by Amelia Jade
She took the card back from him and walked across the mouth of the tunnel to the other side, looking down it the entire time, but she couldn’t spot anything. Nothing except for another guard on this side of the tunnel. Rose nodded at him and headed back out toward the base at large.
“Getting into trouble without me I see,” Stoen said from behind her.
Turning, she saw him coming jogging toward her. From the tunnel.
“Did you just come from down there?”
He nodded.
“Is that like, the dragon roost? Or nest? Or…”
Laughing, Stoen draped an arm around her. “Funny. Real funny. No, that’s where the portal is.”
“The portal. Right. With the aliens.”
Instead of protesting or agreeing, Stoen gave her a squeeze. “How are you doing?”
She knew from his tone he didn’t mean in regard to the jet lag, or if her quarters were comfortable enough. The question was about how she was adapting to learning that shifters were real, and that he could turn into a fifty-foot silver dragon.
“A little rattled still,” she admitted, feeling herself lean slightly into his arm. Why did he have to be so comfortable to press up against?
“That’ll pass in time. You’ll get used to it.”
Somehow Rose doubted that. “Maybe. It’s still rather crazy to think about, even if I’ve seen other dragons now. To think that I’ll eventually get to the point where I think of it as normal? I have my doubts.”
“You’d be surprised what spending a lot of time around us will do.”
“Who says I’ll be spending a lot of time around you?”
Stoen’s arm twitched around her. Was he fighting against the urge to squeeze tight, to keep her close? That was cute, and appreciated. The last thing Rose wanted was to be controlled.
“Just a hope I have,” he replied, the tightness in his voice barely noticeable. He was trying hard.
“A hope…”
He looked away. “I wasn’t lying, Rose. About any of it. Not about shifters. About the Outsiders. About you.”
“Huh? About me?”
“You and me. Us. Whatever you want to term it. We are mates,” he said, dropping his arm to fidget with his fingers.
She thought it was cute, a subtle betrayal of his nervousness. “Right. Mates. Like animals.”
“I am half-lizard,” he teased. “Or serpent. Whatever.”
“Yuck. Do female dragons lay eggs?”
Stoen chuckled. “Why does every human ask that? No. The dragon females have babies same as humans do. We don’t come into our powers until puberty. That’s what makes us compatible with human females as well.”
“Oh.” She hadn’t been aware of any of that. It answered several other questions she had, but still left the burning issue of him believing they were mates.
“We’re connected,” he said softly. “I know you can feel it. That sense of comfort and the feeling that you know me better than you do? That’s what I’m talking about.” He held up a hand to forestall her protest. “I’m not about to propose again. I’m just telling you that what you’re feeling is real. You aren’t imagining it. Accept it or deny it—preferably accept—but you don’t need to be scared of it.”
Maybe she did. Maybe she didn’t. How could she not be scared at the idea that someone she’d barely known was the last man on earth she would ever be with? It was exciting, sure, but it was terrifying as well. What if picking him was a mistake? No, there were too many variables for her to make a decision just now.
But his arm does feel really nice around you…
He was a damn good kisser too.
Without meaning to her hand slipped into his. Stoen jerked in surprise, but he kept walking, clasping her fingers gently with his own. His grip was strong enough to hold her tight, but loose enough that she could pull away if she wanted.
“What’s in there?” she asked, lifting her chin in the direction of a building that seemed to have a fairly regular stream of people headed in or out of it.
“Those are the elevators,” he said, tugging her in that direction. “They lead to the rest of the base.”
“Rest of the base?”
“Most of it is underground, silly. Those take us to it.”
Rose went along, surprised. Most of the base was underground? It was substantially larger than she thought, considering the aboveground facilities weren’t tiny to begin with.
“There are a lot of soldiers stationed here if so much of it is underground.”
“The best of the best,” Stoen agreed. “If the Outsiders come through the portal, we’ll need all the firepower we can to stop them.”
They got into a large elevator with over a dozen various military personnel and descended into the depths of the base while she chewed on that answer. Nobody commented on them holding hands, but she saw several surreptitious glances her way. Most of them from other women. Were they jealous of her?
The doors opened and Stoen gestured her out. Only perhaps a quarter of those on-board got out. The rest headed deeper she assumed.
“Tell me more.”
Stoen half-turned to look at her as they walked. “About what? The base? The Outsiders?”
“No. About mates. How does it work? Am I some sort of mutant then, for being able to feel this?”
“No,” he said quickly, then backtracked. “I don’t think so. Humans mating with dragons is, as far as I can tell, a relatively new thing. But if you are a mutant, it’s not in any discernable way. It’s just more of a…connection, I suppose. Emotional. It’s hard to describe, but when I laid my eyes on you for the first time, my dragon just knew.”
“Your dragon?” she asked, uncertain she’d heard him properly.
“I am two halves, Rose. I’m half-human, half-dragon. That’s how I’m able to shapeshift. Although it’s not a sentient being in the traditional sense, we do communicate. Mostly in emotions.”
“I see. And what does it tell you about me?”
“Um. That you’re my mate,” he said, looking away.
Was that red in his cheeks? “Are you blushing?”
“It’s a more primal sort of thing,” he said. “It has…primal thoughts.”
She thought about it for a second. “You mean sex.”
Stoen nodded hesitantly. “I can’t control it,” he tried to explain, but stopped when she started laughing.
“It’s okay. In a way I’m kind of flattered,” she said. Then another question occurred to her. “Is that why you proposed? Because it told you we were mates?”
He looked around, then pulled her several doors down the hallway in which they’d been walking aimlessly. Punching in a code, the door opened.
“What’s this?”
“My quarters,” he said with a handwave that didn’t do anything for the sheepish look on his face.
She looked at him curiously.
“Base gossip travels fast,” he said by way of explanation.
Rose got it. He didn’t want to talk in public. “Okay.” She stepped inside. He followed and shut the door.
“Sorry, it’s just…” he sighed and sat down on a desk. The wooden construct squeaked ominously under his weight.
Rose eyed it, but said nothing. He wouldn’t be hurt if it broke, and she’d get a good laugh.
“Look, I’m sorry for that,” he said. “I really am.”
“It’s okay. You handled what happened next fairly well, all things considered,” she admitted. “Thank you so much for not being crazy after I said no.”
He laughed, a spiteful sound that she realized was directed at himself. “No, just crazy for doing it.”
Rose politely didn’t say anything.
“You should know that all my friends advised me against doing that. Every one of them. ‘Wait’ they said. ‘Give it more time Stoen.’” He shook his head. “I should have listened to them. Instead I didn’t, and I scared you off.
”
“Yeah, more time would have been nice,” she admitted, smiling big.
“You’re right of course. It’s just…I knew that we were meant to be together. I didn’t want to wait any longer. In all that though, I only thought about myself. I never took into consideration that you might not feel the same, that just because you were interested in me didn’t mean you wanted to up and marry me.”
“It was a bit abrupt,” she said. “But you’re right. I was interested in you.”
Stoen’s head came up slowly, his eyes playing over her face. She saw him watching her, examining her. “Was?” he asked softly.
“I was,” she said. The press of his lips against her the other day in the park came rushing back in an unbidden memory. “Was. Am. I don’t know. It’s complicated.”
“I won’t move that fast,” he said, getting up from the desk and closing the distance between them.
“Slower would be nice,” she admitted, not fighting him as his hand found hers, pressing fingers together and interlocking them. “Very nice.”
The soft caress of his other hand against her cheek threatened to steal her breath away. Every time he touched her she wanted to melt into a puddle in his arms. Every time, no matter what it was! How could he have that effect on her? It was frustrating in its powerfulness.
“Let me make it up to you?” he asked, bringing his head closer to her.
Rose shivered. The proximity between them was awakening a reaction inside her that would soon be too strong to deny. “Maybe,” she conceded. “But we have to take it slow. No proposals.”
“No proposals,” he agreed, his mouth next to her ear by this point, making her spine come alive with tingles as his breath washed down her neck, causing hairs standing on end.
“Okay.”
His lips scraped hers with the utmost tenderness. Tilting her head back, she tried to ensnare his mouth, wanting badly to kiss him, but he pulled just out of her reach. She frowned and tried once more, again with no luck. He was teasing her, and she hated it and loved it all at once.
“Stoen,” she whispered, knowing she was begging and yet no longer caring.
Relenting, the giant of a man kissed her at last. It was perfect. Powerful arms circled her body and held her tight, lifting her just off the floor as their mouths—
Alarms begin to blare loudly.
Chapter Nine
Stoen
He managed to stifle a roar of anger. Barely.
“I’m sorry,” he said, setting her down. “Those alarms…”
“You have to go.”
Nodding, he backed toward the door. “Stay here, okay? It’s going to be dangerous out there. You’ll be safe in here. I’m sorry.”
“Go!” she said. “If you’ve been telling me the truth, they need you. I’m not going anywhere,” she added, flopping down on the bed to prove her point. “I’m a detective, not a fighter.”
He grinned, almost said that he loved her, then blew her a kiss. “I’ll be back for that raincheck in a hot-minute, just you wait,” he teased, then he was gone.
The second the door closed rage blossomed on his face. Things had been going so well with Rose. She was willing to give him a second chance, and they’d been about to kiss, and who knew what else after that! Then the stupid alarms had to go off.
Despite the rage simmering in his stomach, Stoen knew that the base wouldn’t be put on alert if it weren’t serious. Either the Outsiders had come through the portal again, or the final missing Outsider had made itself known.
The timing couldn’t have been worse. It was the middle of the day, and there wasn’t a cloud in sight. Passing the elevator, he ran to the entrance to the tunnel. Everyone was headed up toward the surface, including the soldiers. Stoen went with them, but his long legs and superhuman speed quickly had him outpacing the humans.
A moment later the first of the battlesuits doing the climb came and went. Stoen wasn’t about to waste any time not giving his all.
“OUT OF THE WAY!” he bellowed as he neared the top of the ramp.
Humans turned, saw the oncoming blur, and dove to the sides. Stoen spread his arms wide as he reached the top of the tunnel, wings sprouting from his back as he summoned his dragon. Legs bunched when he flung himself into the air. The huge wings beat once, sending him soaring into the sky, the massive membranes easily able to lift his human frame. Then he let the rest of the change occur, gliding through the air as he shifted.
It wasn’t an overly safe method of shifting, but time was of the essence, and he could fly far faster than he could run. His eyes scanned the base, noting two other dragons angling in to the northern perimeter of the base a moment before some of the base’s guns opened up on a distant target.
“How the hell did it sneak up this close?” he shouted, coming in to land between a red dragon and a slightly smaller white one.
“No idea,” the red said.
His eyesight easily picked up the monstrous figure that was the target of the fixed perimeter defenses. If the return of the crimson dragons didn’t confirm his suspicion that this was the last missing Outsider that had escaped the base months earlier, then the nearly thirty-foot tall matte-black armored creature moving toward the base would have.
It came closer with each ten-foot shuffle-hump stride that was its form of movement. The oddity to it screamed wrong and made him slightly queasy just to look at. Everything about the creature proclaimed its evilness. The dragon inside him wanted nothing more than to wipe it from the face of the earth.
More perimeter guns came online, and several of the human battlesuits locked their legs into position and began firing off long-range missiles that racked the great body with explosions, but seemingly did no damage.
“This isn’t going to be pretty,” the white ice dragon remarked.
Stoen thought it was Caine, eldest of the trio of ice dragon brothers, but he wasn’t positive.
“No it won’t, Caine. We’re going to need to work together to take him down.”
“There’s no way this thing just sneaked through the mountains without any of us noticing. It must have some sort of ability to hide,” Stoen said.
More dragon shifters were arriving on scene now. Most of them were in human form, but a giant green swooped in from deeper in the mountains to join them. The force arrayed against the Outsider was unprecedented in scale, but looking out across the mountainous terrain, Stoen wasn’t sure it was going to be enough.
The Outsiders had the ability to suck the life straight from their hosts. When they did they grew bigger. Stronger. More resistant to damage. They started out seven or eight feet tall, if he remembered correctly. This one had killed a lot of people to reach thirty feet in height. A lot. They had fifteen dragons to combat it, but a normal Outsider was nearly a match for a shifter on its own. This one seemed nearly invincible.
He frowned, looking closer. “Does anyone else see that?”
The other dragons followed his gaze.
“Is it…” Caine trailed off as they all witnessed the massive creature stop and fall to all fours.
“Great, it’s a giant attack dog,” the red muttered.
The black ant-like chitinous armor of the creature shivered and then began to reshape. Huge strands the size of Stoen’s arms shot out and to the ground from the four limbs, seemingly pulling the main body apart, even as a central strand developed from the torso of the creature, reaching down for the ground.
“That’s not fair,” Stoen complained as the creature split into five oversized Outsiders, each one nearly ten feet tall.
“Too bad we can’t power up like that either. Form some sort of super dragon by transforming,” Caine quipped.
“Split by trios and engage,” the red next to him shouted.
Stoen hadn’t been sure who the crimson dragon was, but judging by the way he exerted command over the other dragons, all of whom leapt to obey, it had to be none other than Kallor
e. Stoen had heard about the near-legendary mate of Colonel Mara, commander of the dragon element at Fort Banner. But all the crimsons, including the colonel, had been out hunting this creature since long before he arrived at the base.
“People are going to see this,” he commented, moving to center a line between Kase and Hel, his fellow quicksilver dragons. “There’s no way we’re going to be able to hide and still defeat these things.”
Kase spoke up. “I’d worry about that later, if you ask me.”
“Yeah. Let’s kill this bastard however we have to. We’ll deal with humans knowing we exist afterward.
“No argument from me,” he said as the fifteen dragons proceeded forward.
Behind them ranks of battlesuits were still forming up. The humans would commit their forces by squadrons to help out where possible, but overall this was a dragon show.
Smoke erupted from the shoulders of a number of the suits, and Stoen looked up as they lobbed what had to be every remaining missile available to them at the Outsider.
“Hit them while they’re recovering!” Kallore shouted.
Stoen spread his wings and took to the sky as Kase and Hel ran forward. Ahead the missiles impacted, orange-red fire spreading out to envelop their target, the Outsider second from the right.
All around him dragons of various colors rushed to put themselves in harm’s way, ready to take the brunt of the attack, knowing that they could withstand it far better than humans could.
Weapons of fire and ice, acid and lightning flashed. Dragons spat streams and clouds at their targets. An ice dragon whirled, clubbing the Outsider in the chest with its spiked tail. The Outsider saw it coming, hauled back with its fist, and punched the end of the tail as it came close. The tail stopped in midair, vibrations visibly running up the length until the shifter howled in pain.
Fire lanced out from close by, engulfing another of the creatures. The Outsider shrugged it off and kept coming. A sword of armor sprang up from the end of its one arm, catching a blade of fire and turning it aside before spinning and kicking the hapless dragon in the stomach, hurling him backward.
Stoen inhaled sharply before spitting a stream of quicksilver at his enemy, coating it in the frigid material. He tried to bury the Outsider in it, but the matte-black creature sprouted spikes on the ends of its arms and shattered each layer. The legs never ceased their endless shuffle-hump, closing on the base, and beyond it the portal that would take it home.
