Bonded to the Dragon: The Lick of Fire Collection: Dragon Lovers

by Lockharte, Kara

  I sat there, thinking about what he said. My powers? Wasn’t he supposed to be in control of my powers? Wasn’t that the whole point of him having the ring?

  I followed him out of the car and smelled something disgusting. I hated that I knew what it was.

  There were long scratches on the vehicle’s black paint. Wasn’t his car magic?

  “Why does the outside of the car reek of brain and spinal fluid?”

  He staggered for a moment, then straightened, as if he was trying to hide it. “I told you, I ran into some…things,” he said, walking away from me. “I took care of them.”

  There was definitely more he wasn’t telling me. “What things?”

  “Things you don’t need to concern yourself with.”

  “Look, you said you’d rather have a willing partner. So treat me like one.”

  He stared at me as if I were speaking a foreign language. “Fine. Now if you please, partner, you’re in my way.”

  I glanced up and saw the diner he’d brought us to.

  Holy crap. I knew this diner. Ida’s Pancakes.

  “Hungry?” he asked.

  “I don’t eat,” I said, thinking of the memories I had in this place. Had he “seen” this place in my memories too? I wanted to ask him, but then I’d end up having another long conversation about my past. He had already far too much information on me as it was.

  I walked back to the car, having no desire to ever go into this diner again. “Haven’t eaten since I was brought back. You go ahead.”

  He looked at me, trying to assess my intentions.

  I shrugged. Either he trusted me or he didn’t.

  He set his phone on the dashboard. “Watch this while I’m gone.”

  I leaned back.

  It wasn’t that this was a bad diner. Aside from the one longtime waitress who only ever spoke to Andrew or only any non-brown people I happened to be with, the rest of the staff was friendly, and they had the best strawberry pancakes.

  In fact, this had been our thing, early on in our relationship, back when Andrew had still taken me out to restaurants.

  We weren’t too far from the little white-bread suburb I had grown up in.

  Something blinked on Grant’s phone. I realized it was a camera view that followed him into the restaurant. He was definitely turning some heads with his fancy white suit, in a place filled with blue jeans and checked shirts.

  I looked up from the screen, through the windows of the diner, trying to understand what was following Grant.

  Nothing was floating behind him.

  I looked back at the screen.

  The vision was as clear as if was shot by someone standing behind Grant, following him.

  Right. Magic fucking dragon.

  I stiffened as I saw him approach a man with dark sunglasses.

  No.

  The man took off his sunglasses.

  Andrew.

  Rage filled me. I thought I had loved him. I had given everything to him. I had worked for him, bailed him out, and even fucked for him, and where had it landed me?

  Sold to an alien monster who had eaten my brain.

  I put my hand in the door handle, about to march into the diner.

  But Grant started talking. “You have my attention.”

  “So to the point,” said Andrew, enjoying the grandstanding show villain he was. “Let’s eat first. I already ordered. The strawberry pancakes here are fabulous.”

  “Two coffees, with sugar. To go.”

  Two? I’d told him I didn’t want anything. I didn’t even like coffee.

  The waitress took his order and left. Andrew smirked. “No black coffee to go with the tough-guy image?”

  “What are you offering?”

  “Something you’ve been looking for, in exchange for something I want.”

  He set a velvet box on the table.

  Grant ignored him, staring at Andrew.

  Andrew pushed the box forward. “Go ahead. It won’t bite.”

  Grant opened it. He stared at the box for a moment. “What do you want for it?”

  “Not much.” Andrew leaned back and flashed a smile that had once made me weak in the knees. “I’ll just take the woman in your car off your hands.”

  Grant closed the box. “Why? Is she special?”

  “Val?” Andrew leaned back, waving his hand and chortling. “Naw, Val and I go way back. I miss her.”

  I choked back a laugh.

  “Husband?”

  They paused as the waitress brought Andrew strawberry pancakes and Grant his coffees.

  “No, Val and I were never the marrying kind,” said Andrew as he salted his strawberry pancakes, like the lunatic he was. “But I am a bit sentimental when it comes to Val. When she was gone, I realized what I had lost. Now that she’s back, I want us to have another chance.”

  Bull-fucking-shit. The only way that shit would stink more would be if he vomited some declarations of eternal love.

  Grant looked at the box.

  “No, thanks.”

  He picked up the two coffees, got up, and started to leave.

  Andrew started cutting into his pancakes. “That’s the real thing, you know. There’s nothing else like it. You’ll never have this opportunity again.”

  Grant didn’t even break his stride.

  I watched him come back to the car. The door opened automatically as it sensed him approach.

  Grant got in the car, smelling faintly of syrup and coffee. He set the coffee in the cup holders between us.

  “Do you want to go with him?”

  I kept my eyes focused on the coffee. What had Andrew offered? And why had Grant gotten me coffee? “Are you asking me like I have a choice?”

  “Do you want to go with him?” he repeated.

  I clenched my fists. “Only so that I can fucking kill him.” The threat dropped from my mouth as easily as it had when I’d been alive. Only now, I realized there was more weight to those words.

  Grant grinned, and I realized I was proving him right about his attitude for vengeance magic.

  “Okay, maybe not literally.”

  Amused disbelief crossed his handsome face as if he thought I was saying that just so I wouldn’t lose…whatever argument we had been having. “What do you mean not literally? You have every reason to. He betrayed you and sold you like a dog.”

  I ignored his question. “Did you contact him?”

  “No,” said Grant. “I think Titania did.”

  “That bitch.”

  “It’s what shen do.”

  The car jostled and bumped as the air around us outside shimmered and swirled. The world around us twirled in a dizzying fashion. I grabbed on to the door handle. “What the hell is going on?”

  “I figured as much,” said Grant calmly, as if glowing, bizarre colors and warped reality were a normal part of a road trip. “A pocket dimension,” said Grant. “What a stupid and showy waste of power.”

  “A what?”

  “You put up a pocket dimension when you want to haul people or things to a place you don’t want outsiders to see. Your ex-boyfriend seems desperate to get you back.”

  5

  The air swirled, spitting us in front of an old gray-green house, with peeling paint, taped-up screens, and mismatched roof tiles. Even the grass surrounding it was brown with bare patches of dirt. It hadn’t always looked like that, but after Andrew’s grandmother had left him the house, he hadn’t taken care of it the way it should have been.

  Why would he choose to bring us here?

  “Your ex has made himself into a sorcerer,” Grant said calmly. “It’s not an easy path for humans, and not a kind one either. Sacrifices are required, ones that he has clearly not made himself.”

  I knew what Andrew had done to me, and yet, part of me still remembered the kindness that had drawn me to him in the first place. “How do you know?”

  “He still has all his limbs intact.”

  I stared at the house.

>   Grant slurped his coffee loudly.

  I glared at him. “Do you have to do that?”

  “Only prey eat silently,” he said. “Deliciousness should be appreciated, loudly.” He picked up the second cup of coffee. “Here.”

  “I don’t even like coffee.”

  “It’s not for you.” He gestured toward the window behind me. “It’s for him.”

  I turned and saw Andrew waving at me, a shit-eating grin on his face. He thought he had us.

  I took the coffee from Grant’s hand. “Why, thank you.”

  “I’m assuming you don’t want my help.”

  “Nope.”

  “Then I’ll be here, making my coffee-slurping noises. Just say the word if you need me.”

  I got out of the car. The air had that autumn crispness with a hint of smoke. It was odd to have Grant at my back.

  It felt kind of nice, actually.

  The stupid part of my mind wondered if he made noises of appreciation at other times.

  “Hello, Val.”

  I walked up to Andrew and removed the coffee lid.

  “It’s good to—”

  I threw the hot coffee at him. He jumped back, but not before it splashed onto his stomach and crotch. He let out a shriek. “You bitch!”

  “That’s the least you deserve, you motherfucker. Fuck you, douchebag, don’t you ever fucking come near me again.”

  He stood up. He still smelled of coffee, but there was an aura of darkness around him, along with that scent of blood, intestinal viscera, and spinal fluid.

  “What have you done to yourself?”

  He jutted his chest out at me. “Made it so that no one is ever gonna disrespect me again. You won’t.”

  “Is this what you got in exchange for selling me?”

  “It was temporary, babe. Look at what you are now. So much potential and power.”

  I spat at him. It was so satisfying watching it hit his face. Rage, pain, betrayal, all the emotions that death had distanced me from, revealed themselves once more, thrusting themselves into my voice, turning it into an almost unrecognizable shriek. “The thing you sold me to? Ate my fucking brain. It killed me.”

  He held up his finger. “No, technically your friend killed you. And for you, death wasn’t a permanent state.” He wiped the spit from his face. “You’re going to pay for that, Val. You’ve forgotten how to be a good girl.”

  Before my death, I would have cowered, trembled, said I was sorry, and begged because he would have taken all the drugs away and made me do things like suck his friends’ dicks. But I wasn’t that drugged-up ho no more.

  Funny how easy it was to be brave when you knew you couldn’t die.

  “There’s nothing you can do to me, Andrew. Get out of here before you regret it.”

  He shrugged. “I always said, you don’t need to be willing. You just need to be there.”

  He stretched out his hand to me.

  Loops of familiar slimy black magic wrapped around me.

  It tasted of the Devourer.

  Had that madness in his eyes always been there, or had I just been too wrapped up in myself and the boy he had been?

  My mouth dropped open. How could he? “You gave yourself to that monster?”

  He laughed. “I give myself to nobody.”

  He didn’t know. He didn’t know that the alien intelligence was riding him, watching him, controlling him.

  Perhaps he hadn’t known how bad it would be for me when he had given me to the monster.

  I blinked. None of that mattered anymore. There was no coming back once the Devourer got a hold of you.

  Andrew was already dead.

  His voice took on an odd timbre, shades of the nightmare I had known. “I invested so much time, made a lot of deals trying to bring someone back from the dead. I’m so glad that it’s you, Val.”

  Grant leapt from the car.

  With a wave of his hand, Andrew encased Grant in a glimmering white opaque bubble.

  The Andrew I knew was an ordinary human. Where had he gotten the magic? Where had he gotten the power? And not just power, but enough to hold someone like Grant?

  The opaque bubble began to vibrate and smoke. Not for long perhaps.

  The tentacles started pulling me toward him. “You are very special, Val, even more so now that you’re back. There’s no one else quite like you, and together, we’ll do great things.”

  The tendrils of my dark power curled around me, coiling tight, ready to explode.

  So I let it.

  We were back in that vast black desert, sand swirling around us, three moons above us hanging from a violet sky.

  Flower petals floated past me in the breeze, but they had no scent. In fact, there was no scent in this place at all.

  Andrew whirled, looking around in surprise. “What the hell?”

  “I didn’t bring you here. You did.” I spotted another figure behind him, a swarming cloud of insects or just smoke; I couldn’t tell. “Or perhaps it did.”

  The cloud formed itself into a naked human figure with pearl-white skin and with far too many mouths and teeth studded all over its body.

  “So this is where you bring us,” it hissed.

  A doorway appeared behind it, white hot and glowing with an ancient primordial energy.

  Andrew let out a whoop. “Yeah, baby! That’s what I’m talking about! I knew you wouldn’t let me down.”

  Before I could react, he pulled me into a quick hug.

  I stood there in stiff shock. For a moment, I remembered the boy who had defended me from three guys trying to rape me in juvie, the boy who’d once spent his last nickel to buy me a vending-machine ice cream sandwich because I’d told him that I missed my mother.

  Was it cruel of me to not feel regret for what was about to happen?

  “You were always too good for me, Val.” He greeted me on the forehead and squeezed my hand.

  He had drugged me, dragged me into a life I’d never wanted, and sold me to get power. And yet, for the sake of our history, I had to give him another chance.

  I grabbed his hand. “Andrew—”

  He smiled, and I remembered the first time I had seen that smile, and he slipped out of my hold as if he were a wet fish. “I’m finally going to get what I deserve.”

  There were too many things to say and not enough time, so much emotion and history bound up in a few mangled moments. I tried to grab him again, but my fingers passed through him as if he were already a ghost. “No, you idiot. Listen to me, I’m trying to forgive you!”

  Andrew swaggered toward the light, a confident smile on his once-handsome face.

  I stretched an arm toward him. “Wait!”

  He didn’t even acknowledge me as rippling light surrounded him.

  Spears of light pierced his body, burning holes in his dark figure. Andrew screamed in pain as the light skewered him, lifted him up, and yanked him into the doorway.

  The doorway vanished.

  Andrew was gone. I should feel something, anything, but I just felt…numb.

  A gurgling voice spoke. “I will not be so easily deceived,” it said. “You cannot kill me the same way twice.”

  I turned and saw the monster with far too many teeth rushing at me. White electricity shot from the monster, and I held up my hands to hold it off.

  Fire erupted.

  From me?

  It swirled around the monster, burning, searing, and cooking the thing which bubbled, rippled, and bent itself into a hard ball of black shell.

  And I realized, again, just how small it was.

  There was no logic to the physics in this place.

  I stretched out my hand and grabbed, and the tiny thing of teeth was in my palm. It was sparking and biting with fury.

  All I felt were pins and needles in my skin, like the numbing sensation I got if I sat in a strange position for too long.

  Grant’s voice echoed in my head. This is where you take them.

  I whirled, tryin
g to see where he was. “Grant?” Was that where the fire had come from?

  I’m not really here. What do you do with them when you’re done?

  Another mousehole of an archway appeared at my feet. I knelt and shoved the molten hardened ball into it.

  The desert vanished.

  And then the weight of flesh, of life, of breath, anchored me back into my body.

  Grant had his sleeves rolled up, cradling me in his bare arms.

  I blinked at his golden eyes, full of shock and surprise, as if I had disappeared and then reappeared in his arms. I wasn’t so sure I hadn’t. I swallowed hard, trying to think of something to say.

  “You are different,” he said finally.

  “Thanks,” I said, slowly. “I think.”

  “I thought you said you weren’t going to kill him. If that is your idea of balance, I can live with that.”

  “You can put me down now.”

  He set me gently on the ground. I almost expected him to cop a feel, but he didn’t.

  I looked around the front yard.

  I had loved Andrew once, and even though he had scoured that emotion from me with a metaphysical blowtorch, a part of me still ached over what had happened.

  Hate would have been so much simpler.

  But I couldn’t. We had essentially grown up together, and so I understood what had shaped him, had also made me.

  Death, and the clarity it came with, had been the difference.

  I looked away from Grant, up into the clear blue autumn sky. There was a single fluffy white marshmallow of a cloud in the sky. A red-gold maple leaf spiraled down toward me.

  It seemed strange that it should be such a pretty fall day.

  “I didn’t mean for it to happen,” I said.

  “From what I saw, he made his own choice,” said Grant.

  I faced him. “I didn’t see you there. How is it that you saw what happened? How was it that my hands were covered with…fire?”

  Now Grant frowned and looked away. “I suspect it is because I hold your ring. But I’m not quite sure of the mechanics of it. You were delivered back to life with shen magic. I was trained in draconic magic.”

  “There’s a difference?”

  “As different as Latin is from Chinese. You’re not what I thought you were.”

  Was he admitting a weakness? A hole in his knowledge? Andrew would have never done that. But then as I stood there, looking at his tall, broad shoulders, his handsomely rumpled dress shirt, his sleeves rolled up and exposing those arcane forearm tattoos, like a startling sexy god of groomsmen, I knew he was no Andrew.