Hour of the Dragon - Heather Killough-Walden Page 0,65

Expertly, he twisted them up at an angle, bringing both arms together. She heard the jangling of metal. Cuffs, she realized.

“Don’t you dare…” she whispered through clenched teeth. But he definitely dared, and she felt a little smaller when the metal clicked shut, cold and hard against her wrists.

“You’re going to bind her, Mace? What the hell do you think she is? She’s not the bounty in a warden job. Think about this – Wait…” Sterling paused, and Anna realized the edges of her jacket had come open now that she could no longer hold them closed.

She heard Sterling take a step toward them. “Why the hell is her shirt torn?” he demanded. Now his voice was raised, his accent deeper, and Anna felt the stirrings of powerful magic. “What did you do to her, Mace?”

There was a rumble of a warning growl from behind her that resonated so deeply, the ground beneath her boots trembled. Anna tried to see what was happening, but in her latest tousle with the dragon, her wild hair had decided to obscure her view, and she had no usable hands with which to brush it out of the way because whatever he’d used on her wrists was meant for warden bounties; it was charmed with anti-magic properties.

“I would never hurt her,” the dragon snarled. “Now lift the memory spell, asshole.” Much more quietly, he added, “Or give me one more excuse to fry you.”

Annaleia had an image then, one of a massive dragon waking up, getting to its feet, and shaking out its mammoth black wings. Stardust cascaded off the dragon as it did so, and spiral galaxies tilted in the endless night sky. In her head, the dragon ran a long tongue over very sharp teeth that gleamed in the light of many moons. She could almost hear the beast thinking. All it needed was a reason. Just one reason to rip Jarrod apart.

For the first time since she’d met Sterling, she actually feared for the powerful Nightmare’s life. Jarrod had never hurt her. In fact, when she took a second to consider it, Sterling had never really been anything to Anna but a friend. Yes, he was a dark friend and he was dangerous and he had a checkered past, but he was a friend nonetheless. With benefits.

But Sterling must not have shared Anna’s fears because his only response to Ares was to address Annaleia instead. “Has he hurt you, Annaleia?”

“What did I just fucking tell you, Sterling?” the dragon hissed. A shiver ran down Anna’s spine. The dragon had spoken directly beside her ear, and the sensation of it was not impersonal. It was far too much the opposite. Something primal awoke within her, something dark and delicious, something that made her feel guilty and crazy.

“Jarrod, no!” she hastily told Sterling, ignoring her sudden sensual longing for her captor. Because it was nuts.

And she genuinely feared that the two men would begin exchanging blasts of some terrible magic any second now and she would get caught in the crossfire. “I’m unharmed!” she reassured him. And after all, she actually was unharmed, but for her racing heart and destroyed blouse. Technically the torn shirt was her own damn fault.

But her captor apparently lost what remained of his patience because he growled again and stepped back, affording him just enough space to act. As before, he moved so fast she lost her breath trying to follow the movement. He shifted his hold on her to the grip of one impossibly strong hand, and Anna had little air in her lungs with which to scream a warning when he raised his other hand outward in the telltale position of a magical attack.

Time seemed to slow down, the way Annaleia had noticed it always did when disaster struck. Her theory was that Time was just bored. It slowed these moments down the way Hollywood so often slowed ninja fights or the bizarre confrontations of men in black trench coats in dream-like dimensions. The world began to roll forward at “Matrix” speed for no other reason than – Time simply wanted to enjoy them more.

As she watched, mute and trapped in that pocketed stretch of events, her captor’s body braced as if for impact. The front of his black leather motorcycle jacket pulled open to reveal the sculpted lines beneath his black tee-shirt. At the same time, she caught a fleeting glance at some of the patches sewn onto the front of the jacket. Just as