“Hadyn?” he asked.
“I’m fine.” Only her words were slurred slightly.
“You are not—”
She beat him to the punch and passed out. The crack of the back of her skull against the sidewalk was a sound he never wanted to hear again. In a blink he was on his knees beside her, inspecting every inch of her body. Vaguely, he was aware of the others joining them, Lyndi in particular trying to help.
“Here,” she said and lifted Hadyn’s arm to show her shirt soaked in blood, hidden by the black material in the darkness.
Shifting a single talon, Rune ripped the shirt sleeve right off, exposing a nasty slice on the soft underside of her forearm, just below the bend of her elbow. Deep and seeping.
“Fuck, woman,” he muttered at Hadyn. “You are going to be the death of me.”
Though what had him bothered more was the higher likelihood that he’d be the death of her.
“She’s lost a lot of blood, I’d say,” Lyndi said softly, trying to be gentle.
No shit.
He kept that to himself. Using the sleeve he’d yanked off her body, Rune tied the material tight around her upper arm in a makeshift tourniquet. At the same time, Lyndi ripped off the other sleeve and tied it around the wound itself to try to stem the flow of blood.
Then Rune scooped Hadyn’s limp form up and stood, trying to hide the way he was currently not quite functioning at the edge of panic. “We need to get her back fast.”
Levi moved to stand before him. “Give her to me.”
Rune tightened his grip with a glare as his dragon snarled in his head.
Levi didn’t back down, though. “Listen brother, you are visibly dead on your feet. A stiff breeze would blow you over.”
“Fuck you.”
“How about I shift here and take her,” Lyndi offered. “Would that be okay?”
He liked the soft, placating tone she used about as much as a root canal, but his dragon went silent, which meant he’d let her go. Rune glanced around. They were still in housing, but all the humans would be fast asleep, and the street was just wide enough for a smaller dragon like Lyndi to fit.
“She’d better be alive when I get back to the mountain,” he said. Then he walked to the middle of the street. He laid Hadyn down there, lifting a strand of hair out of her face.
Gods she looked pale in the moonlight.
“No dying on me, love,” he whispered. “Your parents need you. Understand me?”
He half expected her to open her eyes so she could roll them and laugh at his being all bossy, but she didn’t.
Rune didn’t move away until Lyndi shifted. Even then, she had to nose him back. At least she was gentle in how she picked Hadyn up. Almost knocking him over with the blast of downdraft caused by her wings, she took off. It took an inordinate amount of will to not shift and follow her, but he’d only make things worse if he tried it.
Lowering his gaze, he found his three old friends watching him with various expressions of curiosity. Rune made sure his face was arranged in a blank. “Long ass story,” he said.
“We expect to hear all of it when we get back,” Levi said.
“Only after I know she’s okay,” Rune said, then marched off in the direction they’d been headed.
…
Waking up in a strange room wasn’t exactly a new experience for Hadyn given how much she’d traveled and moved through the course of her life. Rogue dragons had to stay on the move, even hiding among humans. On the other hand, waking up to find that the man whose cock—and now she was using words like cock in her head—she’d sucked in the back of a cab while in a succubus-induced sexual haze was now sleeping all scrunched up in a deep armchair beside her bed in an unfamiliar room…
Chalk one up to trying new things, she thought blearily as she tried to scoot her way to sitting. Only her arms were as useful as wet noodles.
Why wasn’t her brain working? Or her body for that matter? She felt as though she’d been run through one of those old-fashioned laundry wringers that her adopted mother shared horror stories of. Limp, damp, and useless was what she was.
With Rune as the only solid thing in her world.
Putting some effort into it, she managed to punch a single word from her lungs. “Hey—”
He jerked in a most un-Rune-like way, almost falling out of his chair. In the next instant a very awake, very alert dragon shifter was sitting on the side of her bed—his bed?—his weight dipping the mattress and rolling her toward him. A hand on either side of her, he leaned closer, the smokey smell of him winding around her. Doing things that a simple, normal dragon smell shouldn’t be doing.
Maybe that sexual haze hadn’t all been the succubus…
This close, in the dim light of the bedside lamp, she could see the boundary between the black of his eyes and the deeper black of his pupils. Like staring at the shutter of a camera lens.
Hadyn couldn’t help the smile that had her lips twitching as she stared back at him. “For a man so determined to keep people out, you sure do invade a girl’s personal space.”
“How do you feel?” he asked.
That finally got through to her that this wasn’t where she remembered being last. Hadyn frowned, trying to push through the dull ache in her head that suddenly announced its presence with an insistent throb. The last thing she remembered was trying not to let on how hard she’d been working to stay upright as she’d followed a bunch of dragons down a suburban sidewalk.
“What happened?” she asked.
His lips flattened in a grim set. “You passed out.”
Hadyn scrunched up her face with distaste. “How embarrassing.”
What his enforcer buddies must think of her. The puny human holding them back, increasing the risk of their exposure.
Except Rune’s face did something weird. A lopsided smile tugged at the corners of his lips. “Don’t be embarrassed. Your arm got sliced during the wreck and was leaking blood like a fucking broken sink.”
Well…holy schnooks. “I don’t remember blood…or pain for that matter,” she said, racking her brain for even an inkling along those lines. “I think you’re exaggerating.”
“I’m not the type.”
“I wouldn’t have thought so.”
Rune curled a lock of hair around his finger almost absently. “I swear you took a solid decade off my life, love.”
She closed her eyes, unable to keep them open any longer, and sighed. “I think gray at the temples is distinguishing on a man. You’ll be fine.”