by Chant, Zoe
Never mind that she’d never even wanted one of those shirts. And never mind that any guy who did that would be kind of dick and not the guy she’d want anyway. The thought still nagged at her: that she wasn’t good enough for bravado.
But Boone wasn’t looking at her like she’d just inflated her own value. He was smiling, openly and sincerely, like she’d given him the best news in the world.
“That’s good,” he said. His voice as sweet and rich as caramel. “Because I definitely want to. I know there are some people who would go their separate ways at the end of a bumpy night, and I’d understand if you wanted to... but I was hoping you wouldn’t.”
Her mouth was dry. “I don’t.”
Suddenly it seemed possible for something to happen between them tonight after all. Once again, she felt like there were ribbons tying them together—like something silky and tight, sensuous and binding, was pulling her closer and closer to him, wanting to wrap around her and get her legs up around his hips, her mouth down on his. It was like their first time would mean something huge, something even bigger than she thought. Something like... everything. Maybe she wasn’t as tired as she’d thought she was.
But it still didn’t feel right. Tonight wasn’t a night for the living.
Boone offered to sleep on the couch, but Lindsay didn’t want him out in her living room. She wanted him next to her, where his big shape in the darkness would reassure her against any other big shapes in the darkness. She wanted to be able to roll over and touch him if she started having doubts that he was real.
She didn’t say all of that, thankfully, just insisted on him sharing the bed with her.
Boone stripped down to boxer-briefs—Lindsay couldn’t help but linger on that particular sight—and a soft white undershirt. Lindsay put on her second least sexy pair of pajamas, feeling like her clothes should acknowledge the fact that they weren’t having sex and she wasn’t trying to tease him about it. Still, she couldn’t bring herself to go all the way to full button-up flannel. She joined him in bed.
His eyes still lingered on her like her in paisley cotton sleep shorts and a UC Santa Barbara tee was one of the best things he’d ever seen.
Later.
“The world has dragons in it,” she said, voicing this observation at the ceiling.
“Yeah.” Boone shifted, turning towards her and tentatively laying his arm across her stomach. “And they’re not even what I’m scared of.”
That figure in the distant darkness. Watching them. Watching Eleanor die. Patient, careful, and brutal.
No, dragons weren’t what she was scared of either.
Chapter Six
In the morning, Boone took Lindsay to retrieve her car.
The day was sunny and mild, a paradise compared to yesterday’s storms. Perfect Sunday beach weather. But there weren’t many people who passed them carrying inner-tubes and ice cream cones and bright striped towels, and Boone could see why. The cops had been right on time, and whatever they’d found, dragon or human, had made them cordon off a huge chunk of the boardwalk and the beach. He’d guess a lot of families had seen the yellow crime-scene tape and the flashing lights and turned right around.
“She must have... changed back,” Boone said, thinking out loud. “I think if they’d found the bigger her, there’d be a lot more than some yellow tape.”
“Mm,” Lindsay agreed. He could tell her attention was somewhere else.
She stood by her car, her hand shielding her eyes from the sun as she gazed out past the crowd. She was looking at the ocean.
She’d been quiet all morning.
Maybe she regretted having asked him to stay the night. Maybe she regretted having met him at all.
He should have been able to protect her from all this.
Maybe Talia was right. Maybe there really wasn’t anything of the Army left in him, and maybe that did make him as useless as she’d thought.
A whole lot of maybes for a summer morning.
Lindsay wasn’t Talia. Even if he was just an artist now, she’d liked him that way. And she’d been nothing but honest and straightforward with him. If he wanted to know what she was feeling or thinking, he’d get further asking her than he would guessing.
He said, “Can I do anything?”
Lindsay turned around, startled, and then her face softened. She put her hand on his arm.
“No. I just don’t want to drive away from you.”
That was a lot better than anything he’d been thinking, but he still didn’t believe that was all of it. He waited.
“And I just can’t believe this happened here,” Lindsay said. “I’ve been coming to this beach my whole life. I learned how to swim out here.” She leaned back against the door of her car, and Boone noticed pale tear-streaks on her face. He wanted to thumb them away and kiss her eyelids dry again. “Last night I was so busy thinking about the d-word that the murder didn’t really sink in. But this is the kind of thing that tears a community in two. And I hate that I couldn’t stop it.”
“You did everything you could.”
“It doesn’t feel that way.” She wiped her eyes. “And this is the second time I’ve cried in front of you in two days. I swear I’m not just constantly leaking.”
“These haven’t been normal days,” Boone said softly. “And for the record, you don’t have to drive away from me if you don’t want to.”
“I can’t turn you into my security blanket,” Lindsay said. “That’s not really fair to you.”
“Security blanket, no. Partner, yes.” He hesitated. “I was—I was in the Army for a few years, you know. It’s not weak to want to have somebody to watch your back.”
Lindsay studied him for a second and then went up on her tiptoes, bridging the gap between them. Her mouth met his.
Her lips were satiny smooth, full and soft against his own. The touch of her was electric. The rest of the world fell away as he pulled her closer, his hands tangling in her hair. He didn’t want to lose even a second of contact with her. He wanted to feel every bit of her, from the dark waves of hair between his fingers to the sweet taste of her mouth to her small hands against his neck. He wanted to pick her up and hold her, his own hands cradling her round, perfect ass that had tormented him all night in those little patterned shorts. He wanted—
He wanted a lot more than he was going to get in the parking lot of a public beach, that was for sure. He knew that.
But he still couldn’t stop the fire she set in him, the one that was now raging in his chest. Her, her, her. Only her. Always her.
What was happening to him?
It took someone wolf-whistling to cut through their mutual haze. They parted, flushed and embarrassed, as some guy in a straw Panama hat clapped enthusiastically and whistled again.
“Yeah, bro!” he yelled. “Get some!”
“I’m right here,” Lindsay said. “I’m a person.”
The guy seemed flustered by this for a second and then nodded. “I get that. You get some too, sis! All right!”
Lindsay turned back to Boone, raising her eyebrows. “Not the direction I thought he’d take that in, but honestly, I’m okay with it.” She flashed the guy a thumbs-up over her shoulder, and he clapped again and jogged off.
“Hi,” Boone said.
She put her hand on his chest, moving her palm like she wanted to feel his heartbeat. She smiled, her teeth cutely brushing her lower lip. “Hi.”
Boone had no idea what to make of her. Even without dragons and death and terror, he had the feeling this woman would have hit him as hard as a hurricane. He’d never had this same feeling of both being rescued and being totally at sea.
But he did know one thing.
He said, “I don’t want you to drive away from me.”
Lindsay’s smile widened. “Be my partner, soldier?”
Boone saluted her crisply, ignoring the little pang the gesture brought back in him. “Yes, ma’am.”
*
They swung by
Boone’s house next. He’d taken a quick shower at Lindsay’s, but he was still wearing all the same clothes from Saturday. The longer he stayed in them, the less likely she’d be to want to repeat their parking lot performance, so he was glad for the chance to get home and change.
He came out of the bedroom to find Lindsay walking around his living room looking at things idly.
She saw him and smiled. “Hey, handsome. You clean up nicely.”
“Well, I know how to treat a work of art.”
She had an easy, friendly laugh, one that made Boone think of rainbow-colored soap bubbles popping. He thought of most things in terms of visuals, and now that he had her in the same place as his cramped little studio, he remembered again how much he ached to draw her. No, to paint her, because he couldn’t imagine seeing her in anything other than the most vibrant colors. It would be a crime to not get exactly the right shade of rosy brown for her skin or the darkest, most glistening black for her hair.
Lindsay said, “I was just looking at the paintings. Are these all yours?”
“No, just a couple of them.” He joined her, standing close enough to feel the warmth of her body radiating outwards to him. He pointed. “That one and that one.”
The first was actually a painting he had done of his first dog, Rufus, an enormous bloodhound that he’d had when he was a kid. Rufus had had the sad, sunken eyes and drooping wrinkles of his breed, but the sedate, glum look had never been anything more than an act. That dog had liked nothing better than tearing around the house with a young Boone and—Boone’s parents had thought this was more significant—thrashing his head wildly and sending drool flying everywhere. He’d been Boone’s best friend for years. He had died before Boone ever knew enough to make a proper drawing of him, but he’d done this sketch from memory and a couple of old photographs. He knew a lot of people would think it was corny having a picture of his childhood dog up on his wall, but he just liked walking through the room and seeing Rufus, just the way he had when he was a kid.
The other picture was a wintery fantasy landscape. It was the first major sale he’d ever made, and it had been a huge deal, bigger than he’d ever dreamed of, because they had used it for an illustration of Narnia in a reissued copy of The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. It was responsible for pretty much all the illustration work he’d gotten after it.
He relayed all this to Lindsay. She tapped her finger against the frame of Rufus’s picture and said, “Good boy,” perfectly sincerely, and then moved onto the Narnia picture. “And I love this. I feel like I’m getting cold just looking at it.”
“‘Always winter and never Christmas,’” Boone quoted.
Lindsay nodded. “When I was a kid, I thought that was the saddest idea anyone had ever come up with. Actually, it still might qualify.”
He got her a drink, and they settled down to try to figure out a plan.
“We don’t have much to go on,” Lindsay said. “Aside from ‘beware the cove,’ all we have are first names—” She froze.
“What?”
“My name.” Her voice had dropped to a whisper. “I gave Eleanor my name and number. She put it in her pocket. If she did turn back, the police have to have it by now.”
Shit. He tried to get himself to think. They knew the police had found Eleanor’s body, because they’d seen the beach cordoned off with the crime scene tape—but if they’d found her body and her body had had Lindsay’s phone number on it, why the hell hadn’t anyone called Lindsay yet? They’d been in her apartment all night. The cops could have come right up to the front door and knocked.
Maybe they hadn’t found the body? Maybe she’d stayed a dragon after all? Or maybe they had found something else instead, like a bloodstain...
“Give me a second,” he said, and he pulled out his phone to look up whatever details might be in the news. He couldn’t believe he hadn’t thought to do that already. The last two days had just seemed completely upside-down.
But he found the article on Eleanor’s death right away. San Marco didn’t have much crime to report besides that.
“Local Woman Found Dead on San Marco Beach.” They even had a picture of Eleanor’s face, one they’d obviously taken very carefully, smoothing the sand from her hair and brushing it out so that she would look almost tidy, almost alive. Maybe it would fool somebody. Boone had seen a few too many dead bodies in his life to not know a photo of a corpse when he saw one.
He read the article out loud to Lindsay, skimming through to find the highlights. “The San Marco Sheriff’s Department received an anonymous tip last night about the death of a young woman the female caller identified as ‘Eleanor’... No ID was discovered on the body... The sheriff asks the caller to come forward as an invaluable witness to the last moments of the deceased’s life, asks anyone recognizing her to please call the hotline... Nothing about you. Nothing about your ‘crocodile,’ either. They probably figured you were drunk or something.”
“They never give away the good stuff in the news, though,” Lindsay said. She was fidgeting with her bracelet, spinning it around and around on her wrist. “They have to hold things back.”
“But then why haven’t they called? Why didn’t they come over last night or this morning?”
She stopped, letting the bracelet fall flat again. “Yeah. Why didn’t they? We were standing right by my car this morning—my car that’s registered in my name. If they ran the license plates in the parking lot and realized that I left my car there overnight and gave Eleanor my number, why the hell wouldn’t they want to talk to me? What’s going on?”
Boone had an idea, but he didn’t like it.
He said carefully, “I think they will come by eventually, because of the license plate. They’ll want to talk to you to see if you saw anything. But I don’t think they have the piece of paper you gave Eleanor.”
“But they have her body.”
“I know. But I think...”
All the blood seemed to run out of Lindsay’s face at once. She said, “You think whoever killed Eleanor, whoever we saw through all that rain-—they went back to her body. The cops don’t have the note because Eleanor’s killer does.”
Boone reached out and took her hands in his, holding them both firmly. “I’m not going to let anything happen to you.”
“But it’s only a matter of time then, isn’t it? Until whoever killed Eleanor knows exactly where to find me?”
Boone couldn’t deny that. It was easy to find people these days, and Lindsay’s name wasn’t common enough for her to vanish into a crowd like your John Smiths and Sarah Browns.
He said, “They’re not going to find you here. No one even knows we know each other.”
“I can’t live the rest of my life hiding in your house hoping no one finds me.”
“No,” Boone admitted. “But it’s a stop-gap measure. It’ll keep you safe until something else—”
He broke off as a wave of discomfort rolled over him. Suddenly he felt like a thousand little things had gone wrong with his body. The back of his neck ached—and then so did his arms, then his legs, and then everywhere else. He felt queasy, almost like he’d taken a hard hit to the stomach. He leaned forward and heard himself groan.
“Boone!” Lindsay swept down to her knees, kneeling in front of him, her worried brown eyes level with his own. “Boone, what’s wrong?”
“I don’t know. Everything just... hurts.”
He tried to get himself to focus on her voice. She was his lifeline, the one thing he had to hold onto as the pain intensified. It was more than nausea now. He felt like something had grabbed him from the inside-out and was slowly ripping him in two. He could feel himself tearing down the middle. His skin was on fire. It was on fire and bursting, like there was too much of him now for his body to hold.
Lindsay held onto him, and he felt his shape change in her hands as he became something new.
Something monstrous.
Chapter Seven
It all happe
ned so fast.
One second, Boone was fine; the next, he was doubled over in pain, hurting so badly he could only talk to her through gritted teeth. Lindsay held onto him as best she could when every muscle in his body seemed to be spasming, and as she was squeezing his hands tightly in her own, something happened.
Boone’s hands—she’d spent a lot of time looking at them. More than she could probably admit to without blushing. She knew those clever, narrow fingers and the calluses they had from holding pencils and paintbrushes; she knew those close-trimmed nails and that tanned skin. She knew how strong his hands were and how careful and tender he could be with them.
And then she watched them—felt them—transform. Right there, in the cage her own hands had made around him, Boone’s fingers became long, blackly metallic claws. Scales flooded up his skin, black and indigo and mirror-like silver, all shaped like the spades on playing cards.
When Lindsay looked up, she saw even more. His eyes had grown huge and catlike, their color changing to an impossibly vivid sapphire. Wings stretched out from his shoulders and moved in and out as he breathed, at first looking like the folds of an accordion and then looking more and more natural on his shoulders because his shoulders were changing too. His face pushed forward, elongating. His ears perked up, coming to points. A huge, thrashing tail suddenly lashed against his couch, effortlessly cracking the frame of it in two.
A dragon. Another dragon.
Lindsay still hadn’t let go of his hands. It didn’t matter to her that they weren’t hands anymore. They were still his.
She didn’t have to be afraid. This dragon hadn’t eaten Boone. This dragon was Boone. She didn’t know if he could still understand her or not or if he still felt like himself or not, but she wasn’t willing to let go. She needed him to know that she was still there. She couldn’t even imagine how much this change must have hurt him and how terrifying it must be to suddenly find yourself in the wrong body. Her heart was pounding just from watching it.