Dark Embers (33 page)

Dylan pinned Riley with a look meant to flay skin from bone. “Really? Surrounded? Then how do you explain the fact that sixteen full-grown dragons from the Wyvernmoon clan manifested on a street corner in Santa Fe this evening? Including, by the way, Jacob fucking LaFleur?”

“We don’t know. That’s what we’re trying to tell you.” Travis spoke up. “We were there all night and nothing changed. No one left; no one came in. Unless they somehow found a way out through that blind spot we’ve been trying to figure out.”

“Do you think that’s it?”

“We don’t know, Dylan.” This from Caitlyn, who looked damn close to tears. Too bad he was all out of sympathy.

“Well, that’s a hell of a costly
I don’t know
, isn’t it?” Unable to stand still for one second longer, he started pacing. It was that or wrap his hands around one of his sentry’s throats and squeeze until his eyes bulged out. Even better, he could do it to all four of them.

“Liam’s dead. So are five Wyverns, including the heir apparent. And we’re right in the middle of a fucking blood feud. So, I’m going to ask you again: if you were watching them so damn carefully, how the fuck did they get here tonight?”

The four of them—Travis, Caitlyn, Tyler and Riley—stared at him with blank faces. Maybe he was being an asshole, maybe he should back off a little, but he was too pissed off to tiptoe around their feelings. Six people were dead, and he now had to figure his way out of a fucking shit storm—never an easy proposition, but damned near impossible with the Wyvernmoons on the other side of it. The logical part of his brain was warning him that the only way tonight’s ambush could have happened was if there was a traitor among them, but he didn’t want to accept that.

Couldn’t accept it, if it meant one of his people had betrayed him. And yet, could he really afford to turn his back when Liam was dead and the others who had fought with him were nearly so?

“Dylan, we’re sorry. We screwed up, obviously.” Riley ran a hand over his face.

“Really? That’s the best you’ve got? You’re sorry you screwed up? Why don’t you go tell Quinn that? I’m sure it’ll make him feel real good when he’s burying Liam in two days.”

All four of them blanched, but none of them made another move to defend themselves. Waving a hand, he dismissed them, turned away. Then changed his mind before any of them could take a step. “Before you leave here tonight, you are to hand over all notes and observations you made on the Wyvernmoon compound to Shawn. You are also to tell him anything you’ve seen that isn’t in those notes. Is that clear?”

“Yes,” they replied in a chorus.

“Good. And the four of you are relieved of duty until I can find out exactly what went wrong.” There were a few shocked protests from the sidelines, but he ignored them. If any of the guys wanted to talk to him, they could get in fucking line. “After you turn the stuff over, get the hell out of here. I’ll let you know when you’re welcome back.”

To their credit, the four sentries did exactly as they were told, turning over notebooks and files to Shawn on their way out the door. None of them looked back, and he didn’t call them back. If he was making a mistake, he’d face them and apologize later. But no matter what had happened, they had screwed up, and they would be disciplined for it.

Furious, frustrated and more than a little fucked-up, he looked around at the seven sentries he had left and roared, “If any of you have some idea of what the fuck went down today, now would be the time to speak up.”

“I know what happened.” Phoebe’s voice rang through the huge room.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

P
hoebe pushed away from her perch against the doorjamb and walked slowly to the center of the room, doing her damnedest not to be intimidated by the sheer magnificence of the place. Add in the furious scowl on Dylan’s face, and her knees were knocking together so badly, it was a miracle she made it to the center of the room, where he was.

As she walked, she contemplated the words she’d been rehearsing for the past hour. He didn’t have to know that she had suspected this very thing, didn’t have to know that she’d sat on her suspicions. She could start with the syringe and work from there.

But that would make her a liar and she wasn’t one, refused to be one now just because she didn’t want to face her lover’s wrath. Better to tell the whole truth and hope to God he still wanted her when the dust settled.

When she finally made it to the middle of the cavernous room, she stopped in front of Dylan, trying her best not to dwell on the enraged look he gave her. If she did, she’d never get the words out.

Taking a deep breath, she started from the beginning—or at least as close to the beginning as she deemed necessary. “For almost two weeks now, Quinn and I have been working on mapping the properties of the disease you brought me here to study. About a week ago, I realized that the reason we were having no luck was because the thing had false layers—the paralysis built over the immune disorders, which built over the hemorrhagic properties, which built over something else.

“It was a breakthrough, one that had us thinking we were finally on the right track, because if we could cull through the others and get to the bottom part of the mutated cells, we might finally have a chance to figure out exactly what we were dealing with. We’d finally know what gene we had to break.”

Dylan was watching her with interest, while looking more than a little puzzled, which just made her feel worse. He was a smart guy, and if he couldn’t figure out where she was going with this, it was because he trusted her. Swallowing thickly, she took a deep breath and prayed that what she had to say next wouldn’t change everything.

“Quinn was really excited about the breakthrough, was working round the clock on it, as you know. But I was a little more leery. I had a bunch of suspicions that I didn’t share with him, suspicions that were proven tonight.”

She paused, licked her lips. Wished she had a glass of water—something, anything to delay the next couple of minutes. But there was nothing, so she took a deep breath and spit it out.

“Mutations like the one we were seeing are very rare in nature. In fact, in the eleven years I’ve been a doctor, I’ve never seen one so complex. Maybe you might see the mapping of one false trait. Maybe,
maybe
you’d see two. But three—nothing I’ve ever seen, nothing I could find in my research, showed me that such a thing was even possible.

“Which led me to believe that this disease, this virus, whatever it is, is man-made. Or dragon-made. Whatever. As the week wore on, I became more and more convinced that someone had created this thing, that someone had deliberately done this to you.”

As she wound to the end, she stopped speaking to everyone in the room and spoke directly to Dylan instead. “I almost came forward a dozen times to tell you my suspicions, almost told Quinn twice that. But in the end, I kept quiet because I didn’t have any proof. Tonight I got that proof.”

A low murmuring started behind her, and she squeezed her nails into her palms in an effort to get through the next couple of minutes.
I’m almost done
, she told herself.
Almost done
.

“At the beginning of the fight, you killed someone. You were in dragon form. Do you remember?”

“Yes.” His magnificent onyx eyes were shuttered, his mouth tight.

“I was watching from my spot under the bench, saw him try to stab you with something. I didn’t know what it was until he was dead, and in the confusion I forgot all about it, until Logan and I were standing on the street corner after the battle and I saw it lying there, where it had fallen. I took it back to the lab, looked at it. It was a syringe, filled with hundreds of cells mutated by the disease.”

She closed her eyes, tried to get through the last. “The disease isn’t a natural occurrence. It’s a man-made biological weapon. It might not be contagious through normal channels, but that doesn’t mean it is any less manufactured. I still don’t know how it’s been introduced. I have to do a lot more research. Since the bodies of the victims have been burned, I can’t exhume them and search for answers, so I have to do a lot more with the blood samples. Have to look at how it mutates in the individual blood and compare it to the sample we now have.

“But what it all comes down to is that someone—I assume these Wyvernmoons who attacked us tonight, but again, that is just an assumption—created this disease with the abject purpose of destroying you. The attack tonight was their best shot at getting the virus into you. The king.”

Chaos erupted behind her, but she raised her voice to be heard over the din. She wanted to make sure Dylan understood what she’d been reasoning out. “They’ve already killed your sister and your niece, those next in line for the throne. You have no heir, so if you contracted the disease like they did—if you died—there would be a power vacuum. Not forever, but certainly for a little while as the clan scrambled to figure out the hierarchy, leaving Dragonstar vulnerable to attack.

“This whole thing—all those terrible deaths—was just their attempt at a coup. My guess is they’ve spent the past ten years testing the disease on others, watching and waiting for a chance at you. Maybe there’ve been other attempts on your life; maybe tonight was the first. You would know that better than I would. But it’s the only thing that makes sense.”

She stopped, because there was nothing more to say. She’d finally run out of words. Looking up at Dylan, she waited for the other shoe to drop. It didn’t take long.

With each word that Phoebe spoke, Dylan’s world grew a little darker, a little dimmer, until all he could focus on was her and the terrible things she was saying. Biological warfare. Studied attack. Lana and Marta. Coup. All these years, the Wyvernmoons had been working to kill him and his people, and he hadn’t had a clue.

His failures crashed down around his head, nearly brought him to his knees. He’d been working for ten years to figure out what Phoebe had surmised in two weeks. One week, if she was to be believed.

And that’s when it hit him. Her look of trepidation, her unfamiliar hesitance. She’d known for a week that they were under attack, and she hadn’t told him. She’d deliberately left them vulnerable, open for attack. And now Liam was dead.

The dragon bellowed inside him, and for the first time in a long while, he gave into it. Roared along with it, in a shout so loud it stopped all conversation, froze everyone in the room.

Fighting through the rage—at Phoebe, at Silus and the rest of the damn Wyvernmoons, at himself—he turned to Shawn. “Find Gabe and get him back here. Caitlyn and the others, too.”

He turned to Logan. “Start mobilizing the soldiers. Get them at their posts, trading off in eight-hour shifts. Impress upon them the importance of their job. We’re in a war. We might be late coming to the table, but we’re there now. And this is not going to end the way they want it to.

“Callie, get to the clan in town. Warn the ones who aren’t in the caves to go there and take precautions until we can get everything in order to protect them. I killed the Wyvernmoon heir tonight, and that is not something Silus LaFleur is going to take lying down. He won’t care that it was self-defense, that Jacob’s sole purpose for being here was to kill the King of Dragonstar. They’re going to come gunning for us, and we will be ready this time.”

Adrenaline was pounding through his blood, roaring in his ears, as he watched his people scatter to do his bidding. Those he hadn’t named directly were pairing off with those he had, and God willing, by the time morning came, their vulnerabilities would be shored up.

Grabbing Phoebe’s elbow, he propelled her out of the room and down the hall to his private chamber. He didn’t say a word to her as he walked, didn’t trust himself to say anything yet. Part of him wanted to fall to his knees in front of her, to thank her for figuring out what he hadn’t been able to see after ten years of trying.

But another part, a bigger part, was furious that she had kept it from him for a week. If he’d known, if he’d had one fucking clue, tonight never would have happened. Liam wouldn’t be dead. His people wouldn’t be scattered to hell and back, easy prey for the Wyvernmoons. He wouldn’t be so unprepared for the war they’d found themselves launched into.

“I’m sorry,” she murmured as he shoved her into his chamber and slammed the door behind them. “I should have told you—”

“Damn right you should have. What were you thinking, keeping that to yourself?”

“I was thinking like a scientist. In my business, you don’t just blurt out your hypothesis without something concrete to back it up.”

“This isn’t about your business, isn’t about your training. This is about my clan. I hired you to help me solve the problem, to help me protect them. Instead, we’re vulnerable, and I find out that you could have changed that. That you could have come to me a week ago with your suspicions, and I could have started mobilizing then.”

“I didn’t have proof!”

“Fuck proof! I didn’t hire you because you follow the damn scientific process. I hired you because I believed in you, believed in your talent and your instincts. And you let me down.”