Page 3 of Devoted to the Dragon

He speaks into my ear, his warm breath tickling my neck and sending a flare of longing to my chest. “She gave birth to an alpha, dragoness. Like the others,” he says, voice low enough to be drowned out by the thumping beat of the club music around us.

His words are jarring, forcing me to focus past my internal battle.

“She is the last?” I ask, already knowing the answer.

When he replies a moment later, I hear the devastation in his voice even though he tries to hide it. “The Morning Meadows Pack omega wasthe last known.”

“Was?” I gasp.

Fennik stiffens behind me, and it’s the only answer I need.

We have failed.

The wolves are going feral and dying out without mates, and the magic of the club is only a temporary solution for a permanent problem.

It has only taken a few generations for the omega birth rate to plummet to zero. Without their omega mates, the wolves are turning feral when they go into their natural mating rut cycle. Feral alpha wolves lose themselves to their moon madness and never recover. Their instincts force them to fight, fuck, and claim. Violently. It’s only a matter of time now before the wolves wipe themselves out.

It’s surreal that the birth of a child is the signal of the end of wolf shifters. It should be a time of blessing, but I can’t help but notice how similar it feels to all my other ends. I’m the last dragon, and I’ll watch the wolves die out until I’m the last of the great shifters. The crushing weight of the promise of an eternity alone tightens inside me.

An ear-splitting roar pulls me from my morose thoughts and toward the end of the bar. An alpha lunges for the rut companion in the cage, completely overtaken by the oncoming fury of his rut.

Just what this night needs—a feral to really kick off the end of the world.

The desperate alpha barely grasps onto the cage's metal, making it swing precariously above us. He shivers in anuncontrolled half shift that reveals yellow eyes and a foaming snout.

Not good.

Our newest rut companion clings to the far end of the cage, wide-eyed as the alphas closest to the scene howl. Feral wolves are venomous, their bites causing a poison to spread through the blood and block our magical healing. The feral scent and bites can turn other wolves too, then the whole bar could go moon-mad, sending them all into a rut that even Vandera’s magic can’t tame.

My dragon responds in kind, pissed off that the feral has scared our newest human. Before I’ve thought about shifting, a grey-and-white wolf darts from behind me and jumps from the bar.

Dammit.Fennik hardly ever lets me take out my claws.

The feral wolf senses Fennik’s attack and turns from the human, launching himself at Fennik with snapping jaws. They collide midair, tearing into one another as they fall to the stone floor behind the bar. It’s a blur of fang and fur that is over quickly. Fennik is a trained warrior, a fierce wolf, and the feral was lost to his rut.

The snap of the feral’s neck sends a new wave of howls, and two more from the crowd lose their humans to their wolves. Before we lose any more, I act. This time, it’s my claws and jaw around their necks. The blood tastes rancid, and I spit the sickness on the floor, my dragon fuming that I refuse to unleash her fully.

Around me, half the club guard works to subdue wolves with spelled sleeping darts while the others control the crowd.

“Delia,” I call over my shoulder.

If the world is ending again, I’m gonna need another drink.

Chapter 2

Randi

Iunleash my fire, my throat warming and neck frills shuddering with the blast of heat. The funeral pyre bursts into flames, the white-and-blue sparks dancing into the rising dawn. The wolf guard sends a final offering to the moon, the chorus of howls bouncing off the mountains on the other side of the lake.

I stare at the ball of light and the tendrils of black smoke chuffing into the sky. Five wolves died in total after the dust settled in the club tonight. It’s becoming more frequent with each passing year as more wolves turn feral because they haven’t found their mates.

Vandera squeezes my hand and sighs. “We are losing too many. I need?—”

“You’ve already done what you can. Their fate is decided,” I say, resigned.

The wolves have always surpassed the krakens and dragons with their sheer numbers. They were made by Odin to be ground fighters, the army of mass. Many centuries ago, the Shifter Wars with the human knight crusaders decimated the great shifter species: the dragons, the krakens, and the wolves.

But even still, it only brought the wolves’ numbers to the thousands. For centuries, they haven’t so much thrived as maintained. Now, their numbers are dwindling as fewer wolves can find their mates. And no one knows why the omegas or the gods-given mating runes have disappeared.

---