Stranded with the Cajun (Captured by a Dragon-Shifter Book 3) (6 page)

D
rake felt
a shiver of awareness course through his body. He jerked his head up from where he stared at the dark water. A car drove on the nearby dirt road. He stood next to the broken dock outside his home, listening for boats, as he did every night.

The emptiness building inside him since Lori had driven away with the sheriff was unbearable, the loneliness worse than ever before. How could humans not know when they had found their life mate? One look and he’d been sure. At the time, he hadn’t realized what was happening on the airboat, but his body had known. He’d felt she was familiar to him.

He kept the sound of the car in the back of his thoughts as he concentrated on the water. Had the careless hunters taken to land, he could have tracked them. Since they stayed on a boat, he had to stand and wait for them to come back. Perhaps this was his purpose in life—standing on the shore waiting. Jackson had called him a guardian of the bayou.

Drake didn’t want to be a guardian.

Duty demanded he do just that.

The ache filled him, radiating from the missing piece of his soul. He’d given it to Lori. With each passing hour, that much became clearer. One second was all it had taken. One look. One touch. One kiss.

One curse to live his days empty.

Guardian of the bayou.

Alone.

The gods were indeed cruel.

His shifted eyes peered over the water. In this form, he could better hear and see in the dark. He focused on the distant familiar details, watching for changes. The sound of the car slowed. It had come closer, but he ignored it. He again focused on the swamps.

Drake had no idea how long he stood in his misery, waiting. Suddenly, he frowned. Something was not right. He looked toward his home, then to the trees. The forest did not make its usual sounds. He directed his hearing toward the dirt road. No car. No motor. Footsteps. Animal? No. Two legs. Slow steps. Stop. Rustle of leaves.

Drake held perfectly still as he scanned the trees. The moon did not provide much light to help his search in the darker shadows. A tiny pop sounded, and he quickly turned his attention toward the noise. Fire erupted in his shoulder, forcing him to stumble backward.

“Nice shot! That’s some fine hunting,” someone yelled, the tone laughing and excited. “You got it, Mr. Howards.”

Drake grabbed his shoulder and felt blood trickle over his fingers. The initial fire did not lessen. Pain burned its way down his arm and up his neck.

“Grab it,” a quieter voice answered. “Don’t let my trophy get away.”

The sound of running footsteps crunched twigs and rocks. Drake stumbled again, a little dazed by what was happening. Another pop sounded. His leg hit the broken dock, and he fell back into the dark water. Liquid cocooned him as he bumped against the swamp bed. His leg jerked, but he couldn’t move his arm to swim or defend himself. Another shot sounded, breaking the surface of the water. A light passed over him. He heard yelling but couldn’t make out the distorted words.

Some guardian he’d turned out to be.

Another ache grew, worse than the pain in his body, as he thought about Lori. This was not how his journey was supposed to end.

“
Y
ou’re trespassing
.”

At least, that’s what Lori thought the old woman said in thick Cajun English. Even if the words were translated incorrectly by Lori’s brain, the fact Ursa held a rifle on her was easy enough to understand. She was trespassing, and she was not welcome.

This was Ursa? The woman who filled Drake’s head full of nonsense and convinced him to drunken skinny dip in a fake Cajun induction ceremony? This was the woman Lori had been jealous of?

Ursa’s thin, homemade dress hung on her small frame. But for all the look of frailty, Ursa held the gun steady. The woman had been easy enough to find once Lori had asked a couple locals…and bought a case of their local jams.

“My name is Lori,” Lori stated loudly from her place on the woman’s lawn. She was careful to keep her shaking arms lifted to her sides to show she wasn’t a threat.

“I know who you are. Sheriff warned me about you,” Ursa stated. Lori had to listen very carefully to understand her.

The small shack looked as if it had been built by hand a hundred years ago but had been maintained with loving care, or at least care out of necessity. Two flame lanterns and one battery-powered light illuminated the porch and yard. The owner, by all appearances, never left her piece of the swamp.

“Dat boy saved my life. He saves a lot of lives. Now you just get before dey…” The rest of the sentence was lost in a rapid, undecipherable stream of half Cajun English, half Cajun French threats that mumbled together only to be punctuated by the tilt of Ursa’s gun.

“He saved me too. Were you trapped in the swamps?” Lori asked, trying to keep the conversation civil. At the moment, she couldn’t picture Ursa needing help with anything. Her mind raced, hoping it wouldn’t discharge. But it was hard to think of options when she couldn’t quit staring at the end of the gun as metal glinted in the soft light.

“No. I know you know about Drake. De…” Again the words were lost.

“I’m sorry, I don’t understand.”

“I said no,” Ursa repeated, talking slowly as if Lori was simpleminded. “I know you know about Drake. De sheriff told me. De night he arrived, coming out of dem swamps like a dragon-man creature from de bayou, I had a gun in my mouth. He saved me. God, gods, doesn’t matter who sent him. He’s here. He’s my family. And in de backwaters, we have ways of protecting our family.” Ursa lifted her rifle and pointed it steadily at Lori.

“People know to come looking for me here.” Lori hoped the woman didn’t detect the lie.

“Let dem come. Dem gators have dey usefulness.”

Lori swallowed nervously and glanced over her shoulder to the distant water and then back to the gun. “Please. I just want to talk to him. If he tells me to leave him alone, I will.”

“Shush!”

Lori jumped as Ursa charged forward. She scrambled to get out of the way. To her surprise, instead of threatening her further, the old woman went to the edge of the water and looked in. Lori didn’t hear anything to warrant the apt attention. The croak of frogs punctuated the night, a singing backdrop over a fetid landscape.

With Ursa’s attention turned away, the prudent thing would have been to run for her car. Lori’s trembling limbs wouldn’t move that fast, and instead she crept as quietly as she could toward freedom.

“Stop moving. Sometin’s out dere.” Ursa lifted her gun and gestured it at the water, following a subtle ripple along the surface as it came closer.

Not knowing why she thought it, Lori whispered, “Drake.”

Lori instantly changed course as she was drawn to the water’s edge. She mindlessly placed her hand on the barrel to turn the weapon from the water. Ursa jerked the gun away from her.

“Don’t,” Lori said, watching the water. “Drake.”

“How…?” Ursa lowered her gun.

“Drake?” Lori yelled, very sure that he was near.

At the sound of her voice, something broke the surface of the water. Drake looked just as he had when he’d come up from the swamp to rescue her, how he’d looked in the deleted pictures. Lori stiffened to see him in his shifted from. Somehow, seeing him was different now. She knew he was real.

She’d been calling him a lizard man, but he was more dinosaur than lizard. The light behind her shone on his face, contrasting the thick brown skin protruding over his nose. His lips were parted as he gasped for breath, showing the tips of his fangs. A taloned hand pressed to his shoulder as he came from the water.

His yellow eyes met hers and he stumbled.

“Drake?” Lori charged into the shallow water without thought. She caught him by his arm and steadied his steps. The hard shell of his body felt strange against her hand. Blood trickled over his fingers from his shoulder. She tried to hurry him out of the water and onto land. “What happened? Were you bit?”

His eyes met hers, eyes that were far from human, and yet she felt him in that gaze. The man was there, beneath the hard armor plating and scary visage. He had characteristics of a medieval dragon if that creature had mated with a human. “What are you doing here?”

His gruff voice sounded harsher than she remembered.

“I couldn’t find you,” Lori said. A rush of nerves and emotions built inside her. Everything she felt like saying sounded strange in her head. Following the impulse to jump into his arms and kiss him would be even stranger. Instead, she mumbled, “I found Ursa.”

Ursa interrupted with a thick stream of accented words. Drake answered the woman in kind, fluently speaking to her as if he were a native to the bayou.

“What’s going on?” Lori demanded, not understanding them.

“She offered to shoot you,” Drake said.

Lori stiffened.

“I told her that is not necessary,” he added.

Lori thought she saw him smile, but it was too hard to say.

Ursa grumbled and turned to her house. “Bring him.”

“Why were you looking for me?” he asked when they were relatively alone.

“Why are you bleeding?” she demanded. “What happened?”

“It will heal.” Drake leaned heavily on her even though she could tell he was trying not to.

“This isn’t right. You need a doctor. My car is right over—”

“No doctors. I do not wish to be sent to Roswell. I have seen the pictures.”

“The alien-conspiracy place? That’s not real. It’s a giant hoax. Aliens don’t ex…ist.” Lori suddenly realized how ridiculous that belief sounded given the circumstances.

“I assure you aliens are real. I have met several who have come to my planet.”

“Alien,” she whispered. That thought hadn’t occurred to her. She’d slept with an alien. Not just a genetic offshoot of human, but an alien. Outer space. Alien. She breathed harder, trying not to hyperventilate. The weight against her arm grew, and if she left him now, he’d fall over.

“It amazes me how vain humans are to think they are the only lifeforms in the entire universes.” He winced and pressed harder to his shoulder. She felt his muscle flex beneath her hand as they made slow progress to the porch.

“You need a hospital. Let me take you. I’ll call the sheriff on the way and have him meet us. He seems protective of you. He’ll run whatever interference you need.” She tried to redirect his steps toward her car. “Can you shift back into your other self and look human again?”

“I will heal better in this form.” He forced her to turn back toward the porch. “I need rest.”

“Hurry up, boy,” Ursa demanded from inside the home. “Guns are loaded. Dem assholes going to get a butt full of hot lead if dey try to cross my doorstep.”

“Guns?” Lori repeated. “For the alligator that bit you?”

“For the hunters who shot me,” he corrected.

“You’re shot?” Lori gasped. Why wasn’t he in a panic?

“It appears the people shooting at the shore were actually hunting aliens. It seems they thought I would make a trophy. Though, I’m not really an alien.”

She glanced behind them toward the water before shoving him into a faster gait. He grunted in protest, but she didn’t care. “What the hell? Dammit, Drake, get inside. How can you be so calm about this?”

“How is a shot worse than a bite?”

“Being hunted by humans is worse than being bit by an alligator in the swamp. An alligator isn’t going to try and track you down to finish the—oh my God.” Lori shook her head in denial. “He couldn’t have… Oh my God.”

“Are you praying for me?” Drake leaned against the door frame and stopped.

“It’s my fault. Mr. Howards from the inn.”

“I heard someone say that name,” Drake said.

“He kept asking me about the lizard man. I told him nothing, but he seemed to think I knew where to find you. I thought my computer was glitching, but the inn has a public internet connection, and I think he must have hacked my machine and copied the photos I took outside your house. He could have used my GPS metadata to track you.”

“I am not a lizard, and I am not technically an alien,” Drake stated. “My people are dragon-shifters. It is said we lived here on Earth long ago and left through the portals to escape human persecution. Cat-shifters came with us. I have simply returned to the home of my ancestors”

“That is what you took away from what I said? You’re worried about being mistaken for a lizard alien? Come on, we need to go inside. You can’t go home.” Lori made a small noise of exasperation and urged him to go inside the cabin. She shut the door. “Do you have a…” Lori’s voice gave out as she looked around. Inside of Ursa’s home wasn’t some dirty backwater shack. Light came from a lamp on a highly polished table. The antique wood furniture complemented the pristine rugs and surrounded a giant flat screen television mounted on the wall over a fireplace. Shelves lined the side of the mantel, filled with DVDs.

“Don’t get ideas,” Ursa warned as if Lori was about to steal something.

“Drake needs medical attention,” Lori said, not bothering to argue with the woman. “Why am I the only one who seems to get the urgency of this situation?”

“Why?” Ursa frowned. “He’ll be fine. Always is.” She jerked her thumb over her shoulder. “You know where to go,
chere
.”

Drake nodded and moved to follow her direction to the dining room table. Ursa produced a sewing box from a cabinet and followed him. She opened the lid and took out a crude metal instrument and a bottle of whiskey. Handing him the drink, she then waited until he took several gulps before beginning to probe at his shoulder.

Drake turned his attention to Lori. It was hard to see if he was in pain by the hardness of his shifted face. Lori approached him slowly.

“Why were you searching for me?” Drake asked. His eyes narrowed as Ursa poked around his wound.

“I…” Lori gave a small, helpless gesture. “You never came for dinner. I wanted to see you, to thank you, to, um, see you. How are you?”

Drake looked at his injured arm and back at her. “I am well.”

Lori winced as Ursa shoved her instrument deeper into Drake’s oozing shoulder. She remained quiet, watching the procedure with a feeling of horror.