by Riley Storm
“Is that from you or me?” she asked.
Barton just whined. He loved the water, but only when it was in lake or river form. Baths and showers were not his thing, even if he seemed to understand they were necessary.
“Okay fine, maybe it is me,” she said, keeping the conversation with her dog going.
It was easier than facing the events that had occurred that night.
Her house was gone.
Carla reached out to steady herself on the shower wall. Barton must have picked up on her mood swing because he was suddenly right at her side, ignoring the stream of water to help steady her legs as well.
“Thanks, boy,” she said, awkwardly moving around so that she could sit on the lip of the shower. Some extra water would get out, but that was the least of her concerns.
Her neighbor Patty had given her some clothes and offered to let Carla stay with her, but they had a newborn, and once she got over the shock, Carla knew she would want to sleep. Plus she couldn’t put that extra burden on a set of parents still adapting to life as a family of three. So she’d declined, and brought Barton to one of the two hotels in town. It had cost her an extra fifty bucks for the dog, but she didn’t care.
“He had horns,” she said quietly to herself. “Horns. And gold on his skin, like, like scales.”
Every time she closed her eyes, Carla was confronted with the vision. The golden man holding the flaming beam over his head, horns jutting from his forehead, yellow eyes focused on her.
And he was speaking in Pace’s voice.
“Barton, am I going crazy?” she asked.
Her pup came closer, forcing his head between her arms and face and giving her some kisses. His tail wagged back and forth, thumping against the tub, splashing water everywhere.
“Okay, okay!” she said, somehow finding it in her to laugh at her dog’s antics. “Thanks boy. Thank you, yes, you’re the best. You’re a good boy.” She gave him a solid pat on his sopping wet flank.
“I wish you could talk,” she said after a moment, scratching behind Barton’s ears, looking into his big puppy-like brown eyes. “Then you could tell me if I saw what I think I saw. And what it means.”
Barton whined.
“Yeah. I think it was real too,” she said quietly as water continued to fall over them. “I saw it. I heard it. But Barton boy, I felt it. I felt his body change. It was real, it was solid, I swear my life on it!”
The dog barked excitedly as her voice rose. Carla frowned. “You’re right. He did save my life, didn’t he? But how did the fire get started? You saw the way the fire parted around him. He was controlling it. Did that mean he lit it? What if the entire thing was a ploy to get me to trust him?”
Barton whined and lowered his head. Not for the first time, she wondered just how much dogs could actually understand. Or was his reaction just based on her own undercurrent of doubt?
It just didn’t feel right, the thought that Pace would have tried to harm them. She couldn’t prove it, but every time her mind returned to that thought, she felt a sense of wrongness. Like it didn’t belong, didn’t fit in the puzzle in her mind.
“What about the fire going out?” she asked, consulting once again her dog. “What about that? I saw him reach out to the house and like, pull on something Barton B. Frazer, I swear it. What does that mean? Did he put the fire out, somehow?”
That didn’t make any sense. Just like the idea that Pace had lit the fire to get into her good books. They had just slept together. Well, more like she’d had her brains screwed out, in every good way imaginable. Pace had been in all of her books, at that point. He didn’t need anything else.
“It came out of nowhere,” she said, speaking her thoughts out loud to Barton, using him as a sounding board. He couldn’t reply. Instead, he started lapping at the water falling from the shower head, trying to eat it.
What an idiot. God, I love that dog.
“It moved so fast, boy. So fast.” An idea came to her. If Pace could control fire—
“I’ll be danged!” she cried out, startling her dog, who tried to jump, slipped and fell into a heap on the floor of the bathtub, where he was promptly even more thoroughly soaked.
Carla barely noticed. She knew what had happened now. Someone had tried to kill her.
Someone like Pace.
All of a sudden, the secrets about him made sense. The reluctance to tell her everything, the feeling that he was holding something giant back. It all made sense!
Everything just clicked! The destroyed support beam in the crime scene. The disappearance of their quarry up on the mountain.
“Yes, of course, that has to be it. Someone else like Pace. He was fighting with one of his own kind. Whatever they are.”
Barton barked at her. He was sitting up again, the shower splashing right over his face. He did not look impressed.
“Okay, let’s get you out of here,” she said, shutting off the water. “We need to get dried off, fast.”
Carla had some questions that needed answering, and she wasn’t going to get them from standing in the shower, that was for sure. It took her some time, and every towel in her room, but she got the dog dry.
That left no towels for her. No regular-sized ones at least. Using a pair of washcloths, she dried her body, and then a hand towel was stretched to the limits to try and contain most of her hair.
With all that done, she picked up the hotel phone and focused for a moment. She hadn’t added Pace as a contact to her cell phone yet. So she’d had to remember his number when calling him from the station.
But the line continued to ring.
“Come on, Pace, pick up. Please, I need to talk to you,” she said as his voicemail played. “Call me back, Pace. Please. We need to talk.”
Of course he didn’t want to talk to her. Why would he, after the way she’d reacted to learning his secret? Carla slapped the wall in frustration. She’d messed it all up.
There was no way Pace would want to see her, even if she drove up to his home and rang the doorbell. They wouldn’t even open the gate.
“What do I do now, boy?” she asked, sinking back onto the bed.
Barton came up and just lay his head on her lap. His tail flicked back and forth, swiping at the bedside table with each wide arc. Carla watched it go back and forth, before her eyes were drawn to the item on the table that his tail kept hitting.
The alarm clock.
“Yeah, you’re right,” she said quietly. “I’m running out of time. I need to track down this bad guy, and bring him in. Otherwise, all of this would be for naught, wouldn’t it?”
Barton gave her a big kiss.
“But how do I do that?” she said with a sigh, flopping back onto the bed.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Pace
Stone crunched and snapped as he landed hard, taking out his temper on the courtyard of Clan Aterna’s home. Others would have felt his landing, he was sure, but as Pace shifted back into his human form, wings retracting, scales disappearing back under his skin, he simply did not care.
“I’m going to kill him!” he raged as Logan came out of the house, his younger brother Xavier at his side. “I swear, I’m going to rip him limb from limb and paint the mountains with his blood!”
Logan slowed to a halt, giving the angry shifter some distance.
Pace smacked a fist into his open palm, flames bursting into light, easily visible in the dark of night. “He’s dead.”
“Who’s dead?” Logan asked. “Why are they dead?”
“I don’t know who it is. But the dragon who tried to rob us. I will end him for what he did tonight.”
Others were emerging now. Emma came out at Asher’s side. The mated pair exchanged a look, then Emma came running up to him.
“Pace, what’s going on?” she asked. “Talk to me.”
He raged impotently, stalking back and forth, mumbling to himself angrily about the things he would do. The voices of his friends, of his family, the
y weren’t getting through to him.
Pace was blocking it out. It was easier this way. Never any pain to feel, if you didn’t let anyone get close to you, didn’t let them matter to you. Then when they inevitably left, like his parents had to return to the Clan Aterna homelands in Europe, it wouldn’t hurt as much.
Hands gripped his shoulders, halting him in his tracks. Looking up, he met Emma’s concerned look.
“Hey, little brother,” she said with a smile. “You still in there?”
“He tried to kill us tonight,” Pace said in a whispered fury, his body trembling with rage that he had nowhere to direct. “That bastard tried to kill us.”
“Are you okay?” Emma asked, looking over her shoulder at Logan.
The head of Clan Aterna in Five Peaks came closer, half replacing Emma in front of him.
“You need to get a control of yourself, Pace,” the mighty dragon shifter said, giving his shoulder a tight squeeze. “Tell us what happened. We can help you. We’re here to help you.”
“Her house,” Pace said, shaking his head, remembering the desperate flight to the front door. “It was on fire. I was with her.”
He looked up, finding Emma. “You would have been so proud of me, sis. I made a move.”
Emma smiled sadly. “I am proud of you Pace. Always have been. But tell us everything.”
“We were in her bed, relaxing. Everything was great,” he said quietly, leaving out the gory details. “Then I smelled smoke. The next moment, the house was blazing around us. I had to get her out of there, you know. I had to. And her dog. Barton, the best dog. Such a good boy. I had to save them.”
“Did you?” Emma asked nervously, wringing her hands.
“Yes,” he said, nodding his head, eyes unfocusing as he re-lived that last few moments.
He shivered at the memory of Carla, the fear in those beautiful jade eyes. Fear that was, for the first time he could remember, directed at him. That was caused by him.
“That’s good, Pace! I’m so glad to hear that,” Emma said.
“Yes. I saved them,” he repeated hauntingly, looking up, meeting Emma’s gaze. “But at what cost?” he whispered.
“What do you mean?”
“She knows,” he said quietly. “She knows about me. About what I am. She saw part of my other side.”
There was silence. Everyone knew what that meant, what the secret of their heritage getting out could do, if someone told the wrong people.
“It didn’t go well, I take it?” Logan asked quietly.
“I was beginning to think about telling her, about showing her the real me,” Pace growled. “But this asshole stole that from me. He forced me to do it, in the worst kind of way. She had no idea, there was no time! The house just went up.”
There was silence from the others. Most every one of them, at least those that were mated to human women, had gone through something like this at some point. The vast majority had done so when the time was right, and they had been able to prepare their mates, to explain to them that not everything was quite as it seemed.
Pace hadn’t had that, and now Carla was forever going to think of him as some sort of demonic creature. She would never understand that he’d done what he did for her. To save her.
“I’m going to find this asshole,” Pace said. “The one who took that away from me. Who took her away from me. I’m going to find him, and I’m going to kill him. Dragon Council or not, I will break his neck.”
The other dragons—more than a few had come out at the commotion now—snarled their agreement. They understood his pain, in a way, understood the emotions. Every dragon carried it within them, the fear that upon revealing what they truly were, that they would be rejected by the one they cared about enough to tell. It was a terrible fear, and not something often talked about, but it existed, weighing at the back of everyone’s mind.
“Okay now,” a new voice said, cutting through the angry sentiment. “Let’s think this through a bit.”
Pace’s eyes found the speaker, Clarice, Logan’s mate. She came up to him.
“You need to make a decision here, Pace. An important one.”
“His neck. That’s how I’ll do it,” he said. “I’ve already made that choice.”
“Dragon smash. Dragon break. Dragon destroy,” Clarice said in as deep a voice as possible, making slow-motion punching motions. “Yeah, yeah, trust me, we women get it. But if you want to win this woman back, to show her that you are the man she thought she knew, just with some other skills, then you need to do this by her rules.”
Pace frowned. “What are you talking about?” He liked the idea of winning Carla back, of showing her that he wasn’t the bad guy. That he cared about her. A lot.
“She’s a police officer, you dimwit. You need to do this by her book. By the law that humans follow. Which means tracking him down, and bringing him to justice. Not just killing him in some horrible manner, even if he deserves it.”
Pace growled angrily. He didn’t like it. But it made sense. If he wanted to show her that he wasn’t a monster, then he had to act like he wasn’t one, in the way she wanted to see.
“How?” he asked, lost for ideas. “I know he’s a dragon shifter. A fire dragon at that, but that doesn’t help me much. None of the other clans are talking about one of their own being missing or doing weird stuff. Nobody seems to know who this guy is.”
Asher spoke up now. “Go over everything you know. Retrace all your steps, examine everything again. If you haven’t looked over something, then start there, though I’m sure everything has been gone over with a fine comb. But somewhere, he’s missed something.
“The farmhouse,” he said slowly. “We never went back there. We chased the car, and got so focused on that. If he was using it as a hideout, maybe he left something there. Idiot!”
They had gotten so wrapped up in the chase, and then pulling the jeep apart, that they had sort of forgotten the house as a whole. That was sloppy, and Pace blamed himself for it. He should have been on top of that.
“First thing in the morning, I’m going back there,” he grumbled.
“Might wanna shower and get some clothes,” Logan muttered, reminding him that he was buck naked after his flight back into the mountains.
Shifting was hell on clothes.
“Yeah. Also, I’m gonna need a ride back to Carla’s place. My truck is parked out front still,” he said.
“I’ll take you,” Asher said. “Gotta make a trip up to Kennewick falls to see her parents tomorrow anyway. We’ll just drop you off.”
He nodded his thanks.
Tomorrow, he would find the asshole responsible for everything, and he would bring them to justice. That would show Carla he was the real deal.
Maybe then she would be willing listen to what he had to say without running in fear…
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Carla
DAY FIVE
The morning had been exhausting. Calling the station, telling everyone what had happened, filing a report. By the time she’d gotten a spare uniform, spare keys and pulled out of the driveway, leaving her burnt house behind, she was ready to go back to bed.
Two cups of coffee had fixed that in a hurry.
Now she was out on the road, heading to her next destination. The one place that she hadn’t been over yet.
Her car pulled off the road and through the line of trees, revealing the familiar barn and farmhouse to her.
That wasn’t all though. Parked right out front of the farmhouse was an instantly recognizable white truck.
“Frig.”
The car rolled to a halt as she slowly pushed down on the brakes, her eyes glued to the vehicle in front of her. She hadn’t expected this, hadn’t prepared for it, and in all honesty, Carla wasn’t entirely sure she was ready for this.
“What is he doing here?” she asked the empty car.
Probably the same thing you are.
Biting her lip, Carla debated her options. If Pace r
eally was inside, this would be her chance, her opportunity to question him. Alone, without anyone around.
If she was wrong though, if Pace wasn’t one of the good guys, then she could be placing herself in mortal danger by those same facts. She was out here without backup, and nobody would get here in time. It was a hard decision to make, and Carla sat in her car for long minutes deliberating which course she would take.
Curiosity won out in the end though.
I have to know if what I saw was real.
Getting out of her car, she closed the door and walked forward. He was here somewhere, and she didn’t want him sneaking up on her. Carla had to see him coming, she needed time to process it all.
She was halfway to the house when he emerged from the front door, coming to an abrupt halt as he noticed her standing there on the front yard. Neither of them said anything, just watching the other, looking. Waiting.
“I just—”
“There’s something—”
They both spoke at the same time, then stopped.
“Go ahea—”
“You fir—”
Pace gestured at her in invitation. “You probably have a lot of questions,” he said quietly, his voice barely carrying to her. “You go first.”
“A few,” she admitted, finding her voice. “Just a few.”
“Everything you saw was real,” he said. “You aren’t going crazy.”
She nodded slowly. “Well those were the two biggest ones.”
Pace smiled tightly. “Yeah. We’ve heard them a few times before.”
“We?” she asked.
“Me and those like me,” he said slowly. “Anytime our secret is revealed, it is usually, um, difficult, for normal humans to accept.”
“So you aren’t human?” she asked. “Are you like, an alien? Is there a little green man inside you, controlling you? Is this just some sort of external bodysuit designed to make you look human?”
Pace recoiled in surprise, and then laughter. “Absolutely not. Completely flesh and blood, from this planet. There’s not a tiny man sitting where my brain should be pulling levers, punching buttons and cursing at the engineer who designed the horrible layout of controls.”
