Page 43 of The Beast's Baby
Something about it made him feel tenderness like heat in his chest, and he knew he couldn’t let anything happen to her. Their baby was a slowly forming reality in his head, but she was flesh and blood and almost painfully real to him in that moment.
He really was falling in love with her.
“Which way?” she hissed as they neared the end of the sea of desks and could choose to go down a corridor leading to their right or another one disappearing down to their left.
He pulled her with him down the corridor to the right, both of them stopping dead when they heard the same slamming of the door they’d just come through.
Someone had just entered after them.
“Fuck,” Isobel whispered, pressing her fingers to her own lips as if to silence herself.
“Hello?”
Though they hadn’t spent that much time with her, they both knew the voice belonged to Cora. The dragon.
Jay tried to use improvised sign language to ask Isobel if she thought she could take her on. Isobel stared at his flailing fingers, at the half-desperate look on his face, and shook her head that she either didn’t understand or that no, she couldn’t fight a dragon. Jay didn’t even know what such a fight might entail. Did Cora turn into an actual dragon?
He repressed the nerd in him that immediately thought that it would be pretty cool to see a real, live dragon and instead pulled Isobel with him down the corridor. He had his sights on the server room but realized the door would be locked. He’d thought to ask Isobel to smash her palm into the glass the way Eva had, but that wouldn’t exactly work now.
He was looking around, frantically, for a place for them to hide when Isobel’s hand on his arm stilled him. She held his gaze, steadily, before she turned to face the corridor. It only took a second for Cora to appear at the end of it, eyes glowing a deep red.
“Hello,” she smiled.
“Hey,” Isobel replied, starting down the corridor, leaving him behind.
He realized it was better not to even attempt to help or to intervene whatever style of confrontation was about to go down, and yet he hated that he was so helpless. He turned to the glass door, looking at the lights of the servers beyond, twinkling like a galaxy of stars had been pulled down and confined in this one space.
He wanted to blow them all out.
But how?
He heard the growl of Isobel’s wolf and turned his head just as she shifted, leaping through the air at Cora, who’s skin had begun to glow from within as though fire was rushing through her veins. Even if it wasn’t the same as shifting into a full-size dragon, it was still pretty cool.
Focus, he told himself.
And he did. He had to. He couldn’t just stand there idly while his wolf-girlfriend fought a dragon.
“What is my life?” he asked his own reflection, spinning around at a second reflection appearing behind his. “Olive?” he exclaimed, and she smiled, accepting his hug though she broke them apart quick enough. “I thought you might be here but you’re here-here,” he added. “Are you okay?”
“There are wolves running around the place and a dragon lady down the hall—what do you think?” she replied.
He raised his eyebrows that this was not an exaggeration and it had been a silly question. She smiled in that self-assured, reassuring way she had, and he felt as though perhaps there was a chance everything was going to be alright. Olive to the rescue.
“So much has happened,” he said.
“Don’t even get me started,” she replied, pulling out a smartwatch from her pocket. “We’ll catch up. But right now,” she said meaningfully.
He couldn’t keep a wide smile down as she pressed the smartwatch to the lock. The light flared green thanks to the backup generators providing the space with electricity. Irony sure was a bitch.
***
They worked fast. One by one, slowly but surely, the blinking lights of the servers went black.
“Are you sure some of this should be saved?” he asked.
“Yeah,” Olive said. “It’s not all bad. There are cures to be had from this.”
“Cures to be had, cures to be manhandled,” he remarked.
