by Starla Night
“And your grandparents always warned me to stay away from that reprobate.”
Amy shook her head. “I can’t. This makes no sense. Why tell me now? After twenty-six years?”
“The leader of the other gang died in prison six weeks ago. We contacted our families and are heading home for a visit this summer. We’ve been meaning to tell you but you’ve been so busy.”
This was just the last thing she’d ever expected. “Basically everything you ever told me was a lie.”
“No.” Her mother held her father’s hand. “We got out of the life to make a life a for you. And you’ve done such wonderful things that it’s clear we made the right decision. So we don’t want you to lose focus just before you reach your ideals.”
“One bad decision can ruin your life,” her father said.
She goggled at him. “Joining an Irish gang? Bartending and dating a gang member? I think there was more than ‘one’ bad decision.”
“Hey,” her mother said sharply. “Watch it.”
Kyan knocked on the door and poked his head in. “Someone’s entered your apartment.”
She didn’t want to know how he knew that.
Amy rose and started for him. “Who?”
“A female.”
Probably Melody. But maybe her roommate knew something. And anyway this shocking conversation was done. “I’m ready to go.”
Her parents followed her to the front porch.
“Amy, this is the bad decision I’m talking about.”
Her father added, “We learned our lesson so you don’t have to learn yours.”
“Okay, then here’s another lesson.” She pointed to her parents. “You met in a bar and married in Las Vegas. Obviously, it worked out.”
“We lost touch with our families. We lost our very identities. For decades.”
“Well, I’m not in any danger of that.” She twined her arms around Kyan’s bulky neck for the flight. “I’m showing up for Sunday dinner with Pyro. And you’ll see.”
“Amy! What’s wrong with his hand?”
She glanced over her shoulder. Kyan’s hand was covered in gray-blue scales like he’d been in a dragon fight and forgotten to shift back. He flexed, and the scales receded into his skin.
Her parents stared with confusion.
Okay, so Pyro’s true identity would come out now. “He’s a dragon shifter. And a billionaire. Sorry.”
Her parents both looked stunned.
“You’re joking,” her father said.
“No. You should know better than anybody that not everyone is as they appear.”
She tapped Kyan’s shoulder to go. He lifted them off the front step, navigated the eaves, and rocketed across the city to search for the male she needed more than anything to be alright.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
In the air over her apartment, a cluster of unfamiliar, black tactical gear-wearing dragon shifters hovered. They clustered around a central character she did recognize: Sard Carnelian, irate CEO of Carnelian Clothiers.
“What’s he doing here?” she asked.
Kyan, being his usual taciturn self, didn’t bother to answer.
They descended to her unlocked balcony and everyone crowded into her kitchen.
“Be careful of the cherry tomatoes.” She craned her neck at the CEO and his guards. “What are you doing here?”
“You don’t know?” His crossed wrists were bound with neon string and the sour expression on his face said it was not a fashion statement. “I’ve been kidnapped.”
“Did you have something to do with Pyro’s disappearance?”
“Obviously not. He’s clearly using this opportunity to insult me and frighten you. You’re going to pay for involving me.”
She tuned Sard out and searched the apartment for Melody. The front door hung ajar, again, and the fan whirred in the bathroom.
She tapped on the bathroom door. “Melody? Can you come out when you’re done? Uh, we have guests.”
Her roommate made a muffled noise of agreement.
“This is an affront,” Sard grumbled. “I have nothing to do with this.”
“Sorry to involve you, then.” Amy grabbed a freshly baked blondie off the counter. “Here. Have a cookie.”
He took the blondie but didn’t eat it. Focusing on her, since Kyan’s tactical team ignored him, he growled. “Pyro is an unreliable hothead. Pretending to have a counter offer and then skipping out on our meeting makes me look like a fool. Trusting him was your mistake and now I’m paying for it.”
“He wouldn’t disappear during such an important negotiation,” she replied angrily.
Kyan slipped through the open door to Melody’s room.
“He disappears all the time.”
“Have a little faith,” she snapped, following Kyan. “If you’re going into business together, you’re going to need it.”
Sard’s eyes gleamed a darker, richer, bloodier red and his canines seemed longer like he was growling silently in fury.
She turned away from Sard and was confronted by … not what she expected.
Melody used to decorate her walls with her favorite fantasy characters. Once, she’d printed out the entire map of Skyrim and laboriously put in pins marking the location of every vein of ore discovered in the fantasy world. Now, that video game map was plastered over by a wall-sized map of Portland. Pins noted times and locations. The bar where Amy had met Pyro was marked in red.
Kyan stood with his feet shoulder-width apart. “What’s this?”
“Um, it’s for fan fiction?” Amy guessed.
His expression didn’t agree. And he must be right.
Were these places she had seen or met Pyro? Something was wrong. This took stalking to a professional level.
Melody, fresh from the bathroom, squeezed past Sard and stared up at the bulky dragon shifters in discomfort. “Wow, Amy. Who are your new friends?”
“Where’ve you been?”
“We lost track of Josh’s dad, so I was checking the bar.”
Right, because Josh’s dad was an alcoholic. “You never go out.”
“I know, but Josh has a tournament. What’s going on?” She frowned at her wall. “Why did you take the blanket down?”
“It was down when we got here.”
Her eyes got wide. “Oh.”
“That thing you had me do — following Pyro and writing notes about him — it wasn’t really for fan fiction, is it?”
Melody sat on her bed and rested her braces on her lap. A snort and a smile crossed her face. She rubbed her cheeks. “I can’t believe you bought that for so long.”
“Well, you are one of the top twenty fan ficcers on three websites.”
“Yeah, but—”
Kyan cut in. “What are you planning to do to him?”
“It was for his protection.” Her shoulders deflated. “There are bad people on the internet. Most are harmless trolls. But you can stumble across real evil, too.”
Kyan’s eyes turned a richer shade of blue and his knuckles flexed. “What have you done to him?”
Melody looked up in confusion.
“Pyro’s missing,” Amy said, cutting through the crap. “He made it to our apartment and then disappeared.”
Melody’s eyes widened. “Oh, no.” She dialed her phone. “Josh? I don’t care it’s a tournament. This is life or death! Where’s your dad? … Go check.”
They waited. Kyan, Sard, a tactical team of dragon shifters.
“I thought Josh’s dad was an alcoholic,” Amy said.
Melody glanced up at her as though she were crazy. “What?”
“You always wanted to keep him away from the bar.”
“Because that’s where you spotted Pyro.” She refocused on the phone. “He’s there? Alone? He might have run into Pyro. Are you sure he’s alone? You’re sure? Okay.”
She ended the call and looked up at them with a helpless shrug. “It wasn’t his dad.”
Kyan looked at his te
am. “We will confirm.”
They turned without a word and trooped out of the apartment marching Sard between them. Sard grabbed another blondie square on his way out to the balcony.
Kyan scooped up Melody. “You come also.”
“Oh! Okay.”
He collected Amy in his other arm and flew off the balcony following Melody’s instructions to Josh’s house.
“Josh’s dad isn’t an alcoholic. He’s crazy,” Melody told Amy. “And he’s obsessed with lizard people. After dragon shifters appeared, he stopped taking his meds and went into a spiral He was hospitalized twice for stalking and once for assault.”
“Assault!”
“Always humans though.” Melody turned grim. “He’s taking his meds again, and after he was last released, he wanted to visit Josh. We thought it would get him away from the bad influences so we said yes. It turns out he just heard the dragons lived near here.”
“You could have said something.”
“I wanted to. But what if he was cured? Anyway, I had no idea you would ever talk to Pyro face-to-face, much less marry him.”
Fair enough.
“Josh and I set up an elaborate tracking system to make sure he didn’t run into any dragons, just in case. The only dragon who hangs out nearby, and so was at risk, was Pyro.”
They landed on the front step of a plain yellow house where Josh lived with three roommates. The windows were blocked out with black plastic. Melody knocked on the door and jiggled the handle.
“Locked.” She frowned. “I didn’t bring my key.”
Kyan lowered his shoulder and pushed in the door.
Splintering wood shrieked, and the handle slammed against the back wall enough to dent.
There went the security deposit.
Josh’s roommates worked during the day, so the dragons fanned out to search the rooms and came up empty.
Melody pointed at the stairs. “Josh’s game systems are in the day basement.”
They poured into his blacked out basement. He sat upright in an office chair, hands on a red-backlit gaming keyboard, thick headphones muffling his ears while the flickering of an assault game reflected from the computer screen onto his totally focused face.
“Josh.” Melody yanked off his headphones. “Josh!”
He jumped, thoroughly startled, and still did not remove his eyes or his tapping fingers from the keyboard. “Argh! What?!”
“Where’s your dad?”
“I don’t know.”
“I called you minutes ago. Did you really check?”
“Yes. No!”
“Josh!”
“I’m in the finals. God! What the heck?”
Kyan wheeled Josh’s chair around, gripped onto both armrests, and stared deeply into the anguished eyes of the tormented gamer.
Although Josh was a large guy himself, he shrank back. His obvious intention to fling off the people who had just destroyed his chance at winning the tournament was checked by their scarred, hulking fury.
“Where is your father?” Kyan asked with deadly softness.
“I don’t know. I don’t… oh my god are you a dragon shifter? You have to get out of here.”
“Josh!” Melody got his attention over Kyan’s shoulder. “Pyro’s missing. Where’s your dad?”
“I don’t know. Upstairs.”
“He wasn’t. We just came from there.”
“Maybe the shed. In the backyard. He was talking about fixing it up.”
“Fixing it up like what, an interrogation room?”
“Maybe?”
Kyan released the chair and wheeled to his commandos. They trooped out the sliding glass door.
“Did he?” Melody’s braces slipped in the muddy grass.
“I don’t know. I was at yours all weekend.”
Kyan hovered off the ground to see in the one high shed window. Then, he flew back and nodded to remove Sard’s handcuffs. “You’re free to go.”
Sard rubbed his wrists.
“So is he in there?” Amy demanded, ready to throttle them all.
Kyan nodded.
“Why aren’t you bringing him out?”
“The human is using dragon technology on Pyro. He could accidentally use it on himself and become hurt.”
“So?”
Sard answered when it appeared that Kyan would not. “Injuring a human violates the treaty.”
“But Josh’s dad could be torturing him.”
“He is.”
“You have to save him!”
The dragon-shifter refused. An entire tactical team led by a huge mercenary stood back and waited while the love of Amy’s life was being hurt.
She bit back her scream.
Josh squared his shoulders. “I’ll go in.”
Kyan stopped him. “You could become hurt.”
Josh looked relieved.
Before Amy could take his place, the dragons formed an impassable blockade. They prevented anyone, even Amy, from getting close or risking injury.
“Somebody has to stop this!” Amy cried, pushing against Kyan.
She might as well have been pushing against a wall. A silent, grim, battle-scarred wall.
Sard spoke again. “Being critically, even fatally injured by unbalanced humans is a risk all dragons accept when they come to Earth.”
Two of his bodyguards, Syenite and a second dragon shifter, landed beside Sard. He confirmed his statement with them. “Isn’t it?”
His bodyguards nodded.
“So, what? You’re just going to wait here until Josh’s dad gets bored or Pyro dies?” she demanded.
The answer appeared to be yes.
“I’m so sorry,” Melody whispered. Tears filled her eyes. “I had no idea it would come out like this.” She turned to Sard. “And I’m sorry that you got dragged into this too.”
The CEO lifted his chin. “Give me two hundred plates of those white chocolate cookies and I will forgive you.”
Melody nodded miserably.
“What? No.” Amy stopped that right away. “What is it with dragons and your ‘hundreds’ of things? You can have two plates of blondies. Two.”
He looked less pleased but still accepted her judgment. “Two.”
Amy got out her phone. She had three missed calls from her mom and two more from Corinne.
Whatever.
Everyone else might be willing to let things take their course, like Pyro was some unfortunate victim or disposable guy, but she wasn’t. Just like everyone thought Pyro was just being irresponsible and only she believed he was in trouble.
A bunch of dragon businessmen weren’t the highest authorities. Even if one of them seemed more like Special Ops than like a clothing manufacturer.
Amy’s call connected.
“9-1-1. What’s your emergency?”
“Police.”
Everyone turned to her in shock.
She stared them down. Why were they so surprised? When bullies gave you a bloody nose, you called the teacher, and when crazies tortured innocent victims, you called the police.
“I’d like to report a crime in progress.”
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Pyro was having a bad day.
What time was it? What week was it?
He squinted at the tiny, grimy window. This small room had once smelled like soil and metal. But not anymore.
His stomach rolled and his scales ached under his scorched human skin. His shirt, torn open, exposed a great searing cut across his rib cage. Only the cauterizing effects of the surgical laser kept him from bleeding out all over the metal folding chair.
And only the paralyzing cuffs kept him from transforming into a dragon and escaping this confinement.
The gray-skinned man dripped with sweat. His stink mixed with the acrid stench of charred skin and hair. He waved the small pen-like laser in Pyro’s face.
“Which politician is a lizard?”
Pyro sucked in a pained breath and let it out. He’d already tried “
nobody,” “everybody,” and selecting a few names he remembered from Darcy. None of the answers had satisfied this male. Probably none ever would.
“Don’t try to control my mind,” the man warned, yet again. His cheek twitched, and he pointed to it. “I can tell when you’re trying.”
Pyro knew better. But frustration made him snap, and he goaded the man. “If I were controlling your mind, you’d stop and let me go.”
The male changed the laser from slicing red to cauterizing blue and traced it over the edge of his cut. His brief victory at manipulating the man disappeared. Pain annihilated conscious thought. And then, seconds later, the pain ended, and he gasped for breath. A new scent turned his stomach.
Burning bone.
How much more could he take?
The old him would have reasserted control by continuing to goad the man, up to daring the man to kill him already. Baited him until the guy lost control, leaving Pyro the ultimate — though dead — victor.
Pyro had too much to live for right now. He had to get back to Amy. Deliver his siblings’ counter offer to Sard. Save the company.
If it was even the same week.
No help would be coming. Everyone assumed he’d blown off his responsibilities. He’d screwed up often enough that this was normal for him.
Amy had lost her faith in him. His family had given up.
Maybe no one would ever come. Maybe his efforts at survival would end in his death. Alone.
Life was short and hard for low caste bastards, and it ended in a swift, un-mourned death. That’s what he believed once. Ironic that when he finally tried to change his fate, his original prediction came true.
“I’m going to ask you one more time,” the man said, sweating. “Which politicians are—”
A knock sounded on the door.
The man straightened abruptly and held the laser on red to Pyro’s temple.
Outside, an unfamiliar voice called. “Dad? It’s Josh. I know you’re in there.”
“Josh?” The barrel of the laser dug into Pyro’s aching temple. “How’d you know that, Son?”
“You’re not in the rest of the house and your outside coat’s by the back door.”
