by Jadyn Chase
Kai let go of my arm. He lumbered to his feet and planted his legs wide above me. As much as I hated the pain of his bite, I quailed more at what he would do next. I couldn’t tolerate much more of this.
He lowered his head close to me one more time, so I had no choice but to look him in the eye. The more I squirmed to get away, the harder Damian crushed my windpipe under his heel.
All at once, Kai shot his head forward. He smashed his bony forehead plate into my snout and ignited firecrackers detonating in my brain. I spun into a daze, but he only repeated the blow time after time with devastating accuracy.
He adjusted his position up my muzzle toward my eyes. He slammed into me so many times I lost count of them all. My consciousness slipped. A veil of black started to descend over my mind.
At the last second before I passed out, Damian stepped off my neck. Air flooded my lungs, and my head crashed back into awareness. Oh, the cruelty of it all! If only I could drift away into the dark and forget all this, I would gladly die here and now.
They wouldn’t let me die, though. They wanted me awake to suffer all their grim tortures before they put me out of my misery. In my agony, I thrashed to one side and spotted the blackened remains of two bodies stretched out on the grass. Revenge for one murder wasn’t enough. Now they would pay back three relatives with pounds of my flesh.
I coughed and tasted blood in my mouth. My whole head throbbed. I couldn’t blink. I tipped over on my side and waved my limbs trying to get them under me, but they wouldn’t obey.
I flopped onto my stomach, and tormenting stabs of pain erupted through my chest and ribs. A sickening wave of nausea and agony obliterated my thoughts, and my sight faded for a second.
In place of this brutal nightmare, I beheld again the angelic vision of Louise standing in front of me at the Falls. The spray puffed her hair away from her face. Her skin glowed with life and pink color. Her lips trembled in anticipation of kissing me.
What I wouldn’t give to hold her and kiss her just one more time! Why didn’t I realize until now how much she meant to me? I didn’t want that moment to end—not ever. I didn’t want to imagine the day she went back to Savannah, the day I would have to face the awful fact that I would never kiss her or hold her again.
Now that day finally arrived. This was it. I kissed her at the lookout. That was the last time. I put my arm around her and held her close. The fulfillment and contentment before this fight couldn’t compare to the bliss and connection I felt with her.
Life meant nothing without that, and I would never find it with another woman. This moment facing death made me realize it. I didn’t want to kiss another woman. I didn’t want to put my arms around anyone else at the lookout or share that sense of belonging to someone.
Louise. I couldn’t kiss her again, but I wished like anything I could tell her. I wish I expressed how I felt before I sent her away. Now she would never know.
I didn’t know myself until now. That was the problem. I guarded myself against her because she was a reporter trying to expose my family to the world. I told myself it could never be, and I was right, but I still should have told her. I shouldn’t have separated from her forever without telling her.
A low chuckle vibrated the ground. It reverberated through my shattered sternum into my soul, and my heart sank. I didn’t have to turn around to know that sound. Kai and Damian were gloating over me. The more I suffered and bled before I died, the happier my suffering made them.
With a mighty effort, I contorted over on my back. I didn’t need to see them anymore. I gazed up at the sky and willed my mind to hold onto Louise. I summoned up the immaculate sensation of her body laid against mine, her lips entwined with my mouth, and our tongues dancing in endless swirls of bliss.
A smile spread over my face and I let that vision take over my world. I could die now. I didn’t care what they did to me as long as I stayed with her. I would take her with me to the other side.
A shriek attracted my attention to Damian one more time, but he couldn’t touch me in my reverie. He bounded toward me and landed with all four feet rooted on either side of my trunk. I braced myself for the next assault, but it never came.
He screamed his furious battle cry again, but when I glanced up, he didn’t look at me at all. He glared beyond me at something out of sight.
A series of deafening screeches muddled my thoughts. I couldn’t make out where they were coming from until I pried back my head and spotted a massive green dragon crouched across the campground.
He flicked his tail from side to side and roared at Kai and Damian. He pumped his wings and shook all the trees. I had to think hard before I recognized Jackson Hodges.
All at once, Damian launched off me and flew at Jackson instead. The two dragons collided in an Earth-shattering concussion. I couldn’t believe my senses. How did Jackson get here? Only one answer made sense. Louise. She must have told him.
Damian and Jackson tumbled over and over each other in a death match to end all death matches. I barely had time to blink the blood out of my eyes when Kai streaked over me to join the fight, and I couldn’t allow that.
I swallowed down the pain and my longing for rest and whipped onto my front. I still couldn’t rise, but I could damn well stop that upstart from throwing the advantage against my friend.
I barely got my head up in time to catch Kai by the tail. I summoned my last ounce of energy and jerked him back. He snapped like a whip and I sent him twirling into a tree trunk. Before he could recover, I took wing and went after him spitting mad. My legs might not work, but I could still fly.
He bounced up and rocketed at me. I couldn’t fight him even if he was weaker than Damian. He already did too much damage. If I closed with him, he would put an end to me for certain.
He narrowed his eyes and shot toward me coming a hundred miles an hour. I gauged my timing down to the millisecond and dove underneath him. I hit the ground hard and almost passed out from the pain—almost.
He soared over my head, and I corkscrewed my neck around to slice my eyetooth down the inside of his neck. His scales hadn’t hardened with age like Damian’s, and my tooth scored deep into the flesh.
Black blood gushed into my face. Kai gasped, but he couldn’t make a sound. He plowed into the lawn headfirst. He waved his limbs in all directions while a pool of dark liquid spread around him. He splashed in his own blood trying to fight it, but a dull cast covered his eyes and his movements became steadily softer and less energetic until he lay still.
Silence enveloped the campground. I looked up from Kai’s inert body to find Jackson regarding me with his vicious red eyes. He straddled Damian. An immobile, scaly mountain towered above the grass. I couldn’t see Damian’s face from where I lay.
I blinked, but my mind started slipping away again. I couldn’t stay conscious much longer. Jackson shifted in front of me. He dwindled to a man and marched toward me at a rapid clip. He nodded up at my destroyed face. “Are you okay?”
I tried to do something. I ought to shift to talk to him and tell him I wasn’t really okay, but I couldn’t even do that. Nothing worked. I hovered on the brink of flying apart at the seams.
Jackson raised his hand and rested it against my shoulder. Even that hurt. “It’s okay, man. Don’t worry about a thing. We’ll take care of all of this. Just lie still and don’t try to move.”
13
Louise
I came down the stairs and headed for the Watering Hole to get my dinner, but when I opened the door, I gasped in surprise. Jackson Hodges stood next to the bar, but the sight of Luka slumped on a stool next to him shocked me more than anything.
“Oh, my God!” I exclaimed. “What happened?”
Luka hunched his shoulders and cradled one arm in a sling. Black and blue bruises discolored his face, and his nose puffed up to a disgusting mess of crushed flesh and broken bone. His hair hung damp and limp over his eyes.
Jackson clapped him on the back, and Luka coughed and
winced in pain. “He’s all right. Nothing to worry about.”
I gaped at Luka’s ruined visage. He certainly didn’t look all right. He looked like he got run over by a train. “Did those men do this to you?”
He shrugged, but before he could answer, Jackson chipped in again. “Your boy here held his own. He took out three of them before I showed up.”
“So did you…..?” I glanced back and forth between the two of them. “What did you do to them?”
“Like I said,” Jackson chirped, “there’s nothing to worry about. We took care of them. They won’t bother anybody anymore. You two have a pleasant evening. Let me know if I can do anything else for you.”
He bestowed a beatific smile on us both and breezed out of the bar. I could only stare at Luka. I barely recognized him through all that bruising.
Before I could say anything, he blurted out, “Look, I’m really sorry. I never should have let you get involved in all this. If I knew they were going to show up at the campground. I never would have taken you there.”
I settled back. Now that I got over my surprise, I compressed my lips and set my hands on my hips. “Who were they?” He opened his mouth to reply, but I cut him off. “And don’t give me any line of bull about it not being any of my business or anything like that. Just tell me the plain truth for once in your life. Who were they? They ambushed you at the campground, so they must have some vendetta against you.”
He sighed and hunched his shoulders. “They belong to Clan Lynch—at least, they did. The Lynches are a rival Clan up north. The Lynches and the Kellys have been blood enemies for centuries. We fought countless wars against them. We keep signing neutrality agreements with them, and they keep breaking them and encroaching on our territory and causing all kinds of problems. Those men who attacked me wanted revenge for…. something else.”
“Something that you did, I think you mean,” I retorted. “Go on. Tell me the whole truth. How am I supposed to trust you or believe a word you say if you don’t?” I shot him a withering glare. “I can’t believe I kissed you, Luka. I can’t believe I ever let myself feel anything for you. That was a mistake.”
His eyes widened, and his gaze riveted to my face. “Don’t say that, Louise. Don’t say it was a mistake.”
“Tell me it wasn’t,” I fired back. “Tell me one true thing about your life that I can hold onto that would make me believe you might someday, somehow, in some fantasy world, feel something for me—anything at all. Go on. Let’s hear it.”
He blinked at me. For a second, I thought he might actually be thinking it over. Then his features hardened into an impenetrable wall that no woman could break.
He gritted his teeth against the pain and got off his bar stool. He swept around me and took hold of my elbow. “Come with me.”
I yanked my arm free. “I’m not going anywhere with you. How do I know you won’t wind up dead next time?”
He shoved his face right up close to my nose and hissed low. “You want to know a true thing about me and my life? Then you better step outside because I’ll be damned if I say it in here for the whole town of Norton to hear.”
He wheeled away and barged out of the bar. I glanced around and saw Larry watching the whole exchange. Of course Luka couldn’t tell me any true thing about his life in here. What was I thinking?
I hustled outside with my tail between my legs. I found Luka pacing back and forth on the sidewalk. He inclined his head to one side and led me to the alley between the Watering Hole and the building next door. When I got there, he rounded on me with his hackles raised.
“All right. You want to know the real truth? Here it is. The so-called emergency I told you about last week was the Lynches making a play on the Hodges territory. The Lynches perpetrated the attack at Horseshoe Falls. They killed those horsemen to assert their presence in another Clan’s territory. I was there. I warned Jackson about it, and we went up there to handle it.”
My jaw dropped in disbelief. “Are you…. are you telling me you’re…..a…..you’re one of the…. a…?” I couldn’t formulate the word.
This couldn’t be happening. It couldn’t be real. He must mean something else.
He squared his shoulders at me. He drew himself up to his full height to show himself to me in all his devastating glory. “I’m a dragon, too, Louise. The Kellys are all dragon shifters. So are the Hodges and the Lynches. There are ten dragon Clans living in these mountains. We’re only one of them, but yes. I’m a dragon.”
He stood still and waited for…..what? Was he waiting for me to run away? What was I supposed to do—scream for the Police? I couldn’t comprehend what he was telling me. He was only Luka. He was just a man, a man I knew, a man I even kissed. He couldn’t be a dragon. How could a dragon fit into that body?
“I know it’s hard to believe right now.” He held up his hands and moved to one side. The movement soothed my brain. It convinced me everything was normal. “The Lynches attacked those horsemen, and those men at the campground were Lynches, too.”
I struggled to get my voice working. “Are you sure? I know you recognized those guys at the campground, but how do you know the Lynches attacked the horsemen? Maybe you made a mistake.”
He gave a horrible chuckle. “Oh, believe you me, I saw it all with my own eyes. I was right there on the spot for the whole thing. That’s how I got that burn on my chest—fighting the Lynches.”
I swallowed hard. “Okay. Tell me how it happened.”
“The Lynches always went after the Kellys in the past, so when you told me dragons killed those men at Granite Gorge the week before, I knew the Lynches must be trying for the Hodges this time. The Hodges are peaceful. They never threaten humans moving through the Gorge. It had to be the Lynches.”
He paused, but when I didn’t say anything, he went on. “Only a blithering idiot would come up with a plan like that because the Hodges defend their own. Nobody messes with them—I mean nobody—so I figured the Lynches must be relying on the element of surprise. I reckoned they planned to hit the Hodges before the Clan found out they were nearby. I knew we didn’t have any time to waste, so I told Jackson, and we rolled out to the Gorge and warned his Clan. They tumbled out the way I knew they would, and they dealt with the situation.”
“Dealt with it?” I repeated. “You mean they killed them all?”
“You’re damn right we killed them. We attacked them at Parrot’s Perch. You saw the remains of the fight up there.”
I couldn’t force myself to blink staring at him. Who was this man? “You did that? You killed those…. those people?”
He came to a stop in front of me and pushed his battered visage into my view. “Take a good look at my face, Louise. This is what they do to people. Those men you saw at the campground tried to kill me. They would have succeeded if Jackson hadn’t found me when he did. They came there hunting for me in revenge for what I did at Parrot’s Perch. It’s an endless cycle of revenge and killing, and it will never stop. If we didn’t kill those dragons at Parrot’s Perch, they would have attacked the Hodges and murdered hundreds of women and children. There are no bystanders in this war, Louise. You wanted to know the truth, and there it is. Every one of us is fighting for survival. I was lucky to get away with my life today.”
I let the whole unbelievable tale rummage in my brain for a few minutes. It took some doing to sink in. Luka—a dragon? The Kelly Clan—I could believe it about them. Now that I put all the puzzle pieces together, it all made sense. It had to. Why else would these stories revolve around Smokey Ridge?
Luka, though—he couldn’t be. It didn’t make any sense. Somewhere deep down in the bottom of my being, I knew it was true, even when I didn’t want to accept it. That first night I met him in the bar, I recognized something different about him. A hidden layer of mysterious energy permeated everything he did, every cell of his body, and radiated through every glance and every slant of his mouth.
Jackson possessed the same curious trait. I didn’
t understand it at the time, but anyone with an eye could see it. Something serpentine, something otherworldly, held them apart from the rest of humanity. Larry knew it. God only knew how many other people in this part of the world knew it, but it was always there nonetheless.
Now I saw it again beneath his puffy, ugly skin for all the world to see. A dragon coiled and snaked just below the surface. No, that wasn’t right. The skin didn’t conceal the dragon—on the contrary. The skin created an illusion, a trick of the light. He was always a dragon and nothing more. The outer covering, the image of the man—that was just a ruse the human world used to fool themselves. They didn’t want to believe in the dragons, so they invented this camouflage to make it easier for themselves.
Now that I saw it, I couldn’t unsee it. The artifice fell away the way it did at Parrot’s Perch,. I could never look at Luka the same way again.
For some reason, the realization didn’t frighten me. It didn’t even shock me. I knew all along. It made sense. I wanted to know him, and now I did. I knew him better than some people in this town who had known him all his life.
At that moment, a shaft of sunlight angled into the alley and lit up the brick wall behind Luka’s head. I glanced toward it and spotted the jagged outline of Smokey Ridge angling its peak into the sky. The sun slipped behind it toward the west.
It no longer breathed menace and foreboding into my soul. It no longer needed to defend its secret against me. Why? I still had my story. I still held all the pictures and all the evidence and all the details on my phone and in my notebook. What stopped me from publishing it and becoming the next greatest media sensation?
“Please, Louise,” Luka murmured. “Please say something.”
My gaze slid to his face, his poor, tattered face. I took a deep breath. “Thank you.”
He started up. “What for?”
“For protecting me today. Thank you for getting me out of there before the whole thing went down. You could have tried to get away yourself, but you didn’t. You stayed behind to make sure I got clear. Thank you. You did this…..” I raised my hand to touch his cheek, but I stopped myself before I made contact. I couldn’t cause him any more pain. “You did this for me.”