Claim the Dragon

by A. C. Arthur

  This was Steele’s home away from home ever since his birth. As one of few Dream Drakons, he was known here, especially by the Reaper. It was those cool white eyes that Steele knew followed him on this journey because the Reaper knew exactly what he was doing. It planned to stop him and Steele planned to do everything in his power to keep that from happening. Even if doing so ended in his death.

  “You cannot have her.” He spoke the words into the darkness as he continued to move, traveling to the rooftop where the ultimate showdown would eventually take place.

  “You cannot keep her,” the Reaper’s hollow voice replied.

  Steele walked with purposeful steps, prepared to take this battle wherever it needed to go as long as Ravyn stayed safe. As long as she stayed alive.

  The wind picked up as he began an uphill trek. In what seemed like moments but he knew was actually hours on the Human Realm, he walked until coming to a stop at the sight of the female form ten feet in front of him. Steele didn’t have to look back to know that the houses that had once surrounded him were now beneath him. He was on the roof and she was there too, holding that dagger in her hand.

  Steele closed his eyes, seeing that same dagger enclosed in its sheath as it sat on the table in his private suite back at the Office. But here, in this place, she held it and it glowed in her hand as tiny waves of that same light shimmered throughout her body.

  Her hair, long and straight, hanging down past one shoulder, blew in the window as she stood with one hip extended, the opposite leg thrust forward, shoulders squared. It was a dominant stance, a sexy silhouette, a powerful message. As he stepped closer his heart pounded. That was new. As many times as he’d walked in this particular dream, he’d never felt that effect before.

  “Give me the dagger.” Words that had not come to him in another dream stumbled from his mouth and for the first time Steele realized his dream was changing. The dagger was changing it.

  She turned her head slowly, the corner of her mouth tilted in a teasing smile, her brown eyes shimmering with flecks of the same warm gold as the dagger in her hand.

  “I told you it was mine from the start.”

  Her voice was heavier in this place, still feminine but with a definite hint of unchecked power.

  “We made a deal.” He continued moving closer, fully intending to take that dagger from her.

  “I am the curse.”

  And with those four words she turned until she was facing him. Everything about her body seemed different, stronger, sexier. The pants she wore clung to her toned legs, cupping the curve of her hips then easing along the flat planes of her abs. The long-sleeved shirt hugged her like a second skin, keeping her ample breasts high. This wasn’t the Ravyn he’d seen in the dream before and it certainly wasn’t the Ravyn he’d met on the Human Realm.

  She stood dangerously close to the edge of the roof top. He knew because a familiar orange glow had begun to rise in the dark backdrop behind her. The sound of licking flames beckoned his beast and his fingers tingled with the beast’s urge to shift.

  “You are Ravyn Walsh and I will keep you safe,” he said, but felt as if those words might now be a futile request.

  Her laughter co-signed that thought. “You cannot stop the inevitable. You know that, Dream Drakon.”

  How did she know what he was? Because he’d shown her when he’d shifted into the dragon and brought her to the Office. She’d seen him and his dragon had had the chance to feel her for itself. It enjoyed that feeling and was ready to touch her once more.

  But Ravyn hadn’t remembered this, or at least she hadn’t when they’d been having dinner because she hadn’t spoken a word about it. Steele eyed this version of Ravyn suspiciously.

  “I won’t let you die.”

  “You have no choice here.” She took a step back.

  “She is correct. You have no choice here.” The Reaper’s voice sounded and in the next second the warrior with the skeletal face stood directly in front of him. “Only I make claims in your dreams, Drakon. That is the way it has always been.”

  Steele let the beast have its way and in the next blink his human form distorted and extended, crumpled and curved, until the huge bronze-colored beast was alive, its jaw dropping to display rows of wicked sharp teeth.

  The Reaper relaxed its spindly arms and in their place weapons that resembled cannons appeared. With a clicking sound bullets laced with a lethal death serum circled in the cannon’s chamber. Blood dripped from each arm, representing the souls that had already been claimed.

  “I am the curse!” Ravyn’s voice sounded over the flames and the Reaper’s artillery.

  The beast could see her taking another step back. With one more step she would fall into the fire that roared beneath her.

  “Let me be what I am!” she continued, but the beast was already on the move, spreading its mammoth wings until it blanketed the air and lifted its legs beneath it to take to the sky.

  The Reaper raised both his arms, aiming at the belly of the dragon as it soared above it. The beast didn’t stop but flew in Ravyn’s direction, intent on grabbing her before she could take that last step off the roof.

  In a blast of white hot fury, the Reaper engaged his weapons, discharging a barrage of sizzling hot death bullets, just as the dragon swooped down to grab Ravyn. She shook her head and dodged its clawed feet, taking the leap into the flames below. The dragon roared, fire spewing from its throat in thick flames as it watched her fall. But with its orange eyes, the dragon noticed that the woman falling into the flames wasn’t Ravyn at all.

  Instead her hair was a fiery red and hung long and curling down to her waist. Her voice was more high-pitched as she screamed, her pants and top the same bronze color as his dragon’s skin, her eyes a piercing reddish-orange hue that belonged to the Nightguild clan—Steele’s Drakon-blood family.

  Opal.

  Steele’s human body shot up off the bed, his eyes popping open, heart thumping loudly. Remnants of the dream floated through his mind while doom, hurt, fear and disappointment swirled in his chest.

  This wasn’t like any dream he’d ever had. It was like a combination of his worst nightmares and he had no clue why it had come to him.

  The cool touch of her hands rubbing along his back jolted and steadied him at the same time. This was why, because she was here with him. Because he’d given the Reaper another soul in place of hers and because of that damn dagger. Everything had shifted, so that the dreams that usually depicted the future were now somehow giving him a different message. In this dream, the Reaper hadn’t mentioned Steele pulling a switcheroo on him. It had remained focused on Ravyn. But the dagger had been in this dream, and Opal, who had been dead for over a hundred years. Things had definitely changed and Steele needed to figure out why and what he was supposed to do next.

  “It was just a dream,” she whispered. “You were just having a bad dream.”

  He pulled his legs until they fell off the side of the bed and he leaned forward, resting his elbows on his thighs as he tried to regulate his breathing. She moved with him, wrapping her arms around his body and laying her face against his back.

  “I used to have bad dreams as a child and every night I woke with the night terrors, I wished for someone to hold me like this.”

  Ravyn was talking. She was alive and she was here with him at the Office. Reality oozed like a thick white sludge over the blackness of the dream in his mind—shifting the scene, his father had told him that was called.

  “Do you want to talk about it?”

  Her voice was so soft and welcoming it made him ache.

  “No.” He couldn’t keep doing this. Talking to her, sleeping with her, getting closer and closer to something he couldn’t have.

  She didn’t push him but eased back a bit so that her hands were again rubbing over his back.

  “How did you get the
se scars?”

  Don’t tell her. Keep quiet. Get the hell out of here!

  His mind screamed directives while the beast had curled into itself, remnants of the dream still plaguing it, because once again it felt helpless.

  “I was in a dark place,” he began. “Mentally fighting a darkness inside me and physically fighting those who thought to control me.”

  She sighed. “I was mentally abused. Words have power, not only in the instant they’re spoken, but for all the time they can be recalled.”

  Her fingers moved over the jagged scars at his back. They’d come from the nails of a lycan shifter. The deeper slashes he’d endured across the front of his chest were from a denounced member of the fae who’d been forced into the Abyss and spent its only day there terrorizing everyone he saw. Until he’d run into Steele.

  “Scars can be covered,” he said.

  “Is that what the tat is for? To cover your scars?” He nodded his answer, hating any memory of the time he’d been so hurt and lost in despair that he’d purposely ventured to the place between life and death, lingering there for twenty years before Magnum had finally found him.

  “I’ll get more until they’re all gone,” he said, even though it had been years since he’d been inked. He hadn’t thought about why he’d suddenly stopped going, but now that Ravyn was looking at the scars, touching them so lovingly, they disgusted him all over again. The point in his life when he was weakest being witnessed by someone who didn’t need to know about his past.

  Hell, she didn’t need to know about his present or future either. And that was precisely the point. Ravyn was never supposed to learn of the Drakon or the Office or anything that didn’t fit into her world on the Human Realm. She wasn’t like him and she didn’t belong here. There was no way she could fight off preternatural beings, so he’d constantly be more worried about her getting caught in the crossfire than he was about whatever dark entity they had to fight. It just wouldn’t work. Steele knew that, and he also knew what needed to be done to ensure she would continue to live her life the way she was supposed to live it.

  “But you’ll still have the memory of how they came to be,” she said. “Memories don’t fade, no matter what you do to get rid of them.”

  The quiet pain he heard in her voice kept Steele still when he knew he should have stood to do what he’d been instructed to do where she was concerned. He turned then, causing her to back up a little so that she sat half at his back and half at his side and he could now look at her. Tousled hair, lips still swollen from his kisses and his T-shirt twisted around her much smaller body didn’t do anything to detract from how beautiful he thought she was. When she reached up and touched a hand to his cheek, he leaned into her touch, closing his eyes and hating himself more than he had all those years ago.

  How was that even possible? Wasn’t the whole point in trying to save her to keep from feeling that bone-deep pain again?

  “Memories can make you the person you are in the present,” she said, and when he looked up at her she shrugged.

  “I just figure that without all that happened in my past, I wouldn’t be who I am now. I wouldn’t be in a position to help those people at Safeside if those enforcers hadn’t burned down my store.”

  “I want you to give me their names. Write it down if you don’t want to say it out loud. But I need to find them,” he said, rage bubbling to rest alongside the fear.

  She shook her head. “It doesn’t matter. They didn’t beat me mentally. They thought they did, but they really just made me stronger. I know what my purpose is now and I’m doing it. Despite what my father thought.”

  This was the second time he’d heard her mention her father and each time her tone had been somber. Had he been the one to mentally abuse her? Great, someone else Steele wanted to kill for causing her pain. He was losing his grip.

  “You should get back to sleep,” he said and reached up to wrap his fingers around the wrist of her hand that was on his face.

  Her skin was soft to the touch and for a second he thought about never feeling that softness again.

  “We can lie down together. When I was little and the few times I could sleep, after I woke up from a bad dream, I would fluff all my pillows up and line them down the bed right next to where I lay. So that when I climbed under the blankets to go back to sleep, I’d feel like there was someone there with me.” She looked so hopeful with the raise of her brow and the slight tilt of her lips into a small smile.

  Steele wished like hell he could lie down with her. He wished he could hold her in his arms through the night and perhaps more nights in the future, to assure her it was safe enough to not only sleep, but to dream of something other than living underground and stealing to take care of the people she cared about.

  But he couldn’t.

  There was nothing he could do. This situation was a mess and he’d helped it to become that way. Now, all he could do was what he thought was right for them both—get rid of the threat against her and move on with his life, without her.

  “Come on, I’ll tuck you in,” he said before standing from the bed.

  “You aren’t going to lie with me?” she asked as she moved to the top of the bed once more and sat with her back facing the pillows.

  “I’ll be back,” he said, because he was too chickenshit to tell her that he was about to clean her memory of him and this place, forever. It wasn’t a dangerous procedure—all he had to do was touch her or point his magick in her direction to clean her memories. And it was safe. After the magick touched her she would fall into a deep sleep that would last several hours. It was almost the same as when he used dream dust, only with this process she wouldn’t remember him or anything about their time together when she awoke. Other than that memory loss, there were no residual effects with this process. At most, she’d awake very hungry. Just because hunger could keep a mind from thinking about anything other than food.

  She wouldn’t agree, he knew that without a doubt. She’d never want someone to decide stealing her memories was the best option, would never agree to giving up that much control. He could almost hear her cursing him in his mind now. Still, he knew he had to do it, and even if there was a tinge of doubt, Theo had insisted the exposure be taken care of, all of which meant, there was no need to discuss this with her. If that meant he was taking consent and therefore control away from her, then so be it. It was necessary.

  Then why was it so damn difficult?

  “Just lie down and sleep. You won’t miss me while I’m away,” he said, even though a part of him wished she would.

  When she lay back against the pillows, Steele pulled the sheet and comforter he’d added on the bed for her to be extra warm, up to her neck and then used his hands to tuck them in tightly all the way down to her ankles.

  She giggled. “I think I’m completely tucked in now.”

  “Good,” he replied and stood back from the bed. But he couldn’t walk away, not just yet. Instead he stood there for what felt like endless seconds just staring at her, watching her blink, studying the rounded end of her nose, the slight lift of her cheeks, her long fingers as they lay on top of the blankets. He would never forget her, he knew, not one tiny part of her.

  He turned then, because his chest felt so tight he wasn’t sure the next breath was going to come. But as he moved closer to the door, her voice stopped him.

  “I will miss you, Steele.”

  He couldn’t look at her again, couldn’t stand to hear her voice saying his name or anything else she might want to tell him. Steele walked through the door, closing it with a resounding click behind him and then he turned, ready to run through the hallway until he could get outside into the open air, to catch his breath. Maybe he’d shift and fly, soar through the sky and let the freedom fill his lungs, remind him of who and what he was. But he came to a quick stop when he saw Magnum.

 
Brothers who’d been through so much, who’d fought together in the clan wars back on Mobo, and mourned the loss of their sister. They’d sworn to never part again in the hours after Magnum managed to pull Steele out of the Abyss. Now, they stood in the hallway staring silently.

  “I’ll do it,” Magnum said finally. “Go. I’ll take care of her.”

  Steele didn’t know what to say. It was his responsibility. She’d been sent to his dream and it had been on his heart to save her, to keep her safe. How could he not do this for her?

  How could he do it knowing that once it was done she’d be lost to him forever?

  He didn’t answer and couldn’t look at Magnum any longer. He walked away, steps heavy, heart crumbling, beast folding to the pressure once more.

  * * *

  It was Saturday morning at Safeside. Ravyn knew this because Saturday mornings were always full of laughter and playing. The few children they had down here did chores and had tutoring hours throughout the week, the same as if they were living above. But on Saturdays they were allowed to sleep in, which they never did. Instead there were exuberant games of tag and hide ’n’ seek that Ravyn encouraged because it was a sign of normalcy they needed. Sure, there were video games that normally kept them occupied whenever they weren’t working on schoolwork or doing something that was needed to keep their living quarters in order, but satellite signals so far belowground weren’t always good.

  Kal needed to work on that. He’d said he would but she would check with him this morning to see how that was going. The television reception was sometimes spotty as well and if this was going to be their home for the foreseeable future, it needed to have all the comforts they could manage.

  She turned over on her side with thoughts still flitting through her mind and breathed a heavy sigh. Her eyes were still closed and she burrowed down deeper into her sheet and comforter, inhaling the sweet floral scent of the fabric softener she used when washing her clothes. It was one of the small indulgences she allowed herself down here. Their money was always sparse and she never wanted to use it for selfish reasons. Taking care of the others was always the priority.