Crouching Tigress Horny Dragon (Fire Mates #3) (12 page)

Drove him across the room.

They hit the sofa, both staggering and tumbling over their feet.

By the time she’d recovered her balance, Ryan was staring her down.

“I can’t let you kill my father, Ryan!” she said, even as her heart and body cried out. In confusion. In grief. In pain.

In rage.

“That’s my girl,” Julian chuckled.

Ryan’s eyes transformed. No longer human. A shudder racked his body. His muscles bunched.

“Ryan!” she screamed, stare fixed on him.

He swung his face her way, hands hooked into claws at his side.

“What are you
doing
, Deanne?” he asked. Confusion and betrayed hurt boiled through him. She didn’t hear his thoughts, but she didn’t need to. She could see it in his face. Hear it in his voice. “What have you done?”

“I’m…” She didn’t finish. She didn’t know how.

Instead, she struck out of him, hitting him with her own invisible wall of heat.

Hitting him hard.

She still had no idea how, but then, why would she? Until less than an hour ago, she had no true concept of what she was.

“Deanne!” her father roared. “Stop. I can’t kill it if you’re in the—”

She ignored him. He had, after all, taught her how to ignore pain. How to deny its existence.

Focus locked on Ryan, she blasted out another inferno of invisible force.

It struck him, sending him backward.

Flinging him through the air.

Into the room’s huge window.

Through it.

The room filled with the crash of shattering glass. With the furious shout of her father.

With the inhuman screech of a dragon.

Deanne had a moment—a split second—to see Ryan’s human body hurtling like a ragdoll through the dawn sky beyond the broken window, and then he shifted into his dragon form.

His massive wings beat the air. His green eyes held hers as he hovered outside the building, the early morning sun reflecting off his red scales in a golden-copper sheen.

My Fire Mate…

His voice, his stunned confusion, flayed at her mind.

Chest tight, she reached behind her shoulder and tore the crossbow bolt from her back.

Her brain recognized the pain, but she didn’t acknowledge it. Instead, she ran across the room, snatched up her father’s crossbow, cocked the bolt so recently buried in her body and then turned back to the gaping hole in the wall.

Leveled the loaded crossbow toward Ryan.

Aimed it at him.

Go
, she ordered without a word, staring at him down the barrel of the ancient weapon.
Now.

The dragon outside screeched. Once.

And then, with a single thrust of his wings, he was gone from her sight.

Grief and agony splintered Deanne’s heart. A numb emptiness rolled over her.

“Why didn’t you fire?” Julian demanded from behind her.

Deanne pivoted on her heel and drew the crossbow level with her father’s heart.

He stopped walking toward her, eyes narrowing. Something she’d never seen before flickered in their dark depths.

Fear.

“What are you doing, Daughter?”

She pulled a slow breath and curled her finger around the bow’s trigger. “Waiting for answers, Julian. And so help me, I will pull this trigger if I don’t get them right now.”

Julian didn’t move.

Not even when someone pounded on the door to Ryan’s room. “
What’s going on in there?
” a male voice shouted, each word accompanied by more pounding. “
Open this door now!
”

Deanne regarded her father.

Father? Really?

“Am I a dragon shifter?” she asked, holding his stare.

His jaw bunched.

Whoever was outside the door hammered his fist on it again. “
This is hotel security
,” he yelled, presumably because he figured that would get the door opened. Deanne wanted to tell him it made no difference to what was happening inside. “
Open the door!
”

Julian narrowed his eyes. “Yes.”

The single-word confirmation punched at Deanne. Her breath caught in her throat. Her stomach churned.

“And you’ve never thought to tell me?” Her voice was little more than a scratch. “Are
you
a dragon shifter?”

Disgust etched Julian’s face at the last question. His lip curled. “Of course not.”

She frowned. “Are you really my father?”

“Yes.”

“So, my mother…” Her voice cracked on the word. “So my mother was a dragon shifter?”

He nodded. A single dip of his head, his gaze never leaving hers.

Deanne’s stomach churned again. A crushing vise seemed to be wrapping her chest. Hot dust coated her mouth and throat. “What happened to her?”

More pounding on the door. Followed by muffled words Deanne could still understand:
Get the manager. And call the cops.

She ground her teeth, watching her father study her.

“What happened to her?” she demanded, still pointing his crossbow at him. “Tell me.”

From beyond the shattered window, the sound of approaching sirens wailed on the cold morning air.

“Open this door!” the person in the hallway demanded again.

Deanne flicked the door a quick glance. They were running out of time.
She
was running out of time.

“We should go,” Julian said.

She fixed her focus on him again, aware he’d shortened the distance between them when she’d looked away.

Closer. He was closer. Close enough he could make a move for his crossbow.

“
Tell me
,” she ground out.

A muscle in his cheek twitched. “I’d been tracking the dragon for months,” he said, the faintest hint of contempt creeping into his voice. Still, his eyes revealed nothing about what he was feeling. “I finally found it in Moscow. It was in its human form—a female. The second I saw it, I was consumed with a sexual depravity, a sick lust to have sex with it I could not refuse. I
had
to copulate with it. I had to. No matter how vile and perverted and wrong it was, I had to
fuck
it. There was nothing I could do to fight the desire. It was like my mind and body were being raped by a perverse sexual want.”

Deanne drew in a sharp breath. The mating fire. He was describing the mating fire. Her father had experienced the mating fire with her mother.

Her mother…a dragon.

“What did you do?” she asked.

His lip curled again. “I surrendered to the depravity. I fucked it, against the back wall of a church, with the tip of my blade pressed to its throat and the moon the only witness to our depravity. For an unfathomable number of hours. I had no choice but to fuck it. To let it touch me, suck me…” He shuddered, disgust twisting his face. “I couldn’t stop myself, no matter how repulsed I was.”

Sickened shock curdled in Deanne’s stomach. She swallowed.

“Where is she now?” she whispered. Her eyes stung with unshed tears. Her pulse thumped in her ears. “Why…why don’t I know anything about her? Why don’t I remember her?”

Her mother. He was talking about
her mother
.

“I fucked it over and over for the entire night.” The statement left him on a venomous sneer. “Every time I tried to kill it, to get away, the sexual hunger controlling me came back tenfold. I am well aware of the irony of a dragon killer being mated by some kind of aberrant magical destiny to a dragon. I am as disgusted by it now as I was then. Finally, after I don’t know how many times I sank my flesh into it, the compulsion faded.”

“And you what?” Deanne frowned. “Just left?”

“I tried to kill it first,” Julian answered. “It defeated me. Used the same invisible wall of heat to slam me against the church that the dragon you’ve been fucking used on me just now. When I regained consciousness, it was gone. A year later…it was not so lucky.”

A cold finger trailed up Deanne’s spine. “What do you mean?”

Noise outside the door told her whoever was pounding on it had been joined by someone else. No,
three
someone elses. Four sets of feet shuffled on the carpet. She could hear them, as if they were in the room with her. Beyond the broken window, the sirens screeched louder, close enough to drown out any other noises from outside.

Julian smiled slowly. “A year after, I picked up its tracks in Stalingrad. When I found it, it was feeding a baby.”

A baby.

Deanne’s heart slammed up into her throat. She knew what Julian was going to say. She
knew
…

And yet, still she asked: “What did you do?”

He smiled. The smug smile of a man filled with triumph. “I
killed
it. I killed
her
. Sank my blade into her ear as she was breastfeeding you.”

Deanne stared at him. Her body burned, as if something deep inside her fought to be free.

Dragon? The dragon you are?

Or your hate? And fear? And anger?

“And then,” he said, his voice low, “knowing you would be the most perfect dragon hunter if trained correctly, I took you from her dying arms and—”

Deanne squeezed the trigger of his crossbow.

The bolt buried into his cheek the second the door lock clicked open.

Deanne sprinted across the room just as the door swung open to reveal four men.

They scurried out of her way—three guys the size of office blocks, and an older man shorter than she was—eyes wide and confused. She didn’t hit them, didn’t touch them.

Didn’t even threaten them with the empty weapon in her hand.

She just ran. Through the now open door, the only sound in her head the echoing solid thwack of the crossbow releasing, and the wet thud of the bolt sinking into her father’s cheek.

Over and over. Those two sounds. Over and over.

She fled, down the corridor, down the stairs.

She was chased. She knew that. Felt the footfalls vibrate through the floor behind her.

She didn’t care. They wouldn’t catch her. She was fast. Very fast. Now she knew why.

Dragon. She was a dragon shifter. Her mother was a dragon shifter. A creature of magic and power and—

…I killed her. Sank my blade into her ear as she…

Her father’s declaration replaced the sound in her head of the crossbow bolt entering his flesh.

A wall of heat rushed through her and, before she could stop herself, she screamed.

The footfalls behind her stopped.

“What the fuck was that?” one of her pursuers gasped.

She didn’t slow down to tell them. They wouldn’t believe the answer.

The cold air biting into her face, bare legs, and arms told her she was outside. She didn’t remember fleeing through the foyer. Nor did she recall seeing the cops belonging to the squad cars parked at angles outside the hotel.

“Hey!” a startled woman’s voice called to her left. “Oh my
God
, are you okay?”

Deanne jerked around. “I’m fine,” she all but burst out, staggering to a halt. She felt…weird. Hot. Sick. Detached and yet at the same time engulfed.

I killed her…I took you from her dying arms…

A wave of concentrated fury crashed over her, directed at the man who’d raised her.

Her skin rippled. A million pinpricks of heat razed her flesh. Her bones burned.

The woman on the sidewalk with her stumbled backward, mouth gaping, eyes filling with horror. “Wh-what…”

Throwing aside Julian’s crossbow, Deanne ran.

Fast. Faster than she’d ever run before.

The street blurred, the air lashed at her face. Her bare feet struck the sidewalk over and over with painless speed. Sound became a steady roar in her ears. The prickling sensation subsided. The fire in her bones faded.

She ran, not knowing to where.

Somewhere. Anywhere. Away from here.

Ryan…

His name floated through her head as an invisible tug pulled at her existence. The same drawing sensation she’d experienced before.

She ignored it. Gritted her teeth and ran.

She was in the park where she and Ryan had first joined before she realized it, running through its stretching shadows, seeking…seeking…

Connection. A connection with Ryan, no matter how tenuous and distant.

She staggered to a halt in the middle of the grassy clearing, her heart wild.

The sound of feet crunching on gravel spun her around, teeth bared, fists raised.

A jogger ran along the path circling the clearing, his expression disconcerted as he kept shooting her quick glances.

She gushed out a breath and slumped her shoulders.
What did she look like? Were her eyes human? Was she?

The terrifying thought made her jerk her stare down to her hands.

Human. Flesh colored.

The hands of the Deanne Roe she’d been for the last twenty-six years of her life.

Is that really how old you are? Dragon shifters age differently. You know that. Are you really only twenty-six? You’ve never had a birthday party, and Julian never drew attention to your birthday. You
assume
you’re that age, but what if you’re older?

Her stomach rolled at the thought. God, she knew so little about herself. Was Deanne even her real name? If she were part human, part dragon, would she ever fly? Could she even transform into a dragon? Ryan believed she could. Could he sense that in her? In the same way he sensed she was a dragon shifter? What would her children—

She killed the last thought. Shut it down.

And then, not knowing what else to do, she sank to her knees on the damp, cold grass.

Deep within her core, the urgent pull flared. Grew hotter. More insistent.

She squeezed her eyes shut and curled her upper body over her thighs, denying the sensation.

Refusing it.

The early morning sun bathed her bent back—covered only by Ryan’s shirt—in gentle warmth. It soothed her. Calmed her. Or maybe it was Ryan’s scent filling every breath she took?

She stayed motionless, allowing her mind to dance over the events of the last few hours without contemplation. Images of her father melded into images of all the dragons she’d hunted and killed in her lifetime. So many. So many of her own kind…

A shearing pain filled her heart. She saw Julian before her in Ryan’s hotel. Saw the crossbow bolt pierce his cheek…