Destiny (The Chosen One Trilogy:Book Three)

Destiny

The Chosen One Trilogy:

Book Three

Mireille Chester

Copyright © 2011 by Mireille Chester

Published by Mireille Chester

Smashwords Edition

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of this author.

A big thank you to Germaine Gaudet and Leslie
Morgan for helping with the editing;

To Charlie and my fellow angels: Dennis,
Sammie, and Allie, your constant support and friendship have been
priceless and a mere thank you doesn’t seem to do justice to how
much you’ve come to mean to me therefore I’ll add a few hugs as
well;

A big thank you to all of you who have helped
spread the word and have kept this momentum going. Without readers,
an author can never succeed. I love each and every one of you even
though I may not know you all personally.

A huge hug to Ray at Baico Publishing Inc.
Without you we’d all still be waiting to see what happens to Hayden
and Jasper. Also a big thanks for answering all of my questions
(some of them more than once) and for making this one of the most
fulfilling experiences I’ve ever had.

As always, this book is for my husband, Kyle.
Your encouragement has been undying and I will never be able to put
into words how much you truly mean to me. I love you, my sweet,
even when you read over my shoulder.

Prologue

If someone had ever told me I would someday
find myself trying to save a world that I had been sure didn’t
exist, I would have laughed. The only explanation would have been
that a) this person was obviously on some bad, or good, drugs, or
b) that this said person had just escaped from a mental hospital
and forgotten to take afore mentioned drugs.

And yet, here I found myself, surrounded by
beings I couldn’t have made up had I tried. I looked straight ahead
at the human keep in front of me. I shivered, partly with
excitement, partially with fear. I took a deep breath and was
comforted by the presence of my pack standing behind me.

I heard a low growl and glanced at the tiger
standing beside me. Jasper’s fur was standing on end, his tail
twitching. His form blurred as he shifted, rematerializing as a
human. He then looked back to Matthew and Luke who were standing
just behind us. The blue bird landed on his shoulder and chirped.
He turned back to me.

“Ready?” Jasper’s face was grim. He put his
hand on my knee.

I nodded. “Are they here?” I couldn’t tear my
gaze away from the walls that surrounded the keep of Paradin.

“They are.”

Dodge stretched his wings.
It’s about
time.

I took a deep breath and patted his neck then
pulled my swords out of the scabbards on my back.

No. If you or anyone else had told me I would
one day be leading an army from the back of a bay Pegasus, I would
have laughed. But today, I wasn’t laughing. I gazed down into
Jasper’s sky blue eyes.

“Let’s do this.” I turned back toward the
human fortress. “It ends here.”

Chapter One

The first indication they had crossed over
was the feeling of peace. Everyone stopped, weapons ready, waiting
for the fight they knew was coming. Jasper took a deep breath, the
crisp night air filling his lungs. He cringed inwardly, waiting for
his ribs to feel like they were ripping out of his chest. They
didn’t. He looked into the night sky and wanted to dance at the
sight of the moons, the smaller of the two partially hidden by the
bigger one. He heard Hayden take her own deep breath.

“It’s just better here, isn’t it?” She was
looking down at him, smiling. She looked around and readjusted her
legs as Dodge’s wings started to sprout from his shoulders. Her
eyes widened and he followed her gaze to where Phlann and Shanus
were standing.

The two draft horses had slowly started to
turn back into the Scannoves that they were. Phlann’s palomino
coloring lightened, his thick horse neck thickened some more, the
hair on it giving way to sun bronzed skin. His arms grew out of the
sides of his torso while the horse head became smaller and turned
into the handsome face of a young man. He blinked his yellow eyes
and smiled.

“Hello, Hayden. Jasper.” He looked back at
Tara who was riding him. “Hang on. I have to shake.” Tara hung on
to his shoulders to keep from sliding off of the caramel colored
scales that covered his body and laughed. “Ugh. I’ll have to admit,
that was not my favorite experience.”

Shanus chuckled, took his son’s lead and
shook himself hard enough to almost drop Ben to the ground. “I
agree.” He blew away some of the dark blond bangs that had fallen
into his deep brown eyes.

Jasper had been so busy watching the horses
change back that he hadn’t noticed Tara and Ben’s transformations.
Ben had shrunk back to his regular height, both of them had some
newly pointed ears, and their skin had changed back to the earthy
tones he was used to seeing on them; Ben’s being dark brown with
green striping and Tara’s khaki green.

“Jasper.” Hayden said his name and he looked
up at her. Her deep green eyes filled with grey and gold flecks
were gazing deeply into his. Her right eye always seemed a bit
greener than the left now that she had the green vine tattoo under
it that marked her as a healer. He watched loose strands of her
long dark brown hair dance with the breeze and could imagine it
blowing into her pretty face had it not been tied into a ponytail.
She smiled. “Much better.”

“What is?”

“Your eyes; the pain is gone.”

He smiled and nodded. A shiver ran through
him. “I need to shift.”

Her smile widened. “So shift,” she
laughed.

He did and adjusted his gaze higher up so he
could look at her again. By the moons, it was nice to be home.

*****

I took a deep breath and laughed. Jasper’s
purr rumbled through him, his sky blue eyes blinked at me, and I
knew he wasn’t hurting anymore. It had been a year since I had seen
him as a tiger. I put my swords away and slid off of Dodge. The big
cat tilted his head in question. I ran my fingers through the thick
fur and kissed him softly between the eyes. Jasper shifted back and
laughed. The breeze blew some dark curls into his eyes and he
brushed them out of the way.

“Well, where’s this big fight Damian warned
us about?” I looked around at the dark meadow, silently praying the
leader of the Majs had been wrong. We all turned toward the sound
of a bird chirping in the woods at the far end of the clearing.
Jasper put his hand to his mouth and made an answering call.

I waited, knowing Luke was about to appear.
Jasper and his adopted brother had come up with a series of
whistles and chirps to communicate when they had been forced to
fight in battles against each other. I was shocked by the group
that came trotting out of the woods. What I’d expected to be a
party of three turned out to be a small pack of six. I recognized
all of them but one. A wolf, a coyote, a fox, a leopard, a jaguar
and a lion came to stand in front of me.

The large grey wolf shifted and Luke smiled
before crushing me in a hug. His usually shaggy dark brown hair was
cropped short, his dark brown eyes just as mischievous as
usual.

“What happened to your hair?” I laughed.

“Tyler and Trent picked a trail that ran
through some birn bushes while we were out hunting last week.” I
laughed even harder. That was all the explanation I needed. Birn
bushes were full of sap that was almost impossible to wash out of
clothes and, yes, hair.

Kacey, the coyote, shifted, smiled and
nodded. “Hello, Hayden.” It had taken a while, but he was finally
able to look a person in the eye when he was talking to them.
Coyotes were shy by nature, but Kacey took the cake.

I turned to where the leopard had been
standing in time for Matthew to lift me clean off of the ground. He
set me back down and held me out at arm’s length. His green eyes
looked me over thoughtfully for a moment. He tilted his head to the
side, ran a hand through his dark blond hair, then gave me another
hug.

“There,” he said.

“What?”

“Well, it was strange, really. My bond to
Melana broke while you were gone and I was able to go to Sageden,
but when I got there, I had this horrible feeling. It was like I
was lost.” He smiled. “That feeling is gone.” He turned to where
the jaguar still sat, looking up at us. “You’ll remember
Roger?”

I nodded. “Of course. You can shift, Roger.
There are no rules when it comes to being in my presence. You have
to remember that. I’m not your leader. I’m just Hayden.”

Roger shifted and nodded to me. He was only
seventeen and his face still held the innocence of a soldier who
had yet to deal with the extremes of war.

A small man of my height with orange hair and
blue eyes walked toward me. He knelt and bowed his head.

“Colton, miss, at your service.”

I wanted to laugh. Instead, I knelt in front
of him and waited until he met my gaze.

“Did you hear the comment I made to
Roger?”

He nodded.

“That goes for you too. No saluting, no
bowing.”

He frowned. “I thought maybe it was because
he was a cat. Maybe you didn’t notice, but I’m a dog.”

This time I did laugh. He looked at me,
surprise clear on his face.

“Yes, as a matter of fact, I did notice.” I
took his hand and stood him up. “I don’t care if you’re a Namael or
a Maj. Every being that joins our pack is free to do as they
please. We aren’t a military pack. We’re a family pack.”

Kacey’s grey eyes met mine and he smiled. “I
tried explaining the rules to him, but he didn’t believe me.”

I sighed. “Alright. I’ll go through them
again. Roger, this is for you too.” I took a deep breath and
recited the non-official list of rules that applied to joining our
pack of misfits. “We don’t fight unless we have too, we don’t kill
if it can be avoided. We are not a troop, or an actual military
pack. We are a family. Your input into any discussion is
appreciated and any comment that you make will never get you
punished. If you feel like leaving to do something, do it.” I
looked at Jasper and caught my breath as my eyes met his. All I
wanted to do was get lost in those perfect blue eyes and forget
about the situation we were about to become involved in. I blinked
and turned back to Roger and Colton. “Understood?”

Alex, the lion, smiled and patted the two of
them on the back. “You’ll like it.”

The two of them nodded.

A rustle in the bushes to our left had
everyone jumping to attention, hands on their weapons. I laughed as
a blue merle Australian Shepherd with one brown eye and one white
eye came trotting toward us.

“Kip, heel.” I bent down to pat my dog on the
head as he sat by my side. “Alright. Well, obviously, Damian was
wrong about the fighting. Let’s head to the waterfall for the rest
of the night. We’ll head for home in the morning.”

Jasper pulled me into his arms before I swung
onto Dodge. He looked searchingly at my face before kissing me
softly. I smiled. “I’m fine,” I whispered low enough so that only
he could hear.

“The baby?” His mouth was against my ear. I
nodded and hugged him tightly. “Let’s go get some sleep.” He gave
me another quick kiss before boosting me onto Dodge. His hand
lingered a fraction of a second over my belly where our child was
growing. It had already passed its first test by making the
crossing with us.

Kip ran ahead of us, glancing back
occasionally to make sure he was heading in the right direction. He
was leading by a good margin when he stopped short and whined. He
lowered his head in the tall grass. Jasper took the lead and knelt
beside our dog.

“Everyone down.”

I flattened myself on Dodge’s back and we
moved forward to see what Kip had found. My heart jumped in my
throat and I slid to the ground.

“Is he alive?”

Jasper rolled the blond man over onto his
back. I pulled his shirt up and tried not to gag at the sight in
front of me.

“Oh, god! What happened to him?” The man’s
whole abdomen had been torn open. His insides lay exposed in a
surreal painting of red, black and grey. I had never been one for
throwing up at the sight of blood but was forced to swallow hard a
few times before I was sure I wouldn’t do just that.