Hour of the Dragon - Heather Killough-Walden Page 0,172

began sailing in every direction like deadly poltergeist weapons.

After a few breathless moments of very hard wishing, Sterling pushed himself to his feet, taking his chances with what was left of the airborne shrapnel. Carmen and Piper had hit the deck where he’d last seen them around fifty feet away. Sterling ducked beneath a swinging metal desk piece from the nineteen-fifties and dodged some kind of concrete and wood conglomerate before he was again running toward the pair.

Half-way there, he skidded to a halt, his incubus eyes beginning to glow with furious magic.

Randall Price had made it to them first. And now he stood staring coldly at Sterling while he held Piper Maddox in his arms and a knife to her throat.

“Not another step, warlock! It would be a real shame to waste skin this fantastic twice!”

Piper turned to glare at her captor. “Fuck you, asshole!” she hissed at him.

But anything he might have said in return was swallowed up by an enraged roar from overhead. Sterling looked up, again shielding himself from flying debris, and watched as a darker shape first formed within and then separated from the core of the storm. Lightning illuminated it in all its glory, and thunder threatened to deafen everyone.

A storm dragon, Sterling thought, wide-eyed. By the gods… that’s Annaleia.

When he looked back down it was to find that both Piper and her captor had also looked up. Piper’s teeth were gritted, perhaps in anger, but most likely also in pain – Price’s knife had begun to slice into her skin, and a thin line of blood was trickling slowly down her neck from the blade.

Sterling closed the distance before he fully realized what he’d done, and the next thing he knew, Price’s face was making contact with his fist. Jarrod’s fingers wrapped around the hilt of the knife just as Price’s grip loosened on it and his body went flying.

Halfway along his arcing trajectory, Price was struck again, this time with the hard end of a dragon’s wing. This second impact was accompanied by streaming electricity, a thunder blast, and was so strong, Randall Price disappeared from view altogether, sailing into the shadows.

Now released, Piper swayed on her feet. Sterling spun to catch her, tossing the knife as he wrapped both arms around her and lowered her back down to the cement floor. Overhead, the dragon beat its mighty wings again then pulled both wings in to tuck them at its side as it dove toward the Earth like a tail-spinning jetliner.

“Annaleia?” Carmen whispered. She’d risen to her hands and knees and was watching the storm dragon with one-step-from-crazy eyes.

“It’s her. I know it is,” Piper whispered in response from where she lay in the cage of Sterling’s arms. Carmen began to get to her feet and Sterling felt time pressing in on him. He needed his magic.

He loosened his grip on Piper and pulled away just enough that he could peer down into her eyes. “Piper, look at me.”

Piper was clearly confused, overwhelmed, and in no state to question the command that came from a stranger and demanded a strange thing. She simply turned her head and met his gaze. Sterling held it hard and fast, utilizing the only magic he had left within himself – that of an incubus. “I’m going to kiss you, Piper. Do you mind?”

She stared at him, her gaze shifting from one of his glowing eyes to the other. She shook her head.

Relief flooded him. As much sway as he held over her right now, she would not have been able to give consent if she truly hadn’t wanted him to kiss her. He simply needed to bypass all the niceties at the moment. Of course, he could have just kissed her without asking for her consent. But incubi who did such things – and far worse – were the bane of the Nightmare reputation, especially when consent could be verified so easily even in the most dire situations.

“That’s good,” he told her with a small smile. That’s very good, he thought as her lips parted and he captured them with his own. Warmth spread through him, rare and divine. He groaned, rapt despite the chaos around them, and opened her up further beneath him, his tongue delving deep, his incubus drinking like a man in the desert.

A kiss was like a snack compared to the more involved acts of sex, but it was special in that it was more intimate. It was personal. It packed more