Free A Dragon for December (Wiccan-Were-Bear Book 11) by R. E. Butler Page B

in opposite
directions, opening doors and searching rooms as they went. Dai
lifted his cell from his pocket and called 911. Tosh leaned over
Meiling and let his beast bleed into him, knowing his fangs were
elongated, his eyes had turned bright green, and the hint of scales
glistened on his skin.
    “What did you do?”
    Meiling’s eyes widened, and tears rolled down
the sides of her face. “I owed a debt to Yuon. He…made me.”
    “Where did he take my mate?”
    Her eyes rolled back in her head, and Tosh
slapped her cheeks to rouse her. “Where? Meiling answer me!”
    She slowly lifted her hand, and Tosh saw her
blood-covered cell phone. Her thumb pressed the center button, and
the screen cleared to show a map with an orange dot on it. Taking
the phone from her, he looked at the screen more closely and
recognized it as a phone location app.
    “Is this Yuon?” Tosh asked.
    She nodded. “I’m sorry, sire. Tell Deci…” Her
eyes rolled back in her head, and Tosh pressed his fingers to her
throat and found no pulse.
    He stood and faced the hallway where Zixin
carried Deci’s angel friend in his arms. She was wrapped in a
blanket and unmoving.
    “Is she alive?” Tosh asked.
    “Unconscious. She smells like Tai. It’s a
weird scent, like flowers, but underneath that is something that
smells awful, like rotten eggs. There were these machines over the
two tables in there, and there was black residue inside them. I
think whatever that chemical was, it made Alli, and most likely
Deci, unconscious,” he said.
    Tosh held up the phone. “We know where Yuon
is.”
    Zixin smiled darkly. “Good.”
    Wei and Dai called from the back of the spa.
Tosh and Zixin moved swiftly to the employee lounge and found Zhen,
Ehra, and Jun unconscious, bound hands and feet.
    “What the ever loving fuck happened here?”
Zixin asked. “They killed the two females in the hallway, and
everyone else is unconscious.”
    Tosh had to force down his dragon. The urge
to shift and destroy the spa was riding him hard. Shaking his head
to clear his murderous thoughts, he said, “Zixin and Wei come with
me. Dai, I know you want to stay with your sister. Call the other
guards from the nest and have them come and help. When the others
awaken, make sure they’re taken care of and get whatever
information you can from them on what transpired.”
    Dai nodded, taking Alli from Zixin’s arms and
settling her on a small leather couch in the room. Tosh rushed from
the spa with his guards and hurried into the SUV. He gave Yuon’s
location to Wei, who entered it into the GPS and tore out of the
parking lot with squealing tires.
    Tosh silently vowed to kill anyone involved
in Deci’s abduction.
    “You know this is because Yuon wants to be
king,” Zixin said.
    Tosh rubbed at his temples, watching the
blinking dot on the screen. “I know. He must have believed that
keeping us from joining tonight would allow him to take over the
nest.”
    “If you follow the old laws, it does,” Wei
pointed out. “But you’re also the rightful heir of the nest, and
not mating with her or making her queen because she was abducted by
a usurper wouldn’t really change anything about your place as the
future king. No one in the nest would stand in your way of being
king and making Deci your queen. Yuon is a lunatic, grasping at
straws.”
    “I have known Meiling all my life. I would
never have guessed she was the sort of female who would betray her
future queen,” Tosh said.
    “Because it’s unheard of. She said that a
debt had to be paid to Yuon. Whatever it was, it was serious enough
that she risked death to betray the queen. She must have known that
she would be killed if the plan didn’t work,” Zixin said.
    “I think Yuon took care of that risk for
her,” Tosh said. He mentally scrubbed the image of the female’s
torn throat out of his mind. She may have felt as if she had no
choice but to betray Deci to satisfy some debt to his uncle, but
she should have