by Karin Shah
Sofia had taken the potion. He’d swallowed his before he’d left his trailer. The pounding of his heart was almost deafening. Time to make his own luck.
Someone switched on some music. A voice yelled, “Let’s party!” There were several whoops and a few people found their way to the makeshift dance floor between the tables, which had been pulled to the sides for the occasion.
His mouth suddenly dry, Roan forced down his last bit of cake without tasting it.
The night sky was a vast, twinkling canopy of stars. The fairy lights cast a golden sheen on all and sundry, softening sharp edges and mellowing colors, and, though the night held a brisk edge, there was hardly any wind.
His heart thrummed like a hummingbird’s wings. The setting was perfect. Could he find the balls to dance with her? Kiss her? His stomach twisted.
Sofia dumped her empty plate and smiled at him, taking the question from the theoretical to the literal. “I love this song! Come on!”
Chapter 23
Sofia stepped toward the shifting clumps of people filling the dance floor, her feet already finding the rhythm, but her pulse a rapid drum solo in her ears. Would he follow?
His face appeared as stiff as a carved wooden mask in the seconds following her invitation, and her stomach took a swing worthy of a scrambler, then a smile creased his eyes and he stepped toward her.
The tiny lights surrounding the dance floor seemed to brighten as he came near, his scent closing around her like a cloak. Her head swam a bit. How could a simple thing like smell make her feel both tipsy and safe?
She spun around to the beat, and he started to move his feet.
If she hadn’t feared he’d run off if she laughed, she would have chuckled at the uneasiness on his face. Though, his scales made him seem like some mix of human and reptile, she somehow got the image of a large, battered tomcat dropped in a bathtub. Her hand reached out as if on remote control and took his.
His hand felt perfect in hers, but the touch came with an electric tingle that settled low in her abdomen. Her body came to life. Her skin becoming achingly sensitive. Heat pooled in her breasts and core.
She buried a swallow in a smile, masking how bowled over she felt.
A simple handhold shouldn’t be so stirring.
She couldn’t remember a single man in the past who’d moved her so deeply. Not her first from college who’d swept her into his bed. Or even the guy she’d told Lu and Thalia about earlier, and he’d been model handsome, charming, and laser-focused on her until he’d revealed his true motives.
None of her past sexual encounters rocked her as thoroughly, as a simple touch from Roan.
He stared at their linked hands.
Whoops. She’d simply taken his hand, just assuming the gesture was welcome and as it dawned on her it might not be, she almost stopped dancing. Still, she didn’t drop his hand.
His long fingers curled more tightly around hers in a tiny squeeze. A wave of relief and pleasure washed over her.
His hand felt so right in hers.
A strange voice purred in her mental ears. Mate.
Mate? What was this? National Geographic? What made her think of that label? Why not partner? Or lover?
That word jacked up her pounding heart.
The song switched to another hit. The rhythm and melody took her over, and she pushed away more reflection. Her feet and hips found the beat.
Forget weird thoughts. They were here to have fun.
She swung his hand and tugged him a step closer, coaxing him into the dance. Something told her Roan hadn’t had much fun in his life, and she ached to change that.
She sang the words to him, letting their bodies graze as they moved. The lights must have had some magic because his face no longer seemed the tiniest bit alien, he was just a man, his pupils seemed to change from oval to round. She blinked to clear her vision, but they remained circular.
The song changed. A slow, sweet ballad began to the groans of the other dancers and several drifted away. Roan took a deep breath, his large chest rising with the heft of it. His other hand found hers and his arms slid around her, circling her waist.
She gasped as he danced closer, tangling their bodies. He was much more than a foot and a half taller than her, so they shouldn’t have fit together, but his thighs cradled her hips. She released his hands and wrapped her arms around his neck, gazing up into his face, her breasts meeting the hard wall of his torso.
He looked away, and she thought maybe there was a hint of pink in the bronze scales carpeting his high cheekbones.
The idea she might have made him blush, lit a flame in her chest.
She had no idea how long they danced like that, gazes alternately locking and then skating away only to lock again. Her hands drifting to sample his nape, his tasting her waist, her hips.
The songs sped up and slowed down again several times. People came and went around them, but still they continued to sway together in small circles around the space.
While another ballad played, something made Sofia glance around. They were alone.
She blinked, as if awakening from a trance. The air had cooled. Someone had cleared away the snacks. The garbage can was full. A pile of bottles to be recycled filled a box. How had she missed the party breaking up?
The idea of leaving Roan and going to her RV by herself burrowed a hollow in her chest.
She met his green gaze again, timidly, almost afraid she would get ensnared again. “Looks like everybody’s gone to bed.”
His eyes seemed to shine in the light. “The most important person is still here.”
His words filled her heart with warmth, but his behavior when they’d first met still stung. “Really? Sometimes I thought you didn’t even like me.”
“Me, not like you? Couldn’t happen.” He ducked his head and studied their feet, which had stopped shuffling. They couldn’t pretend to be dancing anymore. They simply stood there, holding each other. “I just, well, maybe I have a tendency to push people away before they can reject me.”
“Maybe?” She tilted her head.
“Definitely,” he corrected.
He fell silent for a minute. Normally, that would have prompted her to fill the silence, but such things didn’t seem necessary with Roan. She waited while he seemed to struggle with something.
Finally, his forked tongue came out to dampen his lips. “Can I kiss you?”
The question broke over her like the first sunrise after a long Arctic winter. It took her a minute to process the request, and he stiffened a little, starting to tug away.
She tightened her arms around him. “Wait!” She skimmed her gaze over his broad shoulders and back up to his face. “I would love that.”
Her answer seemed to stun him. He swallowed, the movement visible in his throat. He wet his lips again and she lurched onto her tiptoes, shutting her eyes and finding his lips with hers.
Despite the rigid planes of his face, his mouth was both soft and firm. She’d been kissed before, she knew she had, but this was so much more than those banal touching of lips. Those kisses had been in black and white and this was pure, vivid color.
The press of his lips tingled through her flesh and fizzed into her veins. She almost cried out at the thrill of it. She clung to him as he eased away, but he drew back far enough to break the embrace. She opened her eyes and stared wonderingly into his face.
But the face that she saw wasn’t his.
The man whose shoulders her arms enclosed was just a few inches shorter than Roan. His features were handsome, but in a wild, almost painful way. It was the kind of face you wanted to stare at, but also avoid for fear you would stare too much. A perfectly straight nose sliced his face into two symmetrical halves, high cheekbones made his cheeks sheer cliffs, which his jaw c
leaved on each side into triangles framing a strong chin. His eyes were green like Roan’s, but a green only slightly brighter than normal with hazel radiating around the pupil.
Her shock dissipated and she stepped back, planting her hands on the man’s muscled chest and shoving him away, her brain churning to make sense of the past few seconds. “Where-Where’s Roan?”
He rubbed the back of his head, drawing attention to hair as inky, glossy, and long as Roan’s. His clothes were the same, as well. Her head spun. What the hell was going on? The man hadn’t spoken, so she repeated, “Where’s Roan?” anger beginning to replace surprise.
His gaze swept the ground and sliced back into hers. “Right here. I’m Roan.”
Sofia’s hand found her face. Her lips still felt the heat and pressure of Roan’s under her palm. “That’s impossible.”
He stepped toward her, his eyes wide and pleading. She stepped back in tandem, as if they were tangoing.
This person was Roan? The idea was as impossible as she’d stated, but she couldn’t deny she’d kissed Roan. There hadn’t been time for him to run away and for this man to take his place.
“But-But you’re white.”
The non sequitur wasn’t really what she’d meant to say, but she couldn’t seem to muster anything else.
He blew out a breath. His face dropped. “Is that a problem?”
She paced away. “No. But, you—but Roan’s skin . . .” The words refused to form into anything coherent. The hard north Florida dirt felt oddly spongy beneath her feet. Or was that her shaking knees?
She closed her eyes as it hit her. “Oh, I’m dreaming. That’s it. I fell asleep. But why would I dream you were white?”
“Sofia!” He took her hands. His palms and fingers were warm and solid around her chilled flesh. “You’re not dreaming. When you kissed me, you triggered a spell that helped me regain my fully human form—for a while anyway.”
“A spell?” For a minute she seemed to be standing at a crossroads as two people. One, the side that had a culture rooted in spiritualism wanted to accept his words without question. The other, it’s feet planted in science, recoiled in rejection, ready to dismiss the assertion out of hand and walk away.
But the side of belief had an ally—her heart—and it whispered, At least hear him out. She pressed her lips together, her brows lowered. “Go on.”
He searched her face with eyes at once foreign and familiar. “I know it sounds crazy, but my . . . alterations, weren’t body mods. I was born a kind of shapeshifter called a chimera, but a scientific experiment caused my unusual appearance.”
The mention of science settled her a little. She’d heard of chimeras in nature. “You have more than one set of DNA?”
He rubbed his nape. “I guess so, but . . .”
He grimaced, as if a sudden pain had strafed through him, and she had to lift her chin to follow his face as he grew several inches, bronze scales bloomed on his cheeks, and the structure of his face distorted.
She gasped at him, bewilderment a cloud in her mind. She shook her head in perplexed dismissal.
Science or magic, the Roan she knew stood before her. He’d become his old self in front of her eyes.
She pasted both hands over her mouth. There was no denying the evidence now. Whatever the cause of his alterations, they were not simple body mods.
The sky and the ground shimmied around her and she folded her arms, fishing for equilibrium, for some way to reconcile this new truth with what she had supposed was real.
“Sofia!” Her name in Slim’s Mexican-accented voice ripped her attention from Roan.
Slim jogged to a stop as he reached them, gasping and propping his hands on his knees. He held a cell phone in one of them. “Your tia,” he panted. “She’s in the hospital!”
Chapter 24
Peeling into the carnival parking lot nearly two hours later, and slamming on the brakes, Slim stretched across Sofia from the driver’s seat of his ancient Nissan hatchback and opened the passenger door. The hinges screamed.
The sound shot through her, driving her adrenaline higher. She jumped outside and rushed toward Guy’s massive bus-like RV.
The drive through rural Florida had been a nail biter. Slim hadn’t had much news. All she knew was that Carlita had driven Tia to the hospital. There had been no information beyond that and neither Tia nor her teenaged driver were answering their phones.
Her brain had bounced from fear for her tia, to Roan and the revelation that shifters were real and he was one. Magic was real.
Worse, an ache had started in her chest almost as soon as the tips of the massive, painted tent disappeared from the rear-view mirror. The sensation was so severe now, it stole her breath. She breathed past the pain. It was probably nothing more than an anxiety attack. She’d never had one, but a friend had told her they could be painful enough to be mistaken for a heart attack.
Her impulse had been to go directly to the hospital, but it had made sense to stop at the carnival first, in case someone there knew something.
The frosty silence of the fairground bore witness that they were in the wee hours of the morning. Her Converse crunched on the loose stones of the parking lot.
She pounded on Guy’s door as soon as she reached it, not caring who she woke.
Several minutes passed before it popped wide and Guy leaned out, knuckling heavy-lidded eyes and yawning. “Sofia—”
“Where’s my tia?”
“In her trailer. We tried to call, but you must have been out of service.”
Surprised and relieved at the news, Sofia sagged and then jumped down from the steps of his RV and pulled out her phone.
After telling Slim her tia was back and to come find a place to bunk, Sofia let herself into her tia’s trailer with her spare key.
She found the old woman sitting at her table with a steaming cup of what smelled like herbal tea.
Tia shook her head, her long, curly hair still knotted in a bun at the back of her head, her scalp peeking through the steel-gray strands in places. “Ah, m’ija. I’m sorry you came all this way. We got back about a half-hour ago.”
The tension constricting her muscles gave way, Sofia collapsed onto the bench seat across from her tia and stretched out her hand to the elderly woman’s bony knuckles. “What happened?”
Tia shrugged, her normally inscrutable face pinched in a wry grimace. “As soon as I got to the hospital, they hooked me up to an EKG. Seems it’s just indigestion.”
Sofia sighed. “That’s a relief.” She rubbed her own aching sternum. The pain hadn’t diminished, so it was probably not anxiety. She was too young for a heart attack. Heartburn, maybe? “It seems to be going around.”
Tia wasn’t young though. Sofia pressed her lips together. “But they’re sure it wasn’t anything serious?”
Tia fluttered a wrinkled hand in the air. “They wanted me to stay a little longer, but I know how these things work, every doctor in the place comes through without a by your leave, and you gotta pay all of the pendejos.”
A frown tugged at Sofia forehead. “You didn’t sign out against medical advice?”
“No, no. They let me go.” She issued a huge, shuddering yawn, narrow shoulders shaking, and nodded at her murky tea. “I’m just finishing this and then we can make up the table into a bed for you.”
Though Sofia’s chest still hurt, she grinned. She’d often slept on the transformed table as a kid. “Just like old times!”
~ ~ ~
Roan’s trailer door seemed to latch with an ominous click as he closed it behind him. He glanced at the ceiling, but didn’t really see it. Watching Sofia walk away without finishing his explanation or admitting his feelings was one of the most difficult things he’d ever done.
Not tagging along
was the right decision, as much as he wanted to be there to comfort and support her, he didn’t want to distract her from Señora Flores. No. He’d held back, helped her into the vehicle Slim had brought around, reassuring her that everything would be all right.
But as the dust kicked up by Slim’s Nissan had settled, the wound in his chest felt every bit as real as the knife he’d taken in his abdomen.
The pain grew in intensity as the minutes had passed and his dragon raged inside him, urging him to go after her. Even now he clutched his keys like a talisman. The cold, hard-edged metal in his palm crushed hard enough to leave an impression on the scaleless skin.
But following her wasn’t an option. She didn’t need another problem right now. He had no choice, but to wait for her return.
The ache refused to ease, and he paced the floor of his trailer, back and forth, back and forth, unable to rest. His dragon side growing increasingly more agitated as the gray of pre-dawn retreated for the winter sun.
Lu and Thalia knocked about ten, and he paused in his path to let them in.
Lu looked relaxed and rested as she ambled toward him. “How did it go?” She scanned the trailer, peering back toward the bedroom and lowered her voice. “Is she still here?”
Her words were like salt in a cut and he roared, unable to speak past the pain. His jaw bulged with suddenly longer fangs.
Lu’s eyes rounded and she stepped back. The stink of fear stung his nose. Rather than bringing him to his senses, his dragon seemed to gain strength from the odor. It seized control from his human side. Sharp claws formed on his fingers, and he lunged forward.
Thalia muttered a word and he hit an invisible wall before he could reach them. The barrier felt like a thousand tiny shards of glass biting through his scales and he roared again, enraged. His dragon, now in the driver’s seat, demanded he escape and go after Sofia.