His face is like a Phantom of the Opera mask, half human, half alien, with a nose that couldn’t decide and is halfway between ours and theirs.
“Who are you?” I whisper. “Did Shak send you?”
He sneers. “No, my bastard half-brother didn’t send me. I am First and you are coming with me. I will mate you, producing offspring, and retake my place as King.”
Oh sh—
But before I can make a run for it, First snatches me up around the waist, extends huge purple wings, and leaps into the air with me.
Two
FIRST
Why won’t the human stop screaming? Obviously, I am not going to drop her. If I did not need her alive and well, I never would have snatched her in the first place.
“Stop with your howling, I’m not going to drop you.”
But these creatures never can see sense and she continues to screech at the top of her lungs. I grind my teeth against her caterwauling and flap my huge wings harder.
I’m glad the transformation did not completely take because I cannot imagine a life without wings. It is yet another advantage I retain over the pretender King. My brother.
And why, when the time comes, my people will choose me to return as rightful heir to the throne.
But other things must come first.
Like getting this female to my lair without detection. I clamp a heavy hand over her mouth to stifle her screeches and angle my body down so that I’m flying with the wind instead of against it. My allies up on Draci III, the third of our three spaceships, have interfered with the human satellite monitoring systems so this little mid-evening flight should be all but invisible at the moment.
Still, they can’t circumvent the human satellites forever. I have a short window to pull this off and I cannot waste anymore time.
We’ve been flying as high as I dare with the human, but now I swoop back down low as the property comes into view. It’s a secluded ranch in northeast California. There is nothing out here except dirt, sand, cacti, and scavengers.
I belong in a city palace, but this is where I have been exiled to. It is demeaning and humiliating. I am Thraxahenashuash, the First of my father’s sons. Even though, of course, in reality, I am the second. But I was his first legitimate son.
After mother manipulated the death of his first love and—
No. None of that matters. Mother was the cleverest of dragons and I betrayed her in her last moments. Because I was a sentimental fool, like my father before me.
Mother understood the truth and she spent my whole life trying to beat it into my head.
Power at any cost.
The ends justify any means.
I resented her for what I thought to be her cruelty. But I understand it, now. Now, after I have learned the lessons in the hardest way possible. She was only doing what she had to. The decisions she made were never easy, but they were always best. Best for her, best for our family, and best for the kingdom.
My father was weak and Mother knew it. She could not allow his weakness to threaten all that she’d worked so hard to build. So she killed him. But I couldn’t see that at the time. I could only see the kindly father who had slipped me sweet treats and winked at me whenever mom got on one of her tirades. The jolly man who flipped me upside down and made me giggle when I was a growing kit all those many years ago.
But a nation is more than any one person. How often did my mother say that? Father, too. In the end he lost sight of it, but Mother never did. Even as the ceremonial blades sliced into her throat, severing her head from her body, her eyes stayed steadily and coolly on me. Accusing, and never allowing me to forget.
When I finally drop to the ground with the human, she is breathing hard and immediately stumbles away from me, falling hard to her knees but scrambling backward anyway.
“On your feet,” I bark.
She gets to her feet. And immediately starts to run away from me.
I roll my eyes. We do not have time for this. I angle forward and easily lift off my feet. I’m on her within a few flaps of my wings, slamming into her from behind and taking her down.
She screams and shrieks as she fights to get away from me, but subduing her is a small feat. I can hold both of her small wrists in one of my hands. She screams more and jerks at my hold.
“Are you trying to hurt yourself?” I growl. “Humans are delicate and if you force me to be more rough with you, I could damage you without intending to.”