I could have cheered. But even as Duncan won the upper hand, three more dragons had arrived, unnoticed by Duncan, whose attention was elsewhere. I wanted to scream but no words came, and I just watched as one of the new arrivals slashed a clawed foot across Duncan's back. Duncan howled in pain. He twisted around to meet the new danger, but the damage was done. This was no scratch, this was bone deep, blood oozing from the cuts. I could see the pain and weakness in Duncan's eyes as he tried to focus on the three. He roared at them, making them back away—cowards as ever. But it was a stop-gap, I wasn't sure that Duncan had the strength left to back it up with anything.
It sounds strange to say, but I genuinely wasn't sure when I started running. One minute, I was cowering in the alcove, watching as Duncan fought to stay on his feet, the next, I was out in the forest, running towards the clearing, carrying the heaviest rock I could run with.
As I entered the clearing, unnoticed, one of the threatening three started for Duncan, meaning to finish him off. With a strength I never knew I had, I hurled the rock at its head. On any other day, I couldn't hit a barn door with a beach ball at ten paces, but that rock arced through the air with unerring accuracy and clobbered the beast on the head, stunning it. All three creatures snatched their ugly heads around to look at me. I don't think I knew what fear was until that moment.
I didn't even know what good I thought the rock was going to do. Did I think I would scare them off? Did I imagine I might actually take out one of these creatures with a rock? I don't know, but as a diversion it worked brilliantly. The second their heads turned, Duncan was on them, all injury temporarily forgotten in one last-ditch effort. Two of them he had instantly. But the third had made for me. I turned to run but had not gone two paces before a searing pain flared jaggedly across my back, as the creature’s claws found their mark. I dropped to the ground, gasping, too shocked to scream, all sense robbed from me by the white-hot pain that had enveloped me. The creature's claw descended, pinning me to the ground.
But in the next instant it was gone, as Duncan grabbed the beast in his jaws, shaking wildly this way and that until all life was shaken from it. He tossed it to one side, turned his massive head to the sky, and bellowed a howling roar in which victory and pain were combined.
The sharp agony across my back had gone now, to be replaced by a slow but constant burn, only dulled as I drifted from consciousness, vaguely aware of the wetness beneath me where my blood was soaking into my clothes.
The last thing I was aware of was Duncan above me.
Chapter 12
The darkness was complete and oppressive, until it wasn’t. Vaguely, I heard the sound of voices, smelled the scent of my males, felt their presence, and yet I couldn’t open my eyes. Given the trauma of recent events, I felt certain that my mind was trying to protect me and keep me in this cushioned state, away from the pain and stress of being awake, but all I felt was frustrated that I couldn’t hear what was being said…couldn’t speak.
I shifted and tried to sit, forcing my eyes open, but pain shot through my temples and I slumped back again. On the edge of sensation, the voices came clearer—though the words still eluded me. They were not happy voices. Even in my condition, I was aware that the tone had an angry edge that sounded hot red to me in my dream world.
Then I began to feel hands on me, which had probably been there all along but it was only now that I noticed them. The feel of those hands, gentle and nurturing, served further to draw me back into a sharper consciousness.
"What should I have done then? What were my options?” a low voice growled.
"No one's questioning what you did once the drakes attacked. What we're pissed about is that you took her out in the first place. On your own, for fuck’s sake.”
I opened my eyes a crack, in time to see Duncan reply. "We haven't seen drakes in the area in months. She was feeling cooped up and I thought it would make her happy. And until that happened, it did make her happy.”
“You shouldn't have taken her out at all and you damn well know it, Duncan. So I'm a bit at a loss as to understand why you're defending yourself."
“Please, stop. He saved me," I managed to speak and all four of the brothers crowded in around me. “He protected me with his very life.”
MacKenzie crouched over me, his concerned gaze roving over my face. “Are you alright?”
From there, the questions came hard and fast.
"How do you feel?"
"How's your back?"
"Can you speak?"
"She just did."
"Can you move?"
I pushed myself up into a sitting position, eight hands eagerly helping. I was wearing one of the loose robes that the guys wore, fitting me like an over-sized nightshirt—they had presumably had to undress me to tend to my injuries. I touched my back.
"I don't feel... It doesn't hurt. I have a bit of a headache but even that’s fading fast.”
“Little bit of dragon magic speeds healing,” MacKenzie said with a tight smile.
It was only then that I noticed that Duncan, whom I had last seen running with blood, seemed entirely unhurt.
“Oh, thank god,” I murmured, lifting a hand to him, which he took with a grim smile.
"Dragon magic," said MacKenzie dismissively. He was a little red in the face from the dressing down he had been administering to Duncan. "Are you alright?"
"I'm fine. Thanks to Duncan."
MacKenzie said nothing but shot a look at the younger Dragon Shifter.
Duncan looked sick with guilt. “I'm so sorry, love…”
"Don't be," I tried to say.
"I should never have taken you out…MacKenzie is right. It wasn't safe."
"But it was a wonderful day," I said with feeling, adding, "up until the end. You couldn’t have known. What were those things, anyway?”
"Drakes," said Callum. And I noticed Alistair seeming to wince at just the word and look away. "A sort of vicious, twisted sub-species. They're what will be left of dragon-kind when we are gone. And they're a big part of the reason for the decline in our species."
"I thought that was because you couldn't breed?” I asked, my brain still a bit muzzy as I tried to focus.
MacKenzie shrugged. "That's why we struggle to repopulate. But dragons are long-lived by human standards, our numbers would have remained high for centuries if it weren't for the drakes."
"They eat our eggs," Callum explained. "They try to kill any dragon they find alone. They have no magic, they're small and weak, but they have numbers. And while they're not clever, they are wily and they are governed by no moral code."
"A drake would happily let its comrades die to get what it wanted," MacKenzie put in.
I could easily believe that—I had seen it happen.
"For the last two hundred years, the drakes have plagued our kind," Callum went on. "Eroding our numbers, targeting our vulnerabilities. While we struggle to breed, they breed like rabbits. Drakes have no loyalty to a mate, they do not mate for life, and male drakes can produce as many offspring as they wish. They have no interest in who is whose father, enjoy no familial loyalty, they simply produce young in vast quantities."
"Vast?" It was a telling word.
"There are thousands of them," said Callum. "Or more. A dragon can take on as many as a dozen at a time, but they outnumber us fifty to one. And the odds become more and more in their favor with every passing year. They only attack when they have the advantage of numbers. Duncan was lucky that only twenty or so attacked."
"Depending on your definition of 'lucky'," said Duncan.
"I think you should consider yourself extremely lucky," said MacKenzie darkly, and Duncan backed down, the guilt again writ large across his face.
“Why do they want to kill you?" I asked. They had looked to me simply like evil-minded animals, but what I was hearing suggested a kind of insidious plan—a deliberate extermination.
"So they can have the skies to themselves," said MacKenzie sadly. "We ma
y be fighting against the inevitability of evolution. You know, once—and our kind remembers it—there were three different species of walking ape, and they all got along well enough together until one got smart. And only Homo Sapiens was left standing. Our moment may have come."
Alistair got up from where he had been seated. "Excuse me."
He crossed to the door and marched outside without another word. The others watched him go. Once he was gone, MacKenzie and Callum both flashed another look of reproach at Duncan, who could not meet their gaze.
I didn't need their help to know why Alistair had been so silent, and why he had not been able to hear any more of this.
"It was a drake that killed his mate?” I asked.
MacKenzie inclined his handsome head solemnly. "She was an extraordinary woman. And a still more extraordinary dragon. She could have escaped, but she was guarding her egg from them. She could have laid more, of course, but..." MacKenzie swallowed uncomfortably. "Our eggs are our offspring even before they are hatched. Show me a mother who would abandon her child just because she could have another. I suppose she hoped that someone would come to help. No one did. We are spread so widely and so thinly now that no one even knew she was in danger until it was too late."
"She had an egg?" I was recalling what MacKenzie had told me about males only being able to father one child.
"Not Alistair's," said Callum, reading my mind in his dark, quiet way. "She had three mates. Not many by our standards but... that's the way these days."
"I think if it had been Alistair's egg..." MacKenzie paused. "I don't know what he would have done. I'm not sure he would have survived it. He barely did, anyway. He went out looking for drakes—any drakes—that he could kill. One day, of course, he found more than he could take on. He was half-dead when we found him. We told him not to throw his life away, that wasn't what she would have wanted, but...some days, I find him standing on the battlements staring out at the horizon, and I know he'd give anything to go down fighting in one bloody battle, taking as many of them with him as he could." He shook his head. "If our numbers weren't so low, I honestly think he would do it. But there isn't a selfish bone in Alistair." He shot another glance at Duncan
"I know this adds another element to what we're asking of you," MacKenzie went on. "And perhaps one I should have mentioned before. I would have told you, in time, if events had not... This was not how I wanted you to find out."
"But maybe it's for the best you found out this way," said Callum. "Now you know the worst of the drakes from experience. Us telling you about it would hardly be the same."
"I'd hardly say that Ella almost getting killed was 'the best'," said MacKenzie, sharply. "But I suppose Callum makes a good point. You have all the information with which to make your decision."
And there it was; my opportunity to tell them everything, that I couldn’t do this. But if I said it now, then they would inevitably assume that I was leaving because of the drakes, and I sensed that Duncan would never forgive himself for that.
I looked across at him now. He was half a foot taller than any of his brothers, a giant of a man in every respect, and yet, at that moment, he looked so small. His massive shoulders were hunched, his head bowed, his thick arms curled about his sides as if he wanted to take up as little space in the world as possible. His face was still a mask of guilt. He had protected me earlier—been willing to give up his life to do so—and I was determined to protect him now. Moreover, after our kiss and the bond we’d built as we’d soared through the skies and fought side by side?
I didn’t want to go. Not yet.
"If anything," I said to MacKenzie, "this just makes me more likely to help you.”
MacKenzie shook his head with a grim smile. "There's even more dragon in you than we thought.”
I shook my head firmly. "There's more woman in me than you could have known. It's not just dragons who can be strong. Underestimate us at your peril.”
All three men nodded almost proudly at me.
“You should get some rest. Duncan will bring some food up."
Callum carried me to my room. He was the one of the brothers with whom I had spent the least time—an unknown quantity and an appealing mystery. I felt deliciously small and feminine in his strong arms and I felt no shame as I nestled closer, soaking in his comforting warmth.
"Have you ever fought the drakes?" I asked, as he laid me gently on the bed.
He nodded. "We all have from time to time. And we're still here." There was something very comforting in Callum's low, husky voice—as well as something overtly sexual. "We can't promise the drakes won't come. But we will protect you. That I can promise." I believed him without question. He bent down and, very lightly, kissed my forehead. "Get some rest. Duncan will have some food to you soon."
A few minutes later there was a tentative knock at my door.
"Come in."
Duncan entered, holding a tray of food. He'd added a little vase with a single wild flower in it.
"How are you?" he asked, sounding afraid to even speak too loud.
I laughed gently. "Duncan, I'm fine. Stop worrying."
He shook his head as he placed the tray on my lap. "I can't believe I almost... That you almost..."
"You saved me," I reminded him again as I began to eat.
"After putting you in danger. I don't think one cancels out the other. And the others certainly don’t think so."
"Well, it's my opinion that—are you going?”
He had started to walk for the door.
"Yeah. I’m sure I’m the last person you wanted to see after today."
“Oh, no you don’t! You’re going to stay here until I see that proper Duncan smile again, until I've made you understand that today wasn't your fault. Or at least until I've finished eating."
We talked as we ate, but it was hard going. Every other word Duncan spoke was stilted and tight. The guilt was wracking him and, as always with the brothers, I could feel it myself. I knew how sorry he was and I wanted more than anything to make him feel better, to let him know how grateful I was.
When I was done eating, I put the tray to one side.
"I just wish there was something I could do to make it all okay," said Duncan, for the ninetieth time.
I sighed.
"And I wish you could understand what you did for me today. Danger happens. Wherever you go in life, you run the risk of stuff going bad—people get killed just crossing the street. But what tells the good guys from the bad and the great from the good, is how they react." I touched his cheek and guided his face to look at me. "You could have flown away, Duncan. You could have left me and saved yourself and used the excuse that I was dead either way. But you were willing to fight and die for me. Do you know how many men in my life would have been willing to do that? I don't care what anyone else says. You are brave. You are good. You are an amazing man, Duncan.”
And I kissed him. I hadn't been planning to, but when the moment came, I couldn't help myself. Our arms automatically went around each other and he kissed me back as we slowly lay back on the bed, Duncan beneath me. A whole bunch of thoughts raced through my head, but above them all was how incredibly good this felt. How incredibly right.
I pulled away from him, bouncing across the bed and landing on the far side. Duncan sat upright, brows raised in question, looking as beautiful as a man could look.
I stared him down across the bed and finally spoke, desperate to make him smile again. "What's wrong, Duncan? Aren't you going to try and catch me?"
For the first time since the events of the afternoon, I saw the familiar grin return to Duncan's face, and I felt the rush of fresh desire that that smile always brought. With all the energy of old, Duncan sprang across the bed.
Chapter 13
I squealed as I rolled away and bounded to my feet.
Any grogginess had long gone and the nagging pain in my head had vanished once I’d eaten. All I felt now was pure anticipation as I darted around the
room, putting the little table in between us.
Duncan skidded on the floor as I feinted right, a beaming grin on his face that matched mine. I scrambled across the bed, giggling uncontrollably and Duncan went after me, hot on my heels. Round the room we went again, both laughing but both trying to stifle it, aware that we might be heard and that we were doing something that we shouldn't be. Which, of course, just made it more fun.
Finally, Duncan caught up to me, grabbing my hand. I spun willingly back into his arms, turning my face up to meet his. He slanted his mouth over mine with a growl and I rose up on my tiptoes to meet him. His hands moved across my back, down to my ass and back up to stroke my hair. Despite his size and strength, he was wonderfully gentle. My own hands itched to touch him all over as I slid one low to cup his ass and the other up his shirt, letting my fingers skid across his rock hard abs.
Duncan pressed me back, using his big body to maneuver me until my legs hit the mattress. Together, we fell to the bed, Duncan on top of me, his delicious weight crushing me as we continued to kiss. I was wild for him, my nipples aching and straining, my slit going slick with need.
I found I couldn't keep my hands off his tight buns as his hand stole up my side to cup my breast in his large hand. He plucked my nipple between his thumb and forefinger, making me purr with delight. All the while his kisses continued…hot, quick nips that sent a wave of need crashing over me, long sucking kisses down my neck, teasing my sensitive flesh. Never in my life had I felt so aroused. There was a lovely old-fashioned word, “wanton”—that was how I felt.
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