Page 14 of Kidnapped By The Messy Dragon

I roll onto my side. My face is killing me, and my ears ring in one long tone.

Something passes over the alley. Two shadows come down fast, and the shadows have wings, big ones. I blink and blink and the picture won’t resolve.

Something lands beside me hard enough to crack the ring in my ears.

“Zuri!” The shout comes from whatever landed.

Something else lands by my feet. Then the gunfire starts, and someone scoops me up off the concrete.

The ringing thins out long enough for me to see him. He turns his back to the shooting and spreads wings out of it, real wings, wide enough to wall me in.

What the hell is this man doing with wings?

Shots hit his back and his wings. He jolts around me with every hit, and he still doesn’t put me down.

I know this face. He’s the one from the Stillwater lobby with the dropped lunch bag and the eyes too green for a person.

I narrow my eyes at him. “You.”

“I got you, baby,” he says against my hair.

“Jalen!” the one by my feet barks. “Go! Get her out of here!”

He turns with me in his arms in time for me to see the second winged man swat the gun away and punch its owner clean off his feet. The man sails backward, lands on the sedan’s roof, and the windshield goes white underneath him.

“Jalen,” I say.

He looks down at me, and I go dizzy all over again. I can’t blame the punch for all of it.

He smiles. Then he carries me to the second winged man and hands me over like a casserole dish.

“Watch her face, she’s hurt,” he says. Then he walks back to the one I maced, who is on his knees dripping tears and pepper spray, and crouches to his level.

“Ghoul.” He clicks his tongue. “Your soul wasn’t enough, huh? She had to take the moisture too. Snatching women at daybreak, ashy as a January elbow.”

“Ghoul?” I say it mostly to myself. “What the hell is a ghoul?”

No one in this alley answers me.

I press my palm to my cheek, and the ache spreads under it. I should not be this close to laughing.

“You’ll get used to Jalen,” the man holding me says.

“Jalen.” I try it out.

“We’ll explain everything,” he says, and he smiles down at me.

“Who are you?” My hand stays on my cheek. “What are you?”

“My name is Malachi. I’m the Alpha of the Carter clan, and my baby brother answers to Jay.” His grip on me doesn’t change. “We’re dragon shifters.”

“Ohhh,” I say, and it comes out long and stupid.

Across the alley, Jay sneezes. I turn toward the sound, and thin smoke rolls out of both of his ears.

Jay wipes his nose with the back of his wrist. Then he crouches back down to the ghoul’s level, and there’s no play left anywhere on him.

“You put your hands on the wrong woman this morning.” He takes the ghoul’s chin and points his ruined red face up at his own. “She’s mine. Tell your witch I said so.”