Lovestruck, a Dragon Story (2 page)

After his parents had died beneath the claws of dragons from that clan during a flare-up of violence, he’d forced himself to remember that not all dragons from Clan Tyrith were bad.

There was Anna. Anna was different. And though he could never forgive those from her clan who killed his beloved parents, he would never forsake their deep friendship. As he grew older, friendship turned into something deeper, a hot desire that ignited his veins each time she drew near.

Anna was different. A fierce red dragon, she had not yet shifted, but even when she did, he sensed she would not fall prey to the same vile anger that had seized her family and clan.

Anna had a gentle heart, and adored singing. She loved the mountains she called home and cradled the wild creatures of the forest in her hands, instead of roasting them as others did. And yet she was fierce, with a devout loyalty that caused her to sink her teeth into his skin when he’d called her clan “farmers and gardeners” and not “real dragons”.

At age five, she had bewitched him with her frankness, her daring to play with him when no one else in her clan had, and later, her refusal to break off their friendship despite her family’s pressure.

And now, after their heated kiss, he knew they were destined mates.

Shit.

Hellfire.

He had promised a hundred years of service to Xavier, the Crystal Wizard. But his apprenticeship to the powerful member of the Brehon was less of an impediment to this mating than one other factor.

Anna’s father, Barlow.

He’ll flay the scales off my dragonskin before he lets me mate with his daughter.

Michael breathed in her scent of juniper trees, clean, fresh water and tangy air. Anna smelled like the mountains and streams her clan guarded. Her nose was small and pert, her mouth wide and lush. Large sea-green eyes shone with intelligence.

Dressed in a pink scooped-neck shirt and a floral skirt that accentuated her lush curves, she looked appetizing and tempting. Anna nixed the notion that redheads could not wear pink.
Defiant as always
, he thought with a grin.

Her long auburn curls spilled down her backside. He thought about fisting a hand in her hair as he took her, and his erection strained.

Ribbons of violet and rose laced the skies over the tranquil Gulf of Mexico. Palm branches fluttered in the cooling breeze. Desire rushed through him, fierce as dragonfire. His blood surged hot and thick as she leaned closer.

He would become her first lover, here and now.

Then he could not help himself any more than he could stop the tide from lapping at their feet. He kissed her as if his last breath depended upon it, as if they would soon part. He rolled her backwards, onto the hard sand.

Tonight, she would become his. He would make her his mate.

Everything felt surreal, from the pleasure shooting through her veins as Michael kissed her, to the knowledge that she was finally going to lose her innocence to the dragon she’d wanted.

As she felt his erection rub enticingly between her legs, touching nerve endings enriched by blood, Anna’s tiny fears vanished, replaced with an urgent need to mate. Her body sang with arousal, and she rubbed against Michael.

And then she felt a tickling down her spine that warned danger approached. Anna pushed at his chest and tore her mouth away from his.

Michael instantly became alert. “Your father approaches.”

Barely had the words fled his mouth when the breeze overhead shifted. Out of the corner of her eye she saw her father winging through the sky, invisible to Skins, but very much visible to her. Barlow appeared at the edge of the clearing of sea grape trees and shifted back to skin and conjured clothing.

Anna’s heart fell to her stomach. He could see…everything.

“You bastard! Get off her!” her father roared.

Michael slid off her body and stood.

“This is war. Prepare to fight,” her father snarled.

Michael shifted into dragon, his enormous body now half in the Gulf of Mexico. Anna trembled, thankful once again that dragons were invisible to Skins.

With a wingspan the size of a Boeing 747, Michael was impressive even by dragon standards. Though her father was smaller, Barlow held more power, and he knew how to wield it. Barlow shifted into dragonskin and grinned, showing rows of pointed teeth.

Her father was older, and wise to the ways of battle. Michael had purpose and drive, but lacked the battle strategy Barlow had honed over the years. Anna cried out for them to stop, wishing she could shift as well.

Then she raised her hands to the sky and called upon Xavier for help. Surely Michael’s master could intervene.

The Crystal Wizard instantly appeared, saw what was happening as Barlow opened his mouth to breathe fire upon Michael.

“Michael, shift back now,” Xavier roared.

Michael snarled, but suddenly he stood on the wet sand as Skin, clad in shorts and a T-shirt. He fisted his hands as he glared at Barlow.

Barlow immediately shifted back. Fighting as dragon against a dragon who chose Skin was strictly forbidden, and those who violated the rule had the scales flayed from their body.

Xavier put a steady hand on Michael’s shoulder. “He is my apprentice. You have no jurisdiction over him and no right to harm him.”

“The hell I don’t. He tried to compromise my daughter and steal her innocence. I’ll fry his ass.” Her father’s gaze softened as he looked at her. “Anna, you’re my eldest. You come from a long line of notable red dragons, and your mate will be one who will make our line even more powerful. I have great plans for your future. You deserve more than a lowlife land-sucking black dragon like Michael Vincent.”

The Crystal Wizard frowned, his gray-blue gaze turning stormy. “What the hell is wrong with you dragons? You possess incredible magick, magick that can aid Others. And yet you won’t stop fighting for a minute to see you are all the same.”

“The same as that bastard whelp? He has no family, no name. He is lizard bait,” her father roared.

Anna winced at the insult. He was an orphan dragon, one reason Xavier and the Brehon took him under their wing as an apprentice.

Xavier turned toward Michael. His gaze widened as he saw the magick wand in the sand. He gave Michael a stern look, and her friend shrugged. “You have dozens.”

The Crystal Wizard flicked the wand at Michael’s bottom, and he jumped with a yelp. “Ouch!”

“That’s for taking it without permission.” Xavier waved a hand and the wand vanished. “Let’s straighten this matter between you and Anna in a reasonable manner.” He aimed a hard look at Barlow. “It’s called communication, a tactic your clan could use in future negotiations with Clan Fury.”

“The hell with that. There is nothing to discuss,” Barlow growled. “He tried to rape my little girl.”

“Papa, I was the one who seduced
him
,” she snapped.

But Barlow was beyond listening. As her father drew back his arm to toss dragonfire at Michael, her friend stood straight and tall and unafraid.

“Toss that dragonfire and I’ll turn you into an iguana, Barlow,” Xavier warned.

With a snarl, her father forced the dragonfire to recede. “You little puny whelp, Vincent. You dared to touch my daughter? She will never be yours.”

“You can’t deny what Anna and I share, sir. We are destined to be together.” He spoke with quiet authority and his dark gaze gleamed with purpose. Suddenly he seemed to grow in size and stature, his deep voice ringing over the sands. “She is mine.”

“I’ll show you your destiny,” her father jeered.

Michael snarled and started toward her father as Anna bit her lip. Her worst fears manifested; her beloved father and friend at each other’s throats.

But the Crystal Wizard didn’t stand by and watch.

Xavier held Michael back, his arms wrapped firmly about his midsection. “Be gone!” the wizard roared at her father. His eyes turned snow white, and power radiated from him. Anna stepped back, very afraid for herself and her sire, for Xavier could turn them into dust with a flick of his finger.

“Papa, please,” she begged, tugging on his shirtsleeve. “He’s my true mate!”

Barlow blinked in an apparent shock. For a moment she held the wild hope that her father would see reason, understand that she must be with Michael.

“I will never accept him as your mate, Anna. True mates or not. He is your clan’s enemy.”

Finally her father stepped back, but not without glaring at Michael.

Knowing she must push him away from her lest her father crush him, Anna stared at Michael, her heart heavy, though her gaze remained hard. “Go Michael. I never want to see you again. Get out of my sight.”

Stricken with grief, she managed to speak without her voice cracking. But the wounded look in her true mate’s eyes shattered her.

As Michael walked away, her father yelled after him.

“You are forever cursed by my kin, Michael Vincent! From this moment on, you are a blood enemy. If I ever see you near my daughter again…”

Her powerful father pointed a finger and spewed a line of fire on the shoreline, turning it black as coal. “I’ll fucking kill you and every single dragon in your clan.”

Chapter 1

Five Years Later

Tir Na-nog, Land of Eternal Youth and Beauty

Love sucked. Work, on the other hand, was pure solace.

It helped him to try to forget about Anna, and all they had shared.

Michael Vincent arranged the seashells filled with potion on the crystal counter of his master’s lab. The lab smelled of the beach and sunshine, mixed in with the char-grilled steak he’d consumed for lunch. The ogres who assisted Xavier were busy outside, tending to the plants Xavier grew in his vast garden.

The Crystal Wizard was fond of his garden and experimenting. In a rare moment of sharing confidences over a bottle of witch’s beer, Xavier once told Michael he had been apprenticed himself to a wizard. It was hundreds of years ago, and he’d worked in a lab in Europe with magick, before he died and became the Crystal Wizard.

Michael took a vial of lizard ashes and read the instructions in Xavier’s cramped script and then added various amounts to each shell.

Taking a clipboard, he timed and duly noted the results, jotting them down on a pad.

The lab inside the Crystal Wizard’s crystal palace was spacious, with everything neatly labeled. Jars and bottles on crystal shelving held various liquids and dry measures. Most of them he seldom bothered with, for his study was botany and various magick plants.

Maybe there was a plant that would help him erase Anna from his mind. He’d looked for one, but failed to find anything sufficient.

Michael sat on a leather-padded stool before the counter and spun around slowly. Anna had recently celebrated her birthday. She was two years past her first shift into dragon.

He wondered if she had mated with another in her clan yet. He felt a sickening lurch in his stomach at the thought. Anna was his true mate.

She is mine.

How could one forget a true destined mate? He might as well forget about being a dragon.

Footsteps sounded in the corridor. Michael turned to see the Crystal Wizard enter the lab. Dressed in a somber black suit, with a powder-blue shirt open at the throat, the wizard seemed lost in thought as he picked up a vial of dragon’s blood and studied it.

Ever since returning from a stint at the beach, where he had tutored a nymph, Xavier had changed. Even his colorful wardrobe had been abandoned in favor of business suits. When Michael gently pressed him about it, Xavier curtly told him to focus on his work.

It made him wonder about the nymph named Ciara, and what exactly X had taught her. Maybe X had even dared to fall in love. If that were so, he felt sorry for the wizard.

Love sucked.

Xavier came over to examine the results of Michael’s experiment. He showed him the pad and the wizard nodded. The wizard took the shell containing the potion with the largest amount of ash. He mixed it into the vial of dragon’s blood and poured the blood into a canister the size of a whiskey shaker, except this canister had a spray nozzle. Xavier shook the canister, and then summoned his magick. An eerie blue glow pulsed from the canister.

He looked up at Michael. “Want to watch? You’ve worked hard enough on this with your studies of the Lumen seeds.”

Curious, he nodded. Xavier waved a hand and suddenly they materialized on earth, on a patch of desert inside a walled compound.

“This is where I conduct the most repulsive, but necessary, of my experiments. The ogres in service to me keep the compound guarded from human and Other interference,” the wizard said, his expression grim.

His nose wrinkled at the stench of decay, something that he’d never smelled before in the afterworld. Michael shuddered. This was no garden, but scorched earth, and about a dozen dead bodies were stacked against the far wall.

“Holy dragonfire,” he muttered. “Who are they?”

“The lowest of the low, human men who were rapists and serial killers, the types who are most apt to turn into zombies. There may be a former Congressman in the assortment as well. I give the ogres preservatives to seal the dead bodies for transportation.”