by Ava Benton
The dragon inside me growled dangerously when I faced the prospect of choosing a checkout line. All of them were at least three carts deep.
I wondered if the risk of discovery was truly more dire than the threat of the dragon escaping my control and wreaking havoc. The human world would find out about us. They’d know all about us after I tore the building down and buried the occupants alive.
It was a fantasy, of course, but it was all that kept me sane whenever I had to interact with humans. They were all the same: greedy, lazy, ignorant. Obnoxious. They went out of their way to please themselves but very rarely thought of the basic needs of others.
I wondered how much of what they purchased and hoarded like starving vultures actually went to use. Could any family honestly find use for a case of canned peas? Or a carton of deodorant sticks? They bought, and they stored, and they guarded their stockpiles with the same vigilance as my family and I guarded the cache we’d been assigned to guard, locked deep beneath the mountain in which we lived.
But it wasn’t the same thing.
We weren’t greedy, and we didn’t live in fear of some far-off, unlikely doomsday. It was our job to guard it, as it had been ever since its arrival in the New World.
Naturally, it wasn’t considered the New World back then, over a thousand years earlier. Even so, the Vikings had buried their mysterious stockpile deep within the mountain and called on the world’s fiercest dragon shifters to guard it into eternity.
The tunnels and rooms in which we lived came later. The creature comforts we’d adapted to, even later than that.
“Having a big party?” The girl ringing up the items on the belt dropped a comical wink.
Like we were suddenly friends, in on the same joke.
“I enjoy buying in bulk. It’s economical.”
She didn’t seem to notice my flat, just-the-facts tone of voice—either that, or she chose to ignore it.
“You’re not much like most of the folks who come in here, you know.”
You have no idea, lady. “Oh? And how’s that?” I wouldn’t normally have asked, but her assessment was intriguing.
What did she see about me that I tried to hide from the world?
“You’re much better looking for starters.”
Ah. That. I should’ve known. Humans only saw what was right there on the surface, never what existed underneath.
“Thanks very much,” I replied, though it wasn’t much of a compliment.
I had gotten an eyeful of the inbred, bucktoothed, beer-bellied slobs who did their shopping there and was hardly impressed.
She wasn’t finished, either. “That dark hair, paired up with those beautiful hazel eyes?”
“Genetics,” I grinned.
“That body isn’t genetics,” she purred.
I raised an eyebrow. “Maybe I’m just fortunate that way. I hardly ever work out.”
“Bullshit.”
“It’s true.” And it was. My muscular build was common to all of my breed.
“Hmm. If you don’t spend your free time working out, what do you spend it on?”
I grinned as I handed over the cash for the sale. “I keep myself busy.”
She visibly deflated when I didn’t follow up with an invitation to see for herself what I did with my free time and handed over my change without another word or even a smile.
It wasn’t that I wouldn’t have liked to ask her out if I was into human women with overworked hair and too much makeup.
Hell, she might even have been a good time, and I could’ve used a good time. The dragon roared within me at the thought of having a woman.
But not just any woman, and that was the problem. The cashier was right about my looks and my body.
I could’ve had just about any piece of ass who crossed my path. And many had tried to get into my pants—a few had even succeeded. Yet it never ended well, because none of them were the right woman—my fated mate. So I’d stopped trying after a few hundred years. It wasn’t worth the hassle.
The rain was coming down in earnest by the time I finished loading the bags of food and other supplies into the truck, and the image of flooded roads flashed before my eyes as I left the parking lot and turned in the direction of the mountains. Of all the days to go out.
It didn’t get better the longer I drove—in fact, by the time I reached the winding uphill drive leading to the mouth of the cave, the road was little more than a massive mud puddle. I had the benefit of a heavy, four-wheel-drive truck.
The rusty little car in front of me, however, did not.
“What are you doing?” I called out, knowing the driver couldn’t hear me but needing to express my disapproval anyway.
The little two-door was barely managing the turns and kept slowing down when it hit particularly muddy patches.
I could’ve powered through much faster if it weren’t for those patches.
“Why did you bother trying to make this drive in this weather? And what the hell are you doing up here, anyway?”
That was a fair question, too, since there weren’t any campgrounds in the area that I was aware of. Perhaps one had just opened, or the driver had simply forgotten to check the weather forecast before taking a scenic mountain drive. Regardless of the why, the trip was becoming more dangerous by the second.
And that was when the road began to give way.
“Oh, shit!” I yelled, jackknifing as I hit the brakes and turned ninety degrees to avoid driving straight into the wall of mud coming down the side of the mountain and flooding the road.
The driver in front of me wasn’t so lucky, leaning on the horn in one last, desperate attempt to signal for help before the mud swept the car up and pushed it across the road.
I watched in horror as the car came to a stop just inches from tumbling over the edge of a cliff and hundreds of feet down to the forest floor.
My body started moving before my brain could quite catch up.
I was out the door and halfway to the car before I could question my decision. Not that there was a question of whether or not I should try to help. I knew I should—even if it seemed completely insane as I ran to the edge of the cliff.
“Hey!” I shouted over the driving rain which seemed to drown out everything but the thudding of my heart.
No answer.
The car was moments from falling over the edge. “Can you hear me?” I shouted louder, straining my voice. There was no way around it. I had to get closer.
My feet slipped on the wet, slick mud and I scrambled but managed to stay on my feet as I struggled to reach the car.
It was half-covered, with only the passenger door and hood still exposed.
I could just make out the shape of a girl behind the wheel. An unconscious girl with red hair and a nasty cut on her head. Blood trickled down her face, and I understood why she had leaned on the horn when I saw the way her body had fallen against the wheel.
She wouldn’t be able to get herself out of there.
I looked up at the side of the mountain, where the mudflow had started, to be sure there wasn’t a fresh wave coming my way before grabbing for the door handle.
A human wouldn’t have been able to pull it open with mud rising a quarter of the way up the side, but I’m not human.
I pried it from the car, metal screeching in protest, and threw it aside before reaching for her.
I caught a glimpse of the crumpled metal door sailing through empty air as it fell down, down, down until wind-swept trees swallowed it.
The car started to shift the moment I added my weight to it, and I felt it sliding inch by precious inch toward the edge and beyond. I tore the belt in pieces rather than fumbling for the button to release it, and wedged my hands under the girl’s arms.
“I hope you don’t have a back or neck injury,” I growled as I lifted her limp body from the seat and her head lolled against her shoulder.
She slid easily across the vinyl seat, her ass dropping into the mud the moment
it cleared the inside of the car.
I heard the mud coming before I saw it, sounding like a freight train as it barreled down the side of the cliff above our heads and took trees, shrubs, and rocks with it.
And us.
It was coming for us.
The mud sucked at my feet and held me in place for just a second too long. That one second made the difference between getting me and the girl out of the way in time to avoid being swept over the cliff and getting caught up and thrown over the edge.
I let out an incoherent yell as we went airborne, hurtling off the cliff, and through thin air. I lost my grip on her and watched in horror as she tumbled, still unconscious, just out of my reach.
She hit a boulder and bounced off just before I did. I scrambled to catch any part of her, but it was no use.
Her red hair was like a flag as it billowed behind her, the only streak of color in an otherwise mud-painted world.
Once again, I started before my brain could catch up with what I was doing.
And what I was doing was shifting into my dragon, clothing shredding as my body swelled and expanded and lengthened, as my wings unfurled and caught air and allowed me to swoop down past the girl and beneath her, catching her on my back before she could hit the trees.
I sailed over the trees easily, gracefully, triumphant in the knowledge that I had saved her.
What I was going to do with her was another story.
3
Jasmine
The last clear, conscious thought I had before I hit my head on the steering wheel was: This is it. The end of my life.
And damned if it didn’t all flash before my eyes, just the way it was supposed to in a person’s final moments. I saw everything. All my choices, good and not so much. Every opportunity I had to do something I really wanted to do, but didn’t. Every time I let my temper get the better of me and every time I felt a stab of guilt when I did. Every time I settled for less than what I really wanted or deserved.
That was the thing about the end-of-life review. Nobody ever knew when it was coming, and it could be pretty damned depressing when the person having it thought they had all the time in the world to do things the right way.
And then, I’d slid into unconsciousness—or, rather, it had slammed into me. I figured that was it. No more. End of the road.
Except it wasn’t. In fact, things only got crazier after that.
The first thing I was aware of after that was the roar of wind in my ears.
That, and the sensation of flying. Was that how it happened after death? Did a person literally fly away to wherever the next destination was? No, we didn’t believe in that sort of thing, not in my family.
But maybe we were wrong, because damned if I wasn’t flying.
My stomach dipped and dropped in relation to my position in the air. Only I wasn’t doing the flying. That much, I was sure of.
I didn’t want to open my eyes, though. Some instinct told me not to. It was better to let things happen the way they would and open my eyes when it was over.
It was the roar that got to me. The roar and the flapping of wings.
I must be imagining this. No way this is really happening. And if I’m imagining it, that means I can open my eyes and not worry about what I see. It’s all part of whatever’s going on in my head. Or I really did die, and that means nothing bad can happen to me anymore. I have nothing to be afraid of. No consequences.
I opened my eyes.
And immediately closed them again.
“What is happening?” I screamed, clinging to what felt like leather to keep from plummeting down.
Slippery, moving, breathing leather.
What was it? And why was I on top of it?
I opened my eyes again and looked around.
I could see the trees below me, and the side of the mountain. And out of the corner of my eye, a wing roughly the size of a mainsail, flapping up and down.
I froze.
No way. It couldn’t be. But it was.
I could hear it flapping, could see the thin membrane of the brown wing which I realized a split second later was attached to the brown, scaly, moving creature I was sprawled out on.
A dragon.
Either I was having an end-of-life hallucination, or I was still back in the car, unconscious, having the craziest dream anyone ever had.
I screamed again, and the sound barely reached my ears before the wind ripped it away.
I was riding on the back of a flipping dragon.
Maybe it heard my scream and felt the need to reply, because it roared and the roar shook its body and made its sides move in and out.
And it made me lose consciousness again out of sheer terror.
4
Pierce
It is her.
She is the one.
Things were so much simpler for my dragon.
When I thought like my dragon, everything was black and white. Good and bad. There were no shades of gray, no nuances, no weighing of the facts. Yes or no. Right or wrong. The end.
Which was what made it so simple for him when he announced that the girl on my back was my fated mate. The one we had been waiting for.
My human brain cried out in protest.
No way. After a thousand years on this side of the world? My fated mate is back in the father country, back where the clan once lived. How could she possibly be here?
The dragon roared in response. This is her. She is the one.
He was never one to mince words. He knew what was, and that was that. There was no reasoning with him, no making him understand that what he claimed was impossible.
All of us, my family and I, had come to an unspoken understanding many years earlier, when it was clear we would live our lives away from the rest of the world.
When we realized that bringing anyone else into the caves would mean bringing them close to that treasure—a treasure that we’d never even seen—we had been tasked with protecting.
No one could be brought to the caves. It simply couldn’t be done. The risk was far too great. It would mean allowing an outsider to know our secrets and possibly share those secrets with other outsiders.
It could mean failing our mission—and none of us took that sort of thing lightly. We were given a duty, and we were going to see it through.
It was like a common language for all of us when we understood nothing else about each other, when our personalities clashed as they were likely to do after a millennium of living together. When all else failed, we understood our duty.
Things had gone well, for the most part.
Until this very day.
No. Things will still go well.
It wasn’t easy to think as my human self while I was in my dragon form. His consciousness threatened to overtake mine and very easily could if I allowed myself to let go. Sometimes I did, just for the hell of it. When thinking as a human was too much for me to bear. It came in handy whenever it was my turn to guard the cave for a day.
There was no sense in contemplating life as a human while lumbering around in front of the cave’s mouth.
I fought my dragon as I climbed up the mountainside, close to home by now.
She was still on my back and, except for a few minutes of wakefulness, had missed almost the entire flight. That was for the better. She might have fallen off in a panic otherwise.
I only heard one or two screams. Her weight was still firm against my back, heavy in unconsciousness.
What to do with her? I couldn’t take her home, that was a fact.
But I couldn’t leave her lying on the mountain, either. She had a head injury, and I hadn’t had the chance to see what the fall from the cliff did to her.
I remembered her hitting the boulder just after I lost my grip. She might die from exposure even if her wounds didn’t kill her.
The nearest hospital was miles away, and the only road down the mountain was washed out. How was I supposed to explain getting her to the hospital?
Take her. Make her ours.
The dragon wouldn’t let up.
I tried to ignore its incessant voice, not to mention the cravings stirring in my loins.
As the dragon, it was harder to ignore what she was doing to me.
I could smell her, could feel her warmth against my skin. She was so small and helpless, and I could take her so easily. It could be over in an instant, and she would be mine forever, the way it was meant to be…
I shook my head, snorting hard in frustration. There were much more important things to consider, and the calling of my darker needs wasn’t helping.
As soon as it was safe, and I knew the worst of the climb up the mountain was over, I came to a stop and arched my back to allow the girl’s body a safe slide to the ground.
She landed in a heap. I turned to look at her, my sharp dragon eyes taking in every inch of her skin.
My desire rose again, stronger than it had been in centuries. She wore shorts in spite of the chill in the air, and her lean, smooth legs brought saliva to my mouth.
There was a small waist and full, firm breasts under the hoodie. I could make out their shape thanks to the way the wet fabric clung to her.
I could also make out the blood which soaked one shoulder of that hoodie. That splash of red was enough to wake me from the semi-trance the sight and smell of her body put me under.
She needs help.
I shifted back to human, and the dragon roared in disapproval, but he’d have to deal with it. As a human, I could kneel by her side and check her over a bit more carefully.
Her head had stopped bleeding, but her shoulder hadn’t. I peeled back the sticky cotton to find the wound still oozing. She must have done it when she hit the boulder—I didn’t remember it looking that way when she was in the car. I wondered if there was a break. What if it became infected?
I looked around, at a loss. Like there was anything around me that would provide answers. What was I supposed to do with her? She needed help, but I couldn’t get her anywhere. If I let her go, she would tell people about the dragon who carried her to safety. Then again, who would believe that? But how else could her rescue be explained?