“Mine!” Derek yelled from the other side of the sofa, as she scrambled for any kind of traction in an attempt to get to her feet.
Damn it, her shoulder hurt. And her back.
“What the hell are you doing here?” her Viking Harley hunk growled.
Head swimming, she looked up at him through tangled strands of her hair.
Her Viking’s stare was fixed on something near her door. No, not something. Someone. Derek. What the hell was her friend doing charging into her home shouting something about dragons?
“She’s not yours,” Derek snarled, still out of her sight.
Clawing at the sofa, pain a throbbing beat in her head and shoulder, she shoved herself to her feet. “What the hell is going on here?”
Both men locked their attention on her. A split second later, Derek’s attention dropped to her naked body.
Heat flooded her cheeks. Her stomach knotted. Without thought, she snatched up one of the cushions that had tumbled to the floor with her and held it in front of her groin, hugging her boobs with her other arm. “I said, what the hell is going on?”
The hunk from the Harley swung back to Derek, every muscle in his body seemingly poised to strike. “She’s not yours, druid. Now get the fuck out of—”
Derek threw something at him.
Dust? Powder? Jilly couldn’t make it out, but the air between Derek and her stranger, who’d moments ago had been on the verge of making her come with only his tongue, suddenly filled with a bruised-purple mist
Thick and dense. Concealing almost everything. Everyone.
A putrid odor, like vomit and spoiled fruit, tainted the air, and she mashed her hand to her mouth, gagging.
“We’ve got to go, Jilly.” Derek appeared beside her, curling his fingers around her wrist in a tight grip, his gaze drilling into hers.
She gaped at him. Behind him, the purple fog writhed, the sound of a coughing snarl emanating from its dense cloud.
A large, dark shape moved inside it.
“Wh-what did you do?” She frowned at Derek, and then at his hold on her wrist. “Where’s…” Shit, she didn’t know her hunk’s name. She glared up at Derek, pulling at his grip. “Let me go! Whatever you’re doing, I don’t like—”
“Now, Jilly,” he snarled, before turning away, his hand tightening.
He ran from the room, dragging her along behind him, telling her to hurry up the whole time. Her feet tangled and she tripped, tumbling forward, but he didn’t stop yanking on her arm, forcing her to find her balance and follow him. “Derek, stop! This is insane. What are you doing?”
“Hurry,” he barked over his shoulder, increasing his pace. “Hurry up!”
Her hip collided with the console table near her apartment’s door, hot pain shearing through her. “What the hell is going on?” she cried, her wrist burning as she tried to twist out of his vise-like grip. “Derek, what’s going—”
A wall of heat slammed into her back, driving her into Derek.
He turned, expression harried, and threw out his hand over her shoulder.
More powder flew through the air, as putrid in odor as the last, and the heat vanished, replaced by a furious roar. The walls rattled, windows shook. Frames smashed to the floor.
“Come on.” Derek fixed her with that same harried look, eyebrows knitting. “I can’t save you if we don’t leave now!”
“Save me?” Jilly blinked. Her head swam. Her stomach roiled. “Save me from who? What?”
Derek’s grip relaxed a little on her wrist. “Trust me,” he murmured, before holding his hand, palm up, in front of her face and blowing.
Everything turned blue. Her eyes stung, and a blanket of numb detachment fell over her. She tingled. All over. Every molecule of her body tingled, and yet at the same time, she felt nothing, as if she no longer existed.
“Come on,” Derek said, although his voice sounded different. Deeper. Older. The words…the words slid over her mind, mellifluous and guttural at once.
She nodded, fuzzy with that weird emptiness. A surreal compulsion to do exactly as Derek said flowed through her. “Okay.”
He pulled her from her apartment. She went with him, moving through the blue moisture particles hanging in the air as they slipped over her bare skin. And yet even as she followed willingly, a distant part of her mind shrieked at her to fight against him, to tear her wrist free of his grip. To escape him.
To return to…
“Ari,” she whispered.
The tingling void of her existence flared hot at the word.
No, not word. Name. His name. Her Harley hunk.
Ari. His name was Ari.
But how did she know that? How did she—
“Shh, Jilly,” Derek said, leading her to the elevator.
The desire to do exactly as he instructed welled through her once more. She nodded again, gazing at him. Blue fog swirled over her vision. “Okay,” she answered.
Derek didn’t stop at the closed elevator doors. He hurried to the stairwell, shoving open the door with a single push.
Jilly’s brain registered the cold concrete under her bare feet, like an icy wet lick, and then a booming echo assaulted her ears as the door slammed shut behind her.
“You must follow me,” Derek said, his eyes finding hers. “The dragon is going to hurt you if you don’t.”
She nodded her head, incapable of doing anything else, even as she tried to argue against him. Inside, that same earlier heat she’d experienced threaded through an awareness of…what? She didn’t know.
Ari.
The name caressed her mind.
“Put this on,” Derek instructed, shucking out of his jacket before draping it over her shoulders.
The denim kissed the form that was her non-existence. For a fleeting moment the notion of being naked, of being exposed, unfurled through Jilly’s foggy head, before scattering into nothingness.
Derek took her wrist again. “Let’s go.”
No. The word formed in her head, distant and hazy. I don’t want to go.
“Okay,” she said again with a wobbly nod, the word barely a breath.
Time slid around her. The cold concrete beneath her feet turned to carpet and then concrete again a heartbeat later. Swirls of blue washed over her. She continued to tingle, numb and
