The loud crash coming from the entrance to the gallery made Gregory freeze. At the same moment, a bitter, fierce emotion washed over him. Even as he abandoned the startled Jeff in his office to race towards where he had left Naomi, Gregory felt his own power rushing through his veins.
Dragon.
That was what he had sensed, a sudden eruption of elemental dragon power right here in the gallery. Right here where he had left his mate.
If Gregory had doubted it before, all doubt was gone now.
He’d sensed it from the first moment he’d laid eyes on Naomi, breathless at the way her shoulder-length black hair framed the gorgeous face with flushed cheeks and warm, brown eyes. When he’d kissed her, he hadn’t wanted to let go. He’d wanted to claim her, to mate and feel their souls meld, as it should be.
But now, he knew only one single thought: his mate was in danger.
His entire body was thrumming with the awareness. There was no time for thought—mated or not, the heart of his dragon knew without doubt that she was his. As he raced towards where the sound of bursting glass had come from, his dragon’s anger filled his blood until he could hear nothing but the thunder of his heartbeat in his ears.
He came to a skidding stop when he reached the place where just moments ago, a glass wall had stood between the gallery’s rooms and the street outside.
Now, there was a large hole. One of the windows had burst completely, and all of Gregory’s muscles tensed at the awareness that came flooding him.
It wasn’t just a scent, it was a deeper awareness, a residue of the other shifter’s powers.
A dragon. The scent of smoke. Glowing embers suddenly fanned into angry fire.
There’d been no fire dragon on the council of elements in ages. Even Gareth, the chimera shifter who oversaw the council and knew more than the rest of them together, didn’t know why. They had considered them extinct.
Centuries ago, when knights had hunted dragons, the dangerous dragons breathing fire had been an obvious target. Gareth had once told Gregory that the fire element must never have recovered from that. If there had once been a plinth marked with the symbol of fire in the cavern of the council, all knowledge of it had been long since buried.
Gregory stepped out into the street. Wide-eyed passersby hastened past him, staring at the hole in the glass wall which must have appeared out of nowhere to their eyes.
This was a power shared by every mythical shifter: humans could not see them, once shifted. It helped to keep the secrecy. But even so, there were rules that forbid anything that would cause humans to take notice of their existence.
The fire dragon had blatantly ignored such rules as he broke into the gallery in broad daylight.
And he took Naomi. He took my mate.
Suddenly, the information about strange rumors the council had gathered began to make sense. There was a dragon on the loose. A fire dragon.
But why Naomi?
Anger rose in Gregory’s heart when he remembered the ad for the exhibition. The posters showed Naomi’s painting of the storm dragon. It had immediately drawn Gregory’s attention.
But it would have drawn the attention of the feral dragon as well, if he’d come across one of the posters by chance. Had the fire dragon taken Naomi to draw out the dragon she’d painted? Had she been kidnapped because of Gregory?
For the first time in his life, Gregory ignored the rules of the council. He allowed his anger and his fear for his mate to flood him with power, and then he spread his arms.
A heartbeat later, the body of his human form had shifted into the dragon.
All around
him, passersby were still staring at the gallery in shock. One man, who’d been looking right at Gregory, now staggered backwards when to his eyes, Gregory vanished into thin air. A second later, the man dazedly shook his head as the dragon magic began to work on him, making him forget that he’d seen something out of the ordinary.
An angry roar escaped Gregory as his powerful wings lifted him into the air, invisible to all the humans gathering near the gallery. A few seconds later, Gregory was high enough to watch the grid of streets and blocks of houses spread below him—but he didn’t have to search for the road his enemy had taken.
He knew where the dragon was. Because Gregory knew where his mate was.
In Gregory’s chest, his heart was thudding with rage and fear for her. The pain of having her taken from him was terrible, as though someone had stabbed a red-hot knife into his chest. But even through the agony of having his mate kidnapped from his side, there was a different awareness thrumming through him.
It felt as if the pain that threatened to tear out his heart was connected to a line. It was invisible, but through it flooded the most powerful emotion Gregory had ever experienced.
On the other end of that invisible line, Naomi was waiting for him. He was drawn right towards her. He didn’t even have to think about it—with every powerful beating of his wings, his body was propelled forward at an impossible speed, faster than he had ever flown before, aiming straight at where his mate was being held.