“And just how would you like to be treated?” Gabriel asked, walking behind me. His voice was rich with innuendo, causing my back to stiffen with sudden arousal. The dragon shard in me knew exactly what he was doing—he was flirting, teasing me, fulfilling a dragon’s need to play with its prey. He walked in a circle, not touching me, but his eyes glittered with a quicksilver heat that left me short of breath.

“How do I want to be treated?” I asked, struggling to hold on to myself, the true part of me, not the dragon-tainted bits that were slowly, insidiously taking over my sense of self.

“Yes.” He pathed around behind me again, causing me to shiver with anticipation. The dragon shard stopped insisting I pay attention to it, and simply took over, allowing my body to shift and stretch and transform into a silver-scaled form that was so foreign to me, and yet so familiar.

“I want to be treated like this,” I said in a sultry voice I almost didn’t recognize, and whipped my tail around one of his legs, jerking it toward me so he fell backwards onto the floor. Before he could protest, I was on top of him, licking him with fire, tasting him, wanting him, needing him to complete the self that waited so impatiently.

He growled deep in his chest, a mating sound that skittered along my body like a static charge. He, too, started to shift, but a noise at the door was followed by a soft voice saying in French-inflected English, “I have returned, although I could not find the pickle-flavored crisps you . . .”

I struggled to my feet at the sight of the man in the doorway who held a shopping bag from a prestigious store. “Er . . . hello.”

“René, is it not?” Gabriel asked, completely composed despite the fact that a strange man walked in just as I was about to have my dragonly way with him. I fought the dragon shard for control, slowly, inch by inch returning my body to normal. The man named René greeted Gabriel pleasantly enough, but he watched me with a decidedly wary look as the last of the silver scales shimmered into my normal skin color.

“It is a pleasure to see you again,” René said, his eyes flickering to me again.

“This is my mate, May. Little bird, this is an old friend of Aisling’s, a daimon who has been of much assistance to her.”

Daimons were fates, I knew. I’d never actually met one before, although I thought it was interesting that they were occasionally assigned to individuals who they felt needed a little help.

“Including as a purveyor of hard-to-find delectables,” René answered, holding up his bag with a grin. “Drake, he refuses to leave her side, so it is up to me to bring the so-charming Aisling the food she craves most.”

“I thought pregnancy cravings were over by the time birth was imminent?”

He shrugged, a loose-shouldered gesture that made me think of smoky bars in Marseille filled with slinky women in loud-print dresses. “It depends on the woman, hein? I have seven little ones myself, and when the maman desires something, it is better to humor her, I have found. With my wife, it was macaroons. Always the macaroons. At all hours, she must have macaroons. Aisling, she has a passion for crisps of the most repulsive flavors, but it is not for me to deny her when she most desires them. I find the crisps just as I found the macaroons for my Brigitte. Did you say ‘mate’?”

Gabriel grinned as René gave me a thorough visual inspection. “Despite the curse, yes, she is.”

“But I thought . . . you are not a dragon, then?”

“To be honest, I don’t know quite what I am anymore,” I answered with more than a touch of despair.

Gabriel took my hand, his fingers warm and strong, offering comfort. “Do not fight the shard, May. Control it as we discussed, but do not fight it. I will not allow it to consume you.”

René’s eyebrows went up. “A shard? You do not mean . . .”

“I’m technically known as the Northcott Phylactery, yes,” I said, giving Gabriel’s hand a squeeze to let him know I appreciated the support. “I’m a doppelganger, really.”

“A shadow walker? How very interesting. I have only ever met one other of your kind.”

“Ophelia?”

“Oui. You know her?”

I shook my head. “Not really. I gather she’s having a rough time being on her own, but other than one or two conversations on the phone with her, I have no contact with any other doppelgangers. We tend to stay pretty much on our own.”

“Ah, you were not born,” René said, nodding his head as he figured out how we had gotten around the curse put on the silver dragons by the dread wyvern Baltic. “Very clever. And now you are here to help Aisling with the birth, Gabriel?”

“I would be happy to act as midwife, but Drake, I believe, would rather birth the child himself than let me near his mate.”

“Dragons,” René said, nodding, adding in an aside to me, “They can be very protective.”

“So I gather. Perhaps you can answer a question for me. Are daimons assigned to particular individuals, or can you be hired? I know Gabriel will feel otherwise, but I certainly feel as if we could use a helping hand—”

A racket exploded from the entrance of the house, a woman’s shouts carrying loud and clear over a more masculine rumbling.

“Cabrón! Do you think I will be kept from seeing my grandchild? Move aside before I have my son throw you into the gutter where you belong!”

“Who on earth—?” I started to ask, but I asked it to an empty room, Gabriel and René immediately racing from the room. I followed, pausing at the door to take in the sight of a tall, olive-skinned, dark-haired woman chewing up István, who was probably double her weight, not to mention built like a truck. To my intense surprise, István was backpedaling madly as the tall Spanish woman yelled, her hands gesticulating wildly.

“Where is my Drake? Where is my grandchild?” She punctuated her sentences with blows to István’s chest. “Stop running from me and fetch—”

The woman caught sight of us from the corner of her eye. She stopped hitting István and rounded on Gabriel, her black expression suddenly turning sly and sultry. “Gabriel!” she all but cooed.

Hackles I didn’t know I possessed went up at the sight of her as she sauntered toward Gabriel, brushing past René as if he didn’t exist, her hips swaying with an unmistakable message. My fingers lengthened into claws, but I curled them up, refusing to give in to the shard’s demand that I deal with the brazen hussy who was going to be one very sorry person if she so much as laid a finger on my mate.