Valkyrie's Conquest by Sharon Ashwood

Chapter One
    A beautiful woman who could fly? Now that interested Bron even more than a pretty face.
    His lips parted in fascination, Bron watched her from atop his perch on the cathedral roof, where he sat lounging against one of the large stone gargoyles. She swooped from the sky with the swiftness of a comet, her translucent wings sending rainbows through the purple twilight.
    Details were sketchy at this distance, but Bron could see the soaring figure was shapely with a mass of long golden hair streaming behind her. The fading light glinted on a breastplate made of silver links. Beneath that she wore a leather tunic and supple boots that left her lithe limbs bare. To borrow a human term, she was hot—and in response, Bron felt the dragonfire within him smolder with interest.
    â€œWhat do you think?” he asked the gargoyle. “Should I say hello, one winged creature to another?”
    The gargoyle, being no more than a stone statue, did not reply but remained hunched on the rooftop, sticking out a forked tongue at no one in particular. Bron watched as the woman streaked past the half-finished condominiums across the way, past the construction cranes and flashing billboards and old-fashioned neon signs that crowned the streets.
    â€œThe sword makes a statement,” he muttered, eyeing the enormous blade slung across her back. “I think it might be
go away
.”
    Her wings stretched wide as she banked and dove toward the rivers of cars below. The city lights were coming to life, spangling the darkness like a sudden scattering of stars and turning those wings into glowing, insubstantial veils. Before he realized it, he had risen to his feet, wanting,
needing
to keep her in sight.
    Don’t be a fool
. Whatever she was up to, it wasn’t Bron’s affair. He was a dragon shifter, a creature of scales, fire and fang. He was master of his own wanderings and had left the claustrophobic tangle of dragon politics behind. Why get mixed up with anyone else’s wars? But cutting ties with his den meant leaving everyone he knew behind, and the solitude was getting to him. A pretty woman—even one brandishing a weapon—would be an improvement on talking to statues.
    â€œI’ve been told a touch of risk adds spice to a liaison.” Bron gave the stone gargoyle a pat on its cold, hard flank. “And who can resist a dragon when he chooses to be charming?”
    With that, he began running along the rooftops, leaping from one to the next with a strength and agility that would have made humans gape had they looked up to see it. Even so, he barely kept the winged woman in view as she dove into the crevasse between sparkling towers. It would have been easier to shift, but dragons were nothing if not obvious. This close to street level, it made sense to remain in human form.
    He followed her down, springing to lower and lower rooftops until he too was deep in the valley that stretched between skyscrapers. Traffic surged beneath, noisy and stinking but vital as blood to the sprawling metropolis.
    Bron followed his quarry to a pocket of shadowed streets, one thick with refuse and danger in equal measure. She finally landed in a parking lot behind a diner, her boots thumping on the roof of a beat-up sedan. The lot was surrounded by a square of grimy brick walls tagged with graffiti. Garbage drifted along the base of the walls as if an invisible tide had left it there. On the north side, among the crumpled paper and crushed beer cans, sprawled a bleeding man.
    Bron’s mood swerved. He’d come in hopes of flirtation, but this was serious. He took another leap, landing on a flat roof two stories above the pavement. The winged woman, still atop the car, was directly below. She stood with the sword gripped loosely in one hand, looking fixedly at a corner between the buildings. Something dark was moving there—something that was slinking away.
    Bron dropped lightly to the ground, landing in a