city of dragons 02 - fire storm (28 page)

I went to the door closest to Alastair’s room, listened for the sound of his breath.

All I could hear was the water running.

Damn it.

I opened the door a crack, peered inside.

I saw Alastair’s shadowy hulking form on the bed, swathed in blankets.

So far, so good.

I went back to the tub and touched the water.

Ow!

Damn it, I’d only turned on the hot water. I adjusted the temperature, turning on the cold as well. I didn’t want to give myself blistery burns. Geez.

Then I waited.

The tub was filling.

It was dark in the bathroom. I could see the shadowy outlines of the stand-up shower, which was across the room, next to the sink. It had a clear glass door with translucent shell patterns decorating the middle part, for modesty.

Next to the shower was a rack of towels. All of them looked dark blue in the scant light, but I imagined they were shades of pastel. This place was all done in pastels. The bathroom wasn’t different.

I’d been in here before, of course, but I hadn’t paid any attention to the towels.

I was pretty sure they were pastel, though. Maybe even peach and sea foam, like the living room.

But why was I worried about that?

Here I was, thinking about crap like this, and I wasn’t being aware. Alastair was probably awake, and he’d probably sneaked out of the bedroom, like he’d done before, the time he met me at the front door.

I went over to the door again to check.

No.

He was still in bed.

I went back to the tub. It wasn’t full yet.

God damn it. How long was this going to take?

I began to pace. I walked back and forth up and down the length of the bathroom, thinking about what I was going to do if I got out of this.

Lachlan and I had to figure out our magic. If I was free, Alastair would still be a problem, and we had to find a way to get him locked up, where he belonged. Our magic was the only thing that stood a chance of doing that. But I didn’t understand it. I didn’t know what it was, and I didn’t know how to use it.

Everything with Lachlan seemed to be moving at warp speed, anyway. Our relationship was new, but I felt very close to him now, entwined with him, like we were part of each other.

I wasn’t sure how that had happened so quickly. I guessed it was going through so much together or something.

It scared me, if I was honest about it. I didn’t know how I was supposed to deal with everything being so intense between us all of the sudden.

But I didn’t want to think about this either.

I went back to test the tub.

It was mostly full. Full enough. I was going to displace water when I got in anyway.

I really hoped this would work.

I took off my clothes and stepped into the jacuzzi tub. I lay down, face up, letting the water close over my head.

And I allowed the shift to overtake my body.

I had to keep my wings in tight—couldn’t spread them out. There wasn’t room. But since my dragon form was essentially the same size as my human form, it worked. I shifted.

And then I climbed out of the bath, unwieldy in my dragon form.

My wings shot out, knocking over everything in my path. Loud clattering noises.

I wasn’t going to make it through the doorway with my wings.

Well. That didn’t matter. I was burning this place to the ground.

I breathed out a tongue of flame and caught the door on fire.

These bracelets kept me in this house? Well, if this house didn’t exist anymore, there was nowhere to keep me.

CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

Alastair, woken by the noise, lumbered out of the bedroom, flinging open the door to the bathroom, which was now burning.

I turned, spreading out my wings and knocking towels off of shelves. I blew fire at him, and he stumbled backwards.

Everything caught. The doors, the walls, the towels, the wood paneling surrounding the mirrored medicine cabinet.

“What the hell are you doing, Penny?” Alastair yelled through the sound of crackling flames.

I breathed fire at the floor, a circle that surrounded my feet, burning through the floor, so that I fell down to the story below.

He yelled from overhead, but I didn’t care.

I needed to burn down this entire house, and that meant starting at the bottom level. I got to work, moving from room to room, breathing fire wherever I was, turning the lower level into a blazing inferno.

I met Alastair again coming up to catch fire to the second level of the house.

He was in the living room, staring out the window, and I saw that he was using magic to lift water out of the bay.

He was going to drench my efforts.

I couldn’t have that, so I tackled him, claws in his back, and we both went down against the floor of the living room.

It was already full of smoke. The fire in the bathroom was spreading, and the fire from below was spreading. The house was going up like a tinder box.

He used magic to throw me off.

I flapped above him, my wings knocking paintings off the wall, more originals by Elizabeth no doubt. I breathed more fire.

His robe went up in flames. He screamed.

On the other side of the room, the huge picture window that overlooked the bay suddenly shattered, glass exploding outward.

Alastair took off running and threw himself out the window. He landed with a splash in the bay.

Damn it, that meant he could shift. In dragon form, his magic would be fully unleashed, absolutely unbound.

And I still couldn’t leave this stupid house.

I gnawed at the bracelets on my dragon wrists, tried to get a tooth in there.

Didn’t work.

I tried a claw. I tore my skin a little as I slid it between the bracelet and my wrist.

But my claw couldn’t loosen them either.

So, I went back to my original plan of burning the place down.

I caught the couch on fire. The easy chair. The carpet. The end table. Then I moved into the kitchen and blew fire into the cabinets and the breakfast bar and its stools. By the time I got to the dining room, my work was already done. The chairs and table were ablaze, and the wallpaper was peeling and bubbling in the heat.

I burned a hole in the ceiling and ascended to the top level of the house.

Not much here except for Alastair’s office.

I peered out the window at the bay.

Where was Alastair? Why hadn’t he come back? I peered at the bay as the house burned below me, waiting and waiting for him to resurface, to streak up into the sky in dragon form, to come and fight me in the sky, like the dragon wars of the past, both of us clawing and burning and biting each other until one fell.

I waited.

And the house burned to cinders.

When the roof went, I felt the magic in the bracelets collapse. I rose in the air, hovering there and flapping my wings, testing my freedom.

There was nothing keeping me there anymore.

So, I took to the air, leaving the smoldering pile of blackened wood behind me, heading home to my hotel.

* * *

When I got there, the hotel was dark and quiet. There were holes in the walls, after all. I was fairly sure I didn’t have any more guests. And recovering my hotel’s image from all of this mess was going to be quite the feat.

I alighted on the pavement of the parking lot, folding in my wings and surveying it.

I could do it. I would fight until my hotel was everything it was meant to be.

The first problem, however, was to stop Alastair once and for all. I had been half afraid that he would be waiting for me here, possibly flying in dragon form with Felicity in his clutches. Or Connor. Or Lachlan. I had been afraid that he’d be here to hurt me and my loved ones.

But it was quiet.

Except for a light behind the hotel. Next to the pool. It looked like someone had put on the outdoor lights there.

I took to the air again, flew over the hotel and set down behind it, next to the pool.

There they were. Felicity, Lachlan, and Connor. Oh, and Jensen. He was there too, but whatever. Truth was, lately, being around me had been more dangerous for Felicity than being with him.

They were engaged in some kind of animated conversation, but I didn’t hear anything they were saying, because they all got up and looked when I came into view.

“Penny!” yelled Felicity happily. She recognized my dragon form.

I dove down into the pool, submerging myself in the water. And I shifted back to my human form.

I surfaced, sputtering.

They were all crowed around the edge of the pool, talking at me in excited, animated voices.

“What happened?” said Connor.

“We were coming for you,” said Lachlan.

“I knew you’d get out of there,” said Felicity.

I smiled at them. “Uh, could someone get me a robe or some clothes or something?”

CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

We waited for Alastair to show up for the rest of that night, none of us getting a wink of sleep. We stayed awake until noon the next day, and then—exhausted—we began to sleep in shifts, leaving someone awake to watch for him.

He didn’t show up that day.

Or that night.

Or the next day.

Or for a week.

Lachlan was in touch with the police, who had investigated the burnt-down house. There was no body in the ruins, but I didn’t expect there to be, since I’d seen Alastair escape through the window.

They searched the bay, but it wasn’t like dredging a lake or something. The bay, though not as volatile as the sea, was still subject to the tides. Water came and went from it. Currents of water were swept off to sea, and if a body had been in the water, it might have been carried off by now.

I knew that there was no body. He had jumped into the bay and shifted into a dragon.

Then… he had left. Why, I didn’t know. But he wasn’t gone for good. I didn’t believe that for a second.

I called Elizabeth, thinking for certain that she’d heard from him. But she was only angry with me for “spreading lies” about her brother. The way she had it, Alastair had never laid a finger on me, and I’d made it up because I was a huge slut who wanted out of the marriage to have sex with vampires. After listening to her spew this vitriol at me for five minutes, and becoming relatively certain that she didn’t have any idea where Alastair was after all, I hung up on her.

So, I waited, getting tenser by the day, sure that he was going to show up at any moment, and trying to make sure that I was prepared for him.

I went back to Connecticut, went to my family’s vault, and got more artifacts to make talismans for protection.

I had Ophelia renew the wards on the hotel.

And another week went by.

Still no Alastair.

I didn’t like this, because I knew what was going to happen. I was going to settle into a wary relaxation. I wouldn’t worry about Alastair at every second, but I’d be thinking about him at the edge of my subconscious all the time. It would mean that I could never really be truly carefree, and it would mean that I was never really ready for him, because he would still take me by surprise when he arrived again.

But we couldn’t find him. He was gone. And I couldn’t dwell on it.

So, I tried to busy myself working on the hotel. I hired contractors to do repairs. I met with a public relations firm to ask about ways that I could minimize the fact that my hotel had been the site of magical attacks perpetrated by a man who was still at large. They weren’t extraordinarily encouraging. They said I should drop my rates.

I did.

And I was astonished to find that we were booked up for the first week of the season in advance. Apparently, a beach front hotel was a beach front hotel in Sea City. Now I just needed to make sure that the hotel was ready by then, completely repaired and completely safe.

Everything was returning to normal, as galling as it seemed.

Still, I had nightmares. I dreamed of Alastair hurting me, forcing me, of his face looming large in my vision, laughing and calling me names and telling me that I was his.

I woke up screaming.

When Lachlan tried to comfort me, I wouldn’t let him touch me until the dream had fully passed from my system.

Lachlan didn’t like it.

One night, we were awake after I’d had one of the nightmares, and I had shoved him out of the bed, shrieking that I didn’t want him near me.

He got up and went out to sleep on the couch.

Two minutes later, I felt guilty. I padded down the hallway and went into the living room.

He was lying on the couch, staring at the ceiling.

I sat down next to his feet.

He pulled his knees up away from me.

“Come back to bed,” I said. “I wasn’t awake yet.”

He scooted up the couch, so that he was half-sitting up. “I don’t think that you’ve dealt with what happened to you, Penny.”

I sighed. “It’s not like that.”

He raised his eyebrows. “What do you mean?”

I raised my gaze to the ceiling. “It’s not like something you deal with once, and then it goes away.”

“But you’re having these nightmares,” he said. “And I can only think it’s because it’s got to come out somehow. I think when you’re awake, you’re just shoving it all away and acting tough—”

“No,” I said. “I’m not doing that.”

“You are.”

I chewed on my bottom lip. “You’re annoyed because we haven’t had sex since it happened.”

“I’m
not
,” he said. “Not even a little bit. I don’t even think I could. I’d just picture you with him and it would be…” He glared at me. “Don’t think that. There is no pressure on this end. Not from me.”

I put my hands in my lap. I was quiet for several moments. Then I took a deep breath. “Look, I do think about it when I’m awake. I’m terrified that Alastair is coming back, and I don’t know how to deal with the uncertainty of all of it. I’m having these nightmares
because
I can’t stop thinking about him, not because I’m running from thinking about him.”