The third drive on the right had a mailbox with the door hanging open and was stuffed with junk mail as though no one had checked it in weeks. The asphalt changed to dark gravel as she turned, her headlights shining on the thick woods. She imagined for a moment that she saw Wyatt’s chestnut-colored bear through the trees, but when she stomped on the brake and scanned the forest, nothing was there.
She huffed a disgusted breath. How many times had she done that over the years? How many times had she imagined him near her? An embarrassing amount since her dragon couldn’t let people go. She couldn’t move on to protect her own heart. Instead, her dragon was fine wallowing in what-ifs. What if she had been good enough? What if the November of their eighteenth year had never happened? It’s getting cold outside.
A wave of The Unrest washed through her, but was gone in an instant, and thank God for small blessings. She had to keep her head right now. So close. She was so close to Wyatt. He was home. She could feel that old pull from when they were kids, that old excitement.
She tamped it down and reminded herself he was a stranger. She didn’t know him anymore, and he didn’t know her.
Easing onto the gas, she gripped the steering wheel so hard it creaked in her clenched fists. Her windshield wipers scraped a wave of water off the glass, and that’s when she saw something unfathomable.
The clearing, the small cabin, and the woods made sense. Harper leaned over the wheel as horror filled her. There was a man doubled over, on hands and knees in the mud. He was holding his throat as a trio of suited men with pale, glowing skin beat and kicked him. A woman dressed in figure-hugging black lace stood to the side, chin lifted high as she watched with a plastered smile on her crimson lips. Another man held an umbrella over her, protecting her from the raindrops. There were bats everywhere, swirling, circling, washing this way and that like billowing smoke.
When the man on the ground dragged his blazing blue gaze to Harper, a soft, pained sound wrenched from her throat. Wyatt.
Fury blasted through her veins, and a long, deep snarl rattled her chest. The nerves evaporated, her pulse steadied, and her middle heated with the molten lava that said her dragon was about to bring hell to earth.
Numbly, she kicked open the door and got out. The car was still running, and the headlights reflected strangely in Wyatt’s eyes as he tried and failed to scream something at her. His fingers were dripping red as he clutched his throat.
“Hallooo,” the woman in lace called. “Who do we have here?”
“It’s time for you to leave,” Harper said in a much calmer voice than she felt. Right now, her dragon was roaring inside of her, filling up her head with a death chant.
“Here is where I belong,” the woman said, angling her face in an animalistic gesture. She wasn’t baring her neck like she should’ve been right now, but instead, she was daring Harper to come for it. “Wyatt is mine to do with as I please. And this pleases me.”
“Harper, leave.” Wyatt nearly choked on the words, and his eyes were so raw. So pained.
Harper dragged her gaze to the woman in lace. “Final warning, bitch.”
The woman lowered her chin and smiled a challenge. And then she disappeared into a plume of thick, dark smoke.
Harper’s instincts blared the moment before pain slashed across the back of her neck, but she’d expected a dirty fight. Vampires were like that. No honor. Harper hunched inward, then let her dragon explode from her middle. She wasn’t as big as her grandfather, but she had the fire. Stretching her wings, Harper leaped off the ground and pushed the blood-sucker down with the wind she created. More smoke, and the others were in the fight now. Good. Two clicks of her fire-starter, and she whooshed gas out of her middle. Fire rained down on the clearing, and magma dripped from her curled lips. She arched her back at the top of a gust of wind, coasted for a moment, and then dove for the fleeing vampires. They couldn’t disappear completely. Not when she was in this form and could see heat registers, and cold. Corpses on the run, and she could see them blurring around the smallest one, hurrying their queen on, protecting her. Fucking vampires thought they ran the world after shifter rights were established. Harper would need wooden stakes to do permanent damage, but she could blister and char them, and it would take them weeks to heal from her dragon’s fire.
She maneuvered through the trees, tucking her wings at tight places, working her way closer to the cold blue apparitions blurring, disappearing, reappearing a few yards away. She let off a roar to tell the woman in lace she had no power here. Not anymore.
One last stream of fire, and she heard it—the pained screech of an undead queen.
Harper’s instincts urged her back to Wyatt in case one of the bloodsuckers had stayed behind to finish him off, so she caught a cool gust, stretched her wings wide, and blasted upward through a break in the trees. Bowing her back, she turned around and pushed against the currents, faster and faster until she could see it again—Wyatt’s cabin.
He was there in the yard, but now he was as she’d imagined all those years. A rip-roaring chestnut grizzly bear was locked in a battle with one of the men who’d beaten him. Snarling, roaring, slashing with his dagger-like claws. His eyes were fierce, flashing a fiery blue, his muzzle snarled up in the promise of death.
There was the Wyatt she remembered.
She landed hard in his yard, her claws sinking into the mud as she made her way in a tight circle near the fight. Even injured, Wyatt could handle himself, and Harper wouldn’t dare her fire this close to him.