The Hunters they’d encountered recently had been better equipped and better hidden than those in the past. He needed to know more about them, and this was an opportunity to not just torture someone—who might prove strong or a liar—but to spy.
His dragon roiled, and it felt like the beast was biting chunks off his flesh and rending them with its teeth.
Fucking…stop, Damian gritted out, stumbling over to where the tour bus was.
“Damian?” Jamison asked from the safety of the interior.
“Tracking device. Now,” Damian spit out, holding his hand up. Jamison jumped to rummage through a tethered bag and pulled out a chip the size of a dime.
“It’s on,” he said, flicking it with a thumbnail. “But who—”
“Janitor,” Damian said, grabbing hold of the tour bus’s side.
“Are you okay?” Jamison asked.
His dragon was unrelenting. Why are you letting him live? If I were in control—
But you’re not!
Damian pushed the tag back to Jamison. There was no way for him to do it, to get close enough without enveloping the janitor inside his sphere and giving himself away or appearing as a naked man except for gym shorts. That, plus the fact that he would definitely set the detector off. “Tag the janitor. Now.”
“Okay,” Jamison said, snapping to. He set his sphere down and stripped off half his gear in the darkness of the tour bus quickly, thinking along the same lines as Damian.
The dark-skinned man bounced out of the tour bus in black slacks and a black long-sleeved shirt and didn’t look entirely out of place on a chilly day—especially since both of his hands were covered in gloves. He wandered over to the group of people watching the firemen and expressed some interest before walking on, right by the janitor—who was now inspecting his device, probably trying to figure out why it’d registered so strongly just a moment ago—and bumped him, seemingly on accident. Jamison patted the man’s shoulder in apparent apology, and Damian knew he’d slid the tracker into the man’s pocket.
It was done. The tracker would at least lead them to his home, which they could stake out and work back from.
Jamison walked on naturally, and the tour bus circled the block to pick him up. Damian tried to relax, but his dragon wouldn’t let him. It was slamming against his flesh like his body was a cage; he felt bruises blossoming from the inside out.
It’s over…stop! Damian commanded, but the beast wouldn’t. It was as though a switch had been flipped inside. You’ve got to—
I don’t have to do anything! the dragon snarled.
What is wrong with you? he demanded.
The same thing that has always been wrong! I am chained!
I know. Damian breathed deeply, trying to regain control. I’m sorry.
At that, the dragon suddenly stilled, but Damian didn’t know if he could trust it—if he could relax too—or if that only meant that he should brace for what was coming next.
Your regret means nothing to me, his dragon said, but it stopped fighting. Damian had the sense of it receding inside him, to wherever it hid.
“D, are you okay?” Jamison asked quietly, from where he was sitting beside him.
“That’s a matter of opinion,” Damian muttered, then more loudly, said, “I don’t want to talk about it. Let’s just get home.”
The other three men let him off the hook and began talking about other things—how ignoble it was to kill hamsters, even if they were half-zombie, half-insect on the inside, and how no one would believe any of this shit if it were ever in a TV show, a perennial complaint. But at least they weren’t suffering alone and had each other to talk to and laugh with. Damian listened to their jibes and bragging and envied them.
There were days when he wanted to be like them, when he wished his world was simpler. But he couldn’t let go of the fact that he was different, and his differences kept him alone.
Except that now, he had Andi.
He sank back into his seat and closed his eyes and thought of her until Max put the van in park.
“I’ve got that tracker on a trace, okay?” Jamison said as he opened his eyes.
“Good. I’ll check in with you later. I want to know everywhere it goes.”
“Why?” his tech master asked.
“Because that wasn’t a metal detector in his hand. It was a Hunter’s tool,” Damian said with a sigh.
The mood in the van changed instantly.
“Are you fucking kidding me?” Jamison responded, his voice rising in disbelief.
“Why’d we let him live?” Max growled.
“Because,” Damian said, unbuckling his seat belt and getting out of the tour bus, indicating that they should do the same. “We need to know where he lives, where he goes. We need to figure out what the Hunters are up to. Whatever they’re doing now, it’s far more organized than last time. For all we know that man really is a janitor there—under cover—or maybe doesn’t know shit, and he’s just getting paid fifty bucks a week by them to report back. I’m not going to yank someone up to torture them if I’m not sure they don’t have something to tell me when—and if—they flip.”
“Fuck, D,” Zach said, with a head shake.
“I know. It’s awful. And I hate having to think like that. But now we’ll know where he sleeps at night if nothing else. We can stake that out, get a name, have you do your electronic thing,” he said, looking at Jamison, “and track him down. Put traces on his car and credit cards, see who pays him, how and when. If we’re lucky, he leads us someplace good. If we’re not, then we can grab him in a few days and beat what he knows out of him.”
“I don’t like this,” Jamison said, frowning deeply.
“I don’t either. But we need to know more. We’re breaking up a well-funded gang now; they’re not just loose groups of cannibalistic yahoos anymore,” Damian said, and Max grunted. Being from the Realms, he understood the necessity of acceptable casualties more than most.
“I understand, but I’m still pissed,” Zach said, his face curdled by disgust.
“And you have every right to be,” Damian agreed. “Can you contact Stella and find out what information she got the other night?”
“Sure,” Zach said. “I won’t tell her about this, though. She’d hunt that guy down and kill him herself.”
“I’m not asking for long,” Damian said.
“And how long will it take him to murder someone?” Jamison pressed.
“These are the kind of choices you had to make in the Realms,” Max said, coming up behind him. “Which is why Damian’s making it. Not you or me. A situation where both choices are shitty, and neither one lets you sleep well at night.”
“I’m telling Austin,” Zach said.
“I didn’t expect you not to,” Damian granted.
Zach made a small growl and shook his whole body like he was shaking off a fly, a visceral response to Damian’s decision, but he stayed tight-lipped as he turned for the castle.
“Mills is not going to be happy about this either,” Jamison added with a sigh. “But, I’ll restock the bus before I tell her.”
“Thank you,” Damian said, clapping his shoulder, following Zach’s path back in with Max at his side.
“Are you all right?” the bear-shifter asked once they were out of earshot.
Damian shrugged, then realized who he was talking to. “I’m the one who should be checking in with you.” Max was his old weapons master, and he’d come over from the Realms horribly injured a few years after Damian.
“No, I wrote that place off as solidly as you did.” Max snorted ruefully. “What with the whole being blinded and left for dead.”
Damian nodded. If he were a weaker man, he’d still have nightmares about the condition Maximillian was in when he’d come crawling through the mirror. “As long as Ryana’s okay, I don’t really give a flying fuck what happens back there.”
“I just hope the Realms feels the same way about you, brother,” Max said, as they
mounted the mansion’s front stairs.
Damian paused once he was indoors, though Max’s words reverberated around him.
His house smelled like Andi. And it felt like if he could just be around her again, everything would be better. He would know he’d made the right decision, and his dragon would behave. He trotted up the stairs quickly, hoping to catch her napping in his bed, because how glorious it would be to crawl under the sheets beside her and pull her close, breathe in her hair, and sleep—or not…depending.
He opened up the door to his bedroom quietly and found her awake and waiting, sitting clothed and cross-legged on his bed, playing with her phone. She seemed startled to see him and emotions he couldn’t quantify played across her face until she took in what he was wearing.
“Were you out jogging?” she asked, arms crossed. There was a strange box sitting on the bed beside her.
“It’s a long story.”
Her eyebrows went high, and then she shook her head helplessly. “I was going to be mad at you, but now I’m just going to laugh.”
He grinned at her. He’d been right; everything was going to be better now that she was here. “Do I normally keep extra clothes in the tour bus? Yes. Do I restock them as often as I ought to? No.”
“So, where did those fetching red gym shorts come from?”
“The mall. I grabbed them on our way out the door. We were in a rush…I didn’t get to try them on.”
“No wonder they’re tight on you then.” The corners of her lips quirked into a knowing smile.
“I don’t know, I thought you might like it,” he said, advancing with a leer.
Andi laughed and pulled back slightly. “No. First off, I’ve seen you fighting monsters before. You’re gonna have to shower before you touch me. Secondly, I’m still mad at you.”
He paused a good three feet away from the bedside and dragged up a chair. “Okay. Why?”
“Because. You raced off again. And I get that’s what you do, and the world needs you, but I don’t like being the girl who waits behind. That’s not me.”
Damian sighed. “I can’t have you out there on the field of battle, Andi. I just can’t. If anything happened to you, I wouldn’t be able to control myself.”
Andi frowned thoughtfully. “And everyone else here has some kind of superpower?”
“Pretty much.”
“Well…how can I get one?”
Damian blinked. “What?”
“My brother got one. Why can’t I?”
Damian stared at her. “Because you’re not a Hunter, Andi.”
Her frown deepened. “So, there’s no possible other way?”
“As far as I know, no. I’ve never smelled magic on you or in you, Andi.” And Rax had confirmed as much last night, aloud. “I can’t claim to fully know what they did to your brother, but whatever is happening to him, I wouldn’t wish that on you.” Damian watched her sigh and sink in on herself. He could almost see the wheels turning in her head as she cycled through other options, and he hoped that one of them wasn’t leaving him. She did have pride, and Damian suspected it was hard going from always feeling capable to helpless. It was part of what he liked about her, the way she was brashly willing to do what needed to be done—regardless of the personal expense.
Maybe he could talk to Mills. See if there wasn’t some object of power she could give her. Or some facet of operations here he could give her control of. Maybe she could help Austin with Ryana. He opened his mouth to say as much, then saw her hand idly play with the lid of the box beside her. It looked familiar.
Like a nightmare he’d tried to banish long ago.
Suddenly, his dragon surged forward, eager to see through his eyes, waiting with bated breath.
Is that what I think it is? it asked him, roiling around in anticipation.
“Where did you get that?” he asked sharply, standing up.
“What?” she asked, looking up at him, then over at the box beside her. “I found it a little bit ago, in a bag. The bag was making everything smell smoky; I put it by the window.”
Damian swallowed slowly. “Andi, please come over here away from that.”
Andi blinked and then did as she was told for once, to her credit, bolting to his side. “Why?” she breathed.
“Stay right here,” he commanded, walking to the bed.
It is, it is, his dragon whispered. It is!
Damian stared at the ornately decorated box, haunted by memories of his childhood. It could be empty.
His dragon laughed cruelly. We both know it’s not.
“And…you opened it?” he asked her, looking back.
She winced. “Just once. I saw what was inside. But then I remembered what you told me about the mirrors, and I knew I shouldn’t mess with it without asking you.”
Damian picked up the box and turned toward her. He didn’t dare open it up, but if Andi had, that explained his dragon’s outburst when he’d been at the mall when it’d tried to tear him up from the inside to be free. “What did you see?” he asked her.
Andi swallowed. “It…it looked like a heart made out of crystal. Like a real heart—not a Valentine’s one—and it was beating.”
Damian inhaled and exhaled deeply. The Heart of the Dragon—the same as his father had shown him once, right after his first change—the object that bound his linage to dragon-kind. The object that granted him obscene amounts of power as a dragon, but stole his soul till he became one.
And the same object he’d come to Earth to get away from, brought here by his incapacitated sister.
Inside him, his dragon’s laughter doubled in triumph.
“Damian?” Andi came up to him. “Are you all right?”
He set the box down behind him on the bed and walked over to her and roughly pulled her against him.
Chapter 5
Andi let Damian hold her tightly. Something was clearly wrong. She didn’t know if she’d done it, or if whatever was in that box had, but he was hurting. She could see it in his face. She could feel it in his arms and in the ragged way he breathed against her. She buried herself against him, holding him tight.
After a long time when they hadn’t moved, and she wasn’t sure what to do, she asked, “What’s wrong?” He pulled himself away from her, and she looked up. His expression was so dark, so clouded, so serious—far worse than she’d ever seen before. “Damian, talk to me,” she pleaded.
She watched him pull himself from the haunted place he’d been with force, returning his attention to her. “You make me human. You keep me human.” He looked at her with a sorrow so deep that it almost broke her. “I just want to be with you.”
“You are with me.” She grabbed both of his hands, to prove her reality to him. “I’m right here, aren’t I?” But she could almost see the despair lapping at his heels and felt him fading away from her like he was walking backward into a cave. “Damian…please.” She let go of his hands to catch his face. His golden eyes were so dark, and she didn’t know what they were seeing, but it wasn’t her, and the worry she felt for him was worse than when she’d been sitting on his bed just minutes ago. “You’re scaring me.” She pulled his face down to hers and leaned up on her toes to kiss him softly. “Come back,” she whispered, and then pressed her face against his, like a cat, trying to warm him, trying to bring him home, and when that didn’t work, she looked wildly around the room, trying to figure out a way to ground him. She spotted the bathroom door.
“Come on,” she said and tugged him toward it.
He followed her inside, walking like if she weren’t pulling him he wouldn’t know how, and she felt like she was daring losing him just letting go of one of his hands to open the door. She pulled him in and kicked the door closed behind them, hoping that more distance between him and whatever had just happened would help, and then she grabbed the waistband of the silly red shorts he was wearing and yanked them down. “Step out,” she commanded, when they were on the ground around his feet, and he did as he was
told—no more, no less.
She let go of the hand she still held reluctantly. “Stay right there, okay?” she commanded and quickly shimmied out of all the clothing she’d just put back on, standing in front of him as naked as he was. But his eyes didn’t search her hungrily and his breath didn’t catch and his cock didn’t rise.
“Come on, come on,” she said, taking his hand again, pulling him into his enormous shower.
She closed the door behind him and then worked the overly complicated mechanism to make the water spray blindly, cycling through settings until she found one that stopped the wall sprayers and opened up some lever in the ceiling, to let hot water drip down on both of them like soft rain from the sky. She positioned Damian directly under the spray and watched him close his eyes.
“It’s going to be okay,” she promised him, reaching up to stroke his dark hair off his face. It was the same promise she made a thousand times at work, sometimes a thousand times a day. And each time she made it, she meant it, she was going to try the hardest she could to do whatever needed to happen to make her promise good. “Everything’s going to be all right.”
She darted out into the bathroom again and grabbed a towel, bringing it in, folding it over and over on itself until it was just a small rectangle, and she set it on the ground. “Kneel,” she commanded, pulling down on his arms.
It seemed to take forever until he did so, his knees on the soaking towel, and then he was the very image of a penitent man, his head bowed before her as the water came down. She hit the button of some soapy substance trapped in glass along the wall and took a squirt of it that smelled like lime and vanilla, and it didn’t matter what it was—shampoo or conditioner or body wash—just as long as she could touch him with it.
“You’re okay,” she repeated, the water over them both streaming down. She stroked her hands through his hair, sudsing it, scratching her nails against his scalp so he would feel her. “You’re here. You’re real.” She played her hands down his broad shoulders, kneading them along the way. She caught his chin and pulled it up, making him look at her. “Damian…do you hear me?” She pushed his hair back from his forehead with one hand. “If you hear me, I need to know.”
Dragon Fated: A Billionaire Dragon Shifter Romance (Prince of the Other Worlds) Page 9
