Rideten, Present TimePhilip stood in a doorway that Aislen guessed led to the bedrooms and bathroom. He was, disconcertingly in “Philip casual” – a pair of blue jeans and a collared shirt. His hair hadn’t been so vigorously styled back against his skull as was customary and hung in silky strands over his forehead.She couldn’t help but glance at Rhett, mentally comparing the two men. Rhett’s face had immediately curled into a sneer, his eyes hardening and his posture becoming defensive. The change made the similarities between the men even more striking as Philip mirrored the expression.“Fuck, Rhett, it’s called a hairbrush,” Philip crossed to the little kitchen and opened the fridge looking inside.“Have you ever thought about greeting him nicely?” Aislen snapped out irritably. “You know, hi son, nice to see you, how are you doing?”Philip paused, his shoulders tightening, and he straightened slowly, turning his head her way, every move designed to be subtly intimidating. “Are you

Rideten, Present TimeSamuel pulled himself off the wall. He had been standing closer to Ember before her last attempt to shift had produced an explosion of flame and smoke, pushing him back into to the building. The wings her shift had produced were amazing, but they were not dragon wings, and not the wings that she had possessed before the Van Helsings had cut them from her."Are you alright?" He asked her in consternation. He could feel the sweat beading on his forehead as he drew close, the sting of the saltwater in his eyes as the droplets caught in his eyelashes on their passage down to his cheeks.“There is no pain,” she was as shocked by the development as he was. “The flames do not burn me.”He reached out carefully but could not touch the flames. They burnt as hot as dragon flame. “They do not burn me, but I can feel their heat,” he told her. “Flaming wings… That was… not what I expected.”“Me either,” she looked at him wild-eyed. “Do you suppose that I could…”“Yes,” he fol

Rideten, Present TimeIt did not take long before the werewolves sent someone to investigate why Aislen and her mates had invaded one of the houses that were used as secret entrances to the bunker below. The pair of casually dressed soldiers nonchalantly entered the front living room and looked around at them. “Can we help you?”Aislen glanced over her shoulder at them. They were clever these two, she thought, and if she wasn’t able to read their thoughts, she might have thought that she’d interrupted the human owners of the house working on their renovations. But she could read thoughts and knew that they’d been sent from below in response to their appearance on the monitoring equipment situated around the house.“We’re just going to hang here for a couple of hours until it gets dark,” she told them. “We have an errand, and then we’ll be off to meet Victor’s people. So just ignore us, and we’ll all be fine.”As the soldiers withdrew, Cameron pulled a face. “I guess that means we can’

Rideten, Present TimeRhett tilted his head back and squinted into the dark sky. He could just make out the outline of Heath and Samuel overhead. A distant glint might or might not be Aislen and Ember. Shit they were high if it was them. It made him queasy just to think of it. When they’d decided who would be flown in and who would enter on foot, it hadn’t even been a question that he was going in on foot.He hoped the dragons didn’t drop his mates.He refocused on the job ahead of him. He was crouched in the trees of the landscaping around the Van Helsings’ headquarters. Although they gave the impression of vigilance in their guards and patrols, it was all show. The soldiers were sloppy, their attention more on their phones than the streets.The Van Helsings had been in Rideten for weeks, and with the community support, they were the dangerous ones, not the ones that needed to fear, so the vigilance had relaxed into routine, and the soldiers were doing the minimal.Good for him, Rhet

Rideten, Present TimeThe final door at the end of the hall opened onto a balcony overlooking a church. If they followed the balcony around, they would come to the church organ, or the minstrels gallery where the choir would sing, their voices soaring over the congregation.The church was well lit, the pews glowing with soft foot-level lighting, and sconces set against the ancient stone walls to pick up the hand tooling marks left by the stone masons of old. The light was not kind to Heath or herself, Aislen thought wryly. Hybrid night vision didn’t have a lot of color distinction, and things tended to be more different shades of grey, so the splatter over their faces, in Heath’s hair, and across their clothing and arms, had been softened by its grey-tones. In the light, they were walking blood-baths dripping gore onto the well-worn floorboards.Heath’s top was grey, and the blood showed as darker patches that could be sweat. Hers (well, Rhett’s, though she was considering his wardrob