by Jill Haven
He leaned in and I knew what was coming, and I wanted it too. I shouldn’t be dancing on the end of a string for him, but the closer he came, the more I knew it was already a done deal. We were gonna do something stupid together, and I’d probably end up getting hurt, because I always got hurt, but like a speeding train I couldn’t get out of the way of all this stuff rushing at me, so I braced for it. I slammed my eyes closed.
Mason didn’t do what I thought. He didn’t attack. Instead, he gently teased his lips against mine, and the slow, careful heat undid me in ways nothing else could have. He nibbled lightly at my lips until I unclenched and then we were kissing for real. I melted inside. My stomach felt like a bonfire was brewing there, low near my groin, and the slick silky heat of Mason’s mouth as he nibbled on my lips destroyed the last of my resolve. He scraped his teeth sharply across my bottom lip and I groaned with the slight pain, slipping my hands to his shoulders where I hung on for dear life. He wrapped his arms around me and dragged me closer until we were pressed flush from knees to chest, and his very impressive, really freakin’ hard wood poked at my belly. I shivered and let out the most embarrassing whine when he nudged against me with his own grunt.
There was a sneeze out in the living room, followed by a curse. We both froze and eased apart. I shoved out of his hold and grabbed the gun before bolting across the room to the window. I raised the creaky old bitch as fast as I could.
“Get the hard drives now!” I whispered to him.
“What are these for? Why are they important?”
“Just. Do. What. I. Say,” I ground out between gritted teeth and slung a leg over the windowsill, back out into the damned cold. My hard-on took a quick dive and my stomach wobbled as I looked down the side of the building through the fire escape grating to the cement of the alley way that seemed seventeen billion miles away, but I ignored it. I brought my other leg out and carefully put a toe on the old rusted mess. As I eased my weight on to the fire escape, there was a lot of give, but the metal groaned and held.
“Oh, shit, this is a bad idea,” I whispered to myself, but started down the escape anyway. “Be careful, Mason,” I said louder as I made my way to the ladder down to the next level. What choice did I have but to take the risk? Somewhere during that kiss I’d decided I couldn’t just allow myself to be taken to a potential slaying at Grandpa’s house. Maybe I did have something to live for, some good left in me, after all.
6
Mason
I would have made a stand against the humans I could smell, rather than run, but my heart was already trying to escape my body as I watched Seth disappear out the window. I picked up the computer parts he wanted, I knew vaguely that they were what housed the brains of the machine, but beyond that I was lost. My laptop worked when I turned it on, and I was content with that, the same way I didn’t need to know how a lightbulb worked to flip it on. The computer parts were light but bulky, and that was bad for a quick and graceful escape.
“Hey, did you hear something?” a male voice asked in the living room.
“Yeah. That way.”
I could only assume that ‘that way’ was toward me, so I hustled to the window and awkwardly climbed out after Seth. The last time I’d done anything this stupid and casually dangerous, Carlisle and I were running bootleg gin to the tune of a thousand dollars a keg, and that was a lot of money in 1930—buying a mansion money or starting an international import-export firm money. Carlisle was smart about financial things. I built a medical practice that only lasted a few years before I had to shut it down during WWII because most of my doctors went off to save the world from Nazis. He started an empire that still stood today.
As soon as my booted foot hit the grated metallic floor of the escape, the sound of the structure groaning sent dread all the way to the marrow of my bones and jolted me firmly back into the present. There was a loud screeching of steel from the floor above us. The flimsy scaffold dropped by about an inch and then caught instead of dumping us to the ground. One level below me, Seth was clinging to a railing with one arm. He glanced upward, and I was struck by how beautiful his bow mouth was, and how much I didn’t want to see any part of him smeared onto the pavement. I rushed down the ladder as fast as I could with both hard drives in my hold. Moving down to the next level was a serious struggle, but Seth was there taking one of the machine parts from me, and then I was able to maneuver better.
He grinned, a feral expression that was mostly teeth, and my heartrate kicked up. He smelled good, like sex, and I shook my head. “You’re getting off on this.”
He shrugged. “We all got our buttons.” He wiggled his eyebrows and laughed, but that charming sound was cut short by a yell from the open window above us.
“Get back here!” The guy who shouted had a bald head and a bad, bushy mustache. He waved a gun around.
“Uh, no!” Seth bellowed back. I got a good look at the man and realized he was one of the guys that Bishop had dropped to the ground outside the police station. He had recovered quickly.
“They didn’t waste any time getting here,” I said.
Seth urged me toward the ladder with a good push to the shoulder, obviously trying to steer me down the next level. “Yeah, I half expected that. Go, go!”
The loud crack of gunfire had me moving on pure instinct. I grabbed Seth and spun us, pinning him against the wall of the building, I was able to curl entirely around him. His pupils were blown, and he tilted his head up to stare directly into my eyes. The voluminous distraction that was his personal scent had me nudging his forehead with mine. He gnawed on his lower lip and surprised me with a good kick that sparked annoying pain in my shin.
“Go.”
“No. It won’t kill me to get shot. Probably.” He yelped and kicked at me again, but I stood there using my body to shield him. True pain flared hot and liquid in my left shoulder and my vision went gray for a moment while I struggled through the twinkling lights on the edges of my consciousness and back to full awareness.
“Shit, they got you,” Seth wheezed. There was a small dot of red on his cheek, and I swiped it away with my thumb. “They stopped. Move, before they reload.”
We both took a step at the same time and a sickening lurch had me grabbing him again. I dropped the hard drive and Seth cried out, trying to wiggle down to get it. The thing smashed on the floor of the fire escape.
“Damn it, no,” he shouted, but then, all at once, the structure fell another foot. His scared earthy-blue eyes met mine, and I didn’t think, I reacted. The shift happened fast. Bones cracking and rearranging. I tried to keep it to a partial change, but I felt my clothes shredding around my upper arms and thighs, more of my dragon escaping into the open than I wanted. My partial dragon limbs were too bulky and muscly for the clothes. My hands were halfway between claws and dragon feet, and I was fucking thankful I could still grab Seth to myself. My shoes were a split mess, but I didn’t worry about it much. I snagged him close like the treasure he was and pulled us both to the edge of the fire escape.
“No, no, you’re nuts, no,” he moaned, but the entire structure let loose from the side of the building, in true free fall. I jumped as far out as I could without slamming us into the next building and cradled Seth close. He lost his grip on his hard drive to wrap his arms and legs around me and cling, his instinct for life apparently kicking in. I was able to snag the fire escape on the other building, but it only slowed my descent as the metal I had desperately grasped broke off. The landing on the ground was hard, but the impact didn’t jar my bones as much as it would have if I were still shaped like a weak human. My dragon wanted to finish the shift. It was hard to pull back from the pleasure of bursting free into my dragon form. I would be powerful then, could destroy those pests bothering us. There were more gunshots, and with adrenaline raging through me, I tried to focus on Seth.
But that was a mistake, too, because he was shaking and upset. Rage powered through me and I wanted to go back inside and rip the heads free o
f the men who dared try to injure him. Hurt me? Fine. Try it. Seth, though? I growled low in my throat, but windows were opening as curious people stuck their heads out to get a good look at the commotion.
“Change back, oh my god. Change back. Put me down. Now,” Seth moaned. He stared into my face and ran his fingers lightly over my forehead. “That’s a wicked trick. Wow.” In spite of everything, he managed to seem excited about the differences in me. My chest went warm and light. I could tell I’d shifted scales there where he ran his fingers because his touch felt softer than it would have against skin. With him in my arms and my heart racing, my stomach pooled with heat and my cock hardened. I drew in deep gulps of his scent. He was beyond mesmerizing for a long moment but then he wiggled out of my arms and dove toward the wreckage on the floor of the alley. I glanced up at the few faces peeking over ledges. No one seemed to notice me yet, but that wouldn’t last long. I was forced to shift back. I did it so quickly that it left me aching and shaky.
Seth was pulling at the metal wreckage, trying to get to the bits and pieces of his computer equipment. There was cursing from above and another shot was fired out of the window. I sprinted across the way and snagged him around the waist. He strained as I began to drag him toward the end of the alley while he kicked and yelled out an enraged noise.
“No. Damn it,” he finally yelled. Another round of gunfire put holes in a dumpster near us and he stopped fighting me to turn and run by my side. He grabbed my hand when I was going to turn right instead of left at the end of the alleyway and tugged me on a short circuit of the neighborhood where we finally came to a rest about a block away in a completely different alley. My feet burned with the cold and wet because the sides of my boots were split.
Seth moaned and crouched down with his back to the dirty gray building that seemed like a poor protector in this seedy part of town. His light jacket wasn’t enough for the weather, and he looked small and cold in only that light jacket and his dirty, blood-spattered jeans and sneakers.
“Are you hurt?”
“No.”
“Where are we?” I asked, glancing around. All the buildings had blurred together, and I didn’t recall any street signs. Blood ran in a warm river down my arm, so I slapped my palm over what seemed like a graze wound on my shoulder.
Seth raised his head long enough to tell me a general address and then dropped it back down to his knees. He looked worse than he had when we plucked him out of that house of horrors from Vladimir’s slimy clutches. No matter what he said, I figured he must have been banged up in the jump. I didn’t smell blood, though, so I let things go for now and called Bishop. Thankfully my phone was still in my pocket after all that. It was a tense ten minutes before my car pulled into the mouth of the alleyway, tires screeching, with Bishop at the wheel.
“Come on. Our ride’s here,” I said, bending down to take Seth’s hand from where he had it curled too tightly around his own ankle. He shook his head and didn’t look up.
“No, I don’t think I’ll go with you. It’ll be harder for them to find me again if I’m on my own.” If I didn’t have dragon hearing, I never would have discerned that muffled muttering.
I hunkered down beside him, my arm aching, and clamped my hand harder to my wound. I waited for him to look up. “Let me help you. Let me keep you safe.”
“What makes you think—shit, you got hit bad.” His eyes flew wide and he sat up to gape at the blood streaming through my fingers.
He looked like he was ready to castigate himself over a flesh wound, so I rushed to say, “It’ll be fine. Dragons heal fast. I just need to clean it up, maybe stitch it if it’s too rough, and I’ll be all right.”
He shook his head. “You got hurt because of me.”
I shrugged. “I don’t care. They’re bad men. If they hadn’t hurt me, it would have been you, and if I hadn’t been here you might have been dead from that damned fire escape. What were you thinking going out there?”
For some inexplicable reason, he grinned at me and glanced uneasily at my arm. “That I didn’t want to get dead, what else? I’ll come along, but just to help you get fixed up. I’m not guaranteeing I’ll leave the city with you. I don’t think you can stop them.”
“But you’ll go with me now?”
“Yes.”
“That’s good enough.”
He smiled at me and we stood together, but we were both moving stiffly. By this time, Bishop was out of the car with the passenger door open. He tapped his foot, that legendary calm of his breaking enough for that.
“Glad you’re all right,” Bishop said. I stumbled on my way over. From Bishop, that was practically a declaration of undying devotion.
“Me too,” Seth sniped back, snotty as ever. I nudged him with my shoulder, but Bishop didn’t seem off-put. He gave Seth what passed for a smile from him, one upturned corner of his mouth. Instead of getting into the passenger seat, I opted to climb in back with Seth, where we rode together. He inched close enough to me that his shoulder brushed my fingers where they were still clamped around the painful gouge.
The hotel we’d rented rooms in wouldn’t have wanted someone who looked the way the two of us did coming in the front door, and we certainly didn’t need to see the cops again, so Bishop drove around to a side entrance on the tall, clean, bastion of modern travel accommodations, and we snuck in that way. He led the way to the elevators and made sure the coast was clear before he called us out of our hiding spot near some vending machines and we rode up to our rooms. I had a room to myself and Seth made an appreciative sound as he let us into it using my keycard, kind enough to lead the way so that I could keep pressure on my arm and not drip blood onto the nice carpets. I couldn’t help but notice he pocketed my room card instead of giving it back as he closed and locked the door behind us.
“You think there’s a first aid kit around here?” He slipped his shoes off and then crouched in front of me, unlacing my destroyed boots. Pleasant heat filtered through my body at seeing him there, taking care of me. Did he even realize he was making sure that I, his potential mate, was okay? Or would he have done this for anyone? My heart chugged a little faster.
“I always bring my medical bag with me. I have all the supplies we’ll need. It’s there,” I said, pointing at it where it sat beside the bed on a desk chair. The room was typical enough, done up in a deep maroon with a queen bed, dark wood bedside cabinets, a desk, a chest of drawers, and a small table with the television propped on top and a two-cup coffee maker parked beside it. Seth walked past the desk and grabbed the small duffel bag I used as a kit. I dragged myself toward the bathroom.
Now that we were in a safe, secure location, my adrenaline was siphoning away, and I was left tasting the bitter edges of exhaustion. My body ached with the rapidity of the shifting I’d done. It was much better to do it slowly, at least for me. Carlisle was one of those dragons who didn’t seem to have many problems with quick changes. I’d always envied him that way.
I went into the boring mint-green bathroom and settled onto a small stool near the sink. The room wasn’t large, but Seth brought the bag in and sat down across from me on the lip of the bathtub that also housed the shower. He sighed and shook his head. “I’m really sorry you got hurt.” He licked his lips and I couldn’t help but focus on them. He truly was a beautiful omega. “Thank you for coming after me. I shouldn’t have called, but I wasn’t sure of anyone else who could help, and now….” He sort of gestured at me, crestfallen.
“It’s all right,” I said softly. “Open the bag. I just need to clean the wound. I suspect there’s less to deal with than you might think. Sometimes wounds bleed a lot but aren’t much.”
He pasted on a smile weak enough that I knew he’d never be a doctor.
“Get out the peroxide.” I stripped my shirt off quickly and was happy to see that the blood had slowed to more of an ooze. Seth pointedly looked away from my shoulder but didn’t seem to have a problem gazing at my chest. Maybe this wasn’t so bad a
fter all.
He breathed out hard through his nose but didn’t flinch as I leaned over the tub and talked him through helping me to clean the wound. It really was a graze, so it didn’t take me long to get him to slather it in some completely unnecessary antibiotic cream, I felt compelled to use it anyway, though, and he handled the tape to close the wound. When the inner layer was finished, he helped me wrap a gauze pad around it to keep the dirt out.
“That should be gone by this evening,” I said, giving him a smile. “Again, no worries.”
He blinked at me. “Seriously? Sick.”
“No, I won’t be sick.”
He frowned and studied me, and I laughed. “I’m sorry. I had to yank your chain. I’m not that out of touch. I’ve heard that term before.”
“But you would never use it?”
I shrugged. “When you’re over 300 years old you don’t feel the need to add every single passing language phase into your vocabulary. If I liked it, I would keep it, but meh.”
He crossed his arms over his chest. “Like hell you’re that old.” He eyed me suspiciously with a dead-to-rights look he was good at.
“I’m a dragon,” I drew the word out.
His face went serious. “My mom wasn’t that old when she… you know.”
“Yes, I know. It’s unfortunate. She must have been half dragon herself, not a full dragon, and then didn’t mate with a dragon. That’s the only way Divine Omegas seem to come into being. We’ve recently speculated that mating with a full dragon is probably what keeps a partial dragon from dying during the birthing process.”
