Chapter 23 #2
The other two nod as well. The big male with the bushy beard glares at the tall male, who shuts up.
He then crouches, finding sticks, which he snaps until there are five of them, including one shorter one.
He shows the group. He even shows me – like I care.
He stands with his fist closed around all of them, with only the tops showing.
No.
No, no, no.
They’re drawing lots. For me. Like I’m the last slice of pizza at a buffet. A hysterical laugh tries to climb up out of me, and I shove it down, because I understand, with a horrible clarity, that this is them being reasonable.
They’re going to draw sticks and the winner gets me. A person.
This is insane.
The first male draws and gets a long stick. He curses and hurls it into the trees.
The second draws, and it is long as well. He snarls and stalks a tight circle, hands in his hair.
The third one steps up. It’s the short, leery one.
Please, not him.
Please.
It’s the one whose eyes have been crawling over me since they dropped me here.
He draws.
He looks at the stub of wood in his hand, and his whole face changes. The sound that comes out of him is low and satisfied and absolutely certain, and I know before anyone reacts that it’s the short stick. That he’s won. That I’m now his.
Like hell!
The other four look at his hand. Two of them back away at once, cursing.
The tall, wiry one snarls, baring his teeth. “I don’t like this game. I will fight you for her.”
“No!” Bushy Beard puts his hand on his chest. “Venom won her. He gets to keep her.”
“No!” the tall one barks.
The other three step in front of him, making it clear that he needs to back down.
“I don’t like it either, but it is done,” Bushy Beard says in a low voice. “We will get more females.”
The leery asshole is grinning at me. His teeth are too long, and his eyes are slitted. He has a few scales on his arms and chest.
I get to my feet. My legs don’t want to hold me, but I make them, because I am not going to be sitting in the dirt when this thing comes for me.
“Stay away from me.” My voice comes out low and rough. “Don’t you touch me. Stay back.”
He tilts his head.
“You’re my mate. On your knees, female.”
He starts toward me. Unhurried and certain. The other four have pulled back to the edges of the clearing to watch, and there is nowhere to run and nothing to fight with. I take one step back, and another, and my shoulders hit a curtain of vines, and he keeps coming.
Something explodes out of the tree line, moving almost faster than my eyes can track, and then the male in front of me simply isn’t in front of me anymore.
He’s on the ground ten feet away with Magma over him, and Magma’s arm rises and falls once, claws first, and there’s a sound like wet cloth tearing.
The male doesn’t get up. Doesn’t move. Doesn’t anything.
I give a sob of both fear and relief.
Magma turns.
He’s half-shifted. There are green scales all over him, between patches of skin. His hands have gone long and clawed. He’s bigger and more muscled.
“Magma!” I scream as the other four go for him, all at once.
There’s no circling, no posturing, nothing like the theater they performed for each other.
They come from four directions in the same second, and the clearing turns into a blur of bodies and claws and screeches that don’t belong in a human throat.
I press myself back into the vines, and I can’t look away.
I should run while I have the chance, but I can’t bring myself to leave him.
In his new form, Magma is both beautiful and terrible.
One of the males charges. Magma uses the male’s own speed to drive him headfirst into a nearby tree trunk. The crack of it echoes. The male drops, his neck at an angle, his eyes staring. He’s dead.
There is no time to celebrate because the other three are already on him.
A set of claws opens his back, shoulder to hip.
Magma roars, and the sound is so enormous that the canopy shakes.
He gets a hand around the throat of the one behind him and drags him overhead, into the path of the third male’s strike, and the third male’s claws punch into his friend instead.
Magma finishes what the strike started; one sharp twist and he’s gone too.
Blood is running down him now, his and theirs. The two left have stopped rushing him and started working him instead, one in front, one behind, in and out, hitting him with sickening thuds.
“No!” I choke out.
They get him with a slash across the ribs. His right arm takes a hit that spins him halfway around. He’s slowing. This is terrible.
“Magma!” I scream.
The male in front of him turns his head toward me for half a second, and Magma takes his throat out.
Yes!
The last one is the big one with the bushy beard.
“Leave now!” he snarls at Magma. “And I’ll let you live.”
“Not happening,” Magma tells him in a calm voice that is deep and rough.
Bushy Beard drives Magma back with a flurry of strikes, and Magma gives ground, and gives some more. His right arm hangs at his side and his chest heaves; and the blood – there’s so much blood – pours down his ribs and drips from his hanging fingers. The big male sees all of it and presses harder.
Suddenly, Magma stops giving ground. He plants himself and takes a strike across the shoulder that makes me cry out.
In the next breath, I realize that it was on purpose, because taking the hit puts the big male’s arm exactly where Magma needs it.
He locks the arm with his good hand, pivots, and brings the male down under him with all his weight behind one final strike to the back of the neck.
There is a sickening crack and the clearing goes quiet.
Magma stands over the last body, swaying, and then the scales drain away, and the claws recede, and his eyes lose the dragon slits, and he’s just a man, naked and shaking and bleeding.
Holy shit, there’s so much blood.
I run to him.
“You’re bleeding.” My hands hover over him, afraid to touch anything in case I make it worse. “Oh shit. Magma. Where’s the worst of it? Show me the worst of it. What can I do to help you?”
“Fuck! My ribs.” He gets it out through his teeth. Up close, it’s so much worse. Three slashes rake across his right side, deep, gaping at their edges, and blood wells out of them with every breath he takes and runs down his hip and thigh. “Carla. Listen to me.”
“I’m listening. Sit down. Can you sit?”