Fury of Fire (10 page)

“Forever is a long time,
bellmia
.”

“Jerk.”

He chuckled. “Probably.”

“Undeniably,” she countered, pushing against his chest, her let-me-go message clear.

He released her slowly, but didn’t back away. Instead, he locked her in place, spreading his big hand across the small of her back. Dipping his head, he placed his mouth next to her ear. She shivered as his lips brushed her.

He nipped her gently, showing her a little teeth. “Be very careful, Myst. I love a good challenge…and it sounds like you just threw one into the open.”

Goosebumps spiked on her skin. “I wasn’t—”

“I think you were and…I’ll see your bet and raise you.” His fingers slid along her spine. The gentle caress soothed, yet somehow stimulated at the same time. “What do you think about that?”

Every one of her muscles went tense as she fought to hide her reaction. He didn’t need to know she was attracted to him. Good God,
she
didn’t even want to know that, so she put on her big girl panties and said, “This isn’t a game, Bastian. This is my life, so screw you and your stupid challenges. You can’t keep me here if I don’t want to stay.”

“Hmm…I guess that leaves me only one option, doesn’t it?” He shifted his hold on her, slid the tips of his fingers up the back of her arm, killing her with the purr in his voice and the heat in his hands. “I’m going to make you want to stay.”

“It won’t happen.” Okay, time to open her eyes and escape. But, man, her focus was shot. She couldn’t see a thing but indistinct blobs.

“We’ll see. Now, how are the eyes. Better?” Releasing her, he stepped back, taking his warmth with him, leaving her standing unprotected in the cold.

Myst rubbed her eyes with her fingertips, mangling her eyelashes.

“Well?”

“Well, what?” she snapped, sick to death of him and his niceness.

“Vision clearing?”

Done with the rubbing routine, Myst opened her eyes again and realized two things at once. Bastian was still standing way too close. She took two steps back, correcting the oversight. And the second? She stood at the end of a long corridor. A wide one—maybe eight feet across—with polished concrete floors and whitewashed stone walls…the old kind with chisel marks on them, ones medieval builders might have used to construct cathedrals and archways.

Embedded in the floor, round lights ran like twin runways, lining the hallway’s outer edges, providing the only source of illumination. She glanced at the ceiling. At least twelve feet high, the smooth plaster glowed in the low light, an expanse of white that went on forever.

“Where are we?”

“The underground lair of Black Diamond…my home.”

Brushing the hair out of her face, her focus shifted to the baby. Myst held out her arms. “Give him back.”

Without hesitation, Bastian handed him over, making the transfer both gentle and seamless. As the baby settled—small and soft in her arms—she breathed easier and checked him again, searching for problems. Everything looked good: the newborn’s chest rose and fell in a steady rhythm, the color of his skin was a healthy pink, and his heartbeat was still strong.

She nodded at Bastian.

He tipped his chin—acknowledging the thank you she refused to say out loud—and watched her tuck the baby against her shoulder before starting up the slight incline of corridor. After a few strides, he pivoted to walk backwards, his gaze glued to her, his heavy-soled boots landing softly on the hard floor.

“One way in. One way out of Black Diamond, Myst.” He pointed at the now solid wall behind her. “Through that doorway.”

Resisting the urge to look over her shoulder, she suppressed a shiver. No way she wanted to pass through that God-awful thing again. She wasn’t certain she would survive it. Not without Bastian’s hand to hold.

His mouth curving up at the corners, he gave her a knowing look. “If you think you’re going to get past me here…think again.”

The words echoed, the inherent threat bouncing off concrete as Myst followed Bastian’s retreat, keeping pace in the deserted corridor. He was right. The portal wasn’t her way out, but that didn’t mean his home was inescapable. Bastian might want her to believe it, but that didn’t make it true. A problem, after all, could be solved many different ways.

Sight-stealing portal be damned.

Bastian and Black Diamond had a weakness. All she needed to do was find it.

Rikar hated the in-house clinic at Black Diamond. The overhead lights were too bright, the smell too clean, the walls too white. Like a human doctor’s office, everything belonged somewhere: in a drawer, a cabinet, a fucking rollaway cart. The place was a clean freak’s wet dream. Clutter-frickin’-free, Peter Walsh approved.

All right, so the neatness served a purpose. Was no doubt a welcome quality in the whole treat-the-patient thing, but man, that didn’t mean he liked the clinical vibe.

Or the fact his friend had ass-planted him in the room.

On an examination table with crinkly, white paper.

Oh, happy-happy-joy-joy. Someone just shoot him now.
Please.

Legs dangling off the side of the table, shitkickers swinging in midair, he eyed his friend—resident computer genius cum occasional medic—as he approached with one of those carts. Rikar watched the right front wheel flap, the wobble laying down an audio track of flutter-flutter-squeak-squeak as though the thing had a bad case of performance anxiety.

Well, all right. At least something in the place wasn’t perfect. For some reason, the idea made Rikar ease up and unclench the fist attached to his uninjured arm…even though he knew what was coming.

“What the hell are you grinning about?” Shaved chrome dome and mocha-colored skin gleaming under the fluorescents, Sloan slowed his roll, bringing the supplies alongside the examination table. The cart was loaded with gauze at one end; medical instruments that looked more like torture tools were laid out with surgical precision on the other. The collection of stainless steel flashed on the blue cloth. “You think it’s funny I gotta reattach your arm?”

Rikar glanced at the gash bisecting his forearm. Blood welled, his heart providing a steady pump of plasma. Okay, so the rogue had gone Freddy Krueger on his ass and spilt him wide open, but a full-on reattach? “A little over the top, don’t ya think?”

Sloan shrugged. “I watched
The Terminator
tonight.”

“The first one?” He hoped so…Arnold rocked in that one.

“Uh-huh.”

“That explains the overkill.”

Picking up something pointy and sharp, Sloan asked, “Ready?”

“Go for—ow! Jesus, Sloan…” Rikar jerked as his friend went postal on his arm, prodding deep into the wound. “Watch what you’re—fuck!”

“Stop being such a pansy.” Done torturing him with tweezers, Sloan got busy with saline solution. As the cold spray washed into the cut, barbs of pain spiraled up his arm, and Rikar gave his colorful vocabulary another workout.

Goddamn it, the brother was a straight-up masochist.

Unfazed, Sloan shook his head, but didn’t let up. “Man up, my brother.”

“Man up, my dick.” Grinding his back molars, Rikar tried not to twitch as the saline made another pass, but…Jesus, that hurt. And the blood…goddamn, he was bleeding all over the place now. He could feel it, dripping over the side of his arm, falling from the tip of his middle finger to go splat on the floor.

“Shit, Rikar.”

“Yeah, I know.”

And he did know that he was in trouble. No way he should still be leaking like a sieve. His kind didn’t bleed out from a wound like his. Their dragon DNA went to work too quickly for that, closing the wound fast and neat.

Yeah, so the nasty gash cut through muscle to reach bone. But that was nothing new. Injuries happened. Arteries sometimes got sliced. All of the warriors came home dinged up from time to time; the slice and dice with the Razorbacks the rule, not the exception.

Current plasma loss aside, however, tonight was unusual in another way. Rikar frequently got within range of rogue claws, but he always took care of himself in the icy cold of his suite. The drill went something like…clean it up, throw some stitches along with Polysporin at it, and, voilá, problem solved.

This one, though, was a bitch. With a crazy kick.

Rikar grabbed for the edge of the table as his vision tunneled. “Sloan…”

“Lie down.” One big mitt planted on Rikar’s shoulder, Sloan helped him shift his legs up onto the table. Rikar wanted to protest, but with his head gone topsy-turvy, pain nailed him with a great, big body slam. As his back touched down on crinkly paper, his friend murmured, “Breathe through it…and give me a sec. I’ll get it ready.”

“No…problem.” Rikar closed his eyes.

Holy shit, he thought the mental mind spin was bad enough, but now his stomach was sloshing around, making all kinds of noise. And…where the hell were his legs? He couldn’t feel them anymore.

A faucet got cranked across the room. Water started running, and a second later, he heard a door open and close. Plastic rustled and then God, yes…something hard fell, bouncing like marbles against steel. The sound was music to Rikar’s ears.
Hurry,
he wanted to say,
hurry
. He needed it…needed—

Sloan came back, leaning into his visual field. “Come on, buddy. Up and at ’em.”

With a groan, Rikar rolled, helping his friend get his two-hundred-and-fifty-pound, six-foot-six frame vertical. The trip across the room wasn’t a picnic. Yeah, not a red-and-white-checkered cloth in sight, just blurry blobs and a boatload of nausea as they shuffled across the hospital-grade floor.

Not bothering to undress him, Sloan lifted Rikar’s sorry ass over the lip of the tub and set him down—leathers and all—into the ice bath.

Fuuuuck, yeaaaaaah.

“Good?”

“More…” Sore all over, Rikar sank chin deep in the arctic chill. “More.”

Something went click—a cell phone, maybe—as Sloan left the side of the tub, heavy footfalls bouncing around the quiet room. The freezer door opened with a suctioning hiss. Another round of plastic crinkled, telling him more ice was on its way. Thank Christ. He craved the cold, needed to get his core temperature down. If he lost consciousness before that happened, he would overheat—coma territory for a frost dragon.

The first round of ice chips hit him just where Rikar wanted it, up around his shoulders and the back of his neck. Sloan packed him in well, pouring bag after bag of cubes into the cold water and on top of him.

His eyes drifted closed. He burrowed in, nestled his too-warm cheek against the chips, listened to the fast click of fingers on a phone keypad as he drifted on a sick wave of Deepshitsville.

Sloan’s baritone broke through, sounding clipped as someone answered the call, “Ven, where’s Daimler?” A pause. Another male’s voice on the line then, “Shit. We got problems down here. No…it’s Rikar…uh-huh…yeah, exactly. Just get through them and get your ass down here…yeah…quick as you can. We’re losing our boy.”

Fighting the need for a puke bucket, Rikar cracked his eyelids. “New shipment?”

“Yeah. The anti-venom’s buried ass-deep in boxes. Daimler’s out running errands, but Venom’s digging for it.”

Poison. Yup, that explained his spectacular ass-plant.

Anyone else would’ve gotten the chills as the toxin went to work on his central nervous system. But, oh no, not him. Color him lucky. He got the opposite effect, a well of heat that his frosty side couldn’t handle. And at the worse time…when their miracle man was out buying coffee at Starbucks or some shit.

Figured, didn’t it? The second he needed the guy, he got good and ghost…poof gone, nowhere to be found. Although, that wasn’t exactly fair. As a Numbai—a member of a special species born into Dragonkind’s care—Daimler couldn’t be blamed for his absence. It was his job to keep the lair organized and well stocked, to caretake like you read about. The TLC routine had been bred into Daimler from birth, his sole purpose and pleasure to look after those he served.

Still, Rikar wished the male’s special brand of I-got-you-covered hadn’t included leaving the lair tonight. Cuz, if the guy were here? The anti-venom would already be in his veins.

“Hang in there, buddy…help’s coming.”

The baritone sounded close, almost as though Sloan was kneeling right next to the tub. The gentle touch came next, against his temple before brushing over his hair, unsticking the strands from the side of his face.

And wasn’t that a total turnaround? Was he really feeling that?

Rikar tried to open his eyes, but his eyelids weighed five hundred pounds…each. His mouth wasn’t faring much better. He couldn’t get his tongue to work right.

Another pass. Another soft stroke over the top of his head.

Yeah, he felt that, but man, it didn’t compute. Sloan was the only one here, and the warrior was a standoffish SOB who rarely touched anyone. Bastian called him a “long-time loner,” so used to his own company and his computers he existed in a world of his own making. The fact that the male might care about them—about his fellow Nightfury brothers—had never entered Rikar’s mind.

Swallowing past his dry throat, Rikar worked some saliva into his mouth. He had to tell Sloan…needed to—

“Is the ice helping?”

“No. Whatever the bastard hit me with is…fuck. I need. More. Ice,” he said, or at least, Rikar thought that was his voice, slurring all over the place as cold water sloshed and more of the chipped-and-chilly got packed around his head.

The frosty side of him sighed, loving the arctic blast, but the relief didn’t last. The heat pushed it aside, shredding him from the inside out. As he rode the pain train, he concentrated on breathing: in, out…in, out. The oxygen infuse didn’t help. The pain was too intense, making his legs churn beneath the water, the soles of his shitkickers slipping against the bottom of the stainless steel tub.

God, the enemy was getting smarter, using their brains for a change.

Hurrah for them…the rogue jerk-offs.

Moisture beaded on his skin. Rikar swiped at it, annoyed by the drip-drip-drip in his eyes, wondering what…

Christ, the droplets weren’t from the water. It was sweat.

Bigger alarm bells rang inside his head, taking him into apocalyptic territory. A fever…the only thing guaranteed to kill a frost dragon. And he was sliding fast. He never perspired. Ever. He was too cold-blooded for that.

Rikar shifted around in the tub, the agony worsening with each breath. “The…anti…venom?”

“Coming. Ven’s gonna—”

The airlock hissed as the clinic’s glass-paneled door slid open.

“What the fuck?”

The question cracked the quiet wide open, coming at Rikar like a short burst of automatic gunfire. He recognized that deep voice. Bastian. Thank God. His best friend was here. He would—

“Oh, my God!” Female voice…short pause…a bit of a shuffle, and then, “Here, Bastian…take him. And you…” Another pause. Light footsteps coming closer and, “Status report. Right now.”

“Ahh…he’s…shit, I’m…” Sloan’s stuttering pierced through the mind fog that imprisoned Rikar. Wow. That was new. The male sounded shell-shocked, shaken out of his normal calm.

But why?

Rikar concentrated hard, fought through all the thick-white-and-fluffy mucking up his head, searching for the answer.

Someone cleared his throat. “Slashed right forearm. Poison’s gone deep. Anti-venom’s coming.”

“Are you IV-equipped?”

“I…we—”

“If you are, I need a bag…stat.”

Small hands touched his face, then slid away; one landed on his throat and found his pulse while the other moved around to cup the nape of his neck. Oh, man, that felt good. The touched eased him, took some of the pain, scrambling his molecules in a reenergized frenzy. Hmm yeah, that was better. He wasn’t tumbling down the rabbit hole anymore…he was floating, buoyant instead of sinking inside his own skull.

The voice came again: soft, lyrical, and steady as hell. Female and Bastian…here together. Rikar’s brain kicked over. Not good…so not good. Bastian’s female—the one named…something…what was it?…hell, he couldn’t remember—was touching him. And he was taking from her, his body drawing on her energy to fight the infection now streaming through his blood.

A nasty snarl rolled through the clinic.

Oh, Christ. Bastian was going to rip him a new body orifice…the stem-to-stern kind. Once he claimed her, a male never shared his female. Ever. Her hands on him was a bad idea, tantamount to suicide.

But, God, he needed the white-hot energy she was feeding him.

Still, Rikar made the effort, jerked in the water, squirming to get away from her. She held firm, moving his arm from under the ice. With a gentle touch that made him groan, the female checked his injury, soothing him with soft words before turning to bark orders at the others.

Unable to stop himself, Rikar slipped beneath her spell even as he marveled at the unfairness. Sure, she of the glorious energy would probably save him, but it wouldn’t matter. The game would end the same way, because the instant the healing sleep let him go, Bastian would hand him his balls on the end of a blade.