Wildfire Sea Dragon (Fire & Rescue Shifters: Wildfire Crew Book 3), page 10
He’d leaned back in his chair, tucking his long legs out of the way to give her more room. “It is the only way to keep you safe.”
“I don’t accept that,” she snapped. Her hand sought the hilt of her stunsword, as though she could beat destiny into submission. “You said that these reoccurring visions are warnings. This one is a warning about you. You’re the one who’s important, not me.”
“Not to me.”
She shook her head. “I am not the Heir to the Pearl Throne. If my death keeps you safe—”
“It doesn’t.” He surged to his feet, fists clenching. “And even if it did, I would not let it happen. Seven, don’t even think about it. I will never let you sacrifice yourself for me. Never.”
“I am your oath-sworn bodyguard. It is my duty and my honor.” She held up a hand as he started to retort. “But it seems that is irrelevant. If you perish in this vision as well, then the warning is clear. You can’t be here. We have to go back to Atlantis immediately.”
“You think I haven’t thought of that?” Joe shot back. “Seven, I’ve seen what happens if I’m not here. My friends die. All of them. And the demon still rises.”
“Then we must find a way to stop it.”
“I’m trying. I’m not Netflix. I can’t select the future that I want to see and watch how it all unfolds. I just get glimpses. Fate hands me a puzzle piece or two, and expects me to work out the entire damn picture!”
“Then let me help you decipher it.” She let go of her stunsword, taking one of his hands instead. “You do not have to bear this burden alone, Joe. Not anymore. Let me help.”
His shoulders unknotted a little. He let out his breath, rubbing at the bridge of his nose with his free hand.
“Bluebrook,” he said. “That’s the only other thing I’ve seen. The squad is going to get called out to a fire near a town named Bluebrook. I looked it up, it’s pretty close to here. There’s an ambush. It’s the woman who attacked me at the club. If I’m not with the squad at Bluebrook, then she takes Blaise as her sacrifice instead.” His expression went bleak. “And everyone else dies.”
What was it like, to have to watch your loved ones perish—not just once but over and over again? Her heart ached for him. After all the things he’d seen, how could he still put on a smile, acting as if he hadn’t a care for the world?
“And what happens if you—we—are there?” she asked.
“I don’t know,” he said softly. “I haven’t seen that. All I know is that I have to be there.”
“Then I will be there too.” She gripped his hand, raising their joined fists like warriors swearing an oath-bond. “We will not let this happen, Joe. I swear on my honor. Let our enemy set her ambush at this Bluebrook. We are forewarned. We shall lay a trap for her, and catch her in her own snare. She cannot raise this alpha demon if she is in chains herself. Once she is captured, you will be safe.”
Something new was dawning across his face. An expression that she realized she’d never seen there before.
Hope.
His hand clenched tight around her own, strong fingers engulfing hers. “And then we can mate.”
Chapter 13
They could mate. They could mate.
Joe couldn’t stop grinning. He felt like bursting into song, but unfortunately swinging his crewmates into an impromptu dance number would have been overly odd even for him. He had to settle for whistling cheerfully, with the result that he’d already received sixteen sincere threats of death and/or dismemberment from various colleagues, and it wasn’t even nine o’clock in the morning yet.
He didn’t care. It was all he could do not to hug every last one of them. He wanted to point Seven out to the whole world, crowing like a rooster: There, that’s my mate, right there! And she wants me! She wants me!
At the moment, she was at the other end of the storage room, listening with utter attention as Edith explained the difference between MacCleod and Pulaski cutting tools. Seven stood poised and straight, as elegant in her loose-fitting firefighter gear as she had been in her armor.
He just couldn’t keep his eyes off her. His mate. And there were no secrets between them now.
He wished he could kick his past self. How had he been so asinine as to try to run from her? All this time trying to avoid fate, when he should have trusted her strength. If he’d been brave enough to be honest with her from the start, maybe they would already have been mated…
No. He gave himself a mental shake. Even if he had told her years ago, it still wouldn’t have been safe to mate yet. The demon-woman was still at large. As long as she was free, Seven was at risk. The only way to be certain that his nightmare vision couldn’t come true was to not claim her.
After Bluebrook, Joe reminded himself for the thousandth time. Bluebrook was the key to everything, his chance to end the threat for once and for all. He had to wait to claim his mate until after their enemy was safely neutralized.
No! his dragon roared. His animal seethed with impatience, coiling in his soul. Now, win her now! Shake the sea with songs in her honor! Fill her lair with the rarest of treasures! Offer her the most delicious of delicacies!
“Earth to Joe.” Blaise snapped her fingers by his ear. “What are you doing?”
“Wrestling an overpowering urge to hunt down a tuna,” he muttered.
“What?”
“Never mind.” He wrenched his gaze away from Seven, turning around. “Did you need something?”
“Yeah, for you to have been ready five minutes ago.” Blaise was already fully kitted out in Nomex jacket and pants, her Pulaski slung across her shoulder. “Buck’s going to chew our asses out if we’re late for line-cutting practice. Are you actually going to put that jacket on, or just commune with its spirit?”
He fumbled with his gear, pulling up his suspenders. “Sorry. Be with you in a sec. Got distracted.”
“Uh huh.” Blaise leaned to one side, pointedly looking past him. “By your ‘just a bodyguard.’”
“Don’t know what you mean.” He put on his most innocent expression. “She is my bodyguard.”
Seven hadn’t been keen, but he’d convinced her that it was safest to continue to hide their true relationship from the crew. He knew his squadmates too well. If they got a hint of what was really going on, his friends would be trying to bang them together like a precocious kid with a pair of Barbie dolls.
Explaining why he couldn’t claim his mate—couldn’t claim his mate yet—would have required a lot more explanations than Joe was willing to give. Much as he loved his friends, he couldn’t risk telling them the truth about his talent. With that many people knowing, sooner or later it would get back to the sea, and the Sea Council, and his parents.
And that would be goodbye to his freedom. It was one thing to let a silly, somewhat embarrassing Crown Prince make himself scarce on land. A silly, somewhat embarrassing Crown Prince who could see the future? That would be an entirely different matter.
He’d be lucky if they didn’t staple him to the Pearl Throne.
“Uh-huh.” Blaise’s tone said she wasn’t buying his denial for a hot second. “You seem to be spending an awful lot of time staring at your bodyguard’s backside.”
It was all he could do not to let his attention drift back in that direction now. “Well, you know me. Always an admirer of the female form.”
“I’d report you to Buck for workplace harassment.” Blaise rolled her eyes. “Except I’d have to turn her in as well.”
His dragon preened. He couldn’t help his grin widening. “Is she checking out my butt?”
“She is checking out your butt right now.” Blaise smacked him on the arm. “Stop flexing.”
“Sorry. Reflex.” He shrugged into his jacket. “Anyway, since when is my love life any of your business?”
“Believe me, I wish it wasn’t.” Blaise wrinkled her nose. “But if you’re going to drag your drama to work, then it becomes all our business. I know you, Joe. You’ve never had a relationship that lasted longer than forty-eight hours.”
This was, he felt, a little unfair. “Hey, there was that three-day jazz festival, remember? The all-girl trombone group?”
Blaise looked like she was seriously considering setting fire to his hair. “Exactly my point. You don’t do serious, Joe. And that poor woman doesn’t look like she even knows what casual is. I don’t want her to get hurt.”
“Me neither. Which is exactly why I’m not sleeping with her.”
Callum, who was putting on his own gear nearby, looked up sharply. “But—”
The pegasus shifter fell silent again, mouth clamping shut. Blaise pounced on him like a hawk anyway.
“Aha! I knew it. You are so busted, Joe.” Blaise advanced on Callum, boxing him into a corner. “Spill it, Cal. You sensed them sneaking into the same bedroom last night, didn’t you?”
Callum looked down, round, and up at the ceiling. No escape was forthcoming. He caught Joe’s eye, mouth twisting in an apologetic grimace. “Sorry. Can’t turn it off.”
Sometimes Joe suspected Callum had drawn an even shorter straw than himself when it came to special powers. At least he didn’t have his visions constantly.
It had to be distracting, always having the exact position and type of every life form in a five-mile radius intruding on your consciousness. Joe was pretty sure that was why Cal didn’t talk much.
Normally, the pegasus shifter was as tight-lipped about what he sensed as he was about everything. But all of them had difficulty keeping secrets from Blaise. Even when she was at her sweetest, you couldn’t help but be uncomfortably aware of the power that she could bring to bear on you. It was like having a nosy little sister with a pet assault tank.
“It’s okay, Cal.” Joe turned back to Blaise. “For the record, Seven just came in to check I was okay. I was having a nightmare.”
“He does have nightmares,” Callum confirmed. He looked hopefully at Blaise. “Can I go?”
Blaise pursed her lips, but allowed the pegasus shifter to escape. “So you’re claiming nothing happened?”
“That’s what I said.”
“And can you swear to me that nothing is going to happen?”
“Ah, now, who can tell the future?” He struggled to keep his tone light, bantering. “Look, I promise I won’t do anything that could hurt the squad, okay?”
Blaise narrowed her eyes at him. “And Seven?”
“I will never hurt her.” Despite his best efforts, his dragon’s snarl echoed the words like distant thunder. “I couldn’t hurt her.”
Blaise stared at him. “Are you sure she’s just your bodyguard?”
Rory saved him, inadvertently. The griffin shifter leaned through the doorway, his raised voice ringing from the rafters of the storeroom. “Come on, guys, we were due at the field five minutes ago! What’s the holdup?”
“Coming!” Edith yelled back. She passed a Pulaski to Seven. “Sorry, I could talk about this stuff all day.”
“And I would gladly listen,” Seven said, sounding genuinely interested. “I did not realize there was so much strategy and tactics involved in firefighting. It strikes me as remarkably similar to the arts of war.”
“I’d really like to hear about that, but it’ll have to wait until later.” Edith hefted her pack onto her back. “Joe, can you grab a water cooler? We’re going to need to refill our canteens, working in this heat.”
He turned to the storeroom shelves, reaching up for one of the large plastic drums. “Sure. No problem.”
He pulled the bottle forward, sliding it off the shelf. As he did so, a shaft of sunlight pierced through the transparent plastic, illuminating the water within.
Cold chains around his wrists—
Cool fingers closed on his forearm, pulling him out of the vision. He looked down into Seven’s questioning eyes.
“My prince,” Seven murmured. “Do you need help with that?”
He forced his lungs to work again. “No. Everything’s fine. Don’t worry. Everything’s going to be fine.”
Chapter 14
“Rory,” Seven said hesitantly at dinner one evening. “May I ask for your opinion on something? Your honest opinion?”
The griffin shifter glanced up from buttering a bread roll. “Sure. Go ahead.”
“Does Joe…” Seven searched for the right words. “Does he generally have good ideas?”
Rory’s knife paused in mid-air. “We are talking about the man who’s currently attempting to balance a bottle of hot sauce on his nose, right?”
Across the mess hall, Joe was indeed doing exactly that, egged on by a crowd of firefighters from B and C squads. It seemed to be some kind of bet.
“Pay up, Joe,” Tanner, the boss of B squad, called. Edith and Blaise were nearby, laughing along with the rest. “You’ll never do it.”
“No, wait.” Joe crouched low, tipping his head back as far as he could. “I got this, bro. Just watch.”
Seven winced at the thump of the bottle bouncing off Joe’s forehead yet again.
“I don’t mean about things like that,” she said to Rory. “Not when he’s playing around. Out on the line, in serious situations—does he come up with sensible plans?”
“Sensible?” Rory stared at her. “Joe?”
At Rory’s side, Wystan cleared his throat. Seven distinctly saw him elbow the griffin shifter.
“Er.” Rory crammed a bite of bread into his mouth, clearly in order to give himself time to think. He swallowed. “That is, I wouldn’t say that planning is his greatest strength. But he has many other virtues! He’s always, uh, great at building team morale.”
“An under-rated skill,” Wystan said brightly. “Even when things are hard, we can always count on Joe to raise a smile.”
“Exactly. And he’s strong.” Rory flung a somewhat desperate-looking glance at Callum, who was sitting a little way off, silently working his way through a plate of stew. The pegasus shifter twitched as though he’d been poked with a pin. “And determined.”
“Loyal,” Callum volunteered. It was the first word Seven had heard him speak since the previous morning.
“Right.” Rory looked grateful for the input. “We can always depend on Joe to have our backs, no matter what. Even if sometimes we want to shove a sock down his throat.”
Wystan elbowed Rory again.
Seven could almost see the telepathic messages flying through the air. “Are you three colluding to try to come up with compliments about Joe?”
“What? No,” Rory said, extremely unconvincingly. “Definitely not. Just being honest, like you asked.”
A slight flush stained Wystan’s sharp cheekbones. “It’s occurred to us that perhaps, over the course of the past week, you might have come to some mistaken conclusions about him. Based on our…affectionate banter.”
“Yesterday you told him that he should grow headfirst in the ground like a turnip,” Seven felt compelled to point out.
Wystan coughed. “Yes. Well. In my defense, he’d been singing ‘Baby Shark’ under his breath for fifty-eight solid minutes. Even a saint would have been driven to strong language.”
“You have to bear in mind, we’ve known each other all our lives,” Rory said. He gestured between the three men. “Brothers always tease each other mercilessly, right? It just shows that we love each other.”
Callum set down his glass, hard enough to make water slosh onto the table. He stood up, his eyes even colder than usual. “Not always.”
He stalked away, abandoning his half-eaten food. Seven stared after him, then turned back to the others.
“Did I offend him somehow?” she asked.
“No, that was me.” Rory grimaced, rubbing his forehead. “I wasn’t thinking. I forget that not everyone gets on with his brothers as well as I do with my own twin. But that’s Cal’s story to tell if he wants to, not mine. Anyway, what we mean is, don’t take the way we rib Joe seriously. He’s honestly a great guy. Anyone should be proud to be his ma—uh.”
“Friend,” Wystan jumped in, not quite quickly enough. “His friend.”
Seven looked at them. They both abruptly became intently interested in their meal trays, avoiding her eyes.
She dropped her head into her palms. “Has everyone worked it out?”
“Er. Yes,” Wystan said apologetically. “It became somewhat obvious around day two of training. Sorry.”
“We’ve been trying not to say anything because you both seemed to want to keep it a secret.” Rory leaned his elbows on the table, lowering his voice—not that it was necessary, given that Joe’s antics had everyone else’s full attention. “But whatever is going on between you two, the rest of us are starting to get worried.”
“Forgive the impertinence, but we couldn’t hold our tongues any longer,” Wystan said. “Seven, no matter how aggravated we get with him sometimes, he is a good man. He may seem your complete opposite, but I have no doubt that fate matched you two up for a reason.”
Across the room, Blaise flipped the hot sauce bottle into the air. Fenrir caught it neatly on his nose, balancing on his hind legs. The hellhound’s copper eyes rolled to look at Joe, gleaming with satisfaction.
“Woof,” Fenrir said, to general cheers.
“Face it, Joe,” Blaise said, grinning. “You’ve lost. Kiss your bacon this week goodbye.”
“I’m not giving up yet.” Joe plucked the hot sauce bottle from Fenrir’s nose. “Let me have one more try.”
Rory’s voice was a deep, gentle rumble. “He would make you happy, Seven.”
“I know,” she said softly. Longing caught in her throat, sharp as a fishhook. “And I want to make him happy too. But it’s not that simple.”
He looked like he didn’t have a care in the world. He clowned around for his friends…and not one of them knew why he screamed every night.
Five nights in a row now, she’d wakened to the sound of his agonized voice, shouting her name in sea dragon language. She’d listened, fists clenched, staring into the dark while he screamed. As helpless to save him from his vision as he was helpless to save her in his vision.
