The Artistry of Love

by C. J. Scarlett

  She sprang up. That was a mistake. The headache doubled and her stomach turned over on itself.

  “Whoa there, killer,” said a voice she knew but didn’t have the wherewithal to place. The owner placed her hands on her shoulders and suddenly, she was hit with a familiar smell. Lana. “Calm down there a bit.”

  “You drugged me,” Alessia slurred out, falling back into Lana’s arms.

  “Oh, don’t be so dramatic,” she said back, holding tight to Alessia’s shoulders and helping to steady her. Lana came around to kneel in front of Alessia, giving her full view of the woman who seemed a bit disheveled, a few bruises forming here and there, but for the most part fine. “You just breathed in some night-night gas.”

  “Said every kidnapper ever.”

  “Hush.”

  Alessia took in her surroundings. They were, in fact, on grass. They were out in some kind of wild. She’d hoped she’d wake in her apartment and find herself in the comfort of her own bed to the smell of coffee that had been magically set to brew. But instead, she was out in God knew where. Were they even still in California? Had she somehow been ferried away to some unknown part of the world? Was she ever going to see her friends or family again?

  Speaking of them…

  “Where is everyone?” Alessia asked, managing to shake off Lana’s guiding hands and sit of her own power.

  Lana’s face went grim and Alessia knew she wouldn’t like whatever was about to come out of the woman’s mouth. “This is the rendezvous point. My partners, Jack and Asher, have your boys. They’re meant to meet us here.”

  “‘Meant to’?”

  “Well obviously, they’re not here yet.”

  “And does that worry you?”

  “It’s not late enough for it to worry me.”

  Alessia looked around. She wanted to ask exactly how long ago they were supposed to have met up, but she decided it was best not to know exactly how late their companions were. Instead, she looked around. They were in a forested area and Lana had started a small fire. The familiar chill that came with California nights seeped into Alessia’s skin now that she was coming to completely. She shivered, slightly.

  “Don’t be a baby,” Lana said.

  “Easy for you to say when you are your own furnace,” Alessia snapped back.

  She had cultivated an odd sort of friendship with Lana but now she found herself a little bit more irritated with the woman in every conversation they had. Her snark never seemed to disappear and she dealt only in sarcasm. They were in the middle of nowhere, on the run from a shifter cabal and Lana made jokes about how their partners and fellow escapees were somehow nowhere to be found.

  “Do we have food at least?” Alessia asked, her stomach suddenly kicking up in the sounds of growls.

  “Jack and Asher are bringing it,” she said.

  “Of course they are.”

  “I could have easily left you back there to be James’ scapegoat for the escape,” Lana said, for once sounding truly irritated. “I almost did.”

  “Is that why it took so long?” Alessia snapped.

  Lana glared at her before getting up in a huff and walking a few feet away. Alessia wouldn’t let her be the angry one here. She played her like a fiddle, forced her around the dungeon base and Alessia had played her games. She just admitted to nearly leaving her behind and then drugging her, and was still keeping secrets. She wasn’t the one who needed to be storming off to take walks to blow off steam.

  She let Lana walk away and stared at the fire. She shuffled closer to it, wondering if Lana had breathed it into life. She had yet to truly see any of the shifters in action. She’d been witness to Drake’s transformation and flight as a dragon after they had sex. But the things they said dragons could do, breathe fire, have extreme strength. She had yet to see that.

  Not that shifters were there to be her entertainment or personal zoo.

  She shifted closer to the fire and stared at it, trying to find hints that it was somehow different from an ordinary fire, trying to find the signature that revealed it was Lana’s. There was nothing different about it. It burned at the wood all the same and put off waves of heat that Alessia just wanted to roll herself up in and sleep.

  But she had to stay awake. Erik and Drake and even Diego were out there somewhere. She’d feel a lot better about the whole situation if she could somehow know they were okay. Lana seemed so nonchalant and unconcerned. Even if she didn’t care for her partners in the breakout, they were responsible for the safety of people that Alessia greatly cared about.

  So she sat there, cold and shivering in the nighttime, glaring into the mirror of the fire in front of her while Lana stewed. The whole breakout from prison plan was less exciting than she thought. It was a lot more sitting and waiting than she expected and, when her adrenaline ran all over the place, it didn’t exactly make her feel any better.

  **

  Alessia hadn’t managed to fall asleep at all, which meant she was forced to endure the grueling hours of sitting and waiting for someone, or anyone to make their presence known and she wouldn’t feel so alone with nothing but Lana there and her foul mood. It made the waiting that much worse when she could feel the minutes into hours tick by.

  “I can hear you thinking,” Lana said.

  “At least one of us is.”

  “You certainly know how to be grateful.”

  “Grateful that you lied and drugged me and almost left me for dead?”

  “Princess, you don’t even know what ‘dead’ means to James if I hadn’t risked my ass to get you out of there,” she said. “You’d wish you were mangled in a car accident by the time he was done with you.”

  Alessia stayed quiet with her lips forced out into a pout. It seemed all she was lately was talked down to, whether it was from Drake or Lana or even the few times Erik decided to tell her his opinions. She’d sat around in her cell and waited to be rescued only to find she very nearly wasn’t rescued at all and left as a punching bag for her capture to occupy himself with. She was completely at the mercy of people around her.

  And here she was again, sitting and waiting for someone to tell her what to do or give her some sort of orders.

  Well fuck that.

  “Where are you going?” Lana asked when she watched, with careful eyes, as Alessia stood up.

  “To have a look around.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I’m sick of waiting around. Maybe I can meet them halfway.”

  “Do you know which direction they’re coming from? Do you know how to find your way back? Do you even know where you are?”

  But Alessia walked away, not interested in the frustrating things that Lana had to say. She could manage a bit of a hike in the woods without someone criticizing that as well. As Alessia moved closer to the edge of the forest, she could hear Lana calling after her, teasing her and calling her all sorts of names but she ignored her. She’d rather be attacked in the woods at this point than suffer having to watch Lana’s face do anymore smirks and sneers.

  Chapter 10

  They must be somewhere farther north because there was very little sign of the desert of southern California. Any dry, desert brush had been replaced with trees and things far too green to exist in the heat and sweltering dryness of the desert. There was a coolness here unlike the nights spent at school. She realized she must be very far from home. Especially when she looked up and saw the plethora of stars in the sky.

  There were points of light in every direction and some even formed together to create what seemed to be rivers in the darkness above. They were light, frothing places that had mists of stars and galaxies and all sorts of other things. Even if she was far from home and a little too scared out of her mind, this was gorgeous and beautiful and more than a little bit worth the stress and struggles that had brought her there.

  The trees themselves seemed to whisper in the breeze all around her and the sounds of nighttime life hiding in the forest was a calm call. None of i
t was familiar like the things in her dorm or even that cell she’d called home over the past few weeks. But the newness here didn’t bother her. In fact, it excited her. She wanted to see more of this world, as if being kept in the dark for so long now had made her crave things that got to touch the light without condition. No one would ever imprison a tree.

  She walked a bit through the forested area, touching the bark and wondering why she’d never bothered to travel this far before. Who would have thought that all it would take was a chance encounter with the wrong people and a little bit of wrongful imprisonment would lead to some self-realizations?

  It was around the time that she was thinking she really needed to find out if anyone had a cell phone she could use to call her mother that a sound in the woods, distinctly not part of the quiet and calm sounds of the night, caught her attention.

  It was the snap of a twig, the cliché sounds from slasher movies and thrillers that alerted someone that something was wrong. She paused. She stiffened like the proverbial deer caught in headlights. She didn’t dare even turn to look in the direction of the sound for fear of what it would mean. She kept still for follow up sounds, waiting to hear if anything even more threatening would follow.

  So perhaps a nighttime hike in woods that she had never been to before wasn’t exactly the smartest choice she ever made. But she could get herself out of this situation. This wasn’t like the jail cell and waiting for help to break her out. She could actually do something about this. She was in a bit more control of her surroundings than she was before. She could do something with this.

  More sounds. She strained her eyes in the darkness to try to see who or what her intruder was. She had no idea if they’d been followed out of the base because Lana had failed to give her any details and kept her completely in the dark, literally, the entire time afterwards.

  And then more sounds. They were getting faster, closer together, louder. Someone ran towards her. She turned into the direction that the sounds came from, fists clenching at her side, ready to take on whatever it was.

  It was something very, very familiar. It was Erik.

  He slammed into her at full force, knocking her over because she still managed to keep herself as incredibly still as possible. Her legs seemed ramrod straight and her feet cemented into the ground. Until he hit her hard and knocked her to the ground with such force she felt all the air push out of her lungs. The empty vacuum left behind was uncomfortable. Then her still throbbing head smacked into the ground, rattling the teeth in her mouth.

  She tasted blood. She’d bitten her cheek. She groaned.

  “Alessia?” Erik coughed out. “Holy shit. They fucking—are you okay? What happened?”

  “Take a breath,” Alessia said with a struggle, laughing internally at the obvious irony of that as she, herself, struggled to get a breath out without wheezing and pain. “Just, calm down for a second.”

  “Did they fly you here too?”

  “Fly?”

  “Do you even know where the hell we are?”

  Well, at least she wasn’t the most uninformed person anymore. Erik seemed wild eyed and terrified as he turned around violently and quickly, trying to find some grounding around him. Alessia kept her hands on him, trying to anchor him to something before his brain exploded or he took off in another dead sprint.

  “I don’t know,” she said, honestly. “But Lana is with me. Is anyone else with you?”

  “Drake—he—holy crap.”

  “What?” She was suddenly very worried. Was he alive? Was he hurt? Was he somewhere far away?

  “Big, dragon,” Erik managed to huff out, still trying to regain his breath. “We—fuck.”

  Alessia put both her hands on Erik’s shoulders and squeezed until it probably hurt but she didn’t care. She needed him to concentrate. She squeezed until he looked her in the eyes and nodded, taking a breath and slowly blinking. She felt some of the tension inside him release but she didn’t loosen her grip.

  “We ran into some trouble on the way out,” Erik said. “I don’t know who is who but at least one of Lana’s guys was a double agent or some Benedict Arnold crap because he totally turned on us as soon as we got outside.”

  Alessia swallowed thickly and nodded. She wondered if Lana knew. Maybe that slight complication was the reason she very nearly left Alessia behind.

  “Drake got the brunt of it—”

  “Brunt of what?”

  He looked grim. Alessia felt her insides clench. She nodded but felt the color drain right out of her. That was enough for now and she pulled Erik along back towards the camp. Lana was still there, glaring into the fire and looked up with mild interest to see Alessia toting a shaking, worried version of Erik.

  “Well, there’s one,” she said lazily and sat back to stare at the fire while tossing an acorn into it and waiting to hear it pop as it heated up and then exploded from the force.

  Alessia glared as she set Erik down in a seat by the fire and moved to stand over Lana who lazily blinked and looked up at her with a smirk and mild interest.

  “One of your goons betrayed us,” Alessia said.

  “First of all, there is no ‘us,’” Lana said, sitting up and resting her elbows on her knees. “You’re here as a guest, not part of the crew. Second of all, I don’t have goons. I have friends. And some just happen to be less loyal than others.”

  “So you knew,” Alessia said, crossing her arms.

  “By the time I figured it out, there wasn’t much I could do about it, could I?” Lana shrugged. “I was in the same boat as everyone else but please, by all means, keep judging me, lady.”

  Alessia shook her head and walked away. She spent the rest of the night glaring into the dark and huffing loud enough to get Lana to roll her eyes when she heard it.

  Chapter 11

  Drake showed up in the morning and he was hurt. He woke them as he stumbled into their camp. Lana yelled at Erik who was meant to be the awake one on the lookout, but had fallen asleep from exhaustion that Alessia really couldn’t blame him.

  Drake was covered in bruises and dried blood. The most prominent spot of wound came from a spot of deep red in his back where something had clearly inflicted quite the wound against him. He stumbled over the small batch of firewood they’d set up to keep the flames going into the night—though Lana insisted it was dangerous, Erik argued with her that they were nons and couldn’t exactly form their own warmth.

  “Drake,” Alessia sighed out and rushed to him while Erik and Lana were both on guard at the sounds of being disturbed.

  “Alessia,” he breathed out and it might have been the first time she heard her name falling from his lips.

  She crashed into him, feeling bad for the sounds of pain he made, but that didn’t stop her from holding him incredibly tight and not wanting to let go. He smelled of smoke and blood and sweat and dirt and several other things but she didn’t care because each smell meant that he was alive and well, and in her arms. He slumped forward, putting as much as she could take onto her and she held fast.

  “Are you okay?” she whispered into his ear, not knowing what else to ask.

  He’d always seemed like the strong one, the silent professor with the constantly crossed arms and the loud, disapproving sighs. Now he was a crumbled mess in her arms and she was the only thing keeping him on his two feet.

  “I’ve been better,” he laughed and then she felt him wince when he immediately regretted it.

  She led him over to the spot she’d used to sleep. It wasn’t comfortable and it wasn’t what he needed, but it was all she had to offer him at the moment. He gently lowered himself to the ground and gave her a grateful, if very tight, smile. She didn’t move away as soon as his back gently hit the ground. She hovered over him, pushing some wayward hair from his forehead. He’d always kept his hair rather short but their time in the cell had caused it to grow almost into his eyes.

  “You need a haircut,” she giggled, just a bit.

  “A
re you offering?”

  She smiled and Lana scoffed. “Really? Right now? Where are the others, Tekkin?” Lana asked, coming over with a lot more force and a lot less kindness.

  “We were separated,” he said, his somewhat good mood disappearing quickly.

  “I can vouch for that,” Erik said, coming over. “We got outside, we got betrayed, and then we basically scattered.”

  “Just what I like, having no fucking clue what’s going on,” Lana said, stalking off to pace angrily somewhere else while Alessia turned all her attention back to Drake.

  “Where are you hurt? What can I do?” she asked and his face turned unfortunately serious.

  “We don’t really have the tools to deal with the help I need,” he said in a grave voice and she knew he was giving into the worst-case scenario. She rolled her eyes. He was a drama queen sometimes. “I mean it. The bullet is still lodged in my back.”

  Okay, that would be a bit of an issue for her. She cringed, without meaning to. He sat up and pulled his shirt off without preamble at all and Alessia completely forgot that they weren’t alone in this little campground as she gawked openly at the ripple of muscles that had been hiding under his shirt. She was no stranger to his bare skin, but it had been so long since she’d seen it and somehow, the additions of blood and sweat made it that much more tantalizing to stare at.

  So now she was caught in a strange state of being attracted to an injured man, one from whom she needed to pull a lodged bullet. She didn’t understand how this was some kind of turn on; maybe it was the manliness of being shot? She didn’t know and she wanted to banish those feelings because she felt more than a little bit gross over the situation.

  “Okay,” she said. “So… how do we do this?”

  “You sure you want to get involved here, princess?” Lana asked. “It’s gritty stuff.”