Page 1 of Dark Dragon’s Wolf

Chapter 1

Tristan Barnes, white wolf, sat in the library in the Al-Maddeiri castle, surrounded by his friends and a confusion of books and beers and computers, trying to pretend everything was normal.

Trying to pretend he was normal.

It should have been a piece of cake. He’d gotten really damn good at faking normal in the last couple of years. Everybody ooh-ed and aah-ed over how he was a triumph for the healers.

Taken from a tortured, insane, three-quarters-wild killer wolf and turned into a mild-mannered pansy-ass shadow of his former self.

One of the good guys.

Except he wasn’t good. Never had been. He’d been a wild kid, and then a hunted fugitive, and then a prisoner-slash-lab experiment.

The being a killer part came somewhere in between all that.

After he’d finally escaped from the lab, he’d let a bunch of healers in the Silverlake wolf pack prance through his mind, rooting out all the pain and torture and all the bad, bad memories.

Supposedly.

In reality, he’d just put all that toxic shit into a big old steel vault in the back of his mind, and he’d locked the door so tight that most days he honestly didn’t want to kill anybody.

And when he did want to, he managed to keep anyone from knowing about it.

Until now. Now he’d gone and screwed the whole thing up. And unless he could find a way to make himself seem sane again, he was well and truly fucked.

They were supposed to be researching healing and magical protection spells. His good friend Trish—AKA the Nightmare Wolf—was at the adjoining table, right next to her new mate Emon, the Darkwing Dragon. Emon was technically the king of this little tiny self-contained country, about half the size of Rhode Island.

Which existed in some kind of interdimensional spacetime thingy, the comprehension of which was way above Tristan’s pay grade.

Across the room were two of Emon’s new clan members—the red dragons Zakerek and Cazbek. Who were both pains in the ass. In fact, if Tristan were going to get back to killing people again, he’d probably start with Zakerek.

Right now the red dragon was hunched over one of the computers, constantly glaring around in case anyone was trying to sneak up on him and see what he was doing.

As if anyone gave a fuck.

Cazbek was kicked back on a leather couch with his feet up, a laptop on his lap, filling out a profile for an online shifter dating site on Earth.

The Shifter Council had recently learned there were Wild Dragons there, living in secret for centuries. Now that they’d gone public in the shifter community, apparently everybody wanted to bang a dragon. Even one who lived in another dimension.

Thus Cazbek’s enthusiasm for the internet, which Emon had recently started piping into the castle via wireless and a magical portal.

Not that Tristan had any right to get judgy about other shifters and their sexual dragon fantasies. Considering that he was crushing like hell on Emon’s sister Mayah—the most beautiful dragon in all the worlds, in his undoubtedly biased opinion.

Who was currently asleep in her bedroom, not giving him a second thought.

Cazbek said, “What should I put for my favorite movie? I’ve only seen, like, three.”

“Not counting porno flicks,” Zakerek said.

Cazbek brightened. “I can put one of those. What about Biggest Banana in the Bunch? That was a good one.”

Without looking up from the book of spells he was leafing through, Emon said, “Make sure you put that your banana is way, way bigger than the ones in the movie. And post a picture.”

Trish elbowed him. “He can’t do that,” she whispered. “They’ll kick him off the site.”

“We can only hope,” Emon murmured.

Cazbek frowned. “Really?” he said. “I’m pretty sure they said no dick pics.”