Hidden Dragons (28 page)

He stumbled as the blade tore from Ceallach’s body. Verdi saved him from falling by flying into his back. Ceallach hissed a spell that made Rick’s feet go numb and stick to the ground. As if that weren’t enough confusion, Rick heard his gun go off. Cass was standing behind the faerie, firing methodically into his torso. The faerie couldn’t recover quickly enough between bullets to spin another spell. Even better, each shot knocked him nearer to where Rick was stuck. On the fifth shot, he was close enough. Rick swung his blade back and then forward.

He suspected he looked more like a baseball player than a swordsman. Even forgiving his bad form, he definitely needed more practice. The blade hacked halfway through Ceallach’s neck and stopped.

Ceallach still didn’t give up the ghost. His eyes flared like lasers in the low light. The air beside him did a weird unzipping thing. The opening didn’t look like a portal, but it wasn’t regular space either. Rick blinked, and Ceallach disappeared into the slit of Otherness he’d created.

“Damn it,” he said, ears ringing from the abruptly ended fight.

The dragons didn’t seem disappointed. They were flapping around and creeling like kids hopped up on sugar. Scarlet landed on Rick’s tired shoulder and chittered excitedly.

“Okay,” he conceded, petting her for her bravery. “You guys did really good.”

Roald le Beau began to laugh raggedly. “As did you, wolf.” He nodded at the ground in front of Rick.

“My feet!” Rick exclaimed, only then noticing they were encased in blocks of ice. No wonder he hadn’t been able to move them. To his relief, the ice seemed to be melting.

“Not your feet,” corrected Cass’s father. “Look at the blood Ceallach spilled.”

The edges of the dark splatters were sparkling, the glitter gradually eating away the blood—the same as happened to the protector in the subway.

“You severed enough of his spinal cord,” Roald said. “Ceallach may have escaped, but it won’t do him any good.”

“I killed him,” Rick said, hardly believing it. “
We
killed him.”

He looked at Cass, who was rubbing her forehead with the back of the hand that held his now-empty gun. When her gaze met his, it was troubled.

“Right,” Rick said. “If he was dying and bothered to spell himself away, where in hell was he going?”

~

Cass was shaking worse than after their fight with the goblins. She’d fired a gun and helped kill a man. Most trying to her nerves, she’d almost watched Rick die. Though she didn’t want to think about it, she kept flashing back to Ceallach grinning and raising his sword to strike. In that moment, she’d known what she had to lose, that her life would continue minus a piece of her heart and soul. Having a crush on the teenager Rick had been couldn’t compare to getting to know the man. He’d added so much to her happiness. She didn’t want to learn how to go on without him.

Annoyingly, Rick took a minute to stomp off the ice and went back to his usual self. He was in cop mode now. He’d found a pair of bolt cutters to free her chained-up father from the old tractor. Because her dad couldn’t stand, Rick got his arm around him.

“There’s probably a land line in the farm house,” he said. “We can call my pack and get you medical attention.” He looked at Cass. “You okay?”

She wanted him to hold her, to squeeze him tight and breathe in his scent. She supposed this wasn’t the time for that.

“I’m okay,” she said, ignoring the twinge the misstatement sent through her skull. “I’ll corral the dragons and make sure they stay close.”

He nodded but with less than his full attention.
Oh grow up
, she ordered her irritated self. Rick had more important things to do than cosset her.

She joined him in helping her father cross the yard. Despite his weakness, he watched the dragons fly rings around them with wondering eyes.

“They tracked you here,” he said. “That’s marvelous.”

“Is it really surprising?” she asked.

“It’s good,” he said. “They’ve bonded to you the way they should.”

She had the impression he wasn’t telling the whole story. “Dad—”

He stumbled on a tuft of grass, necessitating that she help catch his weight.

“I meant to ask,” he said. “How did you find me?”

“Through the spy bell you put on Poly. When I realized what it was, I traced the spell back to you.”

“The spy bell?” He looked confused for a second before letting out a rough chuckle. “That wasn’t for spying. I didn’t
want
to know what you were up to. It was an alarm system. If things went . . . seriously wrong for you, it would send me an alert. Knowing what you’d done with the eggs would defeat the purpose of handing them off to you.”

“Oh.” She was disconcerted. “I should have thought of that.”

They’d reached the old farmhouse, where Ceallach had left on the lights. Her father squeezed her hand as Rick supported most of his weight up the worn back steps. The house had the same strange energy she remembered from visits with her gran, as if it were stuck in the past like amber and overstuffed with life at the same time.

The kitchen bore evidence of Ceallach having made himself at home. An empty milk carton stood in the sink, a sandwich plate with crumbs left out on the counter.

In a more startling discovery, they found the caretaker dead in the bedroom on the same floor. From the glimpse Cass caught, he’d been desiccated—like a thousand year old mummy in work boots and overalls.

“Okay then,” Rick said, switching off the light and shutting the door hastily. “We’ll deal with that later. Let’s get your father settled in the living room.”

Cass perched on the couch where they’d laid her father while Rick called his pack leader on the kitchen phone. The conversation was businesslike and male—just the facts and no drama. When he rejoined them, she saw speaking to his alpha had improved his mood. He was still . . . vigilant, she guessed she’d call it, but no longer so tightly coiled.

“They’ll be here soon,” he said to her dad. “Are you up for a few questions in the meantime?”

“As long as I don’t have to dance a jig while I answer,” he said.

Rick smiled and lifted a straight-backed chair closer. He’d stuck his new sword underneath his arm—not unlike Ceallach, actually. As he sat, he began to set it on the floor.

“May I?” her father asked, extending one trembling hand.

Rick hesitated, then laid the weapon across the blanket that draped her father’s lap. They’d propped him up on pillows, and he didn’t have strain. His fingertips stroked the runes the sword maker’s art had chased into the blade.

“This is Blood Drinker,” he said as if introducing Rick to a person. “All protectors’ swords have names. Yours is a very old blade. Many protectors carried it with honor.”

“Ah.” Rick seemed interested, but a shadow crossed his face. “Ceallach had one too.”

“So he did. His was a younger blade. I don’t know where he got it. Forced one of the old makers to forge it for him, perhaps. He must have found a way to activate the magic that binds these weapons to their owners.”

“That’s why they zap some people. And why Ceallach said he’d compel me to work for his queen. He couldn’t just take my blade and give it to someone else.”

“That’s correct,” her father confirmed. “I couldn’t claim your sword or force it through its changes, but it doesn’t ‘zap’ me because I’m a hereditary Guild member. Your sword recognizes my blood line.”

“Did you know the woman Ceallach killed in the subway?”

“I did.” He didn’t name her even though she was dead, proving faeries were indeed weird about that stuff. “I hadn’t spoken to her or my other colleagues since coming here. The Guild thought cutting off contact would make me more difficult to find. When I—” Her father sighed. “I sensed my time of safety was running short, but when I heard about her death on the television, I knew the Pocket’s enemies had tracked me down at last.”

“The
Pocket’s
enemies,” Rick repeated.

Her father regarded him, weary but clear-eyed. “You heard Ceallach speak of his queen. Joscela has ever been King Manfred’s adversary. Manfred won the High Council’s approval to sacrifice my . . . the dragon T’Fain and create this dimension. He dreamed of the magical world and the mundane interacting as in days of old.”

“And Joscela disapproved of that.”

“She would have hated any idea Manfred came up with but, yes, she found the mixing of fae with human abhorrent. When a being is immortal, grievances have a way of becoming magnified. Ceallach is . . . was her most loyal minister.”

“Would he have returned to her when he escaped?” Cass asked.

“He’d try,” her father said. “I believe he genuinely loved her—and she him in return.” He released another sigh. “I am sorry, daughter. I hoped to delay your involvement in these matters until you were older.”

His soft blue gaze held hers earnestly. He didn’t seem to realize she minded being glamoured to do things against her will a great deal more than she minded being involved. Of course, considering her recent behavior, this was a tricky complaint to bring up in front of Rick.

She rubbed her father’s arm. The shirt he’d been wearing when he and Ceallach first battled in his apartment was in shreds, no doubt due to his torture here. All her life, this was his personal uniform: button-down Oxfords in nice cotton. Sometimes he wore them with jeans and sometimes with good trousers. She’d never seen his attire bloodied and torn before.

She knew she was very lucky he hadn’t died.

“Just concentrate on healing,” she said. “That’s what matters to me now.”

Her father patted her hand, his tired eyes beginning to drift shut. “You exceeded every expectation I had for you. One living dragon was the most I dared hope for.”

He was asleep then, leaving Cass strangely uneasy. He spoke of
expectations
in a way that suggested a long-term plan—and an elaborate one. She knew he’d set whatever it was into motion when she was a child. The question was, did his plotting go further back than that?

Verdi made a trilling noise from the windowsill he and his siblings were perched on.

A second later, Cass heard what had caught the dragon’s attention: the distant
thwap
of a helicopter approaching. It circled the house with its searchlight directed downward before landing in the level area between the farm buildings.

“Okay,” Rick said. “Let’s get out of here.”

Rick helped her dad while Cass called the dragons to her. The pilot wasn’t turning off the rotor, and she didn’t want them accidentally hurt by it.

Rick’s alpha, Adam Santini—who she also remembered from high school—leaned out the open side to haul them up and in. When he caught her hand, his eyes widened. At first, she thought he was surprised to see the dragons, but his jaw dropped too. Her looks had dazzled him just a bit.

She realized she hadn’t missed people reacting to her like that.

Two more wolves were in the bay, plus a third acting as pilot. Rick did a double take when he saw him.

“Johnny,” he said. “When did you get your license?”

“Yesterday.” Hands staying on the controls, he glanced back with a grin. “I guess you miss stuff when you go AWOL and don’t check in.”

The chopper lifted off as the stylish wolf she’d met at Tony’s buckled her into a harnessed seat. “Nate,” she said, remembering.

He flashed a lady-killer’s smile. “Nice to see you again. And in one piece.”

Intrigued by all these new people, Scarlet cheeped at him from her huddle with her siblings on Cass’s lap. Nate chucked her beneath the chin. “This one’s pretty,” he said.

Scarlet must have understood his tone, because the red dragon preened.

Cass smiled. Some men could win any female’s heart.

Settled now, she noticed Rick hadn’t chosen to sit beside her in the rear. Nate took the empty spot next to her. Rick faced her from the front with Adam, the two big men shoulder to shoulder. Her father had gotten the full invalid treatment. He was strapped to the floor on a pallet with an emergency blanket to warm him. Cass doubted he like this arrangement, but he wasn’t protesting. The final wolf, a stocky older man, slid the open door shut and sat on a side seat opposite. He nodded, pleasant but businesslike, and picked up a serious-looking automatic rifle.

Rick raised his voice above the engine noise. “Where’s Tony?” he asked his boss.

“I sent him, Ari, and the kids to stay with Evina. I know her tigers are tough, but I wanted at least one set of cop’s eyes with them.”

Rick nodded like he approved, but also like the precaution jostled his equilibrium.

“My wife Evina is a fire chief,” Nate explained. “A tiger shifter. She and her pride will keep everyone safe until we can settle this.”

Now Cass was off balance too. “I’m sorry we’ve brought this danger into your lives.”

Nate shrugged. “It isn’t your fault. Those crazy purebloods need their asses kicked.”

Her father, as the sole pureblood in the chopper, smiled crookedly from the floor.

“Tony has your cat,” the stocky wolf informed her. “We found her in the cave with Rick’s phone. We thought she might be a magical feline, but when we tried to interrogate her, all she did was meow.”

Cass snorted a startled laugh at that idea.

“I’m Carmine, by the way,” he said. “Since the oaf has forgotten his manners.”

“Cass,” she said, understanding Rick was the oaf he referred to.

“What?” Rick said.

Carmine said something teasing in Italian. The byplay relaxed her, probably the wolf’s intention.

“So, boss,” Johnny the pilot said. “Where am I flying this circus?”

Adam looked across the helicopter bay at her. He held the same big mother rifle as Carmine. “That depends on Cass.”

“Me? Do you want permission to use my house?”

“No,” Rick and Adam denied in unison.

“We can’t stay there,” Adam said. “You live on top of a department store. If the other faerie mounts an attack, we can’t risk the public getting caught in the crossfire. What I need to know is how well you trust your friends Bridie and Jin Levine.”

“I’d trust them with anything. I’ve known them all my life.” Her face went abruptly cold. “Are they all right?”