She lifted a hand to the door, the bracelets on her wrist jangling together as they slid down her arm. The snarling stopped. She wanted to say something, but nothing would come to her. The thump of her heart filled her ears and made it difficult to hear anything through the door.
Finally, she swallowed and managed to ask, “Is everything alright in there?”
Either Erik didn’t answer, or she couldn’t hear over her own fear.
Fights had broken out in the men’s room before. That wasn’t all that unusual with the weird rules men had over urinal etiquette. The snarl she’d caught could have been the beginning of an argument. If that was the case, she should have gone to get Monty.
Instead, Bree gently pushed the door. It swung open at her touch. At first, she couldn’t see anyone. She took a step inside. A sense of wrongness overtook her, but she blamed it on being in the wrong restroom.
Her mouth suddenly felt dry. She tried to lick her lips before calling out Erik’s name, but she couldn’t pry them apart. No one stood at the urinals. The door of the single stall was closed. She stepped up and put her ear against it.
“You don’t need to be that close to eavesdrop in here,” Erik growled.
Bree lunged back.
Oh, my god. He’s taking a shit, and I totally walked in on him.
She spun on her heel, ready to hightail it out of the bathroom, when a crash came from inside the stall. The walls of it shuddered. Bree couldn’t bring herself to leave anymore. Something was wrong.
“You can’t break out here. Not here. Wait. Wait until we get back,” Erik whispered in the stall.
Bree tilted her head, confident that Erik hadn’t been talking to her. She wanted to ask if he had a dog in there or maybe a kitten tucked into his pocket. Men’s pockets could hold almost anything, and it wouldn’t have been the first time she’d seen a man bring a stray kitten in so he could get more attention from the ladies at the bar.
But a snarl ripped through the room while the stall walls shook violently. Bree didn’t stop to think. She grabbed the top of the stall door, gave it a firm wiggle and yanked it when the lock mechanism slid free. It really was the worst lock ever made.
Erik hunched with his forehead against the stall wall. One fist rested above his head. His knuckles had gone white. As she watched, a shudder rippled down his spine.
Bree found her voice. “What’s wrong? Do I need to call emergency services?”
Erik didn’t answer. He clutched the sides of his head and his sunglasses clattered to the floor. Bree’s heart clenched. She reached out for him. She thought that if she could hold him while she called for help, then everything would be fine. Maybe not that instant, but soon enough. She thought she could help.
She’d never misjudged any situation so badly before.
Erik’s head snapped up. His mismatched eyes glowed with an inhuman light. Bree didn’t jerk back. She didn’t move. Her hand hovered in the air between them. What was probably only a second seemed like an infinity while she watched him.
Bree saw his lips part. She saw the hint of razor-sharp teeth past them. Then, Erik’s form blurred. Pain shot from her hand up her arm. Bree wanted to cry out, but the sound stuck in her throat. The sensation turned from sharp to searing.
She didn’t know what happened. Her vision darkened around the edges. She blinked and looked down at her hand in a daze. Blood coated her olive skin as it poured from a ring of bite marks.
Erik’s voice sounded distant when he let out a string of expletives.
* * *
The bartender collapsed. Erik caught her before she could hit the floor. It was as if the sight of her in peril made the fight between his beasts come to a pause. He cradled the woman as his heart thundered.
Her blood spilled on the floor, filling the tile cracks. Erik cursed again. He’d never had an episode here before. Usually the flow of whiskey kept his beasts quiet. Something about the woman that’d approached him earlier and the way the bartender had glared at him had stirred his beasts.
He’d thought the bartender might have been mad at him for unintentionally flirting with her girlfriend, but the bartender had come to help him. She’d ripped the stall door open and reached out to him. He couldn’t get the look on her face out of his mind. It’d been a blend of concern and determination, the same way someone might look at a feral dog in need of love.
She’d trusted him, and he didn’t even know her name. Erik was sure she’d told him before. She’d served him so many drinks that she knew what he would want the moment he stepped through the door.
Now, she was passed out and bleeding in his arms. What the hell had come over him? He’d never lashed out like that. Not with a human woman, anyway. His monstrous half had seen something it could destroy, and Erik hadn’t been fast enough to stop it.
He wasn’t strong enough.
He wasn’t anything.
Except for a failure. He hoisted the woman in his arms and wondered what he should do with her. No one was going to let him take her far, but Erik needed to sit with her to see if she was going to change. If he stepped out into the bar with her in his arms, the entire place would take one look at her condition and riot.
He wished he could call Casey or Dillon to run interference while he found the woman’s purse, so he could take her home, but he didn’t want the clan to know how badly he’d screwed up. This woman could become a dragon shifter.
Okay, so maybe he was overreacting. To change a human into a dragon shifter, Erik would have had to shift. Since he’d kept his beasts at bay, he figured she would wake up in an hour and need a bandage.
Yet, he couldn’t bring himself to leave her. He took a step toward the door and his body locked up. Was it fear of being caught? Or, was it something else?
He looked down at the woman in his arms. Her dark hair had fallen away from her face. While she usually had a glow to her cheeks, she seemed drained of all color now. He dragged in a ragged breath and felt his lungs constrict.
He had no other choice. If he’d…changed her, then he needed to risk the riot and get her home. A shudder passed through him, but he ducked his head and shoved through the door.
On a Saturday night, no one paid attention to Erik as he carried the bartender out. His stomach sank with disappointment, not because he’d hoped to be rid of her but because he’d expected someone to care that he was carrying an unconscious woman.
Erik had never felt more like a monster, but maybe that was what he should have felt like all the time.
He set the bartender in the passenger seat of his truck as dread trickled down his spine. He caught the edge of her wallet peeking out of her back pocket and cringed when he tugged it out. Everything he did screamed with wrongness, but he needed to make sure she got home okay.
That was all that mattered. He wanted…Bree Halstead to be alright.
35
Darkness swirled around her.
Bree raised a brow and looked around, but everything was dark. This had to be a dream. She thought that if she could acknowledge that, then she would be able to break free. The darkness held her tight though. It seemed to tug at her heels. It grabbed at her hands and tried to lead her deeper into the nothing.
Don’t let go. The mystery voice echoed around Bree.
She dug in her heels and tried to find the source of the sound. The darkness kept tugging, though. It pulled and pulled, and she was just so damn tired.
Don’t you dare let go. We have to live.
Bree jerked away from the darkness grasping at her. A growl started in her mind and filled her chest with a defiant sound. She stumbled back.
Good, the voice said from inside her. We need to hold on. Death cannot have us yet. A mate waits for us.
Bree had a whole lot of questions, but the only word that resonated with her was death. She swallowed and shook herself. The darkness no longer tried to drag her down. Without its weight at her ankles and wrists, she felt impossibly strong.
The v
oice inside Bree told her to turn around. Time was of importance, so she didn’t ask why. She just ran. Away from the nothingness, away from death.
* * *
Bree groaned. Fragments of a strange dream clung to her. She tried to hold onto them, onto the voice and what it’d told her, but it all slipped through her fingers like water until she was left with the vague notion that something important had happened.
Her head throbbed like she’d spent all weekend drinking, but she hadn’t. She rolled onto her side as her memories came rushing back. No drinks had been involved. Not that she could recall. She’d been working. Erik had rushed away from the bar, and she’d gone to check on him.
She shot upright. She wasn’t at the bar anymore.
The four walls around her were familiar. Her ugly dresser with a second-hand television perched atop it sat at the end of the bed. She kicked off her own blankets and peered around. She wondered how she’d gone from the bar to her own apartment as the rest of the night caught up with her.
Erik had bitten her.
Heart pounding, she looked at her hand. A white bandage covered where the marks would have been. If she took it off, she knew she would see a row of punctures where teeth had broken her skin. She held her hand to her chest and scowled.
Who’d brought her home? If Monty had driven her home, he wouldn’t have taken the time to patch her up. She couldn’t remember doing it herself. She couldn’t even remember leaving the bar.
Bree stood and swayed. She had to brace herself against the headboard to keep from falling back onto the bed. Her head spun, but the worst part was the smells. An army of scents assaulted her senses and made her forehead throb. For a moment, she thought someone had spilled a perfume collection in her room, but there was no evidence of a mess.
She’d never owned a perfume collection to begin with. But as she took a wobbling step forward, the scents changed. The smell of wax, oil, chemical vanilla, and char slammed into her. Her gaze slid sideways until she glimpsed a candle on the desk near the door. At no point since she’d bought the candle had it ever smelled so strongly.
Bree panicked, recalling that pregnant women often experienced heightened olfactory senses, then realized she hadn’t slept with anyone for weeks. The missing hours bothered her, but there was no way that she would be experiencing pregnancy symptoms if…
Her stomach lurched. She glanced back at the bed she’d crawled out of. It bore no evidence of anything other than kindness. Someone had bandaged her and tucked her in. Surely, that meant nothing bad had happened.
“I don’t drink on the job for a reason,” she groaned.
A faint shuffle in the other room reached her ears. She froze, suddenly aware that she wasn’t alone. Backtracking, she pulled a pink baseball bat out from behind her headboard. She hefted it in her hand as if to remind herself that she wasn’t unarmed. A baseball bat couldn’t fight off a bullet, but there was a chance she could knock out the intruder before they even noticed her.
She slipped out into the hall, quietly advancing toward the source of the sound. Someone moved around her kitchen. She didn’t wait to find out what they were after. She darted out of the hall, lifted the bat, and swung.
The intruder spun, faster than should have been possible, and threw up a hand. Her shoulder reverberated from the impact.
Erik glared up at her before his gaze slid to his hand. Bree dropped the bat and threw her hands over her mouth. His fingers should have been wrecked, but he seemed fine. Still, he stared at his hand as if she had hurt him. He shook his fingers as he looked her up and down.
“Well, you’re up.”
His sunglasses were gone, revealing a genuinely concerned expression. She’d never seen so much emotion on his face before. Her lips parted as words failed her.
Erik pressed his lips together, nodded, and turned. “I should probably go. Glad to see you’re alright.”
Before he could step out of sight, Bree blurted out, “What the hell happened?”
He paused.
“Did you bring me home?” She cocked her head, trying to understand the man she’d thought she knew.
The Erik she knew would never bite a person. He wouldn’t kidnap her and take her back to her own apartment. But she didn’t know Erik at all. She’d had a vision of him in her head, a fairytale knight that would rescue her from her shitty bartending job. In her daydream, they would have ridden off into the sunset on his motorcycle.
“You don’t even own a motorcycle. Do you?” Her voice became accusing.
Erik stepped back, eyes wide. “Uh, no.”
“I should have known!” Bree threw her hands in the air.
“What does that have to do with anything? I never told you I had a motorcycle.”
Her cheeks heated. She paused and turned her face away from him. A new energy pulsed in her chest and filled her limbs with the excess. She couldn’t shake it off, couldn’t calm it down.
“Bree?” Erik asked from near the door.
“Hm?” She wanted to turn to him and beg him to stay, but she could tell, now, that she’d developed a vision of him that wasn’t real. If Erik stayed and fell short of the version of him that lived in her head, she would have to face the fact that no one would ever be right for her.
“Are you alright?”
No. Hell, no.
Her body felt all sorts of wrong. She could smell absolutely everything, including him. She felt something in her chest that had never been there before.
Yet, she still said, “Yeah.”
She listened to Erik shuffle his feet by the door. The creak of the knob told her he would leave. But she didn’t hear the door open.
“Listen, Bree. I don’t think you’re okay,” Erik said, suddenly standing in front of her.
She reared back as he tried to take her hand. A gap of space opened between them. Her own speed surprised her.
Erik sighed and said, almost to himself, “Oh, this isn’t going to go over well with anyone. Could I be a bigger fuck up?”
Bree looked into the face she’d been yearning after for the past six weeks and wondered what the hell was going on. She raised both hands. “Look, I appreciate you taking me home. I even appreciate the first aid, but I think it’s time we part ways.”
The words physically hurt to say. She couldn’t explain why she didn’t want him to leave, though. It was a feeling, a tug in her heart that wanted him to take her into his arms.
Logic screamed that she didn’t know this man. The rest of her yearned for his comfort until he opened his mouth again.
“This is going to sound absolutely batshit,” Erik said. “I didn’t mean for any of this to happen, but when I bit you, I think I…I changed you.”
He said change as if it meant something else to him. Time changes everyone. She’d read somewhere that a every cell in a body changes after seven years, meaning she wasn’t the same Bree she was seven years ago. The way Erik said it, she wasn’t the same woman she’d been the night before.
“It was just a bite. While I will never understand why you bit me, I’m okay with moving past it. You can go your way, and I’ll go mine. We’ll never have to talk about this again.” She marched over to the fridge, suddenly ravenous.
She yanked on the fridge door and the whole thing rocked forward. She yelped, let go, and leapt back. It crashed back to the floor. A box of cereal that’d been on top fell and spilled its contents.
“Fuck,” Erik said under his breath. “I turned you into a dragon.”
She whirled on him. “In what language would that have made any damn sense?”
“There’s a lot in your life that isn’t going to make sense. You’re going to have to get used to everything I say being a step away from gibberish.” He quirked a smile that she wanted to slap off his face.
She flung her hand toward the fridge. “The airlock was too tight. That’s all.”
“I take it you want to play dense and ignore all the warning signs?” Erik asked. He strode f
orward, grabbed a chair and spun it around before sitting down.
Bree put her hands on her hips and glared at him. Distracted, she glanced down to find that her bracelets were all gone.
“I didn’t think you would appreciate them in case they were actual silver. You’ll find that silver will make you sick to your stomach now.”
She rolled her eyes. This guy must have roofied her. That, or he doped her up with something crazy. She’d heard of junkies doing impossible things while on weird drugs. She didn’t feel high, but she definitely felt a touch off.
Just to prove him wrong, she marched back to her bedroom and found her bracelets carelessly thrown onto the floor. She bent to grab a bangle and jerked back when the metal burned. A voice in the back of her head growled.
Bree clutched her hand to her chest and stared down at her silver bangles. The voice in her head faded. When it vanished, she could tell herself that she’d imagined it. She didn’t try to touch the bracelets again, though. Instead, she straightened and went back to the kitchen.
Erik watched her like a hawk.
Bree shrugged. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Then why aren’t you wearing them?” he fired back.
She fought to keep from wrinkling her nose in annoyance. “I need to take a shower. Why would I put my bracelets on before showering?”
Erik leaned back as a look of confusion flitted across his face. Bree thought she was finally free of him when he stood. Instead of leaving, he approached her. She backed up until her spine hit the counter.
She glared up at Erik as his nostrils flared. The confusion left his face, but an eerie glow filled his eyes. Her lips parted in awe at the sight of them. The voice from earlier growled again, but this time the sound was more appreciative than angry.
Erik leaned into her. He braced himself against the counter by putting a hand on either side of her, so she was locked where she stood. Instead of pushing him away, she glared up at him.
He bent over her, the tip of his nose grazing her neck and sending shivers down her spine. She heard him inhale. Her knees went weak as her core heated. Suddenly, Bree wanted nothing more than to grab Erik and hold him tight. She wanted to wrap her legs around him and never let go.
Rogue Dragons Series: Box Set Books 1-5 Page 28
