Rhyme of Loss by Emily Carrington

Author:Emily Carrington [Carrington, Emily]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: BIN 010711-03482
Publisher: Changeling Press LLC
Published: 2023-02-12T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Six

Did he feel guilty about being raped?

Jack scowled as the question turned over and over in his head. It wasn’t one that anyone had proposed, even his less-than-discreet chief advisor, but it gnawed at his soul. Maybe not because of the rape itself, but his method of dealing with the violation.

Which had been to kill his rapist.

He remembered being a young man and thinking rapists deserved the death penalty, that they’d taken something essential from their victims and must not be allowed to take from anyone else. But as he’d grown older, he’d seen that true justice wasn’t annihilation. He still was unclear, all these years later, on what true justice was but he knew what it wasn’t.

Dan had been in danger. The dragon could have killed him. Probably would have raped him first and changed him into a magical creature so he could devour something other than human flesh. Such had been his stated motivation for changing Jack. Having lived with that for several days, Jack wondered if the orgasm, and the attendant power rush, was actually the point. He couldn’t fathom the dragon’s M. O. at all and wondered if he ever would.

He couldn’t ask the dragon because he’d killed the dragon.

“Mal,” he whispered as he sat behind the barrier of the righthand table in his office. “His name was Mal.”

Which meant “bad” in Spanish and the dragon had been, possibly, of Hispanic descent. He’d presented, when human, as swarthy-skinned and dark-eyed. Jack tried to recall his face clearly, without that visage being twisted with lust. He couldn’t.

“I’m heaping coals on my own head,” he mumbled. “This isn’t about finding his humanity, so to speak. It’s about taking the law into my own hands.”

Someone knocked on his door and he was grateful for the distraction. “Come in.” Then he remembered the room was soundproofed, especially to humans. And since he only smelled Dan nearby…

He stood, walked on wooden-seeming legs to the door, and opened it. Dan was gazing at him with a mixture of professionalism and concern on his face.

Jack took the mail he proffered. “Thanks. We need to compose a letter to all the heads of the different magical communities around the world. Will you help me with that in twenty minutes?”

Dan nodded. “How do you feel this morning?”

Jack thought, Guilty. What he said was, “I’ll be all right.” He knew it wasn’t quite an answer and by the look in Dan’s eyes, he knew the same. But Jack refused to air his soiled laundry any more than he already had.

He retreated into his office and shut the door. He shuffled through the mail and was amazed to find so many printed-out pages. How he knew they were printed out recently and not sent confused him at first but then he consciously felt the warmth of the paper and smelled the fresh ink. He wondered why Dan had bothered printing these out when they were surely in either his email or Jack’s. On the other hand, it gave him something tangible to hold and that helped him center himself.

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