Amazingly, he could see with perfect clarity even without them.
He knew who he had to thank for this now. Thank you, he said, meaning it whole-heartedly.
The response came like a warm blessing in his mind. It’s my pleasure, said Victor.
*****
The man’s hair grew damp beneath Randall’s grip, and though it was an interesting change, it was not necessarily surprising. The man’s face was being left behind in a red line along the wall as Randall dragged it from one corner of the home to another. But the blood was counterproductive. His hold had to get tighter and tighter due to the fact that his victim was growing heavier and more slippery.
The man was clearly giving up the struggle, and as he did he became a dead weight in Randall’s insanely strong grip. The victim’s hair was also a little long, well past trim time. It was natural for some of the blood and even brain matter to seep into the shafts under Randall’s fingers.
But again, it was counterproductive. Randall was losing his grip.
Fortunately when it became too slippery to keep without effort, he knew there was also no further point to his actions and the job was done. He let his victim go. The body dropped to land face-down before the bottom steps of what was apparently one of Antares Mace’s many homes. This one had been just slightly less protected than the others, and with Mace so busy right now, Victor had managed to get past the wards so Randall could enter.
He wondered if anyone noticed yet that the bumps under the blankets in his holding cell were not in fact him. It was a classic ruse for a reason. He was almost sorry he wouldn’t be there to see the looks on their faces when they realized he was gone.
Randall considered the motionless body at his feet for a few seconds before he lifted his head to turn his attention to the domicile itself. Nice, he thought with a countenance that expressed the opposite sentiment. “Guy sure likes marble,” he muttered, his now uniformly green eyes roving over the opulence of black marble and gold veining that included a foyer large enough to play sports in.
The stairs he stood at the bottom of were one of two separate sets that started on opposite ends of the foyer and then joined at the top in a balcony of sorts. Between the stairs was a fountain, its water crystal clear. Chandeliers that probably were crystal hung from a ceiling what looked like approximately a mile overhead. Lavish would have been an understatement.
“Quelle bourgeoisie,” Randall muttered as he slipped his hands into his jeans pockets, but remembered too late that those hands were covered in blood. “Oh, damn,” he said softly, looking down to yank his hands back out. He took a deep breath and sighed.
Then he looked back at the body. Maze had already done so much for Randall, and there were other jobs Randall needed to get to right away for his savior, but Maze was allowing him this final act, just so he could have closure. Of a sort.
There was one more thing Randall could do to make certain the message of disapproval he was sending was clearly received. He hadn’t been planning on it since the victim possessed a motorcycle and a black leather jacket, and he figured that was message enough.
But it wasn’t a Monsters jacket, specifically. So he shrugged now and pulled his favorite folded blade from the inside pocket of his jacket. His hands were already covered in blood, and he felt like he had just enough time to do this right. “In for a penny,” he said pleasantly as he bent to leave the finishing touches on his work.
He’d had a lot of practice over the last few weeks, and once he got the man’s jacket and shirt off, he was able to quickly and accurately carve out the image he wanted. The man’s blood hadn’t yet stopped flowing; he was probably not yet fully dead. So the cuts blossomed with red almost immediately upon having been made, but refrained from overflowing, resulting in deep scarlet lines that were really quite perfect.
When he’d finished, Randall stood and repocketed his blade, slipping his hands into his jeans pockets again, no longer caring about the blood. He looked around a final time, the lights from the chandelier reflecting on his glasses. He didn’t need glasses any longer, but they’d proven so useful in that holding cell, he figured it would be wise to have them on hand from now on, so Maze had given him a second pair.
Randall smiled to himself and began to whistle a tune from his childhood, one he’d had stuck in his head since he’d been rescued from beneath his library’s rubble. With Au Claire de Lune in perfect pitch on his lips, he turned on his heel and took two steps before vanishing from the scene without a trace.
Chapter Fifty-three – Dragon’s Den
“You know what just occurred to me?” Anna asked absently as she stared into the flames of the fire. Antares looked down at her profile where she lay in his lap. For the billionth time since meeting her, he was struck with her beauty. She was wild and carefree, like a field of wildflowers. He smiled to himself when he realized that Annaleia Faith had always reminded him a little of the bloom on a weed. She was strong and hard to kill – and her blossom was impossible to ignore. It was always the wildflowers that bore the most beautiful color.
“What’s that, little one?” he asked, his voice a rumble of part satisfaction and part hunger as he tucked a shining strand of her passion-blown hair behind her ear. She was dressed in one of his shirts and nothing else, and the t-shirt’s bottom hem ended mid-thigh, revealing to him the long expanse of her muscled legs. God, he loved those legs, especially when they were pulling against his restraints in impatient, wanton bliss or wrapped around his waist in ecstasy... as they had been less than an hour ago. It had been a good night.
And now he wanted more. Again.
However, his lust was tempered a little by his thoughts. The fact that one of those luscious legs had been shot and then carved into by a psychopath not long ago sat like a lead weight in Ares’ stomach, despite the fact that her skin was smooth and unmarred now. He hated that she’d gone through that. He hated everything hard and painful she’d gone through in her life, but especially that because it seemed so unnecessary. If Cain hadn’t given her his gun, she never would have been shot, and Price never would have taken a blade to her.
Damn. Now he not only wanted to fuck, he wanted to fight.
It was admittedly the norm for Antares.
“I was thinking about Randall Price and that woman and her two dogs,” Annaleia said, her voice still distant and soft.
She was thinking about Price too? That didn’t sit well with Ares either. No woman should be thinking about another man when wrapped in the arms of her lover during what should have been post-coital bliss. The fact that Price was a serial killer didn’t make it any better.
Ares asked, “What about them?” His voice was a little tighter now.
If Anna noticed, she chose to ignore it or simply understood it and let it slide. “Well, I realized that if it hadn’t been for that fight and the fact that the woman shot me… If Cain hadn’t given me his gun in that portal, I probably wouldn’t be here with you right now.”
Ares blinked. The fact that they were thinking about the same thing – Cain’s gun – took a back seat to the surprise her reasoning made him feel. “How do you figure?” he asked.
“Think about it,” she said easily, her gaze still locked on the fire. “Price had to take time to pry the bullet out of me because it was a Hunter’s round, and it prevented me from transporting away with him. And you guys barely made it through all those wards to find me before he was finally getting ready to leave with me. I mean, it was down to seconds. Without the bullet, or without the gun, I would have already been long gone.”
Ares let that wash over him.
If Cain hadn’t given her his gun… she wouldn’t be here with me. It was true. It was actually true. It had been next to impossible to track them down in the hidden dimension Maze had created for Randall Price and his goons. Without the delay of having to remove the bullet slowing him down, Price would have taken Annaleia and disappeared immediately. She would no doubt have put up a fight, or trie
d anyway. But then he could have just threatened the lives of her friends and she would have caved. That was always the Achilles heel for people like Leia.
That bullet alone saved her from Price.
Cain saved her from Price.
Fuck, he thought, bewildered. But then a few seconds later, he wondered why he was surprised. “Cain,” he muttered aloud.
“Yeah,” Annaleia agreed softly. “It was pretty lucky.”
Luck had nothing to do with it, and Antares damn well knew it.
“Ares?”
He straightened a little beneath her, adjusting her on his lap so he could see more of her face as she spoke to him. She pulled her gaze from the fire and looked up into his eyes. “What kind of dragon will I become?”
Again, he blinked. He actually hadn’t even thought about that. “I… honestly have no idea, little one. You’re actually the first person to be turned into a dragon. Dragons are normally born.”
“Maybe a black dragon,” Annaleia reasoned.
“Maybe,” he replied, though he couldn’t really see his Raindrop as a black dragon. They were mean. He was mean. She was anything but. She was just wild and strong.
“I guess we’ll find ou-”
Annaleia stopped talking when Ares sat up bolt-straight beneath her and easily lifted her off his lap. He felt his eyes shift at once, slipping into full dragon mode. Annaleia placed her hand on his arm. “Ares, what is it?”
“Someone is trespassing on one of my properties,” he told her. “They’re injured. Bleeding.” It was worse than that. He felt death out there somewhere, cruel and wrong.
Annaleia got to her feet, pushing away from the couch. “Then we need to go see who it is.”
He shook his head as he rose to stand before her. “Leia, we can’t leave this cave until the spell is complete.” If they did, she would die.
“Okay… What if you just go and I stay here?” she suggested.
“The spell is two-part, and I started it. Neither of us can leave.”
But something inexorable was pulling at him. It was some kind of threat, something heavy with ominous foreboding. He couldn’t contact anyone he knew from the dragon realm; even the realm’s king and queen were currently in the mortal world. There was no way for him to have anyone from his clan check on things for him.
“Then finish the spell, Ares,” said Annaleia. She rolled her shoulders back and pulled the mass of her shining hair to one side, exposing her neck and his bite marks. They’d faded to four bruise-like points of telling dimension, evidence that he’d taken them two-thirds of the way through the transformation. “Finish it right now,” she told him, her tone final. “And make me the dragon I was meant to be.”
Her voice wavered very slightly with the fear and anticipation she felt concerning the spell’s culmination. But it was so slight, no mortal would have detected it. She was as brave as ever in the face of something that scared her, and Ares knew that if he didn’t do what she was asking of him now, he was a coward. That was all there was to it.
As he stared down at her, thunder rolled from some building storm in the distance, barely audible through the layers of cavern wall. It seemed to echo an inner tumult… and Ares couldn’t exactly figure out why.
Why?
Why was he hesitating? Why was he holding back? Annaleia was ready. She was waiting. This was as easy for her as it was going to get. It was Ares who was stalling, despite whatever was happening out there that was setting off alarm bells.
Why the hell? he thought.
…Make me the dragon I was meant to be…. Her words repeated in his head, rolling through him just like the thunder outside. The storm was coming closer.
And something hit him right then and there. It was a truth that had been there all along; he just hadn’t been willing to acknowledge it.
Ares was afraid.
Right now, he was the dragon and Annaleia was the human and he had that advantage over her. As brutish and primeval as it may be, there was a certain amount of comfort in knowing that if she tried to get away from him again, she would probably fail. The dragon in him wouldn’t let her get far this time. He’d made that promise to himself long ago.
But if she were a dragon?
It tipped the scales back toward even. And Ares desperately didn’t want to lose her again. Not for anything. He stood staring down at her and realized that he would honestly and truly rather face death than a continued existence without the woman standing in his living room, wearing his favorite vintage rock tee-shirt. She was a part of him. She was his mate.
“Leia,” he swallowed over something annoyingly tight in his throat, “tell me you won’t leave me again.” He hadn’t meant for it to sound as desperate as it did. But in that moment he was laid bare before her, and the truth was always desperate.
Annaleia’s eyes flashed with hurt. She reached up, and Ares exhaled shakily as she slid her fingers around his neck. “Ares… my perfect, beautiful, dragon.” She shook her head as if she were filtering to make sure only the most important words came out. Finally she said, “You won’t be able to get rid of me.” Not now, she added mentally. Then she smiled. Because I’ll be a dragon.
Ares let that smile imprint itself on his soul. His little mate stood on her tiptoes and leaned into him with the obvious intent of kissing him, and her clean rain scent washed over him like a drug.
The dragon in him took over, dwarfing her smaller form like a solid shadow. His hands cupped her face, pulling her hard against his chest as he claimed her lips with his and opened her up beneath him. He kissed her long and deep, with a ferocity that he could only imagine told her all the things he couldn’t bring to words. As he tasted her and the storm moved in outside, his mind could think only one coherent, inescapable thought… Mine.
You are MINE.
Chapter Fifty-four – the Dragon’s Den
Anna railed as Ares broke the kiss, caught her eyes a final time, and fisted her hair in his hand. She gazed, rapt, into purple lightning as thunder rolled over them and Ares’ fangs grew to wicked points that promised a blissful agony. He tugged at her hair, forcing her head back. She gave in to his demand, arching her neck.
She tensed when he lowered his lips to her throat, confused and frustrated when she felt only his lips brush softly against her pulse point. A split second later, his teeth pierced the taut skin and sank deep. A soft cry escaped her; she didn’t have time to process the sensations as they layered one over another and her legs gave out beneath her.
Somehow Ares had wrapped his arm around her, his hand at the small of her back, his inhuman strength holding her against the hardness of his body as lightning struck inside Anna. There was a cracking sound in her head, the epicenter of a bolt of electricity that spread like a shockwave, riding the map of neurons through her body. She lost herself to it, helpless in the grip of its white-hot transformative power.
“Ares,” she choked out, her voice overwhelmed by the sensation of pure power, a cacophony somehow louder than the ever-increasing storm outside the cave.
Yes, little dragon? Ares answered, his voice in her head full of reverence for her, a reverence she could not only hear but feel as he reinforced the connection between them with this final, fateful monster’s kiss.
She felt everything, in fact. In the spell’s culmination, this moment that pulled the switch on the tracks of Annaleia’s existence, she suddenly and clearly knew. The train shifted, her fate changed, and the world was turned inside out for Anna, bared wide open.
She was the Great Black Dragon Bantariax, struggling in a stoic and mighty silence in the vast ether of space, as he held captive the lord of chaos – in order to protect the one he loved.
In the next moment, Anna realized the great dragon was Antares, the thing he held captive was his own inner monster, and the reason he had done it – was to protect Annaleia. The one he loved. She felt his anguish as if it were her own, knew his longing. Then she felt his salvation as Antares pulled her tigh
ter to him and sank his teeth in deeper.
His reverence for her grew; she heard his passive thoughts, felt their emotion. That she would allow him to take her blood and give her new life, to bite her so deeply, to mark her as his, that she essentially entrusted to him all she had ever held dear… it was the most precious treasure the dragon had ever owned.
Anna’s consciousness shifted again, this time thrown wide as it struggled to accommodate the building store of power within her. In that widened consciousness, images flashed before her, feelings rushed over her, words and numbers and music and knowledge – so much knowledge – swirled around her and then zeroed in on her and dove in, furrowing deep.
She couldn’t form coherent words any longer; she was a theater to her own awakening changes, helpless to stop the process or interfere. It occurred to her that she might be going insane... all of this was so strong. Waves of power rode her so thoroughly, her cohesion to the real world seemed weakened. This was too visceral, too primal; she felt as if she were feeding from the vein of the cosmos itself. She was doing something forbidden.
This was black magic, after all.
But Ares’ teeth were unmoving in her throat, like steel bindings, and the storm of energy flowing through Anna was unrelenting. It continued to rise in power, obliterating all other sensation until at last it reached a deafening crescendo, striking hard and fast in synchronicity with the thunder outside. All other sound was drowned out by the deafening cacophony of a final lightning bolt that illuminated the cavern through the illusory ceiling overhead.
“Annaleia.”
Anna slowly opened her eyes. She blinked up at the man before her, her dark-eyed fallen angel in blue jeans and motorcycle boots. His fangs were gone from her neck, the tender spot now cupped gently by his warm hands where they encircled her throat. His thumbs brushed the line of her chin as he gazed down at her, his expression one of wonder and hope.
Shakily, he asked, “How do you feel, Raindrop?”
Anna smiled up at him, suddenly at peace, and rested her head against his chest. He moved his hands from her neck to wrap his arms around her, hugging her close. She felt good. She felt really good. But… she knew what he was really asking. He wanted to know if she felt like a dragon.
Monsters, Book Two: Hour of the Dragon Page 39