Damian jerked his chin at the man. “And it never would’ve occurred to you that whatever they paid you, I could’ve doubled it?”
A slow and steady smile spread across Rax’s face. “And here, all this time, I assumed Damian Blackwood was a man of honor and sophistication, unwilling to bend his morals in the slightest.”
“When it comes to dealing with the Realms, you and I both know that morals are a hindrance.”
Rax laughed. “Yes.”
The dark skies above opened up, and it started to rain, with a distant clap of thunder, as if to echo Damian’s dark mood. “Tell me who paid to put the hit on me, and I may consider paying you for the information rather than pulling it out of your stomach.”
“You’re not a ruler here, Damian. As they say on this planet, ‘You’re not the boss of me.’” Rax’s smile was fixed and toothy, daring Damian to act, and it occurred to Damian that one of the reasons Rax had kept them outside was so that either of them shifting wouldn’t wreck his establishment.
Just then, his crew’s SUV wheeled in at speed, cutting off Rax’s retreat and blocking him from the view of his security cameras. Austin and Zach leaped out with Max close behind, and Damian knew they only had a moment’s time before Rax’s own men would join them to brawl.
“It doesn’t have to be like this,” he said, holding up a staying hand. “Right now, on this planet, we have a common enemy in the Hunters. And whatever bullshit the Realms wants with me—their problems are their own.”
Rax looked around at Damian’s men as his own men ran out of the Lynx and circled. They were mostly human. If Rax forced Damian’s hand, they’d wind up slaughtered and mind-wiped by the Forgetting Fire. Rax held up his hand as well. “You’re not going to like the answer, Damian.”
“Try me.”
Rax's full body shrugged. “I can’t tell you precisely who spoke to the girl—because once I broker a deal, I do walk away—but the summoning was from inside the palace. I recognized the mirror’s signature.”
Damian growled. He’d left the Realms two decades ago, abdicating his father’s throne to his stepmother, who had married his father in hopes of gaining it, and their daughter, his half-sister, whose future husband was now next in line. His stepmother had gotten exactly what she wanted when he left, and Damian had stayed true to his word to never go back nor interfere.
“And now that I know you’re willing to pay,” Rax continued, “that’s the last bit of information you’ll ever get from me for free.”
“So be it,” Damian said. He twirled his hand, gesturing to his men to pack up, and Rax did the same.
Damian spotted something on one of Rax’s men, though. He lunged after him, faster than anyone could react, taking the leather of the coat he wore in both hands and bunching it tight enough to hold him pinned as he lifted him up, hoisting him up against the SUV’S metal side.
“What the fuck!” the human squirmed, his brown eyes bugging out as he ineffectually beat at Damian’s arms with his hands and tried to flutter him with kicks. He smelled like panic and expensive cologne. “I can’t breathe!”
Rax stood nearby but didn’t stop him, watching everything with glittering eyes.
“How. Did. You. Get. This. Coat,” Damian growled, punctuating out each word, ignoring all else around him.
“A girl gave it to me!” the man squeezed out.
Andi. Damian set him down slowly as his jaw clenched. “Why?”
“What the fuck business is it of yours?” the man asked, collecting himself rapidly. “Jesus…hell…I should kill you!” His eyes flickered to Rax for instructions.
“I promise you I would kill you first,” Damian said coldly. “Give me the coat.”
“Fuck no, dude. It’s mine.” The man tried to step back, only finding the tour bus behind him.
Damian forcibly turned him, pushing him against the SUV’s side before he could resist, pinning him there with his forearm against the back of his neck as he reached into coat pockets with his other hand.
“Man! Come on!” the human protested, flailing against Damian’s greater strength.
Damian’s rough search didn’t bring up anything silver. Maybe it’d gotten lost—maybe it’d dissolved after he’d ripped it into pieces? It was too late now; he couldn’t know.
“Why did she give it to you?” he asked, whirling the man back around. Had he been foolish to hope it’d be special?
The man he’d assaulted pushed back at him ineffectually. “Because I let her suck my dick, man. Why the fuck do you think?”
Damian rose up to his full height as Austin rushed up to grab his arm, hauling down with his full weight. “D…D…it’s not worth it.”
Damian stood there for a moment, breathing hard. He knew Austin was right and yet.
He lowered his arm slowly, and all the guns that Rax’s remaining men had pointed on him lowered as well. Thunder clapped again, and it began raining in earnest as he released the man. “Go inside before I change my mind.”
Rax tilted his head at their exchange. “One would think you could buy yourself any number of jackets, Damian.”
Damian’s attention turned to the other dragon. “You’d best go inside, too, Rax.”
“Gladly. I don’t like getting wet—or watching once stand-up individuals show their baser natures,” he taunted, before walking around the SUV.
Damian rocked back, all the tension he carried sinking to knot inside his stomach, like a snake spitting venom inside of him.
“Damian?” Zach asked.
“Go home,” Damian told him. “All of you.”
“You’re meeting us there, right?” Max pressed him.
“Yes. But I’ll be training.” The only way to burn off this energy would be to fight against the worst Grim could think up and create to throw at him. “Solo.”
His old weapons master nodded. “Understood,” he said and pulled himself into the van.
Chapter 14
Andi sat outside her single patient’s room. She was all caught up and open for an admit, which gave her altogether far too much free time to think. She couldn’t stop herself from flipping back and forth between the texts she’d had with her uncle and David’s name in her recents list, plain as day.
It made her wish, as she so often had, that she possessed some ability to see into the future.
People at the hospital were always asking her for prognostication: “Should I take a pain pill now?” “When will I walk again?” “How long will I be here?” Or, the worst ever, “What’s going to happen to Grandma?” and the thing was, there were very few circumstances under which she could say, with one hundred percent authority, what the answer was. Not when people were in critical condition in the ICU. Not when she didn’t know their entire medical history or them personally. She could calculate odds like a Las Vegas bookie—but if the consequences of being wrong were somebody pulling the plug on a loved one—doing a family’s emotional bedside triage shit was hard.
So, she knew now that she didn’t have a snowball’s chance in hell of figuring out the outcome of anything having to do with David, her uncle, or Danny herself, without more data—but for some reason, she couldn’t stop trying.
“Andi!” Sheila said sharply, walking down the hall. “Check the board online—you’re up!”
Andi stifled a groan and wiggled her mouse so the computer in front of her would flash back on. There was a likely ICU admit in the emergency department downstairs. A twenty-nine-year-old guy’d gotten into a fight. Fractured ribs, possible internal hemorrhaging.
Well, it’d at least be good for one trip to CT. Which wasn’t usually a thought she relished, but anything to kill time faster tonight and get her closer to tomorrow morning with her uncle and some answers.
“Got it.” She waved Sheila off, hopping into the chart. Her in-hospital phone rang, and she knew from the number it was the emergency department already calling to give report.
Andi was waiting by the bedside as her new ad
mit came rolling up on his gurney, and at seeing him, she blinked.
“Julian?” The ED nurse had said his name, but she assumed he was surely one of the hundreds of other Julians in this city and not the only one she knew. His face looked like he’d hit a wall at speed—swollen and bruised—and he was covered in scrapes and scabs. But his eyes opened as she said his name, and he grunted.
“Yo, Andi.”
“You know this fool?” her coworker asked her.
“Only barely,” Andi said, frowning to take all of him in.
“Yeah, well, it’s like I told you on the phone,” her coworker from the emergency department said disparagingly. “We can’t get a clear story out of him. Either he got beat up, or he was in a car wreck—I don’t know which—good luck.”
Her other coworkers and the tech the ED nurse had brought with her were already pulling him off the gurney and into his ICU bed, switching his IV lines to the ICU pumps and replugging in his monitor cables. Andi took a fast listen to his lungs, trying not to press hard against his fractures, and heard the tiny popping sounds of crackles in his alveoli from where fluid was building up.
“You need anything else?” the ED nurse asked.
“No, thanks, I’ve got him,” she said, dismissing all the extra staff. The second she was alone with Julian, she whipped the curtain closed. “Julian! What the fuck!”
Julian twisted his head to look over at her. “Your ex-boyfriend fucking sucks,” he said.
Andi’s eyes widened. “Shut up,” she said, going over to the belonging bags that’d been tossed onto the couch. Sure enough, Damian’s coat was inside, in shreds from where either paramedics or emergency department personnel had cut it off of him. She whirled back to the bed. “Did he…do this to you?”
But Julian’s head had already sunk back onto his pillow. She walked over and shook him gently. “Julian, Julian, wake up.” His eyelids didn’t flutter, so she reached and pinched his trapezius muscle, hard, and shouted, “Julian!” His body winced and flinched, but his eyes didn’t open.
“Goddammit!” she hissed. If he wasn't awake enough, they'd have to intubate him with a breathing tube to protect his airway, and it’d be a few days before they could take it out again and she could get any answers. She pinched him again, harder. “Julian, wake the fuck up right now; I mean it,” she said.
This time he didn’t even wince. His head just lolled in her direction, and a thin trickle of silver poured out of his nose.
Andi stepped back from the bed quickly, not wanting to believe what she was seeing. But when the silver that’d spilled out crawled its way back up and into him without leaving a trail behind itself, she couldn’t deny it anymore. “Oh, fuck, fuck, fuck.” She wiped her hands on her scrubs and reached for her phone and then hesitated. She didn’t want to have to call Damian. But if something like what’d happened to Zach happened here again, she couldn’t let that happen to her workplace—or her coworkers—again.
She hit Damian’s number and dialed, bracing for the moment he’d pick up—only he didn’t. After six rings, she went to voicemail.
Was he truly not around his phone, after an apparent week of stalking her? Or—after having found his coat on Julian—had he finally given up?
The line beeped without an introduction, so she spoke fast. “Damian, I’m at work. Something bad is about to happen here. I…I need your help.” She stared at the phone for a moment more, breathing hard and willing him to answer.
When he didn’t, she hung up.
* * *
Damian drove home only slightly slower than he’d driven to the coffee shop earlier, wishing he could fly instead.
So, now you want my wings. His dragon challenged him as they parked.
What I want, he said, as he took the stairs up to his training room, stripping off layers of unnecessary clothing along the way, is not to feel things.
Dragons have feelings, his dragon defended itself. It is only that we don’t care about the feelings of others.
Then that…yes…that, Damian growled and slammed the room’s door closed behind himself. “Grim. Hardest setting. Don’t hold back,” he announced, and lasers descended from the ceiling on turrets.
The beams of light burned him whenever they hit. At the beginning of his session, he was acrobatic enough to avoid them, and Grimalkin gave him enough places to hide, but as the training continued, there were fewer objects to duck behind, and the beams of light grew wider. He moved from spot to spot, taking out the turrets however he was able: with gunshot, thrown knives, hands and feet, until it was just him and lasers now, sweeping from side to side. One caught his shoulder; the other nicked a thigh. Green blood dripped down as he gasped in pain and threw himself down to roll away from the next one’s path just in time.
He fought until he couldn’t think of anything else—tempting fate until he was glazed with sweat. There was nothing else to think about than escape-fight-pain, escape-fight-pain, in an endless cycle, and it was almost meditative seeing how far he could go, feeling like he was on the verge of dying, while knowing that he was never in any real danger, because if he was, his dragon would come barreling out of him.
And save you, his dragon muttered. Again.
How many times have I really needed saving?
More than I can count.
Damian snorted at that, as a laser skimmed his shoulder. It wasn’t like his dragon could do calculus. It was a creature of the now; it knew no future other than what it wanted. Had no concerns other than its own desires. It was a weapon of raw power—his heritage from his Unearthly father—and a quality that his very earthly mother had had to manage in the Realms without.
The first time he learned about it was when he was ten when a tutor tried to poison him. Up until then, he’d only known that he was fast and strong. The man had given him a pastry and then watched him eat it, eagerly anticipating both his death and the bounty it would bring him.
And then his dragon joined Damian.
That was the only word he had for it. One moment he was alone, and then after that, doomed to be dual for eternity. He lost himself and arose as something that he’d never been before—scaled, massive, magnificent—and watched his tutor’s horror and utter fear at his transition.
His tutor lunged for the last of the pastry and ate it before Damian could fully comprehend what had happened, and then he watched the man die through his dragon’s eyes, his tutor frothing at the mouth as his fingertips blackened. Shortly after that, Damian fell apart.
That was what it had felt like at the time. He had held space, and then he’d lost it somehow—gone from being powerful back to being a boy of ten, with a corpse in front of him. He looked down at his tutor, screamed, and didn’t stop screaming all the way until he’d found his father.
It wasn’t the body that’d frightened him—in the Realms, public executions were very popular. It was the change in him. Where had the dragon gone? Why had it come out? Was the dragon his or vice versa? His father was dragon more often than human, so Damian didn’t understand.
He had so many questions, and his father had no answers as he propelled them back to look at his tutor’s body for clues as to who’d bribed him—and when they’d returned, they’d found his mother at his tutor’s side, reaching for a tiny crumb.
“No, no, no,” his father reprimanded her like she was a child, then grabbed her, his ceremonial cape surging behind him like a golden wave as he carried her away. She didn’t kick or scream anymore when he did that, not like she used to—and standing there alone, Damian realized he couldn’t remember the last time she’d said his name. He tried to tell himself he didn’t need to hear it from her, and that was when his dragon first spoke to him.
You don’t need her now.
He’d looked around, stunned, afraid he was hearing his tutor’s ghost, or someone else’s magic was playing a trick on him.
I’m not a trick.
You don’t need anyone else.
You have me.
>
And his father erected a statue of an attacking dragon on that same parapet within days—mid-lunge, despite the fact that that hadn’t actually happened—to commemorate Damian’s first change.
* * *
It was a good thing her other patient was stable, because Andi tightened the parameters on his alarms, hung fresh IV bags so nothing would beep and abandoned him.
It wasn’t that Julian needed her to do anything. His vitals were stable—for all of the shit that’d happened to his body—but she felt like she had to keep an eye on him. There was no way she could’ve stopped the thing she’d seen Damian kill last weekend not three rooms down from here, but maybe she could sound the alarm or something. Save a few lives that way. Stop a few more Jessicas from happening. Andi looked at her phone again, feeling impotent. Come the fuck on already, Damian! Call me!
She paced around Julian’s bed like a caged lion. She’d already told Sheila she was skipping her lunch break, so she was surprised when the curtain suddenly pulled back. She expected to find one of her coworkers waiting there, looking to shoot the shit, or asking for her opinion on an upcoming online purchase, when she found the duo she’d “jogged” past the other night.
“Hello?” she asked in a presumptive tone, putting herself directly in their path. They weren’t in the basement anymore, and this was her territory.
They blinked at finding her there and tried to sidle past her. “We’re here to check your plumbing,” one of them said.
“That’s funny, I didn’t put a work order in.” Andi crossed her arms and moved slightly closer to the call light.
“It’s just a spot check. We’re doing a yearly audit,” the short bald one said with a shrug, holding a strange implement with a gage that looked like a compass on it. She could see the needle flickering as it made a light clicking noise, like a Geiger counter.
Andi had a fearful moment of wondering if Julian was radioactive, but held her ground. “Well, you’ll have to come back. This patient needs to be on isolation for c. diff. It’s not safe for you to be in here without gowns.”
Dragon Destined: Billionaire Dragon Shifter Romance (Prince of the Other Worlds) Page 15
