Ashes And Flame (Dragon Magic Book 3) Read online

He waved the comment off and turned around to put his back to me. “Not by very much. Here, just—get on my shoulders, keep your shoes away from me, and you’ll be more stable anyway. And my hands won’t stink afterward.”

  I sighed as he bent his knee and waved for me to ‘hop on’. “Fine,” I muttered and pushed my bag around to my back so that I could hike a leg up. He caught my ankle right away and demonstrated some remarkably fine muscle control by squatting almost to the floor without touching it as he steadied the one leg while I braced myself on the wall and got the other one up as well. Then with hardly any real effort he stood, his head and neck snug against my crotch.

  On the one hand, it was embarrassingly comical. I felt like a toddler riding daddy’s shoulders. On the other, it was surprisingly… intimate. He carefully maneuvered my legs around and hooked my feet behind his back so I could keep myself steady, handling my ankles like radioactive material to do it. “You good?”

  “Er… yeah,” I mumbled. “Just keep still.”

  I reached over head, and put one hand on the ceiling for stability as I scrawled the next sigil there to complete the six sides of the imperfect cube. There was noise outside, and Rez turned his head a little, by reflex. Not enough to throw off my lines, but enough that the back of his neck rubbed against my crotch.

  So, in my defense, it had been twelve years since anyone touched me, in any way, that wasn’t me. And honestly in the last five, I really hadn’t even touched myself all that often because, you know, running for my life and translating a malevolent book of magic kind of made jerking off the last thing on my mind.

  That tiny bit of movement, in just that right place, kind of struck some nerve down there like a little dinner bell. And my cock seemed to slowly wake up at the sound of it, sleepily beginning to swell. Thing about being on the run—and occasionally accidentally burning all the clothes you’re wearing—underwear just isn't a priority.

  I had to ignore it to keep working. “Stay still,” I complained, doing my best not to let the nervous waver in my throat come out in my words. “It’s delicate work.”

  Rez grunted, and said nothing.

  When I was finally done, I cleared my throat. “Okay. You can put me down.”

  He didn’t immediately respond. I was a bit more than half-hard, and pressed against his neck. There was no way he didn’t notice.

  “Rez,” I breathed. “I’m done.”

  “Oh, yeah,” he said quickly, and dipped down, plucking my ankles from his back in such a way that if he’d been any more abrupt I would have toppled off him. He kept a firm hold, though, and helped me get my feet on the floor.

  I turned away from him before he could turn around, and quickly gave myself a readjustment.

  Before I was even finished, he was out of the stall and washing his hands. I took a few seconds to just breathe and avoid having to encounter him at the sink or something, and when he finished, I emerged and washed my own hands before I followed him out in silence.

  The glyphs would hold for a bit. Make it look like I might be in two places at once. As soon as the djinn got close and gave it any scrutiny, the illusion would fail, but it might get us a couple hours of distance. Every little bit helped.

  I occupied my mind with that as we returned to the car, and then tried to occupy my thoughts with anything else when Rez silently turned the ignition and pulled away from the station.

  The silence was loud. I reached for the radio knob, turned it on and scanned for a station, and when I found one that was clear—something country but I didn’t even care—I turned it up just loud enough to hopefully discourage conversation. It wasn’t an event we needed to discuss or revisit, we were both mostly mature adults. What was a little half-boner between strangers who didn’t really know one another and were on the run from a supernatural assassin, after all?

  The worst part, honestly?

  I still kind of tingled from just that little bit of casual, entirely nonsexual contact.

  Yeah, I know. Pathetic.

  7

  Rez

  There are circumstances under which you really have to monitor your attraction to someone. And also evaluate it carefully. The police officer who stops you to give you a ticket. Your boss. Your best friend’s brother—I had a little thing for Nix’s brother, Pendrig, when I was a kid, for a while. All right, for a few years. But there are some people and some circumstances where it really isn’t the time or place, and the dynamic is all wrong. Right?

  That’s what I reminded myself after I got a whiff of excitement off of Daniel, and then felt him getting hard against my neck. Not the time. Not the person. Daniel was trouble, for a start. But also, I was kind of rescuing him—at least, so far—and that just felt a little wrong. Add to that the fact that he probably hadn’t been with anyone in at least the last five or so years Basri and Mikhail figured he’d been on the run, and probably he just had a hair trigger these days. There really wasn’t any sense in reading too far into it.

  It would have been easier to do that, probably, if Daniel was less cute. Especially when he slept.

  I kept glancing at him, checking to see if he was still sleeping. Something about being in the car just knocked him out, basically. When Daniel was awake, his eyes were always sharp, he was always looking one way and another, or staring at the bag and the book inside it. He looked haunted from any angle, and like he expected the next blow to come from anywhere when he least expected it. He had to have some PTSD after all this—who wouldn’t?

  When he slept, though, maybe that was the only peace he got. His face relaxed finally, softening the angles and lines around his eyes and jaw. He snored, but I’d exaggerated when I told him it was loud. It wasn’t so bad—just a soft, almost timid sound.

  I mean—I’m the first to admit, maybe it is not the most virtuous quality in a person but there was kind of a link for me between feeling like I had to protect him and wanting to… you know… do other things as well. It’s just how I’m wired.

  I would have turned the music up and maybe found something I could sing to - but for one thing, I didn’t sing in front of anyone, and for another, I didn’t want to wake him up. So instead I just simmered in it, trying to think of anything else on the long drive west.

  It was a little after midnight when he finally woke again. This time, he seemed more at ease, alert. Like he’d finally caught up on the sleep he’d missed recently. Though, the first thing he did was peer out the window, the windshield, and through the back of the car as if he might catch sight of his pursuer sweeping down on just the dark.

  “Feeling better?” I asked.

  Daniel shrugged. “I guess. Where are we?”

  “About six hours away,” I said.

  He frowned over at me. “Nine hours in. Don’t you need to sleep or something?”

  I grinned. “You don’t know a lot of shifters, I take it?”

  “I don’t know a lot of anyone,” he muttered. “But, no—I haven’t met many shifters. There weren’t any territories where I grew up, and once I joined up with Ivan and his people… they didn’t socialize much outside the group. And those were all mages.”

  “We don’t need quite as much sleep as humans,” I said. “Dragons, at least, and a few others. Cats and bears sleep a lot. I can go for a few days, though. Certainly saves us on motel bills.”

  He chuffed quietly and picked at one of the seams of his bag. “And saves a few motels from burning down, right?”

  “I didn’t mean it like that,” I said gently. “I just mean I don’t have unlimited funds and I don’t know exactly where all we’re going to end up having to go. We’ll have to stay on the move, I’m guessing, until we get you sorted out. This mage we’re going to meet supposedly has a lot of connections. Someone might be able to help. But for all I know, we’re headed to the other side of the world next. I mean not literally… at least, I hope not. But you know what I mean.”

  “Believe me,” he said as he shifted around in the seat and propped
his foot on the dashboard, “I’m used to being on the road.”

  I crinkled my nose. It was easier to miss the smell of his feet when they were in his shoes and on the floorboard. “Yeah… clearly. Look—I don’t mean any offense by this but… I’ve got enough money on me that we could afford to get you new clothes. New shoes. Stuff like that? If you wanted.”

  He took his foot down, and gave me a self-conscious glance before he tried to give himself a discreet sniff. “I showered just a day ago,” he pointed out. “I don’t smell anything.”

  I chuckled, and tapped the side of my nose. “Curse of my species, sometimes. I’m not saying it’s bad, just—we could be in close quarters for a while. I saw a sign back there for a store that should be open late just ahead. And I’m guessing those clothes have seen some action.”

  He shrugged, folding his arms over his chest. “I mean… if it’ll be easier on your dragon nose.”

  “It’ll be a lot easier on my dragon nose,” I said, and looked over to see his jaw clenched, but his lips quivering with a smile he refused to let loose.

  If we’d bought a little time for ourselves, I didn’t see the harm in losing half an hour or so to run in and get him something that hadn’t soaked up fear-sweat, probably weeks' worth of daily body odor, that weird cheap soap that he’d clearly tried to use to wash them, smoke from the motel fire and basically a million distracting smells that, blended together, really were not appealing at all. Any one of them individually I probably would have been able to put up with, but the longer we were near one another, the more those scents clustered together like an itch deep inside my nostrils that I was never going to be able to scratch.

  The place was a big-box store, the sort that stays open until two in the morning or even twenty-four hours so that truck drivers, third-shift workers, and all the other denizens of the night-time working-class crowd had a place to get what they needed. We got a parking spot close to the entrance and I got out first to give everything a sniff. Only dry air coming out of the desert to the west marked the air, along with exhaust and oil and all the other myriad olfactory noise of a parking lot. No hint of the djinn, though, which I took for a good sign that Daniel’s work had paid off for a while at least. I knocked on the window to signal that he could get out, and he hauled himself and his bag with the book out of the car.

  I tried to think if I’d seen it out of his hands even once. Not that we’d been together long now, but he hadn’t so much as put it in the back seat since we’d started driving. He clutched it close even in his sleep.

  “You could leave that in the car, you know. Or I could put in the in trunk, so no one can—”

  He shook his head. “Better to hang on to it. Don’t want it running off.”

  From the way he said it, and what he’d told me about it, I wasn’t entirely certain he was joking. “Fair enough.”

  Inside, we found the place mostly empty, just a few overnight clerks and stockers milling around the place along with a dozen or so customers making their way through the store with either zero place to be, or clearly in some kind of hurry. They had the usual selection of jeans, tee-shirts, and cheap shoes that these places always did, and Daniel clearly wasn’t picky. He plucked a gray tee-shirt from a shelf, grabbed a pair of jeans in his size, took the first pair of shoes that were his size, and a pair of socks from a hook. “That should do it,” he said.

  I glanced around. “I mean… do you need a jacket, or an overshirt, or… underwear or something?”

  He blinked, looked down at the collection in his arms, and shrugged one shoulder. “I don’t know. I mean, I normally just worry about the essentials.”

  “Right,” I said, wondering when the last time was that he owned more than one pair of pants. “Look—grab a couple of other shirts, maybe a hoodie or something. And another pair of pants. And some underwear, I mean, you don’t need a whole wardrobe, I guess, but you should have something to wear while we wash your clothes or something. Unless you prefer to just hang out naked while you wait?”

  His cheeks turned just a shade pink. “I… I mean, I don’t want to spend all your money or anything. I don’t need a handout, either. I appreciate this and everything but… really, more clothes will just weigh me down, I’ll have to get another bag to carry stuff in. It’s better if I can move around unencumbered, believe me.”

  My brow pinched. I shook my head slowly, wondering what was going on in his head. He didn’t get it, didn’t realize what was actually happening here. “Daniel… do you think I’m going to just toss you back out on your own after this?”

  For a moment, he just stared at me, then looked around like someone else might have an answer. None of the other employees or customers apparently did, or even noticed that we were there. His shoulders slumped a little before he straightened them and set his jaw. “No offense, Rez, but I can’t bet the house on your good will. You seem like you mean well. Believe me when I say that it’s been a long time since I thought that about someone. I just can’t risk getting too invested.”

  My chest constricted a little at that. Then a lot. It wasn’t just me. He didn’t trust anyone. He’d been too long without someone in his world who just wanted to help him to believe it was possible. I gave him a slow nod. “Sure. Then how about this—get some more clothes. Don’t worry about the bag. If it all goes wrong and you end up on your own again, you can leave what you don’t need. But at least hear me when I say that I don’t want that to happen and I’ll do what I can to make sure it doesn’t. Okay?”

  He shifted his weight from one foot to the other, then gave a curt nod and looked toward the section where he’d gotten his shirt and walked away toward it without a word.

  I watched him and wished there was a way I could just make him feel that I meant what I said. No one deserved to be on their own like that. If he’d been a shifter, it never would have happened. Not unless he just wanted to be left alone. We took care of our own. Even the shifters who had problems. There were those that couldn’t control their beast, or who were stuck halfway between human and animal. Some were born with a beast that was just overwhelmingly strong, and made thinking like a human difficult. All of them had a home, though. All of them had community, and family, and if for some reason they lost it, they could always find another.

  Emberwood Weyr might have been cut off from the rest of the world for more than half a century, but we would never have turned away a stray dragon that needed a place to rest their wings and find a home.

  I hated that Daniel’s world didn’t give him that.

  He mused over his tee-shirt choices, and then went to a rack and cast me a furtive glance as he picked through a rack of button-up shirts. I waved him on to pick whatever he wanted. Nix would probably complain at me if I asked for him to load more money into my account, but he’d get over it. In the grand scheme of things, money didn’t mean much to us. All that stuff about dragon hoards is mostly bullshit.

  While he did that, I went to grab a pack of underwear for him, since he’d apparently ignored that part of my suggestion. I judged him to be about a medium, and started to grab a pack of plain white briefs. But they looked like they weren’t all that comfortable, and right next to them was a column of slightly nicer looking briefs, all worn by models that were naturally built for filling out underwear and making it look good on a package.

  I picked up a pack of low-rise briefs. I mean, they were practical, right? No one wanted to sprint for their lives in a pair of boxers, everything getting all mashed up and sweaty. These had ‘moisture wicking technology’ which sounded like nonsense but probably wasn’t a bad idea if it worked. Certainly there wasn’t a lot of excess fabric involved to get, like, caught on something, or whatever. And the model did look really good in them…

  “Um…?”

  I dropped the package, flustered and startled largely because I hadn’t actually heard Daniel approaching, and my genius move to cover it up was to dip down and pick the package up again and casually plop it
down on his pile. “Definitely need some drawers,” I said gruffly. “Probably doesn’t matter which ones, they're all… uh, pretty much the same.”

  He raised an eyebrow as he looked down at them. “Yeah. Hardly matters.”

  “You all done or… wanna try stuff on or something?” I asked.

  He shrugged. “I pretty much know what sizes I wear. This is fine, I think. And we probably shouldn’t hang around longer than we need to.”

  “No,” I agreed, “we should get back on the road. Anything else you want?”

  He peered up at me. “What, like a G-string, or…?”

  It was my turn to color a bit in the cheeks. “I just grabbed your package—a pack, I mean, but if you’re a boxers kind of guy—”

  Daniel gave a soft snort, and turned away to head toward the walkway between aisles. “These are fine, Rez. I’m sure they’ll be very snug. You know, for my package.”

  I wiped a hand down my face, mortified.

  It really was not the time or place.

  8

  Daniel

  Once we’d checked out, I went into the bathroom at the front of the store to change. It was… weird.

  When you’ve spent five years only wearing clothes that you managed to dig up from a dumpster or out of the cast-offs from a thrift store in the more rural parts of the country, even holding clean clothes in your hands is just strange. The texture feels wrong, the smell is too clean, the fabric is too thick and heavy. Probably because it hasn’t been worn down to threadbare.

  I really did need to change quickly, and didn’t want the djinn to have more time to catch up, so I set aside my reluctance as quickly as possible and stripped in the big stall. I tossed my old worn-out jeans that were a size too big onto the floor and opened the pack of underwear. Six in all—more pairs of underwear than I had owned since… well, since I first ran away from home. Living among Ivan’s acolytes wasn’t exactly a life of luxury, and since I’d left them, I had even less.