Chapter 269. Marginally Unhinged I

Chapter 269: 269. Marginally Unhinged I

Maisie’s Lycan

We hit the ground with a crack that cracked the stone beneath us.

He roared into our mind, his rage carrying the crushing weight of centuries. "Thousands of years in Exile! We watched our kin wither and die, our immortality reduced to ashes! I finally carved a path to this pathetic, ripe little world, and you, a flea-bitten mongrel, dare to slam the door in my face?!"

Flea-bitten? The audacity. The girl had great hair.

"We know your plans for this world. We won’t let you," I said, though honestly, I didn’t care. But being trapped in the body of a girl who loved boring history had altered me enough to draw up memories from the time I was in a different body, in a different world.

There was a time when dragons lived apart from the rest of the other world, a time when they lived in a separate plane, the highest authority after the Moon Mother herself, for their endless wisdom and power. They were guardians.

But there was a turning point. Perhaps they decided they were done watching us little ’mongrels’ from afar. Perhaps they decided they wanted to be worshipped as much as the Moon Mother was.

Either way, their need to conquer and rule every race left enough carnage and destruction in their wake that even the Moon Mother was deeply displeased and casted them out.

When they descended, they brought with them monarchy and dictatorship.

Sometimes, they were cruel. Sometimes they tried not to be. But the common attribute of dragons after their fall was destruction. Perhaps it was a curse, but it was in their blood.

None of that mattered. All I smelled was a rotting ego and a desperate need for attention. I just wanted to bite something.

A massive, clawed hand trapped us to the floor, crushing us, and swirling eyes burning with a millennia of starved madness and contempt bore into ours. "I will kill you, drain you, and use your spilled blood to carve a path--"

Crack. Crack. Crack.

A silver bullet shattered against his scaly snout, followed instantly by an entire magazine. The impacts barely grazed his thick hide, but the sheer, stinging annoyance of it made him flinch. His crushing grip on us loosened.

I snapped my gaze to the left.

Mercer.

He was panting, his clothes shredded and his arms bled. His forehead was slick with fresh blood. But his rifle was raised and his aim never faltered.

Oh. Oh.

My mouth watered. The girl hurt constantly because this man hated her. How pathetic. How useless. Hate, love, resentment. What did those complicated little human words matter? He was bleeding, he was lethal, and he was standing between a primordial monster and us.

Where I came from, that was foreplay, and it made an old monster like me, who had fought in wars and had seen and spilled enough blood to fill a river... blush.

His scent hit our nose. The coppery tang of blood, gunpowder, that manly spice and underneath it all, my scent that still cling to him, even after all this months.

I purred so hard, our ribs vibrated. With his shirt ripped open like that and all that blood on him, he looked like an offering.

He was practically begging me to climb and fuck him on the spot. Drag him into a dark cave, hold him captive for however long it takes to make him understand he was ours and teach him all the different things I’d learned to do with my hips in every life I’d lived.

Oh, but the things I would do to him--

The dragon’s spiked tail swung left. Mercer dodged, however, the tail recoiled and lashed against his chest, sending him crashing into the stone rubble.

The purr died in my throat.

A cold, jagged silence swallowed my mind. Mine. The overgrown lizard broke my toy.

I had my claws out and I lunged high, fury expanding my chest. I tore right through scale and flesh and bone. Blood sprayed hot against our skin, and the dragon’s icy roar frosted our cheeks and lashes. I barely felt it.

"No one touches my things," I hissed.

His limbs crushed the ground as he tore away from me, a deafening shriek exploding out of him as I gutted the soft underbelly, slipping out from under him.

I shouldn’t have been able to break through his scale, but we kept discovering new things about ourselves, ever since that night.

All for the better, I suppose.

A long, rumbling inhale shook the ground under our feet. We glanced up just in time to see the dragon part his jaw, a horrendous blue flame blooming in the back of his throat.

A heavy body slammed into us from the side, knocking us out of the blast zone in the nick of time. We rolled hard into the debris, the larger body landing squarely on top of ours.

Blue eyes met mine.

"Oh, hello," I purred, licking a smear of black blood off Quinlan’s jaw. Didn’t make him any less appealing. "If you wanted to get me underneath you, you could’ve just asked."

A hot breath of disbelief escaped him. "I can’t believe you’re flirting with me right now, little mate."

I preened. I loved it when they didn’t cower. It made me want to devour them whole.

My thighs circled his waist, my instincts blurring the lines between fighting and mating as I tipped us over, taking the dominant position.

His back hit the rubble and his firm lips parted on a groan as I ground my hips against his crotch. He was hard. He was surrounded by death and fire, and he was hard.

His blue eyes widened, flicking over our head. "Not a good time--"

He pivoted our bodies, and a spiked tail pulverized the earth where our heads had been a fraction of a second ago.

Quinlan was on top again, his chest heaving against mine. "You want to tell me what the fuck is going on?"

Fuck. I loved it when my Frenchman cursed.

I giggled. "Yes. We can do that later."

He blinked. A hoarse laugh escaped him, his eyes twinkling like rare sapphires. I thought he was breathtaking, right before I violently shoved him off us. Blue flame blasted the space he had just occupied, singing the ends of our hair.

Irritation flared hot in our veins. The lizard was becoming a nuisance.

I pushed into a crouch, locking eyes with the beast.

"Maisie, don’t--"

I leaped. I didn’t care about the fire, or the height, or the danger. I just wanted to kill him. I suspended in the air for a second before gravity snatched us, and we slammed down hard.

Onto the dragon’s back.

He rolled right, taking flight, thrashing wildly to shake me off. But I was already anchored. I dug my claws deep into his meat, using his own torn flesh as handholds to haul myself up the massive, trembling joint of his wing.

And I shoved my arm elbow-deep into the wing joint. His agonized shriek tore the clouds apart, and it only made my pulse hammer with glee. I wedged my boot hard against his spine.

"You fools never do listen when you are warned," I growled, gripping the base of the wing with both hands.

And I pulled and heart the snapping of his bones. The cartilage tore and his roaring became blood-curdling music to my ears. Blood erupted, spraying my cheeks.

When the wing refused to give way completely, I began slashing, hacking, and tearing at the sinew. This, was why the girl spent half of the time tuning me out. To her, I was a menace. Unhinged. Lacking of a moral compass. I never did know how to stop.

And the first taste of blood awakened the blood thirst in me. And as the wing detached and we tumbled into a free fall, my eyes were already locked on my next prey.

She knew I was coming for her.

It had been a long time coming, and even as I landed badly and snapped my ankle, even as I was being stared at by everyone within reach, even as the other winged beasts lost their direction as the dragon laid unconscious on the ground, bleeding out on the grounds of the school he had aimed to destroy, even as I vaguely registered the tide of the fight had been turned because of us, I didn’t take my eyes off the Queen Bitch.

I could smell her fear from several feet across. I could smell everyone’s fear. They either watched me with awe or fear of both. It wasn’t often a little girl dismembered a fucking dragon.

We were an anomaly. We always had been.

My ankle snapped back, healing at great speed, and the Lycan Queen took a measured step back, like she knew the distance was nothing to us.

"Guards," she started, and I thought there was a quiver in her voice. The order had barely made it past her lips before I closed the distance, in a split second, and wrapped my hand around her pale neck.