I groaned, tipping my head back against the cushion of the water. So much for resting. But the resolve I’d felt during the battle only hardened inside me.
“Fine,” I said. “They’ve got no idea what they’re getting into when they mess with a dragon. It’s time to show all our enemies what a bad idea that is, once and for all.”
*
*
Are Ren and her mates up to this new challenge? Find out in the final volume of The Dragon Shifter’s Mates, Dragon’s Fate. Pre-order it now!
Next in the Dragon Shifter’s Mates series
Dragon’s Fate (The Dragon Shifter’s Mates #4)
The paranormal world just can't seem to cut Ren a break. Just when she thought she could finally settle into normal—well, relatively normal—life as the last of the dragon shifters with her four alpha mates, she finds her people on the brink of a supernatural war. The vampires have decided all shifter kind must be exterminated, and they've got the firepower to make good on that goal.
Ren's got plenty of fire of her own, of course. But she's only one dragon, and there are a whole lot of vampires. As she scrambles to protect all of her kin and figure up what the heck is up with the last of her mates, she can't help suspecting this challenge is more than she and her alphas can handle alone.
The secrets buried in the dragon shifter estate may hold the answer—but finding it will force her to question everything she thought she knew about this new world.
Order it now!
Magic Waking excerpt
Did you know I also have a romantic urban fantasy series about a female incarnation of Merlin, who fights to protect the reincarnated King Arthur from a fae threat—while also trying not to fall in love with him all over again?
Sarcastic wizardry, cruel fae, Arthurian legend, and a star-crossed love fifteen hundred years in the making await in Magic Waking…
MAGIC WAKING
1
The day I found my king started with a stomachache.
I stretched on my bed amid the tangle of blanket and sheet, still waking up. The warmth of the sunlight streaming through the narrow window soaked into my skin, but the knot in my stomach didn’t loosen. I knew what it meant. My heart thumped.
Today, after twenty years, four months, and six days of searching and waiting—not that I’d been counting or anything—I was going to set eyes on him again.
I rolled over and caught sight of a creature I was much less enthusiastic about.
A gloom was lurking under my computer desk. No one else would have been able to distinguish that patch of thicker darkness within the regular shadow, but my magic-touched sight could make out even those mindless scraps of dark intent. I grimaced.
The gloom crept along the wall. When I breathed in deep, its presence prickled at the back of my mouth. Just one couldn’t do much damage—and wouldn’t bother trying to damage any ordinary human being—but set a whole crowd on the attack and no one would laugh. I’d witnessed swarms like that more times than I cared to remember.
They were the vermin of the dark fae, so I dealt with them the way I’d deal with a cockroach or a rat—extermination.
I sat up in the bed and snapped a twig off the weeping fig in its pot beside the window. A whisper of the living energy nestled inside the wood tingled against my fingers. It would fade by the end of the day, but in the meantime, it held power.
I raised my hand and pointed it at the gloom. My fingers clenched around the twig. “Darkness begone,” I murmured in the archaic English of my first existence.
A spark lit within the patch of shadow and spread across its body. In less than a second, it ate away my unwelcome visitor.
The twig had gone dry and dead against my palm. I tossed it into the base of the pot. Technically, I didn’t have to be up for another hour, but there was no way I could relax now.
I paced the room and grabbed a pair of jeans and a sweater from a basket of folded laundry. My hair resisted the ponytail I finger-combed it into. Several brown strands slipped free to drift across my face as I ducked to retrieve my sneakers from under the bed.
So what? I was going to see my king today.
No, I wasn’t as ready as I wanted to be. I still hadn’t figured out how to fix this mess I’d gotten us into—this repeated cycle of lives lived and cut short. I wasn’t even sure I could avoid my past mistakes, escape what had happened last time—
My throat constricted. Catching that thought before it could blossom, I balled it up and tossed it away. I’d never been completely ready. But we were both still living. At least I’d accomplished that much.
I knelt to pluck several more twigs off the fig’s outer branches, stuffed the handfuls into my pockets, and opened my closet.
My wands waited in a shoebox I’d stuffed under winter boots and a spare blanket. I ran my fingers over the smooth sticks. The magic I’d worked on them had sealed their life inside—if I’d left them out in the sun, they’d have started sprouting leaves. I tucked the birch one into my backpack.
To find a pair of gloves, I had to dig through my remaining moving boxes. But it wasn’t just glooms and other dark rabble my king would need protection from.
It was also me.
I jammed a thin cotton pair into my back pocket and stepped out of my bedroom, my pulse still jittering.
Priya, my roommate, stood in the kitchen. She was spreading jam on a piece of toast. Her head of sleep-rumpled black hair bobbed up at the sound of my door, and a smile leapt to her face.
“Good morning, Emmaline!” She waved the knife at me with her usual frenetic grace. “Want eggs? I was just thinking I’d fry some up to go with my toast.”
No one else called me “Emmaline” except my mom—I always told acquaintances and teachers to stick to “Emma.” But Priya had seen my given name when we’d been filling out the lease and declared it one of the most beautiful names she’d ever heard. Somehow I hadn’t had the heart to tell her I found it incredibly stuffy. In her cheery voice, it did sound kind of pretty.
I was already smiling back at her despite the twist of impatience inside me. Priya’s boundless enthusiasm made it difficult to be irritated at her, which was probably why we were tentatively becoming friends. I hadn’t been in the habit of making many of those—in this life or those prior.
“Thanks, but I think I’ll stick to toast,” I said. “Leave the jam out?” Food derived from animals didn’t always sit well in my stomach. No need to add to my supernatural indigestion.
Priya chattered about an article she’d read for her politics course and her theories about the latest episode of a TV show we’d been watching while I gulped down my quick breakfast. Normally, I’d have contributed more. As I swallowed my last bite, Priya tilted her head.
“Something’s bothering you,” she said. “What’s up?”