Chapter 1
I glanced over my shoulder at the fidgety vampire. “Ready?” I used the microphone built into my helmet to speak to Alucard. My visor was up, but our helmets were connected via radio.
Alucard sighed. “I guess so.” His voice sounded tinny since we were so close to each other.
I turned back to the front door, repositioning myself slightly on the back of the idling ATV. “Yahn should be out any minute. I texted him five minutes ago. Be ready to floor it.”
“There are so many ways this can go wrong,” Alucard complained.
“It’s just a little fun. Calm down,” I scolded him, rolling my eyes. “Is everyone else ready at the tree?” I asked.
He grunted. “I think so. I still don’t know why we’re doing that either. It will be fun, sure, but don’t we have more important things to do?”
I grunted. “I know we have more important things to do. But we can’t do them yet. Things like this will keep everyone’s attention occupied so we don’t kill each other out of sheer boredom.”
“If you say so,” he muttered. At least he sounded mildly interested in our upcoming fight. But he was such a drama queen sometimes, especially of late. The sun shone down on us, and it was surprisingly warm outside for this late in the year. Underneath Alucard’s melancholy, I could sense that the weather had perked him up a little. Being a Daywalker vampire, he still had instinctive fear of sunlight, even though it now gave him power. He didn’t need blood anymore, just a dose of UV to power up. Still, some old habits were hard to break.
The front door of Chateau Falco – my mansion – began to open, and I grinned as a figure stepped into view. My target was Yahn, and he was about to be hazed into my family – a welcoming rite of passage – since he had done so much to assist during the war with Indie and her Greeks.
I glanced down, the motion awkward with my helmet, and pressed the buttons on all three of the leaf blowers beside me, which were aimed directly at the door. As each kicked on, thick clouds of blue powdered paint – which I had packed inside the tubes of the leaf blowers – launched directly at the open doorway, pelting the unsuspecting dragon. I let out a triumphant cackle as I stared at the cloud of paint. “Take that, Mr. I’m so cool because I’m invisible and stuff!” I mocked in my best high-pitched Swede impersonation. “Welcome to the family!” I hooted, turning off each leaf blower – now empty of their payloads.
As the leaf blowers powered down, I heard a very different sound than I had anticipated.
Not the feminine shriek I had expected from Yahn, but two feral snarls of outrage. One a spitting hiss, and another a deep, foreboding growl. My stomach clenched, and I didn’t need to see through the cloud to realize I had made a very, very big mistake.
“You’re dead!” Gunnar roared, just as Talon screeched, “I’m going to kill you!”
“Alucard, go, go, GO!” I snapped, kicking the leaf blowers off the back of the ATV and grasping onto the cargo bars at my hips.
“Shit! That’s not Yahn, you fucking lunatic!” the vampire said, shifting the ATV into drive.
“Fucking right, it’s not!” Gunnar snapped, lunging from out of the cloud of colored paint to tackle me, his fancy new eyepatch glittering in the sunlight – because the werewolf only had one eye. His usual glorious, long blonde hair was now completely blue, as was his entire body, transforming him into the world’s buffest, tallest Smurf. As he took his second step, he hit the trip wire I had set up with make-shift grenades of more powdered paint. Three massive booms overpowered his shout in an explosion of green paint that blasted the area like mortars had just struck my mansion.
The silence was deafening, and even Alucard hesitated as we both stared at the shifting cloud.
“Wow! Like, totally rad. Paint party!” I heard Yahn call out cheerfully from beyond the open doorway, apparently having been behind Gunnar and Talon, thus escaping the hazing I had carefully prepared for him.
I heard a pair of very low, menacing growls.
“Fucking GO!” I reminded Alucard at the top of my lungs. The vampire slammed on the gas right as Gunnar emerged from the cloud of smoke, and our tires squealed on the driveway. I cackled triumphantly as Gunnar fell short, a massive, green and blue vision of murder. “See you at the tree!” I slammed my visor down, just in case Gunnar saw fit to shoot me from a distance.
“What the fuck, Nate?! I thought you were trying to get Yahn?” Alucard hissed into my earpiece.
“I was! I thought you told everyone else to be at the tree already!” I argued, watching as Gunnar decided to run after us, much faster than most humans could. He hadn’t changed to his werewolf form, because that would leave him naked during our upcoming game at the giant white tree that dominated the grounds of Chateau Falco, my ancestral home.
And paintballs wouldn’t feel good striking naked flesh.
Talon wasn’t far behind, silver eyes glinting in the sunlight as his werecat-like form tore up dirt and leaves in his pursuit of absolution.
“The wolf is slightly unhinged, if you forgot, and Talon is a certifiable psycho. He was much better as a housecat. And in case you forgot, cats hate getting their fur dirty. Why didn’t you check who it was, first?” Alucard growled into his headset.
Talon had been disguised as a Maine Coon the entire time I had known him. Up until I decided to take him to the Land of the Fae, which had been when he revealed that he was much more than just a talking housecat. He was now a bipedal werecat warrior – imagine a Thundercat from that kid’s cartoon – and he went by the name Talon the Devourer. The only other thing I knew was that he was the Fae version of a killing machine.
I shrugged. “I was too excited. It didn’t even cross my mind because, you know, everyone else was supposed to be waiting at the tree!” I shouted over the sound of the engine.
Alucard grunted noncommittally. “Don’t try to blame this on me.” I stared off into the distance, noticing that the laborers working on the wall surrounding my property had paused to stare at the sound of explosions and the clouds of colored smoke wafting through the air. Also, they were likely wondering why three figures were now chasing an ATV across the grounds. I waved at them, and they quickly resumed work, probably not sure if one of the helmeted figures was the man who had hired them.
We skidded up to the tree to see a bewildered assortment of people staring at us, already decked out in their paintball gear. Two of them were teenaged girls, creeping ever closer to that mystical age when they presumed the world would be handed to them on a platter – eighteen. They were stunningly attractive red-heads named Aria and Sonya, but we just called them the Reds – both for their hair color and their color of dragon. They could use mind control, like all shifter dragons, and their crimson irises flashed in the daylight, their horizontal pupils contracting as they stared past me, shaking their heads. “What the hell was that?” they shouted in unison, studying the still present cloud of smoke drifting near the entrance to the mansion, and the two figures tearing after us. Yahn jogged behind them, grinning excitedly.
The bastard. He had no idea how much time I had secretly put into setting up that trap.
Alex was leaning against the trunk of the large white tree, shaking his head in disbelief, not sure if he should be smiling or seriously concerned about the monsters racing our way. He was tall, dark-haired, and broody, but he was also wildly naïve at times. We had saved him from the Fae not too long ago, the prisoner of one of their fabled Changeling operations – where they kidnapped a human child and switched it out for one of their own. They got power from this, and I still hadn’t verified how long Alex had been a prisoner, but we were slowly nursing him back to mental health, showing him that not everyone was a monster.
Basically, letting him be a kid again.
In a way, I had kind of adopted him, because his parents had been murdered.
I very bravely repositioned myself so that the ATV was between me and the approaching psychopaths. Yahn ran after them, faster now, but still grinning like a big idiot – enjoying himself.
But the two ahead of him were not enjoying themselves. They wanted revenge.
Gunnar, the alpha werewolf of St. Louis, and Talon, a seriously deranged cat-man from the Land of the Fae. Both were very, very good at killing things that annoyed them.
“Nate, why did you paint-bomb the two most unstable beings here?” Aria asked, grimacing at the two rainbow-skinned nightmares.
“And why, oh why, did you let him do this, Alucard?” Sonya, her sister, added.
I still hadn’t decided which was their most dangerous forms – as red, fire-breathing dragons, or as two mind-controlling teenaged girls. And they had Alucard – their stand-in dad, since their mother had been killed – wrapped around their fingers.
Alucard grimaced. “He was trying to get Yahn, but Gunnar and Talon came out first.”
“Well, that sucks,” Alex said, uneasily. “They’re not really going to kill us, right? They look pretty serious…”
“Play it cool, Alex,” I said, backing up to stand beside him. I leaned closer, verifying the Reds weren’t watching. “Channel four,” I told him, tapping the side of my helmet to switch to a different frequency. He did the same, plopping his helmet down over his head.
“This it?” he asked into the headset, his voice carrying over the communications channel.
“Yep. Let’s make sure Alucard is ready. I don’t think Gunnar is going to want to give us any time to set up.”
I cocked the pistol in my hand and – without warning – shot Alucard in the back of the helmet. He shouted, spinning to glare at the Reds. They instantly pointed at me, laughing inside their helmets. Alucard turned to glare at me, and I waited until the Reds weren’t looking to flash him four fingers and then tap my helmet.
I couldn’t see through the visor on his head, but I bet he wore a frowny face.
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