Page 58 of Flames and Blood

I should be afraid of a thing that looks like that with the blood still on it.

I’m not. My dragon comes straight up at the sight of him, all of her, harder than she’s come up for anyone. Heat floods my chest, and my mouth waters and my whole drugged body tries to turn toward him at once.

Gideon Crowe.

Vex shifts. Not all the way—his back bows and dark scales break up his arms, and his hands go to claws—half a dragon in a bedroom. He’s bigger than Gideon now. He’s older than anything else in this valley.

It doesn’t help him.

“What is the meaning of this?” he roars, voice roughened by the beast sharing his body.

The vampire doesn’t respond. Not with words. And I can already see that this is not a fair fight.

Vex has been valuable for his bloodline his whole long life…but nothing more than that. It’s clear that he has never had to fight anybody. Gideon crosses the space and takes him off his feet before the shift is even finished.

Even drugged, I flinch as he crashes to the floor. Something cracks, and he screams, but it doesn’t deter his attacker.

After that it’s fast, and it’s ugly, and I watch all of it because I said I would. A claw opens the vampire’s shoulder to the bone.

“Do you have any idea who I am?” the half-dragon snarls, sweeping a huge arm in a wide arc.

“Don’t know. Don’t care.” Gideon doesn’t slow down. He gets a hand around the old dragon’s jaw and an arm across him and drives him down. There’s a wet sound, and a scream. Vex goes down against the foot of the bed and stays there.

He doesn’t die quickly. He works at the carpet with one clawed hand for a while, slow, and then the scales sink back under his skin as he goes, until it’s just an old man on the floor. The rasping sounds grow quieter. Then they stop.

Crowe stands over him with blood running down his own arm and doesn’t wait for him to die. He turns to the bed. To me.

Then the door fills up again.

Renwick comes through the broken frame with two men behind him. He sees the floor, and he stops.

He isn’t openly angry. His face has gone gray.

“Do you know what you’ve done?” he says. He’s quiet. He doesn’t raise his voice once. “That was the last strong male of the Vex line. There’s only one more alive, and he can’t breed where he is. Fourteen hundred years, and you’ve ended it in a bedroom. Over a woman.”

“Then it should have ended sooner,” Crowe says.

“You have no idea what you’ve cost. Not his people. All of us.” Renwick’s eyes go to me on the bed and back. “There are fewer of us every year. Men like you are why.”

“Men like me are why she’s leaving.”

Two more men come through the door behind Renwick. Not his team. They’re here with the vampire. I recognize one from the night in the van. The other is older. Both of them are as cold as Gideon, and both look lethal.

“Get them!” Renwick barks at the men he brought with him.

The newcomers exchange glances, and the room turns into a fight.

I see about a third of it. I’m flat on a bed in the middle of it, and I can’t lift my head more than a hand’s width, so I catch parts of it. The older one drives one of the guards into the wall hard enough to crack the plaster. The man slides down it and crumples.

“Door’s clear,” he says. “Get the rest.”

The younger one is somewhere to my left, low and fast. A gun goes off twice. He takes it out of the man’s hands; there’s another sickening crunch, and it doesn’t go off again. Renwick shouts a name. A man answers it once. He doesn’t answer the second shout.

A body comes down across the end of the bed and rolls onto the mattress by my feet before sliding off. A chair breaks somewhere to my right. The candles go over, and I smell the smoke off the carpet before I see it, acrid wool smoke curling up past the foot of the bed, and nobody stops to deal with it.

I can’t help any of it, and I can’t get away from it. I lie there, and I keep my eyes moving, and pray for my dragon to do something.

Then a hand slides under my back and another under my knees, and I know it’s him before I see him, because he’s cold and everything else in this room is hot.