Monsters, Book Two: Hour of the Dragon

by Heather Killough-Walden

  She swallowed nervously beneath his hold, but he felt her body flush and caught the scent of new, different heat stirring within her. He used his thumb beneath her chin to tilt her head back until she was looking up into his eyes.

  Her pupils were blown despite the light above them; their darkness had eaten up nearly all of the purple of her irises. Antares smiled, only a little, and then he held her tighter – and lowered his lips over hers in a long-awaited kiss.

  Chapter Twenty-nine – Unknown Location

  Randall sighed heavily and pulled the ruined bandages from his prisoner’s leg. “You need to stop moving. Every time you start fighting like this, your heart beats too fast and you bleed too much.” He tsked her, tossed the bandages in the nearby receptacle, and grabbed a new roll of gauze. In actuality, he had plenty of gauze and he didn’t really mind that she was bleeding. But he was willing to bet she did. “Before long, you’re going to start feeling sick. You don’t want that on top of everything else, do you? You’ll be in the same boat as your friend here.”

  He glanced up at the other prisoner, who was tied in an identical chair, her legs to the chair legs, her hands cuffed behind her back, her body duct taped to the chair back, but who had tears streaming down her cheeks and a piece of duct tape dangling by one corner of her mouth.

  He’d removed it most of the way for her so that she could continue to throw up as needed, however he left it there as well as a reminder that if she acted up – he could just tape her right back up again. That would get messy real fast.

  There was a bucket beside her chair. The poor thing had food poisoning. In all fairness, he’d offered her a good dose of Ondansetron for the nausea; the medicine worked miracles for nausea, even food poisoning-induced. But she’d refused “anything but your stupid-ass head on a mother fucking platter, tu hijo loco de puta!” so he’d given up and just let her vomit.

  She was lucky in a way. Her compromised immune system guaranteed they use her friend for the blood they needed to send their message. No other form of proof said, “We have your friends and we’re not lying” better than a little bit of blood.

  “You know… she’s too smart to….” The one named Carmen paused in what she was trying to say, and what could he do but politely wait for her to finish? She was putting in such a brave amount of effort, and he really did feel for her. To some extent.

  “Too smart to meet with you.” Carmen swallowed hard. “Anna will know it’s a trap.”

  Randall pushed his glasses up his nose and nodded. “Yes, we’re assuming she’ll know as much. However, your best friend has dedicated her entire existence to helping others. She will absolutely wish to meet us. It’ll be the wardens who stop her.”

  Carmen and her companion, Piper – who had to remain gagged, or Randall’s migraine began to take over – both looked at Randall quizzically.

  “Let me guess. You’re wondering why we would bother if we know she won’t be allowed to go through with it?”

  Carmen looked at her friend, who in turn shrugged. That was a good sign. It meant she wasn’t too weakened by blood loss, at least not yet. They were both still in good shape. That actually comforted Randall. He didn’t really have any desire to do anything to his angel that would break her heart. Not yet, anyway. Not if it could be avoided.

  “This is a single step along the path of a plan, dear Carmen,” he told her. “Don’t you worry. You’ll understand well enough very soon.”

  Carmen closed her eyes and dropped her head a little. He saw a fresh tear break free and trail down her cheek.

  “I won’t hold it against you if you change your mind and decide you want that medicine after all,” he told her gently. “Now would be the time since you just finished vomiting.” He could imagine she was quite weak by now. At least physically. All the fire she’d originally shown him had burned down to faint red embers.

  So he wasn’t surprised at all to find that when he took the medicine and a fresh, cold ginger ale and knelt down beside her chair to offer them to her, she could only stare at him in misery and nod. Just once.

  “There now. That’s more like it. Things will start to get easier now.” He stood and held the pill out toward her. “Open up.”

  She tensed under the command, which he expected – and behind him, Piper the blood donor started yanking like mad against her bindings. She was trying to scream something at him from behind the tape over her mouth, but he couldn’t make heads or tails of it. He could surmise what she was trying to tell him, based on how hard she was fighting.

  “It’s not poison, if that’s what has you ruining your fresh wrappings,” he said with a glance over his shoulder. “You have no reason to believe me, but the fact is, I’ve no desire to kill either one of you. And it really doesn’t make any sense for your friend to continue being sick when there’s medicine right here capable of helping her. Does it?” He asked, shrugging and gesturing to the pill.

  Piper calmed down just a little, but he could tell it was more out of frustration and hatred than anything else. Possibly exhaustion and hunger. She was probably getting very bruised under all that thrashing as well.

  Fortunately she was still enough to be ignored, and when Randall turned back around to face Carmen, she opened her mouth right away. He smiled and placed the pill on her tongue, then opened the ginger ale and helped her wash the medicine down. “Slowly,” he told her.

  Something in the shadows moved behind him, and her gaze slipped to the space above his shoulder. She stopped swallowing, but the pill was down anyway. “That’s a good strong dose; if you can keep it down, it should start working soon.”

  “What… was that?” she asked, her voice completely raw.

  “What I just gave you?” he asked, knowing full well she was referring to the thing behind him.

  She shook her head just a little, and her eyes slipped past him again to the darkness of the shadows at the other end of the unfurnished room.

  He sighed wearily. “That is unfortunately the watch dog Maze insisted on leaving in his staid. He’s here to make certain that neither of you escape.” He turned to the darkness and addressed the beast. “I thought I told you to remain hidden.”

  There was a shifting sound in that darkness, heavy and slithering. The beast was what Victor Maze had referred to as a “Dweller,” and according to him the monster normally lived underground. It could also become quite huge apparently, but Maze had confined it spatially and altered its coloring from white to dark gray so that it could hide in any shadow of any size. Leave it to him to force a fish out of water, Randall thought. No doubt, the man thoroughly enjoyed the tumultuous discomfort the monster experienced.

  He was having more thoughts like that since Maze had left. He was having coherent, cohesive, and decidedly unfavorable thoughts toward his co-conspirator. They were intermingled with returning thoughts that were less cohesive but more pronounced, stronger, determined.

  Victor Maze apparently needed to rest. He was spending inordinate amounts of energy keeping some kind of ward over Randall and the girls to prevent them from being found by scrying or location spells.

  But he would be returning later that night, when the trade was supposed to go down. Randall winced when pain arced from the base of his skull to the back of his right eye. Damn, he thought. Not this, not now.

  It had been a while since he’d had a migraine, he realized. In fact… he hadn’t had one since that plane crash. Since the first time he’d seen his angel. What the hell? he wondered as he rubbed the top of his neck and then slid his glasses down a little so he could tightly pinch the bridge of his nose.

  A sound behind him made him turn around. The medicine must have been working, because a little color had returned to the sick prisoner’s cheeks. But that same color could be seen much darker, spread across the bandages on her companion’s leg.

  Randall made his way to the latter and stood beside her looking down. She had closed her eyes and her head had fallen back, again probably fr
om exhaustion. But she opened her eyes when his shadow moved over her and stared up at him.

  “Would you like me to remove the tape over your mouth?” he asked. He knew the answer, but asking the question reminded her that he was doing her a favor and she shouldn’t abuse the new freedom.

  Her response was to narrow her gaze at him. But she nodded.

  He was surprised, and he knew his expression showed as much. He reached up and pulled the stack of tape from her face. She barely winced when it separated from her skin, though he knew it had to hurt. When he was done, she licked her lips and leveled her gaze on him hard.

  “I’m going to kill you,” she told him frankly.

  He was quiet for a moment. Then Randall tossed the tape into the trash can beside Carmen’s chair and asked quietly, “Is that so?”

  “It is,” she assured him with far too much calm. “But I’m not going to kill you for what you’ve done to me. I’m going to take your life for what you’ve done to my friends.”

  From behind him came words spoken in a voice half asleep, “You tell him, mi sirenita.”

  Randall’s eyebrow lifted. “My little mermaid?”

  “Surfing,” Piper told him with zero inflection in her tone. Her eyes were still shooting daggers at him.

  “I see.” He took a deep breath and glanced down at her leg. “Well, I have to tell you that I admire your loyalty.” He reached down to peel one part of the bandage back to re-check the wound. It was possible it needed stitches and he’d cut too deep. She’d been moving a lot when he’d done it, despite being tied down. His eyes raked over the marks, and something fluttered in his belly. “I also admire your skin. You’ve got good grain.”

  On further inspection, he’d cut exactly as deep as he’d intended, and the cuts were clean. If she would only remain still and allow them to clot, they could heal quite nicely. And leave perfect, straight scars.

  “If only I’d been allowed to get my hands on you sooner,” he thought out loud. “Might have spared one or two others.”

  “You’re absolutely fucking insane,” she told him then, speaking the words with such low, acidic vehemence, they felt like audible poison. But he supposed he couldn’t blame her. This was the art room, after all. Photos of his creations were hung in frames along all four walls. Of course the only one he truly cared about was the one that wasn’t his. A photograph of her was hanging at the far end, long rose-gold tapestries flanking the gilt frame. It was the best one he had, the only photograph he’d managed to take of his angel that turned out so well. She was looking right at him.

  It was also the last photo he’d taken before the wardens had gotten to him. They were very protective of her, and of course they should be. But they’d done things to him to keep him away from her. He knew it was something more than pressing charges and hitting him with restraining orders. He could feel the residuals of it in his brain. They’d done something to his mind to keep him away and keep her safe.

  Or at least they’d tried. But Maze had saved him.

  That’s right, he told himself. Victor Maze is the reason she’s going to be mine. Don’t forget that.

  But being away from her had made him crazy inside. He so badly needed some aspect of her at close range… so he’d begun to try to recreate her. And it was fast that he learned he could do no such thing. No matter how hard he tried, something always went wrong and the canvas was ruined. There was always a fresh canvas available when he needed it, which was strange now that he thought about it. It was strange how easy it was for him to subdue them…. He’d discarded so many of them.

  Randall stopped re-dressing the prisoner’s wound for the second time that hour and turned to glance at the frames along the walls. “Your friend is one in a billion,” he told her. “Or rather just one, plain and simple. She’s unique.”

  “This is just like a man,” Piper seethed.

  Randall looked up, meeting her gaze.

  “You find the one flower in a field of weeds, and because it’s beautiful you can’t help but pick it.” She sneered at him, her look one of absolute disgust. “I bet you can’t wait to traipse across fresh white snow, either.”

  Randall blinked. Actually… he hated people who did that.

  He winced when more pain shot through his right eye. He closed his eyes and held his head for a moment, wondering at this new, horrid pain and the blossoming confusion in his brain.

  “What happened to your eyes, asshole?”

  Randall frowned, lowering his hands again to look up at the prisoner. “What?” he asked.

  “Your eyes,” she told him. “Something’s wrong with one of them. I swear it wasn’t that bad when you lifted us.”

  “They’ve always been uneven,” said Carmen softly from her easing world of not-so-much-pain. “Dark green and light green.”

  Randall’s gaze narrowed. He looked from one of them to the other, then stood and made his way to the nearest framed photograph. He used its spotless glass to study his reflection, and his blood ran cold.

  His right eye was white. It looked as though it had been afflicted with cataracts. Calcification, he thought as his stomach experienced a dropping sensation and the world tilted a little under his feet. The eyes of the dead turn white due to calcification. That’s what his right eye looked like right now.

  “I think I can take things from here, Mr. Price,” came a familiar voice from the shadows on the side of the room.

  Randall was caught off guard. He spun, his heart making a hollow racing sound in his chest as Victor Maze stepped out of the darkness in a perfectly tailored gray suit. As usual, he looked like a model fresh from a shoot. But Price could sense a change in him. He was more pale than before. And there was something else….

  “I see Miss Maddox still hasn’t stopped bleeding.” Maze sighed and waved his hand. Piper looked down to find that the wound that was only half-covered by fresh bandages was closing up. All five of the deep slices Randall had so carefully carved into her, making sure to take some of the muscle as well, were sealing up before his eyes.

  Anger rushed through Randall. He’d even done her the favor of making sure it looked like a claw mark. It would have appeared amazing when it healed.

  “There now,” said Maze, who ignored Piper then and made his way to Carmen. “Miss Seville, how are you feeling?”

  But she didn’t answer. Instead, she turned her face away from him and seemed to become more sober, more awake.

  “Mr. Price took good care of you, I see. I’m glad.” Maze then turned to face Randall. “One should not go to their death in pain. Where is the mayhem in that?” He walked toward him. “When death is merciful, there is no raging, no struggle against it. But when it cuts short something good, something healthy or happy, well… then it is the very essence of chaos.” He stopped in front of Randall and lowered his voice. “It’s time.”

  Chapter Thirty – Santorini, Greece

  Anna felt the touch of his hand around her neck like a gentle but deliciously threatening intrusion into the miasma of Anna’s emotions. Her head swam with past-induced pain, guilt, and regret, and current mystification at where she found herself now – in the candy closet of an honest to goodness dragon – who had once been her best friend.

  And then he was encircling her already trapped form with more than just his hard body.

  She felt his magic curl around her, licking at her wounds like gentle, lovely brushes of some magical narcotic, flushing her skin and changing the rhythm of her heart. It no longer beat too fast in the grip of her past nightmares, now it thrummed hard with meaning, sending magic-touched blood to her extremities to make them tingle.

  His words danced like butterfly kisses in her mind, a salve on her spirit she’d ached for, yearned for and desperately needed for fifty years. She’d been told she was special by others. But she realized then, in the moment his voice kissed her conscience – and his lips kissed hers – that all along, she’d really needed to hear it from him.

 
Anna felt she was in some sort of wonderful dream where she couldn’t see the face of her dream lover, but he seemed to know exactly what to do to her. His hand around her throat manipulated her pulse, and his thumb brushed along the line of her chin, and his lips, gentle at first, tender with care, pressed in harder, opening her up to him.

  His other hand was suddenly running along her waist, a hot band of strength that made her feel secure even as it made her feel kept. His fingers slipped beneath her sweater and splayed across the muscles of her abdomen, gripping her tight to press her harder into his chest. There was no give in the man, no malleability. He was in control, the one with all the power, and that knowledge was a duality of frightening and intoxicating to Anna.

  She was always the one with control, the power. Sometimes she felt she alone had all the power in the multiverse – and the responsibility to make the hard choices that came with it. She was so tired of being in control. She was so tired of being the one to make the decisions.

  So when Ares claimed her mouth with his tongue and she felt the sharpened points of his incisors with hers, the pleasure of just giving in, giving up, and submitting flooded through her hot and hard, and it was all she could do to stifle a moan of sudden longing.

  There was a knock at the door, the sound of knuckles rapping on wood, and Ares went very still above her. Slowly he pulled away, breaking the kiss that had nearly been her undoing. But his grip on her didn’t let up one bit.

  A deep and decidedly confident voice said, “I’m not interrupting anything of vast, momentous importance, am I?” as if it knew damn well that was exactly what it was doing and found it slightly amusing.

  Ares stared down into her eyes for several long beats, drawing the moment out into a kind of forever as his now fully-glowing eyes re-claimed her soul. For the first time in fifty years, she felt she was in the right man’s arms. “Ares…” she whispered, and reached a hand up to cup his face. Feel that he was real.