Bonded to the Dragon: The Lick of Fire Collection: Dragon Lovers

by Lockharte, Kara

  “Why what?”

  Words once stuck now escaped all at once. “Why would you just give this over to me? Why not just command me?”

  “Would you have obeyed had I done so?”

  “I would have tried my hardest not to,” I admitted.

  He studied me. I fought the urge to cross my arms over my chest. Why did he keep looking at me so strangely? “I’d rather have a willing partner.”

  The ring was still strangely warm on my finger.

  “Thank you,” I said quietly.

  “You’re welcome,” he said. “I’m Grant,” he said, offering his hand, like he was some ordinary guy who happened to be driving me somewhere.

  “Val,” I said. I took his hand. It was large, warm, and dry.

  “Is Val short for something?”

  “Valentina Serena Martinez, if you must know.”

  “Do we have a bargain, Valentina Serena Martinez?” There was an accent to the way that he said my name that was not unpleasant.

  We were still holding hands. I squeezed his hand gingerly as if he could sprout claws at any moment. “Okay, sure,” I said, trying to sound confident.

  He nodded, withdrew his hand, and put it back on the steering wheel. The car started again.

  I had struck a bargain with a dragon. And I’d done it of my own free will.

  Definitely not what I had thought would happen.

  I fingered the ring, careful not to look at him.

  Who the hell was this guy?

  Magic simmered inside him, hot, controlled, and utterly enticing. If I reached over and touched his skin, would I feel his tattoos shift? Would his magic be tangible on my skin?

  Fire was pretty too, I reminded myself.

  In my first life, my original life, I’d had no ability to sense magic, but now, it was like realizing I had a nose and learning how to smell.

  And his magic was oddly alluring in a way that was…unfamiliar.

  Would he be as distracting to me if I couldn’t feel his magic? It wasn’t like I hadn’t known good-looking men before.

  I spared a glance over.

  Tall, big, and blond, with a face that could launch movies and wet panties with a single smirk. He was probably perfectly toned and muscled underneath that groomsman outfit.

  Again, I had that irritating urge to touch him, to see what was underneath. I wanted to slap myself for being absurd. I didn’t even like him. It had to be a side effect of being alive; being dead with no body made for clearer thinking.

  A weird awareness prickled the back of my neck.

  A huge gray shape appeared in the road.

  I barely had time to scream “Watch out!” The screens on the dashboard turned red, the car veering away. We flew off the side of the road, the world spinning around us.

  The car came to a stop upside down.

  I blinked.

  I was still alive.

  Relief flooded me. How strange. Shouldn’t I have the opposite feeling?

  “Are you okay?” asked Grant.

  “Fine,” I said, still dazed by an awareness of a strange jittering motion in my chest.

  He unclicked my seat belt, and I fell onto the ceiling. I tried to open the door, but it was jammed on something.

  “Here,” he said, reaching over and punching the car door. It flew off as if it had been hit by a massive hammer.

  I knew dragons were insanely strong. I’d seen Lana’s dragon pick up an asshole’s badly parked BMW and move it somewhere else without even breaking a sweat.

  But watching life as a ghost and being alive, well, that was the difference between watching a movie and being in it.

  I climbed out of the car. The night was still cold, and the moon was out.

  There were no cars on either of the roads. The partial moon cast a silvery weak light. A strange gray figure floated through the trees toward us.

  My heart hammered even more as the thing got closer.

  Holy fucking shit. It was a real fucking ghost.

  I remembered what I was supposed to be, a death demon, and felt just the tiniest bit silly.

  He climbed out of the car. There were rips and tears in some of his clothes, and they mended themselves before my eyes.

  “Grant,” called the ghost.

  I was irrationally relieved that the ghost was not here for me.

  Grant went still, fire flaring from his eyes. He turned to face the coming threat. Gone was the smooth-talking man in the white suit who had asked me to be his partner: this was the dragon who had sieged a fairy queen on his own.

  The thing became solid in front of us.

  And he looked just like Grant. I stepped closer. No, not quite. This version was older.

  The thing that wasn’t Grant extended a hand to him. “Grant,” he said. “You let me down.”

  Grant’s hand began to raise.

  I looked at Grant and then looked at the ghost. I didn’t know what the hell the thing was. But I had a feeling it would be over for Grant if he took the thing’s hand.

  And why wouldn’t that be terrible? I’d be rid of him and on my way to freedom. It wasn’t even any of my business.

  The old Val, the person I had been before I died, would have taken off. It wasn’t my business, and I’d had more than my share of dealings with magical monsters.

  But he had given me my freedom.

  If he hadn’t, this choice would have been so much easier. I wouldn’t have had to think about this; I would just be gone.

  He’d given me my freedom.

  It had to have been because it was in his own best interest. Grant had plans for me, and when men made plans about my future without my input, it never went well for me.

  Shit.

  He had given me my freedom. And I now had to choose.

  I knew I would regret this.

  I grabbed his arm and yanked back as hard as I could.

  Grant turned those glowing eyes at me. His human disguise had been so good that I had forgotten what he was. But I remembered now.

  Time slowed for a moment. I could count the thumps of my irritating beating heart as he focused on me.

  Thump.

  Thump.

  Thump.

  He tried to shake me off, but I was able to hold on. I had come back from death stronger than before. He narrowed his eyes as if shocked to see a tiny ant holding him back. An inhuman rumbling sound came from him—a predator warning it was about to strike because it wanted you to run so that it could have fun chasing you. “Are you for real?”

  I swallowed hard. It was a variant of the question I asked myself every day; how I could be alive whether this farce of living was reality or just some nightmarish version of hell.

  I saw the pain in his eyes. An old, raw pain, the kind that inflicted internal wounds that determined the course of one’s entire life.

  I glanced at the gray thing that mimicked life. I knew life, and I knew death.

  “Grant. That thing isn’t what you think it is. Don’t listen to it.”

  Grant broke free of my hold but took my hand in his, the one on which I now wore my own ring. The circular piece of metal flared hot. His fingertips rested on the ring, and I could see a measure of rationality return to his expression.

  The thing that looked like Grant smiled, its eyes flaring green. “I know you, Valentina Martinez. You are not what you were. Dead? Alive?”

  Oh shit.

  I remembered those tones, sibilant and cold in my head, wrapping its cold around my thoughts as it had used my body as a vehicle. It had killed me in my original life. This was why I’d rather be dead than to suffer in that monster’s terrible grip again. I couldn’t move, couldn’t breathe, could barely think beyond the answers it demanded of me. But to my surprise, other than the expected fear, there was something else.

  Anger.

  “Neither?” I said, struggling to speak. “Both? Not sure, actually.”

  Anger welled up within me. This monster had killed me. It had used me.
My feelings awakened that sleeping magic inside me.

  Vengeance. I could take vengeance.

  Something else pushed back inside me. No, not vengeance.

  But I couldn’t let someone else suffer the same fate I had.

  “It doesn’t matter,” said the thing. In a blink, black and viscous oily tentacles emerged from behind the monster. It was like a cloud of wriggling giant black worms, covered hooks, mouths and eyes, all watching, hungry, malicious. The sight of it froze me in place.

  I pulled the hot circlet of metal off my finger. It resized itself as I slipped it onto Grant’s pinky. Grant looked at me, and I could see his rationality, his control of his own mind, returning.

  A hot torrent of magic burst.

  But it wasn’t from Grant.

  It was from me.

  I was elsewhere.

  Blue fire surrounded me. Someone groaned, and the sound vibrated inside me. It was a death groan. I spun around, trying to figure out where I was, who I was.

  And I saw Grant, lying face down in a pool of blood and black.

  Terror stabbed icy claws into my spine, my sides. I tried to get to him, but no matter how many steps I took, he lay there, just beyond my reach, as if I were on an invisible treadmill.

  “Grant!” I yelled.

  Someone knelt at Grant’s side, flipping him over. It was a teenage boy in white, and he tore open Grant’s black shirt.

  Grant’s black shirt?

  I blinked and realized though the features were similar, it wasn’t Grant. Where Grant was handsome, this man had a jagged scar across his face.

  No, it was the teenager who was Grant, somehow.

  Another figure emerged from the shadows. A big man, with massive dark feathery wings, his face hidden by a helmet.

  Young Grant turned on the winged creature, fire in his fists. His voice cracked in disbelief. “He trusted you. I trusted you. And you killed him!”

  The winged creature’s voice was deep and terrible, ringing with magic. “The Devourer has claimed him.”

  Flames shot from Young Grant’s hands. The teenager’s voice was full of pain as it deepened into a dragon roar. “Betrayer!”

  Flames roared into my face as the figures faded into the memories they were. I had to turn away.

  They were Grant’s memories.

  And the Devourer had returned.

  The Devourer was here!

  Another torrent of magic exploded from me. I fell to my knees, into soft black sand. I looked up and saw a rainbow-colored twilight sky with three moons, blue, purple, and white.

  Where the hell was I?

  But I knew.

  Though this memory wasn’t mine, I knew this place, had made this place into a part of me.

  This was where I had gone after I had died.

  And now, I saw it with different eyes.

  This hadn’t been True Death. It was a threshold, a place in between.

  So I hadn’t been dead?

  Something hummed behind me. I turned to see an archway of dark stone set in the sand.

  Within the archway, a beautiful darkness hummed a song of endings and permanence.

  At that moment, I realized two things.

  It was the most peaceful song I had ever heard.

  The song wasn’t for me.

  I knelt and scooped up the sand and let it run out of my hand slowly.

  It hadn’t even been True Death.

  I stared at the stone archway and took a step forward.

  It moved, without appearing to move.

  I took another step, then another, until I was running. And yet the archway was always out of reach.

  I sank to my knees. The words were yanked out of my soul in a harsh scream. “What more do you want from me?”

  That strange prickling at the back of my neck again. I turned and saw a human-shaped liquid black thing standing next to me.

  It spoke with the monstrous sound of many voices, representing the many lives it had swallowed and taken. “Can it be? How is this possible?”

  It spoke more for itself than to me, for I was but an insignificant bit player in the monster’s discovery of death.

  I thought of the horror, the atrocities, the agony that monster had caused. Even if this archway was not for me, perhaps I could do something to save others from the pain it had brought me.

  “Why don’t you go and see for yourself?” I said to the monster that had enslaved me and taken over my brain in another lifetime.

  The thing shivered, turning into a strange simulacrum of a white woman with silver hair. She opened her mouth, stretching it to monstrous proportions, displaying rows of daggered teeth.

  It attacked me supernaturally fast. It was all I could do to bring my arm up in a useless form of protection.

  A pin pricked my forearm. The sensation made me realize that here, in this place, I was a giantess, and she was but a tiny white insect, scrabbling at my skin.

  I plucked the disgusting writhing thing between my fingers.

  It roiled, shooting out little sparks of what felt like static electricity.

  “There, there,” I said.

  The doorway was right there at my feet, the smallest of mouseholes.

  It was never meant for me.

  I closed my hand on that bug and shoved it into the hole.

  The desert disappeared.

  And then I was lying on the cold muddy ground. My mouth tasted like sulfur. There was a rock or something hard sticking into the small of my back. I sat up. Every bone, every bit of me, felt as if I had been set on fire and burned in acid. I could hear myself breathing hard, felt my heart thump in my chest, smell the rotting wet leaves around me.

  I was still alive. Tears welled up in my eyes, the most honest I’d ever had.

  The only way my mother would be free to be happy was if I no longer existed among the living. But apparently my fate was to torture her with my existence.

  I couldn’t even die properly.

  Again.

  I sat up, wiped my cheeks with the backs of my hands, and steadied my breath.

  Grant stood there, leaning on a nearby tree, looking at me, holding my ring between two fingers. I couldn’t tell what he was thinking as he stared at me with that stone-faced expression.

  I remembered how the flames had licked my face. The anguish and torment in his voice: Betrayer!

  Had he seen my memories?

  I drew myself up slowly and brushed the leaves off me, something in my bones still ringing with…whatever I had done. Yet my mind was oddly focused on Grant, his presence, his watchfulness.

  I still remembered Grant’s screams as he’d watched his brother die.

  I had to focus on what was important: getting my ring back. Because I knew men, and men did not give up control of women who revealed their power.

  “You said you know what I am.” I decided to test him and held out my hand to him expectantly.

  He looked at the ring and then looked back at me with a strange kindness in his eyes, making me wonder what he had seen.

  I didn’t want his pity, couldn’t have it, because that…that…

  “Did you…eat the Devourer?” he asked.

  I blinked. What? I remembered the bug in my hand. “No.”

  “It’s gone. An ancient immortal monster that even the most skilled dragon warriors have a tough time defeating,” he said. His eyes narrowed, his nostrils flaring. “And you…you make it disappear with a touch.”

  Fuck. I’d never get my freedom back now. What had he seen me do? “I don’t know what happened.”

  He kept looking at me as if I were something significant. “You…you somehow opened a portal to an End. And it’s something they can’t learn from, they can’t avoid, because an End is a True Death.”

  “How do you know it is True Death? Do I stink of blood? Of rotting flesh? Is that what you meant?”

  “That isn’t what death smells like; it’s only what death leaves behind. But an End—a True Death�
�that has its own scent, its own power.”

  I was very aware of the fact that he hadn’t answered my question. Great. I smelled like carrion.

  And despite this literally killer thing I could do, I still couldn’t kill myself.

  I had been so close.

  His voice was conversational as if he were asking me the time. “Did you know what was going to happen?”

  I didn’t want to keep talking about it. I seized upon the memories I had seen. “What happened to your brother, Grant?”

  His face was hard. Whatever rapport we’d had was gone. “Old history.”

  That was better. I didn’t need his questions, pity, or his closeness. “It’s why you’re so driven to find this Angel of Death.”

  His voice was hard. “Stop. Look what you’re doing to that tree right now.”

  I looked at the tree I was leaning on. It was a dry black husk.

  It began to crumble as if it had rotted within. A chill skittered across my skin.

  Death.

  “That wasn’t me,” I said in protest, drawing back—right into another tree.

  Dry leaves floated and swirled downward. I looked up and saw the partially full moon floating overhead between the gnarled branches of the tree.

  Something fell from the heights of the tree, falling to the ground with a thump.

  A dead squirrel.

  I crossed my arms, hugging myself, and shut my eyes, as if by doing so I could wish whatever I was away.

  Heat fell onto my face, like the unfiltered rays of the sun on a summer day.

  Suddenly, I was shoved so hard I fell over.

  My ass hit the cold ground painfully. I glared at him and grabbed a handful of leaves. “What the hell was that for?”

  He tried to hide his smile. Clearly, he thought this was fucking hilarious. “I just want to make sure that you didn’t kill yourself.”

  “You are a jerk.” I threw the leaves at him, but they just scattered. “That is a lame-ass excuse that makes no sense at all. If I could kill myself by touching myself, don’t you think I would've done it already?”

  He extended his hand to me. “Take my hand.”

  I frowned. “You think I’m honestly going to take your hand after that? Besides, shouldn’t you be afraid of me?”

  Was he hiding back a snicker? He raised an eyebrow. “Do I look like I’m afraid?”

  I glanced at his hand. “You should be. I might kill you with a touch.”