Shifters Gone Alpha (39 page)

Storming into the garden I see the colors of red everywhere honoring my dragon. What the fuck is going on? Without thinking, I begin destroying everything my hands touch, tables are broken, trees are pulled from the ground, and all the musical instruments are in pieces. That’s when she walks out and looks at me. Queen Nala, bitch!

“Control your thoughts. I’m still your mother.”

“What are you doing?”

“What does it look like?”

“It looks like you are planning an epic failure.”

“I’m not sure about that, my son, but now I will have to ban you from the garden until your big day.”

“You really think this will happen?” My eyes are burning with anger.

“Yes, I do.”

Those words have me spewing fire from my mouth toward her and everything I didn’t destroy has now been engulfed by my flames. I look at her and with everything inside me, I speak with vengeance in my words.

“We will see who holds more control, Queen Nala.” I growl.

Storming into the open field I change into dragon form and fly away. It’s no use to go speak with Tika; she’s nothing but a pawn for my mother. If only I knew what has frightened my mother, then maybe I could have more to fight with. Seeing one of my landing spots, I make my descent and take refuge away from everyone. Still in dragon form I walk around so I can face the sky and I just think. Until I feel Layern pressing against my thoughts.

“Brother I’m coming to speak with you, change into human form.” He sends the message to my brain.

“No, go away.” I respond, sending a message back.

“I know what has her so frightened.”

This is what I’ve been waiting for, so allowing my body to go back into human form I wait for the arrival of Layern. In the distance I can see the blue dragon coming closer. He lands and the ground shakes. After a few minutes he’s in human form looking at me with sympathetic eyes.

“You’re going to fall in love.” Layern says.

“Well, you told me that much, what else do you have?” I demand.

“You fall in love with a werewolf.”

“What? That’s impossible.” I say, looking confused.

“That’s what she’s afraid of.”

“We don’t socialize with dogs.” I say, with laughter.

“Domlen, I’m not kidding, you will fall in love with a dog or werewolf.” Layern says, firmly.

“This is why she is afraid? Maybe I should go round up some wolves and invite them over for dinner.” I say, wickedly.

“This is serious.”

“Yes, it’s very serious and I have an idea.”

“What, are you thinking?”

“Queen Nala thinks she’s in control, but I’m the true dominant.”

“Brother, I can see you will be fine. I’m going to play with my Wella.”

Walking in a circle Layern flies away and this is my time to devise a plan. She’s afraid I will fall for a wolf. They stay as far away from us as possible. It’s not that we have anything against them, it’s just no one in the history of dragons has ever even slept with a wolf. She thinks that I will run across a wolf, but where? This is the best news I’ve heard in a long time. Time to go back to the castle, for I’m surely not marrying Tika simply because the Queen thinks I will fall in love with a wolf. I think she needs to be taught a lesson. As I lie on the ground enjoying the air, I can’t help, but think of what her face will look like when I’m finished. It’s time to put my plan in motion.

After announcing to my entire family I will marry Tika, the Queen visibly takes a breath sighing in relief. The planning of a beautiful, full dragon wedding is in full swing. The castle is turned upside down. I haven’t even spoken with Queen Nala since the announcement.

Tika’s family is keeping her away from me so she can present herself to me upon becoming my Wella in just one day now. I’ve been told that my mother is already treating her like a princess giving her a full history of what is expected of her when she moves into the castle. I have been really quiet eagerly waiting for the day to come and be over.

Walking towards the kitchen, I’m stopped by Hawken.

“You are up to something.” He says.

“Brother, you don’t know what you’re talking about.” I say, raising a brow.

“You have not just thrown in the towel. I don’t believe it and…I look forward to the show you have planned.”

Holding in my smile, I nod at Hawken and keep walking. The only thing I will prove is that my life is always done my way.  After filling up on fruits and cheese in the kitchen, I decide it would be a perfect time to try Beauka’s new tea. It doesn’t surprise me that she’s in her own private kitchen making tea when I approach.

“My brother Domlen, you come for tea?”

“Yes, I need to try this new tea you’ve created so I can build an immunity to it.” I smile.

She turns around and sets two cups with saucers on a tray along with mini cakes. I think if she lived on Earth she would probably move to England, just for the tea. Quietly she moves around setting everything in its own perfect place. Soon a sweet aroma fills the area. She joins me with the teapot and takes a seat in front of me.

“Why do you like tea so much, sister?”

“It was my only defense against all of you growing up, brother.” She smiles.

“Yes well, we were all a little protective of you.”

“A little, Showlyn gets out of the house more than me when I was his age.” She looks at me to agree.

“True, but it was because you are so pretty. We didn’t want to have to kill little dragons over you.”

“You do know, I’m a dragon too.”

“Nooo, I didn’t know.” I laugh.

“Before we drink and you fall asleep, tell me, what is your big plan?”

I love my sister, but if she gets angry with you then all your secrets will be discussed at dinner among the family.

“I’m going to do the right thing, Beauka, and that’s all you need to know.”

“I worry about you sometimes, Domlen, but not today!” She exclaims.

“How long will I be out?”

“I have a drink to wake you to get ready for your Wella tomorrow.”

“That long?”

“It’s new and you are the only one who trusts that I won’t harm you while you sleep.”

“It’s not that I trust you, it’s that if you do, my punishment will be far more severe than anything you could ever deliver.”

“I told you that you are weird, now taste.” She says, pouring tea into my cup.

I lift it to my nose and as it touches my lips everything goes black. My last thoughts are I hope Beauka can really wake me up.

The next day all I hear are voices.

“Domlen, one day you’re going to drink Beauka’s tea and be sleep for a hundred years.” Gemi says.

My eyes feel so heavy right now, but I force them open and see all my brothers smiling at me with amusement.

“What’s so funny?”

“You do realize that it’s an hour before you commit to Tika.” Showken says.

“You really going to do this shit?”

“Warton, it’s his decision.” Draken responds.

Beauka wasn’t supposed to let me stay asleep this long. I get up on a run and after hurriedly taking a shower, throw on nothing but a pair of red slacks. The dress code in Kalin is much better than on Earth. My brothers leave to escort Tika to the ceremony.

I run to the main garden catching a glimpse of Beauka, I mouth to her “I’m going to fucking get you.” She smiles knowing I could never issue a punishment to her.

Tika’s family is in the crowd of guests, but her parents are sitting side by side with the Queen and King. I look at the Queen one last time before turning to wait for what will come next. Soon the doors open and my brothers come walking in with Tika in the center of them.

She looks beautiful I must admit. There is nothing but smiles all over her face. She walks up to the stage with me and now we are facing one another. Then I begin to speak.

“Tika, you look beautiful and I have an offer for you.” I say.

There is a nervous smile that crosses her face, but she remains calm.

“Would you like to hear my offer?”

“Yes Domlen.”

“Queen Nala has promised you a wonderful life filled with Youngs and children all in a castle among Draglens. I however, have promised you nothing.” I speak loudly.

“Domlen, my son, don’t defy me.” I hear Queen Nala’s voice.

Tika looks into the crowd and back at her parents. She turns and then nods for me to continue.

“I will not make you my Wella, you are my Giver, but I promise to pleasure you in ways you can only dream. You will be fulfilled and have access to me, but if you want what my mother Queen Nala has promised, then I will never touch you again. You can speak freely.”

Her eyes are wide and she looks at the Queen for help, but they are in front of the people. Queen Nala never wants the people in the land to think we are not unified.

“If I take Queen Nala’s offer you will never touch me again, but I will be your Wella?”

“Only in name, I would take another Giver and continue to live how I want.”

“If I remain your Giver then I get to have you sexually.”

“Yes.”

She smiles at her parents who look horrified and then turns to speak.

“It’s not so bad being your Giver.”

“So, of your own free will you are rejecting the chance of being my Wella.” I say looking in her eyes.

There is some hesitation, but with her head held high she says.

“Yes, of my own free will.”

I turn to King Dramen and Queen Nala and say.

“She has chosen Domlen’s way and now, I will take my Giver and have fun.”

I take Tika’s hand and we walk out of the garden leaving everyone speechless.

After playing with Tika for hours, I finally have a moment free from all the questions my brothers flooded my head with through our mind speak. I sit and watch Tika sleeping, but still wondering about the female I’m supposed to marry. A wolf, Layern tells me.

I’ve never fucked a wolf before, maybe I should seek one out. Who knows, I might find the female who has my mother so terrified but for now, I will just enjoy the beauty of my Giver. She has decided my way, Domlen’s way, is the best way to go.

DOMLEN STORY COMING 2015

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Solease lives in a quiet area. She is a wife, and mother to a daughter. Solease loves to spend time with her family. She's been called the social butterfly by many friends. She's a huge movie buff, and loves to read books. She writes poetry on a daily basis, as a way to release stress. Solease is the author of "Secrets of the Ghosts - The Sleeper", "Secrets of the Ghosts - AWAKENS", and "The Draglen Brothers Series - DRAKEN" , Showken BK2 The Draglen Brothers Series, Layern BK3-The Draglen Brothers Series and GEMI BK4-The Draglen Brothers Series

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A Riverford Shifters Short Story

CRISTINA RAYNE

CHAPTER ONE

The night was quiet and still in the surrounding neighborhood, not even a dog barking in the distance or the roar of a car engine. None of the locals walking about, either, but given that it was probably nearly midnight, Tori hadn’t really expected to see any. Without the occasional illuminated window as she cautiously moved hidden among the shadows cast by the houses and trees, the area would have seemed like a ghost town.

If there were any living creatures nearby roaming the night, Tori imagined they were now frozen, holding their breath, maybe even shivering in terror. In a town this small, it wasn’t every day an apex predator such as she prowled its streets.

It also wasn’t every day a dangerous predator was hunted by something even more terrifying.

She sniffed the air. Yes, the scent of male lion was definitely stronger than it had been only ten minutes ago when she had first caught a whiff of it outside the small motel where she had planned to rest for the night. Damn. There was no doubt now that at least one of her three pursuers had entered the town. She had hoped that she had confused the trail back in Abilene, made them think she was headed south for one of the border towns along the Rio Grande, but maybe her skills had gotten a lot rustier than she had thought in the last year.

It was a mistake to come here.

She should have bypassed the town altogether and headed directly for the interstate. She was now close enough to either Riverford or Parker Grove that she could have afforded going without sleep tonight in order to reach one of them by at least the morning.

Baring her teeth in anger, Tori adjusted the straps of her small, specially-made-for-shifting backpack over her shoulders just in case she had to shift in a hurry. She then stealthily prowled her way through the small cluster of homes towards the east and the hum of the interstate as fast as she dared.

A few minutes later, she passed the last house on the block, the wind blowing at her back lighting fire to her heels as the smell of lion that was carried along seemed to be strengthening. She paused only long enough to scent the air in all directions, noting that the smell of her pursuers at her back was now strong enough and, more alarmingly, close enough to tell that it was indeed
two
of the bastards. She couldn’t smell the third at all.

Cursing nastily in her mind, Tori darted across an alley into the back lot of a convenience store. The moment her feet hit the asphalt, a large shadow shot out from behind one of the two dumpsters along the back of the building, and Tori only had a split-second to realize her mistake before the now fully-visible lion leapt at her from only a few feet away.

An angry snarl that was halfway between human and beast sounded out into the night as Tori instinctually threw herself to the side, the muscles of her entire body rippling as she started to shift mid-air. The sound of fabric ripping reached her ears just as the side of her now larger body hit the pavement hard. Ignoring the flash of pain, she rolled once and while still in the process of shifting, scrambled to climb onto all fours in order to face her attacker.

The lion hit her head-on with all the power of a battering ram before Tori could completely regain her bearings. Her mouth instinctually snapped at the warmth in front of her as she and the lion went down in a tangle, her jaws locking onto a mass of his thick mane which unfortunately prevented her from reaching his throat properly.

Fire erupted along her left, front leg, and Tori released her grip on the mane with a roar of fury as she began to claw at her attacker’s back with both front paws. An answering roar followed, and the lion wrenched away just enough for her to wiggle out from beneath his larger body and give him a hard kick in the side with her hind legs.

Tori immediately lunged and snapped at his snout, and her attacker flinched back a couple more steps. However, rather than press her slight advantage, she turned and ran with everything she had in her back towards the alley.

The whole town had likely heard their roars. The second lion had yet to appear, and damned if she was going to stick around long enough for him to find them, not even for a chance to stop one of them for good.

She would run a few blocks, find some suitable cover, and shift back into her human form before trying to make it back to the interstate. She
needed
to be in human form if she hoped to hitch a ride because right now that was the only way she was going to put enough distance between herself and the three Retrievers to shake them off her trail again.

The snarl that filled the night air behind her was way too close for comfort. Tori fought the urge to turn around and increased her speed. She could hear the bastard panting behind her, probably almost within leaping distance. She had to get out of the open.

Once again, Tori cursed her decision to enter this town. With less than six thousand people, it was too small to even try to hide for longer than it would take at least one of them to smell her out, a few minutes at the most, but only if she was lucky. A few months ago, she never would have considered it.

Time away from all that relentless training she had endured nearly all her life was making her incredibly sloppy, and if she managed to get out of this latest hole she had dug for herself, she would make damned sure she wouldn’t let it happen again. Paranoia had been her best friend growing up for a good reason.

Abandoning the alley, Tori abruptly skidded hard to the left into a quiet, residential street and halfway down, bounded across a weed-filled yard that was at least a couple of weeks overdue for a mowing and then raced around the house. The back yard wasn’t fenced in, and she ran diagonally across it to another alley and slipped between two houses across the way.

For the next few minutes, Tori raced through the neighborhood, moving between houses and navigating the shadows along the streets in a seemingly random pattern in the hopes of creating a lot more distance between her and the lion that hunted her. Distance was all she could hope for.

Like living car alarms, a few of the braver neighborhood dogs immediately started to bark, howl, and generally stir up a fuss a few minutes after she had run past their yards. However, it was when they
stopped
barking that she was more concerned about, but it at least gave her a general idea of where the Retriever was in reference to herself.

Tori wasn’t sure exactly when it happened, but suddenly she realized she was being stalked from a different direction, catching a glimpse of another lion to the west out of the corner of her eye, coming at her from a backyard only four houses away just as she slipped into the shadows between a couple of houses. This one was a little larger, bulkier, with a stronger smell than the one she had tangled with earlier. Like her, he also wore one of the lion clan’s stretchy, specially-made shifter backpacks that spanned the length of his back. It was secured tightly to his body in a harness-type configuration with straps over the shoulders and a wide belt along each of his sides that converged and locked like a seatbelt over the center of his belly.

She expected him to immediately charge after her, but either he didn’t see her—not likely—or he was content to just keep pace with her for the moment.

Seeing him, Tori knew her strategy simply wasn’t going to work. For all she knew, they were herding her towards the thus-far-missing third Retriever. As it was, even with her skills, she wasn’t one hundred percent sure she could take on and win against two big brutes without severely weakening herself, only to be beaten and captured by the third at his leisure. Given that scenario, it would be better to race towards the interstate and deliberately run in front of an eighteen wheeler rather than be dragged back to her Alpha beaten and slashed within an inch of her life because she was to hurt to fight properly.

She personally knew of lion Rogues and other types of shifter families that had tried to flee the tyranny of the lion clans that had been brought back by Retrievers and tortured for years as punishment before they were finally killed in very public, very gruesome executions.

For her perceived level of betrayal to her clan, what awaited her at the hands of her Alpha should she ever get caught was a horror of torment even she couldn’t imagine. It was definitely time for Plan B. She
had
to make it to the interstate now. Whether or not it would be her salvation or the violent end to three years of running would now be entirely up to fate.

Tori renewed her efforts in putting a few more feet of distance between them as she angled back east towards the interstate again, marveling and a little irritated that she had yet to see a living soul beyond an illuminated window. Never mind her, but seeing more than one full-grown, male lion wandering a Texas small-town neighborhood in the dead of night wearing a military-style backpack would be something that would be talked about for years, the stuff that made government conspiracy nuts cream their pants. It was a fact that she might be able to use to her advantage.

Their earlier fight behind the convenience store hadn’t exactly been inconspicuous, what with all the snarling and roaring, so the assholes were probably already on edge. They wouldn’t want to risk drawing more attention to themselves, especially only a hundred miles or so from a couple of largely-shifter-populated cities. If humans were around, they definitely would be more hesitant to attack her out in the open.

A few minutes later, Tori was right back where the chase had started, in the alley that separated the residential areas from the businesses along the Interstate’s access road, the back lot of a Pizza Hut just across the way. A quick glance showed at least a couple of cars with only about a couple of feet of space between their doors parked up front along the wide, concrete median that separated the restaurant from the gas station next door. They would provide amble cover for the minute or two it would take to throw on the loose-fitting t-shirt dress she always carried in her pack for times such as this when she needed to get dressed fast after shifting.

It was now or never.

As she ran, Tori initiated the shift, adjusting her movements accordingly as her body contorted and began shifting its mass back into the shape of a human. Five seconds, ten, then she was uncomfortably bent over on all fours, running on human hands and feet. She paused for only a split-second to straighten back to two legs before resuming her sprint towards the targeted cars, naked except for her backpack.

Tori crouched down between the cars and released the catch of her backpack. She had just shrugged out of the straps when the sound of claws scraping across asphalt assaulted her ears like the sudden chiming of a warning bell. Cursing, she tightly fisted one of her backpack straps and darted out from between the cars, intent on making it to the access road.

Making a quick sweep of her surroundings even as she ran, Tori saw them both at the same time. The backpack-less lion she had fought was racing towards her from the pizza joint’s back lot, and a silver, double-cab truck was stopped at the parking lot’s exit waiting for a line of eighteen wheelers to drive past.

She didn’t even think, instinctually changing course to make a beeline for the truck and its human occupants with all her strength, the slap of her bare feet against the cracked pavement sounding preternaturally loud to her hyper-focused senses.

A few desperate seconds later, her outstretched hand curled around the truck’s front passenger door handle, and she nearly teared up in relief when it popped open. Grabbing a convenient handle along the interior frame of the door with her free hand, she hoisted herself up onto the fabric seat in record time where she met the shocked, blue eyes of a young man.

“Drive! Please!” Tori shouted as she slammed the truck’s door shut. “I’m being chased by a bunch of thugs!”

The surprised look on the man’s face melted into one of disgust almost in the same instant the smell of a wolf shifter reached her nose. She froze. Shit! She had just screwed up big time!

“Oh, hell no!” the dark-haired wolf shifter snarled, fixing Tori with a disbelieving glare before she could open her mouth to speak. “You have about two seconds to get the hell outta my truck before I shove you through that window without bothering to roll it down! I don’t care if you
are
naked!”

Boxed into an impossible corner, even though it went against every instinct within her, Tori did the only thing she could do because she sure as hell wasn’t going to get out.

She widened her eyes into what she hoped was a mix of fear and desperation and pleaded, “
Please
! I’m a Rogue, and there’s a trio of Retrievers from my old clan snapping at my heels!”

It was the equivalent of baring her throat to him.

The wolf’s eyes narrowed instantly in suspicion. “Rogue, Sniffer, or Retriever. A lion’s a lion. I don’t want any part of whatever shit you’re—”

The passenger-side window abruptly shattered, and Tori could feel the air of a bullet whizzing along probably millimeters from the side of her head and just as narrowly, missing embedding itself into the wolf’s face on its way through the driver-side window.