Day of the Dragon

by Katie MacAlister

  He looked stricken for a moment, closing his eyes briefly. “And now I have driven you from my side with hastily spoken words. This day could not get any worse.”

  “I agree that I’ve had better days, but I don’t think this one has completely gone to the dogs,” I told him, leaning forward so my lips caressed his as I spoke. “Because we’ve only been together a few days, there are some moments when I, too, forget that I am no longer alone in this world. I forgive your hasty words, my delicious, sexy dragon. So long as you immediately amend your statement to ‘one of the people I trust.’ Otherwise…”

  His eyes warmed to topaz blue, his hands hard on my hips as he pulled me tighter against all the hard planes of his body. “I do not deserve you, mate, but I will get down on bended knee every day in thanks that you are in my life. I did not mean what I said—I trust you with my life. There is no one who I trust more—”

  “I know,” I said, kissing him on the corner of his mouth. “I’m in love with you, too.”

  An indescribable expression flitted across his face, and I think he would have admitted the truth but at that moment, a familiar blight returned.

  “Well, isn’t this just grand. I asked him to do one thing, one simple thing,” Edgar said from where he glared at us in the doorway. He stomped over to swear at the smear of oily black smoke on the wall and floor. “And he couldn’t even do that. What the hell use is it to summon demons if they can’t kill one dragon?”

  “Hats of asses,” Bree said, frowning at him.

  “A whole boatload of them,” I agreed, then turned to Archer. “Can we get out of here now? There’s something you need to know, and I don’t like telling it to you here—”

  “And have me be accused of being a poor host?” Hunter skidded to a stop at the door, Miles at his heels. But it was Hunter who kept my attention—his hair was tangled and standing on end as if he’d stuck his finger in a power socket, while black singe marks ringed his eyes, ears, nostrils, and mouth. He looked like a deranged cross between a porcupine and a raccoon.

  He walked into the room, not with the grace and power that I’d seen when he kidnapped me—both times—but oddly stiff and graceless, as if he’d been pulled through a wringer. Backward.

  “I thought you were dead?” Edgar asked him.

  Hunter shot him a look of pure dislike, and to my surprise, Edgar backed up. “Why are you still here, mortal?”

  “I want my money.”

  “You’ll get it when you bring me the leaf.”

  “I gave you the woman. You owe me for her,” Edgar argued.

  “If I ever see you near my mate again, I will kill you,” Archer said simply. “The same applies for her family. Do you understand?”

  Edgar started to sneer, but Archer pulled his sword and Edgar—never stupid when it came to self-preservation—snarled to Hunter, “I’ll send you my bill!” before taking himself off.

  I slid a glance toward Archer, wondering just what he’d done to his brother. Archer looked very satisfied with himself.

  Hunter lifted his big, black sword and pointed it at Archer. “I have a bone to pick with you, brother. Since when did you learn to harness electricity?”

  “I am master of the storm dragons,” Archer said dryly. “What did you expect?”

  “Not that!” Hunter snapped, running a hand through his hair. A clump of it came off in his hand. He glared at it for a moment before transferring the glare to Archer. “I thought it was just a name you picked because you liked it. No one told me you could do”—he waved a hand toward the back of the house—“that.”

  “What did you do?” I asked him.

  Archer smiled. “Took care of him.”

  “Well, I’m not going to have it! Not in my own home,” Hunter said, shaking his sword at Archer before lifting a hand and drawing a symbol that he flung onto Archer. It glowed black on him for a moment.

  Miles started to move, but Hunter spun around to throw the same symbol on him.

  Archer snarled an extremely rude oath in Magyar and tried to leap forward, but whatever Hunter did kept his feet rooted to the large, colorful Native American rug that covered much of the floor. “What did you do to me, you bastard?”

  It was Hunter’s turn to smile. “Took care of you.”

  “Don’t worry, I got this,” I told Archer quietly, and took a step forward.

  He grabbed my arm. “You do not!”

  I leaned into him. “Bree and I spent all afternoon reading some grimoires. I’m chock-full of things like banishment wards, and destruction spells, and something to make pubic hair go berserk.” I patted him on the arm to reassure him that all was well.

  “Regardless, you are not to take one more step forward. Thaisa! I just told you not to!” Archer tried to grab me again, but I was just out of his reach.

  “Right, it’s on now,” I told Hunter. “No one messes with my…my…” I stopped and looked back at Archer. “What are we? We’re not dating, so you’re not my boyfriend.”

  “I’m your master,” he said with lofty disregard of how that would sound.

  “You so are not,” I said, giving him a glare.

  “You are my mate,” he amended.

  “That’s what I am, but what are you? What do I call you when talking to people?”

  “That is not people,” Archer snapped, pointing at Hunter and struggling to free his feet from where they were stuck to the rug. He managed to twist one free and was trying to drag the other one forward so he could grab me. “That is a homicidal, deranged demon.”

  “I like that!” Hunter said, pausing in the act of drawing another symbol. “I’m not the homicidal one here, brother.”

  “You kidnapped my mate,” Archer yelled at him. “You took her from me!”

  “And you know full well why I did so,” Hunter answered with great dignity. “Stop making such a big fuss about it. I’ve treated her with the utmost kindness.”

  “You call binding her hands behind her back kindness?” Archer asked, outrage dripping off every word.

  I sent him a look of appreciation of his concern for my well-being. “There are times when your protective nature gets you a big gold star for the day, and today is one of those days. If you wouldn’t grab me and try to stuff me behind you, I’d kiss you.”

  “She was bound because she came out of the Taser-induced insensibility almost immediately, and in the first five minutes after she woke up, she tried to pepper spray me twice, as well as attempted to hit me on the head with an ashtray that damned sprite already used once on me. She did manage to bite my wrist hard enough to make it bleed, and kicked me in the nuts with such strength that it’s likely I will never have children,” Hunter said, glaring at me, a little smoke curling out of his nose.

  I put on my innocent face. “You Tased me. Besides, those who kidnap should expect to be fought.”

  “Well done, flower,” Archer said, giving me a look of approval.

  I smiled back and had to fight to keep from kissing him. “We’re getting married,” I told him, making an instant decision. “That’s the solution to what I call you.”

  His expression turned to annoyance. “Marriage is a mortal convention that dragons do not hold with, and if it was, now would not be the time to propose to me.”

  “I’m not going to spend my life introducing you to people as my mate,” I said, and turned back to Hunter. “As I was saying before I got distracted by Archer—”

  “I did nothing!”

  “No one messes with my fiancé.”

  “He started it.” Hunter slapped a second black binding symbol on Archer.

  Archer glared at his brother. “The fact remains that you stole my mate.”

  “Yes, but she agreed to translate a manuscript for me.”

  “My manuscript!” Archer roared, his fire riding high in him.

  Hunter waved that away. “It concerns both of us. You should share.”

  I suspected that if Archer could have shot lasers out of his
eyeballs at that moment, Hunter would have been nothing but a smoking mass of charred man.

  I mused for a few seconds over the fact that he was so furious with Hunter, but wasn’t even giving Miles an occasional glare. One of the pieces of the mental puzzle that had been confusing me slid into place with an almost satisfying click.

  “We have strayed from the topic of me opening a can of whoop-ass,” I said, feeling there was no benefit to continuing the argument about the manuscript. I wanted badly to get out of there so I could explain to Archer the third epiphany that had struck me.

  Both men looked at me like I was crazy.

  “And you can just stop drawing whatever spell you’re trying to draw, Hunter,” I added. “Because I see you, and that is so not happening.”

  “It’s not a spell,” he said. “It takes a learned magister to be able to draw a spell.”

  “I know how to do it,” I said with narrowed eyes. “Bree?”

  “On it,” she said, taking Ioan by the hand. “Come on, Ioan. We need to get earth and water and sky. You can help me gather it.”

  Hunter narrowed his eyes at Bree as she hauled Ioan out after her, but I guessed he didn’t feel threatened by either of them, for he let them pass by him, confining himself to a derisive snort in my direction. “I highly doubt that you can do any such thing. You do not have the skills for such an act. For your information, this is a ward, a particularly powerful binding ward that I am using to try to control your deranged master.”

  “You guys so need to get a better name for leader of your tribes. What do those other dragons call themselves? The ones with all the pure colors?”

  “Wyverns,” they both answered at the same time.

  “Oy. We’ll think of something else. Well, time is wasting. Let’s get to the banishment of your brother, shall we?” I rubbed my hands together. “Have you ever heard of the Demonitica, Hunter? No? Well, they have a very interesting section on dragons.”

  Hunter heaved a dramatic sigh when Archer struggled to re-free the foot that Hunter had bound a second time to the rug. He strolled over to the light switches. “Have you ever heard of a trapdoor, Thaisa? No? Well, I have one.”

  And before we could so much as blink, he flipped a switch and the floor literally gave way beneath us, sending Archer and me plummeting down into a dark, inky pit.

  Chapter Fourteen

  ARCHER GRABBED THAISA AS THEY FELL, TWISTING himself around so that it was he who hit the floor, pain exploding through his head and sending him into a well of insensibility.

  It was her voice that drifted through the pain, pulling him back from the darkness to the soft glow of sunshine that was his mate.

  “—and I swear to God, if you hurt yourself seriously, I will geld your brother. Slowly. With a table knife. No, that’s too sharp. A spoon. I will geld him with a spoon. Archer?”

  Soft hands caressed his cheeks, and softer lips kissed his face. He lay still for a moment, weaving in and out of consciousness, his body and mind drifting comfortably.

  “You’re moaning, my love, so I know you’re alive. Are you there?”

  Light pierced his brain. He rolled an eye down to see her peering at him, so close her eyes were almost crossed. “Flower,” he said.

  “That’s right, I’m your flower.” Relief filled her face. She released the eyelid that she’d peeled back, kissing his brow, his cheeks, the tip of his nose, and finally his mouth. He managed to get his arms working, pulling her down onto his body while he sent out little queries to see if he’d been injured. It was just his head that had a dull throb. “Thank God for that rug that was under us. You could have been seriously hurt. As it was, you were out for a good five minutes. How do you feel?”

  He kissed her soundly, then kissed her a second time, at a more leisurely pace, enjoying the sweetness of her, his tongue making sure that nothing in her mouth was out of place. His flower, his glorious mate, the woman who brought him to such highs of ecstasy and such rages of frustration. He reveled in every inch of her.

  Until memory returned.

  “What the hell do you think you were doing?” He pushed himself up, unable to let her go, but needing to vent a much abused spleen. He shook her gently. “You ignored my commands and could have been seriously hurt.”

  “Commands?” she asked, pulling back and bristling. “You must have hit your head harder than I thought if you honestly believe you can give me commands.”

  Even as muzzy as his head was, he saw at once that was the wrong tack to take with her. “I tell you and I tell you of the dangers that are out there, waiting to beset you, and yet, you ignore me, ignore my requests to keep yourself safe. You can’t blame me for being incensed when I see you put yourself in danger that is not at all necessary.”

  She took a deep breath but did not continue to rage at him, as he thought she would. Once again, he felt a little lost by the unexpectedness of her. Would the day ever come when he knew what she would say or do? “I’m going to give you extra bonus gold stars because I know behind all that bossiness is a man who feels the need to protect, but I can’t urge you enough to remove the word command from your vocabulary when speaking to me. I am not your tribespeople, Archer.”

  “Dragons, not people.”

  “Don’t split hairs,” she said with a thinning of her lips. “If we’re going to make this mate thing work, we must have a partnership. I don’t want to be treated like a fragile china doll—either we’re full partners, or…well…”

  “You’ll leave me?” His heart threatened to stop dead in his chest at that thought. Panic unlike anything he’d ever felt gripped him, bringing with it a hundred memories, starting when he was a child, one whom no one gave a second thought, just another mongrel running wild in whatever keep strangers had tossed him. Instinctively, he tried to separate his emotions from her, just as he’d done with those who had never given him the love he had so desperately sought.

  Warmth flooded him, lighting the dark places in his soul with heat and fire, his fire and her heat. She wrapped her arms around him, her mouth pressed to his neck, her lips brushing him with soft fluttering kisses, gently biting the same spot that made her giddy. “Never, Archer. I made the decision to spend my life with you, and nothing will change that. I can’t change it even if I want to because I’m so in love with you. Despite your handsome face, and your hair that I want to rub all over my breasts, and your thighs, and your chest that makes me want to weep with joy, I am yours. You’re stuck with me now, dragon boy.”

  “Dragon master,” he murmured, pulling her tight to his chest, breathing deeply of the scent of her. She smelled wild and untamed and warm all at the same time. She smelled like his flower, the one woman who fate had decreed he must wait long centuries for, and he closed his eyes for a moment against the knowledge that love had finally come to his life. “You are my breath in my lungs, Thaisa. You are the beat of my heart, the heat in my dragon fire. You are life, my life, and I will spend the rest of my days making you happy.”

  “Oh, Archer,” she said, blinking back tears that swam in her intriguing eyes. “That was the most romantic thing you’ve said to me.”

  He pinched her behind and moved out from under her. “But if you ever put yourself at risk like that again, I will show you that there is a reason I am master of the storm dragons.”

  “And there you went and ruined the moment by giving me what sounds very much like a command,” she said, but a smile curved her sweet lips, and her eyes were still soft and filled with love.

  He got to his feet, glancing around at their surroundings. They appeared to be in a basement storeroom, mostly empty but for a few wooden packing cases tipped over on their sides; a long, low, blue-striped Regency-era sofa; two rose-pink wingback chairs; and a waist-high ebony statue of an elephant. On one side of the room, a dim bulb hung drunkenly from the ceiling, the glow from it a sickly yellow. “Did you try the door?”

  “Yes. It’s locked. Oh, I moved your things to the side. They fell
off you when we dropped through the floor.” She watched him gather up the bow and sword. “While we’re talking about that, who has a trapdoor, an actual working trapdoor, just like in some James Bond movie?”

  “My brother, the villain.” Archer tried the door, but it was heavy oak, banded in iron. He wondered if he could burn it down but suspected if Hunter used this room as a form of cell, it had probably been fireproofed. There were no windows, no other doors, just a few dusty pieces of furniture, and his flower, now watching him with a thoughtful look on her lovely face.

  She pulled the two chairs closer to the door, sitting on one before she slanted a glance up at him. “What do you know about star charts?”

  “The night sky? I can navigate by the stars, if that’s what you’re asking.”

  “I wasn’t, but that’s interesting to know. Is that something you had to learn in a sailing class?”

  “You could say that,” he answered, putting his shoulder to the door and leaning into it to see if it budged at all. It didn’t. “I learned to use a sextant when I sailed around the world in the mid-eighteenth century. I think that bastard warded this door for strength. It’s not so much as creaking.”

  He almost missed the look on Thaisa’s face, but caught the expression of rapt amazement as she swallowed hard a couple of times. “You…” She had to stop and clear her throat. “You sailed around the world. In the seventeen hundreds. On a sailing ship.”

  “It was the only way to get across the oceans then.”

  She took a deep breath, her eyes closed, a little tremor shaking her. He eyed her, wondering if she was angry or suffering some sort of an attack.

  “You,” she said slowly, breathing loudly through her nose, “traveled around the world at the same time as explorers? Famous explorers? Like James Cook?”

  “He was a hat of many asses,” Archer said, relieved she wasn’t having an attack. He breathed fire on the door just in case it hadn’t been fireproofed.