Twiceborn Endgame (The Proving Book 3) (2 page)

Steve cleared his throat nervously. His normally dark face was ashen. “I guess he found the phone.”

“Bring his gun,” Luce ordered the other thrall. “Let’s move.”

Garth’s arm snaked around me, hard as iron. His golden eyes blazed with a protective fury. “You’re bleeding.”

“Am I?” I raised my hand to my face and brought it away bloody. “Must have been a splinter. It’s nothing.”

“It’s not nothing. You’ve lost enough blood already today.” His warm hand cupped my face, inspecting the wound. He was so close I felt his breath on my skin, and a wholly inappropriate shiver pierced me. This was not the time. Not the place.

He felt the shiver and his grip tightened. “What’s wrong? Are you hurt?”

Shifters like us healed with supernatural speed, but my body was already on overtime after dealing with a knife to the heart earlier in the evening. My hands found the hard muscles of his chest without my even meaning to, instinctively seeking his support. It felt natural, right, to sag against him.

“I’m fine.”

So not fine. My son was gone, that poor man had just died, and now my stupid dragon libido had decided that werewolf was on the menu, despite the fact that I already had a boyfriend in Ben. My new self suffered desires and violent surges of emotion that I could barely control at times, which only made an already difficult situation all the more nightmarish. How do you cope with a world gone mad when you can’t even trust
yourself
any more?

“That bastard,” he growled. Even the damn growl turned me on. It was so primal. “I’ll kill him.”

“It’s my fault,” said Luce, hustling everyone out the door and back towards the lifts. Doors were opening all along the corridor, people calling out worried questions. “I take full responsibility. I should have expected a booby trap from Jason.”

“Why should you? Who would have thought he’d have the time? We were barely half an hour behind him.” Weary. I was so weary. I just wanted to be home safe with my baby. The smell of smoke was strong in the corridor, and behind us I heard the faint crackle of flame. Instead I was here, trapped in a nightmare that seemed unending, fighting someone else’s war.

The ceiling sprinklers turned on as we reached the lifts. Voices were raised in shouts of alarm all along the corridor. Somewhere a child began to cry. The thin, hiccupping sound reminded me of my own child, though he hadn’t cried like that since he’d been very small. When he’d first started school he’d had a recurring nightmare about being chased by a black teddy bear. Would Jason remember that he liked to sleep with his door open, so the room wasn’t completely dark?

“Take the stairs,” Garth muttered, his hands all over me, holding me up, holding me together. I felt like crying myself. Sometimes this new life was almost more than I could bear. “Let’s get away from these people.”

It was true, people were staring. I could feel the wound in my cheek knitting together already, but there was no disguising the blood, and I wasn’t the only one looking the worse for wear.

“What’s happening?” A woman stepped wide-eyed into our path. “Is it a fire?”

Garth pulled me toward the fire stairs, shaking her off. “Get out of here, lady. Can’t you smell that smoke?”

Then the heavy door slammed shut on her worried face with a hollow thud that echoed in the concrete stairwell. We plunged down the stairs, a party of five that had gone up as a party of six. I hadn’t even known the dead man’s name.

One more casualty in the terrible bloodbath of the proving.

Ben still wasn’t back when we returned to Elizabeth’s palace. Or my palace, I suppose, since she was dead and I was now queen. It was nearly midnight as we climbed the curving road toward its blazing lights. I’d never seen such a mansion before, much less owned one. Perched high on a hill with ocean views out the wazoo, everything about it screamed money, from the marble floors to the chandeliers dripping crystal high overhead. Elizabeth’s taste in furnishings ran to antiques, and her walls boasted a few old masters. It was like walking through an art gallery or a museum. Not quite my cup of tea, but if I ever needed money, I could live off the proceeds of the sale for the rest of my life. Probably my grandkids could too. It was hard to think of it as mine yet, though it was probably the best thing about my inheritance. The main part of what Elizabeth had left me was a tangle of problems.

“You all right?” Garth asked as I started the long climb to my bedroom. The staircase was massive, as imposing as everything else in this house, and the first floor seemed a long way away to my tired legs.

“Fine.” Hey, apart from my missing son, my missing boyfriend, and enemies lining up to kill me in all directions, what did I have to worry about? Life was just peachy.

He didn’t say anything else, just stood in the middle of the marble foyer and watched me all the way up the stairs, his brows drawn in that familiar brooding look. It was a relief to escape to the privacy of my own room, where I didn’t have to put on a brave front any more.

If only Ben would turn up, or at least send word, that would be one worry off my list. He’d disappeared the previous night, off on a mission of his own, leaving a note to say he’d be out of contact for a while and not to worry. Not to worry! Considering he was human and injured, that was a bit of a joke. He had no shifter powers to aid him on whatever idiot quest he was on, just a gun and his native stubbornness. When someone like Ben says
don’t worry
it usually means they’re off doing something highly dangerous and/or illegal. Events had kept me well and truly distracted, what with the attack on my house, our own assault on Elizabeth and my remaining sister Alicia, plus Kasumi’s assassination attempt and the kidnapping of Lachie. It had certainly been an action-packed twenty-four hours, but I’d still managed to sneak in plenty of fretting over whatever Ben was up to. Knowing him, it was probably both stupid and dangerous.

Still, sufficient unto the day are the evils thereof, and all that. No need to borrow trouble, there was still plenty coming my way. I peeled off my disgusting clothes and had a shower to wash off the blood and grime, but I didn’t feel any cleaner. That would take a lot more than soap and water. It still bothered me that I hadn’t even known the name of the man who’d died tonight.

Leandra had been like that. She’d cared so little for her thralls that she’d had trouble telling them apart. They were no more than interchangeable lumps of meat to her, their only value in the service they could provide.

That wasn’t me. I refused to become like the other dragons. I stared at myself in the bathroom mirror. Troubled green eyes stared back. The wound on my cheek had completely healed already. A pink scar on my breast showed where Kasumi had plunged the dagger into my heart tonight, but by tomorrow that too would be gone. Dragons were fast healers.

Just as well, since people tried to kill them so often. Maybe they should consider a rethink on their personal relationship strategies. Alone in the sumptuous marble-lined bathroom, a sudden longing to be human again filled me. Back then my bathroom had had a couple of bare patches where tiles had fallen off the walls, and a water stain on the ceiling, but I hadn’t even known that shifters were real. I’d trade a lot of luxury for the certainties of life in those days. Dragons and werewolves and goblins had been creatures you read about in stories, not people you met on the streets of Sydney.

And now I was one. Stupid bloody Leandra.

I turned out the light and climbed into the massive four-poster bed, but sleep refused to come. Would Jason keep our son safe? His record of doing that wasn’t exactly glowing. Valeria had hurled my little boy off the top of the Sydney Harbour Bridge when he’d been in his father’s so-called care. Now Jason had thrown in his lot with the Japanese queen. How was I going to get my son back before she decided that Lachie was more use to her as a tool to hurt me, never mind that he was the son of her new ally?

I shifted uneasily on the pillow. There’d have to be a honeymoon period, where she’d be pleased with her new alliance. Maybe a week. Maybe more. Surely I had a few days, at least, before the situation went that far. I swallowed hard, my throat suddenly dry. My curly-headed boy had been through so much already. He was tougher now, but I longed to hold him in my arms all the same. He tried to act grown-up, but he still liked a cuddle at bedtime. A story too, though he could read perfectly well himself. And Jason hadn’t had the patience for such things even when we were married. Busy with his new alliance, would he make time for his son?

I rolled over, staring at the hulking shapes of unfamiliar furniture in the dark. I had so much to do tomorrow, decisions to make and plans to set in motion if I were to have any hope of surviving what was coming. And I had to survive, for Lachie’s sake.

Beside me the bed was empty, the sheets cold where Ben should be lying. My feelings about him were … mixed, and it wasn’t even as simple as Kate-feelings versus Leandra-feelings. Our friendship had turned into something more only recently, but already the initial euphoria was fading in the face of his reaction to my new dragon status. It was a hard thing to look at the face of the person you thought loved you and see only revulsion. I’d thought he would get over it. I was still me in many ways. Trying to be, anyway. But if anything it was getting worse.

And then there was the pure Leandra rage at his calm assumption that he knew best. That he had the right to wander off as he pleased on his own mad quest to find the goblin mage Blue Monroe, despite my insistence that we didn’t need any goblin magic. I was trying hard to talk myself out of that rage, because I knew the old Kate wouldn’t have felt like that, and it only seemed to prove his point that I’d become too dragonlike. But still it persisted, seething away under the surface of my concern for him, until I couldn’t tell whether anger or relief would win out when he finally reappeared.

At five o’clock in the morning I gave up and got dressed. I wandered downstairs to see who else was about, and spent fifteen minutes cross-examining the two thralls on duty in the comms room as to their names and complete personal histories. I also discovered the dead man had been known to his mates as “Wazza”, was a mad-keen Eels supporter, and liked Mexican food, the hotter the better.

The lights were on in the kitchen, and I followed the sound of voices and the smell of coffee brewing and found Dave and Luce and two more of the new thralls getting ready for their shift. I gave them the third degree too before they hurried off to their duty.

Luce eyed me over the top of her coffee cup. She wore her usual black pants and long-sleeved top, despite it being the middle of summer. “You can’t save everyone, you know.”

“What do you mean?” I sank into a chair at the big table, feeling grumpy and defensive.

She nodded at the door the thralls had disappeared through. “Those guys, me, Dave—all of us—we’re all expendable. You need to think like a dragon if you’re going to make it through this.”

“Speak for yourself.” Dave set a steaming cup of coffee in front of me. He had big hands for a smallish guy, but he handled the delicate cup with the same competence as one of his knives. One of those hands gave my shoulder a gentle squeeze. “I’m not expendable. None of the rest of you bastards can make a decent cup of coffee to save your lives.”

Luce gave him her usual poker face, refusing to be diverted. “Obviously I’d prefer not to be expended myself, if it comes to that. But the point is, we are resources.” She turned serious brown eyes on me. “You can’t afford to be getting all attached to people, or the proving will break you. The only certainty we have here is that people will die.”

“I think that’s been pretty well demonstrated already,” I said, a little tartly. “But the day I stop caring about that is the day you may as well kill me too. I am
not
the Leandra you knew.”

Just as I wasn’t exactly the old Kate either. Damn, this shit was complicated. I was certainly coping better with all the death and mayhem than I ever would have before. There was a dragonish ruthlessness that hadn’t been part of Kate’s makeup. But I was still human enough to feel that people mattered. Everyone was the centre of
someone’s
world. I’d known what it was like to lose the person you loved most. My world had ended the day Lachie died, and I only came back to life when I discovered he wasn’t dead after all. I would never forget the all-consuming pain, the despair, the black void that had swallowed my heart. I could never see death the way Leandra had, as an unfortunate necessity in her plans.

Luce shrugged. “I’m just trying to help. A little distance is not a bad thing.”

“I’ll bear that in mind.” It certainly seemed to work for her. She wasn’t exactly the warm cuddly type. “Since you’re here, we may as well go through what needs to be done. How about some breakfast, Dave?”

My new super-healing powers certainly seemed to require a lot of fuel. I was always starving lately.

Dave grinned at me from the other side of the long serving bench that separated the main room from the cooking area. That side was his, and when he was working no one else was allowed there, though he’d made an exception once or twice for Lachie. The two of them had formed a snack-sneaking conspiracy against me. “Bacon and eggs?”

“Perfect.” Who would be sneaking junk food to Lachie now? Was he even being fed properly? I swallowed the familiar pangs of worry and tried to focus on what Luce was saying.

“I’ve already anticipated some of your commands,” she said. “I have people watching the airport and the major hotels, plus others checking all Jason’s known addresses.”

“He’s not likely to go to any of those.”

“No. Not likely. But we’ll check anyway.”

“What about the wolves? Have they turned up anything?”

“Not yet.”

“No sign of Kasumi?”

“No.” Luce’s lips thinned. She had shared Garth’s opinion of the kitsune woman. “Jason said she’d gone back to Japan, and I think it likely he was telling the truth. We checked the passenger manifesto of last night’s flight to Tokyo. Her name wasn’t listed, but who knows? She could have been on it, but we can’t be sure.”