Demons & Dragons

by Gina Kincade

  She gave into the kiss, the only part of her brain still functioning in a why the hell not phase. Nothing else made a lick of sense. Why not give into the body when the mind had failed you? What else did she have? And so, she tore her arms from his relaxing grip, running her fingers through hair the color of snow, and grabbing what she could of the wavy locks to force his mouth closer to hers until her swelling lips rode the line between pleasure and pain.

  He moved her from his lap, then, with a feral growl that vibrated through her. With her back on the floor, he covered her with his body. Where her sweater fell open, his hard erection pushed into her stomach, her T-shirt the only thing standing between skin meeting skin. He had to be completely naked, and with his overwhelming warmth cocooning her, she wanted to be in the same state, filled with him, giving into the carnal urges suddenly so fierce before her mind returned, or this drug wore off, and her life probably ended in a way she couldn’t even image. She wanted fear in fleeting thoughts, but only lust came. He’d given her a drug that her mother had warned her about. One that men slipped into girls’ drinks in bars to make them horny or something. It was the only explanation she could come up with for her bizarre behavior. The thought should have been jarring, she knew that, yet she easily gave into the insanity, surrendered to the physical need to be taken, and taken roughly.

  “No,” he said with a heavy breath.

  He brushed his hand over her hair, then her face. His palm felt warm and soft, big and overwhelming as he pulled back from her, looking into her eyes. A hunger appeared, evident in his big blues, in the tight hold of his mouth. The beauty of his ruby red lips against his pale skin, his white hair, unnatural for his age, was nothing short of magical, casting a spell over her probably aided by the drugs in her system. It occurred to her that at least in his arms she’d die happy. Insane. But insanely happy.

  “I won’t have you this way,” he said in a huff of breath. “Not here. I will claim you when the time is right. When you are willing of your own accord and not from my psychic energy willing it so. You are reacting to being my mate, to the hold that has over us both. Plus, we have a connection, so you are feeling my reaction to finally being able to touch you after all this time. Still, while it warms my heart, I know I must wait until you have adjusted to all I have told you, to all there still is to share. I will have you when your emotions are yours again, and you want me.”

  “Psychic energy? Mate? I don’t believe in that sort of thing anymore than I do dragons. Your drugs may have hindered my ability to fear you, to keep hold of my physical longings for you, but they haven’t robbed me of my mind completely,” she tried to say with anger in her voice, but it came out forced, as fake as it had been conceived.

  “You think this is drugs? Honestly?”

  She nodded her head.

  “Really?”

  “Yes. I watch the news. These sorts of drugs are all over the place. I’m not sure how you got it into me, but maybe I deserve it. I went out alone, a woman unaccompanied at night. Just don’t lie to me anymore.”

  “Lie? To you? Never. You want truth, I will release you from my psychic hold for a minute, let you feel the real emotions I’m suppressing.”

  Her body tingled for a moment before the weight of it all suddenly crushed down upon her. Her heart raced at a painful speed, shooting knife-like sensations ripping through her limbs. Ice surged through her veins, aching, freezing her blood, making her unable to move though all she wanted to do was run. She stared, eyes wide, dry, the very walls seeming to close in around her, making her vision spotty until she had tunnel vision, seeing nothing at all really. The panic became so viable she started to choke as bile rose in her constricting throat. And then, just as fast as it had come over her, the negative feelings and overwhelming anxiety and fear drained away, as if someone had doused her with calm.

  The physical pain and tension of the panic lingered, yet her brain became all hippy-dippy love and peace, like she’d done more than one drug this time, only she hadn’t. Her feelings had changed in an instant. In the absence of fear, all she'd been left with was her irrational attraction to this man. She knew that wasn’t possible. Over this past year, being a woman on her own, all alone in a big city without a family to even call upon to talk, it had taken her days at a time to find a even shred of calm and yet this blessed peace stole over her being on the spot.

  “I don’t understand. I just can’t,” she said with a sigh.

  “I know. It will take some time. Until then, I will help you through it. I will be here every step of the way until you begin to believe in what I am, and what we are meant to be together. If you have gotten nothing else, though, I want you to begin to feel safe with me. I haven’t hurt you, not in any way. Please, focus on that fact.”

  “You said you saved me. From what exactly? You probably said but my thoughts are fuzzy, to say the least.”

  “I didn’t. I saved you from another dragon. His name is Fylafor. He’s a Storm Dragon gone bad. Many refer to him as the Lucifer of the dragon world. He believes the human world is his playground. He taunts, tortures, plays with humans until they are no more. He saw you tonight. Something about what you did, combined with your shattered soul, caught his attention, and you were to be his next victim. I could not allow that.”

  “Guess I should be grateful I can’t react to that news. But, you have called me, or said I have a shattered soul twice now. What do you mean by that?”

  “You’ve suffered a great loss in your life, and you are broken, mind, body and spirit. I have mourned with you, wanted to help, but knew I needed to let you find yourself again before we could be together. Before you would be ready to learn the shock of all that I am. I’m sorry I can’t give you that time anymore. I planned, when you were ready, to come to you as a man first. Clothes on, of course,” he said with a slight, sheepish grin so out of place on his rugged face that it melted her heart.

  The house shook with a sound like an airplane flying right over the roof just as he’d finished speaking.

  “He’s found us,” Grael said.

  “Found us?” she managed to ask. “You mean the dragon you called Lucifer?”

  “Yes, stay here. I need to get out and change before he can get you,” he shouted as he bolted from the room, leaving her on the floor, dazed and confused.

  She watched his round, muscled ass move as he left, before she found herself alone with the panic crushing down on her again. Despite the wretched pain that stiffened her muscles, especially the ones across her back up to her neck, with a debilitating bout of agony that stole her breath, she managed to half crawl, half slide her body across the floor to the window. All two feet she had to move was misery. Her body began to tremble at this point, only to freeze up as her heart beat so hard her chest screamed with the discomfort of the erratic pulse.

  She had to struggle to remain conscious as she lifted herself to the window. She only found the strength to do so slowly, reserving her efforts to push up the window of broken glass, carefully, to get a better view. Grabbing onto the sill, basically throwing her arms over it to remain upright, her knees gave way, leaving her to literally hang from it.

  Watching the naked man who’d been with her moments before transform left her lightheaded. No amount of blinking could make right the sight of the human form bursting into a dazzling light show. Bands of light in golds and turquoise, among other colors, sprinkled with stars like the ones that that didn’t fill the sky tonight, raced around him. The lines of his body that had been perfection, in her estimate, blurred. Only when the surreal fireworks on a winter's night faded away did the creature from before, the fire breathing one, appear again in his place. Dragon?

  Out of the corner of her eye, she caught movement above the trees. A cloud of smoke moving too fast until it got closer, took shape against the night sky in the form of another dragon. This one appeared to be a smoky gray, though. Its body flew like an arrow to the house she hung in. A huge crash on the roof made her
think it had landed there until she felt the chips of wood rain down around her. Slipping to the floor in the commotion, attempting to shield her eyes, her body. from the falling debris, she could see the dark tail, claws, and scaly underbelly of the beast where the roof should have been.

  Giving into the truth of the situation before her eyes, the reality of these dragons too large, too overwhelming to deny, she figured the only thing the Lucifer dragon had wanted to do by taking her roof was enrage Grael. Proof came that she’d been right when the white dragon cried out, screeched. or screamed more like. a wounded animal. The sound of the roof crumbling was still deafening. Her arms above her head, trying to protect herself from the dust storm that ensued, she couldn’t cover her ears to dampen the sounds surrounding her. For whatever reasons, this Lucifer dragon wanted her alive. His tail had swept most of the roof, thankfully the bigger pieces, away from her, to fall to the ground. While she was filthy, she wasn’t hurt, but Grael wouldn’t know that for sure. Unfortunately for her, what she now had was a clear view of the impending fight as Grael took to flight after Fylafor.

  At first, it appeared a game of cat and mouse with the two dragons soaring overhead, one in pursuit of the other. At times, they would disappear from her view, behind trees, but she could always hear the hard flaps of their wings, the whoosh of the fire from their mouths. In attempts to protect themselves from the others' flames, they would turn, dip, glide, in various directions, which also enabled the one chased to become the chaser. Her brain registered their demented dance in the air like watching some paranormal horror flick on the big screen.

  The whole time, when she lost her vision to spots or clouds over her eyes, she reminded herself to breath. Her hand gripped her chest, as if she could stop the ache there from the rapid beat of her heart. She had the urge to flee still, but even if she could have gotten her trembling legs to work, she didn’t know where she would go. As fast as these mythical creatures flew, she could only assume running to her car would make her easy prey to the dark dragon who could probably lift and toss her car with a simple flick of its head.

  Trapped and exposed, crouching in a semi-fetal position in the now open air cabin, she watched as the two dragons flew closely together; Fylafor on Grael’s tail. If she’d not believed in these creatures just moments before, and she still desperately didn’t want to, she couldn’t refute what was right before her eyes. She could keep going with the idea she’d been drugged by a naked man, but even her manic brain couldn’t make that logic hold up anymore.

  A loud crack caught her attention, and she looked to find that Grael had hit Fylafor with his tail, pushing him back a little. The smoky dragon, much harder to see—like watching a shadow—recovered quickly, though. Too quickly. As the white dragon turned to locate his opponent, probably plan his next move, Fylafor regained flight, and flew directly at Grael, catching the white dragon's neck in his large mouth. Brilliant frosted scales fell to the earth like snow that glimmered in the moonlight.

  A burst of flames shot from Grael’s mouth as the evil dragon continued to fly with the white dragon's neck clutched in his obviously powerful jaws. Anna found another wave of panic flooding through her already stress-weary system. Not that she was good with being rescued by this still barely believable, sometimes naked man, sometimes dragon thing, but she would surely have met a much worse fate if taken by this darker dragon that had been referred to as a devil among their kind.

  Finally, as they plummeted to the ground, Grael’s entire body seemed to convulse, to shake its way free of Fylafor’s mouth. They hit the ground with a thud that shook her from the window, dropping her into the pile of rubble behind her. Jagged pieces of wood scraped against her skin as she fought to get back up despite the trembling house. Part of her braced for the entire structure to simply cave in, burying her alive in the mess.

  When that didn’t happen, she scrambled back up to at least a sitting position that enabled her to look out over what was left of the wall. She watched Grael roll to his feet, turning quickly to brace himself, facing where Fylafor had landed. In this position, this standoff, the two dragons screeched at each other; a horrible sound that made her instinctively plant her fingers over her ears, made her shoulders hunch up as if that could help cover the deafening caterwauling.

  Finally, the horrible, eardrum-shattering noise stopped. Grael swept his tail along the ground, forcing Fylafor to essentially jump up to miss it as he took to the sky again. Grael went on the chase, going after the massive shadow in the sky, until that shadow made a sharp turn, heading him off, forcing Grael to just as quickly change directions. Fylafor shot a huge burst of fire at Grael, which the snow dragon rounded on and came to face as if without fear.

  As the flames reached just inches from him, from turning the white dragon to ash if that was how it worked, it looked from her vantage point that something cloudy, whitish shot from Grael’s mouth. Whatever it was, it met the flames, making them sizzle, creating a wall between them like fire and ice. The hissing of the two elements made a horrible sound, like nothing she’d ever heard before. It was reminiscent of pouring water over a small fire, but intensified about a hundred times more.

  Tiny tendrils of flames shot out away from them, but were extinguished before they hit the ground. In much the same way, icicles, or something similar, seemed to do the same. All at once, they both stopped expelling whatever came from their respective mouths and simultaneously lifted off to the air again. This time, Grael caught up with Fylafor, grabbing the dark tail in his massive jaws, and stopping his flight abruptly only to whirl the shadowy beast around, essentially chopping off the tops of the trees with its enormous body.

  When Grael let go, the smoky dragon went flying off, landing far enough away from the cabin that she barely felt the aftershocks of it. Moments later, the shaded dragon sailed into the air again but flew away instead of returning to the fight. The white dragon circled the cabin, like a look out, for a time. She assumed he was ensuring Fylafor didn’t come back. All she could do was sit there and wait, trying to talk her mind into believing in what her eyes were seeing.

  She couldn’t shake her head and make it go away. No amount of rubbing her eyes with gritty hands made it any different. Even blinking didn’t change anything. She didn’t need to pinch herself to know she was awake, given the tiny cuts that riddled her body stung with the dust and debris that had continuously drifted down from the now non-existent roof during the battle. She had no choice, at some point, but to believe that this dragon above her was real, even though some part of her still fought the idea as ridiculous.

  After some time of patrolling, the white dragon landed gracefully on the ground and she crawled on her knees to keep him in view. In a swirl of lights filled with sparkling snow–not stars as she had originally thought–the dragon seemed to literally melt into a human. As soon as the light died down, this completely naked man ran into the cabin, mounted the stairs, and skidded to a halt in the doorway to what was left of the room.

  Now, her breath really caught. Her heart and lungs failed her for a minute as she regarded him in all his glory. His unnaturally white locks hung in longer waves, framing his face, playing off of the glittering scruff of hair over his lip and lining his jaw. Her gaze trailed down over him, pale skin covering tight muscles that bulged over his shoulders and chest, leading down to a perfect cut of abdominal muscles. At the base of his stomach, just below his belly button, a patch of glistening hair led her to a heart pounding view of his handsome package, already stiffening.

  Her heart did a flip in her chest. She glanced at his hands, clenched in fists, appreciating the way the veins on his lower arms trailed over the muscles there. Her body begged to be touched in an undeniable hunger that she though permanently dormant inside of her. His lust filled gaze roved over her, despite being as filthy as she was from the falling debris of the roof, as if she were the most beautiful thing he had ever seen. She swore the hunger clearly glistening in those ice-blue eyes pierced t
hrough her to her very soul.

  “We have to go,” he said suddenly. “You need to follow me out. Once I turn, you will climb onto my back, and I will take you away with me. I know it is a lot to ask, but he will come back. This is what he does, takes off and returns. He’s not done with me tonight, or trying to get to you. Especially now that he knows you are my mate, or I would not have been here protecting you. You have to trust me. I can hide you in another realm, get you cleaned up, and we can talk all you want.”

  “Fly away with you, on that white dragon into another realm?” she cried, choking on each word she managed to get out.

  “Yes. He can’t get to us there. We have dragons that protect the realm. But, we can also be alone and talk. I’m sure you have more questions.”

  “Questions? Right. But, get on an animal, I guess, for lack of a better term, one that I’m still having trouble even believing exists, and let it take me away to another realm, whatever that means? That is so far beyond a leap of faith I don’t know what to call it.”

  “I know. And, I’m sorry. I haven’t hurt you. You must trust me. He is going to come back any minute, and I have to protect you. I will take you by force otherwise; grab you and fly away. I don’t see as if you have a choice. Sorry. Again. It is all I can do to keep you safe, keep you alive.”

  “You do realize that you are not only asking me to trust you, but you are asking me to accept a world of myths and legends. Of things that kid’s books. or sometimes nightmares. are made of?”

  “Yes,” he simply replied.

  She shook her head.