The scan took less than five minutes, but it took another hour to convince my dragon to surrender control. Eventually, the nurses came in with a strawberry cheesecake and let us eat it straight from the dish. That was enough to bribe him back into his inner sanctum.
Then I was put back in the roller bed and skated into an inpatient room where Mum waited for me. She read a book with two women in corsets French kissing on the cover. She shoved it back into her purse and ran across the room to hug me. I huggedher, relieved that she hadn’t spent the entire time I was gone pestering the staff or getting herself worked up.
“Rozel and Crilus are on their way,” she whispered.
“You called Crilus?”I asked, switching over to our family link in case someone was listening in.
“He called me! Clarence went to his house demanding answers! He had nothing to do with it, of course, but it was a real shit show! I’ve told them that Rozel and I will be here while you’re questioned. He tried to remind me that you are decades old, but I told him that I’d stop making the Sparkle My Balls eyeshadow pallet and let his mate know whose fault it is!”
Medwin Moonscale didn’t have the same shinymania as his mate, but he did like his eyeshadows from time to time. He mostly wore a neutral pallet that didn’t show up under most lighting but kept him looking fresh. Mom and Clarence always spent their blissfully limited time together arguing. They were both too bull-headed to ever actually be friends but they tried and failed to be civil over and over. It as funny to watch sometimes.
“Did they let you see Jon?” I asked, as the nurse wiggled the bed into the proper spot inside the room.
“Why would I ask to see him?” she sighed and shook her head.
I opened my mouth but didn’t press the issue. She’d get irritated enough when the questioning started. She needed to go home and have breakfast and…. I almost facepalmed. My dragon was ravenous because I never got to have my breakfast this morning. No wonder he didn’t want to play nice with anyone.
“I’ve ordered in a couple dozen pizzas. They weren’t sure the doctor would let you eat but I told them all that you’d eat the doctor soon if you didn’t get some real food in your belly. You don’t have a brain injury. So, no surgery means you should eat. The doctor can take it up with me if he has a problem with that.”
I was grateful that moment held the questioners at bay until I devoured a few pizzas. She’d also called one of the dragonesses who worked with her forever or at least long enough to become her best friend to stop by the house and pick us both up some clothes.
“I spent long enough in my pajamas when I was dying,” she sighed, picking up another slice of mushroom, olive, and ham pizza. She ate it in one bite and everything inside me glowed warm and happy. One day her door would come. Probably before mine if the cycle of life and death played out as it often did but I got to keep her a little bit longer for now.
“Stop looking at me like that. You’re the patient this time, Nic,” she winked at me. “Here. Have some more tea. You still look so pale. You’re not still worked up over him, are you, ducky? He was so cruel to you. Bad acts have a way of circling back around and finding you. He’s been bit on the ass and that’s that.”
“He’s still a person.”
“He’s still a jackass. Losing a hand doesn’t give him a clean slate for what he’s done, and he’s probably done it to other people too,” she frowned.
Soon, the ‘Jon’ conversation was put on the backburner and the empty pizza boxes cleared away by the hospital staff. The questions came in bouts. Detectives came and went from my hospital room as if I might suddenly remember that I did after all have the magic to summon a giant cat with canines that looked more like tusks than teeth. The whole city was searching for the cat, but it seemed the beast had disappeared into thin air.
At my mother’s insistence the hospital agreed to keep me overnight for observation. After she left one of the nurses who knew her well from her time in the hospital admitted to me that my mother confided in her that she’s worried that I fainted from something more than the shock of finding a severed paw on the stoop. Sometimes cancers were genetic but after she fell ill, I hada genetics panel done and I didn’t carry that gene that almost always evolved into wing cancer. Still, I got regular screenings just in case. I wasn’t ready to run through my death door. I wanted to stick around for as long as I could. I wanted to fall in love even if my true-mate never wandered into my life. I wanted to have kids. I wanted to jump out of a plane with a parachute and feel how it felt to freefall without my wings. I wanted so many things, and I needed all my years to experience them.
With nothing much else to do, I texted with Crilus a little bit. He had visited in between bouts of questioning but didn’t stay long because he had a small child at home who was dependent upon him for most of her food. I double-checked with him that he hadn’t tied Jon to me for all eternity as he threatened to do when Jon refused to come clean about his intentions for our relationship. He hadn’t. Of course, he hadn’t. Jon hadn’t gotten back in touch with me because of a spell. He’d done that because he knew I was still a sucker and look where it’d gotten me. I was in the hospital wishing I’d never met him because someone out there knew that I loved him once upon a time and wanted to take advantage of that for one reason or another.
“Not even love is safe anymore,”my dragon sighed and hid his head under his wing inside his inner sanctum.
Chapter Four
Beal
Moonscale London
A less stealthy hunter might’ve waited until the search for the ‘Monster Cat of London’ was called off before returning to the city. Only, dragon shifters were searching high and low (mostly low) for a giant cat. So, I dressed up as I’d seen Raiel do. I wore jeans and a shirt with shiny buttons. I wandered the streets as the sun sank low in the sky, pretending to window shop. Some of the displays were truly lovely but none of it held my attention. To onlookers I was another tourist wandering aimlessly despite the monster cat warnings, but I was following the scent trail of a beaver who suggested it would be easier to kill my mate than to con him out of the cash. A few people had stopped to sniff me but I smelled like any other big cat shifter in London and the guards were on the search for a wild cat.
My cat daydreamed about gnawing on a fatty beaver tail. I had to remind him that the tail was the best part of the beaver, hence why we were going to give it to our mate to eat. Something happened while we were away. He’d tripped and fallen or something. I saw the blood when I passed by his house earlier. It wasn’t ‘life’ blood but still I made my way to the hospital and eavesdropped until I caught wind of what I needed to know. They’d found the cheetah alive but in shock. My mate was being kept overnight for observation to satisfy his rich but somewhat sick mother. I made a note to bring something healthy for her the next time I crossed the barrier between worlds. Some Liver Cat Grass should do the trick. Hopefully. I’d do anything to keepNic happy. He was the man I’d spend the rest of my life with after all.
Most of my clan had no clue why I wandered back over to Earthside. I wasn’t willing to share the knowledge of Nic with everyone. I hadn’t even swung by the Raven’s Perch to share the news with Raiel even though I knew he was working this evening. If he knew what I was up to the dragons might get mad at him too and none of us had time to stop and descale dragons right now. I was in the middle of a courtship hunt with the true-mate I’d claim soon.
It was easy enough to find Chard as the moon rose in the sky and the hour turned to one in which all good people were asleep, working, or at least at home away from the likes of the scum of Earthside like Chard. He played a poker game, in which he cheated, and all the players snorted green powder up their noses. Then he took his ill begotten gains and headed on his way. I stalked him from the shadows as he hummed to himself. An hour or so into following him, Chard stopped and picked up a long metal bar from behind a dumpster. Then continued on his way. He soon came across a wolf shifter pacing back and forth under the fake-light glow of a streetlamp.
The wolf was a beta shifter who had neither the Alpha/Omega Gene to ensure speedy healing. Yeah, Chard was in for it.
“Have my money?” the beaver grunted out.
“I’m working on it, Chard. Really, I am,” the wolf said, a whine to his words.
He smelled like acrid, anxiety sweat and fur as Chard tapped the crowbar against his palm. Why didn’t the wolf just eat the beaver? It would’ve made his life so much simpler. That was unless someone bigger than them both were at the top of the food chain or whatever illicit activity they had going on.
