Charred Tears (#2, Heart of Fire) (2 page)

Chace grunted. “Can you fix it?”

Gunner was quiet for a moment, staring at the wound.

“Yo, Gun. Can you fix it?” Chace asked again.

“I don’t suppose you have any penicillin.” Gunner looked around. “Cabin. Meds, please.”

“It’s not magic anymore.”

“Then we’ll do this the old fashioned way.” Gunner rose.

Chace followed him with his gaze, his energy for the morning spent. He waited, doubtful Gunner was going to be able to save his head, but hoping his friend could.

“Okay, here we go.” Gunner tugged a stool over and set down a bucket full of supplies. He grabbed a pair of scissors and reached for Chace’s hair.

“No!” Chace all but shouted.

“Look, I need to scrub out the wound and clean it. Your hair is in the way and might have germs that can –”

“I’d rather die with hair than live bald.”

“Fine.” Gunner wiped his face and dropped the scissors in the bucket. “I was going to be gentle with you, but not now. You’re being arrogant and stupid, so that’s how I’ll treat you.” He pulled out a scrub brush with thick bristles that had been under Chace’s kitchen sink. “I’m gonna use peroxide to kill off what germs I can. It’s the only chemical you have in the house. Then I’m going scrub the shit out of your head.”

“For reals?” Chace eyed the stiff bristles of the scrub brush, not wanting to imagine the pain it was going to cause against his tender head wound.

“For reals, Chace. You wanna live? This is the price.”

This is gonna hurt.
What other choice did he have? No matter how he felt about what he’d done and how much he screwed up, he was only able to think about the parting words from the infuriated dragon shifter. If Chace died, so did Skylar.

He’d fucked her over enough. He wasn’t about to be the reason she died.

“Hopefully you pass out,” Gunner said, upbeat.

“Yeah,” Chace agreed, bracing himself. “Okay. Turn me platinum.”

I deserve all the pain in the world after what I did to her.

Chapter Two

“What happens after I find my dragon?” young Skylar asked her cheerful mother. Her legs swung, not yet long enough for her feet to touch the ground at the kitchen table in the farmhouse where they’d lived for a few months.

“You protect him.”

“I know.” Skylar rolled her eyes. “But what else do I do?”

Her mother looked up from her breakfast, blue eyes sparkling in a golden complexion framed by dark hair that matched Skylar’s.

“Well, you both help protect the others, too.”

“What others?”

“The dragons and other shifters.”

Skylar contemplated this for a long moment. “We might need a bigger farm.”

“No, Sky!” Her mother laughed. “They aren’t zoo animals. You don’t keep them on a farm. When they need help, you’ll know. And then you go and help them.”

“How?” she asked skeptically.

“The answer is in the palm of your hand.”

The dream slid away. Skylar awoke to the scents of bacon and eggs cooking. She lifted her head from the pillow and looked around. She’d fallen asleep on the couch and woke up in bed, no doubt because her newly found father carried her there.

She sat with a grimace. She felt sluggish and tired despite sleeping the night. With more effort than it should take, she put her hair back in a ponytail and swung her legs off the bed to reach the cool marble flooring.

Her hair was greasy, too, a feeling she absolutely hated. She pulled free a strand and eyed it. Normally, it took about four days for her hair to feel this yucky, and she’d washed it the day before.

Gotta be the humidity.
Trapped on an island somewhere near the equator, she wasn’t accustomed to the mugginess of the air.

She padded down a hallway to the open-aired kitchen at the edge of a vast living area with a near 360 degree view of the beaches and ocean around it. The contrast between the teal waters and sugary sand was beautiful this morning, and large palm trees leaned in an ocean breeze.

“I’m on a protein diet.”

She turned at the man’s voice, the peace she felt at the sight of the ocean fading.

“If you like carbs, you’re out of luck,” her father, a dragon shifter named Gavin, said.

“Fried chicken?” she half-joked, doubting he’d understand her humor.

“Nothing fried.”

Chace would get it.

The man who betrayed her – made love to her then traded her for his own selfish purposes – was probably the only who ever liked her sense of humor.

“I’m good with bacon and eggs,” she said and went to the breakfast counter overlooking the stove.

Gavin was tall, with a runner’s body and cold eyes the same color of hers. He was dressed all in black. He glanced up at her then back.

“How are you feeling?” he asked.

“A little blah,” she said with a shrug. “Maybe I slept too much.”

“Possibly. You’ve been asleep for almost a week.”

“Seriously?”

“Yes. The side-effect of having the bond you have with Chace broken.”

She frowned. “What bond?”

“The one that put that tat on your neck.”

She reached back absently to feel the raised tattoo. It was still there, a reminder of how she’d ended up tagged by a dragon shifter in the first place. It had to do with one of many incredibly erotic meet-ups that made her blood race just thinking about it.

Her father dropped a plate in front of her, yanking her attention from the thoughts of lying in bed naked with Chace, doing all kinds of yummy, naughty things.

“Oh,” she managed. “So it’s broken because he betrayed me?”

“Because he’s dead.”

She froze, the news a shock. A tremor went through her. She didn’t know what it was: fear, sorrow. Disbelief.

Not my dragon.
Was it stupid for her to want her betrayer to be alive and healthy, even if he was too far away for his wicked mouth and fingers to roam her body?

“Oh,” she said again. She felt her father’s gaze on her. “That’s, uh … interesting. Can I ask what happened?”

“One of the slayers got to him.”

Skylar picked up her fork and poked at the scrambled eggs, which were still steaming. According to her training as a dragon slayer, only a dragon slayer was able to kill a dragon, and she was the only one remaining.

She didn’t kill her own dragon. So either her father was lying …

Or those who brainwashed her into thinking she was supposed to kill dragons were the liars.

“This is too confusing,” she said. Either way, she didn’t want to think that she’d never see Chace again.

But why did she want to, after all he’d done?

“I’m glad his death doesn’t bother you,” Gavin said. “I was worried it might.” By his measured tone and the pause that followed his words, he was waiting for her reaction.

Skylar was quiet for a moment, exploring the instincts that had led her to Chace on more than one occasion.

“Honestly?” she started. “I’ve been lied to so much, I’m not going to believe he’s dead until I see it.”

“Interesting.” Her father’s voice was cold.

The silence between them made her skin crawl.

“Anyway, I’ve been asleep for a week,” she said, clearing her throat. “I take it things are back to … normal?”
Whatever normal is.

She looked up and found her father studying her.

“As normal as can be,” he replied.

The quiet moment grew awkward, tense. If she knew one thing about dragon shifters, it was that they were emotional. They made her – a nineteen-year-old who recently learned she’d been kidnapped and brainwashed – feel like the most stable person in the room.

“I’m just gonna sit in the living room and eat,” she said, uncomfortable under his gaze.

“I’m glad you’re okay.” The edge in his voice softened, and the words were genuine.

“Thank you. I think,” she replied. “This is still …” Every time she saw him, she remembered that she knew nothing about him or the life he’d shown her through thirteen years worth of scrapbooks. “…weird.”

“I know,” he said.

He’s not the warm, fuzzy type. That’s for sure.
She offered a small smile then went to the living room, where she was able to see the ocean. As she ate, she couldn’t help thinking that no part of her believed that Chace was dead.

He was a liar. A jackass. Traitor.
Dragon
shifter. But he wasn’t dead. She didn’t know how she knew it, but it came from the same place within her that the instinct to protect him had come from.

I’m not that lucky.

“You knocked up my mom without meaning to, which makes me think you dragons don’t know much about protection. I wonder if I should take a pregnancy test?” she asked.

The sound of Gavin choking on his coffee reached her, followed by his coughing.

“I’m just kidding.” She laughed without turning. It was nice to have the upper hand for once, even if it was a small victory.

“If he wasn’t … dead, I’d kill him,” her father said finally.

She smiled to herself and ate her breakfast, satisfied to know he cared on some level. He was impossible to read, like Chace – another trait of shifters – but it was nice to know the cold, distant man who claimed her as a daughter had feelings somewhere beneath the hardened exterior.

“I’m going to rest.” A nocturnal dragon, Gavin slept during the day.

She glanced over her shoulder to see him disappear down the hallway. After a few minutes, she set down her plate and went outside.

The balmy morning was too humid already, reminding her that she needed a good shower after sleeping for so long.

Skylar walked the beaches around the island, judging the perimeter to be about two miles around. In the center was a thatch of rainforest while her father’s home was built on a small hill on one end. There was no way off the island, no boats or even a dock for one. She saw no land anywhere in the distance.

Not even a plane flew overhead during the few hours she spent exploring the island getaway. Her father spent years finding a place where no one could get to what he valued most: his wife and daughter.

He’d succeeded, but it also meant there was no way off the tropical paradise, unless he flew her off.

Sweating from the heavy heat of the day, she returned to the living room and sat, gazing out the floor-to-ceiling windows of the cement and glass dwelling.

Was she protected or a prisoner? It was the latest mystery she had to solve, next to the missing memories from the past six years, what happened to her mother, what really happened to Chace, how to help the rest of the slayers who had been brainwashed …

She sighed and got up, needing to clean up after her walk. She took a long shower then returned to her room, digging around in the drawers to find clothing. To her surprise, the drawers were filled with new clothing in the brands and sizes she normally bought. She ruffled through some of the stacks. It didn’t seem possible that her father had gone shopping for her clothes. He seemed like the kind who didn’t notice what she wore, so long as she was safe.

Her eyes went to the two items she’d brought with her to meet him several days ago, the night Chace betrayed her. Her cell phone and one of the lassos sat on top of the dresser. She touched them, uncertain why the reminders of the life she thought was hers bothered her so much.

Too much unfinished business.
It was with more than Chace. The lasso represented all the others who were possibly brainwashed the same way she had been. It reminded her of the shifters it was supposed to catch, the ones that weren’t the threats she was trained to believe they were.

Skylar closed the sock drawer. Chace had a magic cabin. If her father didn’t go shopping for her clothes, was it possible he did, too? And if so, had her escape route off the island been staring her in the face since she arrived?

“If you’re a magic dragon lair, I’m looking for pink socks,” she whispered.

A few seconds later, she opened the drawer again. Instead of the white socks, it was filled with pink ones.

Interesting.
 Chace wasn’t the only dragon that took his home with him.

“Think I just found my way off this rock,” she said, satisfied.
After I try to get some more answers tomorrow.

Chapter Three

Chace cracked his eyes open and stared at the morning light on his ceiling. By his count, it was the third morning since Gunner arrived and did the impossible by making his pain worse. He’d awoken the past two days too fevered to move or think.

This morning, his mind was clear, though his body felt beyond trashed. He was hungry and achy, and his skin was gummy, like he’d been swimming in salt water and had forgotten to rinse off.

Maybe Gunner tried to drown me.

Chace rolled onto his side and then pushed himself up. His hair was soaked, along with his clothing, as if the fever had broken shortly before he woke. His legs shook when he stood, and his head spun. The cabin smelled of blood and fever, and he made his way on unsteady legs towards the door.

Gunner was sprawled out on the couch, sleeping soundly. Chace paused and thanked his friend silently for the help. Pitying the man who had probably been up for three days straight to nurse him, he shuffled out of the cabin as quietly as possible.

The morning was chilly, the sun not yet visible above the forest behind the cabin. Night retreated ahead of him, and the savory scent of the ocean and pine trees eased some of his angst.

Too weak to go far, Chace sank into the sand on the beach he’d chosen as his cabin’s final home. He shifted and wrapped his arms around his legs, shivering in the early morning air.

“A thousand years did not change you.” At first the female voice was too ethereal for him to believe it was real.

Assuming a fever dream had lingered, Chace shrugged his shoulders and focused on the waves racing towards him before they ran back to the ocean. The rhythmic movement and sound was soothing.