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Things were changing. I’d been with Danna more than once now, and every time we were together, it was as if I was whole. I wasn’t just a wandering soul, I was finally home.
How could I send her away?
Emmie needed someone in her life to show her the ropes when she finally shifted into a dragon. There was no doubt that was what she was—I was a dragon, and I was her father.
Still, her power was a lot more intense than anything I’d ever seen in a child so young, and something was up with that. It shouldn’t have been like this. I wished I knew a way to find out, but that would mean asking the fae to help me. Circe had good intentions. She was clearly on Danna and Emmie’s side. I had a feeling she’d wormed her way into their life because she’d known what Emmie was long before Danna had figured it out.
Fae were like that, always doing spells, always understanding things about the future that no one else knew.
Would they have helped me if they’d known my future? Why hadn’t they been there for me when I’d been abandoned, left to fend for myself long before I’d had a dragon who could help me with that? They’d just put me in one home after the next, where I’d been shunned and forgotten and used time and again.
Fuck the fae.
I closed my eyes, anger boiling under my skin. My anger was like a live wire, and the smallest shit could trip it, and I blew up.
Lately, it wasn’t that bad. In fact, when I was with Danna, I was barely aware of my dragon and the way the beast liked to rip out of my skin from time to time, making a mess that the human had to clean up again.
What did that mean?
I pushed that away, too. I wasn’t going to think about anything—not Danna and the fact that I was falling for her, not Emmie and the fact that she was my daughter, not the idea that they were helping me keep my dragon in check, and sure as shit not about the fae and how she might help me.
I always flew solo, and to let a woman come into my life and fuck that up was stupid. I was an alpha, I’d gotten here by myself, and I was better than that.
The thing that worried me the most was the curse. It was obvious to me, and anybody who had been around Danna and me, that I was falling for her. She was my mate. And even though it was hard to admit, I loved Emmie.
I knew that love and relationships could never be in my future because of the curse, but I didn’t know the full extent of the ramifications. And I didn’t want to risk Danna and Emmie being hurt. But the truth was, I also didn’t want them to leave.
Sleep came surprisingly easy. I’d thought I would toss and turn for hours, but I was suddenly in a different world, a different body. I had the body of a dragon, but the face of a man. My hands were normal, but my tail was thick behind me, and my wings stretched wide. I looked more like a gargoyle than a dragon, and I didn’t know how I knew that without seeing a reflection of myself.
“What are you doing here?” someone asked, and I spun around.
An older woman stood in front of me, her graying hair in a long braid down her back.
“Who are you?” I asked.
“I should ask you the same thing. You don’t belong here; you should answer to me and not the other way around.”
I looked around. Where the hell washere? Everything was dark—I couldn’t see much aside from the woman in front of me.
Her eyes were a deep violet, jewels that glowed with a fury that I recognized. It was the fury of a dragon shifter.
The moment I thought it, her power was all around me. It was incredibly strong, but something about it was familiar, too.
I frowned.
“You’re a dragon,” I said.
“And you’re an alpha, far out of your territory. You’re not meant to be here.”
“Josephine,” someone called in the distance. The voice echoed all around me, and the woman—Josephine, I imagined—looked over her shoulder at whoever was calling her.
When she turned her head back to me, she was young and beautiful, her graying hair brunette, the braid shorter. Her face had changed, too. It wasn’t the face of the old woman anymore, but Danna’s face.
“Danna?” I asked, confused. I looked around. “I thought… what’s going on?”
“What are you talking about?” she asked, and when I looked back at her, it was the old woman again.
“I don’t understand what’s going on.”
