Damian stepped out of the room they were in and advanced on the nearest cubicles, kicking over the next wall. Three men running submachine guns advanced and Damian ignored them, feeling the bullets hit the scales just beneath his skin. He walked for the nearest one, who couldn’t believe what he was seeing, until he could grab the hot metal of the gun’s barrel and twisted it off with a snap. The fool kept pulling the trigger and the gun exploded in his hands, shrapnel shooting everywhere. Damian relieved him of the weapon, clocking him with it and cracking his skull, before hurling the gun at the next Hunter, nearly taking off his head.
“It’s him, it’s really him!” he heard the third tell someone else, excitedly, and whoever smelled like dragon finally advanced.
The man wore a mask just like Zach's, and he was as broad in the shoulders as Damian was. Damian remembered the fight at Rax’s casino. Danny—Andi’s brother—was a slight man. Wiry and fast, but not bulky. But he knew they’d been doing experiments on him….
His dragon lunged inside him. Killing Danny was the answer to all of its problems, whereas Damian hesitated. “Who are you?” he demanded. Before he murdered the man, he needed to know his name.
“The man who kills you,” the man taunted, and then he leapt for Damian.
Damian dodged the blow and let him take down another wall of cubicles like dominos, as the remaining man with the submachine kept firing. Damian scooped up a desk chair and threw it at the man with the gun, who yelped and ducked, as the draconic man found his footing again, and whirled, launching himself at Damian’s knees.
He was definitely faster than a normal human—but not as fast as Damian. Damian sidestepped him and stomped on his back, catching him flat on the floor. He flipped himself onto his back as Damian dropped down, bringing his elbow down to crash into the man’s sternum. Damian heard it crack—not a very dragon-like sound.
“Who are you?” he hissed, reaching for the man’s mask. Austin flew out of nowhere, catching the man’s hand as it came up with a knife for Damian’s neck. It fell to the drab carpeting and bounced.
Damian ignored it and ripped the man’s balaclava off, and the man underneath was Caucasian, definitely not Andi’s twin brother. Stella lunged beneath him and snapped the man’s neck before he could.
Zach caught up with them after dispatching the last gunman. “What the fuck, Damian!”
Damian eyed him. “Are you going to bite me again?”
“I should,” Zach growled. “You endangered all of us, acting on your own without a plan. Without even a mask!”
“We would’ve had it covered with Jamison,” Austin agreed.
“You didn’t need Jamison when you had me.” Damian looked down at the Hunter’s dead body. He was relieved it wasn’t Danny, but that meant that that problem had merely been kicked down the road—not solved.
“The fuck we did, D, I saved your goddamned life!” Austin said, picking up the knife the man had dropped to show Damian. Its blade was bone. It was a talisman harvested from another unearthly creature, and Damian recognized the carving on the hilt, as did Zach.
“That’s dragon bone,” the dark-haired werewolf rumbled. “And you hesitated.”
“I’d have lived.” Damian stood up, glowering. What were they thinking, shouting at him? He was nigh invulnerable, the night was young, and Andi wasn’t far. His dragon’s energy suffused him, and he didn’t want to fight it as it urged him to mount the stairs to the top of the building where it could take flight, because she was close—so close. Go to her, his dragon wheedled.
Stella took two quick steps up to Damian and punched him in the stomach. “This is exactly what she was afraid of, you idiot!” Then the three men gawked at her as she started dancing, cursing, holding her wrist, and Damian was so surprised he became himself in an instant.
“Did you just punch me?” Damian asked her, blinking.
Go to her! Now! his dragon insisted, but its spell over him was gone.
No, he growled, shoving it back. We have to wait until she wants us.
Zach reached for Stella’s injured hand. She offered it to him reluctantly. “There’s a reason we just shout at him,” he said.
“Or turn into wolves first,” Austin added.
“Oh, fuck all three of you,” Stella said, yanking her hand back from Zach. “But especially you,” she said, focusing in on Damian. “Because Andi told you that this would happen and you didn’t believe her.”
Damian took in his unmasked self, the dragon-bone knife that would’ve actually pierced his skin, and the man wielding it who he’d waited to kill. Stella was right…as was Andi.
“This is your second strike, Damian,” Zach informed him. “I don’t know what we do at three strikes, but you’d better cut this shit out.”
Damian fought back a growl at being chastised, but the wolf was right. “I know.”
Zach gave him a begrudging nod and touched his earpiece after that. “We’ll debrief later. Jamison, are we clear?”
Damian didn’t need to wait for Jamison’s okay. He could use his dragon’s ability to feel-see heat, and the only thing he sensed were cooling bodies.
But the scent of blood had come from somewhere, and the knife alone wasn’t enough to make someone change. He knelt down and ripped the Hunter’s shirt off, revealing an eight-by-eight panel of scaled skin bound against his chest with slippery green edges.
Stella gagged. “God. That’s fucking fresh.”
That was the dragon he’d scented. And he’d been right—in a fashion. The man on the ground wasn’t Danny, but the portion of dragon skin he wore was. Peeled right off of Andi’s brother, to help the Hunters’ cause.
“Disgusting,” Austin said, lip curled.
Damian grunted in agreement, pulling it off the Hunter. It was a piece of hide from a dragon’s stomach, with overlapping scales in mottled army green, in sharp contrast to the bright green blood still fresh on the rawer side.
His dragon resurfaced inside him at feeling the rough skin of another dragon’s hide against his palm. In this instance, your sister is correct, it told him. Traitors should be killed on sight.
Damian rode back in the SUV with them, their mood far more muted than it should’ve been after a successful night. They’d taken all the Hunters’ talismans with them so it was just as impossible to ignore the scent of Danny’s blood stinking up the cabin as it was to ignore the knowledge that the dragon that was on their side wasn’t guaranteed to play nice.
For his part, Damian stared out the window or played with his phone. Still nothing from Andi. And what would he send her if he could? I hope your brother stops skinning himself for the Hunters soon, or, You were right, I hesitated, or, Currently, my friends think I’m an asshole.
But he knew that even if she wanted to be apart from him, she would be worried. It wasn’t in his princess not to worry, because she cared. It was part of what drew him to her—her profound depth of empathy. She needed things to work out, her friends and patients to be healthy, her relationships to be good. She was like some benign force of nature, radiating a wholesome kindness that his own scarred and scaled-self found impossibly alluring, wanting nothing more than to bask beneath her benevolent sun.
So he decided he could risk one word, and he could pretend it was more for her sake than for his.
Alive.
He sent it before he could talk himself out of it as Zach put the tour bus in park in their garage, and he willed himself to expect nothing in return.
“You’re going to dispose of these, right, Wind Racer?” Stella asked, handing the bag of talismans she’d collected over to Zach.
“With dragon fire,” Zach said. “The next time we can trust him, that is.” He gave Damian a meaningful look.
“Which is now,” Damian grumbled.
Stella snorted. “I’ll believe it when I see it, big guy.”
“Which means you’ll come out with us again?” Zach pressed. He was half a head taller than Stella, and he didn’t need h
is suit on to look like he still meant business; you could hear it in his voice. She ducked away, heading for her motorcycle, nearer the front stair.
“Sure, I guess,” she said, shrugging one shoulder as she pulled her jacket on.
“Hold up,” Damian called to her, walking to her side.
“I don’t give rides to strangers,” she said, standing beside her Suzuki GSX-R. She had real gear on, stiff black leather, and was pulling her light blonde hair into a low ponytail for her ride.
“Are you all right?” he asked her, entirely conscious of the way that Zach was now staring at his back.
“No thanks to you and your washboard abs.” She frowned, reaching for her helmet.
“About that…I owe you an apology.”
She squinted at him and finished pulling her helmet on, before tapping the side of it where her ear would be. “I don’t think I heard you,” she shouted, like she was deafened inside.
Damian knew very well she wasn’t, but also understood this was a burden that he’d earned. “I’m sorry,” he said, much louder.
“What?” she shouted back at him.
“I am sorry!” he said, at high volume. “For threatening you this evening…and endangering you tonight.”
She glanced past him, at where Zach was, and her lips curled into a grin. “Apology accepted,” she shouted back. “Call me if you want to go out again.” She made an imaginary phone with her gloved hand and waved it by her ear before straddling her bike and taking off.
Zach came up behind him and clapped his shoulder. “Just because you apologized doesn’t mean you get to skip debriefing.”
“I didn’t think it would.” Damian was resigned, and Stella wasn’t the only one he needed to make amends to. He headed back inside with Zach, and found Austin waiting on the stair, looking peeved.
“I know. I’m sorry,” Damian began, but the werewolf waved his apology away with a hand and cut to the chase.
“Did you really watch Die Hard without me?”
Andi was on her last break on her longest shift at work ever. Both of her patients were despicably healthy, one of them even had transfer orders, so there was nothing for her to do. They were sleeping, for crying out loud, no neuro checks or vascular checks. They were just normal people.
Plain, boring people.
Like her.
She tried not to huff as she turned over on the breakroom couch. There were other people in the room who legitimately needed sleep, so she shouldn’t be rude, but what was there to do? She still had three hours of work left after this. How was she going to make it? She didn’t want to read books on her phone, because all of known fiction was a fucking lie, and she didn’t want to look at Instagram and see happy people with daytime lives, her old nursing school friends with their real tans acquired from actual sun, holding babies and smiling by pretty food.
No, she needed legitimate distractions from all her internal agony. She wanted to do things and save people and not have a goddamned moment to herself to think about the consequences of her decisions, or how awful her family was and how she’d had to leave Damian. She was still in a bad mood when her break was finished, quietly closing the breakroom door behind herself to find her charge nurse waiting in the hall.
“We transferred your room four out and got in a crainy.”
“While I was gone?”
“Yeah. Zenaida was going to take it, but one of her kids called, they threw up, so she’s going home. It’s yours now; we put them in three.”
An actually sick patient meant stuff to do. “Halle-fucking-lujah,” Andi breathed.
“Excuse me?”
“Sorry. It’s just, tonight’s been—”
“Don’t say it.” Sheila glared. Everyone in the hospital knew you never said that it was slow or quiet. There was no surer way to curse your shift.
“Yeah, no,” Andi said, shaking her head quickly with a grin. She went to her rooms and got a fast report from Zen, and then hopped into her new patient’s room to do an assessment. But much to her horror, they, too, were relatively stable, past the craniotomy.
Andi closed the doors and checked over her shoulders for witnesses before announcing, “Tonight’s been slow,” to her very-well-sedated and missing-a-portion-of-their-brain-now patient, welcoming any chaos that that might bring.
Her phone buzzed. She pulled it out and found a simple one-word text from Damian: Alive.
A sense of profound calm washed over her—one she couldn’t deny. She’d wanted to protect him from herself, yes, but everything he did was dangerous, so she was happy just knowing he was all right, even if she didn’t feel comfortable responding to him. She didn’t want to lead him on, but she sure as shit didn’t want to block him. She sighed and rocked back on her heels, feeling like a ten-ton weight had been lifted from her shoulders.
“Hey,” she told her patient, pulling one of their eyelids open, their wide pupil focusing only on the ceiling. “It’s not slow here anymore. I take it back.”
Damian’s days fell into a rhythm after that. Mills announced targets—despite the fact that they didn’t know where Danny and Lee were, there was a never-ending stream of Hunters coming into their city, it seemed—and he and the others carefully took them out. They even closed a rift which Jamison’s gear had predicted. In the beforetimes, that would’ve been a cause worth celebrating, but everything felt dead without Andi.
Each day was a struggle to contain his dragon’s anger and his growing apathy toward all else in his life. The only thing he had to look forward to was the moment between two to four a.m. each night when he broke and texted her.
Alive. Alive. Alive. Over and over again. Even though it wasn’t true, because was this living, really? He was killing things, yes. Protecting his friends and family—also true—but he might as well have been a robot. He’d trained so hard, he could do the things he did in his sleep, and slowly it felt like waking and dreaming made no difference to him; everything was just painfully the same. His life, if it could be called such, was wrapped in drab gray fog.
Alive.
He never got any response.
Was he bothering her?
Alive.
Had she blocked him?
Had she changed her number?
Alive.
He did his best not to scroll up through the texts and torment himself with the photos of her body that she’d sent him or her half-hidden face in the photographs the paparazzi had taken. But sometimes his resolve broke; he couldn’t help himself, and it hurt far worse than any of Jamison’s lasers.
Because he was still himself, he had urges—strong, monstrous, and dark. And dreams of being with Andi haunted him at night, and came at inopportune moments throughout the day, but the idea of touching himself and imagining her stopped him cold. Coming for her while knowing she wasn’t there to answer when he called out her name felt like exactly the kind of thing that might break him.
More, if he were being honest with himself. Break him more…because he was already pretty damn broken.
“Damian,” Grimalkin greeted him, batting at his face one morning till he woke.
“What,” he grumbled. He’d been having a perfectly nice dream. He and Andi had been in a deep forest, walking side by side, and it’d felt so real he’d been able to forget actual reality—until Grimalkin had started in. “We’re not under attack, there are no klaxons. Come back later,” he said without opening his eyes. If he could fall back asleep, there was a chance he could go back to his walk and her smile.
“I brought this for you, Damian,” Grimalkin said into his ear, his whiskers tickling against Damian’s neck.
Damian shivered and growled, sitting up. He was too awake to chase his dream now that Grimalkin had ruined it. “Explain yourself,” he told the cat. Grimalkin stepped sideways, revealing a small crumbly pile of white cheese on a wooden cutting board, looking for all the world like a miniature avalanche. “I should’ve known this conversation would be cheese related,” he sa
id flatly.
Grimalkin pranced to stand behind the platter. “This is the pule cheese I made you get me. I hid it from Austin, obviously.”
Damian wiped a hand over his face, like the last of his dream was a cobweb he needed to knock off, and he scratched at his stubble. He remembered the hassle of getting this particular cheese for Grimalkin. More than the expense—although it was quite expensive—the stuff came from donkeys milked in Serbia. “I got you five pounds of it,” he recalled.
Grimalkin looked affronted. “I’ve. Been. Rationing,” the cat informed him, before batting the cutting board closer to Damian’s thigh. Damian sighed and reached for one of the crumbles and Grimalkin swatted at his hand with his paw, claws out. “What do you think you’re doing?”
“Trying five hundred dollar a pound cheese?” Damian guessed, setting the crumble down and looking at his hand, where Grimalkin’s tiny wrath had left four small red streaks. He was bemused by the injury; not many things were able to hurt him.
Except for Andi.
“It’s not for you,” Grimalkin said, as if he were insane. “It’s for her. Take it back through the mirror and make things better.”
Damian realized what a sacrifice this was for his guardian and how dire his situation must seem for Grim to offer it. “Cheese doesn’t fix everything, Grim,” he said, knuckling the cat’s tiny head.
“But it almost always helps,” his guardian informed him sagely, while leaning into his hand. “Unless…she doesn’t like cheese? No. You couldn’t be mated to someone who didn’t like cheese. Impossible.”
Damian chuckled. “I’ll ask her next time I talk to her.”
“But when will that be?” Grim pressed. Damian didn’t know how to respond, and the cat panicked, sensing that. “She’s your mate and you don’t even know?” The cheese disappeared, and Grimalkin hopped into his lap with a discomfited sound, to start kneading nervously against his chest. “She was supposed to be the one to lick you forever, Damian.”
Dragon Mated: Sexy Urban Fantasy Romance (Prince of the Other Worlds Book 4) Page 8