27. Rafe
RAFE
YOU ARE QUITE DONE.
For one breath, the gallery belonged to fire.
Dimitris stood in the center of it, burning gold from throat to fingertips, his ruined suit blackening at the edges and then falling away as if even fabric had decided it wanted no part of him.
He had been beautiful before in the irritating, curated way of phoenixes.
Now he was something ancient. Heat gleamed over his shoulders.
His hair burned without shortening, flames licking through the strands.
His eyes were bright enough that looking at him directly felt like a mistake.
The phoenix smiled.
I had the brief, unwelcome thought that Quinn would have called it a villain entrance with excellent lighting.
Then Luke Gildstein raised both hands, and the floor between us split.
Stone cracked upward in three jagged lines.
From the gaps, figures made of marble dust, broken tile, and old iron rose, their bodies pulling themselves together from the room Dimitris had built to worship his own acquisitions.
A bronze mask slid across the floor and fused itself to one blank face.
A carved hand from a shattered statue became fingers.
One creature opened its mouth and made a dry grinding sound as if trying to speak.
Dimitris stared at them. “Those are mine.”
Luke stood near the detonator table, blood darkening one sleeve where Max had bitten him. His smile remained calm. “Not for long,” he said.
The first construct lunged.
Dimitris met it with a wall of fire.
The blast struck hard enough to throw heat across my scales. The construct didn’t burn, but the iron in it glowed, softened, and buckled. Dimitris laughed as it collapsed into slag and marble chunks.
“A little gauche,” he said, rolling his shoulders, “but effective.”
Two thieves who had survived the first burst of phoenix fire recovered enough to move. One grabbed the electric baton. The other reached for a rifle from the floor.
The baton would have been a problem for my human body.
In dragon form, it was an irritation.
The man came at me low, aiming for the inside of my foreleg where the scales thinned near the joint. He was trained. That annoyed me. I let him come close enough to think the strike might land, then swept my tail across the floor.
He hit the wall and didn’t get up.
The rifleman fired.
The round struck my shoulder and sparked off scale, not harmless but far from fatal. Pain flashed hot and brief. I turned my head toward him.
He lowered the rifle by an inch.
I opened my jaws and exhaled a narrow stream of fire along the floor between us. The man erupted in flames and shrieks of agony. I hated to waste a life, but I wouldn’t chance one of these men harming Quinn or Max where they were huddled in the corner.
Dimitris glanced over. “Show off.”
I couldn’t answer in this form, but I bared my teeth.
His smile widened. “Touchy.”
Another construct hit me from the side.
I slammed into a display wall hard enough to fracture the glass. Shelves shook. Somewhere, something priceless fell and shattered.
Dimitris made an offended sound.
I drove my claws into the construct’s shoulder and dragged it away from the detonator table. It had no nerves. No fear. No blood. It swung again, and pain burst through my ribs as a stone fist struck behind my foreleg.
I held my grip and pulled heat up from my chest, opening my jaws, burning through the construct’s shoulder.
Stone split. Iron softened. The arm came free in my claws.
Luke’s expression sharpened.
Ah, so he hadn’t known what my fire could do.
Good.
Dimitris saw it too.
“Oh,” he said, delighted. “That explains it.”
I snapped my head toward him.
“Why your fire felt so good,” he said. “Hotter than expected.”
I didn’t have time to hate that sentence properly as Luke spoke a word that made the air fold in on itself.
Pressure struck my chest. I slid backward across broken glass, claws scoring deep lines into the stone floor as I stopped myself short of the detonator wires. Dimitris threw fire toward Luke, but it bent away, diverted by a clear shield that shimmered once and vanished.
“Your guards are down,” Luke said. “Your alarms are dead. Your vault is half-open. Be wise for once and open the rest.”
Dimitris’s smile thinned. “You wound me.”
“I intend to.”
The lights flared. Every loose object in the room lifted at once. Knives. Shattered glass. Bronze fragments. Pieces of carved stone. The air filled with debris and intent.
Somewhere behind me, Max barked.
My blood stopped listening to reason.
Quinn.
I roared.
The sound shook dust from the ceiling and cracked what remained of the nearest glass case. Across the room, Quinn’s head snapped up from behind the fallen display, one arm wrapped around Max’s collar.
Still alive.
I had half a second to register her face before the objects flew.
I threw myself between her and the storm.
Glass cut across my side. A bronze shard struck my jaw and glanced away. Something heavy struck the ridge of my shoulder and drove pain through the joint. I dropped over the fallen case where Quinn and Max had taken shelter, curling my long body around them as tightly as the ruined room allowed.
Debris struck scale, horn, spine.
I held.
Through the storm, I saw Luke moving toward the detonator table, one hand outstretched.
Dimitris saw him too.
The phoenix crossed the room in a streak of gold and hit Luke so hard they both crashed into the far wall.
The spell broke. Everything fell.
For half a second, the gallery was nothing but impact. Stone, metal, glass, all of it hitting the floor in a violent rain.
I kept my body over Quinn and Max until the last pieces struck and settled.
Luke was down, the constructs dragging broken limbs across the stone, thieves lying still among the wreckage. The detonator still sat on the table.
But inside the sheltering curve of my body, Quinn moved.
I shifted back before I had fully decided to do it, scales giving way to skin, claws to hands, fire closing in my throat. Pain arrived all at once, sharp along my shoulder, deep beneath my ribs, hot through the joint where the debris had struck.
I ignored it.
Quinn lay partly under the angled case door, one arm wrapped around Max’s collar. Dust streaked her cheek, and a thin line of blood marked her collarbone, but her eyes were open.
Alive.
Max sneezed, shook debris from his coat, and gave me a deeply aggrieved look.
Quinn blinked at me. “Hi.”
I dropped to my knees beside her, my hands hovering uselessly above her shoulder, her face. There was nowhere safe to put the fear.
“Are you hurt?” I asked, my voice cracking.
“Mostly offended.”
“Quinn.”
“I’m okay.” Her voice softened. “Really.”
Max pressed his head against my thigh, solid and warm.
I touched Quinn’s face with both hands. Her skin was warm. She was alive. A thin cut crossed her collarbone where the knife had nicked her. Dust clung to her lashes. She blinked up at me, trying for a smile and failing when she saw whatever was on my face.
“Rafe,” she said softly.
I couldn’t speak, relief clogging my throat.
The truth had been moving toward me for weeks, perhaps from the moment she had stood in a law firm break room and bargained with a dragon while wearing my family’s necklace.
I had named it interest. Irritation. Respect.
Want. Concern. I had hidden it beneath restraint and professionalism, beneath consequence and responsibility, as if love were a legal matter that could be postponed.
But Quinn Bradley was sitting in rubble with her dog pressed against my leg, and the thought of a world without her in it had emptied me so completely there was no room left for denial.
I loved her.
I loved her in the awful, clarifying way of almost losing someone before admitting they had already become everything.
Her fingers closed around my wrist.
“I’m okay,” she whispered again.
I nodded once because I didn’t trust myself with words.
A crash behind us forced me back to my surroundings.
Dimitris had a fully awakened Luke by the throat against the wall, but Luke’s free hand was glowing dark blue, the magic crawling up Dimitris’s burning arm like rot through gold.
I stood, made room, and let the shift take me again.
Quinn caught the edge of my foreleg before I could move.
I looked down at her. She was dusty and bleeding and far too close to every threat in the room. Max pressed against her leg, ears forward, waiting for her next command.
“Stay alive,” she said. “I’ve got Max.”
Max barked once, offended that this needed stating.
I lowered my head until my snout was close enough that she could feel the heat of my breath. She didn’t step back.
“I know,” she said softly. “Now go before he gets clever again.”
Behind me, stone scraped. The remaining constructs were pulling themselves together, jagged bodies reforming from the ruin. Luke forced himself free from Dimitris with a magical blast and lifted both hands.
The constructs surged.
I met the first one head-on.
In dragon form, the room was too small for elegance.
My body could not fully uncoil. My tail struck broken displays when I moved.
Every turn threatened another priceless object Dimitris would undoubtedly mourn at length if we all survived.
But there was room enough for claws. Room enough for fire.
Room enough for my body to stand between Quinn and anything that came for her.
Dimitris hit one construct from behind in a rush of gold flame. I struck the second from the front, jaws closing around its stone shoulder. I drove it down into the floor and burned through the iron woven into its frame until the whole thing collapsed beneath me in smoking pieces.
There was nothing graceful about it.