Shattered Spirits (14 page)

Jones. Just keep thinking of her as Special Agent Jones. Not sexy, vivacious Capri.

Oh, man. He was in deep trouble. Sticking around and continuing to work with Ca—Jones was a disaster waiting to happen. Except, if he ran right now, he’d miss his meeting with Melissa this evening, and his ex would ruin Jones’s career.

The air outside his windshield shimmered, and he gripped the wheel, focusing on the cold biting his fingers. But that only made him think of the cold last night and their kiss. The future flash rippled, gaining strength.

No, damn it. He had to stay in the here and now. He already knew what his curse was going to show him. Capri hurt. A gunshot. A scream.

The security door materialized in the middle of the hood of his car. It banged open. Capri rushed out.

He squeezed his eyes shut, but the vision didn’t stop. The gunshot exploded around him, and the scream tore across his nerves.

He couldn’t run away from this. If Capri was in danger, he had to do everything in his power to save her. There had to be a way to change the future. No matter how many times fate proved he couldn’t do anything.

Silence pressed around him. He opened his eyes. A normal, snowy, grey street stretched ahead of him. The future flash was gone.

There were three things he had to do: save Capri, figure out how Pete could be murdered twice—if, in fact, the victim in Hiro’s morgue was Pete—and come up with something to tell Melissa tonight.

The first, he had no idea when it might happen, so he had to wait. The second kept him close to Capri, which helped with that first problem. So two sort-of-birds with one stone. The third required some thought.

He had less than a day to come up with something, and he’d gotten next to nothing from the youth center. Well, he supposed almost next to nothing. It was awfully coincidental that the teen, Tyler Pimm, had died in a fire. Fires were becoming his other curse. The child he hadn’t been able to save had died in a fire. So had Pete… maybe. And maybe if the body in the Medical Examiner’s office was Pete’s, it meant he’d faked his death all those years ago. It seemed crazy, but not impossible. They’d been best friends. The idea that Pete would just abandon their friendship didn’t make any sense, and yet—

The wind gusted, blowing snow from the youth center’s roof, sprinkling it on the Camaro’s windshield.

And yet Pete had been different. At the time, Ryan hadn’t fully understood what
different
meant. All he’d really known was that Pete had withdrawn from everyone and everything except Ryan. Pete’s parents had become worried. They’d sent him to psychologists and therapists and special camps until everyone in school thought he was a freak.

Maybe he’d been a freak. Maybe he’d been cursed, just like Ryan.

Then the fire had come. Ryan had foreseen it. Flames night after night. But he hadn’t understood what it meant. Not until fire engines had screamed down the street and Pete’s house had been engulfed in flames.

Even if Ryan had known what the vision had meant, he couldn’t have done anything.

Just like he couldn’t have done anything for that child in the apartment fire, either.

The air outside his windshield shimmered again. Son of a—he fought back the future flash. They were getting stronger and more frequent. With the exception of Pete’s death, the flashes came maybe once or twice a year. They’d been short, fleeting moments, often over before he realized what was happening. But now, they were coming stronger and stronger, hard, shocking moments tearing him from reality. He didn’t know what that meant, though. Maybe he really was going crazy.

This time he wouldn’t fail.

Third time was the charm, right? But before that, he needed to figure out what to do about Melissa.

He started his car and turned the heater on. It blasted cold air even though it hadn’t sat for long on the street outside the youth center. He pulled out his phone and stared at it. He needed information, about Pete, the youth center, maybe even about Mr. Pimm—their only small lead. But he hadn’t had many friends on the force when he’d left, and even just the idea that he’d set that fire so he could save that kid and look like a hero made everyone distance themselves from him—regardless that Internal Affairs couldn’t find any evidence.

Of course, they hadn’t found anything that led them to anyone else, either, which was why he’d been strongly encouraged to take the transfer to Elmsville. The only person who’d stood remotely by him had been Dr. Hiro Yoshida, which was why he’d approached her yesterday about Pete’s—Andy Reynolds’s body.

He didn’t want to bother her much more, but if he wanted to get on top of this case and keep Capri—Jones in the dark about why he was really interested in the murder, and then keep Melissa away from Jones, he was going to have to give Hiro another phone call. Here was hoping she had something he could work with.

* * *

Capri drove her SUV half a dozen blocks, jerked the vehicle into a coffee shop’s parking lot, and pressed her forehead to the steering wheel. She couldn’t do this. So much for being a predator. She wanted—irrationally, desperately—wanted Miller like she’d never wanted anyone else before. Eric had never made her feel this desperate, but then she’d never had to resist her feelings for him.

She had to get away from Miller. Run fast and far. The idea of running made her furious, but she couldn’t continue with the way things were. Her magic had manifested without her power word. She was out of control. He
made
her out of control. The best situation was to finish the investigation as fast as dragonly possible, use what he knew about Reynolds, and then get the hell away from Ryan Miller.

Her lips tingled at the memory of last night’s kiss.

Focus. Those kids at the center had mage auras. Zenobia had turned them into mages for her coup. But that didn’t make sense.

Zenobia’s attack force had been comprised mostly of homeless people from various Third World countries. People who wouldn’t be missed. She’d also had them mind wiped—the less pleasant manifestation of the type of earth magic Capri possessed—to make them easy to control. The spell, while in effect, eliminated self-will and essentially overrode the effects of soul sickness that developed in humans when they shared a body with a dragon to connect to the earth’s magic.

But the mind wipe also made it impossible for those humans to function in human society. If Zenobia had made these kids into mages, she must have had other things in mind for them since they were still out and around and functioning like real people.

Of course, that was all assuming they had been a part of Zenobia’s plan. If they weren’t, that meant there was another dragon breaking the law.

This was becoming more complicated and completely disgusting. It was dangerous to body-share. The human became soul sick, going crazy, and the odds weren’t great that the drake doing the sharing wouldn’t fall soul sick as well. Dragon-kind had discovered that the hard way after the terrible spell, the Great Scourge, that had destroyed dragon-kind’s physical forms.

The Mother of All, dragon-kind’s goddess, had sacrificed herself to power a counterspell to save her children, but she could only save their souls. When the Great Scourge was cast, dragons had to take whatever human vessel was closest, whether there was already a human soul in the body or not. Insane human mages had been created, as well as insane, soul-sick dragon spirits. From everything Capri had been told—since she’d been reborn in the late 12th century and couldn’t remember the time of the Great Scourge—those early years had not been good.

Laws had been created and the Asar Nergal had been organized by King Constantine—now soul-sick himself. Dragons didn’t body-share anymore. At least not until Zenobia and her coup, and the only reason her army had succeeded was because her Chief of Coterie Security had the earth magic ability that turned many of those humans into puppets.

But not all. And those who weren’t puppets were back in control of their bodies. They had to be destroyed to protect dragon-kind. All mages did.

She growled and squeezed the steering wheel. It just wasn’t right. Those kids in the youth center were just that, kids. But if they were mages, dragon law said the Asar Nergal had to kill them.

Maybe they were just on the brink and hadn’t developed anything yet. If they weren’t full mages, maybe she wouldn’t have to mention anything to Tobias; maybe the Asar Nergal wouldn’t notice them.

She couldn’t believe she was actually considering keeping this hidden from her boss, and hence Regis.

Okay, maybe she could believe she’d hide it from Regis. If the teens weren’t body-sharing with a drake at that moment and they hadn’t completed a connection to the earth’s magic, they couldn’t be a threat to dragon-kind. There would be no need to senselessly kill them.

She wasn’t going to be responsible for murdering children, and if she told anyone, Diablo would do it without a second thought. She had no doubt about that. He’d probably grin and laugh through the assassination.

Now she had to figure out what all this meant. Had Reynolds learned something he shouldn’t have and been killed? Had Diablo done it? Which didn’t explain why Diablo had a key to Reynolds’s house—unless he’d taken it from Reynolds’s body. If Reynolds was a part of the body-sharing plot, had he decided it was wrong and wanted to back out and was murdered? That was assuming he was human and not a drake. And what was the connection to Kardas, the first victim?

She needed time to figure this out, and time wasn’t something she had a lot of. By the end of today, Hiro and Cooper would have to report the second decapitation to Tobias. Then the issue would become a part of the political turmoil at Court, and while she had no problem cleaning up another dragon’s mess for the sake of all dragon-kind, she wanted… no, needed to know the truth. Particularly if Regis was the problem. If he was becoming unstable, something needed to be done. Hell, something should have been done years ago, before Zenobia killed two dozen drakes in her coup, irrevocably losing their souls into the universal ether.

If Regis was responsible for the deaths, who knew what he’d do next. No one would be safe. With the Handmaiden gone, no drake could be reborn. That meant any death, sanctioned or otherwise, diminished their ranks.

Her phone rang. Jeez, she couldn’t even get a moment. She wasn’t late to meet with her team yet, but it seemed Swipe was begging for her to vent her frustration on him with a few more bullet holes in his designer coat. “What?”

“I need you,” Grey said, panic filling his voice.

Her heart stuttered. “What’s wrong? Where are you?”

“Downtown, at Anaea’s ex’s lawyers’ office.”

“You’re what?” That didn’t make sense… well, it did, but what was Grey doing at a lawyers’ office with Anaea? Where was Hunter?

“Never mind. Are you alone?”

“Grey—?”

“Are you alone?” he growled.

“Yes.”

Air buffeted the SUV’s windshield and a black vortex burst from the concrete wall in front of her. Grey staggered through. His hands slapped against the SUV’s hood, and he gasped for breath. Sweat slicked his brow and blood smeared across his forehead.

“Mother of All.” Capri rushed from the SUV. “Are you crazy? Someone could have seen you.”

“We don’t have time.” He grabbed her arm and yanked her back to the concrete wall. The black void opened as they hit it, and the world tilted. Darkness and nothingness pressed against her, then something solid hit her foot, and the world erupted into chaos.

CHAPTER 17

Capri’s heart stuttered. Papers, glasses, pictures, briefcases, and jackets roared around a conference room caught in a vortex of telekinetic magic. Sparks of fire flashed around them, threatening to catch the papers, but the wind of the vortex extinguished them. Voices screamed and whimpered, but the fury of the wind drowned them out.

At the center of it all stood Anaea. She was gorgeous, powerful, and terrifying. Rage radiated from her—no, not just rage, fear and frustration and hurt. So much hurt. All of it focused on one man, squashed against the wall of floor-to-ceiling windows. Tears streamed down her cheeks, and her chest heaved with desperate, choked breaths.

A drinking glass slammed against the window beside the man’s head. He screamed. Four other men, cowering under a heavy conference table, screamed as well.

Grey’s grip on Capri’s arm tightened. “Stop her.”

Mother of All! “How?”

“Use your magic.”

“She’s a sorcerer.”

“She’s still human,” Grey said.

Yeah, and when Capri focused her earth magic on Anaea, all that terrifying power would be directed at Capri.

“I promised Hunter,” Grey said. “Capri, please.”

Another glass slammed beside the man’s head. Then a water pitcher. An office chair swept off the floor, flying toward Capri.

Grey jerked her back. “Please, try.”

“If we survive this, you owe me.” Capri yelled her power word. No need to be subtle, and the force of the summoning sometimes helped with how much magic she could draw.

Another office chair swept into the air. It ricocheted off the wall, breaking off an arm that shot across the room and embedded in the opposite wall.

“Anaea.” Capri’s magic crackled around her. No longer soft and sensual like when it had manifested with Miller, but powerful, forceful.

Anaea jerked around. Her eyes and face were red with tears. “Stop me,” she gasped.

Not the response Capri had been expecting. She’d anticipated a woman’s rage, a sorcerer’s rage, not complete desperation and fear.

“Please.” Anaea’s knees buckled, but her out-of-control magic swept her up, raising her a foot off the ground. Her head wrenched back, and with a howl, more magic exploded from her. The conference table trembled, and the rest of the chairs shot into the air, shattering against the walls into sharp, dangerous projectiles. Paper burst into flame, blazing through the air, billowing smoke. The sprinklers went off, dousing them in water, but the magical fire couldn’t be extinguished.

“Stop. Me.”