“It is,” her uncle answered for him, and made a dismissive sound. “And mind you, your mother was never ashamed of this, Andrea. She just knew how hard it would be for you to have a foot in both worlds. Apparently, being a woman in America is hard enough already? Who knew?” he said with a shrug.
She stared at Danny, willing him to ignore their uncle and respond to her. They’d used to be so close—before her own mother had apparently set them off on different courses. But it wasn’t too late. It couldn’t be.
Danny looked away from her…in defeat? Ashamed? Or just irritated that she was trying to meddle in his life again? “Tell her the rest, Uncle,” Danny said.
“Indeed,” Uncle Lee said. “A Joining is coming, Andi. I need you by my side more than I fear Mei Li’s ghost haunting me. Other worlds are set to overlap with ours again, and fresh terrors will fold through.”
Andi gave Danny another three seconds to do something—anything—to show her that he needed saving. Even a strong blink would do. When he didn’t, she sank in on herself and attempted to switch gears. Her phone was still recording. Maybe this was her chance to get some information for Damian, right before asking him to help pay for her future therapy. “How do you know?” she asked, tearing her eyes away from Danny to face her uncle again.
“Because members among our group have dedicated their magical lives to determining when it will happen. It is not an if, but a when.”
“Well…when?” Andi demanded, and some of the people surrounding her politely coughed in surprise.
“Soon,” her uncle told her with a tender smile. “When you live as long as we do, time becomes quite relative.”
“So, soon enough for you to rationalize killing people, but not so soon that you have to be held accountable for your actions?” She twisted as she spoke to include all of them. “You realize that’s what you’re doing, right? Killing people?”
“If we have to kill a handful of monsters so that true humans can live….” her uncle droned, and she realized he’d said the phrase before.
She whipped her head back to face him. “Are you a true human anymore?”
His eyes widened and his nostrils flared. “Probably not,” he admitted. “But I remember what I once was,” he said, tapping his chest firmly. “This was a burden placed upon me, Andrea. A gift…but also a curse. I am among the only people able to see the world for what it is, and act on what I see. And if you could just forget whatever lies the dragon you know has told you, you would see my truth, too, Andrea. Your dragon friend is secretly a beast hiding in human form. They pretend to be one of us, but when the Joining occurs, where will their loyalties lie? You think your dragon friend so noble now…have you ever seen the beast inside? You think it wouldn’t rather take the side of another monster in the chaos of a fight? It has even fewer ties to this world than the descendants that we kill do! What cause can possibly bind it to the earth when it can fly?”
A man behind her banged his hand on the table for their attention. “You never said she knew a dragon, Lee.” Andi turned in panic and saw it was the same man who said her mother’d saved him earlier.
“I didn’t need to. Because we have our own dragon, now,” her uncle said, gesturing toward Danny.
“No, you mean you have a dragon.”
“And I have been generous with his skin, have I not?” her uncle asked archly. Andi flashed her brother a look of concern and saw his shoulders flinch. How were they trapping his dragon and keeping him still? Did they sedate him? Was his dragon some other entity trapped with him, like Damian’s was, and if so, how the hell could Danny even begin to explain the tortures they were performing on him to the creature?
“I’d rather see Mei Li’s notebooks, honestly,” a man with an Australian accent said. He had a suit on as well, but unlike the rest of the men, he wore cowboy boots instead of dress shoes. He was gnawing on a toothpick that shone under the room’s subtle lighting, and Andi had a feeling it was ivory. “Why settle for the egg when you could get the emu?”
Acid flashed across Andi’s tongue as she felt like the conversation was sinking to a new and more frightening low.
“I have her notes, and I’m recreating her medicines as best I can,” her brother interjected. “Without me, you have no connection to her. And Andi’s our best chance at continuing her art.”
“What, you think intelligence has some blood link?” a dour-sounding woman sniffed. Andi twisted to see her. She was Latina, with straight black hair longer than Andi’s, and she had a glamorous golden rose brooch on the lapel of her black dress. Her tone and her gaze were disaffected and ancient, but her body was youthful, preternaturally so—she didn’t look a day older than seventeen. “If so, you should meet my nephew.”
“No. It’s that she cares,” Danny said, ignoring the rest of them to look only at his sister. “If you can make her care about something, she’ll move heaven and earth to make it happen.”
“I’m not helping you here, Danny.” It didn’t matter that her brother was right about her. She knew too many people on the opposite side, and on no planet would she ever hurt someone sheerly to gain from it. “I do care about you still, somehow. But I just can’t.”
“Not today and not tomorrow…but you will,” Danny said, advancing on her with the same intent she’d seen in him a thousand times for others. There was something poisonously charismatic about Danny. Somehow, his entire life, he’d always known how to get his own way. “Now that I’m changing, Andi-bear, I can feel it, in my bones. Eventually, even despite your best efforts, we’ll be fighting on the same side.”
“He’s right,” her uncle told her, with a knowing nod.
Andi shook her head. “No. Absolutely not. You can take your destiny trash and shove it.” She backed up, angling her way out of the tables, searching for the door. “I’m leaving now,” she declared, daring anyone to say otherwise.
“Are we really letting her leave here when she knows the location of a dragon?” Joshan pressed. His suit was every bit as nice as Damian’s. They spoke of money and personal tailoring, and if he caught Damian, the thought of what he would do to him—or what anyone else present would, given the chance—made her want to die. He stared at her, shamelessly trying to memorize her face and she threw up her hands to hide from him.
“We are,” her uncle announced. “She will come to us willingly, or not at all.” His eyes narrowed as he looked at her. “The time will come when you will be forced to choose. Us or them. I am confident you will make the right choice, Andrea, as befits your lineage and history.”
“I won’t join you. Not ever.” She clenched her hands into impotent fists. “Stop pretending that it’s destiny.”
“I can’t help it. It is. But run along now, back to your friends,” he said, dismissing her like she was still a child. It made her so angry, him always thinking he knew what was best for her—it didn’t matter how long he’d lived. But she took a step back and then another and then twisted to see the path she’d taken in so she could run back out it as she heard him go on. “As for the rest of us, I have other entertainments planned. We’ve recently caught a thorn in our side.”
Andi couldn’t help herself, mere feet from the door, she turned around to see two men dressed like janitors pulling in a cage. Inside the cage was a person.
Her stomach dropped. It was the small blonde woman from the coffee shop and again outside the hospital the night prior. And the woman had known who Damian was, after Andi said his name. Andi looked around for someone else to help her stop things and realized all the tables that edged the room were similar to Uncle Lee’s tables at home that she’d seen all the time growing up. Dining room tables. She knew what they intended to do to the woman and knew she couldn’t live with herself if she left.
“You can’t!” she shouted from the back.
The blonde woman’s head snapped in her direction, as did everyone else’s. The woman glared at Andi with intent. “Save yourself, girl. Or call a fucking frien
d.”
Andi only had a moment to decide. If she walked away, the strange woman would die, and if she called in Damian, he would. So she stalked around the edge of the room to play the only card she had, ignoring everyone else but her uncle to stand in front of him once again—only this time on his side of the table. “If you kill her, I will never come and work for you, no matter what my brother says.”
“If we kill her, we could bathe you in her blood until you were forced to drink some. Then you’d know what it was like and gladly talk about your dragon,” Joshan said lightly, smoothing a contemplative hand down his chest.
Her uncle moved almost faster than she could see, nimbly leaping over his own table and crossing to the next while flipping his pipe in his hand to hold the bowl. And then she watched in disbelief as he stabbed the pipe’s stem through the other man’s throat.
Her uncle—the man who’d given her her favorite stuffed unicorn when she was seven—had just killed someone. In front of her. And not in a pretty, dancing kung-fu movie pretend way, but in a way she was used to from the hospital. Real, brutal, and unforgiving.
The stranger slid out of his chair, sputtering, as blood sprayed wildly. Andi ran for him without thinking, although no one else present moved. By the time she reached his side, she could see he’d already lost too much blood, but it didn’t stop her from clapping her hand to his throat, feeling the last of it, hot and sticky, seep out. There was nothing she could’ve done in time, and besides, if she saved him, wouldn’t she only be endangering Damian?
Her uncle didn’t even clean the man’s blood off of his pipe stem before putting it back into his mouth to talk around it. “No one threatens my niece,” he warned the rest of the people present, and then turned toward her, her kneeling near his feet. “Does it matter to you that this woman has killed many of my friends?” he asked her.
“No,” she said, wiping her hand off roughly on the dead man’s wool suit jacket. “Was he a friend?” she asked, pointing with her bloody hand at the man on the floor.
A smile fluttered across her uncle’s face at realizing he’d been caught. “Not much of one, no.”
Chapter 2
Damian sat stunned for the length of a breath listening to what sounded like Andi betraying him.
“That is your woman?” His sister turned toward him, green eyes wide and flashing with anger. She’d intuited things by the way he’d frozen the second he heard Andi speaking on their intercom. Everyone else in the SUV looked to him for instruction, one by one.
“She’s a traitor!” Ryana went on—the only one not shocked into silence, her voice rising in volume. “You have to kill her, Damian, right away. This kind of insubordination cannot be allowed to stand!”
Out of his peripheral vision he saw Austin reach out and clamp a hand down over Ryana’s mouth, stilling in her sheer surprise.
But his sister wasn’t wrong. The Hunter they’d been tracking for a few days had led them here and now they were listening in to Andi—his woman, his mate—consorting with the enemy. It didn’t matter that she was trying to refute the other Hunters. The mere fact that she was here and she hadn’t told him she was coming—she’d lied to him. He should’ve known better. He’d been so blinded by his feelings for her, but looking back, of course something had changed that night when they’d first used her as bait to lure her uncle, when he’d kidnapped her on his yacht. When Andi had pushed him away afterward and told him that she wouldn’t see him again until midnight tonight, how could he not know? Because how precise that’d been of her. Precisely when this charade would be finished.
Andi had lied to him and put him through the worst two days of his life—all of him and his dragon longing for her, and for what? So that she could betray him here, with Hunters? He felt the gemstone he’d had Mills make for her—from his own flesh!—trapped in his pocket against his thigh and it felt like it burned him.
Mills’s hand reached out for his shoulder and caught it, squeezing it tightly. “Damian,” she said, her voice low and sensible.
“No,” he disagreed. He didn’t want to hear what wise things she would say in an attempt to talk him down. He just wanted to be pissed. They all listened in to the rest of the conversation as Ryana angrily shoved Austin away.
“You fell for a human whose mother was a servant?” She made a sound of extreme disgust.
Over the intercom, Andi’s story continued. About her uncle, mother, and brother—just one big happy Hunter family.
Then the janitor they were tracing must’ve gotten closer because they could hear her uncle intone at full volume: if you could just forget whatever lies the dragon you know has told you, you would see my truth too, Andrea. Your dragon friend is secretly a beast hiding in human form. They pretend to be one of us, but when the Joining occurs, where will their loyalties lie? You think your dragon friend so noble now…have you ever seen the beast inside? You think it wouldn’t rather take the side of another monster in the chaos of a fight? It has even fewer ties to this world than the descendants that we kill do! What cause can possibly bind it to the earth when it can fly?
And Damian felt the part of his chest that he hadn’t gouged out with his teeth to make a living gemstone for Andi tighten, as though he were biting himself still. And worse yet, the janitor moved away, so he couldn’t hear her response.
Did she defend him? Or did she think what her uncle said was true?
Had her opinion of him changed?
Did it matter now he knew she was capable of lying?
“I know she loves you Damian; I see it in her aura,” Mills said.
“Love?” Ryana asked, her voice going high. “Oh no, no, no.” She maneuvered around to face him in the SUV, crouching in the wheel well, tearing a higher slit in her ornately beaded evening dress, beads scattering across the floor as she attempted to get into his line of sight. “No. It doesn’t matter how you feel—how strong you think you are—you do not love a simpleminded, weak skinned human. It would be like me saying I was in love with a puppy. Father would’ve already—”
“Ryana!” he shouted, and the SUV was quiet. “I am not my father.”
“Clearly,” Ryana sneered, then looked over at Austin. “Touch me again without permission and I’ll have Lyka peck your eyes out.”
A fire lit in Austin’s eyes—what Damian knew was the thrill of making future bad decisions. The undaunted werewolf gave Ryana a challenging leer and readied to try his luck as Zach waved his hands trying to bat the tension out of the air and stop his brother’s foolishness. “Damian, we need a plan.”
“I’ve infiltrated the rest of the vehicles here that have Bluetooth,” Jamison announced. “We’ll know where they go. I suggest that we attempt taking them one by one.”
“Why?” Ryana asked impatiently.
“Because they do have a dragon in there. We’re significantly outnumbered, and—” Zach jerked his chin at Damian.
“I do not need your pity. And right now, I would very much enjoy fucking things up.” He felt his dragon surge inside him, summoned by the thought of violence. If Andi’s uncle wanted to see what kind of monster he was, that could be arranged.
“As confident as I am that you could kill Andi’s brother, I’m not sure that’d be so good for your relationship, Damian,” Mills said, trying to calm him.
The janitor’s phone came into range again, a stranger’s voice suddenly filled the car: “Save yourself, girl. Or call a fucking friend.”
They each looked to one another again.
“Is that…Stella?” Zach guessed, and Damian watched the werewolf’s knuckles go white as he clenched his hands into fists.
“Max, start the car,” Austin quipped, as his brother looked back at him, stricken. “I’m kidding,” he reassured him. “You need me, let’s go,” Austin said, putting one hand on his gun and the other on the SUV’s door.
“I can’t untangle centuries of cruelty here, uncle. I can only say what I know is right, right now. If you hurt her, you
might as well be hurting me,” they heard Andi proclaim. “I have been hurt a lot lately…and I am growing tired of forgiveness.”
There was a pregnant pause wherein they all held their breath as one.
“Very well. Release the girl.”
“You can’t be serious,” said someone else, unknown.
“Please don’t make me kill you, too,” said Andi’s uncle. Not a threat, just a pleasant suggestion.
They all heard the sound of groans and then her uncle addressed Andi again. “Andrea, the sooner you take your mother’s place, the happier you’ll be. You shouldn’t fight it.”
Andi’s voice came over, as clear as Damian’s heart was dark. “I don’t care what you think you know. You don’t know my destiny…or me.”
That makes two of us, Damian thought.
“Did they hurt you?” Andi asked the strange woman walking beside her for the twentieth time. Andi was still in the outfit she’d last worn at her mother’s funeral years ago: black slacks, black flats, and a black silk shirt, with just enough makeup on to cover up her current level of exhaustion.
Whereas the woman lightly limping beside her was in street gear: a purple sweat shirt, short-shorts, and tennis shoes, with blonde hair pulled up into a messy bun. Her shorts were so short and her skin so pale it was easy for Andi to see the large bruise spreading on one leg, even underneath the tattoos she had sweeping down her thighs, a trail of spinning nebulas and stars.
“Are you sure you’re okay?” Andi pressed.
The woman rolled her eyes and straightened herself to walk normally. “I’m fine. Like I already told you.”
Andi didn’t believe that for a second. She knew the woman wasn’t human; otherwise, her uncle wouldn’t have been interested in her, so she could only imagine how hard she’d been hit to make her limp. “Who are you? How did you know who I was? Why were you following me?”
Dragon Mated: Sexy Urban Fantasy Romance (Prince of the Other Worlds Book 4) Page 2
