Page 39 of Her Dragons

And then, somehow, something came over me.It was not the abject terror that should have clutched my heart at this moment.This was something new, something that I’d never felt before.It was not fear.If I had to name what possessed my mind now, I might have called it…clarity.

I was seeing things as I’d never seen them before.It wasn’t long ago that I had pretended to be a Drake.They took me to a place where they celebrated being what they were.I put on scales and horns, false wings and a false tail, and pranced around as if I were not just a woman anymore, but a woman who could become a dragon.It was almost a liberating kind of feeling, this pretense of casting off my humanity and becoming a winged reptilian creature.It was almost like being free of myself, free of everything I’d ever done and ever dreamed of becoming.I could pretend that there was no longer any such person, any such being, as Lily Turner.There was only Lily the Dragon.

In my heart I became that creature again, but this time not as a lark, not as a game or play-acting, but for real.It was as if some fire inside me had consumed the woman that I was.Lily the Dragon was someone new.She was someone who had once been a terrified, tormented, hurt and helpless woman.And there, raging and thrashing, pinned to the floor by two other dragons, lay the one who had caused my former self so much pain, so much agony, so much terror.There he was.And what was I going to do about it?

Clutched in my hand was a long, hard, shiny, metallic answer.

Lily the Dragon rose to her feet, heavy fireplace poker in hand with its tip, bigger and sharper than a dragon’s fang, gleaming at the end.And with her own roar of dragon fury, she lunged forward.

With the poker like a javelin in my grip, I charged forward at the three figures struggling on the floor.All I needed was one fast, hard thrust of the end of that poker into the right sensitive place.I fixed my eyes on the tender spot at the base of Mark’s throat, between the collar bones.I would bury the end of the poker right there and drive it deep.I’d puncture his windpipe and sever his spine and that would be the end of him.

I brought up my dragon-slaying weapon…

…and the side of his tail, swishing through the air, caught me across the midsection and sent me flying back.

The blow of his tail sent me spinning down onto the floor, but it did not knock me out or stun me.It might have stopped or stunned me before — but it did not stop Lily the Dragon.As fast as I fell, I leapt back up onto my feet and charged again, once more hefting the poker like a javelin.I leaped over Mark’s kicking legs and onto his stomach.I raised the poker over my head.Somewhere in my senses, a voice rang out — “Lily!”Was it Jake’s voice?Or Alex’s?

It didn’t matter.At the same time, I brought down the poker hard, point-first.The sharp, gleaming brass fang that was the business end of the poker struck home, sinking into one side of Mark Reinhardt’s chest — the place where his heart was.

With an unholy scream, Mark thrashed out with his arms and legs, throwing me and Jake and Alex off him.Wings twitching spasmodically, he sprang up to a sitting position with the poker embedded in his chest and blood spurting freely from around it.His scream of pain turned to a reverberating rumble of shock.He clutched at the place from which the pokerprotruded, coughed, emitted a heavy, choking gasp — and then fell backward onto the floor with a heart-stopping thud.

The most dreadful silence fell over the room.I sat a few feet away from where Mark lay, while Jake and Alex picked themselves up and looked at the huge, reptilian body, impaled like a vampire, sprawled before them.They turned their eyes to me with shocked, numb expressions, and the quiet felt as if it would swallow me up.

Dimly, on some level, I became aware of the sounds of voices outside.They shouted things I only partly heard about “ambulances” and “rounding people up.”The voices were distant things, even though they were right outside the door.My whole awareness centered on the figure lying still on the floor.Even Jake and Alex, their dragon bodies melting back to human, became blurred shapes at the edges of my vision.

Some nameless impulse made my legs move.In halting, trembling steps, I went forward to where Mark was lying with the poker protruding from his chest and his tank top reddened with blood that pooled on the floor under him.The thought of it made tremors inside me — that metal object ran through his body, his life leaking out of him.As I approached, Mark’s body contracted, grew smaller, almost seeming to shrivel.When I was near enough to stand right over him, his morphed, pumped, and spiked reptile body had receded into a bloodied and pale human form.It was the Mark that I’d first met — but not as he was that night, dressed in a suit and looking confident and debonair.It was a blanched, unmoving shell of a man lying in a spreading crimson puddle, staring up towards the ceiling.And then, awareness came into his blank eyes for one last time — when they fixed on me.

Mark’s lips parted, and in a tiny voice — so tiny, not seeming at all like the man I’d known, who had first been mylover and then my own personal monster — he spoke my name.“Lily.”

Wrapping myself up in my own arms, I froze at the sound of him speaking my name in that strange, wispy little voice.

“Lily,” he said.“You were mine.You belonged…to me…”

And then, the light went out of Mark Reinhardt’s eyes and his body grew completely, finally still.

Something cracked wide open inside me, like a crack ripped in the crust of the Earth.I screamed as if to pour out all the breath in my body, screamed as if I’d never stop.With my arms still wrapped tightly around me like a straight-jacket and tears streaming from my eyes, I dropped screaming to my knees.

Jake and Alex were on their knees with me instantly.Their arms wrapped me as tightly as my own, they held me and rocked me as I screamed and cried until it hurt.I was now a convulsing mass of shrieks and sobs, oblivious to everything except Jake and Alex holding me, neither seeing nor hearing the Drake police officers charging into the house to find us there.

Somewhere in the midst of all that, everything went black.

CHAPTER 18

Lily

After everything that happened, I physically and emotionally shut down.

Jake and Alex and everyone still conscious after all that were arrested.Everyone else, including Mark, left the scene in body bags.By some miracle, none of the Firewings were killed, though most of them were wounded and were thankfully healed by their Drake morphing powers.Not all of Mark’s gang survived.Those who lived, I was told later, were put in special isolation cells and sedated, and given drugs to dilute the experimental steroids in their systems.The people at Harbor Pharmaceuticals who had helped to develop the illegal anabolic were identified and arrested.Mark’s steroid trafficking operation was brought to a halt.

The police took me from Mark’s house to the Emergency Room of Haventon University Hospital, where I was examined and treated, then admitted for a couple of days for observation.I hardly talked or moved; they fed me intravenously.The hospital called my parents and Elyse.When they walked in and I saw them, I melted into tears all over again.I hadn’t seen my mother and father in two years.Mom threw her arms around me, and we cried together.Elyse looked on, holding on to my father and crying herself.And for the first time in my life, I saw tears in my father’s eyes.When my parents returned to see me the next day, I apologized for letting Mark shut them out of my life, or me out of theirs.My mother told me to hush; there was nothing to apologize for.Countless other women had been treated the same way by men who claimed tolove them.The only difference was that I was their child.And we cried a little more.

No charges were pressed against Jake or Alex, or any of Alex’s friends.When I was discharged from the hospital, I heard something about a Drake detective named Garrity putting in a good word for all of them, and something else about him and Alex having some kind of history together.I barely understood it.I only knew that I wanted to go home.To my home, my parents’ house, the place that I thought I’d never see again.

Mom and Dad finally took me home, and I slept again in the bed where I’d slept as a little girl, and Elyse came to visit.I didn’t want to go out; I just wanted to stay there, where I felt totally safe and totally loved.

And speaking of feeling totally loved, Jake and Alex came and brought me the things that I had packed up in that duffle bag the night they found me in the park.I was happy to see them, as happy as I’d been to see Mom and Dad.While they sat with me in my childhood bedroom, Elyse sat with my parents in the dining room and explained to them about how they’d taken care of me — and how they loved me.My parents were surprised, perplexed, and a little disturbed to know that in place of one Drake lover, I now had two.They had heard of such things, but this was nothing they ever expected of their little girl.Elyse assured them that they could trust Jake and Alex, that she believed they would lay down their own lives for me.And while they were still a little unsure about the relationship that I’d had with them, at least they weren’t afraid.And I believed that they would in time grow to trust the guys as well.

Alex and his friends named Jake an honorary Firewing.Jake was touched and proud at that, the upper-class boy who learned to be tough and found himself accepted by good men that his parents would once have called “ruffians.”And Jake’s parents, in the meanwhile, learned of what Alex did for me andhow brave he was in coming to my rescue, and they actually invited Alex to the house with Jake for dinner.Alex was as moved by this gesture as Jake was to be accepted by the Firewings.Jake believed that in time, his parents would grow to treat Alex the way Jake did — as family.

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