by JJ Jones
“No! Please, please, no!”
Thank god, she was moving. The color was returning to her face, little by little, the blue leaving her lips. He hadn’t been too late. She had just been so close to the brink of death that it had taken far more blood than he would have expected. Then again, he had never actually attempted something like this before. He had only heard stories about it from his father.
His father had told him of a dragon’s ability to heal but the information had also come with a warning. It was not something to take lightly. According to Chase’s father, when a dragon used his blood to heal another living being, a connection formed between him and said human that could never be severed.
It was a blood tie, something that would link them together, their feelings and their awareness of the world, until the day they died. So he had never done it before and had no idea what to expect.
Even having known what was supposed to happen, it was a miraculous thing to behold. She had been so close to dead and now she was sputtering, gasping for air, but she was very much alive. The bullet that had pierced her gut and acted as the source of her trauma had been pushed from her body and fallen to the ground, rendered utterly harmless.
The wound itself had shrunken down in size until there was no wound at all, a smear of blood the only thing that gave any hint of there ever having been damage done at all. She looked very much confused -- confused and afraid, but other than that, he thought she was just fine. She was going to live and even in the face of everything awful that had come and everything dangerous that was almost surely on the road ahead of them, he was overcome by a feeling of complete ecstasy.
He sat back on his heels and crowed with delight, adrenaline coursing through his body like a drug. The only thing that stopped him was the frightened look on her face and the fact that she was slowly attempting to back away from him.
“I’m sorry,” he spoke softly, trying to keep her from going into a full blown panic, “I swear I didn’t mean to upset you. I was just excited. You were hurt. I’m glad to see that you’re OK.”
“Hurt? I was shot. I should be dead right now!”
“I know. It must be very confusing and I’m sorry about that, too. Did I do the right thing by bringing you here? Should I have just left you?”
“No, they would have let me die. But how did you do it? That’s what I don’t understand. The last thing I remember is standing in front of you and begging them to stop shooting. Then it felt like something punched me in the gut and I fell. I blacked out and then I was here. What happened? Where’s my injury?”
“It’s--well, it’s difficult to explain.”
“Please, Mr. Bends, I just watched you turn into a dragon and I didn’t have a heart attack. I’m pretty sure I can handle whatever you’ve got to throw at me.”
“Ha! Well, I guess that’s a good point. I’ll tell you what happened if you promise not to call me Mr. Bends any more. I think we may be past that point of formality, don’t you?”
“OK, Chase, then. Will you tell me why I’m not dead? Not that I’m not happy about it, don’t get me wrong.”
“Dragon’s blood.”
“Dragon’s blood? What about it?”
“So then they don’t know. I guess those guys don’t know as much as they think they do. At least not yet.”
“Most people don’t know as much as they think they do. Are you really so surprised?”
“No” he laughed, surprised to find himself feeling any kind of levity at all but liking it all the same, “I guess I’m not. But there’s something about dragon’s blood that other shifter blood doesn’t have.”
“What, like it’s more magical than allowing you to turn into another thing entirely?”
“Yes, actually, it is. Dragon’s blood has healing properties. I’ve never done it before but I knew the stories. I tried it and it worked.”
To his shock and considerable discomfort, the girl’s eyes began to fill with tears. He wasn’t great with crying women, never had been; not even with his mother and sister. On top of that, he had no idea why she was crying to begin with. Had he done something wrong? Said something to put his foot in his mouth? It wouldn’t be the first time, that was for sure, he just couldn’t for the life of him tell what it could have been this time.
“Shoot, I’m sorry. I don’t know what I did but I’m sorry about it.”
“No,” she said in a soft voice, “you don’t have anything to be sorry for. I’m just surprised, that’s all.”
“Surprised about what?”
“That you would bother to save me.”
“What’s your name?”
“Aubrey,” she told him uncertainly, clearly confused by the change of direction, “how come?”
“Well, Aubrey, you should know that what you did in there was unbelievably brave. Are you military?”
“FBI.”
“Well, then you were trained for dangerous situations. Even so, being in one and being trained for one aren’t the same thing. You were brave and you were kind when you didn’t have to be. In my book, that makes you worthy of saving.”
“All right,” she laughed shakily, “I guess we can call it even, if you like. But where are we? Do you know?”
“No, honestly, I don’t have a clue. I’ve been wondering that myself. Also been wondering if they put tracking devices in us when they knocked us out.”
“No, but they probably should have.”
Chase felt his hackles go up as he took a step back, looking at Aubrey with suspicion. That was a pretty strange thing to say coming from a girl who had risked her neck for him for no reason. Had he really misjudged her that completely? But she must have been able to see the wheels in his head turning because she held both of her hands up in a gesture of submission almost immediately.
“No, no, I didn’t mean it that way. I just meant that it surprises me, that’s all. You would think that with as much money as they’ve been pouring into this, as much trouble as they can get into if the wrong people find out, that they would have thought of doing that. Just doesn’t seem very smart.”
“No, it doesn’t, does it.”
Now he was feeling suspicious for an entirely different reason, one he didn’t have long to mull over, either. Because they were not out of the woods yet. Not even by a long shot. He could smell something coming towards them and it was the last thing he expected to have to look out for.
“What is it?” she asked quickly, once again almost as if she could read his mind.
“Shifters,” he replied darkly as he readied himself for a fight, “it’s shifters, that’s what.”
CHAPTER EIGHT
Things were moving too quickly. She had gone from basically dead to walking around and feeling healthier than she could remember ever feeling in the entire duration of her life. And she was in some unknown location, a location that was very remote underneath a night sky that was so dark it almost felt solid. It was a lot to take in all at one time.
And she had ruined everything. The career she had dedicated her entire life to, everything she had worked towards, all of it had gone up in smoke because of a snap decision she would never be able to take back.
What she didn’t know was why. Why had she done it? What on earth had made her stand in front of that shifter beast and take a bullet for him? Everything she had been trained for had taught her that loyalty was valued above almost everything else.
Looking back on it now, she thought that perhaps it was how well she took to that principle along with the fact that she was young and pretty that made them recruit her in the first place.
Maybe it had all been in their plan from the very beginning. Maybe they had manipulated her, maybe even Mr. Conrad had been in on it, all the way from the beginning. It made her feel wretched and sick just to think about it, but it was difficult to explain the way things had happened and still believe that Conrad had been in the dark.
He knew her better than almost anyone, after all. He had know
n all of the subtle ways to get inside of her head and make her want the job without knowing what it was, to make her beg him to give it to her no matter what the consequences might be.
He knew how she felt about him, had seen all of the results of her psych evaluations. He knew that daddy issues were something she struggled with (gross; she hated even thinking those words). Did he use that against her? Had he known that she would play right into their waiting hands?
If so, she highly doubted that either Conrad or the Commander had anticipated how fantastically she would have betrayed them. Because that was how it would be viewed. A betrayal. She had betrayed her superiors, abandoned her country when the shit hit the fan. That was what would be said of her going forward from this moment on in all of the circles she had previously run in.
In those circles, loyalty wasn’t a thing you questioned. Ever. Even if you knew that the thing you were loyal to wasn’t right any more, you never left the cause; you went down with the ship for better or worse.
But she hadn’t done that. She had been made to stand witness, act as a sort of phony council, for several military shifters all of whom had been so drugged up that they couldn’t even remember their names, let alone contribute to their own defense. Aubrey had gone to law school, she knew how unethical and illegal this whole thing was, and she had stood by and said nothing as shifter after shifter was hauled off to be experimented on, imprisoned, or worse. It was something that would haunt her for the rest of her life and she knew it.
But something had been different with Chase. From the first time she laid eyes on him there was something that drew her in. She was like a fish caught on a hook and she couldn’t get him out of her head no matter what she did. Even in her sleep she saw him, sometimes in dreams where she tried to save him but failed and sometimes in dreams that were racy enough to have her wake up blushing.
Even so, she hadn’t realized the depth of his draw until she saw him change and knew that it didn’t scare her the way it should have. Instead of running away, her instinct had been to throw herself in the line of fire. She had taken a bullet for him and felt the life drain quickly out of her as a result.
Things had gone dim then, like she was caught in a land somewhere between life and death. Things were different when she woke up again. It was like her vision had been switched to high definition while she slept. Everything had moved from black and white to Technicolor from the one-time application of Chase’s blood.
She could see why the blood frightened the military. They didn’t even know the full extent of its power yet, the poor bastards. Imagine how frightened they would become then? She had questions, many of them, and although she was frightened of how things would be for her going forward, the thing she felt the most was a strange and pervasive sense of calm.
Maybe it was the blood. Maybe it was wearing off on her, helping to keep her feel protected and safe. One thing was for sure, she knew without a shadow of a doubt that Chase would protect her. There was no way she could have explained it to anyone, she just knew it the way a person knows that after the sun goes down, it will rise again in the morning.
It was disorienting, if she was telling herself the truth, but she was identifying far more with the supposed criminal at this point than she was with her own peers. She had a lot of questions for him, too, but even as she was trying to arrange them in her head so that they made some kind of sense, she saw the expression on Chase’s face change, saw everything go dark.
It was terrifying. He had managed to keep his cool (for the most part) throughout the ordeal the two of them had just been through without much more than a flinch. How bad were things for him to look the way he did now?
“What is it?”
She wanted to scream, to shake him until he stopped making that face and told her that everything was going to be OK. She realized that she wasn’t a child any more and so had lost the right to demand that kind of false security, but it didn’t mean she didn’t want it. She did. She wanted it badly.
“Shifters. It’s shifters, that’s what.”
Before she had time to ask for any kind of clarification or further information, Chase held up one finger of warning over his lips. He believed them to be in danger and that was enough of a reason for Aubrey to shut her mouth tight.
She was definitely a woman capable of taking care of herself, but she was also smart enough to know when she was out of her depth. If there had ever been a time when that was true, it was now. The only thing for her to do at this point was follow Chase’s lead and try not to get herself killed.
“From that way,” Chase whispered, motioning off into what looked like nothing more than tangled forest to Aubrey, “they’re coming from the trees. Be ready, and if this gets ugly, if it looks like they’re going to take me down, run. Do you hear me? You run as fast as you can. The dragon blood will make you stronger than you were before. It might leave you with a fighting chance.”
Aubrey nodded, afraid that if she opened her mouth to speak she would start to scream and never be able to stop. Instead she bit her tongue, dug her nails into the palms of her hands, anything to distract herself from this strange rabbit hole she seemed to have fallen into.
With breath that felt like glass moving in and out of her lungs, she waited. Time stood still. It could have been seconds that passed or minutes or days and time would not have felt like it ticked by at all for her. Nothing existed except for the enemy rapidly approaching, whose movement she was beginning to hear in the trees.
God, was this really happening? Was she waiting for the monsters of her childhood to come slinking out of the forest and into this dark clearing with the sole aim of confrontation? It felt like idiocy but she knew it was her only choice. However poor of a choice it was, it was the only one available to her at this point.
She shut her eyes for just a moment and when she opened them again they were no longer alone. There in the clearing with them were three strangers, all of them shifters. She was startled to realize that she knew this not only because Chase had warned her of their arrival, but also because she could smell them.
She could actually smell them coming. That had to be because of the blood Chase had used on her. It was the only possible explanation for her suddenly having senses that worked like they were on steroids.
Chase only had eyes for their new found company now, but she could feel him urging her to be calm and most importantly to stay behind him, for the love of god. That was just fine by her. She was still trying to figure out how they had found them so quickly in the first place.
She knew for a fact that they really didn’t put trackers inside of the shifters they bagged because it was one of the first questions she had asked, back when she was troubled by what was taking place but was still thinking about things from the standpoint of an agent; unless they had started doing it and not told her, but she couldn’t see why they would do a thing like that. Unless--it was a sobering thought, but maybe they had known she would go rogue this way.
Maybe she had been part of one of the most elaborate tests of all; how a shifter was able to impact the behavioral patterns of a human. But if that was the case, it would call every bit of intel she had on the Commander and his Institute (pompous, but it was what he liked his operation to be called) into question.
Any part of her knowledge could have been implanted for a purpose, and that would take away the only real advantage they had. No. No, she didn’t believe that. She couldn’t believe that. There had to be some other way that they had been found so terribly quickly and, once she started to listen to what was happening right in front of her, she began to realize just what exactly it was.
“Holy shit. Are you kidding me? You should be ashamed of yourself.”
“Nice to see you, too, Chase. Sorry it couldn’t be under better circumstances.”
“Wait a minute, you know these guys?”
Even while she was asking the question, she couldn’t believe it. What were the odds of a thing li
ke that happening? But the look on Chase’s face made it seem like he absolutely did know them. He looked disappointed, disgusted even. She wondered if the Commander had done it on purpose, sent people Chase knew just to throw him off of his game.
She wouldn’t have put it past him. She knew that he was the sort of man who was willing to take any and every little extra edge he could get. He would put brother against brother and not even bat an eye. So yes, that was definitely a possibility. She just hoped that it wasn’t a close enough relationship to render Chase incapable of action.
If that happened, he was screwed and so was she. Because he was all she had to keep her safe at this point. There was no way the Bureau would take her back. Not a chance in hell.