The Dragon’s E-Mail Order Menage

He couldn’t have that and so he did something that she found completely stunning. He shifted. Right there, in the middle of the city in a dark alleyway that was barely able to contain him in his dragon form, Damon shifted and the next thing she knew he was picking her up in his massive taloned feet and lifting her into the air. She let out a great sob of despair, but there was nobody there to hear it. It was carried away on the wind and she knew that she was lost.

***

“How long are you going to keep us here, Damon? It’s starting to get really cold.”

“Are you cold? Well then come here, all you have to do is snuggle up with me like you did in the old days. Those weren’t so long ago, you know? You remember? Things were nice then.”

“No,” she said firmly through chattering teeth, “I don’t want to ‘snuggle up.’ I want you to take me back. I want you to take me home.”

“Which home?! That new place? The one you left everything you knew, everyone who cared about you for? Or are you talking about your real home? The one where we built a fu*king life together?”

Maggie sighed and looked out across the gorge, the place where he had flown the two of them. She wasn’t sure if he had brought her because it was beautiful and out of the way or if it was because this was one of the most famous places in New Mexico for people to commit suicide, but either way, she wasn’t happy.

It felt like they had been here for hours and nothing seemed to have improved in the slightest. She just sat there shivering while Damon paced in front of her like a maniac. She wasn’t making any progress. If anything, he was getting more and more agitated by the second until, seemingly out of nowhere, he lifted her onto her feet and shook her as hard as he could.

She felt her head snap back and forth uncomfortably and her teeth clatter against each other and she realized with a dull certainty that he intended to kill her. She had been wrong. She wasn’t part of any myth come to life. She wouldn’t be a part of the resurgence of the dragon people. She was going to die right here on this bridge at the hands of a scorned lover. Aside from the fact that they were both dragon shifters, this was going to have all of the makings of a bad lifetime movie. And then, just as suddenly as he had begun to shake her, he let her go, his eyes darting to the sky and rolling wildly in his head.

“What was that?”

“What was what?”

“Don’t play dumb with me!” he roared, shaking her again before he started to pace again, “What the fu*k was that?!”

And then she heard it. Once she did she had no idea how she had missed it in the first place, but she had. She had been too stunned to hear it maybe, but now she could hear it as clear as anything and it was like music to her ears. It was the sound of massive wings flapping through the cloudy air. The sound was too big for it to be anything but dragons and after a few more heart stopping seconds, she saw that she was right.

It was Levi and Hudson. They had come to her rescue. Things began to move very quickly then and she was never entirely sure afterwards what part of what she remembered was real, and in what order it went. Levi and Hudson both landed on the bridge with a booming thud and it actually shook with the sudden added weight. She turned back towards Damon and saw that in the brief amount of time when she had looked away from him and to the sky, he had shifted as well.

She was the only human on the bridge now and there was nothing she could do about it. She was still caught up in those damned handcuffs and no matter how hard she pulled against them, she couldn’t get them loose.

The roar of the dragon that was Levi snapped her attention back to the matter at hand. She was furious with Damon and rightly so, but now she was afraid for him as well. Levi was so much larger than Damon and even as Damon swiped his claws out toward Levi, he was being driven back, closer and closer to the edge of the gorge. That wouldn’t be the end of the world, she thought to herself, not when she was able to fly, but then Levi lashed out with one of his talons, easily shredding one of Damon’s blue wings.

Damon let out an elongated howl of pain and Maggie knew that, if he fell now, he would fall to his death. There would be no flying away from this unscathed and it was all happening so fast! She had to do something. Regardless of what he had done to her he was right. They had loved each other at one time. She had even thought that she would marry him. She couldn’t go from that to standing idly by and watching him as he was herded off the edge of a bridge. It wasn’t right.

“Stop!” she shrieked in a shrill voice that sounded foreign to her own ears, “That’s enough. This whole thing has gone far enough. Too far. I know you’re angry, Levi, but please. You have to stop.”

It wasn’t working. It was like she wasn’t there at all. She was going to have to stand back and watch her childhood friend die, and once that happened, she would never be able to look at Levi and Hudson the same way. Something about their relationship would be spoiled and it would be beyond repair.

Hudson. It wasn’t until she thought his name that she realized he wasn’t involved in trying to send Damon to his death. But where was he? She looked around wildly, the panic gripping her heart with an icy finality that made it difficult to see straight, to think straight, and finally found him standing stone still in the dark. That was when her hope returned. She didn’t even have to say anything. All she did was look at him and he moved swiftly forward, put his body in between Damon and Levi.