city of dragons 03 - fire magic (3 page)

“It’s Alastair,” he said. “He’s dead.”

CHAPTER THREE

Lachlan met me at the door to the morgue. “This way. I’ll show you where they’ve got him. He’s in dragon form, so they couldn’t fit him in the body bags.”

I was shaking. I felt cold all over. “They really found him in a big cooler?”

“It was full of dragon bodies,” said Lachlan, heading down the hallway. “Apparently, this guy would keep the bodies on ice until he was ready to dehydrate them to turn them into powder for the pills he sold.”

I felt even sicker to my stomach. I gagged a little as I followed Lachlan down the hallway.

“Oh, sorry,” said Lachlan, noticing. “I mean, it’s awful what these dealers do. This guy was probably supplying the entire east coast, we figure. He was buying the bodies direct from slayers.”

“So, Alastair was killed by a slayer?”

“Maybe.” Lachlan shrugged. “Initially, they’re saying it looks like he was killed with a bow and arrows, which is consistent with a slayer attack.”

“But he was so powerful,” I said. “You tried to shoot him with a gun, and he stopped the bullets.”

“I know. I can hardly believe that someone was able to catch him off guard like that. But if he wasn’t watching, then there’s no reason that he wouldn’t be vulnerable to an arrow.” He stopped next to a door. “He’s in here.”

“It’s not going to be him,” I said.

“It’s him,” said Lachlan. “They ran DNA samples to identify the dragons. I convinced them that they needed to do that to inform the families of the dragons. You would not believe the way these guys were treating those dragon parts. It was like they didn’t belong to people, you know? Sometimes, this whole department just feels us versus them, and I want to strangle—you okay?”

I was shivering. “If it’s him, Lachlan, then…”

“Then what?”

“It’s over,” I whispered. No more waiting for Alastair to appear around the next corner, compelling me to do something horrible. No more wearing a talisman to damper my mating bond, which made me attracted to him, even though he was horrible and cruel.

“It is over, Penny,” he said, and his voice was quiet too. He pushed open the door.

I entered the room.

There were two different dragons lying out on slabs in the middle of the room. One was orange and red—not Alastair.

In dragon form, Alastair was covered in blue-tinged scales that glinted when his body streamed up out of the water. All dragons had to shift in the water, or it would damage our human form. Whenever Alastair shifted, he was breathtaking.

And that was…

Was…

A strangled sob-like noise echoed in the room.

It took me a second to realize I’d made it.

“Penny?”

“It’s him,” I said in a hollow voice.

“Yes, of course, it’s him,” said Lachlan.

I turned to look at Lachlan. Tears were welling up in my eyes. I shook my head. “This can’t…” I was still shaking. “Things like this don’t happen to me. I don’t get lucky like this. I’m the person that gets hunted down by the bad guy and has to fight him to the death. This is a dream.”

He shook his head. “This is real.”

I looked back at Alastair’s lifeless form.

Free
, I thought.
Completely free. He’s dead, and he can never hurt me again.

Lachlan put a tentative hand on my shoulder. I knew he was afraid to touch me.

I turned and threw my arms around him, laughing. Giggles were welling up in me, and I thought it was horrible to be laughing over a corpse, but the things this man had done to me—

Lachlan hugged me back.

* * *

“You going to eat those?” I snagged Lachlan’s fries off the coffee table in my living room. We’d come back here with fast food—burgers and fries—because I was starving, and I needed to eat something with protein to stave off the nausea.

“Well, I was thinking about it,” he said.

“Sorry.” I shoved several in my mouth and then handed them back to him.

He waved me away. “Please. If you’re hungry, you should go ahead.”

“Thanks,” I said, around a mouthful of fries.

He eyed me, grinning. “I’m glad you’re taking this well.”

I swallowed. “How else would I take it?”

“Well… he was your husband. You might have felt conflicting—”

“Oh, hell, no.” I stuffed more fries in my mouth and chewed. “I hated him. He was a horrible person, and he hurt me, and he hurt you, and Felicity, and Connor and everyone I cared about. No, any residual positive emotions that I had toward him I lost a
long
time ago.”

“Good,” he said. “I think that’s healthy.”

“I just… the relief.” I ate more fries.

“You’ve been looking over your shoulder the past few months,” he said.

“Haven’t you?”

He considered. “I guess, yeah. But I’m not afraid of him.
Wasn’t
afraid of him, that is.”

“You saying that I was?”

“You’d have been crazy not to be.”

“But not you?”

“He took more from you than he could ever take from me. And you guys had that mating bond. Maybe you weren’t
afraid
of him exactly, but things were tense. And now things can go back to normal.”

I stopped eating fries. Things weren’t going to be normal, but he didn’t know that. I should tell him, but I didn’t know how. I set the fries back on the coffee table.

He picked them up. “Did I say something wrong?”

“What? Of course not.”

He plucked out a fry and stared at it. “Because you seem…” He leaned forward. “Listen, if you think that I meant we should be having sex again, I didn’t. I swear I have no interest in pressuring you—”

“Good,” I said, smiling at him, happy that he had given me an excuse, something to blame my reaction on. I yawned. “But you can stay if you want. Do you want to?”

He put the fry in his mouth. Chewed and then swallowed. “I would love to.”

Later, with Lachlan’s warm, solid body wrapped around mine, I felt a soft longing radiating through my core. It had been so long since we’d been this close, and right now, my entire body seemed so, so sensitive.

I put my lips against his.

And he kissed me slowly, carefully, like he thought I would shatter.

I wanted to wrap my legs around his hips, push his shirt up to bare his flat stomach.

But he kissed me on the forehead and said, “I meant it. I’m tired, anyway.”

So, I rolled over and let him spoon me. I was tired too. In seconds, I was fast asleep and dreaming.

* * *

I had forgotten about the weird pregnancy dreams. Something about all the hormones in a pregnant woman’s body makes her have insanely vivid dreams. That night, I dreamed that I had become the queen dragon in some weird medieval world, only there were cell phones and malls, and my dragon friends and I were alternating war strategies with calling each other and going clothes shopping.

When I woke up, Lachlan was leaving. It was morning, and he had to go to work.

I would have stayed in bed forever, but my stomach started growling, and I got that telltale nauseous feeling that told me I needed some protein stat.

I wandered into the kitchen and got a Greek yogurt out of my refrigerator. Greek yogurt had tons of protein, and it was actually moderately appealing when I felt like vomiting. Moderately.

I gulped it down, forcing myself to swallow, telling myself that once I had something in my stomach, I’d feel better.

My first pregnancy, I hadn’t had any morning sickness at all. But I’d also lost the baby at ten weeks, and I’d come to believe—superstitiously—that morning sickness was a good sign. I’d had it with both of my other pregnancies. Not that it had mattered in the end.

Felicity was convinced that Alastair’s beating me and the constant shifting I’d done from human to dragon form had an adverse affect on my pregnancies. When dragons shifted forms, we healed, so I was always shifting after a bad beating to heal myself up.

Truthfully, she could have been right. I hadn’t really told the doctors about the fact that I was being abused by my husband or about all my shifting. But no dragon doctors had warned me not to shift during pregnancy.

Even so, I hadn’t shifted since finding out about it, which meant that right now, I had no magic. Shifting into dragon form was how I recharged my magical batteries. To stay magical, I had to shift every two weeks or so.

After eating my yogurt, I threw on some clothes and headed downstairs. I was going to to the Pink Flamingo Cafe for breakfast. It was just next door, and it was the place my guest went for a continental breakfast buffet. I had a deal with the owner, my friend Ophelia, who also happened to be a mage.

But I didn’t even make it out of the lobby.

There was a woman waiting for me there. She was sitting on one of the benches next to the brochure rack, flipping through one of the brochures.

Becky, who was working the front desk, looked up when I came in. “Ms. Caspian, this lady wants to see you. She says it’s about magical stuff.”

The woman stood up. “Penelope Caspian, I presume?” She had a British accent, and she was wearing a pants suit and dangly silver earrings. She strode over to me, holding out a hand. “I’m Darla Tell.”

I shook her hand. “Uh, nice to meet you.”

“I work for the Order of Rasmossen and Wolffe, which you have undoubtedly never heard of.”

“I’m afraid not,” I said, feeling confused.

“Is there a place where we could speak privately?” she asked.

“Uh, sure, I guess we could go to my office, but what is this about?”

“I have a proposition for you. Your reputation precedes you, and I’m quite badly in need of assistance, and I think you’re the person for the job.”

“Job?” I said. “I have a job. I own this hotel.” I gestured around at the lobby.

She laughed. “No, of course. I misspoke. Not a job then, not exactly. But I need your help.”

I looked her over, thinking about it. “All right, come back to my office.”

“Thank you.”

I left the lobby and led her down the hallway to my office.

Once inside, I had her sit down on the couch that faced my desk, and I sat down at my desk. It was kind of a mess, covered in a bunch of papers and things I needed to get to at some point. This Darla person seemed so proper and together. I was a little embarrassed. And I couldn’t figure what a person like her needed a person like me for.

She clasped her hands and rested them on her knee. “Well, I suppose I should explain a bit.”

“Okay, yeah,” I said.

“All right, the Order, as we call ourselves, is a magical organization of mages, vampires, drakes and dragons who work to neutralize magical dangers to the populace. We were founded in the 1600s, and we are the organization responsible for the end of several wars and the end of magical tyranny on multiple continents.”

“What?” I said.

“You’ve never heard of us because we prefer to work in secret,” she said. “If powerful magical creatures knew of our existence, they’d concentrate their power on getting rid of us. It’s better if we are unknown—the knife that strikes in the darkness.”

“The what?”

She laughed. “Well, at any rate, we imprison dangerous magical creatures, and we siphon away their power. We use that power to keep them imprisoned. In that way, even the most powerful of evil creatures is no match for us, because we are capable of keeping them in check.”

My mind was reeling. “Okay.” I scrunched up my face, trying to get my brain around this. “So, if you’re so powerful, what do you need me for?”

She unclasped her hands, looking a little confused. “Well… you have special skills against magical creatures, Penelope. May I call you Penelope?”

“Penny,” I said. “And I don’t have special skills, not really.”

“Penny,” said Darla, seeming to almost savor the name as she spoke it aloud.

Okay, this lady was starting to creep me out a little bit. “Maybe you should cut to the chase.”

“Of course,” she said. “We know that you have taken on several groups of powerful vampires in the city, and that you’ve neutralized them. We have a drake problem. We were hoping that you could help.”

“A drake problem?”

“If payment is an issue, we’d be happy to—”

“I don’t need money,” I said. “What do you mean, a drake problem?”

“Well, last year, we relocated to the United States because of some issues in Europe with a family claiming we were located on their ancestral lands and—”

“The point, Ms. Tell,” I interrupted.

“Yes, well, our new location is just outside of Sea City, and it contains a number of tunnels beneath the building, tunnels that fill with water during high tide and cause cave-ins. A number of our order were in one of the tunnel during such a cave-in. We couldn’t get to them—”

“You just said that you’re incredibly powerful,” I said. “What do you mean you couldn’t get to them? Couldn’t you use magic to move the debris?”

“Our magic, I’m afraid, is mostly tied up in keeping our prisoners, er, imprisoned,” she said. “At any rate, we were unable to get to the members of the order.”

“What does this have to do with drakes?”

“There were about five drakes in the group. They were cut off from a source of meat for several days, and they went… feral.”

I felt all the blood drain from my face. “That’s true? That really happens?”

“Oh yes,” said Darla. “It really happens.”

“And so now what? If you give them meat, will they revert back to—”

“The lack of meat causes irreparable damage to a drake, I’m afraid,” she said. “They are nothing more than enraged killers. And they will try to get any meat that they can. So, we were hoping that you could… go in and well, take care of them.”

“You mean kill them.”

“We have it on good authority that you killed Antoine Buordais, who was nearly nine hundred years old, at a place called The Dungeon a few months ago.”

I swallowed. So that was how old that vamp had been, huh? I knew he’d been old, but I hadn’t realized… “I kind of got lucky with him,” I said. “And I didn’t intend to kill him. I had to, though. It was self-defense.”