Chapter 13
Quinn
When I woke up the next morning, at first I just stared at the paneled ceiling, my muscles tensing in anticipation. The fluttery-flapping sensation in my chest had jolted me out of sleep twice during the night. I wasn’t sure it wouldn’t hit me again.
After a minute or two, something wavered between my ribs, but it wasn’t as emphatic as the most recent feelings. Like the bird that’d somehow gotten trapped in there was settling down and simply giving its wings a gentle stretch. I swallowed thickly, counting the beats of my heart until my breaths evened out.
My phone alarm went off, and I grabbed my refilled water bottle and my pill container. The rows of mostly empty segments unnerved me. I’d need to talk to the men about that.
I needed to talk to them about a lot of things. The growing urgency of the sensation in my chest made it all the more obvious that this “special” quality I was harboring wasn’t going to just fade away.
Maybe we’d been coming at this problem from the wrong angle. Maybe we shouldn’t be trying to figure out how to guard me against the monsters coming at me but how to squelch the thing inside me that was calling them in the first place.
The sense that something needed to change soon had me shoving my phone and charger into my bag. The battery was full, and I got a tiny bit of comfort from knowing all of my essentials were together.
I pushed aside my sheet and the fragments of cloth that were left from my interlude with Lance last night, a flush tingling through me at the memory. He hadn’t left any lingering marks, carefully healing the few places where he’d briefly broken the skin, but the memory of his touch echoed across my body.
We’ll do that again. Not only did I have no intention of debating that point, a pretty large part of me couldn’t wait to jump back in. If that was how much skill he’d been able to bring to his first attempt at sex, imagine what the second would be like. The tenth. The?—
Another soft but insistent flutter around my heart brought me back to earth. I had bigger concerns than getting laid.
I got dressed, pulling on a shirt and shorts that were a little stiff from being hand-washed in the sink and then hung over a chair to dry. Even if they weren’t the most comfortable, I had a little modesty when I crossed the hall to take my shower. When I emerged feeling more refreshed and ready to face the conversations ahead, I headed straight to the living room.
The first thing my gaze caught on was the new carving Lance must have etched into the wall sometime after I’d gone to bed. The whirling gouges he’d drawn with his claws were as abstract as usual, but something about the shape of them, the hint of one form curving over another, sent me back to our encounter, his head bowed as he worked his tongue over my clit. A sharper flush heated my face.
Was the impression intentional, or had I just turned into a monster-sex-crazed maniac overnight?
Knowing Lance… possibly both.
At that moment, Crag emerged from the shadows by the door, probably returning from one of his patrols. At his arrival, Lance blinked into being too—poised in a headstand on one of the undoctored armchairs. He flipped off with his usual agility and rolled his shoulders, his eyes sparkling with enthusiasm.
“Any peril out there today?” he asked Crag.
The larger man grunted, rubbing his hand over the sheen of black hair on his bronze scalp. “Very quiet.”
“You say that like it’s a bad thing. I can go find some beasties for you to beat up if you’re getting bored.”
Crag’s expression turned even more stern. “Don’t bring trouble.”
Lance held up his hands. “Fine, fine, no unexpected guests. Better that we keep our moody mortal all to ourselves anyway.” He aimed his grin at me and reached out to tease his claws down my bare arm.
A pleased shiver passed through me even as I stepped away. I might have gotten turned on by the idea of Crag and Torrent watching our hook-up from the shadows, but the idea of a PDA while I could actually see either of them watching gave me a little jolt of embarrassment.
“I’m not that moody,” I retorted lightly, and then frowned, pretty much contradicting my point.
He’d called me “moody” before, when the three of them had first rescued me. It’d stuck me as odd at the time, but there’d been so much else going on that was even more insane that I’d forgotten the brief oddity.
But if he was actually referring to my last name, if he’d known it already on the first night, that would only be possible if they’d known about me before I was attacked. If that was the case, one of them would have mentioned it by now, right?
It was probably just a coincidence. To Lance with his carefree vibe, anyone who ever got worried about anything probably seemed moody.
I told myself that, but my gut had constricted more than it’d already been at the thought of the conversation I wanted to have.
Food. We should all get some food into us, and then I could demand more answers. Or at least demand that we figure out how to find some more.
I walked over to the kitchen area and automatically pulled three bowls from the cabinet. “You want the usual, Crag? And should I pour you some cereal, Lance, or are you on an all-ice cream diet now?”
Lance laughed and licked his lips. “I think there are a few other things I’ll continue to enjoy eating.”
“We can get the food ourselves,” Crag rumbled, striding over.
A few days ago, the brusque remark would have made me flinch and worry that I’d offended him. But I felt reasonably sure by now that he didn’t actually have any problem with me.
So I just paused and glanced up at him when he loomed next to me, a question in my gaze. His jaw shifted from side to side, and he put his hand over one of the bowls. His voice came out still gravelly but more measured this time. “You don’t need to do anything for us.”
There, that was all he’d meant. The boost in confidence melted any lingering apprehension I might have felt standing next to his formidable bulk. I tapped my elbow playfully against his arm as I retrieved the Mini-Wheats he always seemed to go for from the cupboard. “You guys are handling all the defensive maneuvers and gathering of supplies. The least I can contribute is tossing some cereal into a bowl.”
“You’re hiding here out of fear for your life,” he insisted somberly. “You’re dealing with enough.” But he wasn’t petty enough to jerk his bowl away when I went to pour the cereal. He did glower at me before getting out the milk for himself, but I simply smiled back at him, knowing he was more annoyed with himself for not managing to stop me from helping him than with me for wanting to.
He could call me “soft” all he wanted—I’d figured out he had a secret sweet side underneath the rocky exterior.
Lance had laid out some strips of bacon on a plate, ignoring the bowl I’d taken out for him. With a gush of his breath, they sizzled and turned crispy. That must have been a different fire setting from the one he’d used to heal up my arm.
My eyebrows shot up. “Um, could I get some speed-fried bacon too?”
The dragon shifter popped one piece into his mouth and smirked at me as he chewed. “Lay ‘em out, and I’ll torch them.”
A couple of minutes later, I was sitting at the dining table with several perfectly cooked strips of bacon and a piece of toast. Not what my doctors would generally have recommended as a dietary choice, but I could make up for it with a bunch of fruits and veggies at lunch time. I was pretty sure avoiding getting killed by monsters was a more urgent concern than a few days off my strict nutritional regimen.
As I savored the salty, greasy goodness, my gaze settled on the shadow on the wall across the table from me. Had Torrent joined us like I’d meant for him to? He seemed to make the final calls about who did what around here. I needed him present for the conversation if I was going to make any headway.
I needed to see him, to gauge his reactions, even if that meant I had to put him in a little physical discomfort.
I washed the bacon down with a glass of orange juice and leaned my elbows on the table. Lance had just polished off his bacon and an apple he’d sliced up, and Crag was pushing aside his now-empty bowl. They both paused, taking in my stance as if sensing that I needed their attention.
I almost balked, but then another flutter passed through my chest. I couldn’t just ignore it.
“I need to talk to you,” I said, and looked pointedly at the shadow. “All of you. Torrent?”
The lean man materialized in the chair at his end of the table. His tentacles unfurled on either side of his seat, and his pale eyes contemplated me with even more gravity than the other two shadowkind had shown.
“What’s the matter, Ms. Fix-It?” he asked, brisk but not as curt as he’d sometimes been in the past.
One of my hands moved to my sternum of its own accord. One thing I couldn’t fix, at least not on my own.
I dragged in a breath. “You’ve all probably noticed, because you could sense the same thing that was drawing the other shadowkind to me—whatever’s happening to me or in me, it’s getting stronger. I can feel it more, but I still can’t make any sense of it or what it has to do with any of you.”
Even Lance’s expression briefly sobered at my words, but only for an instant. “So, what you’re saying is you just keep getting more special,” he teased.
I narrowed my eyes at him. “I’d rather not be if the only thing it does is make monstrous creatures want to murder me.” I glanced around at the others again. “I—I know how it feels inside me, but it’s just a physical sensation, so whatever you all must notice has to be different. Do you have any idea what the ‘special-ness’ is now that it’s stronger? What does it even feel like to you?”
“It’s a sort of energy,” Torrent said evenly. “One that sparks a sense of interest. I’m not sure exactly why that interest is hostile in so many.”
His voice sounded especially bland with that remark. Was it really the whole truth?
I let out my breath in a huff. “Well, can you sense any way to get that energy out of me? We wouldn’t have to worry about anything else if I just… wasn’t ‘special’ anymore.”
Lance tipped his head to one side. “You want us to carve you open and see what we can toss away?”
Crag squared his shoulders. “We can’t damage her.”
Something about his phrasing brought back my prickle of suspicion. He sounded like he meant it not as in it was impossible but that they weren’t allowed. But who would even know about it if they tore me to pieces right now?
There were too many niggling bits of this situation that didn’t quite add up.
My head jerked toward Lance. “Why were you calling me ‘moody’?”
He blinked, looking both puzzled and amused by the change of subject. “Sometimes it seems fitting, especially because?—”
“Because Lance thinks everyone is moody if they don’t cater to his every whim,” Torrent interrupted in a firm tone.
Lance, uncharacteristically, shut his mouth. The prickle of my apprehension deepened.
I crossed my arms in front of me. “You were going to say ‘because it’s part of your name.’”
He smiled at me, all toothy innocence. “Is it? I thought your name was Quinn. Which is a very good name on its own. No need to add to it.”
Suddenly, frustrations I hadn’t even known I was holding in boiled over. I found myself pushing to my feet, my hands slamming down on the edge of the table.
“There’s something more going on here,” I said, my voice coming out at a higher pitch than I liked. “There’s something you haven’t been telling me. I need to know what it is—I need to know everything so I can figure out how I’m getting out of this mess.”
Crag went rigid in his seat, but I couldn’t tell whether his reaction indicated guilt or simply defensiveness in the face of my aggression. Lance slung one arm carelessly over the back of his chair, all simmering amusement.
Torrent frowned at me from the other end of the table. “We’ve told you everything we can. There’s nothing else we know that would help you figure out what’s happening to you or how to keep the other shadowkind creatures away.”
His wording sounded way too careful, as if he was doing his best to avoid telling the truth without outright lying.
I stared him down across the table. “But there are more things you know about me, or about why you’re here, or something. I want to know exactly what’s going on—what’s been going on. It’s my life. I deserve to know, don’t I?”
He sighed, as if I was being an exasperating child instead of asking for information potentially vital to my survival. “Quinn?—”
It still didn’t sound like I was going to get anything useful out of him, but I never got to find out how he’d dodge the subject this time anyway. Before he could continue his sentence, a force like a demolition ball rammed into the cabin door.
The door burst open, the frame shattering at the same time, chips of wood flying everywhere. A huge creature landed on the threshold, filling the entire battered space.
He stood on two feet like a man, but his humanoid form was obviously monstrous, his skin deep blue, tusks jutting from his jowls, and his bared teeth revealing heavy fangs. His gaze swept over us with a gleam of intelligence I hadn’t seen in any of my previous attackers’ eyes.
This one wasn’t just some rampaging shadowkind creature. This was a higher shadowkind being like the men who’d protected me.
Terror rattled my pulse. I scrambled around my chair instinctively, gripping it like a shield. My men all leapt up, Torrent’s tentacles lashing, Lance slicing his claws through the air in a threatening gesture.
The intruder let out a bark of a laugh that was almost as much a snarl. “You don’t want to make this a fight. Give me the mortal girl, or you can all die.”