Chapter 9

Quinn

Isat on the front section of the deck where there wasn’t any railing, dipping my bare feet into the water and letting the cool sensation spread up my legs. I figured that little bit of contact with the dingy liquid was safe enough. Even with the sky overcast today, the humidity stuck to my skin both inside and outside the cabin. I hadn’t realized how much I depended on air conditioning until I had to go without it.

My sketchbook lay on the weather-worn boards beside me. I’d tried to distract myself by working on my projects—both the latest one for class and my own assortment—but there wasn’t much else I could do with them with just pencil and paper. And the knowledge of that I couldn’t take them further without my computer prompted niggling worries I couldn’t ignore.

Both the sense of the hours creeping by as another day slipped past me and thoughts of the new excuses I was going to have to make soon tugged at my mind. Not to mention the uncertainties about what exactly was happening to me.

A flutter passed through my chest—the same eerie sensation as the earlier ripple, only expanded all the way to my ribs. My pulse kept beating on in the same steady rhythm, so I didn’t panic about the feeling meaning my borrowed heart was on the fritz. But I didn’t know what it did mean. Where that feeling had come from. Why it was bringing literal monsters to my doorstep.

I still didn’t think I’d gotten the full story even out of the monsters who’d saved me. It wasn’t like I could force them to spill their guts to me, though.

I tapped the soles of my feet against the murky water, leaning back on my hands. A flash of emerald green was my only warning of an impending attack.

A sinewy, scaled body whipped past mine with just enough force to send me toppling over on the deck. I nearly crashed right into the water—would have if I hadn’t managed to hook my fingers into a narrow gap between the boards. My legs splashed in up to my knees.

I rolled onto my stomach and heaved myself all the way out. When I looked up, I found Lance back in human form, perched on the deck a few feet away. He smirked at me. “Gotta work on those reflexes.”

“You don’t play fair,” I informed him. He didn’t even offer me a hand as I pushed myself upright. Jerk.

A stunningly gorgeous jerk, but still.

“Where’s the fun in fair?” he asked. “You want to be prepared to fight monsters, you’ve got to expect monstrousness.” He winked at me and flipped over in one of his acrobatic moves to land on all fours, his dragon form re-expanding his body at the same time.

I guessed I couldn’t argue with that point. And maybe I shouldn’t have called him a jerk, even in the privacy of my head, because he wasn’t really. He was exactly what he’d said, what I’d already known he was—a monster.

But I was starting to figure out that “monster” didn’t necessarily mean maliciously evil, only inhuman. He wasn’t operating under the same set of rules I took for granted.

None of them were. That was part of the reason I worried, wasn’t it? They might not be evil, but brutal violence did seem to be their go-to solution. They didn’t have families, so how could they understand my responsibilities to my own? I had no idea how their minds worked at all… or what they might have been keeping to themselves in those minds that I’d actually have wanted to know.

Water puddled around my feet. At least I was a little more cooled off now.

Lance’s sleek dragon head weaved back and forth through the air as if taunting me, his violet eyes glinting with mischief. I shoved the sweat-damp waves of my hair back from my face and raised my hands in a defensive posture.

“We’ll see who ends up in the swamp next,” I said. The taunt gave me a little burst of invigoration, even though I didn’t have much doubt that I’d be the one receiving most—if not all—of the soakings here if I gave him the chance.

I started to warn him not to try but clamped my jaw against the words. I wanted to go back out into the world where ferocious shadowy creatures were waiting to attack me. These three men might not always be around to protect me—and even if they were, they couldn’t take on an entire horde alone. How could I be strong enough to defend myself if I was too busy worrying about swamp microbes?

Lance’s lithe tongue darted over his fangs. Looking at his reptilian face, I couldn’t help reflecting on how weird it was to be sparring—both verbally and physically—with a being I wouldn’t have believed even existed two days ago. My breath still caught a little when I took in his otherworldly form, but it was as much with awe as anything like fear.

Dragons were real. And they could be gorgeous in their own mythical way too.

Of course, I didn’t have much time to reflect or admire anyway, because a second later the dragon was lunging at me.

He leapt forward but twisted at the last second, snapping to the side. I’d gotten used to Lance’s hasty changes of direction, though. I leapt right over his body, managing not to scrape my feet on the spikes that lined his back, and landed with only a slight bump of my knees on the deck’s boards. As he whipped around toward me, I jabbed out backward and managed to clock him in the muzzle with my heel.

Lance let out a snort that sounded like a chuckle, his head swinging to the side and the rest of him rushing onward as if he hadn’t taken a blow at all. He bounded sideways and flicked his tail into my calves just as I was scrambling up. I fell forward, barely catching myself on the edge of the deck, one hand splashing into the water.

He aimed another whack at my ass that would have propelled the rest of me into the swamp, but I threw myself to the side in a roll that brought me closer to the cabin. My heart was pounding, but the adrenaline racing through me felt good. I was hardly winning this skirmish, but I was at least holding my own. He wasn’t dropping me in an instant.

Of course, he might be going easy on me. I did complain last time that he didn’t give me enough of a chance.

Lance ricocheted off the wall and lunged at me, and I kicked him in the jaw. He snorted again and slammed the rest of his body down on me.

I didn’t have anywhere to go other than back into the swamp—but I wouldn’t always be able to run away anyway. Instead of trying to dodge, I jerked around to meet his pounce head-on, smacking the side of my hand into one of his eyes.

Honestly, I expected him to snap out of the way at the last second. I put more force into the blow than I would have if I’d actually believed it was going to land. But my kick must have thrown the dragon shifter off just a bit, and all he managed to do was blink before my hand rammed against his eyelid.

The grunt he made then had an obvious twinge of pain to it. I froze with him looming over me and winced on his behalf. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to hit you that hard. Are you okay?”

Lance the dragon reared back, transforming into Lance the not-quite human as he did. He touched his right eye, the lid there a little ruddy from the impact but otherwise undamaged, and raised a quizzical eyebrow at me where I was sprawled on the deck by his feet. “The whole point was hitting me hard, wasn’t it?”

“Well, I mean…” I groped for the words to explain what I’d thought would be self-explanatory. “Not really. I want to practice the right moves for hitting the bad guys hard if they come at me, but I don’t want to hurt you. You’re helping me.”

His slight frown looked as puzzled as the arched eyebrow. “It bothers you.”

Was it so hard for him to understand that? The men who’d rescued me had seemed to agree that it’d be bad if I got hurt.

“Yeah,” I said. “I wouldn’t want to hurt anyone unless I had to so they wouldn’t hurt me. And you and I are… friends, or something like that, so I especially wouldn’t want to hurt you.”

Did shadowkind have a concept of friendship? It’d seemed as if the three of them were pretty companionable, but I hadn’t actually seen a whole lot of them interacting. I had no idea whether they hung out or ignored each other when they slipped into the shadows, or why they’d come together in the first place.

Before I could ask about that, Lance gave a swift nod. “Other humans don’t care—about hurting when they don’t have to. I like your philosophy.”

A sudden lump filled my throat. Other humans—had someone harmed him in the past? Was that why he’d been surprised that I’d mind? It was hard to imagine any mortal creature doing much damage to this guy, but his reaction said more than any words could have.

Whatever Lance had experienced didn’t seem to have affected him all that deeply, though, because an instant later he was grinning again. “I barely felt it—your hit. It’s good that you landed it. You’re getting quicker and smarter, just like you should be.”

His gaze traveled over me where I was still sitting on the deck before him, and my body tingled with awareness of how my tee and shorts clung to my curves with the perspiration I’d worked up. Heat washed over my skin in the wake of his attention.

“Then the training is working,” I said, yanking my mind back to more important matters.

Lance clucked his tongue. “It is. But if you want to stop because it’s getting too intense for you, we shouldn’t strain your mortal sensibilities.”

I glowered at him. “I’m just fine. Sorry for worrying about you. I’m not going to surrender just to spare you a few minor smacks.”

His grin turned into a smirk. “Glad to hear it.” Then he was springing into dragon form without a moment’s warning.

A yelp jolted from my throat, but my limbs reacted on instinct. I heaved myself to the side and hurtled to my feet in one motion, dodging his leap.

I managed to land one glancing blow against his scaly side before he whirled around on me. It was impossible to get a good stomp on his feet when they whipped across the ground so fast I could barely see them. I’d only managed to hit his eye by embracing his pounce, which didn’t seem like an ideal strategy in anything except desperate circumstances.

Where else might a monster like him be vulnerable?

I darted around the side of the cabin to where the deck railing would give me more options for maneuvering. With a playful gnash of his teeth, Lance had me vaulting off the boards and over him. His tail slapped at my ankles. I spun around, eyeing its glinting length.

Maybe that part of him would be sensitive too? If I could find a way to stomp on his tail without jabbing my feet on any of the spikes that jutted across it too.

I tried to test out my suspicion while swerving and ducking to escape the swipes of Lance’s snout and feet—always carefully angled, I noticed, so that his fangs and claws didn’t split me open. He’d avoided aiming any blows at my chest, too, like I’d asked him before. I’d have been in a lot more trouble if he’d really been fighting me.

Every time I leapt at his tail, it lashed away from me again… or toward me, forcing me to scramble to avoid those spikes. Hopefully most other shadowkind that came at me wouldn’t be quite this quick or canny.

Lance bounded off the railing and bumped his shoulder against mine, forcing me backward. I dashed farther back when he spun around into a full-out charge—and realized at the last second that was exactly what he’d wanted. He swiveled around me so quickly it dizzied me and then bumped my legs to send me careening into the outdoor shower stall.

He dove after me just as my elbow bumped the control, sending warmed tap water spurting down over both of us. Lance’s smooth body pushed me up against the back of the stall, and then he was in his human form again, pinning my wrists to the damp boards and smiling his crooked smile.

“Do you surrender now?”

His violet eyes gazed into mine from just inches away, glinting slyly. His ferally gorgeous face filled my entire frame of sight. His muscular chest had come to rest against mine, warmer than sticky humidity of the day or the water that’d sprayed us. A sharper heat sparked between my legs.

I couldn’t have shoved him off me if I’d wanted to… but I wasn’t sure I did want to.

Why the hell was I resisting these impulses? Wasn’t my main philosophy that I should run at everything that called to me? No delaying, nothing left untried or untasted—no regrets. He’d made his own interest clear. Since when did I back down from the unknown simply because it was unknown?

With a surge of giddy resolve, I leaned in and pressed my mouth against Lance’s.

For a second, I thought I’d made a horrible mistake. He’d been so flirty in his teasing I’d assumed he’d leap at my blatant invitation, but who knew what was flirting to a shadowkind anyway? His breath stuttered over his lips against mine in what felt like shock, his body going still.

Then he kissed me back. The flicker of my relief turned into a renewed rush of heat with the melding of his mouth against mine.

He kissed me as if he were putting his whole body into it, as if every part of his being was concentrated on the meeting of our lips. As if he was absorbing every tremor of my breath, the little gasp that escaped me, the minute movements of my mouth.

I’d kissed a fair number of guys over the years, but I’d never been kissed like this. Every inch of me caught fire. I couldn’t think of anything except kissing him more.

Lance released one of my wrists to wrap his arm around my waist, tugging me tighter against him. My free hand shot to his hair of its own accord, my fingers tangling in the glossy curls. When his mouth left mine, a moan of protest tumbled out of me that would’ve been embarrassing if the heat of the moment hadn’t burned away all my capacity for shame.

He trailed his lips along my jaw and down the side of my neck, tasting my skin with flicks of his tongue that enflamed me even more than before. Then he murmured against the crook of my shoulder, “This is good.” He drew back enough to catch my gaze again, his eyes outright smoldering now. “Very good. Why not have fun while we can?”

My body was screaming out in agreement, but something about his phrasing made my gut twist.

While we can.

As if there was some endpoint to this entire situation that he already had in his sights, something that would mean we definitely couldn’t anymore.

The hint of finality jarred against my impression that none of the men protecting me knew how long this would go on or how much protection I’d continue to need. I’d just opened my mouth, torn between crushing it against his again and asking what he’d meant, when footsteps thumped onto the deck from around the side of the house.

“Dinner!” Crag announced in his typically gruff way.

Lance’s tongue darted over his lips. He sprang toward the door with his breathtaking nimbleness.

“More fun later,” he promised, beaming at me. But all at once I couldn’t help wondering what else that promise included that he might not be telling me.

If ads affect your reading experience, click here to remove ads on this page.