With a deep sigh, Mandy stood and started walking down the lakefront path in the direction Russ had gone. She could still see his retreating form, and could still make out the impossibly gorgeous lines of his silhouette. His last accusation against her before he stormed off came back to her, and she felt her stomach twisting into a sad knot.
“I wasn’t pretending, Russ,” she whispered after him. “I sure as hell wasn’t pretending.”
Chapter Five
There were plenty of things Russ loved about living in Chicago, but rush hour on the Blue Line subway wasn’t one of them. He hated being squashed in with all the other commuters, pressed into the train cars like cattle being stuffed into pens. Today, at least, he had managed to snatch a spot next to the small window that separated the door area from the aisles of seats. He had his back turned toward the people squished in behind him, and had his face against the smudged glass. He knew this window probably hadn’t been cleaned any time in the last ten years, but he didn’t care about germs right now. He just cared about having a small part of his body pressed against something that wasn’t another human being. Besides, his immune system was hyper strong, thanks to his dragon genes. He rarely fell sick, even in the dead of winter when half of Chicago was laid up with some type of cold or flu at any given moment.
Some loudmouth halfway across the car started singing at the top of his lungs, and Russ rolled his eyes. He hated it when people tried to be all funny and jolly on the rush hour subway. He wished everyone would just shut up and be quiet and still. Normally, Russ liked to strike up conversations with strangers, or laugh over a beer with someone he’d just met. But not when he was packed in like this. For these thirty to forty-five minutes of his weekday afternoons—that was how long it took him to get home depending on how smoothly (or not) the trains were running that day—Russ morphed from an outgoing people-person to an introverted grump.
Russ sighed as another commuter took up the song with the first jolly singer. He should have just sprung for cab fare today. He hated to waste money on a taxi when he had already paid for an unlimited monthly transit pass, but some days you just needed space. Today was one of those days.
Since he walked away from Mandy at the park, he’d tried to put her out of his mind completely. So far, he hadn’t succeeded at that effort for more than five minutes at a time. He hadn’t gotten any work done today, and despite his attempts to act normal, his boss had noticed his distraction.
“Everything all right, Russ?” he’d asked.
Russ had nodded and pasted on a bright smile. “Everything’s great. Just need another cup of coffee I think. Mondays usually require an extra cup.”
His boss had accepted this explanation without further comment, and Russ had doubled down on his efforts to get his work done. It wasn’t easy, but he’d managed to get through the day without anyone else commenting on his distracted state. He couldn’t afford to lose this job. Mandy’s comments on his need for a better job had hit him hard. From whatever reconnaissance she and her clanmates had done on him, they hadn’t had to look far to see that things hadn’t been going so well at work since the war ended.
A sudden lurch of the subway car caused everyone behind Russ to slam into him, hard. He winced as his nose was smashed harder against the glass window he’d been leaning against, not bothering to acknowledge the muttered, unnecessary apologies of the passengers behind him. He mentally calculated how many more stops he had to go. Four. They’d just passed the Division Street stop. He could feel the sweat pouring down his back. Today had been one of the most humid days yet this summer. He definitely should have taken a cab.
“Ladies and Gentleman,” the train operator’s voice came crackling over the intercom. “We apologize for the delay. There’s a problem on the tracks ahead and we’ll be standing for a few minutes. We’ll get you back on your way as soon as possible.”
Groans filled the air, Russ’s among them. Then, moments later, the lights completely went dark and a whirring sound like an engine powering down filled the air. Startled shrieks came from the passengers around Russ, and he strained his eyes to see in the darkness. Even with his dragon eyes, though, he couldn’t see anything down here. The emergency lighting in the subway tunnel didn’t appear to be working, and, for a few awful seconds, everything was pitch black, too dark for even dragon eyes to see. Russ felt his heart pound in his chest, and he knew his blood pressure must be rising.
This was how it had happened before. He’d been at home instead of in a subway car, but the darkness had been similar. There he sat in his living room, watching television and minding his own business, when the power went out and dark shades were pulled over the windows, blocking out the city lights. Disoriented, he’d barely had time to process the fact that everything was black before rough hands had grabbed him. At first, he’d thought he was being robbed. The thought was almost funny now. If only that was all it had been—a simple robbery. But no, it had been worse than that. Much, much worse.
Now, in the train car, people were finding their cell phones and holding them up. Blue screens cast a strange, cool glow on the faces of his fellow passengers. Some looked confused, some annoyed, and some frightened. But, thankfully, he didn’t see anyone that looked remotely like a dark wizard or shifter.
Russ took deep breaths and tried to get his heart rate back to a normal level. It’s just a simple mechanical issue with Chicago’s transit system, he told himself. It happens all the time. Nothing to get worked up about. Nothing to do with dark magic.
And yet, even as the lights came on again a few minutes later and the train started inching forward once again, Russ felt uneasy. He couldn’t push the images of that awful night three years ago out of his mind. The flashback kept coming in waves.
The “robbers” had turned out to be dark wizards who were working for a dragon shifter named Saul. Saul had learned how to use magic, which was usually impossible for shifters. But through some combination of determination and dark spells, Saul had turned himself into the first dragon shifter wizard. Then, he’d set out on a mission to quite literally take over the world. He had quietly recruited willing wizards and shifters to his evil cause, and, when he’d run out of willing parties, he’d started forcing people to join his army against their will. Russ had been one of those people.
Before Saul’s minions captured him, Russ hadn’t known that there was a shifter war going on. In fact, he hadn’t known that wizards existed. He himself had lived among humans most of his life, hiding his dragon shifter side. He’d deliberately kept himself in the dark when it came to what was going on in the shifter world. Perhaps, then, he shouldn’t have been surprised when darkness came to find him.
He’d refused to fight for evil, so Saul had thrown him in jail along with the other resistors—mostly dragons. There, they had been tortured almost to the point of death. The dark monsters had been one of Saul’s favorite torture devices. Russ shuddered at the thought. He was surprised to learn that dragon fire was what it took to kill those horrid creatures. When he’d been in jail, he’d been kept too weak to shift, so he’d never had the chance to breathe fire on any of them. Now, he would be happy to never have to look at one again.
When Russ finally reached his stop and exited the train, he took deep, grateful breaths of the outside air. It didn’t matter that the air was hot and humid. It was still refreshing compared to the stuffy, overcrowded train. He made the short walk to his apartment in record time, and collapsed on his couch moments after he closed his front door behind him. The day was over. He’d made it through work without attracting too much attention. Tomorrow would be better, right? It had to be.
Russ noticed a pile of mail sitting on his coffee table, and bent forward to pick it up. Sorting through this would at least keep his mind off Mandy and her strange job offer for a few minutes. He flipped through the envelopes, mostly junk mail, until he reached the last envelope and his stomach clenched. He knew the look of this envelope all too well. His horrib
ly past due credit card. He sighed and tossed it aside. So much for forgetting Mandy’s offer. How could he forget the amount of money she’d named? For that much money, he’d never have to work again if he didn’t want to. He could buy his own place and stop living in a shitty apartment. He could pay off all the debts that had piled up while he was trapped in Saul’s jail.
Russ stood and began pacing. Before the war, he’d been a well-respected employee at the accounting firm where he worked. Everyone had thought he’d make partner years ahead of schedule. But a sudden, months long disappearance wasn’t so good for business. Russ had managed, a week into his strange captivity, to send an email claiming some sort of medical emergency. But he’d had to risk his life to do so. If Saul’s dark wizards had caught him sneaking a message on that guard’s phone, he would have been dead for sure. In retrospect, perhaps he should have sent off an email asking for help instead of an email trying to save his job. But who would have believed him? “Hey, by the way, I’m a dragon and I’ve been captured by evil shifters and wizards?” He would have been written off as a mental breakdown case. Whoever read the email would have shaken their head sadly and said something about how the stress of the job had gotten to him.
Miraculously, when the war did finally end, Russ came back to Chicago to find his old boss still willing to give him back his job. His boss had always liked him, and didn’t ask too many questions about the disappearance. He only warned Russ to never let it happen again. Russ had sworn it wouldn’t—what else could he say?—but even then things had never been back to normal. Russ soon realized that his upward trajectory on the career ladder had come to a screeching halt. Now, it had been almost three years and he hadn’t had a single raise. His bills had piled up while he was gone, and he was barely staying afloat at this point. Every month seemed to bring some new, unexpected expense, and Russ knew he was going to completely drown financially if something didn’t change soon.
Mandy offered you that something, a little voice in his head insisted. He tried to push it away. It didn’t matter the amount of money she was offering. He didn’t want to be involved in anything remotely related to the Dark War. Besides, she’d made a fool of him. She’d acted like she was interested in him just to trick him into coming back to her wizard-shifter town with him.
She wasn’t acting, the same little voice insisted. Russ clenched his teeth together and kept pacing. He wasn’t sure what to believe. Maybe she had genuinely liked him by the end of the night, but the fact still remained that she’d gone into that bar with the intent to trick him. How could he ever trust her after that? She could blame the High Council all she wanted to, but she had still agreed to the job. No one had forced her to do it.
Russ knew a big part of his anger at Mandy came from his wounded pride. He’d felt so strongly for her in those moments outside the bar. He’d considered breaking all of his relationship rules to take a chance on her. For one brief moment, he’d allowed himself to imagine what it would be like to fall in love with someone. Mandy had made him feel like he didn’t always have to hide who he truly was. He couldn’t explain it, but he’d been drawn to her in such a strong way that he thought maybe even he, a dragon, could be happy. Then she had turned out to be a total fraud. In the end, she had only strengthened his resolve to never open his heart to anyone. Furious didn’t even begin to cover the way he felt.
Still, furious or not, he had to admit that she was making him a tempting offer. He’d told her that dragons didn’t do anything for money, and that was true to a certain extent. He would never do anything illegal or evil just to get money. But Mandy was offering him a legitimate job. A job that would actually cripple the forces of evil. Surely, there was honor in that, as she’d hinted.
Russ paced back and forth for the next hour, talking himself into and out of the job at least a dozen times. He knew if he left his accounting firm, he would never be able to come back to it. He might be able to find a new job at a different firm, but even that was iffy. His boss was unlikely to give him a good reference, and, although Chicago was a big city, the professional world was still smaller than you would think. Then again, as much as he enjoyed his work, he was sure that he could find plenty of other ways to occupy his mind once he was a millionaire.
Russ looked around at his crappy apartment, filled with crappy furniture that had overdue credit card bills piled on it. He had tried to fit into the human world, and make it on his human skills alone, but perhaps it was time to admit that he could never completely outrun who he was. If he gave in and acted like the dragon he was for just a short time, just long enough to do the job Mandy was offering and collect the money, then he could live comfortably in the human world and not have to stress about bills. Wasn’t that better than this constantly broke existence? He needed some breathing room.
“Okay, fine,” he said aloud to himself. “But I’m only staying in Torch Lake for the bare minimum amount of time. Then I’m hightailing it out of crazy land and getting back here to Chicago.”
His decision made, Russ suddenly felt lighter. Before he could change his mind, he went to grab his phone and call Mandy.
She answered after the first ring.
“This is Mandy.”
“It’s Russ,” he said, even though he was pretty sure she already knew. She was bound to have his number stored in her contacts. “I’ll do it.”
His words were followed by such a long pause that for a moment he thought the call had dropped. But when he pulled the phone away from his face to look at the screen, the call timer was still going.
“Excellent,” she said. Her voice was high pitched, like she was trying too hard to make it sound normal. Russ realized that he’d shocked her. She must have all but given him up as a lost cause, and yet here he was, surprising her. The thought made him happy. It gave him the irrational feeling that he’d won some sort of contest between them. While he had the upper hand, he decided to rub in the fact that this had nothing to do with any feelings he might have for her.
“But no more kissing,” he said. “This has nothing to do with your little game at the bar the other night.”
“Absolutely,” she said, the shock completely smoothed out of her voice by now. “Don’t worry, Russ, I will keep our relationship purely professional. And once you get to Torch Lake, you’ll be working with a new training team. You won’t need to see me at all if you don’t want to.”
Russ tried to ignore the disappointment that filled him when he realized that he wasn’t going to be seeing much of Mandy once he got to Torch Lake. The less he saw of her, the better, right? And the sooner he got this over with, the better.
“When can you leave?” Mandy was asking.
“Is the day after tomorrow good?”
“Perfect. I already have your email address. I’ll send over some information on what to pack and what to expect when we get to Torch Lake.”
Russ grunted an acknowledgement, and then got off the phone as quickly as he could, his heart inexplicably pounding in his chest once again.
This was going to be either the best or worst decision he’d ever made.
Chapter Six
The sun was barely rising over the horizon when Mandy caught her first glimpse of Torch Lake. She and Russ had flown on a commercial airline to Medford, Oregon—which had the closest major airport to Torch Lake—and then flown the rest of the way on Mandy’s broomstick under cover of darkness. Mandy stifled a chuckle when she remembered the look on Russ’s face when she asked him to shift into dragon form to fly. He looked like she’d just asked him to swallow a bucketful of worms.
“Here? Now?” he had asked.
“Yes. Unless you can fly with your arms. We have about eighty more miles to go to get to Torch Lake, and the only way to get there is to hike or fly in. Hiking will take an extra half week, at least. The terrain isn’t the smoothest. So unless you want to add an extra half week to your time away from Chicago, I suggest you shift to dragon form.”
“You said I
didn’t have to shift into dragon form until we were in Torch Lake. We’re not in Torch Lake yet.”
Mandy sighed. “You don’t have to. We can walk. Or you can ride on the back of my broomstick, but since you jump like someone is trying to kill you when I so much as accidentally brush my arm against you, I thought you wouldn’t be too thrilled with the broomstick option.”
Russ hadn’t been thrilled with that option, but, in the end, it was the option he took. Mandy shook her head as they continued to glide through the cool dawn air toward Torch Lake. She couldn’t understand why Russ was so ashamed of being a shifter. Sure, some full humans were horrified to discover that shifters existed, but when there weren’t humans around, he should have been more relaxed. He seemed to literally hate the beast within him. Mandy only personally knew the dragons who lived in Torch Lake, and they all seemed extremely proud of their inner dragons. She knew from her job training that several of the dragons living among humans felt conflicted about the fact that they were shifters, but she was still surprised at how strong Russ’s feelings seemed to be. She wondered if there was more to his story than just what was in his file.
She knew everything in his file by heart. She’d gone over it at least a hundred times before she left for Chicago, and a hundred more times after Russ stormed away from her and said he’d never accept her job offer. When he called her to say he’d come, she’d been desperately trying to find some clue in his bio that would help her find a new way to convince him to come to Torch Lake. She had spent the next day terrified that he was going to change his mind, but he hadn’t. She had a feeling it had to do with his money situation. She knew his finances had been nearly destroyed when he was captured during the Dark War, which was why she’d been surprised that he’d initially turned down the offer of a million and a half dollars. As much as she wished his decision to come had been due in part to her, she knew it was all about the money.
Dragon Returning (Torch Lake Shifters Book 1) Page 4
