His Dragon Protector

by Jill Haven

  I rounded the corner of the fence into the maze of small roads that led through the units. I intended to stay at the fence, like I had last time, and try to be faster than I was before. Unease prickled the hairs up on the back of my neck. Things were very quiet. There were no guards tonight, which was weird. I went to the storage unit and instead of using a keycard—I didn’t have the equipment to program one right now anyway—I jimmied the door open with the crowbar. I’d have to be double super-fast.

  Popping the door, I gaped up into several smirking, familiar faces and a couple of guns.

  “Hey, everyone. This is just the damndest thing, isn’t it? I don’t suppose you’d forget you saw me?” I stood up and grinned, gripping the crowbar in both hands. The guns were lifted, and they were really all I could focus on. Someone gave me a sucker punch and my head rocked back, pain bursting in my mouth. Two guys grabbed me from the side and a third had me around the neck, hauling me right back outside and into the back of big old SUV.

  I struggled, smacking around with my crowbar, but it was knocked out of my hands. I was weak, and my stomach still felt strange and empty after giving birth to the egg. It didn’t take long to have my hands tied in front of me. I didn’t simmer down until an ugly-looking mug with a bushy mustache settled the cool barrel of his gun against my temple.

  “Volpe wants you alive. I can make up a real good reason for you to arrive with a lobotomy, though.” It was dim in the back of the SUV and I was crammed on the floor between two guys who filled nearly all the space.

  Mock saluting as best I could, I simmered down and rested against his knees. “Don’t blast me if there’s a bump.”

  The man laughed. “You’re all right, Seth. You probably don’t remember me, but when you were a boy, I used to play ball with you sometimes when you were visiting.”

  I glanced back at him, but it was too dark and too many years and miles had made it onto his face. “Sorry, I don’t.”

  “Why’d you have to do it? Why take money?”

  Shaking my head, I closed my eyes. “It seemed like a good idea at the time.”

  He grunted and put his gun away, and I thought maybe this guy wouldn’t shoot me, but there was a hell of a lot of others, so my heart still jackhammered.

  When we got to Nonno’s house, I was almost happy to see it when they dragged me out of the vehicle. He had a large old place with slanted slate roofs and pearly white siding that looked more like it belonged in the Mediterranean than New York. Grape vineyards spread away in every direction from the house and in the far distance Lake Ontario sparkled like a silver piece of glass. The moon came out, and all I could see of the vineyard were skeletons of vines reaching across to touch hands with the ones next to them. I shivered and tried to keep myself from reading everything around me as some sort of dark omen. Nonno’s grapes were a fall treat, not a prediction of doom. The men dragged me into the house, through rooms dressed up in fancy furniture, and up a wide marble central staircase to Grandpa’s study where he stood behind his desk.

  “Hope you weren’t waiting long,” I said through the pain of a busted lip. Tangy copper hit my tongue and I swallowed a trickle of blood that had my stomach heaving. “You look good, Nonno.”

  Tall, slim like me, and silver-haired—for a man of nearly eighty, he was impressive. He stood with his back straight even though he used a cane now, and even at this late hour he wore a suit. I think I would probably keel over from the shock if I ever saw him in anything like real old man clothes, especially on a weekday. Right now, he held the back of the chair at his desk like it was going to fly right away if he didn’t anchor it there. Seeing my Dad in his features had me sucking in a deep breath. When should I tell him about Dad’s death? On the desk gleamed a pearl-handled pistol which he’d owned as long as I’d been alive. My stomach clenched, but the gun was always around somewhere, so I tried to relax myself.

  “Seth, I did everything I could for you, boy. I taught you morals.” Grandpa looked the same as ever, but his voice was a wreck.

  “You sure didn’t teach me right from wrong, Nonno.”

  He stared at me, his brown eyes catching the light from the lamp of his desk. I couldn’t read him and that had my balls shrinking in fear. “I taught you how to live life by the code of this family. What do you have to say for yourself?”

  “I didn’t want…” I sighed and licked at my hurt lip. “I didn’t want to piss you off. I did what I had to do, which I know you understand. You’ve always done what you thought you needed to do, when you thought you needed to do it, or am I wrong?”

  Grandpa wiped a shaking hand down his face. This was a guy who had bounced me on his knee as a kid. Who usually hugged and kissed me and ruffled my hair. He wasn’t Dad, and I knew in my heart he wasn’t good, but I was still hurt that we were here with things.

  “Seth, you’re not mistaken. I’ve always taken care of my business, and my life, in the ways I thought were most sound.”

  My gut ached, and not from birthing the egg. I really did feel bad for stealing from him, just because I knew I was putting him in a spot. Grandpa nodded to the man on my right and he cut the haphazard tie job around my hands. I rubbed my wrists. This had to be a good sign, right?

  “There were things going on you didn’t know about, Grandpa. I…” Shrugging, I did my best to try to find a way to explain anything about the dragons without him thinking I had a screw loose.

  Grandpa walked slowly around his desk, his cane smacking heavily on the floor. When he stood in front of me, he bent to cup my chin with one hand. His skin didn’t feel the way I remembered; it was thin, like paper, and when he leaned closer, he pressed a kiss to my forehead.

  “I’m sorry, Seth.”

  “It’s okay, Nonno. I’m not that bad off. I’ll survive.”

  “No, you won’t.”

  My heart raced as he picked the pistol up off the desk. I held up my hands in front of me and squinted my eyes closed, but at the last second cracked one. His hand shook. He fired and nothing happened to me, but someone behind me cried out. Another deafening shot split the air and pain slammed my chest, above my heart. I gasped and clapped my hand to it, knocked backward with the blow. I smashed my head off the floor. Pain rushed me all at once and seemed to come from everywhere and ran in raging, gushing rivers from the spot on my chest. There was crying in the room, and I realized it was Nonno. The pain was fierce, and my blood seeped through my fingers, but I was still conscious somehow. I could feel the tether to Mason that had been stretched and abused when I left Haiden’s house thrum to life, stronger than ever, and I clung to it in my mind. It seemed like I could almost see it if I stared at my chest long enough, but if I looked down, I saw blood, and then I gagged, so I just stared back up at the ceiling again.

  I’d had a good run. This was better than being raped and bred by dragons, I guess—a quick end.

  “Take him out of here. Take the body to the usual place. Make sure he’s not found,” Nonno said around blowing his nose.

  I tried to open my mouth to speak, but my throat wasn’t working. The world faded and seemed to come back. I was being moved and my eyes were closed and I couldn’t open them. It was like I was trapped in my body.

  Someone picked me up by the shoulders and someone else got my knees, and my muscles were limp noodles. I couldn’t make any part of myself move, not even my pinky toe, but bizarrely I didn’t feel like I was dying either, just like I had the world’s most hellacious hangover. My stomach burned with bile. I was carried for a long way and then tossed onto a hard surface. Something covered my head, maybe a blanket, and the air got stuffy and too hot. My chest was barely moving. Wherever I was, I was there, bumping around for a long time. Eventually I realized maybe I was in a car. It stopped. I was moved again. This time, I was unmistakably tossed into a trunk—the smell of exhaust got to me fast—and the lid slammed.

  I lost track of the world for a while, fixated on that electric tug in my chest and the fact that I could wi
ggle my pinkies—why could I move them and nothing else? I had no idea.

  And then the car I was in stopped. The trunk opened and I was flung on the ground like a sack of cement. Men laughed somewhere nearby and there was the sound of what I imagined had to be a shovel in dirt. I wanted to scream and cry and beg Mason’s forgiveness, but I couldn’t do any of those things. After a while I was picked up by rough hands and when I was let go this time, I fell too far. I landed hard and my head hurt more than it already did.

  The electric sizzle in my chest seemed to spark like a disconnected high-voltage wire and I clung to it, even as dirt fell on me. My heart hammered. There were sounds I couldn’t quite place, and the dirt stopped raining on top of me. The smell of damp and loam had me screaming in my head, and then they were real, happening above me somewhere. There was a roar—earsplitting and fuckin’ beautiful. If that wasn’t a dragon, I was the Queen of England. I sucked in air and sat straight up, which hurt like a bitch.

  I stared at the dirt walls all around me and started laughing. I gasped and cackled until tears fell.

  16

  Mason

  “Mason, you can’t do this. You can’t, you need to get ahold of yourself!” Jade yelled right in my face. Her mascara was running at the corners, smearing black rivers down her face, and her red lipstick reminded me of blood. I paced the yard partially transformed, my clothes in rags around my limbs.

  “There’s something wrong with him. I can fucking feel it.” I smacked at my chest and raked my talons there, but they didn’t do much damage.

  “You have to calm down. You can’t fly off anywhere,” Carlisle called from the porch. “I’m literally on the phone with Bishop. He says that they have him. You have to stop. Haiden, stay in the house,” Carlisle said louder, and that halted me. I wasn’t so far gone that I would hurt anyone. I tried to take deep breaths, but all I could feel was the smoke and fire in the back of my throat and the rage bubbling in my guts.

  “Fuck this,” I growled, and the sound was mostly just that, a growl. “I know there’s something wrong with him.” Sparks flew from my mouth, but Jade didn’t step back.

  “You’re not even sure where he is,” Jade said, and I hated how reasonable she sounded.

  “Okay,” Carlisle barked into the phone, and then said louder to me, “Bishop was already on Seth’s tail. He was going after the clan book again, and he got caught. I’m light on details, but he’s hurt, and they’re taking him to a hospital in Buffalo.”

  “It’s night. I’m flying.”

  “Damn it,” Carlisle yelled. “Land outside the city at the vacation house near Niagara Falls. You know it. I’ll have Bishop meet you there with clothes.”

  It felt good to complete the transformation, tear out of my clothes and have the power of my dragon flowing all around me in a rapid swirl of heat. I ran and loped into the air, the tops of the pine trees skimming my belly on the ascent. It took less time to fly to Buffalo, even trying to keep close to trees and away from highways than it would have in a car. I wasn’t following the roads anyway, I was following the feeling drawing me to my mate, pulling me to his location. My chest burned and crackled, and there was nothing I could do to make it stop except to find Seth. I knew that like my lungs knew to move air around.

  By the time I landed, I was a worn-out mess. I alighted in a field that was near a cabin the clan kept. It was close enough to Niagara Falls that we sometimes used it as a quick getaway spot. I wasn’t there more than ten minutes, flopped on cold, tall grass shivering in the dark and cold as a sweaty man, before headlights broke through the darkness. The vehicle came to a stop nearby and I recognized it as Bishop’s yellow Jeep. He opened the door and got out, slamming it behind him, a dire silhouette. I stood and walked toward him, but it had been so long since I flew any distance, my legs trembled.

  When I closed in on him, Bishop tossed clothes at me.

  “You really should take care of your omega better,” he said. “I would give anything to be in your shoes.” Usually he cloaked his emotions well, but tonight Bishop wore a scowl.

  Laughing dryly, I held up the pile of clothes. “These are your shoes.”

  He didn’t crack a smile and I got dressed as fast as I could. Nothing really fit right, all the clothes were too big, but I rolled and tucked and tightened my belt and shoelaces until it was passable, and then climbed into Bishop’s Jeep.

  “You flew the whole way?” he asked and put the Jeep in gear.

  “Yep.”

  Bishop grunted, and I thought he might have been impressed, but there was no way to really tell with him.

  When we got to the hospital, there were two other dragons waiting for us in the parking lot that I hadn’t seen in so long I’d nearly forgotten they were on the continent. They weren’t Blood dragons. Their clan had been decimated centuries before in a war, and they carried no clan name now, or at least I’d never heard it.

  “Ace and Tennyson,” I muttered. They were both dressed in black from head to toe. Ace stood nearly as tall as Bishop with a shock of bright blond hair and a pretty face that netted him a lot of attention, no matter where he went. He tended to stay out of public because of it. He wasn’t a forgettable person. Tennyson was scarred up, there was no other word for it, and attracted every bit as much attention as Ace did. He was handsome in his own way, with strong features and jet-black hair, but the entire left side of his face was marred. Enough damage to a dragon could cause scarring, and it made my stomach curl to think what must have happened to him to make something like that stay. “Why are you running around with the mercs, Bishop?”

  He gave me a look. “Who do you think would be crazy enough to scramble on a moment’s notice to take on some mobsters?” When the Jeep was off, he opened his door and I had no choice except to follow him out into the cold night.

  Ace smiled at me when I walked toward the duo where they leaned against a sleek red car.

  “The omega?” Bishop asked and I shivered, waiting for news.

  Ace smirked and offered his hand to me. I shook it fast. “Yes, where’s Seth?”

  “He’s inside. The nurses were chatty with me. He’s in and out of consciousness, but his recovery is phenomenal. He should be dead. There’s no bullet where there should be one. I think his body must have pushed it out. They’re suspicious.” Ace sounded far too cheerful about that terrible news.

  “Gods, we’ll have the Enforcement Council on our heads if we’re not careful.”

  “Of course, the nurses would tell you all of that,” Tennyson grumbled with a sigh as he stood up straighter and offered me his hand. We shook briskly as well.

  “Thank you both, but I…” My eyes strayed toward the hospital.

  “Yes, let’s go,” Ace said, and he led the way. I hated that we were going in somewhere I had absolutely no pull. If this had happened in Charleston, it would be so much easier.

  When we got inside the hospital, the typical smells of antiseptics and bleach smashed into my nose. No matter how long I’d been a doctor, the initial blast was always a shock. Ace guided us along the maze of first-floor hallways to the corridor where Seth’s room was, and then we had to make our way through chaos. The wide, white hallway was packed with nurses and doctors chatting with each other, and there were three uniformed cops standing around, apparently at loose ends. One seemed extra upset.

  “He was just in the station. He’s not a bad kid. We need to get to the bottom of this.” The cop used his hat to gesture toward the others, and to my surprise, they nodded. Hell, they might recognize me. I tried to keep Ace, Bishop, and Tennyson between me and them.

  This close to Seth, I swore I could smell him, and it was all I could do not to transform and push everyone out of my way. The emptiness in my chest was nearly ripping me apart. Bishop dropped a hand on my shoulder, and it took everything in me not to brush him off. “Excuse me, may I talk to the doctor in charge of Seth Preston’s care? I’m his physician,” I said loudly when I ran into a clump of nur
ses. “I would like to see him.” Everyone turned toward me, and I realized maybe that wasn’t the best move when gazes drifted to Bishop and Tennyson, but Ace smiled and stepped forward, clapping me on the shoulder.

  “Yes, he sure is, let the man through.”

  He beamed and the crowd shifted a little and I was surprised when we were able to make our way through the throng directly into a small room. My heart dropped, and I rushed to the bed as soon as I was inside. Seth was hooked up to oxygen and a heart monitor. He was filthy, with dirt in his hair, and there was dried blood on his face and clothes. I carefully reached out and took his hand. When I did, a shock ran through me and I gasped at the pain that clenched around my chest and then rapidly began to fade.

  I laced my fingers with his and energy pulsed and vibrated between us. He gasped and opened his eyes, groaning. “Mason?” The mask over his face distorted his words.

  “I’m here,” I whispered, leaning over the bed.

  “Oh, ouch.” He patted his chest gingerly. “I fucked up.”

  “Why did you leave me again?”

  Tears ran down his cheeks and he shoved the oxygen mask up. I glanced quickly at his numbers and let him do it. “I didn’t want to. I just wanted all this shit to be done, over with. Seeing the egg made it all real, somehow. I didn’t want the same life for our baby that I had growing up. I’m so sorry.”

  Brushing dirt from his hair, I laughed. I was so fucking happy to see him alive I didn’t care about anything else. “I forgive you. I never would have let that happen.”