Discount Armageddon

Sixteen

The mouse-free bedroom of a semilegal sublet in Greenwich Village

IF I’D THOUGHT DOMINIC’S kisses in the alley were urgent, they were nothing compared to the five-alarm fire motivating him now. He kissed me like all the oxygen was running out of the room, and the only way for either of us to survive was to learn how to manage on a single person’s breath. I wasn’t worried about him hurting me—with my training, that sort of concern is generally oriented in the other direction—but the knowledge that he was one of the few men I’d ever met who could take me in a fight was enough to make my knees go weak. I matched his five-alarm fire with one of my own, feeling the answering tension in his wrists as he tugged me closer to him.

When he dropped his hands from my face and pulled his own face away, it was like he’d just announced that they were canceling Christmas. My eyes, which I didn’t remember closing, flew open, and I gave him a disappointed look, asking, “Did I do something wrong?”

“Did you—God, woman.” He laughed, mumbling something in Italian. It sounded like it was directed at himself, so I decided not to take offense; I just kept making puppy-dog eyes at him, waiting for him to tell me what was wrong. “You are the most insane, insufferable, infuriating excuse for a female that I have ever met.”

“Well, yeah,” I said, blinking. “You knew that before you brought me chicken. Are you mad that I gave your chicken to the mice? Do I need to get more chicken before you’ll start kissing me again? Because I can go and buy more chicken if you’ll just promise to wait he—” He cut my protests off with another kiss. I’ve never much cared for being interrupted, but if all the interruptions were going to be of this caliber, I could probably learn to live with it.

Since Dominic’s hands weren’t setting the terms of our dance anymore, I stepped closer, leaving no space for air between us as I pressed myself against his chest. His arms went around my waist, reeling me in, and I gladly let my heels leave the floor. This kiss wasn’t as urgent. It didn’t need to be. It went on and on, until I began to wonder if it was possible to spontaneously combust just from kissing.

Dominic turned his head abruptly to the side, but didn’t let me go. “This is … I shouldn’t be…”

“Oh, you should.” I nodded vigorously, sliding my hands down the planes of his shoulders, feeling the interplay of the muscles there. He was muscled almost like a dancer, all long, hard sinew and corded strength. A lifetime of training to fight for your life will do wonders for the physique. “You really, really should. It’s actually recommended for solo Covenant agents on their first trip to North America. See the sights, stalk the locals, sleep with a Price girl.”

“You infuriating creature,” he breathed, somehow turning the words into something verging on an endearment. He turned back to face me, letting me see the barely-restrained hunger in his dark brown eyes. He was looking at me the way the mice look at cake on a feasting day; like devouring me wouldn’t just be a pleasure, it would be a holy ritual. “Do you have any idea what you’re doing?”

“I do,” I said, and leaned forward to place a kiss on his chin before he had the chance to pull away. “I am an adult, and you are an adult, and I am doing my damnedest to seduce you right now, or to convince you that it’s worth the trouble of seducing me. Dealer’s choice. Just don’t tease me.”

He barked a short, sharp laugh. “Tease you? Me, tease you? I’m not the one who runs across this city’s rooftops wearing a skirt barely deserving of the name, or fights like it was some sort of ballet routine.”

“My grand jeté kills ’em back on the farm,” I said solemnly. Then he was kissing me again, arms pulling me into his chest until there really wasn’t any room between us, not for hesitation, not for anything. The pressure of my thigh holster digging into my skin was just a delicious reminder of how close we really were, how close I was to feeling his body moving naked against mine, and, oh, God, if the Covenant taught all their field agents to kiss like this, it was a wonder they ever made it from the bedroom to the battlefield in the first place.

Dominic gave a small growl of frustration as he realized that he couldn’t possibly get me any closer to him. Not changing his grip on my waist at all, he lifted me off the ground, turning toward the bed. A lifetime spent learning how to negotiate difficult lifts with a partner made my next motion automatic, as I brought my legs up and wrapped them around his waist, eking out another half inch of closeness even as he was turning us toward the bed. Through the haze of rising hormones and distractingly searing kisses, the small part of my brain that was still on duty managed to identify two throwing knives and a strapped-on vial of what was probably more holy water. That just made me kiss him with more fervency. There’s nothing in this world sexier than a man who comes prepared.

Rather than attempt to loosen my limpet-like hold, Dominic sat down on the bed’s edge, hands starting to explore the unfamiliar territory of my body. It only took him a moment to get my shirt worked loose from the waistband of my jeans, and then his fingers were underneath it, running up my sides and sending shivers through my entire body. I broke off our kiss and unclasped my arms from his shoulders long enough for him to pull my shirt off over my head. Then I leaned back and watched him, waiting. He’d already seen me mostly naked, after the tango competition he so rudely disrupted. But this, here, with me wrapped tight around him and his breath coming in short, hard gasps … this was different. I knew his body wanted this as badly as mine did; even if he’d wanted to lie, my position, settled firmly in his lap, would have made that impossible. I just wanted him to have one last chance to change his mind.

Eyes solemn, Dominic touched my collarbone with the tips of his fingers, watching as my back arched involuntarily. His eyes remained on my face as his fingers glided down, over the top of my left breast, along the shallow divide of my breastbone to my stomach. They brushed across my navel, finally coming to rest at the waistband of my jeans.

“I am assuming,” he said, words tight, like he was almost out of breath, “that this is you giving me one last opportunity to come to my senses?”

I didn’t trust myself to speak. I just nodded, my hands still lowered, trying not to move too much. In his position—in my position—that wouldn’t have been fair.

Dominic smiled, the expression lighting up his entire face. “You foolish creature,” he breathed. “I have gone well past the point of such an easy escape.” And then his arms were around me again, and my arms around him, and we were falling, but that didn’t matter: the bed was there to catch us as our hands began the fevered, frantic removal of clothing, weaponry, and barriers. We were on different sides of this war. One of us might have to die before this ended. But in that moment, with him whispering in Italian in my ear and my every nerve on fire, there were no more boundaries between us.

The intoxicatingly mingled scents of sex and sweat perfumed the bedroom air, making me want to fight an army, dance a tango, and take a long nap, not necessarily in that order. Clothing and weapons littered the floor around the bed, making it look like we’d already fought an army. If we had, I wasn’t entirely sure which one of us had won.

Dominic lay on his back, breath still a little uneven. I was stretched out at a slight diagonal, so that I could pillow my head against his chest while still dangling my feet off the edge of the bed. Rotating my ankles while I reclined helped to keep them from stiffening up, especially after the day I’d had. I’d have to rewrap them before I left the apartment again.

Lizard-men, rooftop marathons, overemotional dragon princesses, and to cap it all off, sheet-scorching sex with a member of the Covenant of St. George. This was going to be a fun one to try writing up for the family record. Maybe I could file it under “diplomatic relations” or something…

“So,” I said finally. “Did you come over for a reason? Beyond the delivery of dinner and ravishment?”

“Insufferable,” said Dominic. This sounded even more like an endearment than “infuriating” had. “I was coming to let you know that I checked what records I can access without drawing too much attention, and there was nothing definitive on the nature of the creatures that attacked us. Rumors and legends of manlike reptiles, but nothing coherent.”

“Oh, Hells!” I sat bolt upright, heedless of the fact that I was clothed in nothing but the sheet—and, by the time I finished sitting up, not even that. “I got so wrapped up in the Holy Feast and the chicken dinner and the … well, and everything, I didn’t get around to telling you. I know what they were. Are. I know what the things that attacked us in the sewer are, and there are going to be more of them if we don’t find out who’s messing with the dragon.”

Dominic pushed himself onto his elbows, eyeing me with a mixture of surprise and irritation. “You didn’t think to say this before? What are they? Why are there going to be more? Are they breeding down there?”

“I was distracted! You’re extremely distracting.” The sight of him shirtless in my borrowed bed was enough to start distracting me all over again. The desire to throw myself at him and beg him to have his way with me a few more times before we had to worry about the dragon wasn’t really a surprise, but it was definitely inconvenient. “Anyway, I spoke to a representative from the local Nest of dragon princesses.” Catching the shift in his expression, I hastened to add, “She wasn’t aware that there was even a chance that there might be a living dragon around here. She was honestly surprised when I brought it up, and I don’t think she’s a good enough actress to fake something like that. I’m a performer. We know how to judge our own kind.”

The brief darkness cleared from Dominic’s eyes, and he nodded, saying crisply, “Proceed.”

“So you know, the military precision thing, really not nearly as effective when you’re starkers. Anyway, I told her about the lizard-men in the sewer and she flipped out, big-time. She says they’re called ‘servitors.’ They exist to serve the dragon—or, if the dragon isn’t in a position to be giving orders, say, because it’s still in the middle of nap hour, to serve whoever’s giving them the clearest instructions. They’re not very smart, but they take directions real well.”

Dominic frowned, a line appearing in the center of his forehead. I had to fight off the urge to lean over and kiss it away. Bad Verity. No Covenant hottie for you. “Why don’t we have any clear records on these ‘servitors’? You’d think we’d at least have something on them.” The unspoken “even if you don’t” hung between us for a moment before he turned his face away, looking faintly ashamed.

I cleared my throat to break the sudden tension, and asked, “What do your records say about the dragon princesses?”

“They’re inconsequential; as harmless as any cryptid can be. They look human, from the outside, although their anatomy reveals certain … inconsistencies … if examined in detail.” He didn’t look back at me as he spoke. He probably had a good idea of my reaction to the idea of cutting up something he’d just admitted was harmless to see how it worked. “They may have served as bait for the dragons, once. It was never conclusively proven, one way or the other.”

“And then there were no more dragons, and they just sort of vanished into the human population. You can’t hunt what you can’t find. They fell off the radar and stopped being a going concern,” I said, concluding his little history lesson.

Dominic nodded mutely.

“Okay, so here’s one of the pieces we’ve been missing all this time. The reason alchemists were always so damn hot to get their hands on dragon blood? It’s a natural mutagen. I mean, we’re talking some Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles-level crap here.” Dominic turned, giving me a blank look. I sighed. “Dragon blood alters human DNA if it’s ingested. That’s why people disappeared when they got too close to a dragon’s lair. If the dragon caught them, and if they were too much of a danger to release, it … changed them. That way it didn’t have to kill them, but they couldn’t go running off to tell the local villagers where the lair was.”

A look of slow horror swept over Dominic’s face, washing away all the regret and understanding—and yes, the affection—as it passed. “You’re saying that those creatures we fought … those creatures used to be men?”

“Yes, but the dragon’s still sleeping. I mean, the dragon’s not the one that’s doing this. Whatever fucked-up snake cult is trying to wake the dragon up—almost certainly a human snake cult, snake cults are pretty much always human, the assholes—they’re the ones feeding dragon blood to humans. They’re the ones creating servitors, and telling them where to go, what to do. The dragon’s just sleeping. It isn’t doing anything wrong.”

“Its existence is wrong,” Dominic spat, sliding out of the bed. I’d been too busy before to really appreciate the symmetry of his naked body, scars and all. He was gorgeous, possibly the most gorgeous man I’d ever had the pleasure of having my way with.

Pity he was turning out to be a total asshole.

I straightened, locking my shoulders like I was preparing to tango for my life, and glared at him. The power of my glare was somewhat diminished by the fact that I wasn’t wearing a stitch of clothing. Fortunately, I’ve had a lot of practice looking fierce while practically nude; this was just taking it to the championship level. “Its existence is the result of evolutionary pressures, the same as yours. Or do you want to start the argument against humanity? Because right now, you’re offering one hell of an example in the ‘negatives’ column.”

“You don’t understand what you’re talking about!”

If he’d wanted to make me mad, that was the way to do it. “Why? Because I didn’t have the benefit of all your precious Covenant training? Your resources? Your centuries of doing it all exactly the same way every time?”

“Yes!”

“Even when the way you’ve been doing it is wrong?” My voice peaked on the last word, nearly breaking.

Dominic looked at me impassively, somehow managing to look dignified, even though he was just as naked as I was. In that moment, I realized how different we really were. We could fight together, we could bleed together, but in the end, he would always be Covenant, raised to view anything that wasn’t human as a danger to be exterminated, while I…

I would always be a Price. Nothing I could ever do in my life, from ballroom dancing to poorly-considered trysts with cute Covenant men, was going to change that. His monsters were my family, and that was a chasm I didn’t think either of us was capable of bridging.

He must have seen the same reality reflected in my expression. Something that looked like regret flickered in his eyes before he turned his back on me, bending to begin gathering his discarded weaponry. “This was a mistake,” he said quietly. “This should not have happened.”

I was glad he was facing away from me. It kept him from seeing the way I flinched when his words struck home. “As long as we’re in agreement about that,” I said, keeping my shoulders locked and my chin lifted. All I had to do was pretend that it was another competition, another stupid cattle call where I had to keep that brave face turned toward the audience until the winners were announced. “Sometimes things can get a little confused after a big fight. You make decisions you didn’t actually intend to make, and then you can’t take them back.”

“Yes, I suppose that’s true,” said Dominic, grabbing his trousers and pulling them roughly on before he turned to face me again. “I appreciate your assistance in obtaining more information regarding this threat, and apologize if I have misled you in any way.”

“Oh, is that what the boys are calling it these days?” I regretted the jeering tone of my words as soon as they were out of my mouth, but there was no way to call them back. Maybe it was better that way. It’s not like the women of my family can exactly be said to respond reasonably when men from the Covenant get involved, and it was becoming increasingly clear what the math of this situation really was: Dominic, or the dragon. My survival wasn’t really part of the primary equation, as Sarah would have said.

There was just no way all three of us were walking out of this alive.

Dominic yanked his shirt on, barely covering the holster buckled around his waist. “I believe we’re done here.”

“I believe you’re right.” I grabbed the sheet, wrapping it around myself with as much dignity as I could muster before marching to the bedroom door and wrenching it open. Dominic gave me a withering look and stalked out into the hall, only to be confronted with a sea of silent Aeslin mice watching him with black, unblinking oil-drop eyes. He stopped dead, staring back.

I stepped out of the bedroom behind him, and sighed. “Tell the mice you’re leaving now, Dominic. It’s the only way to make them go away.”

“How do I…?” He waved his hands helplessly.

The icy core of anger in my chest thawed a little. It was impossible to give serious thought to pitching him out the kitchen window when he was so clearly baffled by the mice. Still tempting, just less so. “They speak English. Tell them you’re leaving.”

“Ah.” He cleared his throat before addressing the rodent throng: “I will be going now. Thank you for your hospitality.”

“At least the man can be polite to my mice,” I muttered, pushing past him to the front door as the mice scampered back to their business, only the occasional cry of “Hail!” marking their retreat. I paused with my hand on the doorknob, a thought striking me. “By the way, I realize that Aeslin mice may not fit your high standards for what does or does not ‘deserve’ to live, but I swear, if you come back here, if you hurt them—”

“Insufferable woman,” said Dominic, tiredly. “I won’t hurt your damned demon mice.” He put his hand over mine. For a brief instant, the contact made me forget how furious I was with him as sense memories of his body moving against mine threatened to overwhelm me. Then he clamped his fingers down, turning my hand and the knob at the same time, yanked the door open, and was gone, storming down the hallway while I stared after him.

After a moment, I realized I was standing in the apartment doorway wearing nothing but a sheet. Not exactly the sort of display I wanted to present to the neighbors I wasn’t supposed to have. I slammed the door, locking the deadbolt before spinning to press my back against the wood, like that was somehow going to be the final barricade to keep him out if he wanted to come storming back. He knew where I lived. A member of the Covenant knew where I lived. Worse, I’d just had sex with him, and now I was probably going to have to defend the last dragon in the world from him. I sank slowly into a sitting position, my knees pressing up against my chest.

“Look on the bright side, Verity,” I said sternly. “There is no possible way this night can get any worse.”

“LET THE CELEBRATION OF THE HOLY FEAST OF KISSING THE NEXT MAN WHO WALKS THROUGH THAT DOOR COMMENCE!” shouted the mice, with the utter glee that normally signaled the beginning of a multi-hour religious ritual.

I groaned, dropping my head forward so that my forehead rested against my knees. “My mistake,” I muttered. “It can always get worse.”

All around me, the mice exulted.