Twiceborn Endgame (The Proving Book 3) (31 page)

“We’re not planning to share the one throne. We will divide Oceania between us, and each take charge of our individual pieces.”

“But you will be the overqueen, I assume?” said Celeste. “With each of them reporting to you?”

Nope, definitely couldn’t imagine anyone voluntarily giving up power. Their certainty made me quail a little. Was I kidding myself? Could we really make this work, my sisters and I? I’d only known them for a week, after all. How could I really trust them to keep their word?

“There will be no overqueen.” I put some firmness into my voice. If I couldn’t believe the idea myself, how could I convince anyone else it would work? “Oceania will simply be split into seven smaller domains. Each of us will rule independently, just as you all do.”

“But it won’t be as we do, will it?” Maria said, poisonously sweet. “Oceania is already the youngest and least of the domains. If you divide it, it will be as nothing.”

And ripe for the taking, said the gleam in her eye. I looked around and saw the others had reached a similar conclusion.

“We may rule independently, but together we will be strong.”

“Well, if your heart is set on it, far be it from us to try to talk you out of this mad scheme.” Maria shrugged prettily, as if she were doing me a huge favour. She looked around at her fellow queens with a knowing smirk. They all nodded, except for Xu.

The message couldn’t have been clearer.
It’s your funeral
. None of them thought we could make a go of it, but they were more than happy for us to make the attempt. It made it easier for them to step in and wipe us out.

“Excellent,” I said, as if I wasn’t well aware what they were thinking. “So there will be a change in the usual arrangements for the coronation. There are six of you, and seven of us.” I paused to let that idea sink in, but I doubt they saw any threat from seven young, untried queens. “That works out nicely, doesn’t it? One of you will have to double up, but you can all crown one of us, as a sign of our unity.”

Unity, my foot. And how I managed to keep a straight face while saying it, I don’t know, though none of them seemed bothered by the irony. I signalled to Mac, who was waiting by the door. She nodded and ducked out.

“My sisters will arrive in a moment, and I can formally introduce them to you.”

I wondered what my sisters had thought of the proceedings they’d just watched on their screen. The queens’ reaction had probably come as no surprise to any of them. They were well versed in dragon history and politics. They wouldn’t exactly have been expecting an enthusiastic welcome.

I was pleased. Things could have gone much worse. No one had stormed out, and Xu hadn’t challenged me on the spot, as I’d half-feared. Guess her sisterly love didn’t extend too far. She would have killed Daiyu herself if Daiyu hadn’t seen an opportunity in Japan and fled China.

I heard a commotion in the foyer outside the ballroom. My sisters arriving. The other queens heard it too, and rose, eager to get their first look at the weaklings who had agreed to share rather than fight. They couldn’t possibly be real dragons. They’d be easy to take down, and then Oceania could be plucked like a ripe plum. Despite the earlier comments about Oceania being young and not particularly wealthy, I could see a calculating greed in their eagerness.

But it wasn’t my sisters. An explosion ripped through the room, and the doors blew off their hinges. Men with guns poured into the room and started firing. Fools! What were they thinking, bringing guns to a fight with dragons? And then I felt something sting my bare arm. When I looked down a dart quivered there, sticking out of my flesh.

Dart guns?

A wave of nausea hit me. For crying out loud, not again. Bane leaf was supposed to be a rare poison. Lately it seemed every Tom, Dick and bloody Harry had a stock of it. Either that or du. At least it wasn’t that. Hey, things could be worse! I felt an inappropriate giggle bubbling in my chest. Was this any time to come over all Pollyanna? My vision blurred, and everything seemed to happen in slow motion. I saw Xu fall to the floor, writhing and foaming at the mouth. Maria slumped in her seat, her eyes rolling back in her head.

And I saw a dart whiz around the corner of a throne to take Celeste in the throat just as she was beginning to shimmer into trueshape. What the hell was this? Darts that could fly around corners?

My knees gave way, and I subsided onto the floor, my stomach lurching horribly. The glasses fell off and I felt too weak even to pick them back up. You’d think, given the number of times I’d been poisoned with bane leaf lately, that I might have built up some immunity by now, but no such luck. I curled around my heaving stomach and saw, through the blurring haze of illness, a man march into the ballroom. His troops had fanned out, making sure that their darts found everyone in the room. The air was filled with the sounds of screaming and retching. Guess we’d soon find out which shifters bane leaf was fatal for. How had this happened? Where were the guards I’d left outside? Who were these people?

I squinted at the man, forcing my bleary eyes to focus. His murky aura said he was a goblin, and as he approached I recognised his dark face. Patel. Damn. No wonder the darts could swerve in mid-air. Goblin magic. They were spelled to find their target, no matter what. Hadn’t the little weasel died in the building collapse at Taskforce Jaeger HQ? I’d certainly had my hopes up. And now he turned out to be a mage. I reached for trueshape, but the effort brought the contents of my stomach hurling onto the floor. I collapsed into a heap. Standing up just seemed an impossible challenge.

Around me the screams were fading, replaced by whimpers and the soft sound of crying. I shut my eyes. Someone was repeating “no, no, no” over and over again. It wouldn’t be one of the queens, nor any of the dragons who’d come with them. This felt much worse than the time Kasumi had stabbed me. I’d just started to wonder if maybe bane leaf could be fatal to humans in strong enough doses when my body gave up the struggle and I blacked out.

When I woke, Patel was standing over the body of Xu, admiring his handiwork. Not all the shifters were down; his men surrounded the ones who were still standing, covering them with real guns now, not dart guns. It was remarkably quiet in the ballroom, and I wondered how long I’d been out. Why had no one responded to the noise of the door blowing out and the subsequent screams? Had they secured the whole hotel? Taskforce Jaeger must have thrown everything they had into this mission.

I stared blearily at Patel, wondering how it had come to this. The taskforce could only have existed for a few weeks at the most. They’d escalated from investigations to wholesale slaughter at breathtaking speed. Surely the government couldn’t have authorised this? I knew people were scared by the revelations of shifters in their midst, but this seemed way out of proportion. And Patel was a shifter himself. It didn’t make sense.

He moved to check out Maria, collapsed on her throne. She was still alive, though probably not for much longer, judging by the look of her. Sweat ran down her pale face, and her lips stood out starkly blue against her skin. She groaned as I watched, and shifted her head restlessly.

Patel considered her, scrawny arms folded. No white lab coat today; he wore dark clothes, as if he fancied himself some kind of ninja, though he wasn’t armed that I could see. As he stood there, he absentmindedly pushed his glasses up onto the bridge of his nose, and the action tickled at my memory. A terrible suspicion took hold of me.

Trying not to draw his attention, I looked around for my own glasses. They’d slipped off when I fell. I groped around on the floor until I found them. Fortunately they were still in one piece. I slipped them on and suddenly Dr Patel sprouted a mop of dirty orange hair, and a face I knew all too well replaced the Indian doctor’s features.

“Blue! You bastard!”

He grinned and came to crouch at my side. “Hello, Kate. How are you? Feeling a bit off, perhaps? What a shame.”

“I can’t believe it.” Although I could, actually. It made a twisted kind of sense when I thought about it. He’d never hidden his dislike of dragons. But to actually join the humans in hunting us down! “What the hell are you doing?”

“Ridding the world of a great evil,” he said. “We’ll all be so much better off without you lot lording it over everyone and treating us as disposable serfs.” He waved a hand that took in the bodies on the floor and the general destruction. “This is just the beginning. Oceania will be the first dragon-free domain, but the others will follow soon enough when they see how much better off we are without the lizards.”

I convulsed, trying to bring up something when there was nothing left in my stomach. The pain in my gut was so bad it was like giving birth all over again. I could hardly think through the agony.

He laid a comforting hand on my shoulder. “Don’t worry, it shouldn’t be much longer. I’m a little surprised you’ve lasted this long, actually. I distilled the brew until it was extra strong. Used up my whole stock of bane leaf, but it’ll be worth it.”

No way. No
way
was I dying here, covered in vomit, and letting this dirtbag win. I tried to find trueshape again, but the pain blocked me. It felt as if the connection between the parts of myself had been severed, and a hard knot of panic formed in my breast.
Calm down
, I told myself.
You’re immune to bane leaf
. I had to believe it was still true. It was the ace up my sleeve, because Blue hadn’t been around for that revelation.

“And then what? Who are you going after next, once the dragons are all dead?”

He shrugged. “I doubt I’ll need to go after anyone. Now the names are out there, I can leave it to the humans to take care of.”

The list. Of course. No wonder there’d been so many shifters from Oceania on that list, and only the overseas queens and a handful of other prominent people. Blue had given them the list. They were all the names he knew.

“You bastard. How long have you been working for Taskforce Jaeger?”

He grinned, baring his sharp teeth at me. “Haven’t you figured it out yet? I thought you were smarter than that. Taskforce Jaeger wouldn’t exist without me. I started it.”

“But why? You’re a shifter too. People are dying already out there. How could you do that?”

“I’m just a goblin. Hardly even a person in a dragon’s eyes. What’s the point of being a shifter at all when you get so little respect?” He leaned closer and whispered. “I’ll let you in on a secret. It’s a shit world out there unless you’re on top of the heap. No one likes goblins—not even other goblins. And mages are kept like animals, whipped into working.”

There was something really offputting about his intensity. I shrank back, as if his hatred would infect me if he got too close.

“That’s why I’ve decided to aim high,” he said in a more normal tone. “Time to be top dog for a change, see what it’s like not to be everybody’s bloody whipping boy.”

He looked at me as if expecting a reaction, but I had no idea what he meant. I could hardly focus on him, lost in the grip of the pain that engulfed me, much less figure out his cryptic utterances. He was going to have to call a spade a spade.

“What the hell are you talking about?”

He blew out an impatient breath, ruffling the lank orange hair of his fringe.

“Let me spell it out for you, Kate. I’m going to cut that funny little stone out of you. You know the one, right? It sits on your rib, just over your heart, and it lets you change into a dragon.”

My channel stone? What the hell?

“I tried using Faith’s, but there was something wrong with it. Or maybe there’s more to it. Maybe the anaesthetic we used on her interfered with the magic, or maybe it only worked in your case because Leandra had been poisoned with bane leaf first.”

“But …” But he hated dragons. Was he talking about making one by stealing my channel stone? I was lost.

“See, I was trying to be nice, knocking Faith out before I cut it out of her.” His face twisted as he pulled his shirt aside to show me a small scar above his heart. “But it ruined everything. It didn’t work. It’s just a lump of useless rock.”

Holy hell. I’d seen that scar before, back in the goblin’s cave. The guy was a certifiable lunatic. He thought that just shoving a channel stone into his chest could make him into a dragon?

“So I won’t be making that mistake again. I’m afraid you’ll have to be awake for the whole experience when I cut it out of you.”

Except I wouldn’t be pushing my essence into the thing before it left my body, if it came to that. He’d never be a dragon.

“If you hate dragons so much, why do you want to be one?”

“I never said I hated dragons.” He readjusted his shirt to hide the scar. “I just hate the fact that they can push me around. Even you, with all your pious worrying about the poor shifters I’ve betrayed to the humans—you’re just as bad as the rest of them. You used me, same as all the others. ‘We’ll tell your family where you are, Blue. Work for me or else, Blue.’” He pitched his voice high in a childish imitation of mine. “Not so caring then, were you? Well, now it’s my turn.”

“Was that your whole reason for creating Taskforce Jaeger and starting this vendetta against shifters?”

“You sound like you don’t approve. Never said I was Mother Theresa either.”

“Seems a bit short-sighted.” The pain in my gut had eased in the last few moments. I hope it didn’t occur to him that I was taking an awfully long time to die. “Won’t the humans come gunning for you next?”

He waved his hand dismissively. “It’ll all die down soon enough. And you’ll notice that
my
name wasn’t on that list.”

Someone behind me cleared their throat. I lay still, not wanting to give away that I now felt well enough to roll over and see who it was.

“Sir, I think we have a problem.”

I recognised that voice. Wilson, who’d led the Taskforce Jaeger raid on Thorne’s house. I’d assumed he was the commander of the taskforce, but apparently not.

“What?” Blue’s voice was sharp.

“We don’t seem to have enough dragons here.”