In the slick mud, Quinn was able to wriggle her way out from beneath Isaac. His hands fisted in the mud, the only sign that he was conscious in that moment. She didn’t bother trying to ask him if he was alright. Quinn launched into action.
Adrenaline was a funny thing. It made mothers lift cars off their children. Apparently, it could give Quinn the ability to lift the heavy branch off Isaac. It was as thick as a tree trunk, she thought when her hands were braced beneath the branch. A human shouldn’t have been able to lift it, let alone a thin human woman, but Quinn felt a ferocious need to get Isaac out from beneath the branch he’d protected her from.
While her arms shook and trembled from the effort, Isaac slowly and clumsily rolled out from beneath it. He fumbled to his feet and Quinn let the branch drop to the ground. They were both caked in mud and debris. Looking at each other through the pelting rain, they knew that if they went much further, they were asking for trouble.
Quinn looked back at the road ahead. She couldn’t make out any of the houses through this storm. Shifting from foot to foot, Quinn debated darting ahead. She’d made a promise.
Before she could move, her feet left the ground. Isaac threw her over his shoulder and made for the nearest doorway. It wasn’t a finished house, but it would provide better shelter than standing in the storm would. Quinn wanted to protest, but the moment he lifted her, her limbs fell limp. There was no more power in her body to be found. The will was there, but the body refused. She made a weak effort to pound her fist against his back and earned a few grunts of pain, but even she knew there was little force behind it.
Inside the house was cold and damp. The rain had washed some of the mud from their faces and knees as they ran, but it was still caked onto their wet clothes.
“You’re going to catch a cold,” Isaac told her.
She wrapped her arms around her middle and looked out the empty window. “That’s an old wives’ tale. You can only catch a cold from germs.”
“I might have been born before the turn of the century, but I’m not an idiot,” Isaac informed her. “Being in the cold is going to lower your body’s ability to fight off the offending germs, which causes a cold.”
“Thank you, Mother Hen.”
Behind her, Isaac sighed. Her shoulders slumped. She knew she was being mean only because of her own disappointment. She could only stand here, trapped in what was the equivalent of a shed. She could only hope that Ruby and Casper were doing the same.
Behind her, Isaac had gone quiet. His presence comforted her in a way she hadn’t expected. He was a complete stranger, yet she found more kinship with him than she ever had with Kenji. It made her glance back at the dragon man who’d braved the storm to help her. Even if they hadn’t accomplished her goal, he’d risked everything to help her when no one else would.
Isaac had planted himself on the floor and was fiddling with something in the dark. She saw an arc of electricity light the space before a battery powered lantern flared to life. Her heart hammered for a moment. She’d almost thought the lightning had found its way inside.
“How did you do that?”
Isaac looked up with a guilty smile. It was the kind kids would wear when they knew they’d done something bad, like drawing on the walls or on their little sibling, and enjoyed it. It made Quinn smile despite her rain drenched and dour mood. She sat on the floor beside him, not caring too much that even the floor was wet.
“It’s my element. I have a few tricks in my bag, but electricity is the most useful one. Half the time it means rigging some horrid prank for Luc’s sense of humor.” Isaac’s eyes slid to her, a cautious look in them, before turning back to the storm outside.
Kenji had blamed this monster of a storm on Isaac. It didn’t make any sense. She could see Ken being mad or jealous, but what he’d said made her think otherwise. He’d claimed to have seen dragons like Isaac before.
“Were you ever in one of the facilities?”
Beside her, Isaac grew completely still. Quinn knew she’d gone too far and there was no salvaging her dumb words. Who asked a person if they’d lived through torture? Who asked a person something so deep?
Isaac’s fingers toyed with the handle of the lantern in his hands before he spoke. His eyes never lifted to meet hers even as she tried to catch his attention to apologize.
“I have no memory of my past, really. We, Dane and the twins and I, think that I came from one of the facilities, but none of us are really sure why or how. I was found wandering by myself with nothing in my noggin. I’ve spent my decades trying to fill the empty space with as much as I can.”
Quinn didn’t know what to say. She leaned and set her chin on her knees to watch the dragon man beside her. His long fingers fiddled with the wires inside a small radio in the light of the lantern. Every now and then, he snuck glances at her from beneath his lashes. Each time, he quickly looked away and gave a small shake of his head.
“I wanted to go to college, to learn from people, but that isn’t an option for dragons,” Isaac confessed. “Instead, I grabbed onto books. I read anything I could, from electrical engineering to music theory, to third world history. Some of it was useful, the rest was just good for trivia night and we don’t have a trivia night, if that puts it into perspective for you.”
Quinn smiled.
“How old were you when Dane King found you?”
Isaac’s brows furrowed and his long fingers ticked off some quantity of time in the air as he thought back. “They found me about four decades ago now. I was just a teen at the time. I wasn’t a full-grown dragon, which is the only way we’ve been able to figure my age without my memories.”
“You wanted to become someone,” Quinn said.
Isaac smiled, but it didn’t meet his eyes.
“We should get some sleep,” Isaac offered. He turned away from her and the light. The look in his eyes was shrouded by the darkness around them. The storm still pummeled the thin walls of the house around them.
Quinn wasn’t sure she could sleep. There was too much on her mind. Ruby and Casper were still unaccounted for. Her eyes were drawn back to Isaac, the dragon sitting with his back to her as he tried to lay down. He pulled her to him. She wanted to curl up against his back, a silent apology for her words tonight.
She’d clearly opened an old wound with her attempt at casual conversation. Perhaps, she wasn’t used to having casual conversations anymore. Whenever she spoke to someone, Quinn was usually digging for information on her next big scoop. She was used to prying and meddling in information. It never occurred to her that her work habits were starting to affect her personal life.
Her heart clenched. She wanted this man to forgive her for over stepping her boundaries. The need to be forgiven was driving her mad. She thought she might never sleep as it held her, but eventually darkness claimed her.
Her last thought was of Ken’s words.
They weren’t mates.
***
Once the blonde woman, Quinn, was asleep in the safety of the shelter, Isaac pushed himself up from the floor. Outside, the storm raged in search of him. His stomach rolled uneasily. Guilt and shame was a heavy burden, making his steps on the plywood stairs heavy.
There was one thing he could do for the family of dragons settled here. He hated having to do it, but if this was his fault he needed to do something. The guilt and shame would only escalate if he stayed in the shelter with the woman, as much as he wanted to. He knew the pressure of it would push him lower and lower until he could barely deal with it.
Outside in the rain, Isaac rolled his shoulders. His back still ached from the fallen tree limb. The pain was annoying and satisfying all at once. It wasn’t enough to make a dragon even wince, as the muscles had slowly been recovering the past hour, but it was enough to know that flying would be uncomfortable. It’d been worth it. The tree limb would have crushed the human woman, broken several bones at the very least.
Isaac let his beast come forward. The creature h
ad no desire to go into the tumultuous skies. It wanted to turn around and go back inside the shelter to curl up beside the woman sleeping there. It wanted to lay beside her as an added barrier against this storm in case the roof caved in or the walls collapsed.
Grabbing tight on the reins, Isaac directed his beast toward the skies. They would do this, then they would return to protect the woman inside. Isaac reminded the beast that it was not their jobs to protect her. She had a mate. He should have been in this storm with her. He should be inside, protecting her.
Then where is he? The beast hissed in response.
Isaac held steady. He wouldn’t be swayed by the suddenly greedy beast. Together, they launched up, into the storm. The energy of it cracked around them and the winds buffeted his wings. He rocked unsteadily as he reached into the clouds. The storm felt violent, as though it would carve through the very earth below in an effort to find him.
Isaac didn’t understand why. He knew that the electricity inside of him might have something to do with it, but not how. He didn’t understand how the storms found him. He didn’t understand why they seemed to want to hurt him. All he knew was that it wasn’t enough to kill him.
His wings stretched outward inside the clouds and the rumble of thunder deafened his ears. Lightning arched from cloud to cloud and crashed into the scales of his wings. The dragon grimaced. It never felt all that great, absorbing the electricity of a storm like a battery, but it often helped to minimalize the damage.
He wished the Avila twins had come along. Their abilities would have helped him to push the storm along. Together, the three of them had cleared a number of storms from the American Dragon Territory. This time, it was only Isaac attempting to run damage control.
All he could do was absorb some of the electrical fire burning along the clouds. It charged his muscles with energy and burned along his core. It was hot, too hot. He swayed and dropped altitude before catching himself.
The storm still crackled. It roared with more energy than he could bear, but Isaac was determined. He would abate the storm’s fire if that was the last thing he ever did. He circled the storm, using its own winds to push him along. The lightning snapped and fizzled, hitting his scales before it could hit the ground.
Below him, the rains were letting up. Lightning no longer struck the houses the dragons were huddling in, no longer tore trees in half and set them ablaze. Isaac’s dragon body trembled with the lighting inside of him. He was a battery ready to burst.
Would the storm follow him if he went back to his own Territory? Would it crash down upon his family if he wanted to release some of this energy into a real battery? He didn’t know if the storm had much life left in it. It’d been raging for quite some time and seemed to be on its last leg in that moment. Isaac made the snap decision to fly back to his own territory to ground himself. He had enough energy in him now to make the flight there and back before the sun crested the horizon.
He turned east and broke away from the storm. The winds calmed and his wings settled onto the air currents. The beast inside of him was not happy that they were leaving Quinn alone in the shelter. Several times, Isaac had to remind himself that she had a mate. More often than not, the beast was appeased with the reminder that they would turn around and return to the settlement. They were not leaving her completely, yet.
Chapter Three
The storm was his fault. He should have been more careful. Isaac knew better. He knew that using his dragon form attracted the storms like magnets. If it hadn’t been that storm, another one would have found him. He cursed it every time, but it’d never been this bad before.
“We’re missing a number of dragons.”
His heart cracked when he heard Quinn’s words. She spoke to everyone, but her eyes were on Isaac’s. He couldn’t tell if she blamed him or if it was her own guilt eating her from the inside out. She’d tried. He wanted to tell her that, but knew it wasn’t his place. He’d been out there with her, trying to help as many as he could while keeping the determined woman on her own two feet.
She’d been brave, or stupid. Isaac couldn’t tell which, yet.
“Where could they have gone?” Hector Avila snapped. Not long after the storm started, he’d disappeared. There had been something else, something he held more important than the safety of his family.
Isaac remembered the female Quetzalcoatl that had attacked the GOE building weeks ago. Hector’s wife was still alive, but neither Dane nor Isaac had seen her, yet.
Before Dane or Isaac could ask, someone ran into the house. The thin, male dragon stumbled and staggered into the dining area, reaching for anything he could grab to keep him upright. His eyes were wide and his breaths short and ragged.
Ken stepped forward, offering the thin dragon a hand to hold. Isaac couldn’t help but wonder what had happened to this dragon. He’d never seen such a thin dragon. The man’s bones were pressed against his skin, the pale surface stretched taught over his cheekbones.
The man struggled to catch his breath enough to speak. It seemed he was not used to running, but something had possessed him into flying as fast as he could to his leaders.
“Guards,” the man breathed. He clutched Kenji’s hands, the stronger dragon leaning in close to hear. “Guardians came.”
The entire room stilled. Had they all heard the same thing?
“You were frightened last night,” Kenji said to the man holding his hands. “It wasn’t too long ago that the Guardians had you locked in a cell, Morty. I wouldn’t blame you if you had a panic attack and thought you saw Guardians last night.”
Isaac swallowed and nodded. It was possible. He didn’t know what it was like, being in the clutches of people who wanted to cut you open or trying to adjust to a life after that. Yet, it made sense that the newly rescued dragon man was seeing things. Isaac had heard of PTSD before. It seemed plausible. Heck, it seemed likely that was what happened.
GOE hadn’t picked the perfect time to attack the family of survivors. That was nigh impossible.
The frail man stood at his full height and nearly towered over Kenji, who was a tall dragon man, himself. The frail dragon man’s brow flattened and his hands slipped from Kenji’s in a moment of strength.
“I saw a team of guardians. Don’t question what I saw. They came and grabbed Ruby and Casper.”
Quinn’s eyes flicked to Isaac’s. Her face was devoid of color. Those names were familiar. Had he heard them over the din of thunder and rain? Were those the dragons they’d searched for through the storm? They’d fumbled through several half-built homes with no luck. They’d found a few, confused dragons, but none of them turned out to be the faces Quinn looked for.
The storm took some time to pass. She didn’t know when, but there must have been a point when the storm ran out of lightning to strike them with for the only lightning damage she could see was the first few strikes she’d witnessed. Many of the half-built houses had been flooded or hit by the dragon-seeking lightning. The storm had wanted to destroy Isaac. At least, that’s what it felt like for Quinn. It felt like the very sky had been about to fall in and wipe them all out for the sake of destroying Isaac.
Never before had she met a dragon like that, a dragon that Mother Nature herself wanted to destroy. Kenji had confessed to knowing dragons like him. As much as she wanted to avoid her old friend at that moment, she knew she would need to dig some answers out of him if she was going to get any further.
Kenji was sitting alone in the house he’d been given by the council. He was the youngest dragon on the council by decades. It spoke volumes about their trust and faith in this dragon. Quinn didn’t know when she would trust him again, all of that smashed when he made his confession before the storm.
But, she wasn’t there to talk about that. No, that was something she would tuck away in a box to investigate further on another day, a day when there was not so much going on. At that moment, she had more pressing concerns. So, when she found Kenji sitting alone, she didn’t
bother with pretenses and launched right in.
“Tell me about the other dragons you met, the ones like Isaac.”
Ken’s head shot up, his eyes wide. There was pain on his face for a split second. Then, he gathered himself and buried it deep. She wasn’t his. Not anymore. Not for a very long time. But, they could be friends, she thought. They’d always been friends and she wanted that back.
Ken sucked in a breath and blew it out through his mouth. Quinn had seen him do this a number of times, each right before he spoke about the facility where he’d been kept. She hated making him go back there, to the worst part of his life, but she needed to know more about Isaac. She needed to know if he was safe for her family. She needed to know why he affected her the way he did.
She’d seen Isaac coming when his human form touched the ground and he was running too fast. By all means, she could have moved out of his way. There had been enough time, but she saw the curly haired dragon man and the world stopped around her. He was coming toward her and her body stopped functioning. When he crashed into her, they both crashed into the soft grass and tumbled until their limbs were in knots.
What had she done? Instead of getting upset or trying to untangle herself from the mess they’d become, Quinn laughed. It’d been one of the funniest things she’d experienced in a long while.
Ken’s voice snapped her out of the humorous memory and she remembered where he was about to take her. Quinn claimed a chair beside him and settled back.
“I never saw the agents bring in any kids. The whole time I was there, I only saw them march adult dragons through the halls. I didn’t pay much attention because I was being cut open every other week, but I was almost certain they never brought in children.
“Then, kids started showing up. I had a sick feeling about where they came from. Some of the female dragons might have been pregnant when they arrived. At least that was what I hoped. It seemed the lesser of all the evils we experienced there. The kids were experimented on in ways that we weren’t. While the so-called scientists were trying to take things out of most of us, the kids looked like the scientists were trying to put things into them.
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