Twiceborn Endgame (The Proving Book 3) (12 page)

“Somebody help him,” said one of the blondes. It might have been Faith.

But they all knew there was no helping him. Abruptly his movements ceased. His head flopped to one side, and pink-tinged foam slid down his cheek from his open mouth.

I stepped forward, one hand pressed to my own rebellious stomach. Every eye in the room turned to me, some fearful, some filled with hate, all shocked by the sudden turn of events.

Naturally that was the moment my stomach chose to give up the fight, and I hurled all over Thorne’s shiny leather shoes.

Luce whipped a napkin off the empty drinks tray and passed it to me without comment. I wiped my mouth and drew a deep breath, fighting to get myself under control. If this was anything like the time Kasumi had poisoned me, the nausea would last a good half hour.

“Excuse me.” There was disgust on some of my new sisters’ faces, but also a respect that hadn’t been there before. Clearly they all knew what had been in that champagne glass—probably smeared all over the inside of it, enough to kill any dragon three times over—and the fact that I was still standing had them almost as spooked as the sudden death of their mentor. If they were a little older and wiser, one of them might have seized the opportunity to attack me while I was unwell. All I could say was thank God for teenagers.

I pressed the napkin to my lips again. “Just give me a minute. I’ll be fine.” No need to tell them about the half hour of chucking. If they thought I had superpowers, all the better. “I’m pretty hard to kill, as you’ll find out if you try.”

Hope came forward—I think it was Hope—and knelt by Thorne’s side in a rustle of ruby silk. She pressed her fingers against the pulse point in his neck.

“Is he dead?” Valiant asked.

“Yes.” Hope drew back, putting some more distance between herself and me, though whether through fear of me or worry that I’d throw up on her wine-coloured dress, I couldn’t tell. If it was the latter, it was a pretty smart move. My stomach heaved, and I had to concentrate everything I had on resisting the urge to decorate the carpet again. Garth rested a warm hand on my bare shoulder. His worried eyes whirled with yellow. No doubt this brought back bad memories. He’d held me in his arms all too recently, thinking he was watching me die of poisoning.

“And a good thing, too,” I said. “He had you believing you had no choice but to kill me and each other, didn’t he?”

“That’s because we don’t,” said Valiant. “And you needn’t think we’re defenceless just because you managed to knock off Thorne.”

She held her chin high, but there was more bravado than conviction in her words. They were too young. Oh, I was sure they’d been raised, just as I had, in the knowledge that they must kill all their sisters if they hoped to win the prize of the throne. And dragons were a greedy lot: wanting the throne and the life of privilege that went with it wasn’t difficult. Nor was the capacity for backstabbing—it was practically a birthright. But no other dragons grew up knowing how very small their chances of surviving were. It messed with your mind, having that hanging over you all your life. Not many were strong enough when push came to shove.

I looked around the room, meeting the eyes of each sister in turn. Most showed as much fear as defiance, and I certainly couldn’t blame them. Leandra had been one of the most pragmatic of her clutch, but even she had found the proving tough going, and these girls were far too young. Only Faith in her stark black gown showed no fear as she glared back at me.

But even Faith might prefer a sure thing to the risk of the proving. As Leandra had discovered, anything could happen, no matter how well prepared you were.

“Of course you’re not defenceless.” I gestured at the tight knot of supporters clustering behind each girl, just as my team gathered protectively around me. “We all have our resources—but look around this room and ask yourself:
how many of these people will still be alive a year from now?
”

I let them take a moment for that to sink in. It was a sobering thought. Eight sisters, and only one of them could live to take the throne. All of the others would die, and many of their supporters with them.

The smell of vomit was strong, mixed with blood and a pungent odour that meant Thorne must have voided his bowels as he died. The mingled aromas were hard to take, but they made a vicious point: this was what awaited almost everyone in the room. Nothing but blood and death and ruin waited down the traditional path.

“How confident do you feel that you will be the lucky one, that lucky one out of eight, to make it through?” I glanced at Faith, but her face was a mask. “I can tell you Valeria was plenty confident, but look where she ended up.”

Floating in Sydney Harbour with an almighty hole punched through her heart, that’s where. And I’d put her there. It certainly didn’t hurt to remind my sisters of that. Their odds of coming through a proving alive had gone down considerably since I’d entered the game.

Faith glared at me, doing her best to project an icy calm. Shame the trembling of her aura gave her away. “And I suppose you have some other option? Apart from boring us to death?”

“I certainly do. Fighting is a loser’s game. Seven of us will die so that one can win everything. Why not agree instead to split the prize?”

“What?” Angry tears sparkled in Valiant’s eyes, and she clenched the ivory satin of her gown tight enough to wrinkle it. “I thought you had some sensible alternative. What kind of garbage is that?”

There was a murmur of agreement among the blondes.

“Are you suggesting we divide the domain between us?” Faith asked, an incredulous note in her voice. “Just agree to share the cake instead of fighting over it?”

It sounded perfectly reasonable to me. “Why not? Just because it’s never been done before? This is the twenty-first century. Time to update a little.”

“And I suppose you get the biggest slice?” Her eyes, green as my own, glittered with challenge. “You’re out of your mind if you think I’m going to settle for some speck of dirt in the middle of the Pacific Ocean while you get Australia. I’d rather fight.”

A couple of the others muttered their agreement, but several more seemed less sure. It was easier to feel that way when you were the eldest sister, I guess, brought up from birth to expect success in everything you did.

“Really? You’d really rather take almost certain death? Australia’s a big place. And don’t forget about New Zealand and Indonesia. I’m sure we could manage to stay out of each other’s way and still keep everyone happy.”

“Are you saying you’d be prepared to split Australia?” Hope joined the conversation, her big blue eyes alight with the possibilities. “I’d heard you were … different … but that seems positively undragonish.”

“Sure. Why not? I’d keep New South Wales. I’ve always lived in Sydney, and I’m not interested in moving. The rest we can sort out later, if you’re interested.”

I could tell that some of them were for sure. Faith and a couple of others had a different sort of gleam in their eye, though. Stupid teenagers. They thought I was offering because I was too scared to fight.

They thought I was weak.

I sighed, and was about to set them straight when I noticed search lights swinging crazily in the dark beyond the pool. In our soundproof room we could hear nothing from outside, but heads were turning among the partygoers.

Luce noticed it too. At a nod from me she moved to the window and opened it. Noise rushed in from outside: cries of alarm and the tread of heavy booted feet on the paving around the pool.

“What’s going on?” I asked.

The distinctive thumping of a helicopter’s blades somewhere close nearly drowned out my words, then it set down on the grass beyond the pool, its lights raking the scene.

“Who else did Thorne invite?” I asked, but before anyone could answer, the door behind me burst open, and suddenly the room filled with men in black riot gear. Men who waved serious assault rifles around and yelled at everyone to get down.

I snatched at Garth’s sleeve just in time. “Garth, no!”

He glared at me, his eyes fading back to grey from violent yellow. No one else had moved, but the sisters looked as shocked as if this was a surprise to them too, and the men wore badges on their arms proclaiming they were Australian Federal Police. I didn’t want to turn dragon and toast a whole bunch of policemen just for doing their job, so I waited—and kept a firm hand on Garth’s arm to encourage him to be patient too. His muscles were tense in my grip.

In a moment I was very glad I had. The police fanned out around the room, and a new figure strode in, an older man with a military bearing, though he wore civilian clothes.

“Ladies and gentlemen, these guns are loaded with silver bullets, so I’d advise you not to do anything rash.”

Surely he was the one being rash, bursting into a dragon’s home and waving firearms around. Though the fact they were loaded with silver meant he at least knew what he was facing. I stepped closer to Garth, still fighting nausea, but worried about those silver bullets. Getting shot was no walk in the park for any shifter, but for werewolves it was invariably fatal. Even the tiniest amount of silver in their system was enough to kill them, in the most gruesome way, too. Thorne’s death was nothing to it.

“Who are you?” I pushed into his mind as I spoke, meaning to compel him, but he blocked me so well he could have been a dragon. That was weird: according to his aura he was nothing but human. “This is a private residence. What are you doing here? I hope you have a search warrant.”

He tapped the breast pocket of his grey business suit. His clothes made him look more like a banker than a policeman. “I am Commander Wilson of Taskforce Jaeger. I have a warrant right here. I’ll be only too happy to show it to the owner of this house, Mr Gideon Thorne. Where is he?”

I felt my face flush with heat. Oh, God, I was such an idiot. I’d completely forgotten Thorne’s corpse stretched so incriminatingly on the floor behind me.

“He’s right here,” said Faith, a vicious smile curving her red lips.

If Commander Wilson was shocked to find a dead body on the floor, he didn’t show it. He stepped closer and gazed down at Thorne’s contorted face dispassionately. His men began to fan out through the room, and I felt Garth tense under my hand. I squeezed his bicep hard. It was like squeezing rock. A policeman with a gun trained on us stood just out of reach, and I was terrified one of those bullets might end up in my hot-headed werewolf. He had many fine qualities, but impulse control wasn’t one of them. I’d already seen one werewolf die of silver poisoning, and I never wanted to repeat the experience. And the thought of losing Garth opened a pit of horror in my stomach that I couldn’t examine too closely, for fear of what I might discover. I pressed closer to his warmth, ready to shield him with my body if I had to.

Wilson looked up from his examination of Thorne’s body. “Would I be right in assuming Mr Thorne didn’t die of natural causes?”

What a comedian. Said it with a straight face, too.

Faith flung a triumphant hand in my direction. “
She
killed him.”

“Is that so?” He turned that unblinking gaze on me, then nodded to someone behind me.

Pain exploded through my head, and the world went black.

I woke with a lingering headache and a peculiar taste in my mouth. My tongue felt like it was covered in peach fuzz, and about three times bigger than normal. I spent a moment trying to process that taste. Was it the after-effects of the bane leaf? I didn’t remember that from last time.

My eyelids were crusted together, and I opened them with some difficulty. The room was unfamiliar, small and white. The glare of the fluorescent tubes in the ceiling hurt my eyes, and I rolled my head forward, feeling a strange resistance in my neck.

A figure swam into view. A face loomed over me, dark hair swinging forward to brush my skin. Luce? I blinked, trying to focus, and saw it was Corinne, the selkie woman.

“Mistress? Don’t try to move. Keep still.”

Naturally as soon as she told me to keep still, moving became the only thing I wanted to do. I tried to move my arms, but something prevented me. I was having trouble even turning my head. A red light blinked somewhere in the bottom of my peripheral vision, but I couldn’t see properly.

She laid a hand on my arm. “Please! Don’t move.”

The fear in her voice jolted me fully awake, and I managed to focus on her face, so near I could smell the scent of the shampoo she used. Something with apples. There was no furniture in the room except the chair I sat in. I wriggled my hands, and realised I was tied to it.

“What the hell’s going on?” I jerked my hands harder, adrenalin surging through my veins, and she grabbed my shoulder.

“Keep still! There’s a bomb around your neck.”

I stared into her terror-filled eyes for a long moment, then tried to see what she was talking about, but my head was held firmly in some kind of neck brace. I strained to get a good look at the little red light, but trying to see something that’s around your neck is like trying to lick your own elbow. No matter how hard you try, it’s never going to happen. That’s why they invented mirrors.

“Someone put a collar bomb on me?” It certainly wasn’t the craziest thing that had happened to me lately, but it hadn’t been high on my list of possibilities of how the night at Thorne’s might end either. Who would dare? “Was it that Wilson guy?”

Last thing I remembered was getting knocked out, just after the cops had burst in. Or were they really cops? Wilson had said something about a taskforce, and they’d looked like cops, but their whole
modus operandi
smelled more of
Mission Impossible
than the staid old Australian police force. And now I was wearing a collar bomb? Something was very wrong here—and not just the fact that I might be about to get my head blown off.

“I don’t know who they were, mistress.” The selkie’s face was white with fear. She raised a shaking hand to brush her hair out of her face, and I saw both hands were shackled in silver handcuffs. There were angry red welts around her wrists already from the poisonous metal. “They caught us with silver nets, then they brought us here and separated us. I was left in this room on my own until two men in white coats wheeled you in a few minutes ago.”