by JJ Jones
“I am,” Mitch laughed along with him, approaching him just like it was the most normal conversation in the world and handing him a fresh beer, “you’re like my brother, you know? You’re our leader. These men here, we’d all lay down our lives for you. Sure, we might have a question or two, but as far as we’re concerned, you’re still the same annoying son of a bitch you’ve always been.”
“And that goes for all of you? You all feel the same as Mitch?”
He watched with semi-amazement as they all nodded at him, grinning like a bunch of school girls who just got let in on the year’s biggest secret. Now that it was all said and done, it felt a little bit anti-climactic. After a not insignificant amount of time spent keeping what he was on lockdown, now it was out there in the open for all of his friends to see and they didn’t appear to be afraid of him.
Nobody was running off screaming in the other direction. Nobody was making the sign of the cross or cursing him as a demon. They were acting pretty much the same way they always did.
“Sure it goes for all of them,” Mitch answered, speaking for all of them before anyone got to answer for themselves, “believe me, boss, we’ve talked about it. I only brought it up with ya because I want you to know we’ve got your back. That’s it, OK? We’ve got your back, no questions asked.”
“Shit! Sorry ‘bout that.”
Chase looked down and laughed when he realized he was apologizing to a poorly placed chair in his very dark apartment. He should have left a light on somewhere in the place, but he hadn’t planned on being out until some time in the middle of the night. It was just one of those nights where time got away from him and the easy flow of alcohol made it far too easy to stay out and play.
He had meant to do the responsible thing, but that was clearly a failed plan. Oh well. In fact, fuck it. It had been a big fucking night and he deserved to let loose a little bit. Things were going to be different from this point on. Whether for better or for worse, the men in his company knew him now better than anyone outside of his family had ever known him. Frightening? Hell yes it was, but it felt good, too.
He trusted those men. He had to, in many different ways, and this was just one more thing for him to trust them with. Sure, he was expecting a whole bunch of questions in the coming weeks about the details of being a dragon shifter, probably even some requests for demonstrations, and that was OK with him. It might even be fun for him to finally get to let down his hair a little bit and enjoy the perks that should come with being able to do the things he did.
He would figure it out, now that the initial shock had worn off. But first, he needed to sleep. He had already spent much more of his evening partying than he should have and cut the time available to him for sleep to a dismal amount. And judging by the way the room was swimming in front of his face he was going to feel like total shit when he woke up.
He sighed, kicking off his shoes and flopping onto his bed. He wasn’t even going to bother with taking his clothes off. He just shut his eyes, feeling waves of relief wash over him like a drug. Maybe he would even be able to sleep dream free tonight. Maybe being able to share the burden of his secret with just a select few others would remove some of the tension that must surely be the driving force behind the nightmares when Katie needed help he could never manage to give.
Already starting to drift off, he wondered if maybe this would be a turning point in his life. Maybe he could have the things in life he had already convinced himself were never going to be available to him. Yes, he would have to be more careful how he went about things like dating and revealing his secrets than a normal man would, but so what? Now that he knew first hand that people could accept him the way his friends just had, the fantasy of a wife and family to come home to didn’t seem so far-fetched.
Except that something was wrong. Something was terribly, terribly wrong and he hadn’t noticed it because he was too drunk and too preoccupied with thoughts of the evening he had just spent. He sensed it now, though, that was for sure. The word intruder was screaming in every nerve ending in his body. He was not alone here in his home. He had walked into a trap. They had been waiting there for him to come home, must have known that he would most likely be drunk and that his reflexes wouldn’t be worth shit.
He had to do something. If only he wasn’t moving so slowly. Every little movement he tried to make felt like walking through a sea of molasses and he knew it wasn’t going to be enough. These intruders were ready to take him down. He could smell it in the excitement of their sweat. He was going to have to shift. He sat up, trying to seem like he still didn’t know there were people in the dark apartment with him, but it didn’t work out the way he had hoped. He stretched his arms out to his sides, feeling the very beginning of his shift starting to tingle in his fingertips, when a voice spoke out of the black.
“Hold it right there, freak. Don’t even think about it.”
Chase heard a sizzle and an oddly hollow click before his entire body contorted, on fire with an astronomical amount of electricity that seized his body up and stopped the shift dead. The last thing he heard before he blacked out was a dead, hateful laugh.
“We got him. Son of a bitch, we got the bastard.”
CHAPTER FOUR
“I know that, Mom. Honestly, I really, really do. But you aren’t hearing me.”
“I hear you. Why do you want to say I don’t hear you? Just because I don’t agree with you doesn’t mean I don’t hear you. You aren’t so much smarter than me. Not nearly so much more as you think.”
“Jesus, Mom, I never said anything like that!”
“Oh no, you don’t, you don’t take the lord’s name in vain with me. I don’t care how much of a hotshot you’re on your way to being. You know I don’t like that kind of talk.”
“I know. I’m sorry.”
“And how do you expect to find a nice man when you talk like that, anyway? Men like a nice girl, the kind of girl they can take home to meet their mamas. That doesn’t mean girls that take the lord’s name in vain, now does it? I can answer that for you, no, it most certainly does not.”
“What if I’m not looking for a nice man?”
Aubrey winced the minute the words were out of her mouth. She would have done just about anything to shove them back in, but it was obviously too late for that and that meant a verbal ass whipping was in order. If there was one thing you didn’t say to Mrs. Adeline Conner, Aubrey’s loving and old fashioned mother, it was that you weren’t interested in finding a good man and settling down as his wife.
Hell, Aubrey had heard her mom go off lecturing girls checking her out in the grocery line for making off handed comments about giving up on men completely. Just imagine, if she was willing to do that to a perfect stranger, how much more intense would she get when the one she was trying to save was her own daughter? She needed to stop the bleeding with this situation, and fast.
“Mom, I didn’t mean-”
“No, ma’am. You hold your tongue. You said it, now you’re going to hear what I have to say. I don’t believe for a minute that you don’t want a nice man. You’re only saying that because the man you have is such a piece of trash.”
“Come on, that’s not fair.”
“Hush! And yes, it’s entirely fair. What has he ever done for you? He lives in an apartment you pay for, pretending to look for an honest job while he does God only knows what.”
“He’s in school, Mom. He’s studying to be a doctor. Are you saying that’s not an honorable profession?”
“A profession doesn’t make a man honorable, Aubrey. It takes a whole lot more than a job to do a thing like that.”
Aubrey shut her eyes briefly, her hands gripping the steering wheel of her car tightly while she sat at what was rapidly proving to be longest red light she had ever encountered in her entire life. She was so not in the mood to be having this conversation right now. Plus, she was pretty sure she had already had this exact same conversation about a hundred times over the two years tha
t she and Brent had been together.
Poor Brent. Aubrey’s mom had decided she didn’t like him from pretty much the moment he walked through her front door with a large, extravagant bouquet that must have cost a fortune. Mrs. Adeline Conner had accepted it with weary, mistrustful eyes and hardly waited until the first time Brent stepped out of the room to say she that the flowers meant she didn’t trust him.
When an astonished Aubrey asked her how come, her mom said he was trying too hard. Aubrey should have known then and there that things would only go downhill. She had been through this kind of thing with her mom before (although never something on quite as large a scale as this cold war turned out to be). She knew how it went.
From all of the pictures Aubrey had seen and all of the stories she had heard about her mom, she knew that Adeline Conner (formerly Adeline Lloyd) had been one of the most beautiful girls in her small Texas town. She had been petite but feisty, with big blonde curls and bigger blue eyes. She had always had a friendly smile and could make conversation with a house plant if need be, qualities that ensured she was never short on dates. There were scads of men and boys who wanted to take her out on the town and she had made a point of enjoying herself. She didn’t want to be rude, did she?
But as it turned out, she was just a little bit too friendly the end result of which was her getting knocked up with little Aubrey. It was out of the question for her to be unwed and knocked up and so the two of them had gotten married in the epitome of a shotgun wedding.
Unfortunately (or fortunately, Aubrey supposed it depended on how a person looked at the whole situation), her father had only been bitten by the chivalrous bug for the pregnancy and a couple of months afterwards.
Apparently, the two of them had only really had one thing in common and after the excitement of that one thing wore off, there wasn’t a whole lot to keep the two of them together. Their fights were epic, legendary and still told to this day any time Aubrey went back to Texas to visit.
They were sort of like the stories men told of the fish they had caught in their youth, the ones that got a little bit bigger with each passing year until they had to have been whales living unnoticed in the fishing hole for the story to be true. They fought that way until one night, after a particularly bad row, her father had gone out to drink the spat away and never returned back home again.
She had never actually asked, but Aubrey assumed they must still be married to this day, at least technically speaking. She had no doubt her father (a man she had absolutely zero memory of and not even a picture to call her own) had been with countless women since he walked away, probably shacked up with one and had a bunch of illegitimate kids. She had no way of knowing for sure. She had never bothered to look him up. Her mom, however, she was a different story. She had turned downright militant about men, always believing the worst in them and positive that they were only out for one thing.
Aubrey didn’t think she had ever been with a man again and she doubted that she would be until the day she died. She still had plenty to say about men as a species, however, and she made a point of pointing out every flaw in every man she met or heard about.
She was evangelical about it, militant. That had been a lot of fun to grow up with, especially once she started to date. Her mom must have scared off half a dozen guys and done so with a smile on her face. As far as she was concerned, she was doing it for her daughter’s own good.
It wasn’t until Aubrey moved far, far away from her little Texas town of origin, all the way to Washington, DC, that she was able to start dating unencumbered. Or at least without being directly encumbered. Her mother still expressed her opinions loudly and frequently and it was just Aubrey’s good fortune that Brent had stayed. He must have bigger stones than most men to put up with her mom’s crap. Either that or he just loved her that much.
“Aubrey! Aubrey Conner, are you listening to a word I’m saying? Or are you too good to listen to your mamma, now that you’re a bigshot FBI woman down in DC?”
“No, Mom, I didn’t ever say that.”
“You didn’t have to say it, now did you? I can tell. Don’t even need to see your face to know it. You think that man you’ve got is so much better than all the rest. You think you ain’t never gonna go through a thing like what I did, what millions of other women go through every day. Well, maybe you’re right. Maybe not. I’m not going to be the one who says I told you so when that boy breaks your heart.”
“OK, OK. Look, I’m sorry, Mom, but I’ve gotta go. I pulled up to my building five minutes ago and I don’t want to just sit in the car all night.”
“Fine, fine. That’s fine. Go on, go on in to your man. Go and live your life. Who needs a mother’s advice, anyway?”
“Goodnight,” Aubrey said quietly, trying desperately to keep her cool for two seconds more, “and Mom? I love you, OK? Really, I do.”
“I love you, too, baby girl. Try and be good.”
Aubrey finally hung up the phone and let out a strained sigh of relief. She did love her mom but that woman made it almost impossible to talk to her without getting into a screaming match every single time. It would have been one thing if the kind of conversation they just had was infrequent, but it wasn’t. No, it was every single time they spoke!
At least she had Brent waiting for her. That made everything a little bit easier. Because the thing was, she had plenty of things going on without all of the crap from her mom. She was working as hard as she could possibly manage as a relatively new female in the FBI and she was moving up through the ranks quickly, gaining trust and taking on responsibilities most people as young as her would never have been given. Take today, for example. Just a couple of hours before leaving the office, Mr. Conrad, her superior, had told her that he had a new opportunity for her, if she chose to take it.
She had been all ready to accept it on the spot, too, but Mr. Conrad told her to take the night and think it over, to talk to her significant other about it as well. He told her that she needed to know that if she said she was in, the project she was taking on would be a life changing one. It would give her access to classified information that could possibly put her in grave danger and it was a decision she should not take likely.
Aubrey was beyond excited but also dog tired and after the conversation with her mother, there was nothing she wanted more than to sit on the couch with Brent, open a bottle of wine, and watch bad sitcom reruns. Boring to many, heaven to her. She turned the key in the lock of her apartment, throwing her shoes gleefully off to one side. She could already taste the cabernet on her lips.
“Hey babe? You in here? I’ve had a hell of a day.”
All of the lights in the apartment were on which meant he had to be home. He was a stickler for turning everything off that wasn’t being used. Said he didn’t want to throw money away on things like that (which, on her worse days she found amusing, seeing as he didn’t pay any of the bills anyway). Maybe he was playing a game of sexy hide and seek? That was something they used to do when they first got together, back before they got too busy and maybe just a little bit too used to each other.
“Babe? Come on, I need a glass of wine and a backrub, not necessarily in that order.”
She heard something in the back of their apartment, a strange thump, and suddenly she wasn’t feeling nearly so relaxed. All of her instincts were telling her something wasn’t right. The little hairs were standing up on the back of her neck and her stomach was doing funny little flip flops that made her feel slightly ill. The amount of adrenaline that was pumping through her system was enormous. Whoever this was, they had picked the wrong apartment to mess with.
She drew the gun from the resting place on her hip and moved silently towards the bedroom, the source of the odd noise. She was stealthy enough, she knew that much. She didn’t expect she’d have any problem surprising the perpetrator. All she had to do was throw open the door.
“Freeze! Get the fuck down, you hear me?”
“Shit! Put the gun do
wn, OK? Please, just put it down.”
“Brent? What? What is this?”
This was somehow the last thing she expected to find. It would have made far more sense to her to walk in on someone attempting to rob the place than the scene she saw in front of her now. There was a stranger, at least a stranger to her. It was a dark haired women with frightened eyes and she was completely naked. She also happened to be sitting on top of Brent, who was missing his clothes as well. The candles next to the bed were lit, candles Aubrey had bought despite Brent’s complaints that they smelled too sweet and girly to light.
“It’s not what it looks like, baby. Really, I can explain.”
“You can explain? Awesome, go ahead. I would love to hear you try and explain this away.”
“I will, only do you think you could put the gun away first?”
Aubrey looked down in surprise. She hadn’t even realized that she still had it pointed at them until he said that, but there it was; her pistol aimed at the two of them with a hand that was trembling ever so slightly. She dropped her arm to her side so that it wasn’t aimed at Brent and his guest, but she didn’t holster it. Somehow it just felt better to hold it in her hand.
