Dragon Fever (12 page)

She pursed her lips. “Your flesh—hard body though you are—isn’t impermeable as the crystal is.” She reached for the stopper.

He put his hand over hers, and she looked up at him.

Did he feel something inside when he touched her? Was that her solarys power? Or was it just his exquisite awareness of everything about her: the determined set of her shoulders, the daring gleam in her dark eyes, her scent—raw honey and cinnamon. And the lingering perfume of their lovemaking.

She tilted her head. “Why are you hesitating now?”

Because he didn’t want to risk her. For her sake and for his brother’s life.

And for his own.

If he lost her…

As if she sensed the corrosive doubt, worse than the stone blight, holding him hostage, she wriggled her hand under his, loosening the crystal stopper.

He tensed, ready to knock the flask out of her hand if Bale’s ichor erupted with the same ferocity as his.

But the blackened lump might as well have been at the bottom of the ocean.

She peered into the flask, huffing a breath over the opening, and gave it a swirl.

Nothing.

She frowned. “Maybe it’s all correlative, no causation.”

“No. I know there was a reaction. I saw it. I
felt
it.”

The look she gave him was almost pitying. “I know how much this means to you—”

“Not just to me,” he snapped. “To every male in my tribe.”

Her eyes widened. “It’s not just your brother and you?”

He dragged his hands through his hair. Everything was spiraling out of his control. “All the males are affected. About a hundred, all told.”

She capped the flask and gave it back to him. “But not the females? Maybe it’s genetic or hormonal. Although there could be environmental factors. If we compare—”

“There are no females in our line.”

She blinked. “What? Did you all hatch parthenogenetically?”

He felt his cheeks redden. “Not exactly.”

She interlaced her fingers behind her head, holding tight as if to keep her blown mind together. “This is just too bizarre. I can’t even… I don’t know what I expected to happen.”

“Well, you came to Las Vegas for a girls’ night out. Presumably you expected to take some chances, lose more than you could really afford, and make some questionable choices that you wouldn’t have to talk about once you left here.”

She blinked again. “Check, check, and check.”

Which one was he?

The thought stabbed him more deeply than the scalpel had, and what welled up wasn’t the opalescent fury of the ichor but something from his bones: an awareness that it was going to kill him to let her go.

And not just literally.

His phone rang, the discordant interruption jangling his temper. He stabbed the slide. “Torch. Piper is here with me. What have you found?”

After the briefest pause, where Rave suspected his cousin adjusted whatever he’d been about to blurt out based on the audience, Torch said, “Talked to the cab driver. He says he was waiting in the stand and was next in line when the women approached. He didn’t know them. He said the red-haired one asked to go to the Strip. There was no conversation on the way there. They paid in cash. He didn’t note which way they went.”

“And from there they could’ve gone anywhere.” Rave avoided looking at Piper.

“Haven’t found the limo driver that brought them originally. The vehicle is from a local livery, but their paperwork is…sketchy. The contact on the rental papers isn’t answering the phone number he provided, but the car was paid for with a credit card issued to Ashcraft Amalgamated—”

“That’s Esme’s fiancé’s company,” Piper cut in. “Based out of Salt Lake.”

“The jet is registered to them too,” Torch continued. “I have someone watching the plane, but it seems to be locked down for now. No flight plan has been filed. And the pilot isn’t answering at the number he left on record with the airfield manager.”

Piper muttered under her breath. “Is everyone missing?”

Rave rubbed his jaw. “Are they all together or are Ashcraft’s people looking for your friends too?”

“Lars would be out here in a minute with all his resources if he knew Esme wasn’t where he’d scheduled her to be,” Piper said. “Maybe we should tell him—”

“Let’s hold off on that,” Torch said. “Your little friend Anjali is leading us on, but I think I’m getting a sense of her wiles.”

“But you said Anj took them to the Strip,” Piper said. “That one street just by itself is too huge to search.”

“Yes, isn’t it.” Torch drawled the words. “She likes darkness and she likes chaos. I can work with that.”

Rave heard the sound of the provoked predator in his cousin’s voice: with Torch, the lazy eyeroll of a bored, lounging hunter could shift in a heartbeat to a deadly pounce.

Piper’s friend wouldn’t stay lost for long, and then she’d regret attracting the attention of a barely civilized dragon-shifter with a penchant for havoc.

“Anyway,” Torch said more briskly. “I’m just calling to find out what level of persuasion is authorized.”

“By any means necessary,” Rave said.

“Well, don’t scare them,” Piper objected.

Torch snorted. “Sweetheart, that don’t even move the needle.”

The line disconnected.

Piper looked at Rave uncertainly. “I don’t know about this. I don’t know about any of this.”

Her confusion and concern was like a fist squeezing his chest. But he knew she’d never be more amenable to coercion.

“Torch will do anything to finish his mission,” he told her. “Until then, I want to take you to meet my brother.”

She was so distracted by what was going on with her friends, she didn’t even question him.

But as they took the private elevator to the highest floor of the Keep, with each story they rose, he hammered himself with doubts and his heart plunged in a death spiral.

Chapter 11

She knew they’d been underground, and she knew the Keep was almost a skyscraper and they were heading to the top, but she felt like they were in the elevator forever.

Or maybe that was just her thoughts and fears trapped in an endless rollercoaster of up and down. She’d gone from her quiet microscope in a boring beige office building to this outlandish fever dream of weirdness.

Friends gone missing. Bizarre blood disorders. A mysterious stranger who roused in her a desire that was morphing into an addiction.

She remembered her father telling her, “Pick the fruit in front of you. Wait for the ones that will be ripe tomorrow.”

He hadn’t been offering any particular kind of wisdom. He’d just been talking about apples and cherries, but she thought it still applied.

Abruptly Rave said, “Please don’t be afraid of…of my brother. With the petralys condition, light and heat are painful. He’s been confined to these rooms for…awhile.”

Piper nodded, touched by his urge to defend his brother. “I dealt with my dad’s illness,” she reminded him. “And in my job, I’ve identified toxic algae blooms and brain-eating amoebas and parasitic infestations that cause deformations in fish and frogs. I don’t startle easy.”

Never mind how often she’d gasped since getting out of that stupid limo.

Rave swayed from one boot to the other. “Bale is a…a little larger than any of those.”

The elevator door chimed quietly.

And opened to utter blackness.

“Uh,” she said.

The hesitant breath whispered out into the void and seemed to be swallowed.

“Rave.” A voice came out of the dark. “What have you done?”

Rave stepped out of the elevator. “I found a solarys.”

What was a solarys? Was it something to help his brother? Why hadn’t Rave told her about it when they were discussing cures?

Piper took a short step toward Rave, peering into the shadows. The light from behind her fell on the floor, illuminating bare cement, but reached no farther into the room beyond. She knew they must be in the penthouse, but the mineral tang of cold, wet stone reminded her unnervingly of her father’s funeral and the raw, gaping hole in the earth. She stopped on the verge between the elevator car and the concrete, preventing the door from closing.

From the dark came a low, rasping sigh. “With the solarys, you will rule the Nox Incendi.”

Piper wedged her foot against the elevator door that was trying to push her out of the way. Nox…what? Incendi? Did he mean the chemical term NOx? The dangerous atmospheric compounds formed during high-temp combustion, like lightning strikes. She’d always struggled with the Latinate names in her biology classes, but nox meant night or something. Nox incendi…burning night?

And Rave would rule it with this solarys thing?

What. The. Hell.

Okay, she might’ve sort of lied to Rave. She didn’t startle easily, but she was
done
with mysteries. Time to hit the bar downstairs.

She sidled back a step. And now of course the elevator door decided not to close right away.

Without looking back, Rave reached for her wrist and tugged her to his side.

“She is not my solarys, Bale,” he said, still facing the darkness. “She is for you.”

She
? Meaning…
Qué chingados
. That meaning was clear enough.

She yanked her hand out of his hold.

But the door slid silently shut behind her, casting them into unrelenting blackness.

Unrelenting except for the very faintest spark of color hovering in the darkness.

No, not one spot. Two.

Red.

Eyes.

She shrank against Rave’s shoulder, not startled, pretty much just damn terrified. She wanted to push him away furiously—
she is for you
, forget that—but he was the only thing she could hold onto in the void. Her heart skittered madly, as if it was going to find a way out, away from this Bale, with or without her.

There was no way out of this lightless place.

She swallowed hard, forcing her wimpy heart back into place. “What…” No, that sounded too weak. “Rave, I promised to help you. This is starting to feel like…something else.”

Rave didn’t reply. She couldn’t even hear him breathing or feel his heat, though all her other senses were on high alert in this blindness; it was as if he’d turned to stone.

But the voice in the darkness answered, “Sacrifice.”

Piper recoiled from the hissed word. “I didn’t agree to that, no way.”

“Not your sacrifice. His.”

Finally, Rave let out a noise, a pained huff as if he’d been punched in the belly. “I must. Your life is worth more than mine, brother.”

Though she couldn’t see his face, she heard the anguish in his voice.

And she knew what that felt like, too well. Even though he’d betrayed her, she couldn’t let the statement stand.

“No one’s life is worth more than another’s,” she snapped. She hadn’t always believed that. The daughter of an immigrant farm worker couldn’t help but absorb some brutal lessons along with the smell of nitrogen and phosphorous. And living in the shadows of rich, elegant Esme and spirited, alluring Anjali hadn’t taught her much different. But she knew better now.

“Maybe in your world,” Rave rasped. “But the king of the Nox Incendi comes first.”

King? Her mind reeled at this new revelation. Certainly the name and the décor of the Keep was strangely medieval, but they couldn’t have an actual king. Even mafias only had godfathers, right?

Those red eyes blinked. “I know the sacrifices you’ve made for me, Rave, to keep me here. I know you’d give your life for mine.”

Despite the shivers that racked her at the seething, inhuman glitter, Piper stepped in front of Rave. “No. There’s another way.”

“There is
no
way.” Bale’s voice was tinged not so much with regret as weariness. “Let it go, brother. Let. Me. Go.”

“But I finally found her,” Rave argued. “A true mate that can reignite the ichor. That can save—”

“She is not a solarys,” Bale countered. “She is
your
solarys. Do you not understand the difference?”

This had gone too damn far. Despite her utter confusion and the intimidating darkness, Piper whirled and held her flattened palms out to both men. “Stop!” She managed not to shriek, but it was a close thing. “Just stop. You’re making me a pawn in some game I don’t understand, and I won’t let you.”

A ragged laugh from the shadows. “Your kind have always been game to us.”

She scowled in his direction. “What is a…solarys?”

Rave answered this time. “The petralys turns us to stone. A solarys is the numinous light and the heat that counteracts it.”

She frowned. “But you said
I
am a solarys. Is it a person or a power or…”

“All of those things,” Bale said. “But only to your true mate.”

“Mate?” Her outstretched hands fell to her sides with a hollow clap.

Off to one side, a candle ignited, so bright after the darkness that Piper had to shield her eyes, dazzled.

In that first flare, though, she’d seen something. Something larger than a man. Something that reflected the tiny flame with more than skin’s brightness.

Something…otherworldly.

By the time she peered out again, the presence had retreated from the light. The small circle of illumination didn’t reach beyond the low hump of damp stone it was sitting on—what kind of penthouse was this?—but it was enough for her to see Rave.

She blinked at him angrily. “I promised to help you and then you didn’t tell me
anything
? Why not just continue on as you’d been going, alone and failing, if that’s how you wanted to play it?”

In the flickering light, he dipped his dark head. “You’re right.”

She drew a breath, ready to keep haranguing him, but his acknowledgment deflated her. “Yeah, I am.”

Another grating chuckle from Bale. “Quite the prize you’ve found, brother.”

She shot a narrow-eyed glare in the direction of the lurking shape she could almost but not quite make out. “I’m no one’s prize.”

“Sharper than Damascus steel, more precious than gems,” Bale said. “Clearly a pain in the ass.”

Rave peered past the candle, as if he could actually see his brother. “Do you feel anything? I noticed a…difference in her presence immediately, but it wasn’t until I sampled my ichor that I was sure. If you would let me draw your blood—”