Page 1 of Red Dragon’s Heart

Chapter 1

Zakerek, red dragon of the Al-Maddeiri clan, sat in the corner of an internet café on the outskirts of Seattle, waiting for a murderer to show up.

Not just a murderer. A woman who’d made a career out of treating shifters like lab rats, harvesting their blood and DNA and frickin’ body parts, inventing serums and ‘treatments’ to mutate them and enhance their abilities, whether they wanted it or not.

Madeleine Fox.

The woman who’d destroyed his life.

It was a cold, rainy, Pacific Northwest day, and rivulets of water ran down the plate glass window next to his table, half-obscuring the dreary street outside and the few pedestrians hurrying by, hunched into their coats. Occasionally, one of them came inside for a hot drink and some internet time.

Zakerek kept telling himself the next one would be her. He’d been here for the last three days, sucking down a dragonload of overpriced coffee and more pastries than he wanted to remember.

Today had to be the day.

He looked down at the corner of his laptop screen, where he’d posted her picture. For the last few months, he’d barely been able to look at it without triggering a murderous, volcanic rage. But from now on, he had to keep the rage in check.

The photo was from her Belvedere Labs company ID: white lab coat; a gaunt, solemn face with high cheekbones and nondescript brown hair scraped back in a tight bun; light, soulless blue-gray eyes behind black-rimmed glasses, with an expression that said everyone she looked at was no more than a bug under her microscope.

Just the kind of evil person to steal company secrets to sell to even worse people, blowing up a lab and killing two people in the process. Which she’d done four months ago, before she went completely off the grid.

But he’d never stopped looking for her. She and the people she worked for had fucked with the wrong people. Namely him.

Over a year ago, Zakerek had volunteered as backup on one of the rescue missions led by the white wolf Tristan Barnes and his mate Mayah, princess of the Al-Maddeiri clan.

The objective was to free a group of captive shifters from an experimental lab. The mission had been a success, but Zakerek had been shot with a crossbow bolt laced with a specialized serum that created a monster inside him.

A very angry and powerful werewolf-sized killing machine that was capable of overpowering both his dragon and his human side.

After that, everything spiraled out of control.

The data they’d taken from the lab hadn’t identified whatever he’d been shot up with, let alone how to counteract it. Even worse, the monster reacted badly to being around other shifters—especially other dragons. Like, full-on ravening beast badly.

After a near-fatal incident back at the Al-Maddeiri castle, Zakerek had left his clan and set himself up on earth, a lone dragon with one mission: hunting down Madeleine Fox, the secretive, evil-genius biochemist whose research was the basis of every single serum the lab had made.

He finally found her in Seattle, Washington, working for Belvedere Labs—which the Shifter Council suspected was backed by the same people who’d financed Grenadier, the original lab they’d destroyed.

Just when he’d been ready to make his move, Fox had stolen some of Belvedere’s most secret data and blown up the lab. For four months everyone had been looking for her: her former employers, human law enforcement, the Shifter Council—and Zakerek.

He and his dragon had a simple plan. They were going to find her before everyone else, carry her off to their lair, and hold her captive until she fixed him.

Then, when the monster was gone and he had his life back, he would flame her to death and devour her bones. The end.

A voice next to him said, “Everything okay here?”

He looked up, startled, and knocked over his nearly-empty coffee cup. Standing by his table was the café’s tech support girl, who kept the computer network running and helped confused old people use the internet.

Her name tag said ‘Chrystal’—which was a ridiculous name and not even spelled right—and she was not his type at all. She had dyed black hair shaved on one side, pale makeup with thick eyeliner and black lipstick, a row of piercings up her ears and in her nose, and a tattoo on her jugular made to look like a vampire bite, complete with a drop of blood.

Goth, humans called it.

If Zakerek understood it right, it meant she liked pretending to be a vampire or a vampire’s blood slave or something else supernatural. And also, she was probably obsessed with death.

That was something Zak really didn’t understand. If she’d seen as much death as he had, she wouldn’t want to go around obsessing about it all the time.

He tried to think about it as little as possible.

He also tried to think about her as little as possible, but that was proving to be almost as hard as finding Madeleine Fox.