Dragon Mated: Prince of the Other Worlds - Book 4 (E-book)

Andi knew taking a chance on love with a dragon might be a risk, but she never guessed that the greatest threat would come from herself.

As a human, falling in love with a dragon shifter was always going to end in tears. Damian Blackwood’s dangerous world of magic and assassins was never going to be safe for a mere human night nurse like Andi. But she couldn’t have predicted that the darkest secrets would come from her own family. Secrets so devastating that they change everything for Andi and the man she loves. Her dragon mate.

Andi will do whatever it takes to protect him, even if it means destroying their love.

Even if it destroys her, too.

Andi fought not to play with her phone in her pocket, saying a silent prayer that its recording app was still running as she sat down. Could it hear her uncle clearly? Why hadn’t she thought to check it at home? Why had none of her uncle’s men searched her? Was the fact that she didn’t smell like dragon enough now…and how sure was she that she didn’t smell like dragon and wasn’t putting Damian in danger? Her knee bounced and she stopped it, watching her uncle walk around to the far side of the table with narrowed eyes. 

Uncle Lee had demanded that she come alone to talk to him, and she’d done so. She needed to know just how much of her past was a lie and why her mother had hidden a whole other life from her. And how come Danny, her brother, was a dragon now himself. 

She hoped like hell she was finally close to getting answers. 

“Are you ready to listen, niece?” her uncle asked, sitting himself down in a chair that looked more like a throne. 

“Yes. Assuming you’re ready to tell me the truth, uncle,” she said primly. 

He gave her a pained smile. “I think the first thing I should tell you is, I really am your uncle, Andrea.” 

Andi frowned. She’d been surrounded by “aunties” and “uncles” since she was born, and she’d always known that none of them were actually related to her. If she could believe he was really telling the truth, then it made knowing he was a deliberate murderer—a hunter of sentient, unearthly creatures—even more painful.

“Your mother and I were siblings. We were orphaned after the Shaanxi earthquake in 1556.” He paused to let the date sink in as Andi did the math.

“You mean to tell me you’re over four hundred years old?”  

“Four hundred sixty-four, to be precise. Your mother only made it to four hundred sixty-one, alas.” 

Andi opened her mouth to say, I don’t believe you, but after seeing her mother’s photo album, with all the photos of her mother in exotic locales wearing historically accurate clothing, from black and white film into color, she wasn’t sure anymore. “Go on,” she said, crossing her arms. 

“The chaos after the earthquake…it was phenomenal. They say now that eight hundred thousand people died. All we knew was that our village was wiped out. For the few who survived, it wasn’t that we didn’t want to help one another, so much as that we couldn’t. We were just two more small hungry mouths to feed. Everyone was just desperately trying to get by.” He brought a pipe and a silver match holder out of his pocket, both highly engraved, and took his time lighting his pipe while Andi waited. He sucked in a breath through the pipe’s stem, then released it in a cloud of familiar smoke before continuing. 

“We were, quite frankly, about to die. I went into the wilds, fully expecting not to return. My arms were the diameter of this pipe bowl,” he said, gesturing it at her. “I could see the cut of your mother’s cheekbones below her eyes. There was nothing left for us—not in the world, and not for our stomachs.” He took another long draw on his pipe.

Andi steeled herself. She knew just how persuasive her uncle could be to get his way. “And then?” she prompted.

“And then…I found it. At the bottom of a deep ravine I’d practically fallen into myself—one I didn’t think I’d have been able to scramble back out of alone. The corpse of a dragon. Green, luscious, meaty…dead. I did what anyone would do—and what you would’ve done too, if you had been there, if you’d known what life was like. I carved a piece off of it with a sharp rock, ate it raw, and for a moment, I felt like an emperor.”

They’d eaten a dragon. Andi bit her own lips in horror.

“I expected to be sick. I could almost feel the meat land in my stomach, same as dropping stones into a shallow pond. But what happened to me afterward….” She watched his face go beatific at the memory. “I felt better. Stronger. Whole. And I knew I had to do two things immediately. One—go find your mother and give her some, and two—never tell anyone what I had found.” Her uncle’s dark eyes unfocused to look through her, at a past only he could see. “That’s maybe the only thing I’ve felt bad about this entire time. Should we have shared? Probably. But if we had, would I still be alive today? I don’t know.” He inhaled deeply. “I told your mother, though, of course. She came into the wilds with me and helped me flay the beast. It was forty feet long, and we were small, so it took a long time. We smoked pieces of it in small caves on windy days, so that no one else could find it, and we set other pieces out to dry. It never seemed to rot or catch flies, no matter how long we waited between times to be safe, or when we hid it when we had to.   

“I won’t recount each century for you, Andrea, but as we carefully rationed the meat, we realized we didn’t age as others did, nor did we ever fall ill. And eventually, we met others like ourselves—people who’d been graced by luck the same as we had, who knew the truth of the world and the others, and, as the Christians say, the scales fell from our eyes.”

Andi now hoped her recording app was working for her own sake, because she couldn’t begin to process all of this right now. “And so what, you worked your way up, from eating a dead dragon in the woods to killing innocent sentient creatures?”  

Her uncle chuckled. “Well, the answer is that they were never so innocent, were they? What do you think caused the earthquake to begin with? My bet would be on the dragon that crashed down to earth. And to think that people thought it was a comet.” 

“But it was dead, uncle…if I even believe you! Why kill all the rest?”

“Because, my dear niece, the world back then was a rougher, crueler place. And every early civilization experienced them. Marauding centaurs and chimeras in ancient Greece, qalupalik waiting to drag Inuit children under the ice, nian attacking people in our China, the grootslang of the Afrikaans. All those stories—and so many more—came from somewhere, don’t you think? And someone had to kill them, even eat them, so that humanity would survive. We may not have been as sophisticated as we are now, and we certainly didn’t kill all of them, as their continued presence here attests. But if we hadn’t tried, if those before us, like us, hadn’t tried, neither you nor I would be sitting here today.”

Andi let his words echo inside her, the sheer horror of them building. Over four hundred years of killing had led up to their meeting tonight, and she realized there was no way she could ever hope to make him change. Her uncle had eaten a dragon once, and he wouldn’t think twice about eating one again. Her pulse picked up in fear. “And now that you know you’re hunting down living, talking people? Neighbors? Friends?” 

“And now we are into the ends justify the means phase. Which is something you find intolerable, I know.” There was a knocking behind her, and Andi almost jumped out of her skin. “Come in,” her uncle commanded someone else.  

The man who entered was a gentlemen dressed in a well-tailored managerial suit. He had darker skin and appeared older, his brown hair shot through with gray, but Andi realized that she couldn’t rely on her sense of that anymore, what with the magic they were ingesting. He didn’t look decrepit, but he could be a thousand and three for all she knew. 

“Lee,” the man announced, moving to sit at one of the tables like his seat was pre-assigned.

“Joshan!” her uncle said, sounding pleased. “You’ve heard of my niece, yes? Mei Li’s girl, Danny’s sister?”

“So much of you, yes,” the man told her, giving her a warm smile. Andi was about to tell him she’d heard fuck-all about him when he went on. “Your mother saved my life once.” 

The words hit her like a punch. It wasn’t fair that this man had stories about her mother that she didn’t even know. Nor that those stories may or may not have involved her mother killing someone—not something, but someone, a person—to save him.  

More people began showing up: men, women, scattered in ages and races, greeting one another with quiet handshakes and nods. Completely outnumbered, she felt shy, especially realizing that her uncle had placed her in the U-shaped grouping of the table’s center. 

“All right,” her uncle announced when all but one of the seats were taken. It was hard not to feel like all eyes were on her as the group settled down. “This,” he began, while waving in her direction, “is my esteemed niece, Andrea.” 

Everyone present murmured and made sounds of acceptance. Andi had to put her hands between her knees to not instinctively respond. 

“While she’s reluctant to join us,” her uncle granted while nodding at her, “I know what’s best for you, Andrea, and you belong here at my side. As your mother was. As your brother is.” 

Andi risked looking around at all the people intent on her. “But…I’m human.”

Her uncle laughed. “So was I, once upon a time! And your mother, too. But the powers that we have access to can change all that.” 

“If that’s true, then why did my mother die?”

“Because she chose to have you.” 

He couldn’t have hurt her more if he’d shot her with an arrow. “That’s not true,” she gasped.

“It is. We rationed that dragon meat for centuries, Andi—a bite here, a bite there. We even aged in the meantime; look at me. For all that I’ve lived, I am not a young man. But it wasn’t until the end, when we knew we were running out, when she decided to stop eating her fair share and give her portion over to me. She met your father and the rest, as they say, is history.”

“And her cancer?”

“Inevitable, really. I understand magic more than I do biology, but I suppose you can only betray your own cells for so long. Though you had good times before then with her, right?”

Andi didn’t want to answer that right now because the answer was yes, even if everything had been built on lies. She’d loved her mother and known she was loved back. But…she stood so quickly, her chair teetered and whirled on the surrounding room. “Was my father one of you?”

Her uncle snorted. “Hardly. He was a commoner. An unfortunate decision, born of nothing but well-timed infatuation.” 

“Well…if your organization is so strong and powerful, why did you let him use her?” 

“Oh, Andrea, let me make one thing clear. Your mother was using him. She got what she wanted. Your brother and you.” Uncle Lee gave her a tight smile. “Monogamy’s a fairly recent concept when you’ve lived as long as we had. She wasn’t bothered by his other family in the least. Although I suppose she had no idea the effect discovering it would have on you two.” 

Andi reeled. “He left her to clean toilets, uncle!” 

“And did that matter to her? No. No matter what your mother did, she always had pride in her work.” Andi took another look around the room and found twenty pairs of eyes looking at her expectantly. “Andrea,” her uncle went on, ever so reasonably. “I won’t stop you from leaving. But you need to know that I want you here.”

“Why?” she said harshly, the thought of it bitter on her tongue. 

“Mei Li was quite the alchemist and herbalist. I feel sure you could be too. And you have modern medical training! We could use someone like you. There’s been a hole in our little congregation since your mother’s passing,” he said, and pointed to the empty chair beside himself.

“And why isn’t Danny in it?” she asked, crossing her arms.

“Because there’s a chance Danny could change and take out the antique table, if not everyone else in the room,” her brother answered from the shadows, stepping forward. He looked much worse than when she’d seen him last, at the cemetery beside their mother’s grave. He was sallow, like a drunk with a bad liver, a shade not normally found in any “skin tone colors” of a crayon box, and his bright eyes were rimmed with red. The way he held himself said that he was tired, and he was hunched forward slightly like he might lose his balance at any moment. 

She turned to face him. “Aren’t you afraid they’re going to eat you, too?”

“Nah. I’d fight back too hard,” he said, giving her a lopsided grin, despite his apparent exhaustion. 

Andi turned to her uncle while pointing at Danny. “How?” 

Her uncle shrugged. “As I said, your mother was a master alchemist.”

“While cleaning toilets.”

“She was not without resources. She just chose not to access them, in her efforts to provide you with a normal life.” 

“A normal life?” Andi mocked.   

“Andi-bear, just ask the question you really want to,” Danny said wearily. “Why did Mom choose her degenerate son for her experiments and not you?” 

Andi inhaled sharply and grit her teeth. It was too horrible to ask, knowing what those experiments were borne of and what they’d led to, and yet, he was right. She couldn’t have admitted it to herself beforehand, but it was definitely why she’d lied to Damian and why she’d had to come here. She wanted to learn her uncle’s plans, yes, but she needed to know why her mother had betrayed her more. “Okay, fine,” she spat. “Why you?”

“The answer’s in the question, Andi. You were going to get out.” He looked at her and shook his head in the way that always infuriated her, like he knew something she didn’t—some fact she was too stupid to understand. “You know, when she and I started the experiments, and she swore me to secrecy and said I could never tell you or anyone, I actually thought I was the special one. Me. You would be out playing with friends, and she’d be compounding oils to rub on me, making me eat strange things that didn’t taste good, putting stinging drops in my eyes. Always trying to summon out the dragon that she hoped was in my blood.” He chuckled ruefully. “And to think, I felt so lucky. Like I was the chosen one.” 

“Because you were,” Andi whispered, and she couldn’t hide the tinge of jealousy in her voice. She’d always known Danny and her mom were close, just like she’d always known Danny was the favorite one. Everyone had! It was obvious! He didn’t even have to learn how to peel his own oranges until he was freaking twelve! Even their dad wanted him! The world had been handed to Danny on a silver plate, and he’d taken that plate and spit on it and thrown it out the nearest window.

“No, Andi,” Danny said, and his voice had a serious timbre she was unaccustomed to hearing from him. “You were.”

“Yeah. Right,” Andi said, with maximal sarcasm.

Danny tossed his hands up in the air in frustration at her, a familiar gesture from him. “I don’t care what you believe, Andi, but it’s the truth. She chose to keep you ignorant and safe, to save you from this…and yet, here you fucking are.” 

“Now, now,” her uncle chided, as Andi wavered. 

Was Danny telling the truth? For once in his life? She couldn’t ask her mom anymore. 

Andi was struck by another fresh pang of grief, like a knife in the center of her chest. She used to get them all the time right after her mother had died, when she’d reach for her phone to call to tell her mom something and then realize that her mother wasn’t there. The pain never went away or felt less sharp. The only thing time had dulled was that she didn’t get stabbed as frequently. 

Even if her mom had tried to save her from all of this, she knew she would’ve wanted Danny to be safe too. And she didn’t have to be a nurse to look at him and know he wasn’t well. Whatever was wrong with him—whatever had happened—she could undo it, somehow, if he gave her a chance, if he’d just give her time. “Danny, come with me,” she began, reaching a hand out for him. “It’s not too late.”

“It is,” her uncle answered for him, and made a dismissive sound. “And mind you, your mother was never ashamed of this, Andrea. She just knew how hard it would be for you to have a foot in both worlds. Apparently, being a woman in America is hard enough already? Who knew?” he said with a shrug. 

She stared at Danny, willing him to ignore their uncle and respond to her. They’d used to be so close—before her own mother had apparently set them off on different courses. But it wasn’t too late. It couldn’t be. 

Danny looked away from her…in defeat? Ashamed? Or just irritated that she was trying to meddle in his life again? “Tell her the rest, Uncle,” Danny said. 

“Indeed,” Uncle Lee said. “A Joining is coming, Andi. I need you by my side more than I fear Mei Li’s ghost haunting me. Other worlds are set to overlap with ours again, and fresh terrors will fold through.”

Andi gave Danny another three seconds to do something—anything—to show her that he needed saving. Even a strong blink would do. When he didn’t, she sank in on herself and attempted to switch gears. Her phone was still recording. Maybe this was her chance to get some information for Damian, right before asking him to help pay for her future therapy. “How do you know?” she asked, tearing her eyes away from Danny to face her uncle again.   

“Because members among our group have dedicated their magical lives to determining when it will happen. It is not an if, but a when.”

“Well…when?” Andi demanded, and some of the people surrounding her politely coughed in surprise. 

“Soon,” her uncle told her with a tender smile. “When you live as long as we do, time becomes quite relative.”

“So, soon enough for you to rationalize killing people, but not so soon that you have to be held accountable for your actions?” She twisted as she spoke to include all of them. “You realize that’s what you’re doing, right? Killing people?”

“If we have to kill a handful of monsters so that true humans can live….” her uncle droned, and she realized he’d said the phrase before.

She whipped her head back to face him. “Are you a true human anymore?”  

His eyes widened and his nostrils flared. “Probably not,” he admitted. “But I remember what I once was,” he said, tapping his chest firmly. “This was a burden placed upon me, Andrea. A gift…but also a curse. I am among the only people able to see the world for what it is, and act on what I see. And if you could just forget whatever lies the dragon you know has told you, you would see my truth, too, Andrea. Your dragon friend is secretly a beast hiding in human form. They pretend to be one of us, but when the Joining occurs, where will their loyalties lie? You think your dragon friend so noble now…have you ever seen the beast inside? You think it wouldn’t rather take the side of another monster in the chaos of a fight? It has even fewer ties to this world than the descendants that we kill do! What cause can possibly bind it to the earth when it can fly?”

A man behind her banged his hand on the table for their attention. “You never said she knew a dragon, Lee.” Andi turned in panic and saw it was the same man who said her mother’d saved him earlier.  

“I didn’t need to. Because we have our own dragon, now,” her uncle said, gesturing toward Danny.

“No, you mean you have a dragon.”

“And I have been generous with his skin, have I not?” her uncle asked archly. Andi flashed her brother a look of concern and saw his shoulders flinch. How were they trapping his dragon and keeping him still? Did they sedate him? Was his dragon some other entity trapped with him, like Damian’s was, and if so, how the hell could Danny even begin to explain the tortures they were performing on him to the creature?  

“I’d rather see Mei Li’s notebooks, honestly,” a man with an Australian accent said. He had a suit on as well, but unlike the rest of the men, he wore cowboy boots instead of dress shoes. He was gnawing on a toothpick that shone under the room’s subtle lighting, and Andi had a feeling it was ivory. “Why settle for the egg when you could get the emu?”  

Acid flashed across Andi’s tongue as she felt like the conversation was sinking to a new and more frightening low.

“I have her notes, and I’m recreating her medicines as best I can,” her brother interjected. “Without me, you have no connection to her. And Andi’s our best chance at continuing her art.” 

“What, you think intelligence has some blood link?” a dour-sounding woman sniffed. Andi twisted to see her. She was Latina, with straight black hair longer than Andi’s, and she had a glamorous golden rose brooch on the lapel of her black dress. Her tone and her gaze were disaffected and ancient, but her body was youthful, preternaturally so—she didn’t look a day older than seventeen. “If so, you should meet my nephew.”

“No. It’s that she cares,” Danny said, ignoring the rest of them to look only at his sister. “If you can make her care about something, she’ll move heaven and earth to make it happen.” 

“I’m not helping you here, Danny.” It didn’t matter that her brother was right about her.  She knew too many people on the opposite side, and on no planet would she ever hurt someone sheerly to gain from it. “I do care about you still, somehow. But I just can’t.” 

“Not today and not tomorrow…but you will,” Danny said, advancing on her with the same intent she’d seen in him a thousand times for others. There was something poisonously charismatic about Danny. Somehow, his entire life, he’d always known how to get his own way. “Now that I’m changing, Andi-bear, I can feel it, in my bones. Eventually, even despite your best efforts, we’ll be fighting on the same side.”

“He’s right,” her uncle told her, with a knowing nod.  

Andi shook her head. “No. Absolutely not. You can take your destiny trash and shove it.” She backed up, angling her way out of the tables, searching for the door. “I’m leaving now,” she declared, daring anyone to say otherwise. 

“Are we really letting her leave here when she knows the location of a dragon?” Joshan pressed. His suit was every bit as nice as Damian’s. They spoke of money and personal tailoring, and if he caught Damian, the thought of what he would do to him—or what anyone else present would, given the chance—made her want to die. He stared at her, shamelessly trying to memorize her face and she threw up her hands to hide from him. 

“We are,” her uncle announced. “She will come to us willingly, or not at all.” His eyes narrowed as he looked at her. “The time will come when you will be forced to choose. Us or them. I am confident you will make the right choice, Andrea, as befits your lineage and history.” 

“I won’t join you. Not ever.” She clenched her hands into impotent fists. “Stop pretending that it’s destiny.” 

“I can’t help it. It is. But run along now, back to your friends,” he said, dismissing her like she was still a child. It made her so angry, him always thinking he knew what was best for her—it didn’t matter how long he’d lived. But she took a step back and then another and then twisted to see the path she’d taken in so she could run back out it as she heard him go on. “As for the rest of us, I have other entertainments planned. We’ve recently caught a thorn in our side.”

Andi couldn’t help herself, mere feet from the door, she turned around to see two men dressed like janitors pulling in a cage. Inside the cage was a person. 

Her stomach dropped. It was the small blonde woman from the coffee shop and again outside the hospital the night prior. And the woman had known who Damian was, after Andi said his name. Andi looked around for someone else to help her stop things and realized all the tables that edged the room were similar to Uncle Lee’s tables at home that she’d seen all the time growing up. Dining room tables. She knew what they intended to do to the woman and knew she couldn’t live with herself if she left. 

“You can’t!” she shouted from the back.

The blonde woman’s head snapped in her direction, as did everyone else’s. The woman glared at Andi with intent. “Save yourself, girl. Or call a fucking friend.”

Andi only had a moment to decide. If she walked away, the strange woman would die, and if she called in Damian, he would. So she stalked around the edge of the room to play the only card she had, ignoring everyone else but her uncle to stand in front of him once again—only this time on his side of the table.  “If you kill her, I will never come and work for you, no matter what my brother says.”

“If we kill her, we could bathe you in her blood until you were forced to drink some. Then you’d know what it was like and gladly talk about your dragon,” Joshan said lightly, smoothing a contemplative hand down his chest. 

Her uncle moved almost faster than she could see, nimbly leaping over his own table and crossing to the next while flipping his pipe in his hand to hold the bowl. And then she watched in disbelief as he stabbed the pipe’s stem through the other man’s throat. 

Her uncle—the man who’d given her her favorite stuffed unicorn when she was seven—had just killed someone. In front of her. And not in a pretty, dancing kung-fu movie pretend way, but in a way she was used to from the hospital. Real, brutal, and unforgiving. 

The stranger slid out of his chair, sputtering, as blood sprayed wildly. Andi ran for him without thinking, although no one else present moved. By the time she reached his side, she could see he’d already lost too much blood, but it didn’t stop her from clapping her hand to his throat, feeling the last of it, hot and sticky, seep out. There was nothing she could’ve done in time, and besides, if she saved him, wouldn’t she only be endangering Damian? 

Her uncle didn’t even clean the man’s blood off of his pipe stem before putting it back into his mouth to talk around it. “No one threatens my niece,” he warned the rest of the people present, and then turned toward her, her kneeling near his feet. “Does it matter to you that this woman has killed many of my friends?” he asked her.

“No,” she said, wiping her hand off roughly on the dead man’s wool suit jacket. “Was he a friend?” she asked, pointing with her bloody hand at the man on the floor. 

A smile fluttered across her uncle’s face at realizing he’d been caught. “Not much of one, no.”