Day Care Dragon (Bodyguard Shifters Book 4)

by Zoe Chant

  Loretta snuggled closer to him. The devastation in his voice spoke more clearly than the words, telling her of a lonely little boy, orphaned and isolated.

  "They even took our hoard," he went on in that same aching voice. "Down to the last coin. Have I explained about a dragon's hoard to you?"

  A mental image came to her of an illustration in a storybook from her childhood, showing a dragon coiled on a heap of gold and jewels. "You mean that's real too?"

  "It is very real. All dragons hoard. What they hoard varies by dragon. My daughter Melody hoards books. Esmerelda hoards music. But I was always a traditionalist."

  "Your fortune," Loretta said softly.

  "It's not just wealth for wealth's sake. It is what I am. I'm a dragon. I must have gold and jewels, the more the better."

  Loretta nodded, but she wondered about that. If a hoard didn't have to be made of gold, then it sounded to her as if Darius had chosen his hoard based on his desire for security, the ache of a lonely orphan to be safe and secure, and not based on the desires of his innermost self.

  "The most valued item in a dragon's hoard is called the Heart," Darius went on. "It's the seed around which the hoard is built. It doesn't have to be the same as the other items. It can be anything ... or anyone. The Corcorans, a clan currently allied to my own, used to have a family of humans who served them as the Heart of the Hoard, a position passed down through the generations." He smiled briefly. "One of them is now married to my son."

  "What is yours?" Loretta asked, and then quickly checked herself. "I'm sorry. Is it rude to ask about that?"

  Darius smiled again, more softly this time. "It is something that dragons never speak of to outsiders. But you are not an outsider; you are my mate, and all that I have is yours. Therefore I don't mind you knowing, although the Heart of my hoard is very different from most dragons'."

  "What is it?"

  Now his smile was triumphant. "Me."

  "I don't understand."

  "The Heart of the Hoard is a dragon's greatest vulnerability. All a dragon's power is invested in the hoard's Heart. It is, in some sense, a dragon's soul. If it is destroyed, the dragon will be incapacitated, writhing in agony, a mere shell of themselves. At that point, death comes as a mercy. I don't know why no dragons have ever thought to base their hoard around themselves, but that is what I have done. I need nothing and no one, and I can rebuild my hoard no matter how many times I lose it. All I need, all I've ever needed, is myself."

  He looked triumphant, but all Loretta could feel was pity. The look of delight in his own cleverness was slowly replaced by puzzlement as he realized she wasn't sharing his pleasure.

  "You're so alone," she said quietly.

  "You're not a dragon. You wouldn't understand."

  I bet other dragons wouldn't understand either, she thought in a sudden bolt of insight. The fact that other dragons didn't do what he'd done was probably a good reason why it shouldn't be done.

  "Everyone needs someone else sometimes," she told him. "You're not supposed to be completely self-sufficient. It's not natural."

  "Anything can be lost in life, my love. It's not a good idea to make anything essential to your heart."

  "Even me?" she asked in a small voice.

  Darius kissed her forehead. "I cannot bear the thought of losing you, it's true. But if there's one thing I've learned, it's that any loss can be borne, any grief overcome. Life rarely gives, it only takes away. You cannot love things too deeply; they will only be lost."

  The resignation in his voice cut her to the bottom of her soul. "I don't believe that," she whispered. "Life does give us good things sometimes. It gave me to you, and you to me. And when you find something worth hanging onto, you have to hold onto it with everything you have."

  "I wish I had your faith, my mate."

  "I'll have to have faith for both of us."

  Darkness had fallen fully on them now. She leaned into him, and he held her as the last vestiges of daylight faded from the sky, leaving them with the pinpoint stars and the lights in the valley. Below them, the mansion blazed with light, warm and inviting.

  "It's going to be all right, Darius," she told him quietly, her cheek resting against his jacket. "You'll get through this. We'll get through this."

  "I can't ..." he began, so softly she could barely hear him, and then left it lingering there. She felt him go tense against her; he suddenly became very still.

  "What?" she asked, lifting her head off his shoulder.

  "Shhh."

  Loretta shushed. She couldn't tell what he was doing. She didn't hear anything except the rushing of the wind in the trees. It was actually kind of eerie out here at night, no longer romantic now that the sun had gone down. She knew that she needed to fear nothing with a dragon by her side, but she still found herself wishing they were, perhaps, a little closer to the house.

  "Loretta, get up."

  Darius rose and gave her a hand to her feet. He didn't seem afraid, just tense, moving with a quick and calm economy of motion.

  "What's going on?" she asked.

  "I don't know."

  She had never seen him this uncertain—not alarmed, not quite, but alert and unsure, looking around them at the dark woods. He kept an arm around her, and she pressed close to him, not wanting any separation between them.

  Everything seemed serene and quiet. The lights of the mansion shone bright and steady; the town's lights cast glittering reflections across the lake.

  Suddenly Darius cursed and spun her around, sweeping her without warning from the place she'd been standing. Loretta cried out and clutched at his arms, and cried out again as a crack split the earth where she'd been standing a second ago. There was no apparent reason for it to happen, nothing visible in the moonlight except a sudden dark crack yawning through the grass. She smelled a moist forest smell of damp soil and stone.

  "Get back!"

  Darius's voice was harsh. Loretta stumbled backward, allowing him to place his body between her and whatever was happening in front of them.

  The moonlight made it hard to figure out what she was looking at, though she wasn't sure if it would have made any more sense by daylight. The ground lurched and heaved, splitting again in cracks running between the trees, through the grass and stone and rocks. Beneath her feet, it trembled, and Darius crowded her backward, trying to shove her out of range of—what?

  Something lurched out of the ground. Loretta screamed. The very ground itself was moving. There were things climbing up out of the cracks in the earth, human-sized but hunch-shouldered and powerful, with doglike heads and claws on the hands they were using to crawl up from the earth itself. Clots of soil dripped off their bodies.

  "Abominations!" Darius spat. He shifted without warning; one moment she was clinging to his arm, the next minute she had her hand on his scaly foreleg. He drove his head at the nearest of the things, hissing. When he snapped his teeth on its shoulder, his mouth rebounded off; there was no noticeable effect.

  The creature swiped its claws at him. It was much smaller than the dragon, but its claws raked down Darius's neck. He hissed in pain and reared on his back legs. Loretta scrambled behind his bulk as he swatted the creature into one of its fellows. They went down together with a noise that made Loretta think of a pile of rocks being dumped out of a bucket.

  Darius bent his foreleg to lower his shoulder to her level. "Get on!"

  Loretta wasn't the most athletic person, but she lost no time scrambling aboard. Darius took off with a powerful downbeat of his wings. As they soared over the trees, Loretta was horrified to see dozens of the creatures, with more of them crawling out of the ground all the time. They stood like gorillas, bent over with their long forelimbs touching the ground.

  "What are those?" she cried, her voice cracking with terror.

  "Stoneskins," Darius rumbled. "The mindless gargoyles I told you about. Their skin is rock-hard. They don't feel cold or pain. They're almost impossible to damage or destroy."
>
  "But ..." She clung to the spikes on his neck as he swooped over the mansion. "Why are they here?"

  Darius landed on one of the mansion's top balconies rather than the lawn, shifting so abruptly that Loretta (in the middle of getting off) would have fallen flat on her face if he hadn't caught her. "Sharpe," he said. "Sharpe is why they're here. It has to be. Come on."

  Loretta had to break into a fast trot, almost a run, to keep up with his swift stride. As soon as he was through the double doors of the balcony, he slipped a hand inside his sleeve and did something—it looked to her like he pressed a cufflink. There was a sudden loud siren, like a fire alarm noise, that nearly scared her out of her skin, especially with her nerves already on edge. At the end of the corridor they'd just entered, a door slammed shut.

  "What's happening?" Loretta asked. The siren cut out after a few seconds, but it left her nerves jangling.

  "I have an emergency protocol in case we are ever attacked," Darius said. His voice was cool, his expression flat. "I think this qualifies."

  He stopped abruptly and touched a place on the wall. A panel slid open, revealing a hidden passage behind it. "Shortcut," he said tersely, and as they stepped in, he pulled out his phone, which had begun to vibrate. "Yes, we have a code red, Maddox," he said into it. "Not a drill. It doesn't get worse than this. The village needs to be evacuated immediately, so contact the mayor to begin evacuation protocols. All staff currently at the mansion should suspend their duties and await instructions. As for you, when you've seen to that, meet me at my office."

  "You planned for this?" Loretta asked as they slipped down the narrow confines of the passage. "Did you know this would happen?"

  "I didn't know it would be gargoyles, but I knew I might someday have to deal with an attack from a powerful enemy. I have," he added in a low voice, "made a number of enemies in my life."

  "What kind of enemies?" she couldn't help asking.

  He glanced at her over his shoulder. "I don't like you to know of this part of my life."

  "I'm going to have to deal with every part of your life," she pointed out. "It's not going to protect me if there are things I don't know about."

  After a pause, he said, "Rival dragon clanlords. Business rivals of the less scrupulous sort. That sort of thing."

  She laid a hand on his back and smiled, though he was no longer looking at her, but she felt him relax slightly under her touch. "That wasn't so hard, was it?" she said.

  "Don't be so sure." But she could hear the smile in his voice. "There's nothing about me that intimidates you, is it?"

  "I know you too well," she said simply. Darius didn't answer, but he reached back and squeezed her hand.

  They emerged from the passage into the hallway outside Darius's office. Maddox was waiting for them, checking the load in a gun that he tucked away into a shoulder holster.

  "What's going on, boss?" he asked, falling in step with them as Darius opened the office door and strode inside.

  "Gargoyles." Darius leaned over his desk, tapping computer keys to wake up the machines. "Stoneskins. Do you know what those are?"

  "Never met one," Maddox said, unperturbed.

  "You're about to." Darius touched another key, and the flat screens on the walls, which had been idly running news channels and stock tickers, changed abruptly to different static images of scenery. It took Loretta a moment to realize they were security cameras, showing the house and grounds. A couple of them displayed grayish images of woods; one showed a waterfront street in a small town where people were hurrying into cars.

  "There," Darius said grimly. He pointed up at one of the night-vision cameras. This one showed a view of the cliff, with movement on it. Loretta's hands knotted into fists on her skirt when she recognized the hunch-backed creatures crawling up the cliff. As she watched, a crack in the cliffside opened and another one crawled out to join the others.

  As she looked around between the different camera views, she saw more and more of them. They were all throughout the woods.

  Maddox's cool facade had cracked as soon as he saw the monitors, and now he was staring in open horror. She'd never seen that much emotion on his face. "What are they?" he asked in a hushed voice.

  "Gargoyles," Darius said impatiently, busily tapping keys on the computer. "Try to keep up, Maddox."

  A hint of irritation crept into Maddox's gravelly voice. "I didn't even know gargoyles were a real thing 'til a couple minutes ago, boss."

  "Well, now you do." Darius spoke with his eyes on the computer. Loretta moved over so she could see what he was typing, but it didn't help—all she saw were computer windows full of numbers. "Those are stoneskins, mindless animals, extremely hard to kill but also extremely stupid. There seem to be a lot of them, but they don't work well without direction. Somewhere nearby there will be a gargoyle shifter giving them orders. Sharpe, no doubt." His lip curled. "He can't attack me without exposing himself. That's going to be his fatal mistake."

  Loretta looked up at the screens again and sucked in a breath. "Darius," she said, pointing. There were more stoneskins on the road to the mansion. All of them seemed to be converging on the mansion, ignoring the village.

  "I see it," Darius said quietly. He reached for the desk phone. "We're cut off. We'll need to use the helipad to evacuate the remaining staff. Maddox, go see to it."

  After Maddox left (still looking disturbed), Loretta turned to Darius as he hung up the phone after a few brief words to whoever was on the other end. "What now?" she asked quietly. "What are you doing?"

  "Getting my people to safety. Locking down the mansion." He glanced up. "Getting you to safety. Ideally I'd want you on that helicopter—"

  "I'm not leaving you."

  "I thought you might say that." A hint of a smile turned up the corner of his mouth. "In all truth I'd rather have you with me, my mate. I don't trust anyone else to protect you as well as I can." The smile dropped away. "And I am so, so sorry for getting you into this."

  "Don't be," Loretta said firmly. "I chose to be here. I'd rather be here facing this with you than anywhere else. We're a team, Darius. You're not alone anymore."

  Darius took a deep breath that had a catch in it, and turned back to his computer. "All the preparations are in place. It's time to lock down fully."

  He tapped a key. There was a low grinding noise. Loretta looked up in surprise as metal shutters slid down over the tall windows, cutting off her view of the valley. All over the mansion there were hollow booms and distant grinding and sliding sounds, dimly visible and half-felt through the soles of her feet.

  "You weren't kidding about locking down," she said faintly.

  Darius put an arm around her. "Come with me."

  They walked briskly down the halls of the mansion. Every window was now sealed, and many of the hallways were blocked with impenetrable-looking doors; Darius took them by a route that avoided these. Along the way, they passed Elvie with the orange cat in her arms, looking harassed.

  "Everyone's on the helicopter, sir," she said, and tucked the cat more securely in her grip. "Maddox and I are the last."

  Darius looked down at Loretta. His eyes gleamed with love and pride. "Last chance to get a ride out."

  "I told you, I'm not going anywhere. You're going to have to fling me over your shoulder and shove me into that helicopter if you want me to leave."

  "You know I'm capable of it."

  "I know," she said quietly. "But I don't think you will. And anyway, I don't feel safe anywhere but with you."

  As if to punctuate her words, there was a sudden, distant thump from somewhere nearby. Loretta drew closer to Darius. I must be crazy to stay here for this, she thought, but it was true: she didn't want to be anywhere but where Darius was.

  Darius grimaced and turned to Elvie. He reached out briefly to stroke Toblerone's flattened ears. "Get on that helicopter and go. I'll contact you when it's safe to return."

  "I don't suppose you're planning to tell us what all of this is
about."

  "Later," Darius said quietly. "Go."

  With a last backward glance, Elvie turned and hurried away down the hall. Darius urged Loretta forward. "Come."

  They stopped at a large blast door and Darius entered a code to open it. They went through into a hallway that was unfamiliar to her, though it was hard to tell with everything so different.

  "Where are we going?"

  "We're here," Darius said. He touched a wall, and a door was revealed, sliding back on what looked like another bedroom. Although still richly appointed, it was smaller than the others, with a bed and a desk and chair.

  "What's this?" she asked, turning to him with a smile. "Another love nest?"

  "A saferoom," he said, and gave her a gentle push.

  Loretta was so startled she stumbled forward, and as she started to turn around, the door slid shut behind her. Shocked, she stared at what now appeared to be a blank wall.

  "Darius!"

  "I am so sorry," he said through the door, his voice so muffled she could barely understand him. "I have to keep you safe. It's the only way."

  "The only way to what? Darius!" Loretta pounded her fist on the wall. "You can't lock me up down here! What's the matter with you!"

  "I can't risk letting you fall into Sharpe's hands. Not now. Not ever. I can't make you leave, and I don't trust anyone else to protect you anyway. In here, you can survive anything up to a nuclear blast. The door will open automatically in 24 hours if I don't open it first, and you'll be fine until then."

  "Darius!" she screamed, and beat her fists against the wall. There was no answer.

  Chapter Sixteen: Darius

  Darius pressed his palm against the hidden door and closed his eyes. On the other side, he could faintly hear a furious Loretta shouting his name. Her distress and anger cut his heart. But he'd rather have her hate him than see her hurt.

  She'll be safe down here no matter what.