Chapter 1
When I find my sister, Ivy Viverna thought grimly as she flew through the cold night air, I am going to kill her with my bare hands.
This was, unfortunately, a distinct possibility. As a wyvern shifter, Ivy was the most venomous creature on Earth. And thanks to her unusually powerful inner animal, she was always venomous. Even in human form.
At the best of times, Ivy’s briefest touch would give someone an instant, agonizing rash. This was most definitely not the best of times. If she’d been in human form now, the storm of fear and anger currently churning in her gut would have had deadly poison sweating from the palms of her hands.
As it was, she had to be careful to keep her sharp-toothed jaws clamped tightly shut. She couldn’t risk any of the boiling acid rising in her throat dripping out over the buildings and streets below.
Spit. Kill. Destroy. Her inner wyvern was a blaze of fury in her soul, urging her to rip apart the entire city of Brighton until she found her sister. Rescue! Defend!
Ivy shook her horned head, trying to suppress her beast’s snarls. Wyverns were the smallest of all the draconic breeds, but like all dragons they had a bone-deep need to hoard treasure, and an equally deep instinct to defend it. Anyone who stole from a dragon soon regretted it—briefly.
Ivy’s treasure wasn’t cold gold or unfeeling gems, though. Her treasure was flesh and blood. Her flesh and blood.
Her sister.
Other dragons have it easy. Their treasures don’t skip merrily away while their backs are turned. At least she left a note this time.
The note had been written in purple glittery pen. Hope’s messy handwriting, always ridiculously girly, had sprouted heart-dotted i’s and extravagantly curling loops of excitement. The exclamation mark situation had gone critical.
Got a ride to the party!!!! See you there?? If not, don’t wait up!!!! Love you!!!!!!
Hope had signed her name with a little smiley face in the o.
Ivy could murder her little sister sometimes.
Well, technically she could murder Hope all the time. She had to work very, very hard to make sure that she didn’t.
And right now, Hope sure as hell wasn’t helping.
Ivy narrowed her eyes, trying to pick out the apartment block she sought. She wasn’t used to flying over Brighton, and it was hard to recognize neighborhoods from the air. She tried to spend as much time in human form as possible. The less she reminded other shifters of her existence, the better.
One building caught her eye. It rose at least ten floors higher than any of the structures around it, thrusting up into the air defiantly. It had a wide, flat roof terrace, illuminated by dozens of red LEDs. The bright lights marked out a wide circle bisected by a cross, something like a helicopter landing pad.
This landing pad wasn’t intended for human machines, though.
That has to be it.
Beating her emerald green wings hard, Ivy landed in the circle. She dug her talons into the graveled surface of the roof terrace, finding her balance before folding her wings. Unlike larger dragons, wyverns had two legs, not four. She was built for speed in the air rather than agility on land.
Her arrival hadn’t gone unnoticed. Two hulking brutes straightened up from where they’d been lounging on either side of the open door leading into the building. They were both dressed in artfully ripped designer jeans and leather jackets that strained across their broad shoulders. Ivy’s shifter senses prickled at the unmistakable aura of feral energy exuding from them.
Ivy’s long, scorpion-barbed tail instinctively curved above her back, ready to strike as the two shifters sauntered forward. She hissed in warning.
The two men stopped in their tracks, eying her arched tail warily. “Shit,” the smaller of them muttered. “I told Gaze this was a bad idea.”
“Take a chill pill, freak,” the other man said to Ivy. A snarling wolf-head tattoo on the side of his neck marked him as a member of the Bad Dogs, a local pack with a particularly vicious reputation. “You may think you’re a big deal, but if you start something you’re sure as hell going to regret it.”
Ivy let her scaled lips wrinkle back from her foot-long fangs. Acid dripped from her jaws, sizzling as it hit the ground. She had the pleasure of seeing both men flinch.
*Stay back, puppies,* Ivy said telepathically. *I can obliterate you with a single breath. Now where is my sister?*
She ha
d the unmistakable sensation of her mental demand bouncing unheard off the men’s skulls. Shifters could generally only talk in animal form to others of the same general type—cats to cats, wolves to wolves, and so on. It was one of the reasons packs and crews usually tended to be formed of similar types of shifter.
As a wyvern, Ivy herself was a mythic shifter, one of the rarest of all the shifter groups. Although Britain had an unusually high population of mythic shifters, they were still uncommon. It wasn’t too surprising that neither of the men could hear her.