Me and My Shadow (9 page)

It was oddly quiet, as well, no sounds of civilization managing to penetrate the thick cotton-wool fog that wrapped around us. Only the occasional whine of a mosquito broke the pat-pat-pat of dripping water.

One of the little bugs landed on the back of Cyrene's exposed neck. I shuffled forward through earthy-smelling leaf residue, and slapped the back of her neck.

She spun around, her mouth opened in surprise.

“Mosquito,” I explained.

Her eyes narrowed. “Oh, you'd like me to think that, wouldn't you? But I know the truth—you're just peeved because Kostya is angry with you because you insist on bringing Magoth, and you're taking it out on me.”

I gave her a little shove forward when Magoth, clad in expensive hiking garb that I suspected owed its orgins to my credit card, disappeared behind a clump of scrubby fir trees. “I don't give a hoot if Kostya is angry. And if you don't want to end up lost in the wilds of rustic Latvia, I'd advise you to get moving.”

Cyrene
hrmph
ed and started forward. “I just wanted to point out that if Kostya is in a grumpy mood, you have no one but yourself to blame. He's very unhappy about having you and Gabriel out here, but when you said Magoth had to come, too, I thought he'd never calm down.”

“Magoth being here wasn't my choice,” I pointed out, smacking at a mosquito that landed on my arm. “He invited himself, as you know, and since I have no way of making him do what I want him to do, we figured it would be easier to just bring him along where we could keep an eye on him, rather than have him follow us and get up to who knew what sort of trouble.”

“
Hrmph.
Kostya doesn't like Magoth.”

I took a deep breath and held it for a moment, then said only, “I'd be surprised if Kostya liked
anything
.”

“He does, too, like things! He likes lots of things,” Cyrene said, deliberately releasing a tree frond early.

I glared at her again before saying, “Such as?”

She marched on for a moment in silence while she tried to find something that would satisfy me. “Well, I can't think of anything at the moment, but there are any number of things. Oh . . . oral sex! He likes oral sex a lot!”

Jim, who had been off sniffing what it said was an imp trail, shambled up behind me, catching the last bit of the conversation. “There's not a male alive who doesn't,” it said, spitting out a tiny little boot. “If I couldn't lick my own package—”

“Enough!” I said hastily, not wanting to hear more.

Jim cast me a hurt look. “I was just going to say I would have picked a human form if I couldn't. Sheesh. Some people have dirty, dirty minds.”

“A dirty mind is the sign of a healthy libido, say I,” Magoth said, popping up from behind a large cluster of rocks. “What are you ladies doing back here? Are you engaging in wild lesbian urges? We could have a quick threesome if you like.”

He waggled his eyebrows at Cyrene, who just rolled her eyes and pushed past him.

“You could have a Magoth sandwich! One of you could start at the top, while the other started at the bottom, and you could meet in my center,” he suggested.

Something inside me stirred.

“That's not even funny,” Cyrene told him.

“It is a bit self-centered having both of you pleasur ing me, I admit. How about this—you and your twin can make love, and I will watch and give pointers?”

The hairs on the back of my neck stood on end.

Cyrene spun around to give him a tight look. “I told you before—I'm Kostya's mate.”

“I suppose he could join us, too, although it's not so much fun with two males,” Magoth said thoughtfully. “Mind you, there are ways. I haven't indulged in an all-out orgy in, oh, at least a week. No, ten days. But if you have your heart set on it, I suppose I could oblige.”

I gritted my teeth and scooted past Magoth, giving him a wide berth. “You are not a dragon's mate, Cy.”

Magoth turned to leer at me as I passed. I realized at that moment that the dragon shard was responding not only to Magoth but to the location. It liked it here; it liked the primal feeling of the area, the earthy sense of power that seemed to flow around us in intangible streams between ground and living things and air. My feet stopped as the shard zapped me with a sudden, overwhelming wave of emotion.

“Get Gabriel,” I gasped to Cyrene, wrapping my arms around myself as I struggled to control the power of the dragon within me.

“What?”

“Oh, man. That's not good,” Jim said, studying me. “You're going to do the nasty with Magoth, aren't you? Right out here in the open where Gabriel can see? Wait! Let me get out my cell phone. Ash is going to want pictures of this. . . .”

Magoth looked startled for a moment, then slipped into his normal suave, seductive persona. “I knew the day would come when you gave in and—”

“Shut up,” I snarled, doubling over as I fought the transformation. “Cy, for the love of all that's aquatic, get Gabriel!”

“What is wrong with you?” she demanded to know, marching over to me. Doubled up as I was, all I could see was her feet. “Is this an attempt at garnering some sympathy? Because if it is—”

Silver shimmered up my arms and legs, my back arching as my body lengthened and stretched into a shape that was not normal for a doppelganger.

Cyrene took two steps backwards, her hand to her mouth in surprise. “I'll get Gabriel,” she said, still backing up.

I snarled something unintelligible at her as I spun around to face Magoth.

He watched me with pursed lips and a thoughtful expression. “You prefer to do it in dragon form, eh? I can't say that I've indulged in that before, dragons being strangely averse to visiting Abaddon, but if you insist on it, I'm sure we can make it work.”

“Oh man, oh man, oh man,” Jim said, trying to hold a cell phone in its mouth and use one of its paws to take a picture of me. “This is great. I'm going to make millions off of this video.”

I flicked my tail at it, sending the cell phone arcing through the air into the dense undergrowth.

Jim's lips formed an O of astonishment. “That was Aisling's phone!”

I narrowed my eyes at the demon and breathed fire. “Do you want to follow it?”

“Hurry with Gabriel!” Jim bellowed after Cyrene, keeping its eyes fixed firmly on me. “May's gone feral!”

Feral.
The word resonated within me as I stretched, relishing the power to be had in this form. I was feral. I was dragon, and this place was mine.

Magoth shimmied forward toward me, his clothes dripping off him with each step until he stood before me stark naked. He put one hand on his hip and gave me a knowing look. “Shall we begin?”

I smiled, and sent a plume of fire onto his penis, which was waving jauntily at me.

Magoth's jaw dropped for a moment.Then he grabbed my head with both hands and planted his mouth on mine.

“May!” Gabriel's voice sounded distant and faint, as if he were at a great distance, not just a few hundred yards ahead.

“I don't suppose you have a digital camera in your bag? I'll just check, OK?” Jim said.

I let Magoth kiss me for a moment, the dragon shard analyzing the sensation. The differences in the shapes of our mouths made him less effective than I knew he was with a human, but it wasn't that that ended up causing me to reject his advances.

It was the place. It was the land around us that called to me, not Magoth. I pushed him away just as Gabriel burst from a dense clump of ash trees, Savian hot on his heels. Kostya and Cyrene pulled up behind them, all four watching with startled expressions as my tail whipped out, catching Magoth in the midsection, flinging him a good thirty yards backwards until he smacked into a large tree.

“Wow, nice one. That's gotta be at least a bronze medal for demon lord flinging,” Jim said, watching with interest as Magoth fell out of the tree to the ground.

“Thanks, but no, thanks,” I yelled to Magoth before turning my attention on Gabriel. The dragon shard hummed happily inside me at the sight of him, and I thought seriously for a moment of pouncing on him. I knew he would like that—it was a dragon mating game, and something told me that he would respond to it.

“Yes, I would, but that's not what
you
want,” he said, reading my mind again.

I made a little pouty dragon face.

“My darling!” Magoth staggered into view, still naked, but now covered with dirt and lichen, with bits of tree clinging to his hair. “My sweet, powerful May! Your idea of foreplay is most pleasing to me. Do it again?”

I flicked my tail again, and he went flying, squealing with delight that was stopped only by the sound of his body smashing into yet another tree. He cooed gently to himself as he slid down the trunk.

“Silver medal. I think you should go for the gold,” Jim said.

“May, why have you shifted?” Gabriel asked, stroking his hand down the elongated curve of my neck.

I shivered at his touch and leaned my head into his chest, bathing him in a light sheen of fire. “I don't know. Chase me?”

“What is going on?” Kostya asked, pushing between Savian and Gabriel to look at me.

I licked Gabriel's neck.

“Oh, that's what's going on. Er . . .” Kostya glanced at Gabriel.

“No, this is not normal. May does not embrace the dragon within,” he answered the unasked question. “May?”

“I just felt like it,” I said, twining my tail around his leg. “It's this place. It feels right here, like I've come home after a long, long journey. It feels like a place we should play.”

“Play?” Gabriel looked around us.

“What does she mean, play?” Cyrene asked, frowning at me. “May, honestly! Should you be sucking his ear like that in front of Magoth?”

“I'm fine! Don't worry about me!” Magoth called from the distance. The only part of him visible was one hand waving out of a dense bank of ferns. “I think I'm in love.”

“Dragons use play as part of their mating,” Kostya explained as he, too, started examining the area around us.

“Really?” Cyrene transferred her frown to him. “You never play with me when we make love.”

“That's different. You're human.”

“I am not! I'm a naiad!”

“You look human,” he pointed out.

“Well, so does May. Most of the time.”

Magoth tottered toward us, dirt speckling the front of him, twigs now added to the leaves and lichen and moss that clung to his head, a small leafy shrub evidently stuck to his foot. His hands waved in the air as he approached. “Once more, my sweet—”

The whipcrack of my tail as it hit him was followed almost immediately by the sound of Jim whistling. “That's got to be an Olympic record right there. Nice going, May. I think you knocked him out.”

Magoth's unresponsive body tumbled from the tree to the ground, hitting with a muffled thud.

“I'll go rescue lover boy, shall I?” Savian said, giving me a long look as he headed off to where Magoth had fallen into a thick patch of what looked to be poison ivy.

“Mayling, tell me what you feel,” Gabriel said, his hand on my neck again.

I looked deep into his eyes and let my emotions show.

“No, not that.” His dimples threatened to burst to life. “I know that. What do you feel about this place?”

I sighed and tried to clear my mind of the lustful images of me twined around Gabriel in an erotic dragon dance. “It's . . . right. It's a good place. I feel happy here.”

“Do
you
feel happy, or does the dragon shard?” he asked.

I tried to sort through the emotions that swamped me, picking out those sensations that were native to me. “It's the shard. It likes it here.”

Gabriel and Kostya exchanged glances; then both turned to look at a rocky outcropping that was about ten yards away. The rocks jutted out of the earth like angular, flinty fingers, softened over the centuries by moss and plants and the detritus of the forest around them.

“The lair?” Gabriel asked Kostya.

He nodded. “Has to be.”

“What do you mean, the lair? We found the lair already,” Cyrene said. “Or we found where it should be. It's over there.” She pointed to the south.

“It's a false entrance,” Kostya explained.

“Set up to fool anyone who was searching for it,” Gabriel added, nodding to himself. “Very clever. I would have done the same, although I'm not sure I would have gone to the trouble of rune binds.”

“You have to admit it was convincing,” Kostya said as both men strolled toward the rocks.

Savian emerged, dragging a limp Magoth. He deposited him in a heap, looking over at Gabriel and Kostya as the two men climbed over the outcropping, clearly searching it. “What did I miss?”

I hummed to myself and tapped my claws on the ground, visions of Gabriel chasing me through the woods keeping the dragon shard occupied. “They think this is the entrance to Baltic's lair.”

“You're kidding. This?” Savian looked around, his eyes carefully searching the outcropping of rock. He shook his head. “I don't see it. Where?”

“I'd show you, but I'm currently occupied,” I said.

He pursed his lips as he glanced back at me.

“I'm keeping the dragon shard distracted while I try to shift back,” I answered the question in his eyes. “If I get near Gabriel, it will demand I jump him, so I'm letting it have all sorts of fantasies about being chased through the woods. Ooh. That one was really good.”