The Protector (Fire's Edge)

by Abigail Owen

  The next thought went out to his replacement on sky duty. “Elijah—”

  “In the first spot.” Younger than William but having made his first shift sooner in his life, it was so easy to forget Elijah was a kid until he reminded you. Damned if the young green dragon hadn’t earned Levi’s respect by sticking with this ragtag family. After kicking him out, now that Elijah had proven himself, his old community were willing to take him back. How convenient for them. Fear had a lot to answer for.

  Here he was instead. Protecting his real family.

  A decision that Levi could stand behind a hundred percent. As quietly as he could, given his larger form, Levi landed in one of the two spots they’d designated for shifting when they’d scouted this location. Ignoring the exhaustion dragging at each motion—he always took the longest patrol—he shifted.

  Immediately, Elijah stepped out of the trees in human form and began his own shift in order to take his patrol in the skies.

  “Nothing out there,” he said to the younger dragon. “But don’t just focus on the south of us. They can easily circle around and come from any other direction.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Levi’s lips hitched. “This isn’t the military. You can call me Levi.”

  Dark-rimmed green eyes widened. “I don’t think so, sir.”

  Levi’s grin felt like it was cutting new canyons through his tired face. Damn he needed sleep, or he’d be useless if something did happen. With a nod at Elijah, he made his way up the side of the mountain and back down the other side to the small flat space beside running water where they’d set up.

  He headed straight for the black tent at the edge of the group. If anyone came at them from the ground, they’d hit him first.

  Trying to not wake the boys around him, he carefully unzipped the flap that acted as a door. Leaving his shoes outside, he stepped in and zipped the door closed, then dropped on top of the sleeping bags he’d spread out to make more of a double bed than two singles. Wishful thinking, waiting for Lyndi. He could almost imagine her springtime scent in here. Three days with very little sleep and flying long distances was wearing on him, even with his training. He’d be better after a few hours of shut-eye and a gallon of coffee.

  Only they hadn’t brought coffee. Some damn thing about stunting growing boys’ growth and if it was just for one person it wasn’t worth hauling around. Shit.

  He dropped onto his makeshift bed and flung an arm over his eyes. Only, no matter how exhaustion dragged at him, he couldn’t make himself sleep.

  Lyndi was out there, risking her life for a total stranger—which was the calling of an enforcer, and he’d supported her decision to go. Not that he’d liked it. Watching her fly away with Deep had been the hardest damn thing he’d ever done in his life. Every protective instinct had screamed against it.

  Hell, he’d had to make her leave first or his dragon wouldn’t have let her go.

  If she was caught…if Tineen dared to touch her…Levi had no doubt that if he didn’t kill the black dragon, his dragon would. She would never…fucking never…be that man’s mate. Which was yet another problem with sleeping. His dragon refused to settle. Not until they had her back.

  “Come back to me, min eneste,” he whispered.

  …

  Lyndi snorted herself back awake, bobbling in the air. She needed to land again soon, but she was so close. So close. She had to be.

  But she’d also pushed herself maybe longer and farther than she should have.

  After Deep made her go—her heart contracted at the memory, hoping he was all right—she’d flown for hours and hours, stopping only long enough to rest a short while. She’d done everything Rune had taught her. Everything she and Levi had talked about to mask her tracks, lay false trails, and hide where she was really headed. If she’d done her job right—Deep did, too, drawing them away from the way she’d gone—she should be untraceable.

  Days on her own with her grief and fear, looking over her shoulder every gods damned second.

  “Levi.” She sent the thought out.

  This was part of the plan. She knew generally where they’d be, but not exactly. She’d been calling him mentally for most of the night. She’d sort of stopped expecting an answer.

  “Lyndi.”

  She bobbled in the air again, exhaustion gone for a second, banished by the sound of his voice and the sudden need to see his face.

  “Thank the gods. Are you okay?” he asked.

  “I’m fine.” Except Tineen was still alive and Deep was out there alone. “The boys?”

  “Safe.”

  She took a deep breath. She’d take every victory she could get. “Where do I go?”

  Quickly he determined what she could see from the sky and then relayed instructions. She’d timed her arrival well. Levi had been traveling nights and they’d just gone to sleep for the day. A tiny burst of golden fire caught her eye in the forest below, a large clearing nearby.

  “I saw you.”

  She aimed at the spot, landed in a clearing, and caught his scent. Something about him smelled like home, and memories, and suddenly everything that had led up to this—his being recalled, her being assigned Tineen as a mate, having to run with the boys—all hit her at once. She shifted and walked toward the man at the other end of the clearing.

  The second she saw his face, she crumpled, the exhaustion she’d been fighting to get here faster finally hitting hard.

  She had no idea how fast he could move until that moment, because he managed to catch her on the way down, wrapping his arms around her, tucking her face into the crook of his neck.

  “I was going to kill Tineen, only he wasn’t there,” she whispered.

  Levi tensed against her. “I should have guessed.” He cupped the back of her head and held her. “The most important thing is you’re safe.”

  She nodded against him. “I know. I just…I could have ended this.”

  “I get it.” She could feel him smiling against her hair. “I want that bastard dead, too. Did you get the mate out?”

  “Yes.”

  He nodded and then they just sort of settled. He held her, seeming to be in no hurry to move them. Then he listened as she told him. Everything. Including her plan to take Tineen out of the equation so she could keep her boys safe. He didn’t like it, but he didn’t yell at her about it, either. Just ran his hand over her hair and held her, and that somehow lightened the load.

  Not that the worry or the problems were gone by a long shot. But she was here now, they were all safe for the moment, with Levi, until he had to leave for his clan, and with her boys who were alive and well.

  Rest. And then maybe she could face this better.

  “Come on,” he said.

  As though he knew exactly what she needed, Levi got them up and into camp. “The boys are all asleep,” he said. “We’ll let them know you’re here when it’s time to get up.”

  He got her into their tent and lay down with her, wrapping an arm around her stomach to pull her in tight to his body.

  “Sleep. I won’t let anything hurt you.”

  …

  Levi didn’t close his eyes, his gaze on the woman who’d claimed his heart over two hundred years ago. Who’d never shown weakness. Ever. Not in front of others at least. But she’d trusted him enough to show him her frustrations and fears and exhaustion, not to mention that damn plan to take out an enforcer alpha on her own—something she would have tried to hide from him before—and his heart had rejoiced that she would turn to him in that moment, in that way.

  He thought she was asleep, but suddenly, Lyndi shimmied around in his arms until she turned over to face him. Sneaking a hand between them, she feathered a touch over his face, no doubt tracing the lines of tiredness. “You look as bad as I feel.”

  He huffed a laugh. “It’s been rough.
”

  “Let me guess, you’ve been taking most of the patrols?”

  He shrugged. “I couldn’t sleep without you next to me anyway.”

  She shook her head at that. “Thank you. For keeping them safe,” she whispered.

  “Of course,” he said on a sigh, tipping his head back. “Another day or two, when I’m satisfied the trail is cold and we haven’t been tracked and neither have you, and I’ll rest.”

  His eyes were closed so he missed her expression. He didn’t miss the speaking silence.

  “You have a plan, don’t you?” she asked quietly. “Of where the boys and I should hide.”

  They’d only talked deep Alaska so far. Wilderness territory. He smiled though he kept his eyes closed. “I was part of the team that explored the mountains up here for potential headquarters.”

  “Oh, really?”

  “Yup. A while back.” Just before Lyndi exploded into his life.

  “You know of a mountain we can use?” The hope in her voice was better than a thousand gallons of coffee. So was holding her and knowing she was safe. She’d been going to kill Tineen. He’d kept how much that scared the shit out of him to himself. This woman was hell to pay on his heart.

  “It’s rough and is going to take work to both make it livable and defensible, but…yeah.”

  A sharp pinch to his bicep had him flashing his eyes open. “Ow.”

  He encountered a scowl on his lover’s face. “You should have told me.”

  “If we were followed, it wouldn’t have worked. Plan B.”

  “You have a plan B?” she asked slowly.

  “Min eneste, I have at least to plan D.”

  He closed his eyes again, mostly because he was too tired to keep them open. Lyndi was here now. In his arms.

  “Once we’re in this mountain, you’re sharing those other plans.” A demand, not a request.

  “Yes, ma’am.” He tipped his head back to not breathe on her as he yawned hard, then snuggled back into her.

  “What does min eneste mean?”

  He scooped her closer, resting his chin on the top of her head. “I wondered when you’d ask about that.”

  His words were definitely slurring now as a deeper sleep reached out soft fingers, coaxing him under.

  “We’ve been a little busy,” she grumbled into his chest.

  He chuckled but couldn’t seem to pull the answer from his mind for her.

  “Why are you doing this?” she whispered.

  The vulnerability in that question slipped through the darkness, wrapping around his heart, and he tightened his arms around her in response. “Because it took me forever to find you.”

  “Find me?”

  He snuggled deeper into her, inhaling her warm scent, content in a way he couldn’t ever remember being. “A dragon might never find his mate.”

  He wasn’t sure if he said the words aloud or just thought them. A vague frisson of worry wormed its way into his thoughts, but he was too far down the road to sleep to give it much credence.

  …

  Mate.

  Lyndi knelt on the ground, her sleeping bag folded and ready to roll in front of her. It had been for a solid five minutes at least. Because she was too busy with her thoughts and covertly watching Levi across their camp as they were breaking everything down and returning the area to the pristine state it had been before they arrived.

  The boys had been elated by her arrival, practically forcing Levi out of the way in their rush to hug her. He’d laughed at her over their heads, and she might remember that moment forever.

  Now, fed and dressed, they needed to go. Levi’s easy grin was in evidence, as if they weren’t running for their lives and doing everything they could to remove any evidence of their being here, not to be responsible stewards of nature but to hide their tracks from anyone following. He shoved Elijah in the arm, making her serious kiddo laugh. Every single one of her boys watched him with a form of hero worship, and Lyndi had to admit she got why.

  In a few short days, he’d obviously taught them so much. Things she wished her boys didn’t need to know—evasion, setting false trails, setting up defensive perimeters and patrols, leaving as small a footprint as seventeen people on the run could. Levi also listened. She could tell by the way they talked to him and asked him questions. Most of her kids, before she’d found them, had been forced to keep themselves alive in a world that wanted them dead. Abandoned and alone. They weren’t stupid or naive.

  In fact, apparently the reason they now traveled with a host of human trash and other items was because Elijah had shared how, after he’d been kicked out of his community, he’d hid his tracks by pretending to be ignorant humans leaving messy campsites. Levi, it seemed, had listened, so now half the time they did that instead of the full erasure of their existence. Lyndi swore Elijah had stood taller with extra pride when Levi explained it to her.

  He said mate.

  He’d been slurring his words as he’d fallen into a hard sleep, but a girl didn’t miss the word mate no matter how exhausted she was herself. He said something about finding her and how a dragon might not find his mate.

  What the hell did that mean?

  That he thought she was his mate? Or that he was willing to give up the dream of finding his true mate, the woman the fates had destined to be his, in order to be with Lyndi because he thought he’d found something special with her?

  Does it matter? He’s getting us to a mountain and then leaving.

  The pall of that realization, which hadn’t been entirely real until now, hung over every moment. As though she was waiting for him to suddenly fly away and be like, “See ya.” Her dragon gnashed her teeth at Lyndi. She hadn’t been happy with her a lot lately.

  Not really, Lyndi answered her own question. Because either way she looked at it, Levi was thinking of giving up the most precious thing in his life—a blessing every dragon shifter kept going through this long life with the desperate hope of finding.

  And he’d turn his back on that. For her. When she was halfway around the world, sterile, and on the run.

  Gods help her.

  When she’d been old enough to understand what she was—a female-born dragon shifter—and that made her…wrong—a word others used—and what that meant, she’d made a vow to herself. She would never, ever mate a dragon shifter. Without the bond that turning a mate created, she and Levi would only be a pale version of what was possible. A facsimile of the real thing. Worse, without that bond, their mating wouldn’t extend his life. Or hers, but she’d always known her life would be cut short.

  Lyndi knew herself, even when she’d been young. She would need to love to consider mating at all. Love on both sides. But how could she love someone that way and allow him to sacrifice perfection for something so much…less?

  She knew she couldn’t. Even then.

  Now, looking at Levi, the reality of this truth was so much harder to live. This was why she’d held him at arm’s length, sniped at him, kept him solidly in the annoying older brother box, for decades. Centuries.

  Because she’d fallen in love with him a long time ago and part of her had known it would hurt this much when she finally realized the truth.

  A wail of anguish rose silently from a place buried so deep inside her, she thought the sound might break her, even as she contained it inside, clamping her lips shut. Her dragon lifted her head and howled, echoing the pain of the loss they were about to go through together. A thousand times worse than any other loss in her life.

  Oh gods. How am I going to survive this?

  Levi, still grinning, turned his head and caught her stare. Lyndi tried to pull off a casual smile and went back to rolling her sleeping bag into the ultra-small bundle it could become.

  Two boots moved into her line of sight. “Something on your mind?”

 
I can’t let you go.

  Tomorrow, the coward in her justified. After they found the mountain and relative safety. Once she could get a grip on herself, then she’d cut the ties and send him on his way to do his duty for his king.

  She shook her head, not looking up as she focused on her task. Except she knew if she didn’t give him a reason for her staring a second ago, he’d keep poking. “I was just thinking you’re good with the boys.”

  Levi squatted down beside her, broad shoulders filling her vision. “Finally appreciating my assets, huh?” he teased.

  Gods, that crooked, goofy grin might be what she’d miss most about him. “I’ve always appreciated you.”

  Damn. That came out way too honest, the throaty quality to her voice revealing more of her emotions than she wished.

  Levi’s eyebrows shot up. “Could’ve fooled me.”

  At the odd note in his voice, Lyndi paused what she was doing to look at him, really look, more closely. Maybe she wasn’t the only one vulnerable here. No matter what happened between them tomorrow, she couldn’t let him keep thinking that she’d hated him all this time.

  “Any time Drake went out on a call…I felt worlds better if you were part of the group going with him.”

  Levi blinked at her. “You did?” he said slowly, as though he was rolling her words around in his mind and not making sense of them.

  She didn’t look away, trying to let him see how much she meant this. “Your protective instincts might be a pain in the ass when you get in my way or speak a little too much truth.”

  He huffed. “Don’t tiptoe around my feelings or anything.”

  “But…” She leaned forward, needing him to truly hear her. “Drake’s a loner and can be an asshole. He needs someone to have his back regardless. I knew that you would die before letting anything happen to a single one of your teammates.”

  The teasing light faded from his eyes, replaced by a searching frown. Gods, didn’t he know who he was?

  “You are the anchor for this team. This family. Don’t you know that?”

  “You…really mean that.” He sounded baffled, which was this side of adorable.