Free Kiss of Destiny by Deborah Cooke

form and more wiry than his older brother. He inhaled deeply of the night air, as if expecting to catch a whiff of something in the wind, and listened to the world outside the house while Ginger and their sons Liam and Sean slept.
    Niall Talbot, the Dreamwalker of the Pyr , was changing a diaper, his keen sense of smell so affronted by the odor that Erik smiled. Niall and Rox had twin boys, Kyle and Nolan. Erik was aware that Rox was beside Niall, changing the other boy’s diaper, and that Niall was also listening for a sound that had not yet come.
    He was not alone in his sense of foreboding.
    Erik found that reassuring.
    He followed a brilliant and sturdy line of fire to his old friend Rafferty, secure within the line of dragonsmoke that defended his townhouse in London. Rafferty was gold and opal in his dragon form and was humming softly, reinforcing the dragonsmoke even though it was already deep and thick. It was early morning there, and the Pyr abandoned his creation of dragonsmoke when his partner Melissa embraced him. Erik turned his attention away on purpose, not wanting to intrude, but noted that Rafferty also was preparing for a sensed threat.
    Stretching beyond Rafferty’s thread of gold was the glittering line that led Erik to Lorenzo, stage magician and chameleon of the Pyr . Lorenzo was staring out of his home at the waters of the Grand Canal in Venice, looking so intently into the water that it seemed he expected something or someone to suddenly appear. Erik felt Lorenzo jump when his partner Cassie spoke to him, a remarkable thing given how observant Lorenzo was.
    On a shoal west of the Hawai’ian islands, Brandon scanned the horizon, as if expecting a storm. He stayed close beside his pregnant partner, Liz, and Erik felt the younger Pyr ’s readiness to leap into a fight. Brandon’s father, Brandt, even farther away in Australia stood on a beach and listened to the sound of the wind with care.
    Erik spared only the barest glance at Thorolf, because he was so disappointed in that Pyr and his choices. Given his lineage, Thorolf should have been not just a large dragon with fearsome appetites but a force for change and good in the world. Instead, he fought, drank and seduced women. Erik knew he shouldn’t be surprised that Thorolf alone was oblivious to any threat, engaged in a bout of lovemaking with some woman in Bangkok. Erik didn’t want to know if that Pyr was also drunk so he turned his attention away quickly.
    In California, Sloane, the Apothecary of the Pyr , was stirring some concoction as it cooled. He stood in bare feet in his kitchen, the glass doors slid back and the evening breeze sweeping through his house, which perched on a hilltop, his attention distracted from his task by something he sensed drawing nearer.
    They all—with the exception of Thorolf—sensed the same portent that Erik felt. He wondered if their minds were aflame like his, too. Because that was the sum of the Pyr remaining. Their numbers had dwindled over the centuries. Though Erik had hopes for the next generation of dragon shifters, they wouldn’t come into their powers until puberty. In a sense, they were slumbering like Drake. He was used to an array of glimmering lines of gold in his mind, enough that he could count them readily, enough that he could feel comforted that he wasn’t alone, enough to cast a glow in the darkness of his dreams.
    The problem was that lately, there had been a fireball in his mind. He could see and follow the same lines that he knew well, but hovering on the edge of his vision was a brilliant halo of light. Erik could make no sense of it.
    But it drew steadily closer. It had first lit when Drake took the darkfire crystal from Lorenzo, and it had become almost blinding in its intensity when Drake appeared at his door three days before. It was clear to Erik that his fellow Pyr sensed a change as well, though none of them knew what it might be. There were others of their kind, Slayers who had