There was no way to drop off Andi at her apartment without remembering the last time he’d left her there—only this time he was in a lightly disguised assault vehicle and with the majority of his crew. The tour bus jumped the curb because there was no way for it to make the tight turn into the parking lot, and then it pulled to a rumbling stop at the bottom of her stairs.
“Nice to meet you all,” Andi said, giving everyone a group wave as Damian opened the door again for her to get out. She hopped to the asphalt lightly, and he followed her, closing the door behind himself quickly so no one could make any quips.
“Can I walk you to your door?” he asked her.
She looked over his shoulder at the SUV’s tinted windows and gave him a half-smile. “You do realize they’re like all literally watching us?”
“Let them,” he said, angling around her to take the first step and offer out his hand. She didn’t take it, but she didn’t fight him following her up, either.
Damian watched her as her ass swayed, and the dress’s slit parted, showing glimpses of her tawny thigh, her eyes half-lidded, her clenched jaw jutting strong, and she was such a complicated mix of things to him right now. Fragile, but unbreakable—the one woman he ought to stay away from for her sake, the thing he couldn’t help running toward for his. They reached her blue front door, illuminated only by a stuttering porch light, and he watched her fish around in her small purse for her keys, pleased to have a slightly longer reason to be in her presence, and unable to resist teasing her. “You know, if you forgot them, I know somewhere else you can sleep.”
Her eyebrows rose as her lips fell into a disbelieving pout. “Just sleep, eh?” she said, pulling her keys out to triumphantly dangle between them.
“Yeah. Isn’t there a motel just up the road here?” he said, jerking his chin in an easterly direction. Andi snorted. “What, you don’t think I’d buy a night at a motel for you?”
“Stop trying to make me laugh,” she complained, settling her key in the door, but he caught the corner of her lips quirking up.
“Stop letting it work, then,” he said, smiling down at her. “No, really, I know you do need sleep, Andi,” he went on, more reasonably.
Her hand paused in its turn as she looked over at him. “What I need are answers. And fewer nightmares.”
His golden eyes searched hers. “One I can help with if you let me, the other, I’m not so sure.”
Her fingers flexed on the key but didn’t twist it. “All those times I needed help before, how did you know?”
He took a step back and sighed. “Mills—the woman you met—she’s the one who ran the background check on you. Someone else at the coffee shop put that escapade on the internet. She got a hit, and I came flying. As close to flying as I could without getting into trouble with the FAA, at least.”
“And then you followed me?” She let go of the key entirely and turned toward him, her hair swirling down around her shoulders, the blue streak in it picking up the blue of her front door. “Don’t lie, I saw your car.”
Damian winced. “I hung around afterward. Frankly, I wanted to see who you’d ditched me for.”
“I was just trying to figure out where my brother was, Damian—”
“No, I know, and it was none of my business, besides.” He shook his head strongly. “Although can I just say, if I’d killed him then, I would’ve saved us both a lot of trouble.”
Andi chuckled darkly. “Yeah, well, if I could go back in time, there’s a lot of things I would change.”
“Like what?” he asked, quick with hope.
“Like…I would probably be nicer to my brother, for one. Or meaner…I don’t know, something, somehow,” she said, hugging herself. “I would’ve figured out a way to fix him.”
It was his turn to bite his lips before speaking in the shadows. “I’ve learned the hard way that some things you can’t just fix, Andi. No matter how much you might like to.”
Her dark eyes looked up at him. She was still in that dress, and all of him yearned for her, not just out of lust but from his shared soul. He wanted to hold her, protect her, solve all of her problems, and stop her from ever having more.
And the first problem he needed to solve for her was his presence. He was the one who had hurt her; he would have to wait for her to invite him back in. He took a determined step back, wondering if Andi would ever know how much it cost him. “It’s cold out, princess. You should go inside.”
“I should,” she agreed. She put her hand on the door and pushed it open, stepping fully inside, only to turn back to look at him. “Damian, about those answers….”
If he didn’t know better, he might’ve thought she didn’t want him to leave, and his dragon, which had up until then been lurking quietly, whispered, Then, don’t.
“You need to rest, first,” he commanded quickly, deciding for both of them. He wanted to pull her to him and brush his lips across her forehead, but to do that would unwind the short leash he’d wrapped around both his dragon and him.
“When will I get them, though?” she asked forlornly, safely inside her apartment.
“Whenever you desire, but not tonight,” he told her and reached in to pull her apartment door lightly shut.
Damian clambered back into the tour bus and was met by an unfamiliar silence among his crew. He looked around at his people as he made his way to his seat. “What?”
“I’m just more than a little surprised you’re riding back with us,” Jamison announced the second he sat down.
“Me too,” Mills chimed in, as Jamison pulled away from the apartment complex.
“Thanks,” Damian said ruefully, buckling his seat belt.
“It’s just that—” Mills began, and Damian cut her honesty off quickly.
“It is what it is. And it’s okay.” Damian forced himself to shrug. Austin and Zach gave each other looks across from him. “What?”
“This new you? It’s entirely unlike you. And I don’t know if I like it,” Austin said.
“It’s fine,” Zach said, dismissing his brother’s concerns. “Unusual, I agree, but it’s fine.”
Damian rocked back into his seat and looked around the van. They weren’t wrong. Before last weekend and pre-Andi, if he were in a somehow similar situation with some other girl, he definitely would’ve pressed to stay. But now, he couldn’t, for her sake. If they were to have a relationship of any kind at all, it would have to happen on her schedule, no matter how keenly he wanted her. “Answers aren’t just going to produce themselves. We’ve got an influx of Hunters more powerful than we’ve seen before, who somehow have access to dragon skin and have somehow changed Andi’s brother. Jamison, I want you figuring out how the hell that tracker those two Hunters had worked. Austin and Zach, I want you scouring the ports—that’s where the interloper came from, so maybe there’s a trove or a lab he left behind. Mills, I want you figuring out what the fuck they did to Andi’s brother, figuring out whose skin this is,” he said, shoving the dragon skin on the floorboards with one foot, “and running endless searches on who was renting the place we just left. And I’ll go visit Rax tomorrow night. Whatever else the man thinks, he owes me, and I need to know who from the Realms tried to act against me. He’ll help me with that, or else.”
Austin looked to Zach and grinned. “Never mind, he’s back.”
“Yeah,” Zach agreed, also grinning.
When they got back to the castle, Damian went to the bar in his bedroom, pouring a drink to settle himself. Driving away from Andi affected him. It was the only word to describe it. It made him feel crazily mad, starving, weak—like he’d lived his whole life in the sun then been chained inside a cave where not even a whisper of light could strike him.
I know how that feels, his dragon told him.
Before he could interrogate that further, Grimalkin appeared beside his feet, meowing.
“Not now, Grim, it’s too late for cheese.”
Grim sat back on his hind legs primly. “Not everything is about cheese,” he reprimanded Damian.
“No, just most things,” he said, kneeling down to affectionately knuckle the head of his cat. It felt normal, and he tried to hold onto the feeling. Because if he got too used to being around Andi, how would he ever find his way back? How far inside the cave would he be trapped?
“Well, if you’re done being judgmental,” Grimalkin chided him, in between fits of purrs, “one of your mirrors in your office is on.”
Damian tensed. “Which one?”
“Didn’t look. Since you were here, I figured I’d just tell you.”
Damian grunted, gave Grim’s head one last rough pat, and then turned to the mirror closest to his bed and willed himself to step through it.
Damian’s office was completely separate from the rest of the castle and only accessible via mirror, preventing anyone from Earth ever happening across it. A carved plaque that said Serva me te servabo, the same inscription as was on Michael’s gravestone, hung over a desk full of books he was in different points of reading, a small brazier of the Forgetting Fire in case his larger furnace full of it burned out, an orchid that was somehow still non-magically alive, and an orrery which was probably the most magical thing in the building after Grimalkin.
It wasn’t an orrery in the Earth-sense, because the Realms didn’t move in simple ellipticals around a central point like the solar system’s planets. Instead, the Realms were represented by chiming gems and crystals, attached to a carved marble central base by golden chains that expanded and contracted as they moved in almost no relation to one another, like somewhere in the marble a fidgety child held a handful of strings attached to expensively precious balloons.
He pushed this to the side carefully, listening to the chimes inside the gemstones ring until they settled themselves into their bizarre orbits again, and opened up the drawer full of book-sized mirrors that he used to communicate to the other Unearthly Wardens.
He wasn’t the first person to protect the Earth from the Unearthly. When he’d come to Earth, he’d found other groups already protecting it, scattered geographically. Some of them considered their duty a generational burden; a job they were literally born to do. Others formed a ragtag gang, believing in one or two members with magical sight who announced when Unearthly were at hand. It’d taken him some time to sort through their assorted organizational structures and regions to figure out where he would be of most use, and how he could best support the others like him—with cash and tech—without robbing them of their pride. Many of them still distrusted him and his direct connection with the Realms, which he found irritating but for the best, because if something ever happened to him, they would be alone again. Better to keep them angry, self-reliant, and sharp, and if hating him helped that, all the better.
But if one of them was calling him…. He sorted through the mirrors quickly, hoping he could help in time, and then found the one that was activated, softly glowing and relaxed.
It was Guinevere, from one of the generational groups. Everyone in her lineage had been named after someone both magical and important. And there had been things that he had done to her—and she to him, in the not so distant past—that had made his blood rush low.
The mirror tapped again. He set it into the notches carved into his desk for just such a purpose, and he tapped it back, letting it open, revealing her in its glass. She was only in a shift, busy letting her hair down out of its many ceremonial braids. He used to think he could sit in bed and watch her do that for hours, but now he found himself strangely unmoved.
“Damian,” she said, smiling at him as she took him in. “You look rough. Long hunt?” she asked, running her fingers through her long, blonde hair.
“No. Just a long night.”
“Aren’t they all?” she said, turning toward him and leaning forward so that he could see her cleavage as her hair swooped toward it like molten sunlight. “Long and lonely?” she guessed with hope.
“Long and exhausting,” he said. His eyes spotted the large succubus stinger Grimalkin had added to his desk’s collection after Andi had removed it from him last week, though it seemed like a lifetime ago. How funny that the physical pain of it when it’d happened was nothing compared to the pain of his memory of Andi addled with pheromones and wanting him now. “Why did you summon me, Gwen?”
She folded even closer to the mirror with a pout. “I miss you.”
Damian sighed. He knew Guinevere had a mirror big enough on her side for him to walk through, and it would be so easy to do just that—fuck her senseless, then return—same as he had on other nights prior.
But the sunlight of Gwen’s hair wasn’t the sunlight that he needed. What he needed was to look into the face of a woman who lit up when he was near—even when she was still angry with him. A woman whose goodness was so bright that sometimes it felt like his heart was burning when he looked at her.
“Sorry, Gwen; I’m busy,” he said.
Her chin rose haughtily. “Your loss,” she said with a shrug, then tapped her mirror off.
Damian put his head in his hands and composed himself for a long time before his phone buzzed in his pocket.
Andi sat on the edge of her bed for what felt like hours, illuminated by her nightlight, still wearing her silk dress. It was four a.m. now, and while she was exhausted, there was nothing she could do to calm her mind. Her brother was alive—but changed. Her uncle had spent an apparent lifetime lying to her. And David had truly been a monster, but he’d died in front of her. It felt like everything she’d thought she’d known in her life—everything that’d once been bedrock—had shifted to the side and left her falling.
Who could she safely talk to? Who could she trust? Who else would even begin to understand? She interrogated everything and everyone she thought she knew and could come up with only one answer.
Damian.
She pulled out her phone and stared at it. How many times in the past week had he been infuriating? Almost too many to count. But whenever she was near him, things felt like they made sense. Despite the fact that they so obviously did-fucking-not, it was just him being there that made it all seem bearable. Survivable. Like all the horrible things that were happening weren’t hers to shoulder solo. Like she was in a terrible storm, and he was there with an umbrella—or maybe dragon wing, she didn’t know—but if he could help her somehow sleep tonight without nightmares…. She swept up her phone to text him: Are you up?
For you, always, he replied after what felt like far too long. For the record, I meant that to be truthful, not pervy, he added.
Andi looked at her phone with a wry smile. How soon can you get here?
In thirty.
She nodded to herself. She knew she’d still be up in thirty minutes. She didn’t want to sleep ever again if it meant her being chased down by that awful thing in her dreams. Is it okay if you just hold me? she typed back.
Of course. But…Andi…I meant thirty seconds.
Andi stood straight up. “What the hell, Damian,” she muttered, texting furiously. Are you in the parking lot????
There was a buzzing sound from inside her bathroom as though someone was getting a text. She twisted on her bed and gasped, as the handle of its door opened.
“I’m calling nine-one-one right now!” she announced, running for her bedroom door.
“No, Andi, don’t,” Damian warned, walking out and pocketing his phone simultaneously.
“What. The. Fuck,” Andi said, looking between him and the bathroom behind him, starting to panic. Her bathroom counter had a clear space where he’d swept her makeup and hair products aside to get through quietly. Her bedroom hadn’t been cleaned since Danny’d disappeared. Damian was used to living in a freaking castle, and here he was walking into her postage stamp-sized bedroom with her clean and dirty clothes all over and a Fate of the Furious poster on the wall.
He waved his hands in a placating fashion. “You saw my bedroom, it’s full of mirrors. You know I’m magical. Mirror transportation is a part of that. Should I have warned you? Yes.”
Andi clutched a hand to her chest, which was still heaving in surprise. “My…my uncle’s house didn’t have a single mirror in it.”
“That makes an unfortunate amount of sense,” Damian said, taking a step toward her.
Andi took a step back and felt her clothes-covered chair behind her knees. “I cannot believe you just whatevered over here!”
Damian detoured for her bed, taking a moment to be bemused by her penguin sheets, before kicking off his shoes and propping himself up in it, his back against the headboard. From that vantage point, he saw the Fast and Furious poster, and a slow smile spread across his face like liquid joy. “Vin Diesel and The Rock, eh?”
“Oh my God,” Andi said, flushing, wishing she could melt straight into the ground. She walked over, lifted the poster off of its hook, and set it down to face the wall, trying to swallow down the urge to frantically clean. “Inviting you over was supposed to make things better, not make me want to die.”
Damian chuckled and held one arm out. “So, let me hold you already.”
She whirled on him and hugged herself. Seeing him there just waiting caused a reaction in her that she couldn’t have explained. It wasn’t like he belonged there physically so much. He made her bed—hell, her entire bedroom—look small. But he belonged here. With her.
In her life.
She bit her lips and took a tentative step forward. “Can you also promise me one thing?”
“Name it,” he said.
“To never, ever, ever lie to me?” She sank down on the bed opposite him, the silk of her dress shifting over her sheet’s cotton.
He outright laughed. “Oh, I thought you were going to ask something hard. Like, ‘Damian, don’t yell.’ Or ‘Damian, don’t have a temper.’”
She reached over and pushed on his legs, rocking him. “I mean it, Damian. Say it.”
“I promise you, Andi. I will never lie to you,” he said and reached for her.
She fell into his arms and let him pull her up beside him on the bed.
She fit beside him like she was meant to be there, snuggled up against him, one of his arms wrapped possessively around her, the other across himself to hold her hip. Her whole body was turned toward him, her head on his shoulder, her arm around him, and one of her knees crooked on his thigh. From here, she could sense the heat radiating off of him, smell the light manly scent of him, and feel the prickles of his five o’clock shadow catch her hair as he fit her underneath his chin.
“I wish you could just tell me everything’s going to be all okay,” she whispered.
“You should’ve asked for that before you made me swear,” he murmured.
“I know.” She folded up even tighter against him, and his arms followed, pressing her close.
“Just sleep tonight, and I’ll protect you,” he told her, and she gave in, closing her eyes and laying her head against him—clearly able to hear the beating of his heart, slow and steady. She wondered if his heart was dragon or human, but it didn’t matter now.
She lifted her head off of his chest. “You were wrong.”
“Never,” he teased.
Andi shook her head at him, then searched his eyes. “You told me you couldn’t afford to have a heart, but you do have one. I can hear it. And here you are with me.”
“Where else would I be?” He ran his hand up through her hair to cradle the back of her head and fit her to him again.
Andi swallowed, thinking about how suddenly empty her world had become. “Literally anywhere else?” she guessed, biting her lips and unsuccessfully trying not to cry. “Everybody leaves me, Damian. Even you tried to, remember?”