And then, out of nowhere, Lydia burst into tears.
Chapter 18
Lydia
Lydia hadn’t known that she was about to cry. She wasn’t sad—she was elated. And it was so overwhelming that it brought happy tears to her eyes and rolling down her cheeks. The tears were only slightly sad—sad because Jack wasn’t here to share this with her and because she didn’t know why he wasn’t here.
But she had just flown on the back of a dragon, and she had never in a million years thought that she would get the chance to do that. She had half-expected Quentin to run away from her as fast as he could when she had told him the truth, but he had run towards her. He had invited her completely into his world, and she felt like she would never be the same.
Quentin couldn’t know what was going on in her head, though, and he assumed that he had frightened her. He flew over to the tree where he had left his clothes and shifted, pulling his pants on quickly. He wasn’t so quick that she didn’t get a good glimpse of him, though, and God was he every bit as good-looking all over as he was from the neck up.
He hurried back towards her, taking her hands in his and pulling her to him. His arms wrapped around her, and she was pressed up against his chest, his hand patting her back with rhythmic thuds. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m sorry—I’m sorry. I thought you would think it was cool. I didn’t mean to scare you. Lydia—don’t cry.”
She half-laughed through her tears, pushing him away only so she could see him as she explained, and so he could see in her face that she was okay. If she’d had her way, she would happily have stayed wrapped in his arms. “I’m fine.” She was smiling through her tears. “I’m not scared. It’s just—you have no idea what that meant to me.”
Quentin looked relieved, and he stood back, running a hand down his sculpted chest. “Oh, good because I thought I had terrified you, which was definitely not what I intended to do. Then again, I’ve never flown around a non-shifter before.”
“I’m honored,” Lydia said, sincerely, swiping at her eyes and taking in a deep breath. “You have no idea how much I mean that. What you just showed me—wow.” She shook her head. “I can’t—I mean, after what a royal mess I made of coming down here, I wouldn’t blame you for just writing me off. I really wouldn’t.”
“I wouldn’t blame me either,” Quentin said, “but there’s something about you, Lydia.”
“There is?”
Quentin nodded. “I couldn’t figure out if I had done the right thing on Monday, ordering you out. I don’t like things that I can’t trust or understand, but at the same time …there was something about you. I can’t let you write a book. And my boss, Barrett, is going to be really upset to hear about this video. And if Jack knows about all of this too, and he’s unstable right now—that’s a big problem. But you? You sound to me like someone who has a passion for something, and I don’t know if enough people have a passion for things anymore. I like a risk-taker. Even a really naïve and semi-clumsy one.”
Lydia laughed, admitting to all of those things with a nod. “Thank you for trusting me after I gave you every reason not to.”
“Don’t make me regret it.”
“I won’t,” Lydia said. “I swear I won’t. I’m an open book from here on out.” She scanned her eyes over him, wanting to reach out and touch him again, but not daring to know that he was in his sculpted, human form. She wanted to touch him because he was incredible, but as she bit her bottom lip, looking over his body slowly, she had to admit that he was incredible in many different ways. His abs were chiseled, and his pecs were well defined. His shoulders were broad, and his biceps bulged beneath them. His skin was neither pale nor tanned, but it was smooth, and it glistened in the faint sun that was coming through the trees. Her pulse picked up, and her palms itched, and she realized that she was fascinated by much more than the fact that he was a dragon shifter. He was also absolutely gorgeous.
“Do you want to see?” he asked.
Lydia’s eyes lifted to his, shocked, because she had been thinking of all kinds of things that she wanted to see. But he was talking about shifting into a dragon—of course he was. Lydia nodded, wetting her lips with her tongue, as she stood back from him. “Yes.”
“Close your eyes.”
She did as he asked, but when he turned to strip out of his pants, Lydia peeked an eye open, drinking in the sight of his firm ass and muscled legs, as he slipped out of his jeans. Then she squeezed both eyes shut, remembering her promise to be entirely honest from here on out. She did not want to have to confess to him that she had been ogling his ass—she especially didn’t want him to know that what she really wanted to do was reach out and squeeze it.
When she heard him jump into the air and shift again, her illicit thoughts temporarily left her mind. When she opened her eyes and saw him standing there before her, his maroon-colored dragon form shimmering and his wings flapping lightly in the wind, though not enough to lift him off the ground.
Lydia put her hands on him again, running her fingers over his scales and along his wings. He nudged her with his head, drawing her closer to him, and she walked fully beneath him as he closed his wings around her. She was surrounded by him, and she touched the underside of his wings and ran her hands along his dragon belly. She touched his legs, and she ducked low to slip out behind him, stroking her hands along his tail.
He flicked it at her, and she laughed, pushing back at it. He flicked her again, and when she pushed him back again, he snapped her up into the air, deftly catching her with his wing when she fell back down. Lydia slid along his wing, her whole body gliding against his. His wings were softer than the rest of him—almost silken. She loved the feel of it, as he wrapped her up and then lifted her down to the ground again.
She felt like everything in her life had led to this moment, where she was standing with a real dragon shifter in the bayou, experiencing his power, and his strength, and his beauty.
God, he was beautiful. He was so incredibly beautiful.
She wished that Jack could be there to see it with her.
And when she thought that, the joy faded from her face, and she stepped back. “Quentin?”
He turned his back to her and shifted, his human form reappearing. His broad back, and his sculpted ass were still impressive, but she was less distracted by them this time as he pulled on his pants.
Facing her, Quentin walked closer. “What happened? What changed?”
“I need to find Jack,” Lydia said. “It’s selfish of me to stand here, enjoying this moment with you. I don’t know what’s happened to him, but I know Jack. Whatever Whitney says, I know Jack. And I know that he needs help.”
Quentin nodded, touching her arm gently. “Then let’s help him.”
Chapter 19
Quentin
They looked around the area where they had seen Jack running, spending probably half an hour going up and down streets, looking for some sign of the man. But Quentin put a stop to that fairly quickly, feeling that it wasn’t a good use of their time. The key to Jack’s behavior had to be in the power emanating from the supernatural force within the apartment, and he knew that they needed to go back there.
When they walked into the apartment, Quentin led Lydia straight to the kitchen, pointing at the shimmering curtain. “It’s there. Do you really not see that? I mean, it’s glowing. It looks more powerful now than it did when we first left.”
“I have no idea what you’re looking at,” Lydia said, shaking her head. “I don’t see anything, and I don’t feel anything.”
“I feel it all over me,” Quentin said. “It makes me want to shift. It makes me want to move towards it.”
“Well, you’re a shifter,” Lydia said. “Doesn’t that make sense? Some supernatural beings or forces are drawn to each other, and they trigger reactions in each other. Clearly, whatever you’re seeing, triggers a reaction in dragon shifters.”
It was strange, having a client who knew so much about him and so much about the s
upernatural world, in general. Most preferred to be protected from such knowledge, and that was his general policy. But he had just shared the most private part of himself with Lydia in the woods, and it had felt right. It had felt like the last barrier to enjoying Lydia’s company, [as he instinctively did], had fallen away, and now he could just be at ease with her. She knew all there was to know about him—or, rather, she knew the most important thing to know about him.
That made her special. But she had already been special.
“I know,” he said, responding to her assessment. “It must, but I still don’t know what it is. I’ve never come across it before. It looks like …I mean, if I had to guess, I would say it looks like a passageway. It looks like you should be able to pass through it. Just reach in, and part the curtain, and walk straight through it into something else. But when I put my hand through it, my fingers just go straight through.”
“I’ve been thinking,” Lydia said. “I know that I didn’t create this. And I know that it probably didn’t just arise here out of nowhere, spontaneously and randomly. So that leaves Jack. Jack was as interested in the supernatural as I am.” She held up a hand, qualifying her statement. “Well, no one really is as much as I am. But he was right there with me. What if he created this somehow, and it backfired on him, and now he’s running away for some reason?”
Quentin nodded. “It’s possible. I have another theory, though. You know how Whitney says that this has been something he does for a lot—he just leaves and then pops back up whenever?”
Lydia nodded. “Yes. Although I still have a hard time believing that.”
“Well, assuming it’s true, maybe this is something that has been attached to him for a long time, and when he has these episodes, it’s actually this …” He gestured towards the shimmering passageway that wasn’t a passageway. “This thing.”
“I want to see it,” Lydia said, more just talking to herself than making a real request. There was nothing that Quentin could do to help her see it, and they both knew it. He couldn’t control it at all. He saw it, but when he touched it, his hand went straight through. When he walked through it, nothing happened other than a strengthening of that spark along his skin.
Quentin circled around the shimmering curtain, searching for some source of the phenomenon. It seemed self-suspending, but he knew enough to understand that there had to be something that was generating the power. Power lived within objects or people. It was rare that it simply existed independently. At least, not this way.
He touched different objects in the kitchen, remembering the way that touching Jack’s belongings had increased the power he’d felt in the apartment. “What belongs to Jack in here? There must be something of his in this room.”
Lydia looked around, shaking her head. “No. I don’t think so. I mean, he was barely ever here, you know? He spent the first night here, and then we left in the morning. Then he was here for all of …twenty minutes last night. I don’t see anything of his.”
“Think outside the box,” Quentin said.
As he watched her, Lydia walked around the kitchen. She touched the countertops, her eyes searching through the usual clutter that sat out—the knife block, the cutting board, the drying rack, the dish towel. She walked over to the fridge and opened it, shaking her head as she peered inside. “I bought all of this,” she murmured to herself.
But when she got to the opposite side of the counter, across the kitchen, from the sink and the main work area, she picked up a small object that was almost unnoticeable, it was so innocuous. She held it up, turning back to Quentin. “I haven’t seen this before. Or, I haven’t noticed it before, anyway. It looks like a film canister, doesn’t it? Like from back when people used actual cameras with rolls of film. This is what the film went into before you got it developed.”
Quentin walked towards her. He had noticed the object before, but he had thought nothing of it. It could have been a film canister. It also could have been a pill bottle. It could have been a small, black container for almost anything. Reaching out, he started to take it from her, but even before his fingers made contact, he felt a jolt of power that was so strong, it made him take a step back.
“That’s it,” Quentin said. “This is it. Do you really not feel anything?”
Lydia shook her head, looking puzzled. “No, it just seems like some ordinary thing. I don’t even remember looking at it before. I would have thought nothing of it.”
“So, you don’t know if it was here before Jack came?”
“Did you see it when you were first here?” Lydia asked. “Because I honestly don’t remember.”
Quentin closed his eyes, trying to remember. He had a good memory, and if he put the effort into walking himself back through memories, he could often recall moments in extreme levels of detail. He had been in the kitchen before, so he walked himself back through that memory, looking around in his mind to see if the small canister had been there. But as he focused on that, a glimpse of the future filled his mind instead. In his head, he saw the container that Lydia was still holding spontaneously burst into flames, and he opened his eyes, grabbing her hand and yanking her over to the sink.
“Quentin!” Lydia said, not understanding why he had been so rough, as he dragged her over and turned on the water. He knocked the canister from her hand just as it set on fire, and he turned the pressure of the water up higher so that it cascaded down over the flaming canister. Lydia gasped and stepped back, then peered forward, trying to see around him from a safe distance. “Oh my God! What is that? What happened?”
The water was having no effect on the flames, but neither were the flames growing. The flames simply burned the canister itself, giving off a saccharine-sweet smell, until the canister disintegrated and the flames petered out, entirely unaffected by the water pouring over them.
When Quentin turned around, the shimmering curtain was gone, and the power that had been grazing his skin had disappeared.
“It’s gone,” he said. “The curtain. The power. It’s all disappeared with the canister.”
“How did you know that was going to happen?”
Quentin leaned back against the sink, scrubbing a hand over his hair as he tried to figure out what the hell was happening. “I can see glimpses of the future,” he said, absently. “You know, like how you said blue dragons are healing dragons. Well maroon dragons, like me, are seeing dragons.”
“Wow,” Lydia murmured. “I haven’t come across that in my reading.”
“We’re rarer,” he said, “at least in the United States.” Quentin shook his head, turning around to look into the sink again. “I have no idea what’s going on here, Lydia. I’ll be honest with you. I’ve never seen this before. I don’t even know where to start, and when I don’t know where to start, there’s one person that I go to.”
Lydia raised her eyebrows expectantly. “Who?”
“Norman Rockwell,” he said. “Oldest living member of the Rockwell Clan. More powerful than any of us, I would think, even though he’s weak in his old age. He knows everything, and he’s seen everything.”
“I’ve read about the Rockwell Clan,” Lydia said, nodding. “It’s an amazing legend.”
“It’s not a legend,” he said. “It’s true.”
“And your family is part of it?”
Quentin nodded. “Yes and no. We’re not Rockwell’s, but we’re members of the Rockwell Clan. My family moved to Louisiana generations ago, at the beginning of the Rockwell Clan’s power. My mother was once part of this agency, when Barrett’s father, Gideon, was in charge. Both of my parents are retired now, and they try to live a quiet life further upstate. I visit them when I can. I haven’t been lately—I need to go. And my sister, she’s moved away altogether. She lives in Maine.”
“Why?” Lydia asked, shaking her head. “Why would they leave this?”
“It’s the kind of life that you love while you’re living it,” Quentin said. “My mother loved what she did while she w
as doing it. But when she started to get older, she was ready to not have the burden of protecting the world on her shoulders. Older generations pass the baton on to new generations. My mother didn’t want me to feel as though she was looking over my shoulder all the time, and she also wanted to feel free to do things like sew and take up writing. She writes a lot of children’s books now.”
Lydia smiled. “She sounds nice. And your father?”
“He goes where she goes,” Quentin said, simply. “They’ve always been together.” What he was about to tell her held some stigma in the dragon-shifting world, and he didn’t always advertise it to people, not because he was ashamed, but because it wasn’t always a person’s business. And other people, even in the Rockwell Clan, could pass judgment on it. “My father is a non-shifter.”
“Oh, like a human,” Lydia said, looking surprised. “So, dragon shifters do marry humans …”
Quentin shook his head, then reconsidered. “Yes and no. He’s human, of course, but he was born to two, shifter parents. But he was a non-shifter. His siblings were shifters. He was the only one in his family who somehow, for whatever reason, didn’t end up with the gene.”
“Oh,” Lydia said “God, that must have been hard for him.”
“It was,” Quentin said, “at different times of his life. But then he met and fell in love with my mother, and she fell in love with him. It never mattered to her that he was a non-shifter, and she would tear into anyone who dared to make a comment about it. But my sister …she’s a non-shifter too. She moved away as soon as she turned eighteen. She didn’t know how to live in this world without really being in this world. So, she left.”
Lydia reached out and touched his arm. “I’m sorry. That must have been hard on both of you, growing up. She would have looked at you and seen what she wanted, and you would have felt guilty at having something she couldn’t.”
Quentin nodded. “Yes.” He didn’t feel the need to elaborate any further. It was strange, really, sharing all of this with a woman that, a few hours ago, he would have said he didn’t trust as far as he could throw her—even though he could throw her quite far if he had the urge. Now he had no further reservations about Lydia, and he found that it was nice to talk to her and tell her all of these things. She didn’t overreact, despite her deep passion for all things dragon shifter. She seemed to get what he was saying.
Rockwell Agency: Boxset Page 60