Andi shook her head. “I…used to.” Poker had been more Danny’s thing, but he’d played her often enough for practice that she’d gotten good at it too. Not as good as she’d been at pool though, and she heard the slapping smack of balls rolling into one another at speed. There was a pool table here somewhere. Already, she felt fractionally more at ease. No wonder Danny had come here to sell his car parts with Julian. How crazy was it that a place like this—so full of strangers—could even slightly remind her of home?
“Ladies,” said a suave man who walked over to their side. He was well dressed like Julian had been the other night, only he’d clearly spent more on it—his shoes sharper, his shirt and slacks more impressively tailored to fit his leanly muscled body. His dark hair was tamed into rippling waves, and he had eyes that reminded her of Damian’s—in that they missed nothing—only the stranger’s were more amber than Damian’s gold. “What a charming pair. Did you two come together?”
The woman beside her laughed and put a hand to her chest. “No! But I’m always happy to make a new friend,” she said, looping her other arm through Andi’s.
“I’m sorry,” Andi said, disengaging, looking up into the man’s oddly familiar eyes. “But I…got a text?” He looked like he was in charge, and she prayed he had news for her.
“Yes!” the man said enthusiastically, nodding strongly. “I believe I messaged you earlier. Shall we go someplace private?”
Andi knew she probably shouldn’t follow him anywhere alone, no matter that he looked pleased to see her now. But if she was going to get any news about Danny or Argento to pass along to her uncle…. “Certainly,” she said, squaring her shoulders.
The woman beside her caught Andi’s elbow again and surprised her. “Are you sure?” she asked.
Andi was well versed in all the nuances of the Girl Code and knew that the other woman was just trying to watch out for her—or to get her to watch out for herself.
“Yes, I am,” Andi said with a nod.
“Don’t worry. I’ll take good care of her,” the man told the woman beside her, before giving her a conspiratorial wink.
Andi let the strange man navigate her along the edges of the casino toward a door that two men in suits stood on either side of. They were well dressed, but not so well dressed that she couldn’t make out the lumps of what were surely weapons underneath their jackets.
They parted for the man leading her, and he strode into the room, indicating that she should follow, as he rounded a desk to sit down. “I’m Rax,” he announced. “And you are?”
“Andi.”
“Ah. I only had your phone number, courtesy of Julian.” He gestured, and she took the chair opposite him. This was his office. They were separated by a desk, and behind him was a bookshelf with more items on it than books, mostly tiny bejeweled pieces of art. There was a framed map of the city with gilt edges on the wall behind her, and to her right, one wall of the room was occupied with a mirror so old the glass had fogged. On his desk was an old-fashioned worn deck of cards. “You don’t get tired of games?” she said, nodding her head at the deck.
He picked up the deck and shuffled them like a magician might, his fingers moving impossibly fast. “Never. So many things are predictable these days. Games of skill and chance, however, are always amusing.”
“Says someone who owns the house.”
“Would you expect any less?” He chuckled. “Skill is so rare these days. Chance, however—that’s a cheap hit anyone can take.” He smiled a white smile and put the cards in a drawer. “So, why don’t you tell me what’s going on?” he said, in a companionably warm tone. He didn’t seem dangerous in the least, which was how Andi knew that he truly was. He reminded her of herself when she’d gone on the road with Danny.
“What’d Julian tell you?” Andi asked, tossing his question back at him. She needed to know if he knew anything, first. The man chuckled, clearly recognizing her technique.
“He told me you were in over your head. And that your brother—who I’ll admit, was an associate of mine—was in trouble with Argento.”
Andi sat forward. “Did he tell you why?”
“No, alas. I don’t recommend you go taking him on without an army, though.”
“That’s pretty much what Julian told me.” Andi frowned and shifted, making sure the skin of her legs didn’t show through the silk dress’s slit. “I hope that’s not why you texted.”
“No,” he told her. “I know where Argento is.”
“The docks?” she asked confrontationally, worried she was wasting her time.
“Which dock. Down to the warehouses he operates out of,” Rax said, gesturing at the map of the city behind her. “And what times he’s there.”
Andi fought to keep the excitement from her voice. “You mentioned a price?”
Rax’s eyes slid over her, clinically. “That’s a very nice dress.”
“It is,” she agreed. “And it is staying on me.”
He laughed. “Don’t worry, my dear, I’m only calculating how much you can afford.”
“Not much,” she said, hoping to head him off at the pass. “Why did Argento want my brother, anyway?”
Rax gave her a sly smile. “Knowing that would raise the price.” Someone rapped on the door from the outside. Rax stood up and opened it, leaning out. She didn’t hear what the man was telling him, but she did hear his response. “Demanding? To see me? That’s rich.”
It was all Andi could do not to melt into the seat. Goddammit. Damian again, following her! She was going to have to strangle him.
“I don’t want you. I need more power,” said a man with a British accent, bursting through the office door.
Andi’s jaw dropped in surprise at seeing him. It was David—dressed head to toe in bulky black. “David?” He had a sweetly-metallic smell about him. Andi recognized it from the hospital, like fresh blood from open wounds.
He wheeled on her. “Andi? What the hell are you doing here?”
“No…you first…Argento.” She stood up, shoving her chair back. “What the fuck have you done with my brother?”
David rushed for her. She shrieked and danced back. “Nothing that he didn’t want me to do to him! I swear!”
Andi gasped. “What?”
David whirled on Rax. “But when he’s changed, he’s out of control. I need more power!” He spotted the mirror past Andi, and his eyes went wide.
“Fuck you,” Rax told him with cold precision. “I paid your extortionate fees—my operation was off-limits. You were never supposed to come here.”
“That…it radiates power. I want that,” David hissed, advancing on the mirror behind her.
“Over my dead body,” Rax threatened, calmly moving around the desk to block David’s path.
Andi looked between them—utterly confused—but she had the presence of mind to edge toward the door.
“Give me what I want, or I will take it,” David growled at Rax.
Rax tilted his head as though he couldn’t believe what he was hearing. “I’m sorry?”
“You heard me. Give it to me.”
“You think your poor attempts at ritual magic with borrowed power threatens me?” Rax’s presence seemed larger now, and Andi had a feeling she knew what could happen next.
David reached up and pulled the fabric of his shirt down and off, revealing something raw and leather-like underneath. “I think I have access to dragon skin now.”
Rax’s eyes widened in shock. “What have you done?”
“What I needed to do, to protect everyone,” he said. Andi was almost to the door when David whirled and grabbed her. “And if Rax won’t give me what I need, maybe he’ll listen to you.”
Andi yelped as David pulled her through the doorway and back out to the casino floor.
Chapter 17
All the visuals coming in from Mills’s neck got blurry as she ran over to stop a man from hurting Andi. Damian saw a flash of the man he’d seen through the coffee shop
window as Mills came up, and then Rax snatched Mills away, forcing her to look at him, his face appearing large in the mirrored reflection. “A little help here?” he mouthed directly to Mills’s choker.
The wink had been a hundred percent intentional, after all.
“Spheres,” Jamison said, tossing one to him as he got out of the tour bus. Damian felt the magic envelope him, reflecting whatever it was the people on the outside wanted to see, as their group walked straight into the club, following the trail they’d seen Mills go through unseen until they reached the door with the small black window. Jamison pulled a skin-like glove onto his metal hand and set it on the screen, palm down, and the door flew open, revealing the casino floor inside.
People were screaming as David was fighting Rax off while holding Andi against his chest, hostage-style. She was struggling against him—panicking—until she saw Damian.
“Damian!” Andi gasped his name.
“Let her go, or you die,” Damian growled, advancing on the man. Something smelled like blood here, and if it was Andi, there wasn’t a force on earth that would be able to hold him back. “Get the others out—quickly,” he snapped to his crew. Jamison had already run to collect Mills, and Zach and Austin funneled the other screaming patrons out the door.
David shoved Andi forward, and she fell, sprawling to her knees as he patted assorted pockets full of gear. Damian walked forward slowly, hoping to push him back without him doing anything else bad to Andi, but the man seemed to have abandoned her, more interested in drinking the vials from his pockets. Then Damian recognized the leather grain of the breastplate that he wore.
Dragon skin! his dragon alerted him, sending waves of revulsion and retaliation through him in turns.
“You’re a Hunter,” Damian said, his voice dropping ominously low. “Where the fuck did you get dragon skin from?” Andi crawled toward him, and it took all his strength to keep his gaze on the dangerous man in front of him and not kneel down to comfort her.
“Wouldn’t you like to know?” the man threatened, panting in open glee. It seemed like he was changing now, although unevenly, like his body couldn’t decide what it wanted to become. Damian kept an eye on Andi and stepped aside, clearing his angle of attack.
He is not a dragon! He is wrong! his dragon howled.
The other man’s fingers extended until they ended in claws, and he leaped at Damian.
Damian caught him in mid-air and used his weight to throw him sideways, well away from Andi and saw Mills run up to her to drag her safely back.
The man stood up from the rubble of the table he’d landed on, looking at himself before speaking hoarsely to Damian. “I can defeat you. I can defeat anything.”
“I very much doubt that,” Damian said as the man grabbed a table leg and ran at him.
Damian grabbed the leg as the stranger brought it down and folded the energy through and up again, to punch the stranger in the stomach with it, but instead of having the soft-yield of a human’s guts, it was like he was pounding into another dragon’s belly—like the stranger’s abs were made of stone.
“What’ve you done?” Damian murmured, watching the scales from the stranger’s stomach expand, to crawl up and cover the man’s face. “How are you….” Damian began, shoving the other man who was slowly becoming draconic somehow back.
The man took a moment to marvel at himself. “This…this is what is supposed to be happening! I am full of it…I feel it…and I don’t fight it moving in me!”
Damian ran at him full speed, barreling him down. They writhed, wrestling each other on the floor—Damian’s dragon seething just under the surface, disgusted by the abomination that they fought against. “Try not to destroy everything!” Rax shouted from afar as they took another table out, sending chips and cards scattering.
Damian moved more quickly than the creature could, and pinned it. Everything that was cold inside him and his dragon agreed, trying to take control: Kill him! Kill the thing!
No! We need answers! How the fuck is this happening?
“Whatever the fuck you are. Stay. Down,” Damian growled.
“You,” the thing beneath him muttered. “Cannot,” it said, somehow lifting up. “Stop me!” it howled in triumph, arching up and knocking Damian back.
“But I can,” said someone else’s voice, much more quietly.
* * *
“Danny?” Andi felt a thrill of hope until she turned to see who’d spoken. Somehow, in the middle of all the chaos and monsters, a new creature had joined their ranks. He looked physically ill and half-broken—crouched over unnaturally, like the mottled hide that covered him was too small—but he had a voice just like her brother’s. “Danny, is that you?” She took a teetering step toward him.
He was shorter than David and Damian both—and slighter—but the anger she was familiar with was written across his face.
“Danny, are you all right?” She ran for his side.
“Stay back!” he shouted at her so forcefully she stopped. He had too many teeth, and the hand he’d raised in her direction didn’t look like a hand anymore; it appeared like a leathery paw. “This isn’t safe!”
“Danny!” she protested, and then, the thing that had been David turned on him. “No!” she shouted, certain she was witnessing her brother’s demise.
But what happened instead was magnificent. The thing ran at Danny, and he just stopped it. Whole. David was slavering down on him, pushing hard, scale-covered muscles bunching, and Danny pushed back the same, a third of the size, but he didn’t even budge. He just turned toward David and pushed him back. “I told you to leave her alone!” he said, with a shove.
Damian moved to go back in, but Andi ran to his side. “Don’t hurt him!” she pleaded.
“I won’t,” Damian swore as his eyes tracked their fight. “But….”
“He’s my brother!” She caught his hand, squeezing it tight. “Please, Damian.” Damian looked at her, and then at where she held his hand, and squeezed it back with a pulse, before letting go.
The thing that David was now, fighting Danny, looked less human by the moment, and it lashed out dangerously. They were both snarling, ripping off shreds of scales and skin from one another. Each time Danny injured David, Andi gasped.
David bled red.
Danny did not.
His blood was as emerald green as Damian’s.
They twisted around the room, and Andi didn’t know what to do. Damian made to lunge in, but Rax’s hand on his arm held him back. “Wait and see, brother.”
“You’re no brother to me,” Damian said, shaking the other man’s hand away—but he didn’t run in, either. Andi looked up and saw him watching the fight the same as she was, with a similar mixture of awe and horror. And when she looked back at the two of them still wrestling, it seemed like David had won.
“No!” she shrieked as David’s arm swept around Danny’s neck and began to squeeze. Damian ran for the two of them, but she knew in her gut no matter how fast he was, he’d never get there in time. Then Danny reached behind himself, over his shoulder. His claw-tipped fingers found the meat of David’s unprotected eyes and slid deeply in.
Andi put a hand to her mouth and tried not to gag. She fell forward at the same time as David sagged lifelessly behind her brother. “Danny?” she whispered from the sidelines. Her brother turned toward her at last, as Damian put himself between them with a growl.
Even under the dim lights of the casino and at a distance, Andi could tell that Danny’s eyes were not his own.
“Danny, what happened to you?” she whispered, taking a stumbling step toward him.
“Too…close….” he grunted, looking wildly around. “Can’t…be here.” He ran for the back of the room to where Andi didn’t know, but the slot machines and bar enveloped him, and he was gone.
“Danny!” she called after him, as Damian put a restraining hand on her shoulder.
Whatever her brother was now—wherever he was going—she knew she coul
dn’t follow.
* * *
Was that creature one of us? Damian frowned after the man Andi’d called her brother. From the Realms?
I truly do not know, his dragon told him, just as mystified.
The temptation to run after the man—or dragon—was strong, but he couldn’t leave Andi or his crew behind, not when he didn’t trust Rax.
Instead, he released Andi and moved to inspect the vetiver scented man’s corpse. In death, the influence of the dragon skin talisman he wore released him, and Damian watched him change back into the man he’d seen through the coffee shop window one night prior. Damian stripped him of his dragon skin and saw the wet-slap markings it’d left behind on his human flesh where he’d tied it to himself. The skin was clearly freshly procured, still oozing green.
From whom…and where? Damian wondered as his dragon deeply breathed in the scent, trying to identify the owner, but there were too many conflicting scents to make sense of things right now.
“Could you have broken fewer items?” Rax said, picking a path through the rubble of his casino to join him.
Damian ignored the jab. “Did you know he was a Hunter?”
“Of course. I was paying him to leave me the fuck alone.” Rax shoved the body with a wing-tip shoe. “Extortionate bastard.”
“So, what the fuck else was he doing here tonight?” Damian inquired, giving Rax a sharp look.
Rax’s eyebrows rose high on his forehead. “Remember our last conversation? I told you I wouldn’t ever give you any information—ever again—without a price.”
“The fuck we’re playing that game, Rax,” Damian said, advancing. “I owe you nothing.”
Rax meaningfully coughed and took a dramatic look around. Damian’s eyes followed him and found Rax’s men and their machine guns, mixed with his crew, against the walls. Everyone was armed, and everyone had been waiting to see the outcome of the earlier fight—but if they started anything now, it’d be bloody chaos—and he and Andi were right out in the center of it.
Dragon Destined: Billionaire Dragon Shifter Romance (Prince of the Other Worlds) Page 19
