“He saved me too. Were you trapped in the swamps?” Lori asked, trying to keep the conversation civil. At the moment, she couldn’t picture Ursa needing help with anything. Her mind raced, hoping it wouldn’t discharge. But it was hard to think of options when she couldn’t quit staring at the end of the gun as metal glinted in the soft light.
“No. I know you know about Drake. De…” Again the words were lost.
“I’m sorry, I don’t understand.”
“I said no,” Ursa repeated, talking slowly as if Lori was simpleminded. “I know you know about Drake. De sheriff told me. De night he arrived, coming out of dem swamps like a dragon-man creature from de bayou, I had a gun in my mouth. He saved me. God, gods, doesn’t matter who sent him. He’s here. He’s my family. And in de backwaters, we have ways of protecting our family.” Ursa lifted her rifle and pointed it steadily at Lori.
“People know to come looking for me here.” Lori hoped the woman didn’t detect the lie.
“Let dem come. Dem gators have dey usefulness.”
Lori swallowed nervously and glanced over her shoulder to the distant water and then back to the gun. “Please. I just want to talk to him. If he tells me to leave him alone, I will.”
“Shush!”
Lori jumped as Ursa charged forward. She scrambled to get out of the way. To her surprise, instead of threatening her further, the old woman went to the edge of the water and looked in. Lori didn’t hear anything to warrant the apt attention. The croak of frogs punctuated the night, a singing backdrop over a fetid landscape.
With Ursa’s attention turned away, the prudent thing would have been to run for her car. Lori’s trembling limbs wouldn’t move that fast, and instead she crept as quietly as she could toward freedom.
“Stop moving. Sometin’s out dere.” Ursa lifted her gun and gestured it at the water, following a subtle ripple along the surface as it came closer.
Not knowing why she thought it, Lori whispered, “Drake.”
Lori instantly changed course as she was drawn to the water’s edge. She mindlessly placed her hand on the barrel to turn the weapon from the water. Ursa jerked the gun away from her.
“Don’t,” Lori said, watching the water. “Drake.”
“How…?” Ursa lowered her gun.
“Drake?” Lori yelled, very sure that he was near.
At the sound of her voice, something broke the surface of the water. Drake looked just as he had when he’d come up from the swamp to rescue her, how he’d looked in the deleted pictures. Lori stiffened to see him in his shifted from. Somehow, seeing him was different now. She knew he was real.
She’d been calling him a lizard man, but he was more dinosaur than lizard. The light behind her shone on his face, contrasting the thick brown skin protruding over his nose. His lips were parted as he gasped for breath, showing the tips of his fangs. A taloned hand pressed to his shoulder as he came from the water.
His yellow eyes met hers and he stumbled.
“Drake?” Lori charged into the shallow water without thought. She caught him by his arm and steadied his steps. The hard shell of his body felt strange against her hand. Blood trickled over his fingers from his shoulder. She tried to hurry him out of the water and onto land. “What happened? Were you bit?”
His eyes met hers, eyes that were far from human, and yet she felt him in that gaze. The man was there, beneath the hard armor plating and scary visage. He had characteristics of a medieval dragon if that creature had mated with a human. “What are you doing here?”
His gruff voice sounded harsher than she remembered.
“I couldn’t find you,” Lori said. A rush of nerves and emotions built inside her. Everything she felt like saying sounded strange in her head. Following the impulse to jump into his arms and kiss him would be even stranger. Instead, she mumbled, “I found Ursa.”
Ursa interrupted with a thick stream of accented words. Drake answered the woman in kind, fluently speaking to her as if he were a native to the bayou.
“What’s going on?” Lori demanded, not understanding them.
“She offered to shoot you,” Drake said.
Lori stiffened.
“I told her that is not necessary,” he added.
Lori thought she saw him smile, but it was too hard to say.
Ursa grumbled and turned to her house. “Bring him.”
“Why were you looking for me?” he asked when they were relatively alone.
“Why are you bleeding?” she demanded. “What happened?”
“It will heal.” Drake leaned heavily on her even though she could tell he was trying not to.
“This isn’t right. You need a doctor. My car is right over—”
“No doctors. I do not wish to be sent to Roswell. I have seen the pictures.”
“The alien-conspiracy place? That’s not real. It’s a giant hoax. Aliens don’t ex…ist.” Lori suddenly realized how ridiculous that belief sounded given the circumstances.
“I assure you aliens are real. I have met several who have come to my planet.”
“Alien,” she whispered. That thought hadn’t occurred to her. She’d slept with an alien. Not just a genetic offshoot of human, but an alien. Outer space. Alien. She breathed harder, trying not to hyperventilate. The weight against her arm grew, and if she left him now, he’d fall over.
“It amazes me how vain humans are to think they are the only lifeforms in the entire universes.” He winced and pressed harder to his shoulder. She felt his muscle flex beneath her hand as they made slow progress to the porch.
“You need a hospital. Let me take you. I’ll call the sheriff on the way and have him meet us. He seems protective of you. He’ll run whatever interference you need.” She tried to redirect his steps toward her car. “Can you shift back into your other self and look human again?”
“I will heal better in this form.” He forced her to turn back toward the porch. “I need rest.”
“Hurry up, boy,” Ursa demanded from inside the home. “Guns are loaded. Dem assholes going to get a butt full of hot lead if dey try to cross my doorstep.”
“Guns?” Lori repeated. “For the alligator that bit you?”
“For the hunters who shot me,” he corrected.
“You’re shot?” Lori gasped. Why wasn’t he in a panic?
“It appears the people shooting at the shore were actually hunting aliens. It seems they thought I would make a trophy. Though, I’m not really an alien.”
She glanced behind them toward the water before shoving him into a faster gait. He grunted in protest, but she didn’t care. “What the hell? Dammit, Drake, get inside. How can you be so calm about this?”
“How is a shot worse than a bite?”
“Being hunted by humans is worse than being bit by an alligator in the swamp. An alligator isn’t going to try and track you down to finish the—oh my God.” Lori shook her head in denial. “He couldn’t have… Oh my God.”
“Are you praying for me?” Drake leaned against the door frame and stopped.
“It’s my fault. Mr. Howards from the inn.”
“I heard someone say that name,” Drake said.
“He kept asking me about the lizard man. I told him nothing, but he seemed to think I knew where to find you. I thought my computer was glitching, but the inn has a public internet connection, and I think he must have hacked my machine and copied the photos I took outside your house. He could have used my GPS metadata to track you.”
“I am not a lizard, and I am not technically an alien,” Drake stated. “My people are dragon-shifters. It is said we lived here on Earth long ago and left through the portals to escape human persecution. Cat-shifters came with us. I have simply returned to the home of my ancestors”
“That is what you took away from what I said? You’re worried about being mistaken for a lizard alien? Come on, we need to go inside. You can’t go home.” Lori made a small noise of exasperation and urged him to go inside the cabin. She shut the
door. “Do you have a…” Lori’s voice gave out as she looked around. Inside of Ursa’s home wasn’t some dirty backwater shack. Light came from a lamp on a highly polished table. The antique wood furniture complemented the pristine rugs and surrounded a giant flat screen television mounted on the wall over a fireplace. Shelves lined the side of the mantel, filled with DVDs.
“Don’t get ideas,” Ursa warned as if Lori was about to steal something.
“Drake needs medical attention,” Lori said, not bothering to argue with the woman. “Why am I the only one who seems to get the urgency of this situation?”
“Why?” Ursa frowned. “He’ll be fine. Always is.” She jerked her thumb over her shoulder. “You know where to go, chere.”
Drake nodded and moved to follow her direction to the dining room table. Ursa produced a sewing box from a cabinet and followed him. She opened the lid and took out a crude metal instrument and a bottle of whiskey. Handing him the drink, she then waited until he took several gulps before beginning to probe at his shoulder.
Drake turned his attention to Lori. It was hard to see if he was in pain by the hardness of his shifted face. Lori approached him slowly.
“Why were you searching for me?” Drake asked. His eyes narrowed as Ursa poked around his wound.
“I…” Lori gave a small, helpless gesture. “You never came for dinner. I wanted to see you, to thank you, to, um, see you. How are you?”
Drake looked at his injured arm and back at her. “I am well.”
Lori winced as Ursa shoved her instrument deeper into Drake’s oozing shoulder. She remained quiet, watching the procedure with a feeling of horror.
Chapter 14
What new test was this?
Sheriff Jackson had warned him away from Lori. Ursa wanted to shoot Lori. Both were people whose opinions he trusted. Drake wanted to keep Lori with him in the swamps as his mate, have babies with her and—if the gods ever blessed him with a way to make it happen—take her back to his home world to show her where he was born.
Drake stared at Lori, thinking of her to avoid feeling the pain in his arm. Ursa filled the silence, demanding the story of how Drake came to be on her lawn. He told her everything. There was no reason not to.
When Ursa finally dug the bullet from his arm, he was assaulted with an almost instant numbness as his body began to heal. The sound of metal clanked against porcelain when Ursa dropped the bullet into a container. She then dabbed at his arm.
“You don’t look like a dragon,” Lori said. “At least none that I’ve seen in mythology books.”
“You are thinking of female dragon-shifters,” he answered.
“I thought you said you came back to Earth because your people didn’t have female dragons.” Lori moved closer to him. He watched her expression for fear but didn’t find any. Instead, she looked curious.
“Very few in our older generations,” he answered. “But they are dying out. We have not had a female shifter birth on Qurilixen for a long time. When the problem first began, couples were encouraged to have more babies in hopes that it would result in some women. It did not work. All it did was make a large generation of men with little prospect of having a family.”
“So you all decided to move back to Earth?” Lori asked.
“Our old documents say that humans are reproductively compatible. So the portal that was used to escape persecution on Earth was unburied. Unfortunately, no one can agree on how to go about finding brides. Some wish to cross over and take batches of them by force. Some want to move our populations over in segments and bring them back once they’ve mated. Some suggest we barter with your government. Though after living here, I think that is a mistake. I have seen how your people deal with outsiders. Some believe we are defying the will of the gods and wish to close the portal permanently so humans cannot come through. They think humans will taint shifter blood. But all this matters very little for the time being as the royal families have kept the portal from the population and are selfishly only letting royal members through to find wives.”
Ursa snorted and gathered up her crude medical kit. “I’ll call de sheriff and tell him about Howards.”
Lori waited until the woman moved toward the kitchen before stepping closer to study Drake’s arm. When they were alone, she asked, “Are you in pain?”
“Yes,” he answered. It was the truth. His heart had ached since she’d left and now was filled with fear that she would go again. It was the most severe of pains.
“The royal families wish to control the population by blocking access to brides?” Lori inquired.
“I believe so.” He remained in his seat, afraid if he moved he’d be tempted to hold her. If he held her, he’d want to kiss her. If he kissed her, he’d never let her go.
“Then how did you get to Earth?” Lori lightly touched his injured arm, keeping her fingers away from the wound.
“They will not let us make decisions for ourselves on whether we wish to come to Earth, but they let the new human princess come and go as she pleases. I waited, followed her and came through the portal after her.” Drake remembered the fear he’d felt leaving his home. He’d often wondered if he’d made the right decision.
“Do you want to go back? You must be homesick.”
“I miss parts of my home world. I miss the contrasting sweet and acrid smell of the mountain air. We only have darkness once a year. And there are three suns in the sky, not one. Many of our trees are as big as your redwoods, with smooth bubble-looking texture very unlike your rough bark that grows in shards. The leaves are much wider.” He could recall the details so clearly, and yet he worried that one day the memory of home would fade. “The bayou reminds me of home, of the shadowed marshes near the borderlands where I grew up.”
“Will you return? Or will they punish you for disobeying?” She stopped touching him and let her hand hang in the air between them.
“I doubt they’ve noticed I’m gone. If they do, I’m sure they’ll suspect the Myrddin clan of doing me harm, but without proof or anyone to protest, they will not be forced to look into the matter. The friends I have said goodbye to will not betray me. I would like to return some day, but I am not sure I will ever find the way.” Drake stared at her hand. She was so delicate and soft. Everything inside him wanted to protect her. How could he do that when he had people hunting him?
“If it’s something you want, I’ll help you. We can go to the French Quarter. You mentioned the LaLaurie Mansion. We can find—”
“It is a kind offer, but the portal does not open in the same place every night. I do not know when or if it will appear there again.”
“Drake,” Lori hesitated. Slowly, she reached for his shifted face. Her fingers moved over his hardened features. The protective shell of his armor dulled the sensitivity of his skin, but he still felt her. She traced his old scar.
“I must appear to be a monster to you,” he said.
“The men who shot you are the monsters.” Lori cupped his jaw and turned his face up to look at her. “You confuse me.”
“I am not confused. I know what I feel.” He traced the tip of a taloned finger down her arm.
“Does it hurt to shift?”
Drake chuckled. “No more than breathing.”
“Can you do it whenever you want?”
“Yes.”
“Will you show me?”
“No.”
Lori stopped caressing him. “Is it because you’ll die from the wound?”
“No.”
“You don’t want me to see?” She frowned.
“Being in dragon form tempers back my desires since I cannot make love to you in this body.”
“Oh,” she said, and then, as if realization hit her, she repeated louder, “Oh.”
“If I were to shift, I might do something you don’t want me to.”
“What makes you think I don’t want you to?” Her cheeks colored ever so slightly.
Drake stood from his chair to tower over he
r. His skin tingled as his body transformed into his human self. Her breath caught as she watched, but she did not pull away in fear. He leaned into her and pressed his lips to hers. The ache inside him instantly lessened at the contact.
Lori gasped and pulled away. “What was that?”
“Don’t leave me again,” he whispered.
“Ole Jack said to lock up and stay here,” Ursa announced loudly. “Drake can hear sometin’ coming ten miles away. I have guns, whiskey and cards.” Ursa came from the kitchen holding all three items. “Everytin’ for de bourre.”
“Boo-ray?” Lori sounded out. She eyed the whiskey. “I don’t know what that means, but it better not involve me having to strip down naked so you can make me a Cajun.”
Ursa arched a brow and laughed. “No one is asking to see you naked. What fun is dere in dat for me?”
Chapter 15
“Boo-ray” was some kind of card game. Lori didn’t exactly know how to play it, but she was pretty sure Ursa kept changing the rules. She was also confident that Ursa moonlighted as a frat boy from a party house. The old woman might look frail, but she could knock back whiskey like the best of them and told loud, incomprehensible stories that couldn’t have been appropriate by the way she cackled and winked after each one.
Whenever Ursa left the table to do her version of a perimeter check, Drake would sneakily drink Lori’s whiskey for her. She’d nodded, grateful to him for recognizing she couldn’t keep up with the two of them. Though she tried to tell Ursa she didn’t want another drink, the woman kept trying to ply her with alcohol.
“Drake,” Lori insisted when Ursa reached for a shotgun and made her way to the front window. “She shouldn’t be carrying a loaded weapon.”
Drake reached under the table to the chair next to him and then revealed a couple shotgun shells he’d hidden there. “She’s not.”
Lori gave a small laugh and relaxed. “How did you possibly become friends with Ursa?”
The woman hardly seemed like the ideal ambassador for first contact with an alien species…or a dragon-shifter former Earthling coming to his medieval ancestors’ home.
Stranded with the Cajun (Captured by a Dragon-Shifter Book 3) Page 6
