Page 31 of Her Dragons

I looked at the coffee table and what our fight — and my own damn stupid tail — had done to it, and was perhaps even more disgusted than Elyse was.Shaking my head, I said, “We were supposed to be looking out for her.”

We both hung our heads and thought about that.

CHAPTER 13

Alex

To make things worse, I recognized one of the cops who showed up.

For any violent crimes involving Drakes, the Haventon Police Department always sent out Drake officers.It was just my luck that I knew one of the two guys who came in human shape, knocking at the door.

I had never forgotten — would never forget — the face of Officer Dylan Garrity.I would never forget either of his faces.Not his dragon face, growling at me while we both wrestled over his truncheon in that garage basement, before he got the drop on me with his tail.And not his human face, later at the Police Headquarters during my booking.He was in uniform the first time I saw him, but if you looked at him now, in plain clothes, you wouldn’t have thought he was all that different from me.He was a Drake guy, a little older, probably in his mid-to-late thirties, with brown hair in a conservative kind of cut, and a goatee about as short as my own growth of fuzz on the face.He was built a little more heavily than Jake and I were, his age putting a few more pounds of muscle on him.I watched him watching me being fingerprinted and claw-printed, and posing for my mug shots, and he fixed me with this judging look, like I was personally a threat to Drake/human relations everywhere.His wardrobe had changed, but his look hadn’t.To him, I was the same dragon punk now that he thought I was then.

Not wanting to start anything, and having learned my lesson from the stupid smack down that I’d just had with Jake, I didn’t let on to Garrity that we’d met before.But afterhe and his partner, a big black Drake guy named Edgars, did an initial walk-through of the living room, Garrity looked me up and down and said, “I busted you for a Joust once, didn’t I?”

Jake had this sudden deer-in-the-headlights look, and I stood there with scales breaking out up and down my back.Damnit, why did Garrity have to have as good a memory as mine?I would have liked it better if the two of us had been just two ships passing in the night.Not pretending to be happy to see him, I just said, “Yeah.You did.”

He narrowed his eyes at me.“Aidman’s Garage, off the campus of Haventon University, wasn’t it?”

“That’s right,” I said, keeping my cool.

“Disorderly conduct, resisting arrest, assaulting an officer.”

“You got it,” I replied, shifting on one foot.Since that night, I’d distrusted cops even more than I’d learned to do back in the gang days.

“Been keeping your snout clean since then, I take it.”

“Clean as a whistle,” I said.I wasn’t liking this little moment we were having between us.I felt suspected of something and I didn’t appreciate it.But under the circumstances, I checked my reaction.I’d learned always to feel guilty when a cop was around, whether I’d actually done anything or not.And I hadn’t done anything since the night of that Joust.

Jake spoke up.“Like our friend said when she called you, we were away when someone came in, probably through the terrace door.Whoever it was, they took our friend.It looks like she tried to fight back.”

The other guy, Edgars, who had been examining the glass souvenir balls with latex gloves on, stood up from where he was crouching, looking at the one that had all the stars on it,and said, “We’ll probably find human fingerprints on these glass pieces.Maybe traces of Drake body oil.”

Garrity nodded at him.In our dragon bodies, our skin had small amounts of a special lubricant that kept our scales from getting dry and rough.Humans who touched us in our reptile shapes always said our bodies felt like well-oiled leather.Some humans who felt us that way thought it was a turn-on, but there was only so much we could do with a human in our reptile bodies.Having sex with a human in Drake form was an act that would get us busted by guys like Garrity and Edgars and put us behind bars for years.

Stepping closer to his partner, Edgars said, “We had some reports of noises coming from this place — including some screams — and there was one eyewitness sighting of two Drake males flying away from this building with a human female.We don’t usually think anything about Drakes taking humans for a joy ride.That’s usually all it is.But that sighting, along with those noises, was a red flag.Then when Ms. Turner’s friend, Elyse Simmons, called about something going on here, we would have come over anyway.”

Drakes taking humans for a joy ride.We’d taken Lily for plenty of “joy rides”.Only a couple of them were in the air.But I pushed that thought out of my head.

I said to the cops, “Listen, we know who must have got her, or sent those two guys to get her.You’ve got to find Mark Reinhardt.He’s got to be the one; he had his guys leave that note and singled me out in it.She didn’t have any enemies or anyone who might be after her — except him.Reinhardt is bad news.She used to live with him.He hurt Lily — bad.”

“He made her scared for her life,” said Jake.“This guy abused her and beat her and she got away from him to save herself.”

“Got away from Reinhardt,” said Garrity, looking back and forth between Jake and me, “and came to stay with you.”

“Yeah,” said Jake.“She’s been staying with us.We’ve been helping her.”

The two cops traded a knowing look.They didn’t say anything, but they were both Drake males and they knew about how we sometimes hooked up.These two had probably seen it all.While they didn’t actually say, So you guys have been sharing Ms. Turner in bed, the words still hung unspoken over us.

All Garrity said was, “ ‘Helping’ her.”

Defensively, I answered, “Yeah, helping her.She was in trouble.We brought her here because she didn’t have any place to go.She was alone.She was scared.Reinhardt had cut her off from everybody else in her life.You must have heard about abusers pulling crap like that.”

“Yeah, we’ve seen things like that,” said Edgars.

“Well, that’s what he did to her.He beat her and made her feel like she was worthless without him and kept her away from everybody else.She was in pieces because of him and we helped her.”

Jake put a hand on my shoulder, an attempt at calming me.It only partly worked.I was glaring right into Garrity’s face, as if challenging him to a rematch of the bout we had at the Joust — which would have been a seriously bad idea and Jake knew it.

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