Andi growled at herself, then picked up her bag of wet clothes left by the bathroom door and stepped out of the room.
“HEY!” she yelled, her voice echoing through the apparently empty corridors. “Is anyone here?”
To her surprise, Austin was waiting for her by the time she got to the lower level, and he seemed surprised to see her. “Damian didn’t take you home?”
“Nope,” she said, as his eyes took her outfit in.
“Damian…took you to bed?” Austin guessed.
Andi rolled her eyes. Not for lack of trying on her part for a bit there. “Also, no, although not that it’d be any of your business if he had.” She wondered what it meant that that’d been Austin’s first guess—did Damian have a revolving door? He was rich and impossibly handsome; of course, he got laid—all the time, probably.
And none of those women had realized he wasn’t human like she had.
“I pulled a weird purple thorn from him. He was bleeding green blood,” she said calmly, watching Austin’s reaction.
Austin looked at her, a mixture of surprise and wariness in his eyes, clearly wondering how much she knew, how much she would ask him to explain.
“Don’t worry. He’s fine. He told me to find you and have you pay me and take me home.” She stopped, and Austin looked at her, clearly waiting for her to ask more questions—questions she desperately wanted to know the answer to!—but shit with her brother had taught her that sometimes it was better not to get involved. “Look, I’m tired and I’d just like my money and a ride to the bus stop.”
Austin hesitated for long enough that she started to get worried, then shook himself and said, “All right. Wait here.”
He returned with her coat and a large envelope. Before he handed it over, though, he glanced down. “Do you know those are eight hundred-dollar shoes?”
Andi stopped herself from gasping in time. “So?” she said instead, defiantly.
“And they’re…men’s shoes.”
“I know. I can mail them back, all right?” She pulled her coat on roughly and found her own phone in its pocket. “I don’t want to talk about what happened to mine. Just take me to the bus already.”
He looked her up and down again. Something about her current situation made him uneasy—but it didn’t stop him from leading her outside.
“Wait here.”
She did as she was told, waiting on the mansion’s marble stairs as Austin went to retrieve a car. Dawn was rising over the horizon, and from this height, the light spilled over the hills, making the morning breathtaking. A light breeze pushed the scent of roses her way and picked up a lock of her hair to play with.
Out here, it was like last night had never happened—like it wasn’t even real. Like the entire night had been a bad dream—except for the part that hadn’t been.
Him.
And her kissing him.
Whatever he was.
She was almost glad she hadn’t asked questions because if Austin had lied to her—which, of course, he would’ve; he’d have to—she’d have started to doubt her own two eyes.
Because that blood had not been human. Maybe that green stuff was what they pumped you with when you were rich enough to get something to somehow live forever? She fought not to nervously laugh at herself. She’d be on the bus soon, and she didn’t want to seem crazy with a fist-sized wad of cash inside her pocket.
But where was Austin? Was he ghosting her?
Maybe Damian was…a ghost? And that green stuff had been ectoplasm?
Andi put a hand to her head, feeling the edge of a no-sleep headache approaching, knowing she needed to get to bed soon before she could think about anything else stupid—crazy, impossible—and real.
And then, just like it’d been designed to set off a migraine, a klaxon started wailing from somewhere behind her.
Andi whirled to look back at the house. “What the—” she got out before the lights on the inside of the house went red, and the metal shutters started loudly rolling down outside, cutting through ivy and beginning to cover all the castle’s windows.
“Fuck,” she breathed as a car pulled up behind her.
“More like, oh, shit!” Austin said, getting out.
“What’s happening?”
“No time to explain,” he said, and just as she’d imagined earlier in the night, he picked her up and put her over one shoulder.
Chapter 7
Andi was swung over Austin’s shoulder and started hitting his back with closed fists. “Hey! What the fuck!”
Austin ignored her and started to run toward the garage. He swiped a keypad with his hand—she watched him do it through his armpit, and then ran with her inside, knocking the air out of her lungs with his broad shoulder. “Get your hands off of me!” She grabbed hold of his belt and used it to brace herself, trying to slide forward. He completely ignored these efforts and any impropriety, hitching her back up by her crotch.
“HEY!” she shouted, twisting to try to knee him in the head.
“It’s for your own safety,” he explained, grabbing hold of her waist again. She thought he was about to set her down, but no, he held her under his arm. Her hair swirled, blocking her vision, but then she heard a latch open, and he threw her into a tiny space with shelves and a metal plated floor.
Andi got to her knees and inhaled because she was an excellent curser in two languages and she was about to tell Austin off, but the look of fear on his face stopped her cold.
“Keep quiet. You’ll be safe in here,” Austin said and shut the door. She heard it lock, heard him leave, and knew she was alone in the dark.
Andi felt around the edges of the space she was in. Judging by the curve of the ceiling and the way she was barely able to stand up all the way inside, she thought she was in a van.
“Fucking asshole serial killer,” she muttered to herself. Sammy’s fears were right.
She patted her pockets. Her phone must’ve fallen out of her pocket on the way here—same for her envelope of money. All this trouble, all for nothing, and now… She moved her way up to sit on what seemed like a bench.
“What the hell have I gotten myself into?” She brought her knees up to hug to her chest. Why the klaxon and why the shutters? It’d have been an elaborate ruse if all that had happened just to kidnap her now after she’d been here all night. Same thing for if they didn’t want to pay her—a month of pay was a lot to her, but not to Damian and his eight-hundred-dollar shoes.
She pulled one of them off and beat it against the side of the van.
“Can anyone hear me?” she shouted, then thumped some more. “I’m in here! Let me loose!” She took out all her frustrations on the van’s interior, beating on it like it was a piñata. “Get me the fuck out of here!”
When she was done, she threw herself back on the bench, exhausted and panting, just this side of crying herself to sleep when something thumped back hard enough to make the entire van rock.
“Hello?” she whispered. Why hadn’t she thought about the freaking fist-sized bee stinger before she’d made that much noise?
The van rocked again, as whatever was outside hit it from the other side. Andi bit her lips not to scream and scurried underneath the bench, pressing herself against the wheel well, feeling the pattern on the cold metal floor press against her skin.
She breathed in and out into her coat—half to calm herself, and half to mask her breathing. Whatever was outside… Oh, God…oh, God…oh, God.
But it was gone now. Right?
Andi lay stock still trying to see in the dark, and phantoms came—the kind you get when you rub your eyes too hard. Shimmers of gold with stripes of green—only her eyes weren’t closed. She was filled with a sense of unholy dread as she realized something was materializing inside the van with her.
In the coin toss between dying lying on the ground and dying trying to escape, escape won. She rolled herself out and up and ran for what she thought was the front of the van and searching against t
he wall there for something—anything to help her—and on her second panicked pass through, she found it—a latch so flat it couldn’t catch on anything. She popped it open so hard she broke a fingernail, but then fluorescent light flooded through. The van was still in the garage. She crawled through the hole—no way it’d been meant for that, probably just a pass through, she was just lucky she was small—and fell into the van’s cab.
The van rocked behind her, and she heard the sound of something slithering. She kicked the pass-through shut and lunged to lock it just in time. A solid thump jarred her.
Whatever was back there was pissed. She whirled in the driver’s seat, looking for something to protect herself with, and caught the glint of keys. In the ignition. Because when you had your own garage inside your own fortress, there was never any reason to take them out. She froze for an instant, trying to remember how it was that people did these things in movies, then twisted the keys wildly. The engine sputtered, and lights came on. She stomped at pedals indiscriminately, and the van threw itself backward. She heard it hit god knew what, but more importantly, whatever was inside the van had fallen backward—hard.
Her panicked hands scrambled over the console, trying to figure out what was what and put the van into D because it had to be for Drive, didn’t it—if R was for reverse? And then she stomped on one pedal. Nothing happened, so she stomped on the other, and the van lurched forward, racing fast.
“Oh, shit!” she shouted, as the entire van ran into the garage door and it rocked forward. She kept her foot on the gas and heard the tires spinning as they tried to crawl up the bent doors.
“Come on!” She shoved herself forward as if her own slight weight would somehow help things as a shimmering began beside her. “Oh…no…come on!” She beat her hands on the steering wheel, and the van revved up a fraction of an inch higher—high enough for the wheels to catch on some mechanism of the door itself, pull itself almost vertical, and then the weight of the van crushed the garage door down and forward like a soda can. The van ran over the remains of the door, bouncing like it was going over craters on the moon, and then headed straight toward the fountain she’d thought was so pretty in the night. She only had time to scream before she crashed into it.
She was flung forward, and the steering wheel knocked the breath out of her. Gasping, she rolled toward the door, her foot still on the gas. The thing shimmering beside her hadn’t stopped. It was growing more solid, and she didn’t want to know what it was. The mere fact that it still existed in daylight meant that it was bad. The klaxons hadn’t stopped alarming; they were louder now that she was outdoors. Andi opened the door and fell—the van had jumped onto the fountain’s wall, leaving a three-foot gap between her and the ground. She landed on her forearm and scraped the shit out of it, shouted in pain, and then crawled away until she could gather herself enough to run—only to find that there was a golden-metallic shimmering ahead of her now.
She crouched, panting. She’d lost one of Damian’s shoes, her elbow was bleeding onto his dress shirt, and there was a thing hunting her—was it real? It had to be. She took off Damian’s other shoe and threw it at the golden glow, only for it to bounce back.
That seemed like an inherently bad sign. “Oh, no.”
More and more of the striped monster—that was the only word she had for it, that had to be what it was—was forming. Too many limbs and three tails; it was like a cross between a tiger and a centipede, and it had an almost human face that wouldn’t stop grinning.
Andi drew in on herself. The thing could move through walls. There was nowhere she could go that it wouldn’t be able to touch her. She was going to die here, and she wouldn’t know what killed her.
Chapter 8
Damian heard the klaxons halfway through his shower and was tempted to blow them off. Trust Austin to run a drill after the longest night they’d had in a while.
But if they weren’t a drill, it meant a perimeter breach. What on earth—or off it—could penetrate their barriers?
The shimmer-tiger. Damian hit the shower off and stalked into his bedroom without thinking. Shimmer-tigers were nasty affairs. They weren’t fast, but they were sneaky, and their ability to teleport—albeit slowly—gave them an advantage over what other Unearthly creatures lacked.
It would be foolhardy for a shimmer-tiger to come after him directly. But he had plenty of humans and semi-humans in his employ, plus—he heard the sound of a violent crash and a distant, high-pitched scream.
“Open this window, now,” he commanded, and Grimalkin obeyed, whipping the shutter up. He could see the roundabout, three stories down, where a steaming van had crushed his fountain, and Andi was curled up, surrounded by the materializing tiger on three sides. For once, both he and his dragon agreed—he punched the window’s glass out, throwing himself through it as a man, knowing he would land as his dragon.
In her time as a nurse, Andi had watched a lot of patients die, and she’d learned there were three types of death:
The easy, quiet kind that struck in the night, and you knew no better before you went.
The kind that came up and walloped you—massive heart attack, massive pulmonary embolism, burst aortic aneurysm—that killed you so fast you hardly had time to be afraid.
But to her mind, the worst was the in-between kind. The strangle-some kind. Where you were aware of what was happening—when you couldn’t get enough air, or when the chemo stopped working—and there was absolutely nothing you nor science could do about it.
And that’s what it felt like was happening now.
That…that…that…thing was coming after her, and it didn’t matter what she did or where she went, it wasn’t going to stop, and she knew with every fiber of her being that whenever it did catch up with her, it wasn’t going to just kill her. No, she could tell by the insane grin on its face that it was going to hurt…
Glass broke from somewhere far above, and it felt like it was the sound of her sanity giving way. It rained down, and she heard it land on stone and water, and then something cast a shadow over her like a low-flying plane. She threw her arm up to protect herself and then gasped as a dragon landed.
If she hadn’t spent the night in the carnival house, if she hadn’t pulled the stinger out of Damian’s side, and if she hadn’t been under attack by that thing, she would’ve thought she’d broken her mind. But as it was, she struggled up to standing and shouted.
“Help!”
Her cries for help only enraged his dragon further. It bellowed in anger the second its paws touched the earth, and the dragon’s thoughts raced through Damian’s mind.
This home was his home! And everything in it was his!
Including her!
Damian struggled to disconnect that thought from the dragon’s mind; the girl was not part of the package—even if they were saving her. Damian knew he wasn’t safe, and shit like this was why!
The tiger! Damian redirected, and the dragon growled.
Of course, the tiger. The dragon batted his concerns aside. He’d landed inside the circle it’d been creating of itself, trying to funnel her toward its face-bits, only she’d been smart enough not to run. He wove his head to look at her.
Stay here, he tried to emote, but with his dragon’s face on, all snout and teeth, who the hell knew what she saw, or what she thought of him? Her eyes were wide, and she was terrified; he could smell it, but who wouldn’t be?
Not me, Damian’s dragon reminded him.
No, of course not, Damian groaned.
Never me. The dragon whirled, using his own Unearthly ability to hone in on the tiger’s most solid part. Because I like killing.
The dragon pounced at this, using a massive paw to press half the tiger down, snapping its teeth through a portion of the rest of it. The problem with fighting a shimmer-tiger was the teleportation. If his dragon didn’t kill enough of it, quickly, it’d vaporize itself, heal, and reform. So his dragon shook its head, feeling things snap and tear deliciously, cl
awing at the piece it’d bitten into until it was sure it’d rendered enough of the tiger’s flesh useless that it could never regain its form.
At the end of it, he was spattered in acidic violet-colored blood—it streaked against his golden scales, and he resisted the urge to clean himself with his tongue.
See? the dragon rumbled, satisfied with itself. It whipped its head back and roared, a sound of ultimate triumph, arching its back and flexing its wings. My home, it insisted.
Yes, Damian agreed.
And now—my woman. The dragon’s head snaked back to Andi with alacrity.
That…that is a dragon.
Her mind could barely name it; it felt so unreal. A lifetime of watching movies, reading books, playing video games, had somehow never prepared her to see the real thing. Had she hit her head when the van hit the fountain? Was this one more crazy thing here? Or was her mind cracking in two?
It was golden, massive, winged, and glorious—and it acted as if it could understand her. When it looked at her, Andi thought it was trying to communicate something, and for the first time that morning, she’d felt safe. But then it leapt onto the other beast, pressing it down with massive paws and slaughtered it in front of her. That was the only word that would work for what it did. She watched it snap its teeth through a chunk of the thing that hunted her and shake its head like a dog with a toy—between that and the keening sounds the other thing made as it died, she knew this moment would haunt her nightmares forever. Violet blood rained over the grounds as the feline demon was literally torn to meat in front of her.
But it was a dragon.
Saving her.
And when it was done, the dragon whipped its head back and roared, a sound of pure triumph, arching its back and flexing huge sail-like wings, until they blocked out the sun.
And then it turned to look at her.
Andi’s heart had already been beating fast, but now it was as if she had shot herself with epinephrine.
Dragon Called: A Slow Burn Sexy Paranormal Romance Page 6