“I’m sorry to hear that,” Emmett said. “I believe—”
He never got a chance to tell us what he believed. Mick brought up his hands, his dragon aura rushed outward, and the entire office exploded into flames.
I let out a cry and shielded my face with my hands, but the fire didn’t touch me. Mick and I stood in a clear, five-foot space on the white floor, while the flame raced around us and through the rest of the office.
A rope of fire lifted Emmett’s desk and tumbled it end over end straight through the thick glass wall. The windows were meant to withstand impact—and Emmett no doubt had his bulletproofed—but the desk crashed through the heated glass and flew out into the bright daylight. Fire consumed the steel frame and the computer, raining ash to the city below.
Emmett himself was on fire, a pillar of flame, but he only stood there, no screaming, no flailing. He watched, with me, as darkness filled the room, and every window melted and flowed to the pristine floor in a thick river of glass.
Sudden wind blasted through the three open sides, sweeping both Emmett and me off our feet, the wind tunnel sucking Emmett out into open air.
I skittered on my stomach across the smooth floor, hit the edge, scrabbled for hold, and found myself swept into empty space.
Chapter Twenty-One
I screamed and screamed as I fell, knowing that nothing between me and the thirty floors of air would stop me. My arms pumped, as though some primordial ancestor whose DNA I carried instinctively tried to fly.
I tumbled, dizzy and sick, for all of two seconds—a very, very long two seconds—before a talon caught me and pulled me up into the sky.
“Mick!” I yelled. “You …” I choked off my words, knowing he’d never hear me, and slumped down into the now-familiar dragon’s claw.
Mick didn’t like to go dragon in front of anyone, but he should have thought of that before he destroyed the windows of Emmett’s building and dove out to a metropolis of five million on a bright, clear-skied morning.
We soared far too high above the teeming city, the freeway streaming with cars to our left, arteries feeding into it. Mick flapped over the baseball park, the roof open today, letting me see down to the green of the field too far below me. He winged his way toward the airport, then turned and streamed north just before we reached the flight path of the landing jets.
As he passed over the freeway in the middle of town, cars flowing into a short tunnel staggered to a halt, quickly building a jam that began to stretch for miles. Mick let out a screech that I knew was a dragon laugh, then flew straight north, following a main avenue that crossed low mountains to northern suburbs, then beyond to open desert hills.
Mick headed skyward to navigate the eight-thousand foot mountains of Rim country and off to the high desert of Magellan and home.
***
Mick landed with precision on the other side of the railroad bed from the Crossroads Hotel about an hour and a half after he’d destroyed Emmett’s office.
I fell to my knees when he set me down, weariness and reaction taking over. By the time I hauled myself up, Mick had shifted back into his human form and was helping me with strong, warm hands.
I glared at him. “You enjoyed that!”
“Fuck, yeah.” Mick grinned down at me, his eyes smoky black. “Even if Emmett can protect his body from my fire, I’ll destroy every single thing he enjoys until he leaves you the hell alone.”
I shivered, suddenly cold though the September day was plenty warm. “If you irritate him enough, he’ll come after you.”
“I don’t give a rat’s ass. I will make his life a misery. Wherever he turns, there I’ll be, ready to—how did I put it?—rain down hell. I want him out of your life.”
Mick’s smile had vanished, his anger taking over. Mick rarely lost his temper in a big way, but when he did, continents took cover.
I clasped his hands in mine, closing over his hot fingers. “I don’t want him taking you away from me, Mick. When I thought you were dying in my dream, it was …” Empty, terrifying, a dark hole in my life. “I never want to feel like that again. I was ready to make a deal with the devil to keep you alive.”
I had told him everything about the dream as I recovered in the hospital, though some of the details had gone. Mick squeezed my hands.
“Maybe that’s what the dream was telling you—that you’d go to Emmett if you were desperate. That you’d give him anything.”
I shook my head. “I think it was telling me I’d do anything to keep you safe.”
Mick’s voice went quiet. “I’m supposed to be keeping you safe. From dragons, Beneath goddesses, powerful mages, and your own magic.” He took a step closer, right into my personal space, his body heat warming me. “You’re my mate. I live to keep you safe and next to me.”