by Amelia Jade
Shaking her head she stood, intending to be polite and escort him to the door, even as her skin tingled from the imaginary prickle of his black stubble. It was such a real feeling, so strong. He was so close, too. All she had to do was reach out and grab him, show him she was interested, and he would do the rest. She knew he would.
But she couldn’t, and she didn’t. Reaching the door a half-step ahead of him, she reached out to grab the knob at the same moment he did. Their hands brushed against each other, and the moment their skin made contact, she jumped. A burst of electricity shot up her fingers, shaking her arm and making all the fine hairs from her legs to her head stand on end. A pleasing tingle followed afterward, rushing through her blood and setting it aflame.
Move your hand.
Move. Your. Hand.
MOVE YOUR DAMN HAND RIGHT NOW.
Her brain was screaming at her, but instead of obeying, she felt her head slowly swiveling until she could look Joel in the eyes—those glacier-blue eyes with their perfect mix of unexpected warmth and laughing intelligence. They dragged her in, a swirling pattern that threatened to pull her below the surface into the icy waters below.
Yet even as she knew that was impossible, heat began to blossom from the bond between them. It was slow at first, no more than touching pavement that had been warmed by the sun all day, but was now giving off heat in the evening. But it increased steadily, and all at once, it reached critical mass. The warmth seemed to flow up her arm, leaping and skipping as it went. She continued to stare into his eyes as it hit her shoulder, where it spread its tendrils far and wide, digging them deep into every corner of her body. It coiled itself around her soul before a blossoming of light within her sent it out explosively, a cloud of heat enveloping her entirely.
All from the touch of his hand.
“What—” she tried to say, but the words wouldn’t form.
Joel stepped closer to her, keeping his hand on top of hers.
“Courtenay,” he breathed, his voice deep and yet soft at the same time.
She knew what was about to happen. Was she going to let it? He wanted to kiss her, and she was thoroughly interested in the idea.
Instead of speaking, she decided to give her answer by kissing him. Getting bolder, she moved her hands to cup his face and pull him toward her.
The instant they stopped touching, the heat evaporated and she snapped back to reality. It was so instantaneous she couldn’t help but blink in surprise, unaware that so much of the moment had been because they were touching.
Holy shit! You were just about to kiss him. At work!
Courtenay was a professional, and she hated the idea that simply by touching her, Joel had been able to overwhelm her rules.
Awkwardly she dropped her hands to her sides, slowly straightening her head, so that it was no longer tilted. Feeling like a fool she shoved her hands in her pockets and took a step back.
“So, uhh,” she stammered, unsure of what to say.
Joel just stood there, as if he couldn’t believe that it had stopped so quickly. But when he spoke, his words were strong.
“I’m not sure what you’re feeling,” he said, slowly at first, but picking up confidence as he went. “But I would like to see you again.”
She hesitated.
“Perhaps outside of work hours?” he suggested, before she could respond.
Courtenay froze.
What should she say?
Chapter Two
Joel
“Tell me again why we’re out creeping around like this?”
Corey had dragged him out that night, telling him he needed his help. It was an odd request from Corey, but he had changed a lot over the past few weeks, and Joel was willing to give him the benefit of the doubt.
“Because Ferro needs our help.”
That was another change about Corey. The notoriously reclusive shifter hadn’t made a whole lot of attempts to integrate with the Jade Crew. He had been the first to respect Garrett as the Alpha, but none of them had ever felt like he truly became one of them. He had always been unwilling to talk about where he came from. Now, however, he was like an open book, and also insistent on helping out where he could.
Which brought the two of them to the muddy forest outside of town, where they crept along. Although creeping was probably a bad word to use when describing the movement of a two-ton bear through the unwieldy landscape. The fact that there were two of them meant they weren’t exactly being as stealthy as they might have hoped.
Still, the sounds of the storm raging overhead managed to cover most of their mistakes.
“Ferro, right,” he muttered, one of his paws slipping out from under him for the umpteenth time since they began their trek.
Ferro was a dragon shifter, and a nominal friend of the Jade Crew. He owned and operated the Tongue & Flame, one of the bars in town. It also happened to be the watering hole of the Jade Crew, and their close allies the Emerald Crew.
The week before, Ferro had passed a note to Corey. The message had been cryptic, but they eventually discovered that someone was controlling Ferro’s actions, and that they had less than two weeks to prepare before whatever was going in Genesis Valley hit critical mass.
“Are we sure that what’s going on with Ferro is related to what’s going on elsewhere?” he asked Corey. There were long pauses between their questions and answers, because they had to shift back and forth between their bear and human forms to ask such complicated questions. It was a tiring process, and they didn’t want to arrive at their destination completely exhausted.
So they only answered when they had to shift to get around or over certain barriers that would have been far more work as a bear.
It was another five minutes before Corey responded.
“Yes. It practically has to be. Ferro would have gotten involved on our side long ago if he was able to. Whoever is orchestrating these attacks is holding his strings so that he stays on the sidelines. We know they have a dragon of their own, and Ferro is the only one we know. If he’s forced to stay neutral, we’re screwed.”
Joel’s massive bear moved up and down in the best approximation of a human nod that it could. That made sense. Over the past seven or eight months, Genesis Valley—and in particular the shifters who mined its mountains—had come under various forms of attack. Joel and the rest of the Jade Crew had been right in the thick of it from the beginning, and were now inexorably wound up in the conflict.
The goal of their unknown enemy wasn’t entirely clear, but there seemed to be several different prongs of attack. The miners had come under attack, with one crew after another either succumbing to the temptations their enemies offered or being eliminated by the Jade and Emerald Crews and several of their other allies. The entire mining operation had been decimated.
Unfortunately, that left the Valley prime for invasion, devoid of many of its prime defenders. That was when they had noticed a shift in the enemy’s tactics. Now they were after the stones that they mined in the mountains. The bears didn’t dig for gold and silver, like most miners. They were after something far more precious.
Dragon Stones.
Each one contained the essence of a dragon, dead for many millennia. Genesis Valley, as its name implied, was the birthplace of the dragon shifter race as far as anyone could tell. They had pulled thousands of stones out of the mountains over the years. Some of them had life breathed back into them, something that could only be done by the flame of a mature dragon shifter.
As Joel had been finding out lately, with humankind expanding rapidly in population, the dragons had begun to limit their numbers. Each dragon controlled large swaths of territory, and there were increasingly more incidents between the two species as space in the world declined. So many of the Stones they mined had been hidden away by the Dragon Council in an effort to keep them secure, if necessary, but unavailable to any dragons who had differing views on how humans and dragons should coexist.
Joel frowned internally
as he lumbered his bear up another hill, his paws flinging mud everywhere as they scrambled for traction. He eventually made it to the top, but it was a struggle the entire way. It didn’t help that he was distracted, thinking about the other dragon problem they had recently.
The Dragon Council had been silent for months, unresponsive to any communications from the Kedyn twins, the gryphon shifters who owned the Mining Consortium and the entire Valley.
That, in Joel’s opinion, was a very, very bad sign. That was one reason why they were sneaking through the forest. It was somewhere around two or three in the morning, and besides the violent streaks of lightning that sometimes lit the sky, it was pitch black out.
A noise from his left drew his attention. He looked over and saw Corey gesturing ahead of them. Following his gaze, Joel saw that they were nearing the edge of the trees. There, in the clearing ahead of them, was the Tongue & Flame, Ferro’s bar. They were going to break in.
Corey believed that they would find some information about what was going on in there. Perhaps it was somewhere in the back rooms, where only Ferro went.
Every instinct in his body screamed that this was a terrible idea. He would so much rather be visiting with Courtenay, getting to know her better. Somewhere dry, and doing something that didn’t involve pissing off one of the oldest dragon shifters there was. Ferro wasn’t one of the original twelve, the first recorded dragon shifters. But he was the son of one. Corey had been doing research on the dragon shifters lately, and they had confirmed that he was an ancient dragon, and somewhere over eight thousand years old.
For some unknown reason, Joel just wasn’t interested in pissing him off.
“Okay, let’s go,” came the whispered voice off to his side.
Corey, it would seem, had decided they would go as humans from there on out. With a mental shrug, he dismissed his bear, the change occurring in as much time as an eyeblink.
The two of them picked their way to the edge of the forest, very glad once the ground became a little firmer underfoot, even if it was still muddy as all hell. It had been raining nonstop for two days, and the warmer temperatures meant that even though it was still March, the snow had melted away, leaving everything a disaster.
“So, the front door?” he asked his partner in crime as they approached.
“No, the back door,” Corey said, pointing around the left side of the building.
They reached the door. Out of curiosity, Joel reached out and tugged on it. It was locked.
“What?” he said as Corey gave him a look.
The other shifter just snorted and looked at the door.
“I feel kind of bad,” Corey said.
“For what?”
“This,” he replied, and punched the door hard, right where the locking mechanism was. The metal crunched under the full force of his shifter strength, but didn’t give way. Another two blows, however, and they yanked the lock out and pulled the door open.
Joel pulled out a plastic sheet and spread it out on the floor inside. He stepped in, and quickly divested himself of the wetsuit he was wearing. Corey followed quickly, and the two of them, now clad in nothing but swim trunks, crept inside. It was annoying, but they were covered in mud and they couldn’t just go clomping around inside. Not without leaving all sorts of tracks. They already had to hide their scent; that was going to be difficult enough. Cleaning up after themselves would just be an even bigger nuisance.
“Okay, which way?” he asked.
“Let’s try over here,” Corey suggested. They pulled open the door, revealing what looked to be Ferro’s office.
The rectangular room spread out to their left and right. Straight ahead of them, against the wall, was a big wooden desk. It appeared to be fashioned out of the same mahogany wood as the bar top itself was. Joel made a beeline for that. It was mostly covered in ledgers, loose leaf paper, and other binders that they assumed Ferro used to track his business.
There was a shelf mounted to the wall, perhaps a foot or so above the desk. It was covered in pictures.
“Looks like he’s a bit more sentimental than we thought,” he said softly, drawing Corey’s attention.
There were several pictures of Ferro as the bar was being built. Judging by the equipment being used in it, they realized that the bar was a lot older than Ferro let on.
“It must have been built when LMC moved into the area over two hundred years ago!” he exclaimed as they pointed excitedly at the pictures.
“Who’s this?” Corey asked, pointing at the picture on the far right of the shelf.
It was of Ferro, dressed in his usual gray T-shirt and blue jeans, with a girl. She was clearly much younger than he was. In fact, it appeared that she would be roughly the same age as the shifters. It was of her holding a high-school diploma, and it was dated the year 2000.
“Daughter?” Joel theorized. “I didn’t realize Ferro had any family.
“Me neither,” Corey agreed. “I figured if he did, they were all old like him.”
Joel nodded. “No glaring threatening letters or anything here,” he said after another few minutes of searching the desk.
“Yeah, nothing anywhere else in here either,” Corey said, having searched the rest of the room.
They explored the rest of the back room, but couldn’t find a thing that seemed out of place or that might lead them to what was going on with Ferro.
“We should go,” Joel said after a fruitless hour of searching.
“Yeah,” Corey agreed glumly, taking a packet of small balls from his pocket. He ripped it open and dropped half of them into Joel’s hand.
“I hate this part,” he said with a grimace, before closing his fingers around the balls and squeezing until they mashed together. He moved back into the office they had entered and began waving his hand around.
His nose began to twitch.
“Yuck,” he said again as the scent hit him.
Shifters had long ago learned how to disguise their scents. They took a mix of rather unpleasant liquids from various animals and mixed them together, until it created an epic stench that clung to everything, including the various particles of their own bodies. It faded after a few days and would take the scent of the two shifters with it.
Thankfully it also washed off easily. In the meantime, however, the two of them would stink to high hell.
The two shifters ensured they got full coverage. It wouldn’t prevent Ferro from knowing someone had been there, but the broken door ensured he would know that. It just meant he would have no idea who it had been, which would hopefully work in their benefit. At least that had been the idea when they still thought they would find something that would allow them to help Ferro out.
“Hey, something just occurred to me,” Corey said as they shut the door as securely as they could.
“What’s that?” Joel responded, keeping a watchful eye around them as Corey worked on the broken latch.
“Where do you think Ferro lives? I’ve never seen him go anywhere before.”
Joel thought about it for a moment. A small smile played across his face. “In a cave in the mountains filled with gold of course.”
Corey laughed softly before standing up. “Okay, that’ll hold as best we can. Let’s go.”
They waved their scent cover-up around the door a bit more, especially around the punched-in latch, and then headed for the forest. The continuing downpour would cover their tracks in a matter of minutes, but they still waited until they were deep into the trees to let their bears out. Human footprints were far easier to wash away than those of a bear, even with the large size and weight of shifters.
***
“All I want is a steak and my bed,” Joel complained as they finally emerged from the woods.
“Now that does sound wonderful indeed,” Corey said.
The two of them sniffed, knowing that they were not going to get anything but leftovers, and that they were also going to be sadly short on sleep.
Before the
m lay Ridgeback Lodge. Although bathed in shadow, it was still easy to identify. The Jade Crew, known in formal occasions as the Ridgebacks, had taken over the rundown motel when they had first been formed. Several months of renovations had been needed on the old place, but they had worked hard to make it their own.
The length of the building ran parallel to the road, with the right-hand side jutting forward at a right angle to form a very distinct “L” shape. The single story was augmented by a beautiful wooden deck that ran the entire front of the building, providing a pleasant walkout for the occupants. The first eight feet of it were covered in awning, but there was plenty more room to set out chairs for relaxation under the warm summer sky.
“Shit,” Joel said, looking around them. The sky was beginning to brighten.
“Well, maybe we should be nice and just get breakfast going for the others instead?” Corey suggested.
“Maybe we should shower first,” Joel said, looking over at his friend.
They were both covered practically head to toe in mud. It was in their hair, under their fingernails, and Joel could even feel some caked in his ear.
“Smart idea,” Corey said.
The pair of them reconvened a few minutes later, freshly washed and dressed. They proceeded into the common room, where the kitchen was housed. Shifters burned a lot of calories, and thus they needed to eat a lot. The order of the morning was pancakes and—shudder—fruit, fresh bacon, hash browns and a lot of eggs.
“You two are up early,” Garrett commented, the Alpha stepping into the kitchen as the snapping of bacon in the pan caught his attention.
“Got back too late,” Joel told him. “Weather made the going a lot tougher than expected.”
The Alpha of the Jade Crew looked back and forth at both of them. “Yeah, you do look like shit.”
“Thanks, boss,” Joel muttered. “You get the burnt pancakes.”