Prologue

Life can be a series of unfortunate events or it can be an adventure. The choice isn’t always yours but the road you’re predestined to take will always take you to where you were meant to be no matter what choice you make. The road I had walked started out smooth, I had faced many hard choices but I was always destined to end up what I became.

It took me a while to come to terms with those decisions and I reveled in the path I was on. It was filled with violence and blood and it satiated my beast. He was angry, angry at the world and angry at the people that filled it.

I grew up in a loving house, my parents weren’t your normal run of the mill parents and the word ‘asshole’ featured a lot. My father was strict and he had no time for bullshit but he was also our biggest ally. He covered for us a lot, much to our mother’s frustration. She was loving and caring but she expected us to be gentlemen and taught us that we always represented the lair.

The lair was important but family came first. Our father included both of us in Sire training and he didn’t treat us differently and as far as twins go, we could communicate with our eyes and we were as close as twins could be.

Our father had expanded his lair and it now not only included the whole of Aurora but he had also taken over Geneva, Yorkville, Naperville, Elgin and Wheaton. We had many warriors and soon after we were born my father, together with his friends and the Elders, created the Elite Hunters Team.

The EH Team consisted of dragonkin, witches, vampires and wolves who hunted other supernatural beings. Those that went rogue and broke the laws of both sides were hunted down and eliminated so that history wouldn’t repeat itself where someone like Joseph McIntyre could freely kidnap and sell women.

My brother and I were outgoing and popular, having grown up in Aurora where we knew almost everyone, it wasn’t a surprise really. We did well and our father started training us from a young age. His team remained intact and their friendship just grew in strength over the years.

Timothy and Nadia had a boy named Truman who had inherited his father’s vampire genes and he was eight months younger than us. Jasper’s son, Cameron, was born three months after us and Haley his wife kept him on a tight leash, not that he was complaining, his words actually were “a leash in the bedroom just adds excitement.”

Brandon and Kimberley had settled down and their first son Brady was five months younger than us, then they popped out babies like it was going out of fashion. Mia was born the next year with Gunther following eleven months later and Carey almost exactly nine months after him.

Preston and Jennifer had a boy named Jason a year younger than us and two years later they had Kennedy, their daughter. They had moved out of our house when Jennifer was pregnant with Jason but we saw them regularly and spent most weekends together.

Hannah had given birth to a girl ten months after we were born and named her Emily. She was like our sister and we followed her everywhere much to her annoyance. Rev still had tea parties with her and once or twice she got us to wear tiaras too, not that we would ever admit it now.

Our father kept his relationship with the Elders on good terms and he was very involved with them, especially when it came to investigating other lairs and that’s how the EH Team first started out, I guess you could say they were the first members of the EH Team.

Summer holidays were spent at our lake house and every family had a house on the sixty acre property that had a five acre lake in the middle. We spent a month at the lake house every year. It was an almost three hour drive and we spent our time having bonfires, fishing and hunting.

The houses were log cabins and not as fancy as where we lived, but that made it more fun. The lake was filled with bass, bluegills, crappie, catfish, muskie and walleye and once or twice our hunt resulted in a trophy Whitetail. There were trees that bordered the property all around us and kept the prying eyes of neighbouring land owners away from us.

Every year my parents had to attend the Illinois Dragonkin Ball which consisted of seventeen year old teens eager to meet their bonded halves or to complete the ceremony in front of the Elders. According to my father Bazzoit had spoken to Typhon in the dragon realm and they had altered how the ceremonies worked.

You could complete the bond and the mingling of blood but your bond would only complete permanently and have your mark appear after the Elders completed the ceremony. It seemed that for a while people had completed the bond and then decided to reject each other and quite a few people died who weren’t strong enough to survive it.

When you enter the dragon realm Typhon can see into your soul and he decides if your bond will be strong enough to last or not, if your mark doesn’t take then the bond is broken immediately and both of you are free without the rejection ceremony having to take place.

When things go well for too long it makes me apprehensive, because it can’t be good all the time, right? Right. My life wasn’t bad and yet I felt like something was missing. My brother was happy, so was I, I had my girlfriend and we’d been dating for a year and a half and we had a few months left before we turned seventeen and got our dragons.

Our father spoke to us a lot about our bonded halves and what he and our mother went through with their own relationship. It didn’t really surprise me, our father was a hot head, quick tempered but strangely enough always level headed when it came to making lair decisions.

He was the strongest person I knew, both physically and mentally. He could be funny and he spoke to us like we were one of the guys and we really could tell him everything. He knew some of our secrets that our mother didn’t know and he was wise enough to tell us which ones not to tell her.

I guess this is where my story truly starts. The end of one life and the beginning of a new one started, taking its predestined course when I was sixteen and I thought I had it all. I knew exactly who I wanted to be and where I wanted to end up.

Life’s a bitch and I would soon find out just how much of a bitch she really was until I took charge and looked fate in the eye and basically told her to go screw herself. The decisions I made was mine alone and for that I’ll never apologize.

My name is Ryder Grey and I’m the second son.