City Of Dragons Read online

  THE CITY OF

  DRAGONS

  A PARANORMAL SHIFTER ROMANCE

  BONNIE BURROWS

  Copyright ©2015 by Bonnie Burrows

  All rights reserved.

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  About This Book

  The Big City Has An Even BIGGER Secret....

  When city girl Sarah finds herself attacked by something she is not even sure is human she has no idea that she is about to uncover one of New York City's darkest secrets.

  The big city is constantly under threat from rogue shifters and it is dragon brothers Gavin and Dylan's responsibility to protect it.

  However, when they both save her from this attack they both realize there is something about her that there is something extra special about Sarah.

  And they both want to find out what it is....

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER ONE

  Flame snickered through the air, a yellow ribbon of heat that seemed to singe the air itself as it blew past Dylan’s ear. He snarled and brought up his left wing, spiraling out of the way of the geyser of concentrated fire. Even through the heavy thick plates that naturally armored his body, he could feel the intensity of the attack. That was too close, he thought, holding his right wing up as he pulled into the wind and let himself duck down into a free-fall.

  The Rogue dragon had cut off his pursuit of Dylan and was trying its best to evade a third dragon, black as a pistol grip and just as deadly when pointed in the wrong direction. Gavin, you took long enough, Dylan thought, admiring his partner’s smooth, almost mercurial movements through the air. He was a temperamental bastard at the best of times, but Dylan had to hand it to him – in Form he was a hell of a flyer. It was like he was made for the air, like he’d been born to the element.

  Dylan regained his composure, dropping his wing back. The impact of air lifted under both outstretched wings and he used his remaining momentum to cut back in their direction. His dark-green body wavered like a serpentine shard of glass above the buildings below. It was strange to think they were flying over Old New York, diving lower than the Manhattan buildings as they pursued the Rogue.

  He looked down and saw the steady lights of traffic, the small ant-like figures of other people, all of them frozen in a pocket of time. Sealed, Dylan realized. It was a consequence of entering into Form, especially where Rogues were concerned, and a secret ability that was bestowed only to the most elite of his and Gavin’s Order. Freeze time in a specific radius. It had its benefits – he wondered at the sort of panic and news attention they’d get if people looked up and suddenly saw dragons attacking each other a hundred feet above.

  The Seal could only be activated by two dragons together, a safety measure to ensure that it would never be abused. But it’s doing us little good right now, Dylan lamented, flapping his wings harder as he tried to keep up with Gavin and the Rogue ahead. Gavin’s dark shape blended into the night, barely reflecting itself off the time-frozen glass skyscrapers. He was gaining, cutting inches off his pursuit as he drove perilously close to other buildings.

  Dylan knew his partner wouldn’t flame out, not until he was absolutely certain he had a clear shot. It was almost frightening going up against the black dragon, even in tournament combat – he took it too seriously. It reminded Dylan of a famous chess player named Morphy who would only raise his eyes to his opponent when he knew he was going to win. And by then, it’s too late to do anything about it, he thought.

  Suddenly, Gavin turned his sharp cylindrical head toward him, and Dylan caught the red glare of his eye. They’d rehearsed this many times before. Even in Form, they were as interconnected as brothers, and had developed their own subtle signals.

  He pulled right and felt the wind snap into his open green wing. The force of it spiraled him toward a narrow alleyway and he twisted his body sideways. It was a tight fit, but his speed was more than adequate to clear the gap, and he felt the top scales on his wings brush against the cement, just enough to kiss it. Way too close. He was getting reckless. But Gavin’s instructions had been clear. Dylan moved lower, but kept his eyes locked above. Any moment now and-

  There!

  Dylan had only moments to react as he spread his wings again and pushed upwards, thinning his body into a green needle. The air drove past his beaked snout, and he felt it coursing over his scales. Above he saw the half-full moon glinting like a tired eye on its side. A second later, a dark shape flitted across it, and Dylan knew he’d timed his approach well. He saw the Rogue dragon attempt to turn mid-air and fire another blast of flame in Gavin’s direction, but Gavin elegantly dodged it, barrel-rolling in anticipation as if it were the easiest thing in the world. Slick. He’d managed to lure the Rogue into a trap, and the younger dragon didn’t see Dylan’s upward approach until it was too late.

  Dylan growled as he butted his weight into the Rogue’s back and felt a crushing blow impact both of them. It was worse for the Rogue who was completely caught off guard, and Dylan was certain he heard a muffled snap of the bone in his wing breaking under the flesh. The Rogue waved it uselessly, already starting to descend. A shriek gasped from its long brown throat, and Gavin made his move now, landing on the unprotected belly with both hind-legs, and sinking in his talons. Both Rogue and Gavin began to spiral, their wings causing them to tornado down toward the city and rooftops below. They’re falling too fast, Dylan though. Even with their sturdy dragon bodies, falling from this height would be enough to turn them both into jelly, but Gavin seemed intent, single-minded, on taking out the Rogue who was fighting back desperately.

  Dylan cupped his wings together and spread them forward as he reached the apogee of his flight, then shot his wings out behind him. The force propelled him downward, accelerating him to a break-neck speed. Gavin you idiot, he wanted to shout – the black dragon may have been a good soldier, but he was a damned fool when it came to his own wellbeing. The ground loomed up on both of them and Dylan flapped again, bringing him within a hair’s breadth of his partner.

  Gavin let out an irritable snarl as Dylan grabbed him under the base of his wings and flapped upward hard, trying to slow both of their descents, but the Rogue was still firmly attached to the black dragon and it was like trying to stop a freight train that had already picked up momentum. At that moment, Gavin must have realized their collective plight as well and brought out his looming wings as well, flapping down hard.

  Still moving too fast, Dylan thought, stretching his wings to their limit and grunting through his oval nostrils as he tried to push them skyward again. It was no use. The roof of an apartment building approached them and it was all he could do to throw himself clear of the other two dragons. Gavin did the same, and hit the tar paper hard with an exasperated whoof and rolled to one side, using his wings to protect the rest of his body.
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  The Rogue was less lucky. There was a shattering sound of metal as his immense form cratered into a silver heating duct, bending it inward. Sharp rebar underneath splintered upward, erupting through the Rogue’s chest cavity. The dragon opened its long snout and let out a whimper, its eyes still wide with the panic of falling through the air. One jagged claw lifted uselessly toward the heavens as a stream of dark ichor pooled underneath, filling the spaces between the gravel.

  Dylan gasped and resumed his human shape. He felt the warm tingling sensation, as if his limbs had fallen asleep. The long green wings shrunk, folding into his back, and the tiled scales on his arms and legs and chest disappeared inward and became the tan hue of flesh again. Even as he shook his neck and felt his skull collapse in on itself like a Chinese finger trap, he was aware of the fact that time had resumed its normal course.

  We broke the Seal. It took considerable energy and focus for both of them to keep the time-dilation bubble intact. Tumbling out of the sky and getting the wind knocked out of them counted as a distraction, he figured.

  He got to his feet clumsily and saw sharp talons curve back into his human hands. He was dressed from his neck down in a black nerve-suit, specially designed by his Order. The suit was designed to accommodate his transformation in Dragon form, bending and elongating automatically. Two metallic silver blisters at the back of his scapula allowed his wings to protrude. He shrugged and swung his arms out, trying to get used to his human form again.

  “Hey, you still kicking?” he murmured to the other man lying on his back a few feet away.

  Gavin groaned and got to his feet. He was a year younger than Dylan, but carried himself with the pomp and confidence of someone twice that age. He was wiry, too, and the nerve-suit did little to hide the tightly ripped musculature underneath. It was like the man was made of ropes – he was skinny, but every ounce of him was trained and tempered. His long neck angled into his sharp chin. For some reason, no matter what emotion he felt, Gavin’s face was almost always set in a triangular grimace, and his piercing eyes held their own special darkness. He winced, winking one eye as he rose to his feet, and held his fingers to a narrow jagged cut that reared up into his hairline. Like his Form, the infamous jet dragon, his hair was the same color, and he’d let it grow out long.

  “Still,” Gavin groaned, “thanks to you, I guess.”

  “You’re a bloody fool,” Dylan said, moving past. In comparison, he felt like a slow moving glacier – he was strong as well, but his strength had come from working at a gym tirelessly, not from the repetitive self-training that Gavin had suffered. His bulking arms stretched the nerve-suit’s fabric, and his legs were almost twice the width as his partner’s. Different strengths, he thought, and it wasn’t just in terms of physical prowess.

  “I had him,” Gavin tried to defend himself, gesturing with his head toward the dying dragon impaled on the rebar. There wasn’t a flicker of regret in his eyes, which Dylan found unsettling. “In any case, well done. I think we should learn to market our moves. What do you want to call that last one? I was thinking the 'Dylan Maneuver'.”

  Dylan gave him a distasteful look as he limped towards the Rogue. The younger dragon was coming out of Form now, but the grisly rebar that sprouted from his chest was deep and had pierced the aorta. There was nothing more to do. Our duty is to get rid of the Rogues by any means necessary, but somehow this feels wrong, he thought. Death was a haunting business – you either learned early on to put your own feelings about it aside, or you went mad.

  “Who are you?” he whispered, leaning over the Rogue.

  The Rogue’s wings sucked into his back, and a human visage appeared. The only evidence he’d once been a dragon was the lingering slit in his pupils, reptilian. He opened his mouth as if to say something, but only a strangled breath came out, and the eyes grew wide. His jaw was set in a twisted silent scream that would howl out forever. Dylan groaned and spread his fingers over the dead Shifter’s eyes, closing them.

  “He’s dead,” he shouted over his back to Gavin, “bloody fools. He looked like he was about to tell me something, too. It’s no good… we should probably get out of here. Let the police find him, it’ll be better if we’re not anywhere around.”

  Gavin folded his arms. The sound of traffic had resumed, along with the other less noticeable sounds of the city. It was always a shock when the two of them finally broke the Seal – while inside the perimeter of frozen time it was like all sound had become muted, impenetrably silent. Dylan could scarcely believe how loud the city actually was and he rubbed his ears.

  “And next time, try to limit the amount of collateral damage, huh?” Dylan said, and gave Gavin an accusing look.

  That was another quirk of the Seal. While inside it they could scamper around New York without having to worry about being noticed – but once the Seal was brought down, and time resumed, any damage to buildings (or, Dylan gulped, other people) was suddenly brought into the present. He looked up rather annoyingly at one of the tall skyscrapers where Gavin’s long black tail had accidentally carved out a section of windows – there was only a black dent among other adjacent lights. That will be kind of hard to explain.

  But if that was the extent of the damage, he had to be thankful. He turned back once as they headed for the roof’s exit and muttered an old dragon prayer under his breath for the fallen Rogue. Then, straightening his nerve-suit, he followed his partner back into the human realm.

  CHAPTER TWO

  “It’s a bloody shame, is what it is,” Gavin said, fishing some cold pizza out of the refrigerator. He had taken off his nerve-suit and cast it haphazardly in the corner of their small apartment. The Order provided them with everything they needed, but from time to time Dylan wished he had his own apartment.

  “What’s a bloody shame?” he grumbled, fumbling with a beer. He caught his reflection in the reflective window, and was taken aback by how much older he looked. His hair was cut shorter than Gavin’s, trim and military, and there were a few specks of grey hidden in the dark brown. His eyes were the same dragon-green as his partner’s, but there were more wrinkles around them, as if they’d somehow sunk into his face, pulled inward by their own gravity. A single jagged scar ran down one temple, almost to his jawline.

  Gavin bit into the pizza ravenously. After every change, their metabolisms skyrocketed, and it was all either of them could do to keep the hunger pangs away. For the time being, Dylan was stubbornly resisting the urge to join in.

  “The Rogues, I mean,” Gavin continued. “I know they’re a threat… not just to themselves but to the citizens, to the Order. But it seems like a damn shame… we could use soldiers like them.”

  “Not like them,” Dylan reminded.

  The history of their Order was one that had been built on bloodshed and warfare, internal strife that centuries earlier had culminated in a young dragon overlord finally taking power and uniting all the different tribes together. It was apocryphal, of course. Historians loved to elaborate and embellish on history, but the key facts were there.

  After the tribes had been united, peace fell between the dragons. As they found themselves entering the modern human world, it was only sensible – keeping the secret of their existence was considered the most important, the most crucial duty, and so an Order was formed. Consisting of the most elite and promising dragon warriors, their task was to enforce both realms, to make sure their secret was never compromised – but also, to keep the human population safe from dragon intervention.

  As is the case with all empires, there are always those who sought power for power’s sake, who rebelled and brought chaos. The Order called them Rogues, and Dylan thought it was a convenient use of language to suggest that they were isolated incidents. But Dylan had spent enough time on the front lines to see a pattern in their movements. The Order may not want us to believe they’re organized, but someone is training them, recruiting them – these aren’t just individual events of dragons rebelling, he thought. H
e had kept his suspicions even from Gavin, relying on his own prudence and patience to get to the bottom of it. But in the last six months he’d gotten no closer to rooting out a mastermind.

  Gavin was glaring at him from across the room. Dylan grunted again and stepped toward the high windows of the balcony where the New York skyline gleamed. Restless and reasoned in its insanity, he mused. “Anyway, don’t let it get to you. Just focus on the mission,” he reminded the younger dragon.

  “You think I’m not?”

  “I think you can be headstrong, Gavin. I’m not saying that’s a bad thing, but we have to be careful. That little stunt you pulled off tonight could have had repercussions – thankfully, it was just a few broken windows.”

  Gavin bristled, and his body seemed to enlarge like a bird of prey taking offense to someone else taking a bite out of its quarry. Dylan knew he had to be careful – in reality, a brawl between them could only end one way. Dylan had more experience in combat, was stronger gram for gram. But Gavin was fast, decisive. I don’t want to get in an argument right now, he thought, fondling his beer.

  “Don’t lecture me, I know what I’m doing. I’ve been doing this almost as long as you. And that was an accident. Besides no one got hurt. And we did get our mark, didn’t we?”

  “The ends justify the means, huh?” Dylan smirked, “I’ll include that in our report to the Order. I’m sure they’ll get a kick out of it. I’m not lambasting you, even if it feels like that. It’s just… I can’t say, not yet. But it doesn’t have anything to do with the Order, or even with protocol. I just want us to take our next call more… diligently.”

  Dylan knew his intentional vagueness would only incite his partner’s interest more. Gavin scratched at his bare chest. The outlines of his abs flexed as he raised his hand behind his head and rubbed the back of his head.