by JJ Jones
“You gotta think about it from my point of view.”
“No,” Chase spat out with a voice full of venom, “I don’t.”
“You’re right, I guess you don’t, but you might want to give it a shot anyway. I mean, you were in that van with me, you heard what Jimmy said. It’s a fucking witch hunt. The options were clear. Either get hunted or join the hunters.”
“What’s going on?” Aubrey whispered, desperate to not be totally in the dark on whatever was happening here. “Who is he?”
“Aubrey, I’d like you to meet Kenny. He was one of the men in the van that brought me here. He was real nice, too. The only one out of them that was. Only one who was decent or gave a damn about helping me to figure out what was going on.”
“Hello,” Aubrey said in a hoarse, quiet voice, knowing it was only a matter of time before this broke out into an honest to god fight.
“Well, hey there, you doing all right? You’re actually one of the reasons we’re here, little lady. The folks in the Institute are pretty worried about you. They said you were hurt, although you look pretty OK to me.”
“It wasn’t as bad as it looked, I guess.”
“Bullshit,” one of the shifters with Kenny hissed, a lanky little brunette with mean eyes, “she’s lying. She’s been touched.”
“Touched?” the other one yelled, a big, dumb looking red headed man who looked almost as afraid as she felt. “What the fuck does that mean?”
“He’s a dragon, you dipshit. They’ve got healing blood. Don’t you know anything about shifters?”
“No, I ain’t no dragon. What would I know about their blood?”
“Like I said, dipshit.”
“Enough!”
When Kenny yelled, his companions shut right the hell up. So he was their leader, then. But how had he gone from trapped in the van that brought Chase into the belly of the beast that was the Institute to being sent to bring them back to their captors?
Chase’s line of thought seemed to be travelling along the exact same lines because that was precisely where his questions went.
“So what was it, Ken? Were you already one of them when you woke me up in the van, or did it happen after they locked you up? Was it the fear? I bet that’s what did it, isn’t it? No shame in it, I guess. People have different thresholds for that kind of thing. I’d just like to know. More for myself than for anything else. Just want to know how off my read on you was.”
“No, it wasn’t off. I was just like you when we were in that van, just another poor fucker without the ability to defend myself. You best be careful when you talk about fear, though. You might want to think twice about that.”
“Oh really? Well then, you tell me what it was that made you turn on your own kind. Honest to god, I was hoping it was fear. It’s pretty much the only thing I could think of that isn’t straight up despicable.”
“Self-preservation, asshole. Maybe you should’ve thought about looking into it before you wound up here.”
The tone of Kenny’s voice was still light, as if he hardly cared enough to be having this conversation at all, but Aubrey could tell when she looked closely that he was beyond agitated. Chase was getting to him. That was good. That was only going to work in their favor when it was all said and done, and they needed everything that could do that in any possible way. Because any way you sliced it, they were already at a pretty big disadvantage. It was a sheer numbers game. There were three of them and all three shifters compared to the two of them, one of whom was a plain human who had very recently been on death’s door.
But there was no denying that Chase was getting under Kenny’s skin, eating away at the part of him who still knew that the choice he had made was the wrong one, and that was good. They could use that.
“Man, I’ve gotta say, I would rather be standing over here in my shoes than standing in yours. I guess I’m just not quite ready to see my soul, you know? I think I’d rather hold onto mine for a little while longer.”
“All right,” Kenny snarled, “enough of this shit. You two are coming with us, one way or another and whether you like it or not. Chase, you had to know they were gonna get you. If you don’t want to be responsible for that pretty girl’s death, you’ll convince her to come with us. You’re a sinking ship, man. Put her in the lifeboat.”
Aubrey could feel panic taking hold of her, wrapping itself like a straightjacket. She wasn’t panicked because of what this Kenny guy was saying, that didn’t matter to her at all. The thing that was making her body feel cold and sick was that she could see Chase thinking it over. He was a decent man, a genuine, big hearted man. She knew that.
It was one of the things that made it so difficult to stand beside him every day, knowing that she was contributing to a bad thing for a good man. She believed it must have been that which drove her to throw herself in front of him when those bullets had started to fly.
It was also the thing that was getting inside of his head and making him think that maybe what he needed to do was throw her back to the wolves. If he threw her back they would rip her apart. He might as well just snap her neck right then and there.
“Chase. They’ll kill me. If you send me back, they’re going to kill me for sure.”
“That’s just the blood talking, you know that, man. She’s tied to you now. She’s gonna say things like that. She’s gonna say things like that because she doesn’t know what she’s saying.”
“No,” Aubrey tried to stay calm and keep Chase from believing Kenny’s lies, “you were there. He wasn’t. None of those three were. You saw what I did. Now you tell me, if you were the Commander, what would you do? Would you welcome me back with open arms or would you punish me? You tell me, whatever you think is best and I’ll do it. You just tell me.”
He looked so, so lost and as absurd as it was, that she had to fight the urge to just wrap her arms around him and make him feel safe. How much validity there was to this blood tie formed between them she did not know, maybe it was everything and maybe it was nothing at all. But she did know that she felt much more strongly about protecting him than she had any right to.
She could only pray that he felt that same tie to her. Only pray while she listened to nothing but the beat, beat, beat of her pitiful heart while she looked at him with eyes she wished could speak. When he looked at her, when he finally looked, she knew that he could see everything he needed to see. She wasn’t going anywhere. Not today.
“All right. All right, if that’s how you want to do things. You two will learn, not that it’ll do you any good. Not a whole lot of use for learning when you’re locked up.”
“You could just walk away, pretend you didn’t find us. You don’t have to do this. Once you go to war with your own, you can’t ever go back.”
“Not a chance, asshole.”
The brunette shot the words out like spears and that was the end of the talk. The violence came in currents of electricity crackling in currents across the air. Everything happened very quickly, so quickly that when she thought back on it she wouldn’t be entirely sure that it had happened at all, but in the moment, she saw enough to know that jumping back was probably a good idea.
She could tell that Chase was going to shift again. She heard that same unearthly roar starting in the pit of his stomach that had signaled the change in the courtroom, saw his head drop down and his chest twist as his skin shifted into a sea of thick, armoured scales.
Part of her was completely enthralled. There was a certain level of morbid curiosity over what animals the three strangers would become. She hadn’t known of the reality of shifters for long enough to be over the initial shock. There was something strangely beautiful about watching their bodies morph from one thing into another and part of her wanted to just stand there and stare, but the look Chase shot her put an end to that plan pretty quickly.
“What the fuck are you doing?” he roared, hardly sounding like there were English words being spoken at all. She understood him very well,
however, and flung herself as far from the action as she could get. She watched in fascination as Chase’s massive wings unfurled from his back, stunned to see Kenny morphing into a dragon as well.
From her limited knowledge, Aubrey knew that dragon shifters were more difficult to come by than the other species and so she knew that finding two of them prepared to engage in combat was exceedingly rare.
It made sense that one of the three was a dragon, though, now that she thought about it. That explained how they had caught up to her and Chase so quickly. They had probably been standing by somewhere very close during Chase’s trial, just in case something went wrong.
The moment it did, they were summoned and told to give chase. They had tracked them simply by flying after them. Interesting. That possibility hadn’t crossed Aubrey’s mind. Then again, she hadn’t expected to have made such a complete change in which side of this fight she was on.
“Fuck!”
It took her a minute to realize that the very loud expletive had come from her own mouth. Suffice it to say, she wasn’t having fun any more (if you could ever have really described what she had been having as “fun” to begin with). Chase had now become a magnificently large green dragon while Kenny had shifted into a slightly smaller but undeniable scrappier version of the same animal.
Behind the dragon formerly known as Kenny was a black panther (the girl) and a very large bear (the bumbling red headed man). The fight was upon them. Chase let out an earth rattling shriek that literally shook the ground beneath their feet and charged forward, swinging his massive tail and striking Kenny across the chest. The barbed ends made solid contact, blood spraying from the wounds they inflicted.
Kenny hissed and swung his own body around, lashing out with sharp talons that ripped across Chase’s beautiful scales. Now they both bled, thick black blood that trickled down their hides in little rivulets. Aubrey scurried backwards, afraid to find out what further contact with dragon blood would do to her already heightened senses.
The red-headed man was apparently too turned around by what was going on to actually join the fight, and so he just stood off to one side, standing on his hind legs and roaring as loudly as his probably massive lungs would let him. Absurdly, she let out a burst of laughter. It was just such a strange thing to see! Right in front of her, two dragons bleeding freely, and off to the side a screaming bear.
Maybe she had just gone nuts. Maybe she was locked up in some facility somewhere and this was all happening inside of her head. Part of her hoped that was it, especially when she saw Chase’s jaw unhinge and unleash a barrage of fire. If it wasn’t real she could just stand back and watch without feeling invested in any way.
“God! Oh, shit!”
Reality all came crashing down when she felt a searing pain from behind her. She could already feel a wetness beginning to spread down her back and she turned, the effort of it almost blinding, to see the panther crouched behind her. There was nothing confused about her. Aubrey could see pieces of her own flesh caught in the panther’s claws and backed up, wondering what the chances were of her outrunning the feline.
She was in pretty good shape, she might even have a chance. But instead of making a run for it what she actually did was trip and fall on her back. There was another shot of pain that made her feel like she might throw up right then and there. If a panther could laugh, that bitch was laughing at her now, stalking closer and closer until she was breathing right in her face.
This was it. This was how she was going to die, with a face full of cat breath. It sure as shit wasn’t the way she was expecting, not by a long shot. She closed her eyes and winced, waiting for the end to come.
But instead there was a snarl that was quickly reduced to a whimper, followed by a rapid rush of air moving directly across her face. Still, she kept her eyes closed for another moment or two, just in case it was a trick. Just in case the panther was still there waiting for her. But what she saw when she finally dared to peek, was the panther on the ground only a few feet away from her. It took a moment for Aubrey to realize what was wrong with the animal she was looking at.
Then she saw it. The throat was ripped out completely, all raw meat and stinking blood staining the dirt beneath it. The tongue was half missing and the back half was facing the wrong way. One good swipe was all Chase had needed to break that panther into pieces and one look at the demolished body was enough to send the bear running.
She wasn’t really surprised by that. Aubrey hadn’t really seen him as the type of man capable of this kind of work. That left her, Kenny, and Chase, and she could see that Kenny had lost his fire, both physically and mentally.
His neck was underneath Chase’s large, clawed foot, the struggling movements of his body diminishing by the moment. Finally, Kenny shifted back into his human form, battered and bruised almost beyond recognition. Chase, taking his cue, shifted as well, his foot still squarely on the other man’s neck.
“Do you really want this, Kenny? Are those assholes worth dying for?”
“You know if I don’t bring you in I’m as good as dead already. You know that, boy.”
“Well then, maybe you don’t go back, either. You can always come with us, you know. You’re still a good man inside. I know it. I can see it in your eyes.”
“No,” Kenny half sobbed, “you can’t. There ain’t nothing of that man alive. Now, I’m supposed to bring the two of you in and I’m supposed to bring you in alive, but she’s the one who's more important to them now. I’ll kill you if I have to. I think you know I mean that.”
“But they’re just going to kill her when they get her back, right? Isn’t that it?”
“Why do you care so fucking much?” Kenny snarled, probably using the last real bit of his strength. “What is she to you?”
“I don’t know. But she stuck her neck out for me when she didn’t have to. The very least I’m going to do is the same for her.”
“Then you’re gonna have to kill me to do it.”
He meant it. Aubrey could see it and she knew that Chase could see it, too. Even without having anything close to the strength to do it, Kenny attempted to shift again, spitting his pitiful fire up towards Chase’s face. Chase shut his eyes, turned his head away, and stepped down just a little bit harder. Aubrey gasped and covered her eyes but that couldn’t keep her from hearing the sick sound of Kenny’s neck breaking.
She was almost positive that she was going to remember that noise until the day she died (which she was hoping was later, rather than sooner). At least it was done, though. Two shifters dead and one on the run, but it was over. At least for now, but god only knew for how long.
“I’m-shit, I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have done that. I just didn’t see any other way. He wasn’t going to stop. He was going to keep going until he killed us or we killed him.”
“I know. I saw it, Chase. I know.”
She had no idea what she was supposed to do now. Maybe because of the blood link between them or maybe because of something else she couldn’t begin to understand, she could feel his pain rattling around inside of her own chest. Their hearts beating like one organ, sad, weakened even, but still beating together none the less.
On a whim, using her instinct, which was just about the only thing she had left, she ran to him and threw her arms around him as best she could. He hesitated for just a moment and then she felt his strong arms closing around her, pulling her body in close to his, acting like a human shield.
They stayed that way until the beating of their hearts returned to normal and became their own once more and then Aubrey looked up at Chase’s face, almost afraid of what she would find.
“I want you to know that I’m ashamed, Chase. I’m ashamed that I ever let myself get sucked into any of that. But you have to know that wasn’t the kind of government I thought I was working for.”
“Aubrey. Sweetheart. Up until very, very recently, I was a Navy SEAL. I was pretty high up in the ranks, too. It’s what I did. It’s al
l I did. I was every bit as tied to the same government you were. Neither of us had any idea it was capable of doing this.”
“Thank you. That means a lot to me. More than you know, probably.”
“Well, I meant it. Truly. As far as I can tell, you’re a very remarkable woman. You stood in front of a dragon, for Christ’s sake, to shield me from bullets. A dragon. That’s a woman I’ll take on my team any day of the week.”
Something about his words felt like a charge of electricity running through her blood. She felt renewed. Hell, she almost felt good.
“We’re going to find a way out of this.”
“Whoa, there, sugar, let’s not get ahead of ourselves. This is a pretty big mountain we’re going to have to climb.”
“I know that. And we’ll climb it. We just have to figure out what the first step should be.”