Quentin turned his back on her, and he used his powerful tail to swipe across her head, knocking her into the marsh. He hit her twice more, making sure that the life left her body, and then he turned back around, staring at the woman as she lay face down, motionless.
He knew that she was gone because the clouds cleared, and the rain stopped, and the sunlight began to stream back through the trees. His eyes and skin were still burning, but he paid no attention to that. Shifting, Quentin sank down into the marsh, catching his breath. He lifted his head, looking to Jordan, who was holding Lydia in her arms.
Jordan looked up at him, and she smiled slightly, nodding. “She’s breathing. She’s hurt, but she’s breathing.”
Quentin bowed his head low, his forehead touching the murky water, and he sagged there, letting himself hang in the moment, knowing that Whitney was gone for good, and Lydia was breathing.
Chapter 35
Lydia
Lydia had been drifting away, floating into a nothingness that had no pain and no fear. It was a peaceful, drifting sensation, taking her away from the dark place she had been in. Her lungs had burned, and the rain had battered her skin. Her head had spun, and her body had exploded with pain—pain that reverberated in her ankle and up her leg. But all of that was gone now as she floated into a nicer, happier darkness.
When something started to pull her back, Lydia fought against it. She didn’t want to return to the fear and the pain when floating here was so peaceful. She was starting to drift away entirely, but something slipped its fingers around her wrist and tugged her back towards reality.
Pain began to seep back in, and she remembered that her lungs were on fire. Her body was screaming for oxygen, but she couldn’t draw any into her lungs. Lydia began to thrash, desperate for relief. She didn’t know where she was, or why it was so dark, but then memories started to come through the haze. Quentin. Jack. Whitney. It all came rushing back to her, and she remembered that Quentin was fighting for his life.
For her life.
Oxygen rushed into her lungs before she even realized that she’d been able to gasp for air. Once she got one taste of oxygen, she began gulping it in with breath after breath. Her eyes flew open and sunlight shone down on her. Trees blocked her view of the sky, and she was aware of arms around her. Lydia trembled, realizing with startling clarity just how close she had come to death.
“Quentin,” she said, her first thought to find him and make sure that he was okay. “Quentin!”
“He’s here,” a voice said, and Lydia focused on the woman whose face was hovering over hers. “He’s here, and he’s fine. He’ll be right here with you any second. Keep calm—keep breathing.”
Lydia stared at Jordan, not knowing how the woman had gotten there but so glad that she was in the arms of a healing dragon shifter. “Did you—was I—I was dead, wasn’t I?”
“Damn close,” Jordan said.
Lydia shuddered, closing her eyes for a moment and opening them again. She looked up at Jordan, realizing that the woman was naked. “Oh.”
Jordan chuckled. “Well—I think you’re out of the woods if you’re suddenly uncomfortable about seeing my breasts. Hannah—toss me some clothes, would you?”
From wherever she was, Hannah did toss clothes over, and Jordan quickly pulled on a shirt. Lydia didn’t care because she had turned her head, and she could see that Quentin was pulling on his pants. Her heart lurched at the sight of him, and when he turned his head, and their eyes met, she felt such a powerful sense of relief and warmth that she once again knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that she was so completely in love with him.
“Quentin,” Lydia whispered.
He hurried over to her, moving stiffly but swiftly. Falling down onto his knees in front of her, Quentin pulled her into his arms. His mouth crushed down on hers, and Lydia almost sobbed as she clung to him, wrapping her arms around his neck. He kissed her over and over again, smoothing her hair back from her face and pulling her into his lap, so that he could cradle her in his arms.
She was still catching her breath, and Quentin’s kisses hardly helped her replenish her oxygen supply. Her kisses soon became frantic, as she tried to keep kissing him and drawing in air at the same time. A hand landed on Quentin’s shoulder, patting him matter-of-factly.
“Plenty of time for that now,” Barrett said, crouching down beside the couple. “Let’s take a look at both of you.”
Quentin drew himself away from Lydia, but his eyes stayed on hers, so much emotion flowing between them, as they held each other. Barrett was wearing just pants as well, and Lydia was struck with just how perfect each dragon shifter was. Their bodies were all perfectly sculpted, and their facial features radiated power and beauty. Hannah was sitting next to Jack, draped in an oversized sweater, her hair tumbling around her. Jack looked stunned, sitting there in a daze. He was covered in mud and blood, and his clothes were torn. He looked like he had been through a war.
They all did.
Several people were inspecting her injuries, but Lydia’s eyes suddenly focused on the shimmering curtain that was suddenly visible to her. It hung over Whitney’s corpse. Or at least one of Whitney’s corpses. There were two, and Lydia didn’t know why, but she didn’t care either. She pointed at the curtain.
“It’s there,” she said. “It’s a portal. That’s a portal, isn’t it?”
Quentin turned to look where she was pointing, nodding slowly. He was still holding onto her hand, recovering from having almost lost her. Lydia wanted to spend days with him, so they could both recover, but not with Jack—her Jack—still in danger. She scrambled to her feet despite protests all around her, and she immediately regretted the move, as her ankle sent jolts of pain up her leg and along her spine. Lydia gasped, pitching forward into Quentin’s arms as he jumped up to catch her.
“Careful,” he said, picking her up in his arms and holding her against his broad chest. “You’re still weak sweetheart.”
She nodded, but she pointed towards the curtain again. “That’s a portal. I can see it.”
Quentin adjusted her in his arms so that she was cradled against his chest in a honeymoon-style position. “You’ve been affected by Whitney’s magic. I guess that’s opened your eyes to the portal. People connected to the supernatural world can see it. It looks like Whitney was a portal herself. When I killed her the first time, it opened and the other version of her came out of it. I had to kill her again. The portal is still there though. I don’t know how to close it.”
“No, we can’t close it,” Lydia said. “We have to send Jack back through it.” She gestured to her friend, who still sat, looking at nothing. “Jack—this is it. Go back through to your side. To your world. Whitney is gone from it. You’ll be safe now. You can be happy.”
He looked up at her blankly, then turned away.
“I’m not sure that’s the best idea,” Quentin said, quietly. “Jack tried to kill you, Lydia. He dragged you to Whitney. He was going to sacrifice you to save himself. The only reason that I haven’t killed him yet is because I wanted to see you first.”
Lydia remembered Jack dragging her, and it hurt her heart. But she forced herself to think with her head. “That wasn’t my Jack who did that. That was this Jack. We need to send this Jack back through, and then my Jack will come back to me. My Jack would never have done that.”
“People are still who they are in each world,” Quentin said. “Just like Whitney was an evil bitch in both worlds. Jack—he’s an opportunist in both worlds. What’s to say that your Jack won’t come back through, discover that we killed his wife and the mother of his children, and turn on you.”
Quentin’s words weighed on her. Jack didn’t know about any of this, and he would have no reason to believe that his wife was who Lydia was going to have to tell him she was. As far as Lydia knew, Whitney had never revealed her true nature to Jack in this world. And her kids. Their kids. God—their kids had nothing to do with this, but their lives would never be t
he same.
“He won’t do that,” Lydia said, “and if he does—we’ll deal with it then. I can’t leave him there to die, knowing that he’s innocent. Knowing that his kids have already lost one parent.”
Quentin didn’t seem convinced, but he did set her down on the ground, carefully positioning her leg so that her ankle wasn’t jarred by anything. He walked over to Jack and pulled him up by the arm, paying no mind to Jack’s attempts to resist him.
“Jack, go,” Lydia said. “Go back to your world. You know what’s happening there. You can make sense of all of this there. If you stay here, you’re going to die.”
Jack looked at her for a moment, but all that she saw in his face was hate. “I don’t know what you’ve done,” he said, his voice vibrating with shock and anger. “But you’ve ruined everything. You bitch. You horrible little bit—.”
Quentin shoved Jack through the portal, causing the shimmering curtain to flutter as Jack’s body passed through it and disappeared. It was so sudden that Lydia gasped, not understanding how one minute a person could be standing there, talking to her, solid and in the flesh, and the next minute be in a completely different version of the world that she lived in.
The curtain fluttered again, and Jack reappeared. But he wasn’t covered in mud and blood. Lydia took one look at him, and she knew that he was her Jack. Her friend.
“Jack!” Lydia gasped, reaching her hand out to him. She didn’t dare get up again for fear of her ankle giving way completely. “Jack—oh my God! It’s you!”
Jack blinked at his surroundings, but then he looked down at Lydia, and he smiled, his eyes lighting up. He ran to her, grabbing her to him, and Lydia hugged him hard, despite the pain it caused.
“Lydia,” Jack gasped. “I haven’t been able to find you anywhere. The strangest thing happened to me. You have no idea. Where did you go? I was in this other world—it was the same but it was different. Whitney was there. She was awful—just awful. God, it was the most terrifying thing.”
Lydia opened her eyes just in time to see the portal behind Jack vanish. She had him back, and Whitney was gone from every world, and everything was back as it should be. There was still so much to explain and so much healing to be done, but she had Jack back safe and sound, and Quentin was standing there, looking down at her with tenderness in his gaze. Her ankle was radiating pain, but she knew she would recover, and the sun was shining down through the leaves of the bayou trees.
For one moment, everything was almost perfect.
Chapter 36
Quentin
Quentin opened the front door of his house, pushing it open, so that he could walk through it without having to release his arm from around Lydia’s waist. “Here we go.” He helped her hobble across the threshold. Her ankle was broken, and she was going to be laid up for some time. Neither of them had wanted to go back to the apartment that Lydia had rented, where everything had begun to go so terribly wrong, so Quentin had brought her back to his place for the first time.
He helped her get to the couch and set her down there gently before going back to close the door and turn on the lights. It was dark outside now. After the confrontation in the woods, they had taken Lydia to the hospital to get her ankle x-rayed and a cast put on, and it had taken hours. Now it was late, and they were both tired and hungry, but there was no time for sleep yet. Jack would arrive soon, with Barrett, and the four of them had a lot to discuss.
Before Barrett and Jack got there, though, Quentin needed to talk to Lydia.
When he walked back into the living room, he saw her stretched out on the couch, her eyes closed, and he couldn’t help the smile that touched his lips. She was so beautiful and so …alive. He had almost lost her earlier that day, and it had been the worst feeling in the world. He had been so helpless to save her from Whitney’s clutches, and if it hadn’t been for Whitney’s powers weakening and his friends arriving, he wasn’t sure what would have happened.
He walked towards Lydia, perching on the side of the couch and taking her hand in his. Her eyes opened, and she smiled up at him, pressing his fingers. “Hi.”
“Hi,” he said, reaching up to brush a strand of hair off her cheek. “For a woman who went to battle in the bayou, you sure look pretty good.”
Lydia smiled slightly. “I got cleaned up a bit at the hospital. And you did most of the battling anyway.”
“You survived,” Quentin said. “That was battle enough.”
They looked at each other for a long moment, neither really knowing how to begin the conversation they both knew they needed to have. He had told her that he loved her, and she hadn’t said it back—not yet anyway. Not that he knew of. Had she even heard him say it? Did she want him to say it again? Did he even want to say it again?
She seemed to read his mind, and her fingers laced through his. “Quentin …”
He cut her off before she could say anything more, not knowing what her tone meant. “Lydia, we’ve only known each other for a few days, and they’ve been pretty tumultuous, desperate, confusing days. I know that things were said …and maybe you feel …how I feel. I don’t know. Maybe you don’t even know how I feel. I want you to. I mean, I still feel the way that I said that I feel, but I’m not sure if you do, and I wouldn’t blame you if you didn’t—yet. I mean, obviously I wouldn’t blame you if you didn’t at all because, well, you can’t blame someone for not loving you, can you? What I mean to say is—I hope that this has been real for you, because it’s been real for me. And I hope that I didn’t just assume too much. I assumed that everything had changed when we spent the night together, but maybe that’s foolish romanticism. I’ve never been a romantic before, really, but I am with you. And I just—.” He blinked, his words grinding to a halt suddenly. “Oh God, I’m doing that thing you do when you can’t stop talking.”
Lydia was smiling, and she sat up, looking up into his eyes. “I love you.”
Quentin felt his heart thud against his chest, and he swallowed hard. “Oh.”
“Did you doubt it?”
“Maybe for a moment,” he said, reaching out to stroke his thumb over the curve of her cheek. “Say it again.”
“I love you,” Lydia said, tapping his chest. “For you. Not because you’re a dragon shifter. Although …that doesn’t hurt.”
Quentin smiled, carefully gathering her into his arms and holding her against his chest, basking in the joy of having her safe and near him. “I love you, too. So much. Lydia …you’re not writing a book, are you?”
“What?” Lydia asked, easing back from him, her brows knitted. “What do you mean?”
“The book you said you were going to write,” he said. “None of this can go in a book. We can’t go in a book.”
Her expression cleared, and she shook her head, smiling again. “Of course not. I was foolish, thinking that I could come down here like some private investigator and investigate the investigators. It was silly of me. And now that I know you, and that you’re a real person to me, I would never dream about profiting from telling people about you. Not even if I hid your identities.” She shook her head. “It was non-sense. I’m sorry I ever thought it.”
Relieved, Quentin pulled her in for a sweet, slow kiss. “I love you so much. I never thought it could be like this. Especially so fast. I’m sorry I ever doubted you.”
“You have nothing to apologize for,” Lydia said, looking up into his eyes with such sweetness, that it melted his heart. “I doubted us, too. I wondered if I could really have these feelings. If you could ever really love me. But I don’t doubt it anymore.”
“Neither do I.”
They kissed again, but a knock at the door came quickly, interrupting them. Quentin sighed, regretfully, but he untangled himself from her and walked to his front door, opening it to let Barrett and Jack inside. After things had calmed down in the bayou, Quentin had only had one purpose—to get Lydia medical attention to set her ankle. So, Barrett had taken Jack with him and filled him in on everythi
ng while Quentin had taken Lydia to the hospital.
Now Jack walked in, and he nodded to Quentin, but he went straight to Lydia, sitting down on the couch beside her and hugging her. “Hi,” Jack said, pulling back to look her over. “God, you’re a mess. How are you feeling?”
“Like everything is going to be okay,” Lydia said with a smile. “What about you?”
Jack’s jaw clenched, and he shook his head. “I can’t believe it. I mean, I do believe it because I know I went somewhere, and I know Whitney was terrible in the world I went to. But I just can’t believe …and now she’s dead. God. She’s dead. I loved her, Lydia. I really did.”
“I know,” Lydia said, putting her arms around him again.
Quentin let the two friends have their space to talk, and he stood by Barrett near the front door. “How did he take it?” Quentin asked, quietly.
“He’d had a hard time processing it all,” Barrett said, shoving his hands into his pockets. “He gets the concepts—he’s very well-versed in the supernatural, actually. But it’s a shock that his wife was nothing like what he thought. And his kids. Obviously he’s very worried about the kids.”
“Of course,” Quentin said, “but better to grow up without a mother, if your mother is like that, no?”
“Yes,” Barrett said, “but try explaining that to a five-year-old.”
Quentin nodded, looking back at the two friends who were deep in conversation. Lydia would help Jack get through this, and he would do everything he could to help her help Jack. They were in this together now. They were in everything together now. He was hers completely.
“Thank you for your help today,” Quentin said to Barrett. “You pulled through, per the usual.”
Barrett shrugged a shoulder, leaning up against the doorjamb. “No big deal. You know I’ve always got your back.”
“How are you dealing with the fact that there are more and more people learning about who we are?”
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