city of dragons 02 - fire storm (9 page)

But Alastair grabbed my wrist and he seemed to… stop my magic with his. I had never seen anything like it before. My magic just dissipated, floating away. It didn’t hurt Alastair at all.

Then Lachlan surfaced, yanking the gun out of the water.

The shot echoed against the moon.

Alastair let go of me in shock. His upper thigh was bleeding. He clutched it, letting out funny high-pitched noises.

Lachlan climbed out of the pool. He yanked a set of handcuffs out of his back pocket. “I’m placing you under arrest, Mr. Cooper.”

But Alastair used magic to knock the cuffs to the ground. He turned and staggered away from us, diving into the pool. Once submerged, Alastair shifted into dragon form. He had iridescent blue scales. They were beautiful. He was always so beautiful.

He rose out of the water, flapping his wings and spraying us with droplets from the pool.

And then he flew into the air and out of sight.

* * *

“What the hell happened?” Connor was saying.

Lachlan was speaking to him in low tones, and I couldn’t understand what he was saying. The two of them seemed very far away, over by the doorway to the hotel.

I was still sitting by the pool where Alastair had left me. My ears were ringing, and my head felt strange—sort of tingling and tender—the way it always did after one of Alastair’s beatings.

But this one hadn’t been so bad. This one had only been a few punches.

And now he was gone, and now I needed to shift and heal and be good as new, like it had never happened. Go to the water. Wash it away.

But I didn’t want to get in the pool where he’d shifted. It seemed too intimate.

I needed to get up and go to the ocean.

Except I couldn’t move. I was sitting here, and I was shaking, and I couldn’t move.

Connor went back inside the hotel, and Lachlan started toward me.

He knelt down next to me. “Hey there.” His voice was steady and soft. “Would you like me to call this in, or do you think you can make it down to the station to file a report?”

“Call it in?” I gasped. “What?”

“I won’t do that if you don’t want. You don’t have to have police here, waking up your customers, causing a scene. But if you don’t think you can handle going anywhere—”

“Why are we involving the police at all?”

He raised his eyebrows. “What?”

“I just need to shift.” I gestured toward the ocean.

“Penny, he hurt you. He was violent, and you need to report it.”

“The police can’t do anything.”

“It was only a couple months ago that you were saying you wished you’d reported what had happened to Alastair so that there was a record of his violence.”

“That was when I thought he was a serial killer,” I said. “I thought he’d get locked up, and I’d never see him again.”

“Penny,” he said.

“I just need to shift.” I pointed to the water. “Please, Lachlan, don’t make me do this.” I started to cry again.

He sat down on the ground. He was still bleeding. His whole face was cut open from that damned chair.

I touched him, touched the blood.

“I won’t
make
you do anything,” he said in a low voice. A different voice. He sounded defeated and worried, and I had never heard him sound that way before.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I’m sorry he hurt you.”

“I’ll heal this up,” he said. “It won’t even scar.”

“He did it to you because of
me
.”

“No. He did it because of him. He’s responsible for his own actions. You are
not
responsible.”

Right. Right, I knew that. Why did it seem so easy to blame myself? I took a shaking breath, and I let it out. I waited as my sobs ebbed. “Okay,” I said, raising my chin. “Let’s file a damned report.”

* * *

Lachlan did all the talking at the police station. Well, not all the talking. I answered the questions that they asked me, and I reread the statement that they typed up for me, and I signed it, and I participated. But he was calm and collected and professional, as if it was no big deal to be telling people that my ex-husband had showed up and started punching me and using magic to hurt us both.

Lachlan didn’t mention the fact that we’d been kissing when Alastair showed up.

I didn’t either.

Maybe that was important, because maybe that’s what set him off. But I just couldn’t bear the other people knowing so much about me. I already felt like I was laying bare all my most embarrassing secrets, and I needed to keep something for myself.

Because…

There’s always something there, a hint of accusation behind every interaction with a person in which I tell them I was abused. They all say nice things, but their eyes accuse me.
Why did you put up with it for so long?
they say.
Why didn’t you respect yourself enough to leave?

They don’t understand.

And it makes me look weak.

And I don’t like showing weakness. I don’t like that at all.

I didn’t get the impression that this report meant they were going to run out and arrest Alastair or anything. Lachlan said that it was on file, though, and that if there were enough of them, they would provide evidence of Alastair’s violence, which could lead to his being put away for good.

There was a prison inland, one made especially for magical creatures, because its foundation had been seeded with dragon sacrifice by mages. I didn’t approve of dragon sacrifice, of course, but it was the most powerful form of magic, and the only thing that could contain a magical creature.

When we got back to the hotel, I felt soiled and sweaty and tired.

Lachlan started to walk me toward the door, but I stopped him.

“No,” I said. “I need to shift. I need to heal.” And I wanted to be clean too.

“Okay,” he said. “I guess I’ll leave you to that.”

I grabbed him. “Don’t leave me. Just wait. On the beach.”

He swallowed. And then he bobbed his head.

We walked down over the sand. It got in my shoes. It probably got in Lachlan’s too.

He didn’t say anything about it though.

I took mine off.

I flung them into the waves.

And then I let go of him and I ran into the water, diving underneath. I shifted, and my dress ripped and shredded and fell into the water, and I didn’t care. I was never going to wear it again. I wanted it destroyed.

I could have flown away, but I didn’t.

I shifted back.

And then I realized the problem.

I didn’t have any clothes.

Lachlan was tugging off his suit jacket, wading through the water to me.

He would use it to cover me, I suppose.

I let him drape it over my shoulders. But then I looked up at his face. He was right. The cut on his face was already healing. I put my hands on his chest, felt his skin through his sopping wet shirt.

“Penny,” he said, his voice strained. “I don’t know if—”

I cut him off, putting my mouth on his, pressing my naked skin against his wet clothes.

He crushed me against him.

The waves crashed against us.

Suddenly, all I wanted was something to wipe away the feel of Alastair. I had erased the damage he’d done to my body, but I could still remember the horrible way that I had been aroused and repelled at once, my being split, my physical body fighting my brain. With Lachlan now, I felt a surge of arousal again, but it was different—pure, somehow.

Salty and wet like the sea, and tinged with newness and moonlight.

My fingers moved against him, unbuttoning his shirt.

“Penny.” He was out of breath, shaking his head.

I didn’t care. I fumbled lower, working at the clasp of his pants.

He sucked in breath sharply.

And then I found him, and I dragged my palm against the stiff length of him.

He groaned, his lips seeking mine again, his fingers grazing my bare skin, skimming over my rib cage, brushing the undersides of my breasts.

I sighed. I wrapped my hand around his hardness.

“No,” he said in my ear. “Not now. Not after… Not like this.”

I looked into his eyes. “You don’t want me?”

“You can feel that I want you,” he muttered. “But it’s been too long since I had any blood, and your hands… your smell… It’s confusing.”

I shut my eyes. “It’s okay if you want my blood too,” I whispered. I was getting more excited at the idea of that, in fact.

“No.” He was touching my face, his fingers fluttering around my cheeks and chin. “I don’t know if I could stop.”

I swallowed. Then I began to tug at him, my hand between his legs, pumping him there. “Then just this. I want this. I want you inside me. I want—”

“You don’t know what you want.” He was agonized, trying to pry my hand off of his body. “Right after Alastair—”

I let go of him. “You’re disgusted by me. You heard the things he said about me. Now, you—”

“That’s crazy.” He yanked the jacket tight around my body, covering me up. “I am the exact opposite of disgusted by you, Penny.” He tucked himself back into his pants, zipped himself up.

I felt sobs welling up inside me. “Why can’t you do this for me?” I whispered.

“Things are already so complicated when we’re only kissing,” he said. “How can you think having sex would possibly make things better?”

“In this moment, it would,” I said. “I need…” Goddamn him. I threw off his jacket, baring myself. I was intending to simply shift back into dragon form, fly off into the air and disappear into the night sky.

But his gaze took in my nude body, and I was struck by the raw hunger in his expression. Stark need as he greedily ran his gaze over every inch of me.

My breath caught in my throat.

And then he was on me like a wolf, fingers slippery as he pressed my body against his.

He kissed my mouth. My cheek. My jaw. My neck.

Ow. His teeth were—

But then…

We were still together in the water, wrapped in each other, his teeth in my neck, my blood flowing into him, but it felt as if we shot out of the water like a rocket.

We settled in the clouds, stars as far as we could see, and we were part of everything. We were the sky, we were the air, we were the water droplets suspended in the clouds, we were the ocean, we were the sand.

We were tangled up in each other, part of each other.

I could feel him, all the parts of him, including the hard part that I’d been touching earlier, and it was strange to feel it from this side, feel it inside out, feel how his arousal made his body change—made him sweat, made him tense, made him want. But it was also right. I felt that. It was perfect to be connected like this, to be part of each other. I felt a strong sense of belonging, of coming home, as if Lachlan
was
my home.

But within Lachlan, I felt something else, something foreign and red and hungry, something that wasn’t part of us, something alien.

It was his blood lust, and it was expanding, it was coming for me.

It reached out with red claws and sunk them into my skin.

And we crashed back into our bodies, back into the sea, and all I could feel was how hungry the blood lust was, how thirsty, how there was never enough, and how much it wanted to drain me.

Fear spiked through me. I fought to disconnect. I didn’t want to be part of that horrible hunger anymore.

And then I could feel that I was starting to lose too much blood. My body was weakening.

At first, I was flooded with terror and adrenaline. I thrashed in the water, splashing, trying to push at Lachlan.

But he was holding me too tightly.

And then I started to feel sluggish, like I couldn’t move so well, like an icy current was sucking me down, down, down into its depths, and I would be lost there in the blackness. I wanted to feel afraid, but I was so tired, and the blackness was seeping into my brain.

No
.

Something inside me woke up, and it kicked. I reached up to find my talisman, the one I always wore, even with evening dresses, and I wrapped my hands around it.

He had drunk so much of my blood that my magic was fading, but I still had… enough…

Hard to concentrate now.

I was so tired. I just wanted to fall into the black abyss and sleep.

No
.

I funneled the magic out of me, into Lachlan, pushing it directly into his stomach.

He flew backwards into the waves.

I closed my eyes and sunk back into the water too. It was nice here.

“Penny!” Lachlan was yanking me up out of the water.

I squinted at him.

“Shift,” he said to me. “Shift again.”

Oh, that was a good idea. I let the water close over my head again, allowed my dragon form to overtake me.

When I emerged from the water, the sea dripping from my wings and scales, Lachlan was gone.

CHAPTER EIGHT

My cell phone buzzed. I picked it up and looked at the caller. Lachlan. I put the phone back in my pocket.

“Are you ever going to answer that?” said Felicity. “It keeps ringing.”

“Telemarketer,” I said. “Let’s try it again from the beginning.”

Felicity sighed.

The both of us were in the living room of my apartment. We were in t-shirts and yoga pants, and we were sweating, but we weren’t doing exercise. I was trying to teach Felicity how to use magic.

Felicity backed up toward the door. “I don’t think this is working.”

I pointed to one of the objects I had on the coffee table, a hairbrush. It lifted several feet off the table and hovered in the air. “I think you’re just not properly motivated.”

She raised her eyebrows. “What does that mean?”

“Well, I’ve been stopping these things before they could actually hit your body, because I don’t want to hurt you. But this time, I’m not going to stop it. I’m going to throw this brush at you, and you’re going to stop it, because you’re going to be terrified, and it’ll just kick in, like instinct.”