Twiceborn Endgame (The Proving Book 3) (22 page)

I was all set to ring Kasumi straight away. No time like the present, right? I’d waited long enough, and I was itching to set things in motion to free Lachie. Every moment that he spent with Daiyu was a moment he was at risk. Sure, Jason was allied with her now, but she knew he was my son. The thought of using him against me must be very tempting. I just prayed that Jason didn’t offer her any reason to be dissatisfied with his alliance.

Mac met us at the door. She usually looked sad—it wasn’t that long since Jerry had died—but now her face had that fake cheerfulness that meant she had bad news and was trying not to worry me. I’d seen it enough times to know.

“What’s wrong?” My first thought was for the leaked list of shifters. “Are there more names?”

“No. Detective Hartley wants to see you.”

“When?”

“Now.”

“It’s eight o’clock at night. Doesn’t she have a home to go to?”

“I’ll put Blue to bed,” said Garth, who had carried the goblin in behind me. The orange head, damp with sweat and covered in the kind of muck you’d expect to gather crawling around a cave, lolled against the werewolf’s shoulder. He was barely awake.

I smoothed my own hair, conscious that it probably didn’t look much better. “Get someone to look at his chest.”

“I’m on it.”

Mac watched them disappear down the corridor towards the staff quarters. The cheerful mask slipped, showing the troubled look in her big puppy dog eyes. “What happened to him?”

“Goblin magic. It’s brutal stuff. What did Hartley say?”

“She was very insistent. Said it was urgent, and that if you didn’t show by nine o’clock she was sending a squad car round to arrest you.”

“Geez. What’s the rush?”

She shrugged. “I don’t know.”

I sighed, and scrubbed at my face with a weary hand. “All right, just give me a few minutes to get cleaned up. Where does she want to meet?”

“At the Park Hyatt. Room 330.”

Oh, Lord, not that again. That was the room Jason had booby-trapped and blown up. I’d hoped my part in that investigation was over. No such luck, apparently. Just what I needed—more complications. Would I
never
get to Japan?

I cocked an eyebrow at Steve, still hovering at my elbow. “You up for another run tonight?”

“No problem.”

In twenty minutes I was showered and changed, and feeling much better. Dinner would have been the icing on the cake, but Mac was so unnerved by Detective Hartley’s threats that I didn’t stay long enough for that, though the smells emanating from the kitchen were certainly tempting. Instead I grabbed a bread roll to snack on.

“You need to eat,” Dave said, giving me a disapproving look. His apron had “Kiss the Cook” blazoned across it in big red letters. “You’re getting too skinny.”

“What are you, my mother?” I brandished the bread roll at him. “Besides, I
am
eating.”

“Proper food. Man doesn’t live on bread alone, you know.”

“Lucky I’m a woman, then.”

I headed for the car, Steve on my heels. Luce had offered to come too, but it was only a meeting. It would look weird if I turned up with a cast of thousands.

“Why are we meeting at the hotel?” Steve asked. “Did she say?”

Though she’d threatened me with arrest before, in the past Detective Hartley had always come to me. The change bothered me. So late at night, too. Something was different.

“No.”

Steve drove, and one of the thralls took the passenger seat, at Luce’s insistence. Evan, his name was. Unlike Leandra, I could tell my thralls apart. Naturally Garth had wanted to come, but his skills weren’t exactly suited to diplomacy, and I didn’t need shifter protection from the police force. Besides, I needed to focus on Detective Hartley and I was finding him more and more distracting.

Steve pulled up in front of the hotel’s arched entry.

“Stay with the car,” I told him. “Evan can come with me. This won’t take long.”

At least I hoped so. Did I need a lawyer? What reason could she have for asking for a meeting here?

Evan and I stepped into the lift, and I remembered to check. No camera. Well, that was one weight off my mind.

The lift pinged and the doors slid open on level three. No camera in the lift lobby either, or the corridor. So the only footage she had of me was from the hotel lobby. Nothing there that would contradict the story I’d given her. So why was I here?

We walked down the familiar brown-toned corridor, past the weird little phallic sculpture. Room 330 had a new door, its dark wood as sleek and undamaged as all its neighbours’. It was closed, so Evan knocked. Footsteps approached, then the door opened and a pair of familiar eyes squinted at us with suspicion.

“She’s here,” Detective Franks called over his shoulder, then he opened the door wide and stepped back to let us through.

The sour tang of smoke lingered on the air inside. The windows had been replaced, and the litter cleared away, but no effort had been made otherwise to repair or repaint. There were no lights on, which seemed odd.

I don’t know what saved me. A hint of something, a smell? I sensed movement behind me as Franks stepped between me and Evan. He felt close, and I turned to see his arm upraised. My shocked brain took a fraction of a second to realise I was under attack, and then the fight-or-flight instinct kicked in, and I leapt back just in time to avoid the syringe slamming in a vicious arc toward my neck.

I caught my foot on something and went down. Guns barked in front and behind as Evan and someone silhouetted by the windows opened fire, but I only had eyes for Franks. He hurled himself on me and I caught his arm with both hands, straining against him. He was a big guy, and my arms quivered despite my dragon strength. The point of the syringe glistened a handsbreadth from my face.

Evan cried out, but my ears were ringing from the gunfire, and I couldn’t make out his words. He lunged forward and caught at Franks’s broad back in an effort to drag him off me, but the gun behind me barked again and Evan collapsed limply to the floor.

A bullet struck my shoulder, and the strength in that arm melted away in an instant. The needle hovered closer to my face, drawing inexorably nearer. I squirmed, trying to throw Franks off me, but his bulk pinned me down. Panic’s claws dug into me, sharp as knives.

I panted for air, but I couldn’t hear myself. Blood crept along my shoulder, spreading its wet warmth across my shoulder blades. Franks’s breath was hot in my face, his squinty eyes bulging so close to mine. I glared into them. I’d almost forgotten I was a dragon in the terror of the moment. Gritting my teeth, I pushed into his mind, determined to put an end to this.

Only I found the way barred. Someone had been here before me, and Franks was enthralled to another. There was no way to command him.

Panic consumed me. Only another dragon could have enthralled him, and if a dragon had sent him against me like this, there was only one thing that could be in that syringe. Fear surged like bile in my throat and I struggled like an animal. My left arm collapsed, useless, at my side.

Instinctively I reached for my essence, but fear throttled the channel between the parts of my soul. Trueshape hovered just out of reach as my arm gave way and the syringe slammed down.

It shattered against the armour of my face.

Franks reared back in shock and I backhanded him across the face. He collapsed into the wall and I scrambled to my feet, one scaled arm dripping blood. The gunman by the window emptied his clip at me. I heard the click of the empty chamber. None of the bullets hurt me.

Well, this was new. I was covered in scales but still in human form. Just call me Lizard Woman.

The shadowy gunman turned out to be Detective Hartley. She still pointed her gun at me, though she was out of ammo, and her hands shook so much I could see the movement from across the room. I closed the gap between us in three quick strides and punched her hard enough to drop her to the singed carpet, out cold. Then I fell to my knees at Evan’s side and fumbled his phone out of his pocket.

Steve answered straight away.

“Get up here,” I said. “We’ve got a problem.”

How long did we have before hotel security arrived? Someone would have reported the sound of gunshots. Steve brought the first aid kit with him from the car, and rigged a competent field dressing on Evan’s bicep, where the bullet had torn completely through. Another had grazed his thigh, which meant he walked with a limp, but at least he could walk. All the while I stood in the dim alcove just outside the door, watching the corridor, Detective Franks’s syringe in my hand.

My shoulder throbbed a song of agony in time with my heartbeat, but the wound had already closed. I was feeling kind of wobbly, but we were running out of time. Steve hoisted Evan to his feet, and I urged them to the door.

“What are we going to do with them?” Steve indicated the two detectives still unconscious on the floor.

“I don’t know.” If we left them, the first thing they would do when they woke would be go get a warrant for my arrest. But if we took them with us we’d have the whole police force on our trail baying for blood. “They’ve been enthralled. Franks tried to stick me with a syringe full of du. Whoever’s pulling their strings isn’t going to let this rest.”

“Want me to …?” He made a gun with his hand and mimed a headshot.

I have to admit, I didn’t say no straight away. The dragon part of me had grown impatient with the danger represented by these two. Dragons didn’t put up with insects buzzing around being a nuisance. They swatted them.

I’d tried to play the game by their rules, and look where that had gotten me. Some other dragon had enthralled them instead and turned them from a nuisance to a deadly threat. Maybe it wouldn’t be long before someone in the force noticed their erratic behaviour and started investigating, but in the meantime there was nothing they wouldn’t do for their master or mistress, whoever it was. Jason or Daiyu, clearly, given the presence of that syringe. Proper police procedures, due process, logic: it was all out the window. These two wouldn’t rest now until I was brought down.

I stared down at Detective Hartley for a long moment. She would be a thrall for the rest of her life unless the dragon who’d enthralled her died, unable to think for herself beyond the basic functions. If that dragon told her to, she’d kill without blinking. That went against everything she’d dedicated her life to. She was the victim here, even more than I was.

I shook my head. “Leave them. Let’s go.”

We took the elevator down and marched straight out the front door, under the apprehensive gaze of the woman at the front desk. Hotel security must have been waiting for police backup. We looked like extras from a zombie movie, spattered in blood, but the woman sensibly decided not to get involved.

Evan groaned as Steve eased him into the back seat.

“Hang in there,” I said. “We’ll get you some major-league painkillers when we get home. How are you doing?”

He blushed as he looked up at me, eyes adoring. “Don’t worry about me, mistress. I’d take a hundred bullets for you.”

I looked away, chastened. Was I any better than whoever had enthralled the detectives? I hated the unthinking adulation of the thralls, but what could I do? Evan was a middle-aged man. He must have been in Elizabeth’s service twenty years or more. Like his fellow thralls, his mind had been so warped by his long enthralment to Elizabeth that he would have been reduced to drooling idiocy if I hadn’t enthralled him as soon as she died. None of her thralls could have functioned any more without the bond. One of them had been too far gone to save, and he’d died within the hour. The others—I could enthral them, or leave them catatonic.

Wasn’t a life of enthralled service to me better than no life at all? I didn’t treat my thralls like slaves or cannon fodder, as so many other dragons did. He could have a long and happy life within the limits of the enchantment that bound him to me. Was life without freedom truly worse than death?

Then why did I have this bad taste in my mouth? I got into the front seat, letting him lie on the back seat. At least I’d been trying to save those men when I enthralled them. Whoever had enthralled Hartley and Franks hadn’t been thinking of their welfare, just using them as a means to an end. Even though Hartley’s cool intellect had been used against me in the past, I hated to see her reduced to virtual slavery in the service of some dragon’s ambition.

And which dragon was it? The answer to that question mattered. If it was one of my sisters, my hopes for brokering a peace between us were at an end. But the syringe in my hand said Daiyu. Those girls all knew I was immune to bane leaf now, but where would they get their hands on the only other alternative? I didn’t need to analyse a sample to know what must be in this syringe, and the only dragon around with guaranteed access to it was the Japanese queen. She probably wouldn’t even give a syringe like this to Jason. I know I wouldn’t, though the prospect of injecting
him
was pretty damn appealing. I stared out the window at the night city sliding by, neon lights ablaze, and decided it was time for a leap of faith.

“Give me your phone.”

Steve took one hand off the wheel and passed it across with a curious glance. “Who are you ringing?”

I pulled her card out of my pocket and dialled the number. “Valiant.”

“You going to ask her if she enthralled Hartley and Franks? She’s not going to admit to it if she did.”

I didn’t answer, just listened to the phone ringing.

“Yes?” Her voice was crisp and firm.

“It’s Kate.”

Her voice was calm, if a little wary. “Good to hear from you. What can I do for you?”

“We need to meet. Now. Tonight.”

“Where?”

“I’m in the city. Name somewhere.”

“The Art Gallery steps. I can be there in ten minutes.”

“See you then.” I hung up and told Steve to head to the Art Gallery.

“What about Evan? I thought we were taking him home?”

Evan’s face was so pale I felt guilty. He needed to be home, in bed, dosed up to the eyeballs with painkillers.