The Dragon's Wing

by Tate James

  There was a long pause, and then he called back cautiously, “How about a truce… Kitty Kat?”

  “What sort of truce?” I asked suspiciously, watching his hiding place like a hawk for any sign of movement, my gun at the ready. I didn’t believe for a second he’d given up that easily.

  “Let’s agree not to shoot each other, and we can just hang out in your base until the others finish the game!” he suggested hesitantly.

  “Hah! Yeah right, you must think I’m stupid!” I scoffed. Caleb was most definitely not above using sneaky tactics. Even as tempting as his offer was.

  “Come on, Kitty Kat. I saw Cole and River are both taking on… Austin… so I bet they’ll have this thing won in no time,” he coaxed, and I wavered. Despite how good Austin was, with Cole and River teamed up together, he wouldn’t last long.

  “I suppose you have a point… What about Wes? Won’t he be backing up Austin?” I wasn’t silly enough to assume just because Wesley wasn’t the most active field agent that he wasn’t just as well trained.

  Caleb made a noise of frustration, and I realized how much closer he was than before. He must have been army crawling behind the low hay wall because I hadn’t seen him move at all.

  “Wes had some tech emergency like five minutes into the game; he’s not even playing anymore.” He sounded annoyed and was close enough that he no longer needed to yell to be heard. “So, are we calling a truce? It’s really cold down here!”

  “Yeah, sure, whatever.” I sighed. “I can’t believe Wesley isn’t even playing after giving me this care-bear ammo and you guys all giving me grief about the team bonding!”

  Caleb hesitantly stood from his hiding place and approached my base. The way he was carrying himself suggested he didn’t trust me to keep my word on the truce or something. I took a moment as he prowled closer to admire his form. Even wrapped in the saggy white jumpsuit, he still managed to look hot as hell. His dark hair was disheveled, and the white fabric was stretched tight across his biceps as he climbed the short ladder up to my sanctuary. By the time he reached my platform, I was practically drooling with the need to run my hands through that hair and feel those arms around me.

  Goddamn, what is going on today? It felt as though my libido was making up for lost time, having been practically non-existent for the past two months, because I could not seem to keep my mind out of the gutter ever since arriving at the paintball park.

  “Geez, don’t look at me with such suspicion, Cal.” I smiled, placing my gun on the floor in a gesture of good faith then climbing to my feet and wrapping my arms around his neck in what was meant to be a friend-hug. My body pressed against his a little harder than I had initially intended, and my inner sex goddess reared her head, pulling us in tighter.

  “Thanks for coming to break my boredom,” I whispered, meeting his surprised gaze. He was probably a bit shocked that I was all of a sudden initiating more than friendly contact again, but that mounting desire inside me just wouldn’t back down. I bit my lip, debating my next move. His deep, emerald green eyes seemed to widen even further, and with a little voice in my head cheering like we were at a sports game, I plucked up a bit of courage and dipped my head forward, pressing my lips to his. For a moment, we were both frozen.

  Oh fuck, have I completely misread this situation?

  I’d been positive he was interested, with all the flirting and borderline sexual contact prior to the Simon incident, but his lack of response was making me second guess whether it was all in my head. My face burning with embarrassment, I hastily pulled back.

  “Sorry, I—” My mumbled apology was cut short as he grasped the back of my head, slamming his mouth back onto mine. I gasped in surprise, and he took advantage of the opening, plunging his tongue in to caress my own, the hard metal of his tongue stud clicking against my teeth. Huh, I hadn’t noticed he was wearing it earlier. Not that I’m complaining! Oh God, the things he could potentially do to me with that piercing…

  I knew his tongue was pierced, of course; he had it done a month ago when Austin had decided to get his done. Being identical twins, they often needed to exchange places on undercover missions, so they mirrored each other’s appearance changes exactly. The only variations were in their tattoos, but I had seen them both using heavy duty concealer to erase the beautiful designs whenever they were on a job.

  The incredible sensory contrast between the hard metal of his piercing and the soft heat of his tongue was something I’d never experienced before, and I moaned a little in pleasure, desperate for more. The sound seemed to spur him on, and he grasped the backs of my thighs, hoisting my legs around his waist as his lips continued to explore my own as though committing them to memory. My fingers threaded into his dark hair exactly the way they had been wanting to since we had met at CFA, which felt like a lifetime ago. It seemed hard to imagine now, how we hadn’t done this sooner, but fuck if I didn’t plan on making up for lost time.

  Caleb pressed me against one of the flimsy walls of the paintball sanctuary, pinning me in place with his hips, his rock hard cock grinding against me through our oh-so-sexy jumpsuits. My hands slipped from his hair to grasp his tense shoulders to help keep my balance. He broke away from our kiss with an almost pained groan and cupped my face with one hand to bring our eyes level.

  “Shit, you drive me crazy,” he muttered in a gruff voice, all signs of my familiar, joking friend totally gone. His serious tone and the intense way he had captured my gaze made my breath catch. My heart seemed to be galloping halfway out of my chest, but before I could respond, he had recaptured my mouth once more, sending tingling shivers through me from every touch of his lips on mine. One of his hands tangled in my long hair, and the other grasped the zipper of my jumpsuit, sliding it down to expose my low-cut, black V-neck and the striped flag tucked into my cleavage. He paused as his hand brushed the bunched up fabric and pulled back from my lips to see what it was.

  “Well, well, what have we here?” he purred with an evil looking smirk, extracting the fabric from between my breasts with excruciating slowness. “You do realize this means you’ve lost?”

  “Fuck paintball. Trust me, I haven’t lost.” I panted, grabbing his face for another searing hot kiss like some sort of addict. He groaned low in his throat, reciprocating with equal enthusiasm before suddenly breaking away with a heavy sigh and stepping back, dropping me to my feet.

  “What’s going on?” I asked, puzzled, my heart thundering and my breath coming in short gasps. He backed up a few more steps, a disconcertingly smug look on his face. His predatory gaze ran over me, pausing briefly at my lowered zipper then on my lips as he fingered the striped fabric of our team’s flag.

  “Sorry about this… Kitty Kat…” He smirked, reaching behind him for his paintball gun, which was still slung across his back. Without a moment’s hesitation, he popped off three shots at my midsection, knocking the wind out of me and causing me to double over.

  By the time I caught my breath and looked up, he was nowhere to be seen.

  “Son of a bitch!” I exclaimed, hardly believing what Caleb had just done to me. Even if that had all been a ruse to get our flag, was it really necessary to shoot me as well?

  I glanced down at the wet paint splattered across the front of my jumpsuit and froze.

  It was red.

  Without a flag left to defend, there was really no point in staying in our base. I slid down the short ladder and started back towards the starting point to find Cole and River while desperately trying not to think about the fact that I’d just thrown myself at Austin.

  How the hell had I confused him for Caleb? In hindsight, all the signs were there. I had just given way too much control over to my newly reawakened libido, and it had blinded me to the obvious. As insane as it sounded, though, I could have sworn he had been just as into that as I was. Surely you can’t fake heat like that? Not to mention the physical evidence of his arousal. My head hurt thinking about it all.

  Ugh, he was so i
nfuriating!

  I stomped my way through the snow-covered field, lost in my thoughts, and barely noticed when someone stepped out from behind an obstacle, directly into my path.

  “Oh!” I exclaimed, pulling up short and narrowly avoiding running into the stocky figure. “Sorry, I didn’t see…” I trailed off as I recognized the rough, bearded man in front of me.

  His beady eyes raked a slow path over my body, pausing for an uncomfortably long time on my lowered zipper and my exposed cleavage before he smiled a cruel, victorious smile.

  “Hello, Emily,” Sergei's heavy accent crowed, and a thick cloth was clamped over my face from behind. A strong, sickly sweet chemical smell engulfed my airways as I reflexively inhaled, and my whole world faded to black.

  2

  WESLEY

  I could see Austin stalking towards me down the obstacle field, clutching the other team’s flag, and sighed in disappointment. Damn it. Looks like I missed all the action!

  I had been really looking forward to this game. It had been ages since we last paintballed, but it was really the only time I ever got to use the practical skills we had learned during our Omega training. Being a mostly behind-the-scenes agent, I never got to use those skills in a real life situation, so paintballing was a huge source of fun for me.

  “Already?” I called out to Austin as he came closer. I could tell it was him and not Caleb because he was the one who had gone after the other team’s flag. It was common knowledge in our group that Austin always defended the base, so I had suggested we switch him and Caleb for this game in the hopes of taking the other team by surprise. Evidently it had worked.

  He just scowled at me, his eyebrows drawn down low and his jaw clenching, but didn’t respond, which gave me a bad feeling. He would normally be on a victory high and rubbing it in everyone’s faces.

  “Aus, dude. What’s going on? You look majorly pissed right now.” I prodded him in the shoulder playfully to try and refocus his attention. “Did Kit put up a better fight than you anticipated or something?”

  He made a strangled noise, his eyes widening as he stared at me. “What? Why would you say that?”

  “Uh, because she is a pretty badass marksman now and you look super ticked off?” Wasn’t it obvious that’s what I’d meant? Maybe I do need to get out more. I spent so much time with my computers and tech that even I could admit I was somewhat lacking in people skills. It was why I always seemed like a blushing, stuttering mess around Kit.

  “Oh.” He looked startled and confused for a second, which was not a look I was used to seeing on Austin, but quickly reverted to scowling anger. “Piece of cake. Told you this would be a quick game.”

  I grinned; he had been pretty confident when we started. “Yeah, you did. I bet she didn’t even know what hit her, huh? I hope you were at least nice enough not to shoot her at too close of range, though? You know how much these suckers hurt.”

  Weirdly, his face flushed red as though he was embarrassed, and he just muttered something under his breath before walking with me back to our team’s base, where we were most likely to find the rest of our friends.

  “So where is she anyway?” I asked him, looking back the way he had come to see if she was on her way.

  “What do you mean?” he snapped, with an edge of defensiveness. What the hell was his problem today?

  “Kit. Where is she? You told her the game was over, right?” I rolled my eyes at him. The way he had been acting around her, I wouldn’t be surprised if he hadn’t told her the game was over and just left her out there in the snow.

  “Of course she knows the game is over. She’s probably just sulking about losing,” he sneered but avoided eye contact with me. Austin rarely, if ever, avoided eye contact.

  “Aus,” I warned. “What are you not telling me?” He was probably my closest friend on the team, as we shared a private love for first person shooter games and had spent countless hours hanging out. I knew when he was hiding something, and his tense shoulders and tight lips were screaming that he was hiding a big something.

  “Nothing,” he snapped. “She’s just a sore loser. Let’s go find the others. I’m sure she’ll catch up once she’s done having a cry.”

  I narrowed my eyes at him, but he wasn’t paying attention anymore, already striding across the field to where we had left Caleb protecting our base. If only I hadn’t needed to take that damn phone call. Something had obviously happened with Kit, but I could only hope it was just Austin being his usual charming self.

  No matter how often we tried to talk to him about his attitude towards our beautiful new houseguest, he continued to treat her like a piece of gum he had scraped from his boot. For a short time after we’d rescued the two of them from Blood Moon, it really seemed like he had gotten over his ridiculous hang ups, but then all of a sudden he was back to being an antagonistic jerk to her.

  Worse even.

  The only time I had seen him willingly in the same room as her over the last two months was when he was obligated to either coach her in target practice or attend classes. Not that I was complaining. I had been quietly crushing on Kit in a big way ever since the boys had brought her back to our house after her attempted kidnapping. That night, when Caleb had returned with her unconscious from the tranquilizer, it had been like seeing a ghost.

  For months before arriving at Cascade Falls, I had been having these incredibly real dreams of a gorgeous red-haired girl, and there she was. In the flesh. On our couch. I swore my heart had actually stopped beating for a second while I’d just stared at her in shock, until Caleb snapped me out of it.

  “Hey, pussycat!” Cole yelled out as we came within sight of them. I stifled a laugh at his nickname for Austin, whose callsign within Omega was Bengal. “How the fuck did you get that flag?”

  “What sort of question is that? It’s the objective of this game, isn’t it?” Austin replied with the same evasive tone he had used with me. Something was definitely going on with him.

  “Yes, we know that. But how did you get it? We know where Vixen had it hidden, and I doubt she gave it up willingly to you.” Cole was glowering at Austin with a dangerous look in his eyes, which made me tense up, even though it wasn’t aimed at me. Our team’s second in command was not someone you ever wanted pissed off at you.

  “Where is she anyway?” River asked as he and Caleb approached, both covered in multiple splotches of colorful paint.

  “Fuck, what is with all these questions? I won. End of story. Christina is probably just licking her wounded pride and will meet us back at the reception hut.” Austin threw the flag to his brother then stalked back towards the hut.

  “Guys…” I started, frowning after my friend’s retreating form. “He’s hiding something.”

  “Agreed,” Caleb murmured. “What did you mean about the flag, Cole?”

  Cole made an angry noise in his throat, like the dragon of his callsign. “It was tucked into her bra. Alpha, remember what she said about her bad feeling?”

  “I do.” River glowered. “Cole, you and Caleb head back to our base and find her. Wes, you and I are going to find out what Austin is hiding… and how he got that fucking flag out of her bra.”

  3

  KIT

  “Hello?” My voice croaked into the darkness, husky from disuse, and the sound echoed back to me hauntingly. “Is anyone in here?” My head was pounding and fuzzy, and the concrete in front of my face was spinning. My stomach clenched hard, and I groaned, clutching at it and trying to hold back the bile rising in my throat. It was the same sick feeling I used to have as a child when we hadn’t eaten in days.

  How long have I been out?

  Shaking my head a little to try and clear it, I pushed myself up to sitting and looked around. If it hadn’t been for the thin strips of light from the tiny, barred window, I would have thought I'd lost my eyesight. It was that dark. Fear spiked within me, and I took several deliberate breaths to control it.

  “Hello?” I called out
again in a slightly stronger voice, but still no one responded.

  Where the hell was I? The last thing I remembered was being at the paintball park with the guys, and then Caleb and I making out… no wait, Austin and I were making out… and then what happened?

  I rubbed my pounding forehead as I racked my brain for what had happened after that, but all I was coming up with were disjointed slivers of memories. Sergei's sweaty, leering face, and then the jolt and thump of a drive in someone's trunk, and then nothing until waking up in the dark.

  I hesitantly hauled myself to my feet and blindly felt my way around the room, ascertaining that I was definitely in there alone. The walls were solid, made of huge stone blocks, which held a dampness that suggested I was underground. The little window was set high enough in the wall that I couldn’t see out, but it didn’t seem to lead outside. Most likely just an air vent rather than a window.

  Fucking hell, I knew something bad was going to happen. Stupid me for thinking that bad thing was making out with goddamn Austin.

  That was something I needed to deal with, if I ever got home. I couldn't believe he’d gone that far just to win a stupid game. No, I didn’t believe that for a second. There was definitely something more going on, and I was almost positive that he was feeling something more for me than just the contempt he layered on so thick. He had to be. God knows I am. It wasn’t really going to be an issue though, until I could get myself free.

  Leaning my forehead against the door, I pressed my eye against the hinges, trying to get some clue as to where I might be. Of course, all I could see was a blank concrete wall directly opposite my door. Shit. How the hell am I getting myself out of this mess?

  I should never have ignored that foreboding feeling. Everything in me had been screaming a warning that something bad was coming, but I had chalked it up to paranoia. Ever since Dupree’d had her goons try to kidnap me, beaten my best friend half to death, then revealed that I had the power to restore magic to all the dormant supernatural creatures of this world… oh, and also that I might be a fucking immortal… I had been a bit on edge.