His unicorn was even more magnificent in the bright sunshine, his coat appearing so shiny it almost seemed mirrored. I slowed my glide, turning in lazy arcs while he came closer. It was a joy to see him in flight again, but I thrilled to be able to join him in the sky.
All we needed for the moment to feel complete was Sage.
Unfortunately, I didn’t think that was going to happen. At least, not at that moment. But we would have plenty of opportunities to fly together. I just had to be patient.
If only patience was one of my strong suits.
Serge brayed at me when he neared, his sharp gaze assessing me. I wished we could communicate in our shifted forms, but until we bonded, all we could do was exchange our animalistic sounds and hope that our companions got the gist of what we were saying.
Case in point: I imagined Sergio was asking if I was alright. And I, chuffing out a blast of hot air from my nostrils as I nodded, hoped to impart that,yes, I was fine, and he worried too much.
He nickered and swooped forward, doing a slow barrel roll around me. I preened under his attention, understanding that he was taking his first look at my dragon form.
In this form, I was smaller than Sage, who also happened to be the smallest of his brothers. Where Sage’s scales were a vibrant, nearly-orange shade of red, mine were a pale, eggshell blue. On a very clear day, if I flew high enough, I could blend into the sky. Sage had once described my dragon form as ‘pretty’. For a dragon, I supposed I was, though my claws and teeth were justas sharp as any other dragon’s I had met, and I could breathe fire with the best of them.
Sergio leveled out with me, gliding at my side in companionable silence. It felt nice to fly with someone —with my alpha— without any kind of pressure. He didn’t expect conversation, and we didn’t have any time constraints. We were just enjoying one another’s presence. It was relaxing.
By the time we returned to the ground, landing in a spare patch of land not far from home, I felt much more settled. But as Sergio shifted back into his human form and reached for his discarded clothes, I released the dragon equivalent of a groan.
My clothes —which also held my wallet and phone— were in the field behind the clinic. I shifted into my human form with a disgruntled sigh.
“I need to take off again,” I told Serge, who seemed quite happy to drag his steely gaze from my toes to my forehead as I stood naked in front of him. “I shifted at the clinic. I need to get my things.” I didn’t particularly want to risk facing Sage or any of his family right then, not with the way I had stormed away earlier, but needs must.
“Stay,” my alpha instructed gently, dropping the pants he had been readying to climb into. They landed on the grass with a crumpled thud. “I’ll get them.”
“You don’t have to—”
“Let me take care of you, dear-heart,” he practically purred, closing the space between us to cup my jaw. “I don’t know what you’re thinking or feeling right now, but Sage texted earlier to say you were upset when you left the clinic.”
“Of course he did.”
“He cares about you,” the admonishment was soft, but spoken with a firmness that brooked no argument, “and so do I. Let us help you, Dexter. Please.”
What was I supposed to do with that other than agree?
Chapter Fourteen
Iwas beginning to understand why The Magic had matched me with these much younger men. They needed someone stable. Someone who wouldn’t run or panic at the first sign of distress.
Because both of my beautiful young mates were distressed in their own ways, and I was determined to help them both, even if I wasn’t arrogant enough to think that I could heal all their ills on my own.
Returning with Dexter’s clothes, I set them carefully at his feet before I shifted back into my human form and dressed at his side. Sage’s earlier messages had suggested that Dexter was feeling raw and perhaps even misplaced in the pack —that he had seemed hurt by Damon’s statement that Sage could do better than Dexter, either as a lover or a friend— and he had asked me to make sure that our oftentimes snarky mate was okay.
When Dexter hadn’t appeared back home, my instincts had urged me to take to the sky and, sure enough, the stunning blue dragon had been circling above the town aimlessly.
Dexter’s dragon form was something to behold. His scales were nearly iridescent in their paleness, gleaming and glintingin the morning sunlight. He wasn’t as large as the other dragons in the pack, but that made him seem even more formidable: this scaled, sharp-toothed beast who could probably camouflage himself in the sky and attack at speeds the others couldn’t replicate due to their mass.
Not that there were any reasons to contemplate attack strategies in Shifters Sanctuary. The pack had been peaceful for years, from my understanding. Outside, there were rumblings and negative mutterings about them —mostly from those packs still tightly aligned with Morstein’s so-called ‘religion’; something The Magic truly bristled at— but with the security measures in place, Shifters Sanctuary had been left well enough alone.
I did wonder how long this peace might last, though. Between Morstein feeling threatened, and the human fear of things that were ‘other’ or ‘different’, tensions would escalate eventually. That was always the way of the world. And when things did come to a boiling point, I had faith that The Magic would favor Shifters Sanctuary. My new pack.
It had been a long time since I’d had a pack to call my own. I’d been a nomad for hundreds of years: for almost as long as my mates had been alive, in fact. However, now that I had mates —not just one, buttwoomegas for my surprise alpha designation— it was most certainly time to settle down into the life fate seemed to think I deserved.
I wasn’t one to look a gift horse in the mouth, so I was going to accept The Magic’s offering gratefully instead. And I was going to do what I could to help ease my mates’ woes as well.
“I’ve been a horrible person for the past hundred years,” Dexter’s lowly spoken admission startled me from my thoughts as we began our walk towards his house.Ourhouse.
I turned my face towards him, but I stayed quiet, sensing there was more on his mind.
