Page 7 of My Monster's Keeper
He grunts. “A single question doesn’t mean she has what we need.” The scathing tone makes me feel like a child caught stealing.
They argue back and forth.
But I’m not listening any more. The dragon thing has crawled down the pylons and is sneakily moving in my direction. Its gaze is fixed, and it hasn’t blinked. I’m not looking at it, but I’m watching from the corner of my eye with growing alarm.
It gets close enough that I can see the overlapping pattern of its scales. A huge black tongue rolls out and whips around, tasting the air before it vanishes back into its mouth that is filled with far too many teeth.
I feel faint.
He moves closer, his paw, no, giant freaking hand, lifts with lethal fingers tipped with long black claws. My mouth is suddenly so dry I can’t even swallow.
I can see the flex of his muscles as he moves, as he times his attack. But just as he shifts his arm down to snatch me into his lunch, I’m shifted into the protective hold of the big not-antlered man who I think is named Wilder, if I’m following this conversation right.
Stix jumps on the thing and slams it into the ground. And there ensues a fight like none I’ve ever seen. I can barely keep up with where they are. They move so fast. The sounds of their blows are deafening. Hartley ends up moving and sitting on the boot of the squad car, smoking a cigarette. He looks like a man who’s had a gut full.
As the blows get more contained, I find myself leaning into the creature behind me. Wilder might be cold, but he’s feeling like an awfully safe wall right now.
Frost appears on the other side of the car, and our eyes catch. His strange white and black eyes consider me for a long moment before he quirks his eyebrow. It’s such a human gesture that I feel like the entire world just tilted on its axis.
“Enough!” I shout.
It’s torn out of me: frustration, fear, grief, a false sense of safety, and also a bit of suicidal tendencies coming to bat. To my endless surprise, it works, and the two stop rolling around. Now, all eyes are on me, and I start to sweat. I didn’t think this through; I didn’t think about it at all, I just reacted.
“What do you want with me?” I snarl. “I am an officer of the law, a servant of this city. Look, I want to thank you for saving my life, but I cannot condone the eating of people! Bad though they were. So,-”
“Wait,” Hartley says, looking between us. “Did they eat Lee, Trance, Rocklea, Packwell, Fiedlstein, Tanner, and Adams?”
I snap my mouth shut with an audible click. I feel a bit queasy just thinking about it.
“No,” Hartley sings and slides off the boot. “You promised. You swore you wouldn’t eat anymore cops! Do you have any idea how much paperwork I had to do to cover that last incident up?”
“Last incident?” I echo.
“They were killing her,” Wilder growls menacingly. “The cub, Adams, died at their hands.”
Hartley closes his eyes. “Motherfuckers. Why does this shit keep happening to me?”
I look between them. My new partner doesn’t seem surprised at the turn of events. If anything, he’s annoyed.
What is wrong with him?
“What is going on?” I snap.
No one even looks my way, except that dark dragon thing. It’s still observing me with sinister intention in its beady eye.
“What is that one’s name?” I ask Frost.
He follows my arm and grins. “That’s Puppy.”
“Puppy?” I frown. I heard that on the night, too. I thought I’d heard wrong. Still not a puppy.
The creature stiffens and stands up, shucking his skin like he’s flipping a blanket over his head, and, oh, my fucking god, he’s a darkly Gothic, incredibly tall and handsome man who is also a lizard who eats people.
One eye is black and the other bright yellow. He grins, and I find myself leaning back into Wilder’s body. That smile is the most inhumane promise of impending death I’ve ever seen.
“Right, we’re all here,” a voice booms from the dark. “Let us begin.”
Chapter 3
