Chapter 5
Quinn
The pixie—whose name, I’d finally learned, was Paisley—stamped her foot as she looked around the shallow grassy dip a few minutes’ walk from the coast where she’d hoped to find some of her former fellow lackeys.
“They must have moved on from here,” she said in her squeaky voice. “I don’t know where else they’d have gone.”
“The leviathan might have moved all his operations since the behemoth’s death,” Crag rumbled. “He knows we’ve been looking into his activities and trying to interfere.”
“Wonderful.” I hugged myself, my tee and the protective undershirt beneath it clinging to my skin with a growing dampness. It wasn’t exactly cool, considering we were in the midst of a southern California summer, but the storm clouds condensed around L.A. had been creeping ever closer. The gray haze overhead had been spitting on us for at least a half hour now.
Lance shook himself as if he didn’t appreciate the moisture either. “His minions have to be around somewhere.”
I glanced back toward the sea—and toward the gloom hanging over the distant city. “We could go closer to their main base of operations. We’d probably run into someone eventually.”
Crag frowned. “We don’t know how many we might run into all at once or who else might see us. I don’t like it.”
“You don’t like me being here at all,” I reminded him. “You think we’re going to get pummeled by a tidal wave at any moment.”
He glowered at me, but he couldn’t manage to put much annoyance behind it. “We might. Rollick said the flooding was getting worse all around the city.”
The demon had gone off to meet with some contacts and sort out business he hadn’t gone into a lot of detail about, but that I gathered had something to do with arranging the army we were supposed to be building. Paisley had also told him where to find the freed beings who’d wanted to pitch in. I expected to be spending a lot of time tonight casting minor sorcery on one after another to confirm their loyalty the way I had with the pixie.
“Well, we’re not getting anything done here,” I said, holding in a huff of my own frustration. I was a powerful enough sorcerer to have compelled a behemoth to his death, and here I was wandering around mostly trying to avoid running into our enemies. How was that helping anything?
But I knew that getting caught—and maybe killed—wouldn’t be particularly helpful either.
We trudged back to the shoreline not far from where Torrent had left us a couple of hours ago. I wasn’t sure how long his investigations would take. He’d been gone for a few days the last time he’d slipped into the ocean to find out more about the leviathan, but then he’d traveled all around the world. I’d gotten the impression he was planning to stay local this time.
What if he was caught? I couldn’t imagine the leviathan would go easy on him if the monster realized he’d gotten his hands on one of my closest companions.
I clambered along the rocky shoreline restlessly. The waves splashed higher than before, drenching my sneakers, and I grimaced with a prickle of apprehension. The giant serpent was definitely stirring up the salty waters in ways that could be awfully destructive.
Lance let out a little shout of triumph and vanished from view. I hustled over to find him in a small dip where a stretch of sand had gathered within a circle of taller rocks that framed it from three sides, a few trees looming even higher around the edges. Their branches rattled with the rising wind, but between them and the arched boulders, they held off most of the rain.
Lance was stalking around on the sheltered sand. He gave a disgruntled sound. “I thought this looked like a good place for beasties to want to hide. No one down here, though.”
Crag was studying the spot with a pensive expression. He rubbed his rocky jaw. “Maybe it would be a good place for Quinn to hide—as long as you keep an eye on the water and make sure it’s not surging too high. I could fly farther down the coast and see if I can find a minion to pick off from the rest. It’d be better for me to bring one back here to question than for Quinn to get closer to the leviathan’s territory.”
It said something about how concerned he was about what the ancient shadowkind might do to me that he’d rather leave me with just Lance for protection than bring me with him on his quest. I sighed and hopped down into the natural alcove. “Fine. But search quickly, and if you don’t find anything, come back. Otherwise I’m going to do more searching on my own.”
Paisley fluttered her wings. “I can fly with you,” she offered to Crag. “Cover more ground. I mean, I’ll need to come to you to do the rest if I spot any of them, since I can’t carry much of anyone off myself, but it could mean we find them faster.”
Crag paused, eyeing the tiny woman, and seemed to decide that she’d be more use scanning the terrain than protecting me from whatever threats might arise. “Fine,” he said gruffly. “Let’s go.”
As they vanished into the shadows, I walked across the sand, testing the grains under my feet, until I reached the driest section where the overhead rocks formed what was almost a cave. I sank onto the ground, finding that the pale grains were at least pleasantly soft, and Lance dropped down next to me. He tucked his hand around mine. The gesture came so easily now that I barely noticed the claws that could have sliced open my skin in an instant if he hadn’t maneuvered them so deftly.
“It’s good for you to have a little time to relax,” he told me in his breezy way. “You’ve been on your feet for a long time now. Did you bring some food? Maybe you should eat something. I could try to hunt if you don’t.”
A crooked smile crossed my face at the barrage of concerned suggestions. I reached into my trusty messenger bag and pulled out the apple I’d packed. “Not a bad idea, but no hunting necessary. And I’m fine. I had that bad spell with my heart yesterday, but I don’t feel so different from usual today. It was probably just the strain of tackling the behemoth and?—”
Before I could finish my sentence, my hand tremored. As if my body was determined to prove my words wrong, my pulse started to race, a chill washing over me that had nothing to do with the damp air. The clenching sensation that’d gripped me before tightened around my chest, making my breath hitch as I struggled to catch it.
Lance leapt to kneel in front of me, his eyes blazing with urgency. “You’re sick again. What do you need? Did you take the medicine Rollick got with that paper from the doctor?”
I managed to nod, my fingers digging into the sand as I fought for control over my body. My voice came out ragged. “Yeah. But it’ll—probably take a while for that—stuff to kick in.” If it did at all. If the reasons my heart was acting up had anything to do with normal transplant issues and not the supernatural energies that’d been passing through it.
Lance stroked my arm from shoulder to elbow, obviously uncertain about what else to do. But I didn’t think there was anything he could do for me right now. I breathed as deeply and evenly as I could, focusing completely on the rhythm of the air moving in and out of me, and I wasn’t sure how much time passed before I felt like myself again. I inhaled shakily and raised my head, barely aware of having lowered it.
The dragon shifter peered at me with concern shimmering in his violet eyes. I’d rarely seen him look so serious. “It was bad again. Two times in two days, when it never happened before since I’ve been around you. Should we go look for Crag and tell him we need to go? Or I could find a way back to Rollick’s safe house on my own, I think.”
I wasn’t sure how likely that was. We’d driven here, and Lance didn’t know how to handle a car. I could drive, but I doubted Rollick would appreciate us taking off with his ride anyway. If he’d even left it where we’d parked instead of using it himself on his business, which I didn’t know.
And besides…
“It’s okay,” I said, grasping Lance’s forearm. “It’s over now. I’m probably going to have to deal with moments like that every now and then for the time being, and that’s okay. They’re not really doing any damage.”
They just meant that my heart was starting to wear out to the point that it was giving off warning signals.
Lance’s brow knit. “Maybe you should stay in the bunker. Away from everything. Then you can get better. We’ll fight the leviathan, the four of us and the other beings who want to. Shadowkind to shadowkind is more fair anyway.”
I wished fairness was a factor that mattered. A lump rose in my throat. I scooted closer to the dragon shifter, my forehead coming to rest against his.
“I won’t get better,” I told him, more steadily than I’d expected—but then, these facts weren’t news to me. I’d just never before had to explain them to someone I cared about who didn’t already know. “No matter how much I rest or what medications I take, a transplanted heart was never going to last me my entire life. If I’d been really lucky, I might have gotten twice as long as I have so far. But it was a strange heart, and obviously I’m not so lucky.” I paused. “Well, I wouldn’t even say that. I don’t regret that the strangeness of the situation let me meet you.”
Lance growled low in his throat, a pained sound. “You made us go away, and you promised you wouldn’t do that again. You aren’t allowed to leave us either. I want you to stay right here with me. That’s where you belong.”
I leaned into him more, an ache spreading through my gut. “It is. And I don’t want to go. But I’ve known since I first had the operation that this was going to happen someday. To some extent I’m lucky I even made it past the first year. I’ve been prepared for this moment my whole life since I had the transplant. That’s why I tried to make every day count. To experience as much as I could while I could. So holing up underground and doing nothing really isn’t my thing.”
“I don’t want to see you hurting,” Lance said, and looked down at his claws, curling them away from me as if suddenly scared that he might hurt me, the way Crag had once feared.
A spark of inspiration lit in my head. The idea wouldn’t fix everything, but maybe it would help him accept the way things were and make the most of them like I hoped to. It was exploring excitement that’d brought us together in the first place, after all.
I slid my hand down to his palm and unfurled his fingers. Then I raised his hand to my face to trace the tips of his claws over my cheek. Even now, with the dreary weather around us and my body still a little shaken from the brief glitch of my heart, their delicate touch woke up a quiver of delight that ran straight to my core.
“I still want to enjoy every moment as much as I can,” I said. “In all the ways that you can help me enjoy it. The thrills you give me won’t hurt me at all—I promise. They’ll just make the time I have sweeter. Will you remind me of how good we can feel together?”
Lance made a rough sound. Then he was sliding his fingers from my cheek into my hair, his other hand rising to trace across my neck. His mouth collided with mine.
As his tongue flicked between my parted lips, its dragon ridges forming across it the way he knew I liked, I couldn’t think of any place I’d rather be, no matter how much longer this heart kept beating.