The scent of blood hit her nose, and not just any blood, but the blood of one of her kind. Everything that followed, happened at seemingly lightning speed. Morgan drew her gun and came up from under the desk in a flash, but Rodolfo, his face a sunken, hideous, bloody mask of sadistic delight already had Travis in his grip, her angel’s head tilted at a hard angle to expose his throat, the Born’s teeth buried in viciously deep to feed on that powerful blood.
Travis’s eyes shifted to glowing yellow striated with black, his pupils narrowing to reptilian slits as they met hers. His bellow of “Run!” barely registering in her brain as she searched for an opportunity to shoot.
An unholy roar filled the air, Travis’s skin darkening, his face transforming, reshaping as a layer of dark green iridescent scales began to cover him. A wing broke free from his back, but instead of the feathers Morgan would have expected to see, the appendage was leathery, bat-like, and spike tipped at the joints. Before her eyes, her lover’s body began to pulse and grow.
Another wing ripped out of his back, the force of it throwing Rodolfo away before he’d released his teeth, the resulting tear in Travis’s throat gushing blood for a moment before the wound sealed over with scales and the unexpected transformation was complete. Travis had told her he was no angel. She had assumed at the time that he’d been teasing, letting her know that his character was far from angelic. How wrong she’d been.
A prehistoric screech shook the house, the windows shattering as his wings spread to their full impressive span, knocking out walls and a section of the roof as if they were made from nothing more substantial than tissue paper.
Morgan took cover as debris began falling around her and a creature long thought extinct took flight to hover menacingly over the villa, the scales covering his long neck beginning to glow with an internal fire. Shit. He was going to light the place up. About to make a run for it, Morgan was suddenly grabbed from behind as Rodolfo attempted to use her as a shield. Fucking coward. Closing her eyes, she held her breath as she let her body break apart into a cloud of bats knowing that Rodolfo couldn’t do the same. With a bellowed, “No!”, the Born’s arms closed on nothing but air as she flew upward to join her dragon in the sky where she watched with satisfaction as the first stream of fire let loose from her love’s fearsome jaws onto a screaming Olivier Rodolfo.
For Jamie,Morgan thought,and for Sophia.
∞∞∞
Lying naked on the ground in his human form behind Rodolfo’s blazing villa, Travis’s senses came back to him in a rush. He quickly turned to look at Morgan, who was sitting behind him with her arms around him and checked her for injuries. “You’re all right?” he asked, nearly breathless with worry. Since he wasn’t able to shift with any sort of regularity, when his beast did get released, it was hard to control, the dragon driving more than he consciously did.
“Not a scratch,” she promised before getting to her feet and offering him a hand up. “But now, after that show, wereallyhave to get out of here. The press is going to have a field day.” Her eyes moved over him and her mouth quirked up on one side with amusement. “I wonder which headline they’ll feature? A gunfight, a fire-breathing dragon, or a naked man streaking through the Garden District?”
Travis was dumbfounded. That was it? She wasn’t going to berate him for lying to her? Not that he’d intended to deceive her, yet by allowing her to keep her misconceptions, he supposed he had. He hadn’t exactly encouraged the lie, but he hadn’t corrected her assumption either. Being one of the last dragon shifters, caution had been instilled in him since his infancy. Like vampires, dragon shifters were immortal, but not invulnerable, and they had been hunted to near extinction with less than fifty known dragon shifters currently remaining worldwide. Yet, with Morgan, he’d known he could trust her, for Christ’s sake, he had fallen in love with the woman, was planning to spend the rest of his hopefully long life with her and still, he hadn’t shared the biggest part of himself with her. He deserved her fury, so why wasn’t she bringing it down on his head?
Sirens wailed, and horns blasted as firetrucks rushed to the scene. Morgan grabbed his hand and pulled him into a run. “Let’s not press our luck any further,” she yelled over her shoulder as they sprinted for his truck. Somehow, they managed not to be seen and once inside the dark, relatively quiet space of the cab, they both exhaled their breath in a whoosh. Not from the exertion of the run, rather from the sheer magnitude of the events that had unfolded that night.
A look of concern filled Morgan’s eyes as she lifted gentle fingertips to his neck. The area was burning, felt raw, and he knew it probably looked much worse than it was thanks to Rodolfo chewing on his neck. “The bleeding’s stopped,” she told him.
He nodded, lifting his own hand to feel the damage. “Good thing the wound wasn’t too bad or I would have crusted over.”
Morgan released a little surprised laugh that warmed his heart as she blurted, “What?”
He nodded. “When a dragon shifter sustains a significant injury, our bodies encase themselves in stone so that we have an opportunity to heal. It’s a defense mechanism. Only once we’re safe and strong enough to do so will we break out.”
Her face seemed to freeze with the exception of a single slow blink of her eyes before she grabbed his arm and excitedly told him, “I think I know where your sister is.”
Chapter Twenty-One
He had wanted to head straight back onto the property to see for himself. Only Morgan’s restraining hand and her common-sense lecture had held him back. As she had rightly pointed out, he was naked, the place was crawling with police and soon to be overrun by firetrucks, and Sophia was currently a statue of mammoth proportions that they had no way of moving by themselves. They needed to take a beat and come up with a plan, not run around – as she put it – with their dicks out.
She was absolutely right, of course. With a fire to battle, the police would step back and let the firemen do their jobs, coming in only once the blaze was contained to investigate. Anyone who saw Sophia would assume, as Morgan had, that she was a piece of art, a sculpture in Rodolfo’s collection, and while the wait hurt his heart, he needed to be smart and have patience. Not to mention clothes. Clothes would be good.
Forcing himself to put the truck into gear and vacate the area, he drove them to his apartment in the city. Kane, armed with one of Travis’s own guns, met them at the door. The vampire’s steely look quickly morphed into one of horror before he covered his eyes and laughingly declared, “You need to cover that shit up, man,” before backing away to allow them in.
Once the door was shut behind them, Kane asked “Why are you naked?” and then to Morgan, “Why is he naked?”
Morgan shot Travis a quick glance asking for permission, and Travis nodded. Her look, one of pride as she declared, “My boyfriend is a badass dragon shifter,” thrilled him down to his bones and made him want to grab her into his arms and kiss her breathless.
“No way,” was Kane’s excited response. “And I missed it? Shit. Please tell me you mounted that sick fuck, Rodolfo, on a spit and roasted him.”
“Extra crispy,” Morgan returned with a grin only for that smile to collapse a moment later when she asked, “How’s Jamie?”
Kane’s own expression noticeably dimmed. “I fed her and patched her up as best I could,” the vampire returned, shaking his head. “But she’s going to need time and definitely more blood. Those bastards smashed all of her fingers…” He trailed off with a snarl, unable to finish for the moment under the weight of his anger. Running a hand through his hair, he swallowed hard. “The only good thing is that they sewed her mouth shut rather than cutting out her tongue.”
“You were able to remove the wires okay?”
A sharp nod. “And splinted her fingers. Luckily, she was unconscious for most of it.”
“We’ll bring her to my place in the bayou,” Travis said. “The wolves have a healer there, not to mention more space to move around and fewer humans to ask questions.”
That had Kane raising an eyebrow. “Last I checked, shifters didn’t exactly get along with vampires and the last thing we need is to be fighting off a pack of wolves.”
