Forbidden Honor (Dragon Royals #1)(89)

Branok favored me with a slow smile that told me he savored the thought.

The funny thing was, I almost didn’t hold a grudge over his merciless beatings. After all, as far as he was concerned, Lucien had hurt his sister. And as much as I didn’t enjoy it, there was no denying how much stronger I became with each miserable day.

So, really, Branok and Lynx’s hatred worked out in my favor. Even if I never felt that way at the exact moment that one of them shattered some bone that I’d always consider very precious to me.

“Would you ever travel across the sea?” I asked Tal.

“Maybe I have.”

Branok responded by cutting his eyes at him fiercely. We weren’t supposed to be able to travel across the sea at all. Had the dragon royals been on some kind of secret mission?

I wanted to go on a secret mission to the far fae lands.

Jaik shushed us. The look on his face was intense, as if he’d heard something that none of the rest of us had. “Time to shift.”

His voice was urgent, and he’d barely finished before scales rippled over Talisyn’s arms, before Arren’s wings sprouted. Shifting was always harder and slower for me.

I was the last one to shift into a dragon.

All the while, I could see what was coming at us, and I really didn’t want to face it as Lucien.

Through the woods lurched half a dozen hybrids, all of them huge. Three of them were like the one that I had run into in the tunnels; half ram, half human with twisted horns. Their bodies were muscular and powerful and deformed all at the same time. And they all had the same half-mad air, as if they were desperate for blood.

They ran at us at full speed. Those glowing yellow eyes fixed on me as they sprinted toward us made me want to turn tail and run on my most primal childish level, even though I’d never do that when I had people I needed to fight alongside.

Behind them came three more shifters. One of them had a face like a frog, and somehow, he was the tallest of any of them. He must have been almost eight feet tall, his bulging eyes were fixed on me, and his mouth moved in a strange rhythmic thrusting motion that freaked me out even before he darted out his tongue, an enormous six-foot-long weapon.

Behind him were two huge shambling half bear, half humans. No other shifter was the size of a dragon, but these came close.

“I do not like this party,” I said out loud to no one.

And then finally, finally, I dropped to my knees, the shift taking me over. My bark of pain surprised me as scales sprouted across my skin, horns wrenched from my body.

The frog thing ran straight for me while my wings were just beginning to rise from my back, in the moment between human and dragon when I was my most vulnerable.

A snarling dragon slammed the beast to the ground. The frog monster’s tongue lashed out, those eyes staring at me even as Arren in his dragon form, went to work on tearing the damn thing apart.

Feeling a puff of fire escape my nostrils, I searched for my own monster to attack.

Jaik shouted, “We need to take at least one of them alive.”

“Do we get to keep ourselves alive?” Arren snarled, his voice recognizable, even in his shifted form.

“Optional,” Jaik snarled back. Even Arren, his second in command, sometimes pissed him off. We all pissed him off though, so that was no reason for him to choose favorites.

One of the bear shifters finally reached me and reared on its rear legs. Its legs weren’t deformed like I thought at first—there were eight of them, all thick, like a tarantula’s legs.

“No wonder this thing is in such a bad mood. I would be too if I were so ugly.” No one else seemed to find me as amusing as I found myself, least of all the bear spider thing, which attacked me.

I danced around it, ripping chunks out of its flesh, trying to take out its legs so that it would be disarmed, but not dead. I wanted to make Jaik happy for once. Not that Jaik seemed like he had a very high threshold for joy.

The monster scrambled away from me toward Lynx’s back.

Lynx was busy fighting another one of the shifters, so he didn’t see the enormous bear claws snapping so close to his body. I threw out a rush of flame, lighting the bear on fire and maybe a few parts of Lynx as well. Lynx finally spun, daring to give me a dirty look.

“You’re welcome,” I snapped in my head.

“I don’t need any favors from you,” he answered.

The corpse of the bear-thing was smoking. I had accidentally killed it all the way dead.

I looked at Jaik. If I could’ve pulled a face in my dragon form, I totally would. Whoops.

Jaik shifted himself back to human and as I reminded myself, Lucien, Lucien, be Lucien, I did the same.

He looked around the carnage still splattered with hybrid blood, and said, “Well, that could have gone better.”

“We’re all alive,” Talisyn offered.

“I wanted to try to track the hybrids, maybe even ask them some questions if they’re capable,” Jaik said.

“We have no way of asking them questions now, but maybe we can track where they came from,” Talisyn said.

The others shot him a look, that familiar look telling him to shut up in front of me.

“How?” When no one answered me, I looked around them in exasperation. “Look, I get it. You don’t trust me, but I want to find the source of the hybrids as much as anyone else. And I don’t exactly have any other friends to spill your secrets to. I’m not going to betray you all.”