Chapter Twelve
Kylie
Corde gave her a shove, sending her sliding five feet forward as several shots rang out from another window, two of them hitting the space she’d just occupied. He rolled to his knees, grabbing chunks of a downed mirror and sending them through the open window like knives. A yelp of pain rewarded his efforts and the gun disappeared.
“Exactly what I said.”
She stared, her eyes still trying to register the speed with which he’d just acted. From pushing her to getting to his knees and throwing half the mirror out the window had been perhaps two seconds. Maybe three, if she was slow on the stopwatch.
“A dragon. Right. Because that makes sense.”
He rolled his eyes, ran over to her while crouching low, picked Kylie up like she was a ragdoll, and carried her into the basement.
“Yes, I am a dragon. That is how I’m okay. Guns don’t hurt me, but they can hurt you.”
She blinked while thinking furiously, trying to comprehend what the hell he was saying. “So what do we do?” Getting out alive seemed to be of a more pressing concern than whether or not the guy she was just tonguing was off his rocker or not.
“Uh, I don’t know.”
“What the hell do you mean you don’t know?!”
He stared at her. “Uh, because I wasn’t exactly thinking ahead to the fact we might get in a gunfight at your house!”
“Okay, that’s fair.” She looked around.
“Can we call the police?”
Kylie shook her head. “No, they take forever to respond to this part of town. Even with gunshots, we’ll be dead before they arrive. Next?”
The growl that came from his throat was so loud she backed away slightly. It was almost…inhuman. But that was impossible. Dragons weren’t real. Everyone knew that. They were just legends. Stories. Fairy tales. There absolutely was not a dragon sitting at the top of the stairs in front of her. And Kylie most certainly had not just been making out with one and thinking about his tight little buns. Definitely not.
“I don’t have any other ideas.”
“None at all?”
“None that don’t involve violence beyond what I think you’re comfortable with,” he said, his voice just a touch sarcastic.
Given the situation, she was willing to let it slide. He was worrying about keeping her safe, and that was perfectly okay with her.
“We need to leave.”
“Absolutely. I one hundred percent agree.” He cocked his head at her as the sound of footsteps thudding inside the house reached her ears. “Any ideas on how? And if you say a secret passage in your basement, I swear to God I’m going to be the happiest dragon in the world.”
“What?”
He smiled. “We love secret passages.”
Kylie gaped at him. “Now is not the time to be making jokes.”
“Sure it is. We need to stay calm. Jokes help with that.”
“Uh, in case you can’t hear, they are inside the house.”
“Yeah, but they aren’t coming closer. They’re afraid of me,” he boasted.
“You’re getting awfully confident given our situation, Corde. Care to let me know why?”
The smile left his face, replaced by a mask of anger and hatred. “Because if they come down here, then I’ll do whatever it takes to protect you, Kylie. They are not going to harm one hair on your body.”
She shivered at the proclamation, hearing the utter truth in it. Whatever Corde was, he certainly was a fearsome opponent, and she felt sorry for any of Jose’s gang who tried to come down here. They hadn’t bothered asking each other who was behind it, but the answer was clear. Who else would come after them in her house, trying so hard to eliminate them?
Upstairs the footsteps had stopped. There were a few more thuds, and then nothing but silence.
“What’s going on?” she crawled up a few more stairs, trying to get a better look. “Where did they go?”
Corde still blocked her way, and despite her curiosity, she wasn’t all that anxious to get past him and expose herself. If he truly could take a bullet, then she was more than willing to let him.
Speaking of which…
She got closer and started look at the back of his T-shirt as best she could in the darkness. Which meant running her fingers over it.
“What are you doing?”
Ignoring his question, she felt around, until her fingers encountered a hole in the fabric. Gently she pressed on the skin beneath it. There was no reaction from Corde.
“Do you not feel that?” she asked.
“I feel you poking me, though I can’t fathom why.”
“That’s where you were shot!” she hissed. “There’s a bullet hole in your shirt! How are you not hurt? It’s only your skin beneath it.”
Corde opened his mouth to reply, but a flicker of light from under the door caught his attention and his head rocked back around. Her hands were still on his back, meaning Kylie could feel every muscle in his torso go rigid.
“Umm… Corde? What is it? What’s wrong? You’re scaring me,” she said when he didn’t reply.
Then the self-proclaimed dragon man turned to face her, and even in the darkness she could see the whiteness of his teeth as he grinned from ear to ear. “So don’t freak out,” he said calmly. “But your house is on fire.”
She stared at him. “I’m sorry, did you just say my house was on fire?”
The brightening light from under the door made it easier for her to see him nod. “Yep.”
“Okay.” She took a deep breath. “Now would be a really good time for you to explain why you seem happy about this. ‘Cause just so you know, my natural reaction to my house being on fire would be to freak out.”
He looked away. “Mixed feelings, truthfully. I’m sad that your house is on fire. But I’m laughing because the idiots used fire. Trust me, we’re going to be just fine.”
Flames began to lick under the door and she moved backward, the smell of burning wood now filling the basement, even as the crackling sounds of the timbers began to reach her ears.
“And why is that a good thing? Because let me remind you, my house is on FIRE!” she finished. “How am I supposed to trust you?”
“Because Kylie,” he said, suddenly all business, “I’m going to trust you. I’m a dragon. A red dragon, to be more specific.” He smiled and stuck his fingers into the flames. “And fire is kind of our thing.”
She gasped as the flames curled and danced around his fingers, leaping into his palm and then encircling his forearm like a huge bracelet. He moved his hand and the flames came with it, shooting high into the air and then diving back into his hand.
“I…don’t believe it.”
“No reason you should,” he said, still as calm and serene as a meditating monk. “But it means that we’re not going to die here.” He frowned. “Unfortunately I cannot save your house.”
“Nothing much left to save,” she said, feeling suddenly hopeless. “So, how do we get out of here?”
He bobbed his head thoughtfully, casting a hand back to the door. The flames seemed to suddenly retreat back under the door, leaving them alone for the moment. Kylie doubted that would last though, as she could hear them eating away at the wood. It wouldn’t be long before the floors started to give way.
“My guess would be they’re sticking around until the first police or firefighters get here, which is probably what, another three minutes?”
“In my neighborhood? Five to ten, probably.”
“Right, it hasn’t been all that long, has it? Okay, so assume they’re outside, watching the windows and doors for us to come stumbling out. They shoot us and then leave, nobody is the wiser, can’t prove anything, etcetera. Am I understanding these modern assholes well enough?”
“Makes sense,” she agreed, looking around nervously as the frame began to shake.
“Then we can’t leave through those methods. And since you don’t have a secret passageway out of the basement here, that only leaves one option.”
“If I’d known that one day I would need a secret passageway to escape my house from burning down while I’m stuck inside of it with a dragon, then you know what, in hindsight, I might have bought a different house.”
Corde laughed while she thought about his words. Eventually her head tilted backward and she found herself looking up. “You want to leave through the roof.”
“I want to leave through the roof.”
“You’re even crazier than I thought.”
“Only about you!” he said, leaning in and giving her a brief but passionate kiss before he slid by her down the stairs to the basement floor.
“I can’t believe this.”
He grinned. “Just wait till you see what happens next.”
She followed him down, but he waved a hand to hold her back. “Just stay over there by the washing machine for the moment, will you?”
Kylie did as she was told, while Corde moved to the opposite side of the room. She watched as he reached up toward the ceiling, easily able to touch it. Her basement had seven-foot-high ceilings, which was plenty for her, but likely left him feeling quite cramped.
She gasped as a tornado of flame suddenly burst through the floor, opening a huge hole.
“My poor house,” she moaned as debris clattered down around Corde.
There was a pause, and suddenly she saw what appeared to be roof shingles come falling down as well.
“What the hell are you doing?’ she yelled at him over the roar of the flames, now quite audible as she looked up through the floor into the raging inferno that had once been her upstairs living room.
Fire was everywhere. The entire building was engulfed, and she doubted any of it could be saved before the fire trucks arrived.
“Do you have a rug down here by chance?” he asked. “Or sheets, perhaps?”
“Spare sheets, yes. Assuming they didn’t get destroyed.” She turned and opened the cupboards above the washer and dryer. To her relief, everything was intact.
“Bring it all!” he shouted.
She grabbed it all and dumped it at his feet. Corde made a few rips, tore one sheet into strips, and then tied several flat bed sheets to the strips at the corners.
“What the hell are you doing?”
He shook his head. “No time. Here, bring that table over here and set it down.”
Kylie frowned, but grabbed the old coffee table she’d had stacked up against a wall, and, with a grunting effort, dragged it over to him.
Corde finished with the sheets, all of which were somehow miraculously not burning or charred from all the embers floating around. Thinking about it, Kylie suddenly realized that the air she was breathing felt quite fresh and not smoky. Was this all Corde’s doing?
“Come on!” he shouted, climbing on top of the table and extending an arm to her.
Shaking her head, quite unbelieving that she was doing this, Kylie jumped up. Without asking permission he tied two of the strips to each arm, and pushed a bundle of sheet into her chest until she held it there. Then he repeated the act with himself.
“Corde, what is going on?!” She struggled to untie herself. What was he thinking? She needed her hands free if they were going to escape!
He turned to look at her, all humor gone from his eyes. “Kylie, if we’re going to do this properly, then I need you to trust me. I trusted you. Now I need you to do the same for me.”
“Corde…”
“Look up.”
She did, gasping as she realized she could see the sky above them. “Corde, this is insane!”
“Well, until you let me deal with this my way, yep, it is insane!” he shouted over the burning house. He put his arms over her head, holding his bundle of sheets to her, and then his eyes did something she never would have believed unless she’d seen them before.
The graphite-gray rings filled with orange-red fire until his entire pupil glowed with flames. The burning house around them groaned and tendrils of flame lanced out toward them, curving down and under the coffee table where they swirled. The wooden surface began to shudder and vibrate as more and more flame was packed underneath them.
“Corde…what are you—DOING?!” she finished in a scream as the contained flames were released in one direction: up. The coffee table, and thus the two of them, were flung up through her floor, then through her ceiling, and high into the night sky.
She wanted to scream, but no breath would come. As it turned out, that was because Corde’s hand was clamped over her mouth.
“Don’t scream.”
Easy for you to say, she wanted to say, letting her eyes do her talking instead. You’re not the one shooting through the sky ON A FREAKING COFFEE TABLE!
A warm breeze reached up from the fire and began to blow against them.
“Let go of your sheets,” Corde said, doing the same, yet still managing to keep her held tight.
Kylie did as instructed. After all, he’d gotten her this far. She gulped as they reached the peak of their arch, nearly a hundred feet at least in the air, if not more. The wind picked up, and the sheets billowed out wide above them, catching the warm air and slowing their fall dramatically.
“You have got to be kidding,” she whispered, as the strips tied to her arms now acted to curl the sheets around like a parachute.
“I’ll be honest, I wasn’t really expecting it to work either,” Corde admitted, the heavy breeze from the fire guiding them away to the north of her house.
In the distance she saw the first police and fire trucks beginning to arrive at long last. It boggled her mind to realize that perhaps no more than ten or fifteen minutes had elapsed since that first gunshot. It felt like hours.
“What were you going to do if it didn’t work?” she asked as the ground rushed up at them. It was coming fast. Really fast. “Corde?”
At the last moment Corde swept her into his arms, absorbing the impact of the landing on his legs as if it had been nothing.
“I would have gone to Plan B,” he said, untying the strips from her wrists and massaging her forearms where they had dug deep.
“Plan B?”
“Yeah. Don’t ask.”
“I see.” She looked back at the sky, then at his legs. “You really aren’t human, are you?”
“Oh, I’m human,” he said, sounding somewhat hurt. “I’m just not completely human. I’m a dragon shifter, Kylie. Half and half.”
“Uh-huh. Forgive me. Despite the evidence I saw, and that…that thing you did with the fire, I’m still a little skeptical.”
“I don’t blame you.”
“And why are you here now?”
“To help the government fight some non-humans from another realm.” He smiled. “Also unbelievable, I know.”
“Just a little.”
Her mind thought back to some events a few months earlier. “Wait, does this have to do with the military exercises that happened in the mountains? The ones that they claimed to be normal, but everyone thought were bogus? And the major military presence that’s suddenly come into being to the west?”
“Fort Banner,” he confirmed. “Yes.”
“I see. Well no, actually I don’t. But I’ll admit there is a bunch of evidence in your favor.” She looked around, desperate to change the subject. “Do you think they saw us?”
He shook his head. “No, the building suddenly shot flames out in every direction as we escaped. They would have been ducking for cover.” A grin crossed his soot-stained face. “How convenient.”
Kylie sighed. “How convenient indeed,” she echoed dryly, realizing he’d actually been the one to cause that. “That’s why you didn’t want me screaming.”
“Exactly. The police and fire department are there now, so we should be safe.”
Looking back in the direction of her house, the glow of flames still very visible in the night sky, she sagged. “I guess. Should we go back?”
“No. If you show up looking like this, they’ll think you had something to do with it.”
She shot him an accusing look. “You’ve burned things down before.”
“Kylie. I’m a dragon. What do you think?”
“I think I don’t want to know. I’ll go to the fire department in the morning and blame it on arson I guess.”
He arched an eyebrow at her sudden idea.
“I’ve dealt with enough criminals I know what to say, though I feel like I’m betraying myself doing so.”
“You didn’t set the fire,” he told her. “Nor did you cause it. Don’t feel guilty. Think of it this way: you can use your insurance payout to fix your car, instead of feeling guilty when I had it done for you.”
She started walking. “You were going to fix my car without telling me?”
“Yes.” He offered no further explanation.
“Corde?”
“Yes?”
“Call a cab. I want to shower.”
“I’d love to, but I left my phone back in your house by accident. I think we have to walk.”
She shook her head. “No, correction. You’re walking.”
“What are you going to do?”
She grinned. “You’re carrying me, dragon-man.” And she threw herself into his arms.
Corde didn’t even blink as he swept her up, holding her still, his arms not trembling in the slightest. Kylie smiled to herself. She could get used to feeling so small and little around him.