Page 10 of A Gathering Storm
He goes still in that way alphas do when processing a threat to their territory. "Who?"
"If I knew that, would I be standing here talking philosophy with you?" The anger surprises me—I thought seven years had drowned it. But it rises now, hot and familiar. "I came back because the pacts demand it. My bloodline sealed something here, and my bloodline must maintain the seal. But I can't do it alone, not with the old alliances broken and my kin..."
Dead. All dead except me. The last dragon in the North Atlantic, keeper of promises I never made, guardian of secrets I only half understand.
"The others need to know," Declan says, changing into his role as strategist, alpha, the one who holds Stormhaven's fractured pieces together. "Tomorrow night...”
"I know about your meeting. The old boathouse." His surprise flickers across his face, and I almost smile. "The gulls still speak to me, MacRae. And they see everything."
He turns to leave, then pauses. "Why now, Finn? Why return after seven years?"
The truth is too heavy for this moment—that I've felt each death like fishhooks in my scales, that the water itself screams warnings only dragon-blood can hear, that something my grandfather feared enough to bind with his own heart's blood is stirring in the deep places.
Instead, I give him part of it: "Because what's coming will make the grief that drove me away look like a gentle rain. And because, despite everything, I still remember when this place was home."
He leaves without another word, but I feel his presence fade slowly, reluctantly. He'll spread word—to Rafe in his shadow-kingdom, to Grayson guarding the harbor, to the wolves who gnash their teeth at my name. The sea dragon has returned, and with him, all the old fears.
Within an hour, I sense them gathering. Not approaching—none are that brave or foolish—but watching from safedistances. Young wolves in the tree line, testing the air for my scent. A crow that might be one of Rafe's informants perched on a dead pine. Even the selkies surface briefly beyond the breakers, their seal-eyes reflecting moonlight as they verify the impossible: a dragon walks the land again.
They remember or think they do. Fire that turned sand to glass. Storms that lasted three days and sank half the fishing fleet. The way I held Saoirse's body and screamed until windows shattered in houses a mile away.
But they don't know the rest. The months I spent learning control from a grandfather who'd lived eight centuries. The discipline required to keep dragon-fire from consuming everything in rage or passion. The weight of being the last repository of knowledge about things that swim in trenches no human has mapped, about pacts written in constellations that no longer align, about why Stormhaven exists at all—a lock on a door that should never open.
Lightning forks across the horizon, and I taste ozone and possibility. The storm will hit before dawn, washing away evidence of whatever happened on these cliffs tonight. But storms can't wash away what's coming. The drownings will continue. The summonings will grow stronger. And somewhere, someone who knows too much about old magic and older grudges moves pieces on a board I can only partially see.
Wind tears at my jacket, carrying salt and sorrow and the faint copper tang of blood—not fresh, but remembered. This clifftop has seen too much death. Saoirse's. The ones before her. Maybe mine, eventually, when whatever my grandfather bound finally breaks free.
But not tonight.
Tonight, I stand between sea and sky, dragon and man, past and present. The ocean calls me back to the silence of the deep, where grief can't follow and responsibility dissolves in pressureand darkness. But the pull of the ancient pacts is stronger, a chain of starlight and blood-promise that binds me to this broken place and its fractured people.
Tomorrow, I'll face them in that boathouse. Declan with his desperate need for unity. Rafe with his shadow-games. The others with their fear and resentment and half-remembered stories of dragon-fire. I'll endure their distrust, their anger at my abandonment, their terror of what I represent—power too vast for comfortable alliance, grief too deep for easy forgiveness.
But tonight, I mourn. For Saoirse, whose laughter once made even a dragon believe in gentleness. For my kin, scattered to ash and memory. For the simplicity of exile, where the only voices were whales and waves.
The storm builds, and I let it wash over me—rain like tears I can no longer cry, wind like the rage I've learned to contain. Somewhere beneath the waves, in trenches that know no light, something turns in its sleep. The seals are right to beach themselves. The fish are wise to flee.
Because when it wakes—and it will wake, the summoning is too far along to stop entirely—Stormhaven will need more than wolves and panthers and bears. It will need what dragons were made for: to stand between the mortal world and things that should never breach it.
Even if it costs everything. Again.
The isolation wraps around me like the ocean's embrace, familiar and suffocating in equal measure. This half-life of reluctant return, neither fully of land nor sea, neither dragon nor man. The exile was easier—you can't fail the dead, can't disappoint ghosts, can't break promises to echoes.
But the living demand more. They demand presence, participation, the pretense that I'm still capable of connection when everything I touch turns to salt and sorrow. They need thedragon's power but fear the dragon's nature, want the protection but not the price.
CHAPTER 6
JAX
The storm drives needles of rain into my scarred face as I climb the cliff path, each step deliberate, controlled. Lightning fractures the sky, illuminating the gathering ahead—five figures standing like standing stones against the tempest. My wolf prowls beneath my skin, hackles raised, sensing the wrongness of this assembly.
Declan. Grayson. Kian. Rafe. And him—the dragon who left us to burn.
Thunder masks my approach until I'm close enough to smell them all: Declan's pine-and-iron alpha scent tinged with exhaustion. Grayson's salt-cedar steadiness. Kian's restless tiger musk. Rafe's shadow-and-silk danger. And Finn—brine and ozone and something ancient that makes my wolf bare its teeth.
"This is madness, Declan." My voice cuts through the storm, rough as gravel over broken glass. They turn as one, and I let them see what I've become—scarred, brutal, built from betrayal. The white lines crossing my throat and jaw gleam in the lightning's flash. "A panther who deals with cartels, a tiger exile, and a myth that abandoned us when we needed him most?"
Declan's gray eyes—so like mine before the rage consumed them—narrow. "Jax...”
