The Twiceborn Queen (The Proving Book 2) (2 page)

Although, to be fair, it had been more me jumping him than the other way around. Not that he’d been exactly reluctant, mind you.

“No, I can’t.” He shut his eyes for a moment, long enough for me to admire the long sweep of lashes against his cheek. He still looked good enough to eat, despite the bandages. He couldn’t get well soon enough for me. “I spoke to Mel today.”

“Oh? How is she?”

He turned an intense gaze on me. “I told her to take the girls and leave town.”

“Surely that’s not necessary?”

Jason had forced Ben to keep Lachie’s survival secret by threatening the lives of his sister Mel’s two little girls. But not even Jason, wherever he was, would be concerned that the secret was out now. He had way bigger things to worry about.

“Just taking precautions. Elizabeth can’t be very pleased with me. Who knows what she’ll do?”

“Probably nothing.” Leandra’s memories of her mother weren’t very complimentary. Like most dragons, the woman was bone lazy, with a sense of entitlement bigger than Sydney Harbour. True, she did take a dim view of certain things, like threats to the queen’s peace—it made more work for her—or shifters taking trueshape in front of humans—ditto—but my guess was she’d see Ben’s defection from the ranks of the heralds as a move in the proving. Queens rarely interfered in that traditional battle between their royal offspring. They had no maternal feelings at all, and were happy to sit back as their daughters died, waiting to see who proved the strongest. “It would be out of character for her to use Mel as a means to get revenge on you.”

“But not impossible. Better to be safe than sorry. The situation at the moment is pretty volatile.”

You could say that again. And dragons could be unpredictable. I wouldn’t put it past Elizabeth to decide to punish me through Ben. I had Garth or one of the thralls—ex-thralls—stationed in the hallway outside Ben’s room most times when I wasn’t visiting, just in case. Not that I told Ben that. “I’ll be glad when we can get you out of here.”

“It’ll be nice to sleep in my own bed again.”

“You mean my bed.” I grinned at him. The thought had a certain appeal. “I need you somewhere I can keep an eye on you.”

He didn’t smile back. “I can look after myself.”

He sounded like Lachie in a sulk.

“With one arm in a sling?”

“I only need one arm to use a gun.” His mouth set in a mulish line.

Lachie looked our way. Must have been an ad break. “Are you two fighting?”

Maybe I had raised my voice a little. “Of course not, Monster. Just discussing things.”

Clearly I wasn’t convincing. Or maybe the scowl on Ben’s face gave it away. He turned a serious gaze on Ben. “You shouldn’t argue with Mum, Uncle Ben. She always wins.”

Damn right, kid. God, I loved that boy.

Ben didn’t crack a smile. His good hand picked at the sheet in a frustrated motion. “I hate hospitals.”

That was when the nurse bustled in, rushed off her feet as they always seemed to be. Her name was Amy, or Amanda, or something. She was one of the regulars who’d been looking after Ben, a slight, dark-haired woman who somehow seemed to find the muscle to manhandle him with no trouble.

“How’s your pain?” In typical nurse fashion she gave him no chance to answer before giving her thermometer a professional flick and shoving it under his tongue.

“Goob,” he mumbled.

She consulted the chart hanging on the end of his bed. “It’s four hours since your last painkillers. You can have another dose if you need it.”

“I’b fine,” he insisted, still with that mulish look on his face. Probably wouldn’t admit to any discomfort unless his arm was about to fall off.

She bustled about, and rattled the blood pressure machine closer to the bed. I set Lachie on his feet and squeezed past her to give her some room to move.

She smiled. “Thanks. Oops!”

My handbag hit the floor as she brushed past. It had been hanging on the back of the chair. She scooped it up and handed it to me, then whipped the thermometer out of Ben’s mouth, all in one fluid move.

“Come on, Lachie.” It was getting late. “Uncle Ben looks tired.”

And grumpy. He made a bad patient—one of those annoying people who never get sick. Probably last time he’d been in hospital was the day he was born, and he wasn’t dealing well with the whole confined-to-bed-being-weak-and-helpless thing.

I kissed him goodnight and hustled Lachie out into the hall while the nurse was still making notes on the chart. We marched down the sterile corridor, Lachie’s small hand warm in mine.

Once we left the air-conditioned hospital the heat hit us in the face like a wet sock. Beautiful Sydney, so humid in summer it was like walking round inside a sauna some days. The earlier rain had cleared, leaving the evening air hot and sticky as we trudged to the multi-storey car park.

I’d got as far as the ticket machine and started scrabbling around in my purse for change to pay for parking when I realised that something else was missing.

“Where the hell are my car keys?”

I stared at Lachie as if I expected him to pull them out of his ear.

“Did you drop them?”

Maybe. My bag had hit the floor, and Amy or Amanda or whatever her name was had snatched it up so fast half my belongings could have been left behind. The keys were probably still under the bed.

“Come on. Let’s go back.”

The lift seemed to take ages to arrive, and then we had to wait for an old lady on a walking frame to stagger her way in and dither over which button to push. I forced myself to breathe deeply and smile at her. I seemed much more impatient since Leandra and I had merged—or whatever had happened. Clearly she hadn’t been the kind to suffer fools gladly. I had to make a conscious effort not to let her attitudes colour my view on life.

We hurried down the corridor on Ben’s level, my heels tapping an impatient rhythm on the vinyl floor. His door was shut, and I threw it open without knocking.

Amy/Amanda stood there, holding a pillow over Ben’s face.

For one astonished moment I stared, unmoving. Ben thrashed wildly, his feet drumming against the mattress, the sheet tangled around his legs. The nurse stared back at me, her face showing no emotion. She might have been still taking his temperature instead of trying to kill him.

Then I spun, shoving Lachie out into the corridor. “Nurses’ station! Quick, get help!”

I slammed the door on him and dived straight across the bed, hands outstretched for the woman’s throat. She sidestepped with a single-minded focus on the job that chilled me to the bone. Ben’s struggles were growing weaker. He made surprisingly little noise. No one passing in the corridor would guess a man was fighting for his life in here.

“Get off him, you bitch!” I snarled, rolling off the bed.

I threw a punch that would have taken her head off if she hadn’t dodged it, still without releasing the pillow. Desperate, I swept the water jug off the rolling portable table and slammed it into her face. That knocked her aside at last, and I snatched the pillow and threw it into the corner of the room.

Ben lurched up off the bed and heaved in desperate breaths, his face bright red. I only had time for a quick glance before the nurse scrambled upright and launched herself at me. A knife appeared in her hand as if by magic, and I sidestepped just in time. Neat party trick. I guess we were lucky she’d gone the pillow route first, or Ben would be dead already. Probably trying to make it look more natural. Hacking someone up with a knife did tend to raise a few questions.

I kicked out, catching her in the knee—always a good strategy in a fight. It’s hard to run with a busted kneecap.

She was strong, though, and it barely slowed her. Behind me Ben half-staggered, half-fell off the bed, and I heard the ding of the nurse-call button. Wouldn’t want to be the poor nurse answering that call. You expect a request for a bedpan and you walk in on a knife fight.

She bared her teeth in a savage grin and circled round, trying to get between me and the door. Closer to Ben.

“Who the hell are you?” Not just Amy/Amanda the nurse, obviously. But she wasn’t a shifter, or I would have been able to see her aura. One of the perks of being a dragon—only we could see the coloured glow that surrounded each shifter. I backed away. As far as I could anyway. The room was barely big enough for visiting in, much less staging hand-to-hand combat. She must be on somebody’s payroll. “Who sent you?”

She said nothing. I watched her eyes and backed up as far as I was willing to go, watching for her next move, trying to plan my own. I could feel Ben right behind me. I hunched over a little, trying to look non-threatening, maybe a little scared—though if she knew who I was that probably wasn’t going to fly. Worth a try, though.

She feinted with the knife and I flinched back, waiting for the real move. I opened myself to the other, felt the familiar welcoming tug of trueshape. My breast warmed as the channel stone inside me flared with the magic of transformation. Only a little, though. This room wasn’t big enough to hold a full-sized dragon even if I wanted to go all the way. A little was all I needed.

I heard running feet in the corridor, and Lachie’s voice shrieking, “Mum!”

She lunged as my eyes flicked toward the sound, sure she’d caught me off guard. Instead my claws burst from my fingertips, as long as swords but stronger than any steel. I’d slashed her throat before she’d even realised what was happening.

Behind me Ben gave a strangled cry as blood sprayed from her throat. As I retracted my claws the door burst open behind me. She fell against me, then the knife slipped from her hand and she collapsed at my feet.

A woman screamed, and I turned to find two horrified nurses staring at me, with Lachie desperately trying to see around them.

“You killed her! You killed Amy.”

“Keep him out! Don’t let him see.” I sank to my knees on the bloody floor, only now beginning to shake. What the hell was
that
? Like a faint yellow mist rising from the body? “She attacked us. Out of nowhere. She was trying to kill Ben!”

The first nurse hesitated, her face a mask of shock. “Amy would never … Why would she …” She swallowed hard, glancing between me and the body on the floor, and pulled herself together with an effort. “Are you hurt?” Then, to the other nurse: “Where the hell is security?”

She knelt beside me and tried to urge me to my feet. I must have looked a sight, spattered in blood, hair across my face like a madwoman. Ben said something to the other woman, who nodded and drew Lachie gently away.

The door snicked shut behind them. No sign now of the yellow mist. Had I imagined it? Everything had happened so fast. I gave the nurse a brief, mainly true version of events.

She kept shaking her head, her eyes drawn over and over again to the body of her co-worker on the floor, as if she couldn’t make sense of my story. I was having trouble myself. If she wasn’t a shifter, how was she connected to the shifter world? It wasn’t as if shifters had human moles planted all through the community, just in case they needed to assassinate someone. Not even a dragon like Elizabeth had that kind of reach.

Could it be a goblin seeming? One of Elizabeth’s people—or even Alicia’s—wearing a borrowed face to get close to us? In which case things were going to get mighty interesting when the spell wore off and the dead body suddenly looked like someone else. But it was the best explanation I could come up with.

I finished by saying I’d accidentally cut the woman’s throat as we struggled over the knife. The nurse didn’t even bother to take the would-be killer’s pulse. It was painfully obvious she no longer had one.

“The police will be here soon. It will be all right,” the nurse kept saying, though the expression on her face said different. Clearly she was having trouble imagining how anything could be all right in a world where such strange and random slayings could occur. She wrapped me in a blanket, as if she expected me to go into shock. The poor woman looked as though she needed it more than I did.

I tried my best to act shocked, but now the danger was past I felt nothing but the deepest satisfaction. That woman had threatened my mate, and if I could kill her again I would.

Perhaps that was the most shocking thing of all.

We spent two more hours at the hospital, answering the questions of every uniform that went past, watching the parade of police and hospital staff coming and going. Photographers and forensics, and whole hordes of other people whose jobs I couldn’t even guess at, made their way into the room, then reappeared, checking me out as they went past as if they couldn’t quite believe what I’d done. The nurses gave me a wide berth, though eventually one came with a wheelchair and took Ben off to be examined, ignoring his protests that he was fine.

A uniformed officer showed me to a tiny room that boasted a ripped-up couch and a microwave that had seen better days, then lurked uncomfortably outside the door. I’d cleaned the blood off my face and hands, though my clothes were a mess, and I sat, still wrapped in my blanket, with Lachie on my lap. His head drooped onto my shoulder—by now it was close to nine o’clock at night, and high time he was in bed.

The cop at the door stood up straighter as someone appeared: a small hard woman in plain clothes. She waved him away with a flick of the hand that spoke of authority and entered the room. A large man followed her.

“Good evening. I’m Detective Hartley and this is Detective Franks. I’m sorry for the delay; we got here as fast as we could. We’d like you to come with us to the station.”

I eyed her suspiciously. She wore no jewellery apart from a wedding ring, but her dark trouser suit looked expensive. That, combined with her confident air, gave the impression she was higher up the food chain than the people I’d already spoken to. “Why? Are you arresting me?”

“No. We just want to do an interview while the details are still fresh in your mind.”

“Can’t it wait until tomorrow?”

Her polite expression didn’t change, but a sharpness entered her voice. “A woman has died here, Ms O’Connor. I think that warrants a little inconvenience.”