At the sound of her mother’s voice, Skylar Amon jerked her head up from the computer screen she’d been staring at. She’d been studying for her next-level pilot’s exam, having completed her final hours needed. But everything in front of her faded as she focused on those words in her mind, a telepathic communication.
Mom is afraid.
That alone petrified Skylar, freezing every thought, every muscle. Their mother was never afraid, always knew what to do. Skylar’s heart stopped cold, then slammed against her chest in an attempt to leave her to deal with this alone.
She knew what her mother’s words meant, what she had to do. Since the moment she and her three sisters were born, their mother had been preparing them for this day.
“Skylar!” So much fear filled her sister Meira’s call, Skylar’s body clenched against the sound of it.
“In here,” she shouted back.
I can’t let the fear in. Fear had no place here. Right now, all she had to do was act.
The screen door banged as Kasia ran into the kitchen from outside. Her pale skin had a greenish tint to it, probably made worse given the contrast to her deep red hair. Her pale blue eyes were wide and wild. “Did you hear that?”
“Yes.”
A second later their other sisters, Meira and Angelika, sprinted into the room and they stared at one another. They all knew what those words meant.
“He’s come for us,” Skylar spat through lips almost frozen.
Pytheios.
The Rotting King of the Red Dragon Clan. The man who had once deluded himself into thinking he could mate their mother, Serefina, because mating a phoenix would make him the High King, legitimize his reign, and grant him incomprehensible blessings. A tyrant whose every decision, every choice, ended with the exact consequences he wanted.
But Serefina had chosen another—Zilant Amon, the King of the White Clan of dragon shifters. For her sins, Pytheios had murdered Zilant.
Terrified, Serefina had escaped.
What the mad king would do if he discovered their mother was pregnant at all, let alone with four babies, had kept them in constant, vigilant fear.
Four possible phoenixes when there had only ever been one born to any previous phoenix in history? The most likely scenario to enter Skylar’s nightmares, when she allowed it, would be Pytheios using the sisters against one another. Maybe even force one of them to mate him.
Not that it would end well for him.
Nor for whichever sister he forced after his followers found out he was dead.
Running was all they’d ever known. Five centuries of it. Ages of training, preparing, and hiding.
Was it all to end this night?
The shock that had held her immobile, if only for moments, disappeared. She was the strong one of the four of them. She was the fighter.
Kasia was the courageous one. Meira the brains. And Angelika the heart.
But Skylar was the protector. Ever since they were tiny, she’d been the one to pluck her sisters off the ground when they fell down, or take out the bullies, or speak the hard truths.
She could protect them from this, too.
Gods above I hope I can.
“Let’s go.” She ran back out through the same screen door Kasia had just come in, her sisters right behind her.
They sprinted through the small backyard of their unassuming house—rickety white siding that needed replacing, dirt-covered screens, and white sheets drying on the line out back. A house in nowhere, Kansas, USA, where they’d lived quietly for the last twenty years. Out through the gate in the chain-link fence and into the clearing beyond. Skylar stopped in the middle of a field with tall, dry grass almost silver in the light of the full moon—the location her mother had told them to meet if they ever heard those words.
The time had come.
Death, in the form of a red-winged monster determined to claim the phoenix as his own, was upon them.
“Where’s Mom?” Skylar whispered, searching the fields with a desperate gaze. She should be here by now.
No sooner had the words passed her lips than a woman suddenly appeared in the field. She hit hard, crumpling to the ground. Skylar gasped as she immediately recognized the long silver handle of a knife illuminated by the moonlight. The blade was buried in their mother’s back.
No. Oh, gods, no.
Pytheios had already attacked? He must’ve caught their mother alone at the diner where they all took shifts. Where Skylar should’ve been working tonight.
This is my fault.
“Get up. Get up. Get up,” Skylar chanted under her breath.