by Meg Ripley
The longer I hold her captive, however, the more my attraction to her grows by the second. My need to possess every inch of her is becoming unbearable, and I can’t help but surrender to the passion that threatens to consume me.
Surely, someone will come looking for her soon, but freeing her could spell the end of everything I’ve ever known and spent my life protecting. Will I be able to convince this feisty beauty to stay with me and keep our little secret?
12
Ethan Beaufort sat back against the booth seat and poked at the orange slice in his old fashioned, feeling moody. It had been a long week full of endless days at the office, and he had come to The Club to relax. It was the one place he was supposed to feel completely safe and where he could truly be himself, but he couldn’t shake the irritation that crawled over his mind like a spider. He looked around the lounge at the deep red booths and the dark wood tables. A few other patrons had come in for after-work drinks, or perhaps pre-dinner drinks, but the place was pretty quiet. It was supposed to be relaxing and comfortable, but it only made him feel trapped.
“Are you going to drink that, or just play with it?” The old man who sat across from him pointed at his own beer, which was nearly empty; the foam clung to the inside of the glass. “Personally, I’m a pretty big fan of the free drinks around here.”
Ethan picked up the glass and downed the remains of the mixture in one gulp, leaving only the soggy fruit. “Is that better?”
Wade shrugged. “I don’t know; I guess you’ll have to tell me. Did it give you an attitude adjustment?”
“That’s easy for you to say; you have no idea what it’s like. You just sit around in here and observe us like animals at the zoo. In fact, I think sometimes, you must be living out all your dreams.”
Normally, Ethan didn’t mind sharing a drink with Wade Emerson. He was a crazy old man—and completely human—but anyone would be hard-pressed to find a bigger dragon enthusiast. Since he knew the secrets behind the Darkblood Society, Mr. Cross had decided to keep him close and allow him in The Club as often as he wished. At first, Ethan understood that decision. It kept Wade safe from any remaining dragon hunters that might be out there. But lately, the old man was starting to get on his nerves.
Everything was getting on his nerves.
The old man shook his head sadly. “You underestimate me, Ethan. You must think I go home at night and write detailed descriptions of everything I’ve seen, just waiting for the right person to sell them to. Well, that might have been something I would have enjoyed doing at some point, and I can’t deny that there’s plenty of hunter blood running through my veins, but things are different now. Lance showed me a whole new side of things, and I’m blessed and humbled to be able to explore it like I do.” He raised his empty glass at Mia, the bartender, and began searching around in his numerous vest pockets. “Why don’t you tell me what’s really bothering you?”
“The same thing that’s been bothering me for years,” Ethan snapped. “There are dragon hunters out there. We know that. You’ve seen them in action yourself. Just because you saw them die doesn’t mean there aren’t others. But Mr. Cross and all the other members of the Darkblood Society are perfectly content to sit back and allow them to exist. We don’t bother doing anything about them simply because they aren’t knocking our door down. It isn’t right.”
“Ah!” Wade pulled his glasses from his pocket and put them on, blinking as he looked around the room. “That’s much better. I haven’t been able to find these suckers for days.”
Ethan’s irritation was only growing stronger. “Are you even listening to me?”
“Of course, I am.” Wade patted his hand in the air above the table reassuringly. “But you’ve got to understand things from Mr. Cross’ perspective. What if he assembled an army and took them out to track down the hunters and eliminate them all? It would only serve to expose you and the other shifters. There would be dragons everywhere, and everyone would know about it. If that happened, half the citizens of the city would be intrigued and the other half would be terrified. You’d have no idea who was your enemy and who was your friend.”
“It might be worth the risk.” Ethan knew the dangers of exposing the Darkblood Society, but he also knew the perils of fighting too hard to keep a secret. “Don’t you see that if the hunters are eliminated, then it won’t matter if people know who we are? We won’t have anything to worry about. Sure, there might be a few people who are scared at first, but they aren’t going to be able to do anything to hurt us. They’re not strong enough. They don’t have the right weapons.”
“I think you underestimate the general populace,” Mia interjected, arriving with a fresh beer for Wade; she had also brought a new drink for Ethan, even though he hadn’t asked for one. “People are mean, Ethan. Even when they don’t know anything about you, they’re just terrible. Why do you think I hang out in here all the time?” With her naturally ruby lips and bright blue eyes under a fringe of dark hair, Mia might have been pretty if she smiled once in a while.
“Because your uncle pays you and you don’t have to bother being nice,” Ethan retorted.
She shook her head and made a noise of disgust. “You’re just as terrible as the humans are. One of these days, someone is going to wake you up, Ethan. They’re going to open your eyes, and it’s going to hurt you so bad, you won’t know what to do with yourself.” Mia turned on her heel and went back to the bar. Instead of cleaning up the empty glasses that had been left there by a couple of patrons, she stormed through a door and headed into the back.
Ethan wanted to shout after her that someone had already hurt him, that he had been carrying the scars and the burdens of being a dragon for a long time and that he was sick of it. But it wasn’t going to change her mind, and she wasn’t going to change his.
“She could be right, you know,” Wade said quietly, causing Ethan to finally look away from the swinging door. “The Club is a private place for shifters. The outside world isn’t always a friendly place.”
Taking a swig of his fresh drink and feeling the whiskey burn on the way down, Ethan set it down gently and looked Wade right in the eye. “But I’m thinking about leaving it.”
Wade ran a hand through his wispy gray hair, his pale green eyes widening in surprise. “You can’t be serious. The Club keeps you protected.”
“But protected for how long? How do we know that those hunters you helped defeat a few months ago hadn’t already passed on some information about us to their comrades before they died? How do we know they aren’t out there, just waiting for the right moment to attack once they’ve built up their forces and their weapons?” Ethan pointed vaguely toward the street outside the building, even though there were no windows on the first floor of The Club.
“We don’t have any reason to believe they are,” Wade contended.
“Here, let me show you something.” Ethan pulled his tablet out of the briefcase at his side. On the back, engraved in the casing, was the blue dragon that was the Cobalt Computers logo. It only took him a moment to skim through the internet and find the article he was looking for. He turned it around and held it out for Wade to see.
The old man took the device gently, uncertainly. He adjusted his glasses, and the headline of the blog post was reflected in them: “Dragons in the City: More Evidence Unearthed.” Wade skimmed through the post and shook his head. “I really don’t see why this is relevant. It’s all speculation.”
Impatiently, Ethan took the tablet back and flipped his finger on the screen until he reached the very bottom of the article. “Look. It shows how many times this has been read. Thousands, Wade. There are thousands of people out there willing to read an article that claims to have information about dragons. This person may not be a hunter, but she’s so interested in us that she’s spreading the idea out to the general public. It keeps the rumors of dragons going, which is only going to spur the hunters on more.”
Wade pointed at the author’s picture next
to the statistics. Her dark hair was pulled back from her face, showing her pale skin and wide eyes. She looked slightly away from the camera, like she was looking for something. A tiny ring pierced her nose, with a little crystal sitting in the valley between her nose and her full lips. The byline listed her as Resa Robinson. “She’s pretty. Well, she would be if she took that metal out of her face.”
“You aren’t listening to me.” Ethan put the tablet away and sank the rest of his drink.
“Ethan, I understand that it’s hard to keep your secret. It’s not even my secret, and I find it difficult as well. But you’re just arguing in circles. You want to go out and get the hunters so you can be out in the public, yet you don’t want people to write about the possibility that people like you exist. If there’s one thing I know about humans, it’s that there are no finite lines. The edges are blurred wherever you look, and it’s just something you’ll have to accept.”
Feeling his body sag with exhaustion, Ethan nodded. “You’re right, I know. I’m just so tired of all this. So many times, I’ve wanted to just walk out in the street and stretch my wings after a long day at the office. I know I can do it here, but it’s not the same. And don’t even get me started on dating.”
Wade raised a furry gray eyebrow. “A handsome man like you can’t get a date? It might have something to do with that nasty attitude of yours.”
As badly as he wanted to argue, Ethan had to laugh. It went against everything he’d been thinking about the entire week, but it bubbled up inside him and refused to be held in. He shook his head. “Okay, I have to give you that one. But really, it’s impossible to find a woman. Eventually, if things got serious, she would figure out what I really am. She’d find a scale on the bathroom counter or wonder why there were claw marks in the backyard fence. Any woman who’s interested in that would be crazy, and the rest of them would run away screaming.”
The old man tipped his head. “Not necessarily. My niece happened to be rather open-minded to that sort of thing, if you recall.”
“That’s different.” Wade’s niece had seen first-hand just how bad the hunters were, and by the time she had discovered her boyfriend was a shifter, she was already in love with him. “I can’t expect that to just be the standard.”
“Maybe not, but I don’t think you should leave The Club, either. It’s good for you, whether you want to recognize it or not. Humans have always felt a need to be around people like themselves, and I don’t think dragons are any different.” Wade downed the rest of his beer and held up his glass, but Mia hadn’t returned to the bar yet. He slowly set it back down on the table, content to wait. “I wish I knew how to help you.”
“Maybe you can.” Ethan rubbed his chin thoughtfully, where a rash of pale brown stubble had begun to grow. He’d forgotten to shave that morning, and he didn’t really care. Despite the fact that he ran a massive corporation, his employees were more than happy to have a casual dress code. “You used to be a hunter. You knew them and how they worked. You can go back to them and see what they know.”
Wade pushed himself back from the table, leaning as far away from Ethan as possible without getting up. He looked around them with fear in his eyes. “Sshh! Don’t say things like that! I’m lucky that none of the shifters in here have murdered me for my previous associations, and I’m pretty sure that’s only because I was such a terrible hunter. If I had actually killed a dragon in my lifetime, I would have been roasted on the spot and deserved it!”
“But the other hunters are out there, and they have no idea that you’ve been walking amongst us. You can go find out what they’re planning, if anything. If there’s nothing going on, then I can stop worrying. But if there is, we’ll have good reason to go to Mr. Cross and ask him to plan an attack on their headquarters.” His ideas were pushing at him from the inside, begging to be acted upon. Ethan could feel it in his body, the urge to shift pounding at the underside of his skin. Even at The Club, he wasn’t supposed to shift indoors, but it was so difficult to hold it back.
“You’re not thinking this through,” Wade argued. “I haven’t had anything to do with the hunters for months. They would have tons of questions for me if I went back, and I wouldn’t know how to answer them. While their goals might not be admirable, they aren’t stupid, Ethan. I’d be dead before I ever had a chance to find out what they were plotting.”
Ethan sighed. “Alright, fine. Maybe you’re right. But I swear I’m going to find a way to infiltrate the hunters. Just tell me everything you know, and I’ll work on it.”
The old man crossed his arms in front of his chest stubbornly. “You know I’ve already told Mr. Cross everything I know, down to the last detail. He’s ordered me not to reveal any of that to the rest of you, and it’s for just this sort of reason. I know you’re formidable, Ethan, but Mr. Cross is the last person I want to anger. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m supposed to have dinner with my niece and Lance. I don’t want to keep them waiting, especially since Sabrina promised she’d be making a roast.” He nodded to his drinking companion and stood, and the bouncer at the door glared at the old man’s back as he left.
Ethan pulled his tablet out and looked at the article once again. He’d read it several times, and it had prompted him to explore the rest of her website. Though he had scoured the internet for evidence of himself and his fellow shifters many times, he had never seen anything quite like this website. While many other blogs were dedicated to hunting ghosts and sasquatch-like creatures, he had never seen anyone so desperate to find evidence of dragons. It unsettled him in a deep way, moving inside his very bones. The hunters were out there, and they were likely part of this woman’s readership.
He sighed. He would find a way to fix this, somehow.
13
Resa Robinson hadn’t slept long. She’d stayed up late editing the most recent posts for her blog, and they had only inspired ideas for more articles. She wanted to explore the concepts of mythical creatures in general and why people had been fascinated by them for centuries. There were numerous tabs open on her laptop as she had searched for archeological evidence that some of these creatures had once existed, even if they didn’t today. Somehow, she had gone off on a tangent where she explored whether the legend of mermaids was propagated by sightings of manatees or children born with a certain deformity that made their legs look like mermaid tails.
Eventually, she had stumbled off to bed, only to be awoken again by the same dream. She was in the woods, playing after a family picnic. Intrigued by the light and shadow of the sunlight falling through the branches, she had strayed down the path, even though her mother had told her not to. She couldn’t help it; Resa had to see what was there. Something exciting must be living in such a beautiful place. But there was the swoop of a wing, the flash of a tooth, and the deep bellow of a creature far more terrifying than she had ever expected. Though in reality she would have run, she never did in her dream. She stayed frozen, trying to turn her head to see the creature more fully. It always eluded her vision, never allowing more than a fleeting glimpse.
Awake well before her alarm went off, Resa sat up in bed and grabbed the notepad she kept by her nightstand. She wrote faster on the computer, but she wrote better with a pen. For the hundredth time, she tried to capture the way she felt when she saw that creature. It wasn’t just for her blog. It wasn’t just to justify her years of searching. It was going to become her novel, her big break that let her quit her day job and stay at home in her pajamas all day while she pawned off real stories as fantasy.
But once again, it wasn’t right. The words just didn’t do it justice. Resa ripped the sheet out of the notepad and crumpled it between her fingers, feeling the hard edges dig into her palms before she chucked it across the room. It missed the wastebasket and landed on the floor amongst other balls of paper, each of them holding her shameful attempts at fictionalizing reality.
Pushing off the heavy covers, Resa padded across her studio apartment and turned on the coff
ee pot, letting it brew while she took a quick shower and swiped on her makeup. By the time she was ready for breakfast, she was ready to write again. Her laptop waited for her on the dining table, ready to crank out more blog posts and rack up her views.
But there was a real job waiting for her, and she left the apartment an hour later. The massive skyscraper that housed The City Chronicle as well as numerous other businesses always felt ominous as she walked up to the front doors, tipping her head back to follow it up into the bright, late-summer sky. Resa had been so nervous when she had first come to interview at The Chronicle that she had thrown up in the scrubby bushes that rimmed the building. She still felt like doing it every day.
A small crowd had assembled in the elevator, and Resa joined them. She frowned when she noticed that Carmen Gray was there as well. She pulled out her phone and pretended to check her email.
But Carmen wasn’t giving up that easy. “Good morning, Resa,” she said in a singsong voice that dripped of distaste. “What are you working on today? Some little column for the back page about fairies in the park? Or is Mr. Stephenson just going to have you type up the obituaries today?” She batted her heavily lined eyes and smoothed her long, blonde tresses.
“Sorry, I’m just not interested in kissing ass all the way to the top,” Resa muttered. “Or is it sucking dick? I never did quite get all the details.” A few of the other people in the elevator turned to look, but they quickly turned their heads back toward the doors.
Carmen’s emerald eyes narrowed, but Resa’s comeback only fueled her anger. “That’s your problem, Resa. You never get all the details, and then you wonder why your byline is so tiny that even your mother can’t find it.”
“Yeah, you’re right,” Resa said with a sigh. “It’s such a shame that I prefer to write the pieces I care about instead of just the ones I think will take me to the top. I hate that I’m so genuine.” The elevator doors opened, and she stepped off with a little wave to Carmen.
