Careful. You sound like me, his dragon warned him with a sharp laugh.
You were there too, Damian said, walking out of his castle toward the lightly armored SUV, full of weaponry inside, that they jokingly called the tour bus. You know what she’s like.
I do, his dragon said, making a satisfied sound.
For all that his dragon was nearby now, he hadn’t felt the beast riding him earlier. Not like he usually did—especially during sex. Damian wondered if his dragon was still granting him the space he’d claimed to be giving him last night, but not enough to question it. If the dragon wanted to fade away entirely and leave all of Andi to him, that would be fine by him.
But how would you wrestle monsters without me? his dragon told him, slowly uncoiling to take up more space, readying for the fight.
I would find a way, Damian promised the monster inside himself and headed out the door.
Damian hopped into the tour bus and found himself joined by Max and Zach up front and Jamison with his tech gear in the back.
“No Mills?” he asked, taking a spot in the back beside Jamison. Jamison was already running his one metal hand over the equipment, a stark contrast with the dark skin of his other hand, triangulating the latest rift between Realms.
“Turns out faking your sister’s death is a little bit harder than we thought,” Jamison said without looking up. “The coordinates are on your dash, Max.”
“Got it,” the bear-shifter said, putting the tour bus into drive.
“How so?” Damian asked Jamison.
“Magic reasons. We took a sample from her wings, but now, Mills is pretty convinced that it won’t work.”
He bet Lyka loved the sample taking process. Damian had a mental image of Grim holding the red bird back. “Why?”
“For the same reasons you can heal yourself, but we can’t heal you. You can make more of you, but apparently, we can’t. For anything more detailed than that, though, you’d have to ask her,” Jamison said.
“Makes sense,” Zach chimed in from the front seat. “I mean, if you could just culture out magical cells, couldn’t you create magical meats? Like those Impossible Burgers, only from us?” Zach pondered this for a second. “I mean, if you could, you could figure out a way to have ethical magical ingestion.”
Max recoiled. “That’s still disgusting.”
Damian gave Zach a bemused look. “Since when did you become a scientist-slash-philosopher?”
The werewolf laughed. “I do occasionally do things at the board meetings you skip out on. Like researching what to invest your money in.”
“Heh,” Damian said, relaxing back. “Well, back to the here and now…what’s the stat on the rift we’re heading toward?”
Jamison made portions of his screen larger, and Damian watched his expression darken. “Fuck me…. It’s the Clearcreek Mall.” That meant a ton of space to cover—and far too many people to protect. Damian felt the tour bus pick up speed.
“Size?” Max asked.
Jamison pulled his head away from his screens to give a grim look. “At least a meter.”
“Goddammit,” Zach hissed from the front seat, and Damian knew why. A lot of things could wedge themselves through a meter-sized rift. And, conversely, you should shove a lot of things back into a meter-sized rift to save to eat later.
“I’ll know more once we’re closer,” Jamison promised. “Maybe it’s only in a janitorial closet.”
“One can hope,” Damian muttered.
“Spheres,” Jamison said, as Max double-parked the van. He handed out one of the magical objects to each of them. They turned them on, blinking out of sight one by one as the magical barrier the spheres provided showed whoever was watching on the other side just what they wanted to see—which, presumably, wasn’t four muscular, well-armed men running for the entrance of a mall with guns out.
If Damian hadn’t known what they were there for, it would’ve been a nice day. The wind from earlier had died down, the sun was out, there were birds chirping, and a janitor in a navy jacket was sweeping a metal detector across a patch of grass out front.
They entered and jogged down a broad tiled hallway between storefronts, dodging groups of people—mothers pushing strollers, teenagers with swaying bags. Damian did his best to avoid places like this; there was something about the way they were constructed that made him feel trapped, and he didn’t particularly like meeting strangers. For all that he had money, this wasn’t the kind of place he liked to spend it when he bothered to.
“Fuck,” he muttered, dodging a gaggle of preteens sharing a soda. They reached an atrium with wide stairs leading up, and beside them, someone was shilling face creams from a cart. “Jamison?”
“Overlaying blueprints…second floor!” Jamison said and started up the stairs. Damian overtook him, dodging people too busy with their phones to pay attention. The sooner this was over with, the sooner he could get back to Andi.
“And now?” Damian asked from the top, looking around. But he didn’t need Jamison’s tech to see it.
“Shit,” Max said, pulling to heel at his side.
Halfway down the next stretch of tiled hallway, equidistant between a women’s clothing store and a store full of candy and dolls, a rift fluttered.
A flexible triangle hovered like the entrance to a teepee, beginning at knee height and ending at the floor. Its edges flared through colors Damian’s eyes could only barely retain—a bright portal in comparison to the otherworldly darkness it held inside.
And out of it burped a small furry creature. It had white and tan splotches, was about the size of Damian’s fist, and it started zigzagging down the hall toward them on six legs.
“Start shooting; I’ll be right back,” Jamison announced, racing back down the stairs the way they’d come.
Max whipped out his gun and aimed it as Zach stepped up. “Whoa, whoa, whoa!” Zach said. “Why do they look like hamsters?”
“All the better to infiltrate a place like this?” Damian guessed, picking the creature up so that it was hidden inside his sphere with him. With it suspended, he could see a chitinous underbelly and that all six of the legs ended in claws. It was all too easy to imagine a kid taking it home with them to post on the internet, if nothing else. “We’ve got to get everyone out of here.”
Zach looked wildly around, then apparently spotted something familiar on a wall. He ran to it, hit it, and a siren started wailing.
“What on earth did you do?” Max complained.
“Fire drill,” Zach said, grinning. “I have always wanted to do that.”
Everyone else in the mall paused for a moment taking a collective breath, and then they flipped out. People started screaming and running for the exits. Damian moved to the side, watching the tide of humanity rush by, before chucking the hamster-like creature back into the rift like a football. A second one leaped out—or perhaps the same one Damian threw, racing back—this time heading for the stairs like it was following the people.
Max pulled out his pistol and shot it, sending its components splattering against the red tile and the glass wall that held the railing for the balcony.
“Disgusting,” Damian said, shaking a glob of creature off his dress shoe.
“Yo, peeps,” Jamison spoke up in their earpieces. “Good news, bad news time. The good news is that the bottom of this rift is inside a storage closet that I evacuated and locked. The bad news is that there’s like two hundred of those creatures already inside it.”
Zach groaned. “I am not going to feel good about killing hamsters, guys. I don’t care how Unearthly they are.”
And as the werewolf was complaining, the pieces of the hamster Max had shot—including the lump of flesh Damian had kicked away—beaded and rolled back together. All three of the men watched the creature reform. Damian picked it up; it was whole again, impossibly.
“Oh, shit, I take that back,” Zach whispered.
“I’m gonna bomb them so I can seal the rift,” Jamison
went on. “One sec—”
Damian grabbed his earpiece. “No!” he shouted, but it was too late. The floor beneath them shook as he ran for the stairs, carrying the reanimated hamster with him.
Damian raced downstairs and found Jamison walking out of a men’s clothing store, smoke billowing out from a closed door behind him.
“What?” Jamison asked.
“They can reform,” Damian said, holding the hamster-looking thing up so that Jamison could see its stomach. Its six legs strained out for him, waving in the air as it chittered.
“Oh, God, it’s like a furry roly-poly,” Jamison said with revulsion. “I hate those things.”
“Not that…this,” Damian said, twisting the creature violently into two halves—with mysteriously little dripping blood. Then he put the two pieces back together, and both the men watched them reseal—like a magic trick.
“Oh, fuck,” Jamison muttered, then winced as ominous rustling and thumping sounds began in the storage room he’d bombed.
“I don’t think you killed any of them,” Damian said, “so much as you made them mad.”
“How do you kill something that can’t die?” Jamison asked as a mad scrabbling started on the wall behind them.
“With dragon fire,” Damian growled. A wall full of drywall fell forward, and a tan and white furry creature the size of a VW Bug scurried out and into the store, on hundreds of tiny legs, each one of their claws scratching gouges into the tile. Both the men dove sideways out of its way and watched in bizarre fascination as it trampled over racks of clothing to go out into the mall. “Seal the rift,” he commanded Jamison, tossing his sphere to the man, racing after the thing to change.
His dragon had been waiting for just this moment.
It was hard to explain the changes that overtook him when his dragon was revealed. There was a moment of intense pain, yes, but he was never fully sure if it was physical or emotional, the sensation of his body changing into something utterly other, gaining in mass and expanding in scale, or the knowledge that each time he did so, it was like he was ripping himself in two and being left with a little less of himself each time. The process was slower now that he was on earth, but the sensation was the same.
Freedom, his dragon growled and reveled in it. Except, it complained, gnashing its teeth as its wings were trapped by walls.
It is what it is…burn that thing, Damian said, and the beast snaked after it. His claws caught on the tile now, his dragon dragging itself down the now-narrow hallway, propelling itself off the ground and walls around them, sending carts and benches scattering to each side, gaining speed. They reached an intersection and wheeled themselves around it, experiencing a moment of freedom in an atrium, before diving back into another hallway, hot on the creature’s tail.
The furry thing appeared to bumble to a stop, reaching the wall at the end of the hallway, bouncing against it like a blind mole.
Damian’s dragon inhaled and then exhaled with intent, catching its breath on fire, releasing a torrent of flame at the furry thing. The scent of burning hair was instantly in the air, just as it’d been this morning. Then the shield of fluff burned through, revealing the insectile creature beneath, and it started to scream and…broke in two.
No…thirds. One third of it was dead, Damian knew, from all his dragon’s senses. The fire had killed it, but the other two had abandoned ship and were now reforming into discreet entities, racing away on different paths. One scurried up into the ceiling; the other raced at him, finding speed, diving between him and the wall.
As his dragon was hardly smaller than the hallway, he roared and then took out the storefronts of the establishments on either side of itself, so that it had more room to turn, chasing after the third of the creature that was still visible to him. He howled fire after it and clipped it, right before it ran down another hall.
Faster! Damian urged.
Yes! his dragon laughed because, Damian realized, it was having fun. For the first time in weeks, his dragon didn’t also want to run to Andi, knowing she was safe back home, and it wasn’t fighting him, as they both wanted the same thing. It was in its element hunting here, even in this strange environment, and for the first time in a long time, Damian almost felt a part of it. The same sensation of ability and glee, the knowledge that there was nothing he couldn’t do as a dragon, the way that they were working as one.
There! he shouted as his dragon spotted it with their eyes, circling behind a bench. In the atrium again, his dragon pounced on the thing. Don’t shred it! he warned.
You’re no fun, his dragon complained, and then let loose a burst of fire at it, close enough to feel the heat himself and bask in it—this revelation of his power.
When it was done, Damian prompted, And the third?
His dragon pulsed out with his senses. There! it crowed, spotting the last piece of the creature frantically climbing the ceiling over the atrium, trying to get to the glass at the top and the presumable freedom of outside.
Damian’s dragon bunched and leaped for the creature, knocking it down, and every instinct flooding through him wanted to play with it, to rip it apart with teeth and claws.
Fire only! he reminded his beast.
Fine, his dragon complained as it dropped to the ground with the creature, holding it clasped between its paws, crashing down the stairs. It rolled as it landed, folding its wings in the small space, holding the creature up and letting out a gout of flame as the creature writhed and clawed, trying to escape. It chittered pathetically as the dragon crisped it, and then they were done—the cause that’d brought them together finished.
Damian waited until his dragon had righted itself before demanding, Change back.
And what would you do if I said no? his dragon asked him.
Then we would fight. Again. Damian braced himself. Before he’d met Andi, it felt like all he ever did was fight. He hadn’t expected the knowledge that there was another way to be to leave him so exhausted with his former reality. Do you really want that?
There was a long internal pause as his dragon contemplated things. No, it said, not right now. Damian felt himself fold back. Changing always cost him his clothing. He jogged back up the stairs to find his men, his bare feet slapping on the cold tile.
He saw Max first, casting the light of the Forgetting Fire he’d brought about to undo magically caused structural problems and erase them from any cameras. Jamison was inside the now reset and restocked clothing store, the wall behind him solid again, as he rewound the end of his rift closing detonation cord, which Damian knew was warded strands of Mills’s long hair. And he heard the static blast of a flamethrower, spotting Zach torching a few remaining hamsters down the hall.
“I’d forgotten we had this in the bus!” Zach announced at seeing him.
“Yes, but it’s not magic…those stains’ll stay,” Damian said, looking at the scorch marks Zach was leaving on the ground.
“Well, we did pull the fire alarm,” Zach said matter-of-factly. “At least something should really be on fire.”
“Pyro,” Damian snorted, as Jamison tossed another sphere at him. He caught it and switched it on.
After a group of firefighters burst in, it was all hands on deck to help Max spot and erase the last of the Unearthly physical damages with the Forgetting Fire before they clocked it. But when they were through, and after Damian had swiped a pair of red gym shorts from an athletic store, making Zach give him a twenty-dollar bill to leave behind, they descended the front stairs triumphantly—at least in their own minds.
Because none of the kids, mothers, or employees who’d stuck around to gawk could see them. Even the same janitor who Damian’d seen earlier had stayed to stare, casually leaning on the metal detector he’d been waving, probably wondering just how much work they were leaving behind for him. Damian would have to give the mall an anonymous donation to make up for the damage Zach’s flamethrower had caused. He brushed by the janitor, bringing up the rear, and heard the metal
detector the man had clicking louder.
So did the janitor, who suddenly stood upright.
But instead of looking at the ground, where one would think you would be able to find dropped coins and jewelry with a metal detector, he started looking around him.
Damian paused as the rest of his crew loaded into the tour bus and watched the janitor raise the detector up. The thing clicked more loudly as the man pushed it in his direction, but the janitor couldn’t see him because of the sphere’s magic, although he definitely was looking at something. Damian turned and saw what the man had focused on. A small brunette girl with a pixie cut. Not even in high school, surely, she was riding a girl’s bike with tassels off the handle—she was probably from the elementary school down the street.
And the janitor was absolutely looking at her with intent.
Damian backed up, shielding the girl with his body, assuming the worst and feeling murderous. Did this man even belong here? Was this his gimmick, his way to get close enough to kids?
Damian sidestepped, ready to yank the man into the sphere with him, punch him out, and grab his wallet to figure out who he was and how to prosecute him when the janitor’s attention waved because the metal detector was still going after Damian. The janitor turned, swinging it his direction, and Damian realized it wasn’t a metal detector after all.
The janitor was a Hunter. They’d just affixed a handle to the tool he’d seen the Hunters running around with at Andi’s hospital.
And if Damian hadn’t been there, he’d have been scanning the mall to find people with just a bit of shifter blood in their background, maybe so little that they didn’t even know it was there.
Hunting them.
Kill him! his dragon demanded, rushing forward so hard that Damian swayed.
No! Damian shouted him down inside.
Kill him now, his dragon hissed, seething, clawing, and Damian tensed.
Don’t you think I want to? Damian asked, biting back a groan. The thought of this man preying on kids—at least the Unearthly were carnivores from other Realms, they had an excuse—but this man was human, and he knew what he was doing.
Dragon Fated: A Billionaire Dragon Shifter Romance (Prince of the Other Worlds) Page 8
