and times like now when it was deeply inconvenient.
“You’re grieving,” Costa said flatly. “I know you like to pretend you don’t have feelings like the rest of us ordinary mortals, but Cameron Thiessen was our friend, Azarias. He was your friend, maybe the only close friend you have here. I’ve repeatedly offered you time off to recover—”
“And I don’t want it,” Caine snapped, leaping to his feet. His body felt like a live wire, jangling with energy. He kept his voice cold and calm, his face still, with a lifetime’s practice. “I want to work. If you’re going to suspend me, go ahead, but you’d better be prepared to put a reason on the paperwork. If you think you can justify feelings to the big boss, go right ahead.”
Costa straightened ominously from his perch on the edge of his desk. As anyone who had dealt with the volatile temper of the Arizona SCB chief knew only too well, it was when he got quiet that you knew you’d entered the danger zone.
“I don’t need to justify compassionate leave to Director Easton. But if you’re going to force me to complain about your work performance, Caine, then how about this. You go off leash constantly, you’re never around when we want you, you don’t answer your phone, you pick and choose assignments based on what you want rather than what I hand out. You’re not a team player, you don’t work well with others, you’ve alienated most of your colleagues at the bureau by being a dick to them. You’re becoming an active liability because half the time you end up working at cross purposes to the people who are supposed to be on your team because you can’t be bothered to talk to anyone—does that sound like enough reason for you?”
The two men glared at each other. Costa was broad and tall, Caine slim but of equal height, with wiry strength hidden beneath the dark clothing he preferred. Caine’s sunglass-covered eyes glared into Costa’s light hazel ones.
When Caine blinked at last, it was with slow and deliberate insubordination.
“If you want to suspend me, go ahead,” he said quietly. “If you want to fire me, do that. If not, I’ll be back on duty tonight, as always. You’d have to put on two or three agents to replace me, and you know it, because I’ll take the shifts no one else will, and I never take time off.”
“I know that,” Costa said. “And it’s killing you.”
Caine turned on his heel and walked out.
Driving home in the knife-edged morning sun, Caine cursed under his breath. Delayed by Costa, he was now tangled up in Tucson’s morning rush hour traffic. In general, he rarely had to deal with it because he was driving out of the city when everyone else was driving in. But even side roads could snarl up at the wrong time of day, and now he was caught in a crawling line of cars. His headache spiked, equal parts tension and the glare of the sun off walls made of adobe or painted pale colors to reflect heat. With nothing to do except think, he couldn’t stop the confrontation with Costa from playing over and over in his aching head.
“Meddling, intrusive asshole,” Caine snarled.
As if on cue, his phone vibrated with a text from Costa: You’re off duty tonight. Get some sleep.
Calm and glacially controlled most of the time, Caine was rarely given to displays of temper. When he struck his steering wheel with a fist, the outburst startled him. He drew a few deep breaths, leaned back in his seat and closed his eyes.
Thiessen.
Costa was right about one thing. Caine didn’t have many friends—or any friends. Cameron Thiessen, his sometime partner, had died in the line of duty earlier that year. Since then, Caine felt as if the life he had built for himself at the SCB had become as fragile and easily shattered as a thin layer of ice.
Nothing had actually broken—yet. But he had no idea how to put things back to the way they had been, solid and secure.
Maybe being suspended or fired was the inevitable outcome of it all. Maybe it was what he needed. Freed of the Bureau’s onerous regulations, he would have only himself to be responsible for. He would be—
“Completely alone,” he murmured.
The traffic continued to inch along, and it finally occurred to him to wonder what the hold-up was. He rolled down his window. The air was cool enough to be pleasant this early, but it reeked of s
When a fire truck crawled past with sirens shrilling, driving half on the curb to avoid the car-packed street, Caine decided to investigate. There was nowhere to park legally, so he veered onto the sidewalk. A human onlooker was nearly clipped by his bumper before jumping, startled, out of the way. This was followed by flipping him off. Caine ignored it and got out of the car.
“What’s the matter with you, buddy?”
The human was a college kid, early twenties, with a blond crew cut and muscles straining against a U of A T-shirt. Caine was tall but lean, thirty-something in general appearance, his utter lack of a tan signaling to the sun-loving desert dwellers that he was either newly arrived from more northern climates or a terminal shut-in. In dark jeans and a black suit jacket, he was aware that he gave off a vague impression that he might work for a tech company or similar. Not a physically threatening type. The sense of menace that made shifters veer away from him apparently didn’t work so well on humans.
At least not on the jock, who got up in his face and demanded, “Are you drunk? You deaf? I’m talking to you, buddy.”
Caine pulled down his sunglasses and looked at the college kid over the tops. The glare off the buildings stabbed an icepick through his temple.
The jock paled visibly under his tan and stepped back.
There was nothing exceptionally unusual, Caine knew, about his eyes—most of the time, anyway—except their profound darkness, the irises almost as black as the pupils. But when he turned the full force of his stare on most people, they suddenly found somewhere else to be. Their conscious minds didn’t register it, of course. If asked, they would have said his kind were a myth, a legend, a fantasy for a more superstitious time.
But their hindbrain knew. Their instincts knew. And because of that, the jock moved out of his way without a word and went hastily off to find a better vantage point to shoot cell phone video of emergency vehicles, preferably a spot with 100% less Caine in it.
Caine jogged toward the epicenter of the commotion. A multi-story apartment complex was on fire. Smoke boiled out of the third and fourth floors, rolling up into the cloudless blue bowl of the sky. There was a scrum of emergency vehicles around the building, police doing crowd control, fire trucks trying to get close enough to douse the flames. A group of firefighters were working on getting a ladder to the top floor. Looking up, Caine briefly glimpsed an arm appear out of a window, waving frantically.
Civilians trapped inside.
He was off duty. Driving home, minding his own business. In fact, his boss had outright ordered him to take some time off. If he’d made it out of the SCB offices ten minutes earlier, he would’ve been through this neighborhood before anyone called the fire department. He might already be almost home. Five more minutes and he’d be in his own quiet, dark living room, stripping off his shoes, popping some painkillers before crashing on the couch ...
Caine took a last, long look at the window, fixing its location in his head, then turned his back and went looking for the thing he needed most: a dark place.
This would have been so much easier at night.
There was nothing nearby that would do. The neighborhood was mixed residential and low-rent business, duplexes and apartments sharing street frontage with strip malls, inexpensive Tex-Mex restaurants, and check-cashing places. Most of the businesses were still closed. In the clear morning sun, none of the shadows around the buildings were deep or dark enough to use.
... wait. There was a small convenience store with its OPEN sign lit up.
Caine pushed open the door, its cheerful bell jangling against his last nerve. The only person in the place was the countergirl, pretty and ponytailed, craning anxiously to see the fire through densely packed displays of junk food.
“You got a restroom?” Caine asked her gruffly.
“Employees only,” she told him.
Caine flashed his badge at her. He didn’t hold it up long enough to let her see what it said, just showing enough to make the official status clear. “I’m a federal agent and I need to use your restroom.”
Wordlessly, she pointed to the back. Caine marched past the counter, through an open EMPLOYEES ONLY door into a cluttered storage area. A door stood open to the back alley, letting in a dry breeze that smelled of asphalt and smoke. Caine stepped around a mop bucket to the closet-sized employee restroom, consisting only of a toilet and a sink so crammed together there was barely room to stand. At least it was clean.
He closed the door behind him and threw the bolt to avoid the risk of the countergirl getting curious and coming back to find out if he was up to anything funny. The light was on, the fan rattling anemically. He flipped the switch off and plunged the small space into darkness.
It wasn’t completely dark; enough light came in under the door to turn the darkness faintly gray. But it was enough. Caine took off his sunglasses, folded them neatly, and slipped them into his pocket. Then he opened his eyes wide and looked into the dark.
It was an odd experience, this shifting of perception. He “saw” the world now as a kind of three-dimensional abstraction. Physical matter had no meaning. Shadows were the only solid things. The shape and depth of nearby shadows were very clear to him; he could have walked almost without effort from this cramped bathroom into the more spacious public restrooms of the closed restaurant next door.
Farther away, things became harder to see, especially with the pitiless sun wiping out the links in the network of shadows that connected all parts of the world. At night, he could have gone almost anywhere, as long as he had some kind of visual and spatial reference for where he was aiming at. By day, he was much more limited. He could still make long jumps if he had a good map to pinpoint the place he was going—the farthest he’d leaped like that so far was a couple hundred miles—but getting to it without guidance, shadow to shadow, was harder.
But the apartment building was close, and he knew its direction. As for the negatives, well ... fire. Most of the building was lit up with pitiless light that banished shadows and made it impossible for Caine to see or sense anything at all. His very soul shrank away from it. Trying to look at the fire hurt. It was like peering into the sun.
But there were still shadows. The upper floors were cloaked in them; he just had to find a route around the cruelly bright flames. He had to make sure he had not only had a way there, but ensure that it wouldn’t immediately close off behind him so he couldn’t get back.
If he did get trapped on the top floor, he still had one way out, but it was an absolute last resort only. If he ever played that hole card, nothing would ever be the same again.
He had to go now, before the fire closed off any hope of escape. Eyes wide open, staring fixedly at the destination only he could see, Caine went.
It took a hard push, lasting only a fraction of a second, but he felt the energy go out of him as if he’d struggled to lift a heavy weight for hours. There was a sharp chill and a sense of vast space around him.
At the same time, he felt himself partially shift, dark wings unfurling. The change, like the journey, was nearly instantaneous—and unlike most other shifters he’d met, his clothing stayed with him, fading away as he shifted (perhaps into the same shadow-space that contained his other self; it was vast, with no limit to what it could hold) and then returning to coalesce around him as he stepped out of the true shadow into a lesser darkness.
Smells hit him, acrid smoke mixed with floral perfume. Fabric clung to his face. Hangers rattled. He was in a closet.
Caine coughed. His body ached. He had dragged himself through too-thin shadows to get here, and going back would be worse. He had to move fast.
He pushed open the closet door and looked out into a bedroom, cluttered but empty of people. Smoke stung his eyes.
Caine went swiftly across the room to an open door leading into a small living room and kitchen. Here the air was a little fresher; the window was open. There was a teenage girl leaning out, waving frantically—the slim arm he had seen from below.
“Miss,” Caine said.
His voice wasn’t loud; it never was. But the girl heard him. She jumped and turned around.
Caine beckoned, and she came willingly, too frightened to ask questions. She didn’t balk until he attempted to herd her into the closet. Then she began to say, “No, no!”
