Code-words for: Will this really kill me? Damian knew. His dragon growled a challenge inside him, from where he’d hidden it away.
Damian nodded. “Indeed.”
Austin finished his phone call and was loudly discussing what to do next with Andi, the monitor was beeping incessantly. Grimalkin was pacing from wall to wall, hissing disapproval at so much destruction in his house, and Jamison had pulled out some sort of half-divining-rod-half-game-controller-like device to wave over the lurker’s corpse.
Damian toed it, watching a tentacle-like arm flop while grinding his teeth together. How the hell had it gotten in? What if he hadn’t been there? And the gun hadn’t worked?
Could he have lost all of them?
He looked over to where Andi was, appearing largely unfazed despite being covered in body fluids, talking loudly to Austin about what she thought would help next.
Could he have lost…her?
He kicked the lurker in earnest and watched it slide across his floor, into a door Grimalkin conveniently opened and then closed, making its corpse disappear. “We also need to solve the question of how the fuck a portal opened endangering everyone IN MY CASTLE.”
He hadn’t meant to shout the last three words, and yet he had. Everyone else in the room snapped to silence, except for the monitor.
See? his dragon laughed at him. You can’t even control yourself. How can you hope to ever control me?
That’s what the gun is for, Damian snarled back.
You wouldn’t dare, the dragon challenged.
Try me.
But instead of surging up to wrestle, his dragon roiled back inside him, feeling suffused with mirth. Damian inhaled and exhaled slowly as Jamison stood.
“I’ll have to get back to you on that,” he said and went to run his gizmo over Zach’s body on the bed. And there, despite his best efforts not to, Damian’s eyes met Andi’s.
Whatever else was happening at that moment fell away. All the noise and commotion seemed to hush, and it was just him and her—a dragon-shifter and a gore-covered goddess.
Are you okay? he mouthed at her, unable to imagine that she could be.
Her eyebrows rose, betraying the utter absurdity of the question given the situation, and a sarcastic smile played at the edges of her lips.
Fuck, no, she mouthed back at him. But I’m all right.
He wanted to lunge in, grab her, and swoop her up, to take her someplace far away from here. But before he could even think to act, a group of uniformed men was clattering in behind a gurney.
“What the fuck happened here?” one of them asked.
Andi watched with increasing disbelief as Damian explained his friend’s wounds away as tiger disembowelment—and Grimalkin changed his form into one, going from a small Siamese into a three hundred pound black and orange striped beast in half a second.
“Fuck!” one of the paramedics shouted, spotting him.
“Run along, Stripey,” Damian told the tiger, and it did. “He’s usually very well behaved,” Damian told the paramedics. “You’ll find we have the appropriate wildlife permits.”
The rest of everything was explained—somehow—by Austin’s training and their quick thinking. Of course, they’d intubated the man. Of course, they’d put IVs into him. Of course, an eccentric billionaire would have all the tools and equipment for keeping himself alive nearby—of course, of course, of course. But the absent Mr. Blackwood “senior,” she pieced together from overhearing their story, wasn’t here presently—also, of course. He was off doing business in Dubai. She overheard Damian give the paramedics his own name though as Damian Blackwood the Third—the elderly billionaire’s “useless” younger cousin, according to her pre-job internet searches.
Listening in, Andi had a strong nursing hunch that Mr. Blackwood “senior” didn’t actually exist.
“We’ve got him, Miss,” one of the paramedics said, placing his hands over hers, preparing to take over pressure-duties.
“Really?” she asked, then shook her head at herself. She could barely handle what had happened; there was no need to tell anyone else about things. Andi pulled her hands back like she was doing a magic trick and dismounted the bed. The rest of the paramedics buckled him in, and she thought to ask, “Where are you taking him?”
“General,” the medic closest to her answered.
Another of them said at her expression, “Don’t worry, it’s a trauma center. They’ve seen worse.”
She already knew that. General was her home away from home. Her last shift seemed so long ago, and her next shift—fuck, no. She was calling in sick tonight. She’d been awake for over twenty-four hours, had had her life threatened at least twice, and had met a real-life dragon. A girl needed time to adjust.
“Hey,” Damian said from beside her. Austin was trailing after the men. She had a feeling he’d cop a ride in the ambulance, the stranger-with-the-metal-arm was gone as was the magic-cat, and something had happened to the blue-monster-thing when she hadn’t fully been paying attention.
“There’s not an older version of you running all this somewhere, is there,” she stated flatly.
He shrugged, not looking caught in the least. “No. Whenever we need the ‘elder’ Blackwood to go out, we slap some magic on my friend whose life you just saved, and he pretends to be an older version of me.”
“Why?”
“Because that way, everyone pays attention to him, and no one gives a shit about me.” His voice held a deep tone of irony as he went on. “Everyone knows I’m just the asshole. Go ask Google.”
Andi felt her eyebrows rise. Damian was the asshole who was also a dragon who had saved her life—before threatening to erase her memories. She looked up at him and caught him staring at her again—probably afraid she’d tell someone his secret—and she suddenly felt swamped by exhaustion. “Take me home?”
He nodded quickly. “Of course.”
Together they walked to the front of the house and out the main door. The fountain was fixed. The van had disappeared. And now they were heading toward a garage—not the one she’d wrecked before—and Damian used his handprint to unlock it. The white door rose up, revealing the sleekest looking car she’d ever seen inside, low-slung and gold, as shiny as an icicle. She didn’t recognize the make, but she saw the logo on the side.
“Pagani?” she asked aloud.
Damian snorted. “It means expensive, in Italian.” He moved to hold a winged door open for her, and she looked down at herself.
It was at this point she realized she was in shock. Because normal Andi would’ve never stood for this, being covered in human blood—and who knew what else from that monster-thing—down to her toes, definitely under her fingernails. Normal Andi would’ve been finding a vat of alcohol sanitizer to bathe in. As it was, she just asked, “And your expensive upholstery?”
He shrugged with a small smile. “It’s seen worse.”
She didn’t fight him on this. She just sank inside and let the buttery leather interior catch her, putting her seat belt on and curling up into a ball against the door. A pierced golden coin hung from his rearview mirror on a satin ribbon instead of fuzzy dice—because of course it did. She watched it sway back and forth as he drove and she let the hypnotic motion of it lull her into sleep.