Twiceborn Endgame (The Proving Book 3) (32 page)

Blue spun on his heel, checking the circle of queens, then letting his gaze rove the rest of the room, over dead male dragons and other assorted shifters.

“You told me they were all assembled! I specifically said to wait until they were all in the room!” He turned an accusing glare on me. “Where are your sisters?”

He sprayed me with spit with the word “sisters”. I wiped my face, and his eyes widened as he saw the ease of my movements. Yes, I was feeling a lot better. So much so, in fact …

“Find them, you idiot! And give me that dart gun!”

He snatched the gun out of Wilson’s hand, but he was too late. I surged to my feet, reaching for trueshape as I went, and felt the blessed thrill of union as the parts of my soul rushed back together. Blue screamed, a high-pitched wail that held the death of all his hopes.

The scream cut off abruptly as I bit him in half.

I felt the impact as dart guns hissed out their deadly little missiles, but they fell harmlessly off my scales. I swung my great head round to glare at the offending men, and they backed away, trembling. They huddled together against the far wall, no longer so sure of their superiority. Numbers were nice, but manpower meant nothing up against dragon power. One of them unloaded a handgun into my chest, but the bullets had no more effect than the darts had.

Behind the mass of terrified taskforce men, the wall exploded, spraying them with bits of plaster board. The lights died abruptly, and large bodies shouldered their way into the room through clouds of dust and bits of ripped-out wiring. Large dragon bodies, glinting silver and golden and copper in the half-light from the foyer behind them. My sisters had decided to join the party.

I spat the two halves of the goblin’s corpse out, and saw the glitter of silver in the remains of his chest, peeking out from beneath all the blood. Silver veins on a black stone. Faith’s channel stone, stolen by this imposter. My blood boiled, and I turned to the soldiers, a song of vengeance singing through my veins.

What followed was a bloodbath. With seven dragons in the room, the soldiers stood no chance, and I lost myself in the pleasure of ripping into my enemies, feeling their blood spurt in my mouth and run down my chin. Some of the other shifters joined the fray too; they had no love for these men who had killed their queens. I saw a leshy turn into a bear and tear a man’s arm off, gun and all, and a wolf leap for the throat of another who was trying to fight off two mermen.

All too soon, there were no more enemies to face, and I came out of my killing frenzy. That wolf was Garth. Now I recognised his night-black coat, and felt a fierce pride in the blood coating his muzzle. He was a killer, same as me. Our eyes met across the room and he gave me a wolfish grin.

As the dust settled my sisters gathered in a loose semicircle around me, crouched low, tails still lashing. The ballroom was big, but with seven full-sized dragons in it and a crowd of shifters and corpses, it was almost cosy. Most of them were golden like me, though one—Charity?—was silver, and Valiant had such a red tinge to her gold it could hardly be called gold any more. More like rust.

Valiant held a body between her front feet, and chewed absently on its leg. It was Wilson.

“We could have used him,” I said, my voice reverberating in my chest and coming out in a deep growl. “Someone needs to report back to the government on the folly of attacking dragons.”

“Sorry,” she growled back, and my lips curled back in a snarl of amusement. She wasn’t sorry at all. I guess I wasn’t either. The corpses would probably be just as effective as a deterrent.

“You looked like you needed a hand,” said a golden dragon in Hope’s voice.

They must have seen what happened on their TV feed and hurried down to help. Of course they would have missed the part where I turned dragon and chomped Blue, but there was no need to be ungracious. We needed to build a working relationship, after all, and this had been an excellent bonding exercise. The family that slays together stays together.

“I had it pretty much under control by the time you got here, but I appreciate the assistance.”

The black wolf trotted past the crouching dragons, with no apparent concern for the size of the jaws looming over him. He sniffed my bloodied claws, gave them an exploratory lick, then settled himself comfortably between my front feet.

I glanced down at his furry trusting head and felt a wholly undragonlike rush of love.

“Time to shed your fur and get to work, wolf,” I said. “You can’t laze around like that. We’ve got a lot of clean-up here.”

He rolled his yellow eyes at me and began the bone-crunching contortions to shift back to his human form. The other dragons watched him like cats watching a mouse, and I rose, a warning rumble vibrating its way up from my belly as I stood over him.

Valiant tore her eyes away and made an effort to refocus our sisters’ attention. Everybody’s bloodlust was still up. Time to talk them down.

“Do you think this is all of Taskforce Jaeger?”

I surveyed the mess of corpses and body parts scattered over the bloodied floor.

“I’d say so. Seemed like this was a big step in the goblin’s plans. He would have wanted to make sure of it.”

She cocked her giant bronze head at me, and I realised most of my conversation with Blue had probably taken place after they’d left the suite with the TV feed, so I filled them in on what had been said. That distracted them from the vulnerable werewolf completely.

They were all shocked; Hope seemed positively outraged.

“He meant to make himself a dragon? The
only
dragon?” The spurs on her golden head trembled with anger as her gaze swept the room. “Is there anyone else here who’d like to see the end of the dragons?”

The assembled shifters hurried to assure her that no, they were all very happy to bend the knee to dragonkind. Maybe they were even sincere. Certainly no one was brave, or foolish, enough to say otherwise.

“Looking on the bright side, this gives us some ammunition in the PR war,” I said.

“What do you mean?”

“When word of this gets out, the government will have a huge scandal on its hands. A taskforce they set up to investigate goes totally rogue and starts conducting secret experiments and killing shifters. And word is
definitely
going to get out.”

A naked man stood now between my feet. He still smelled of wild wolf and blood, but he looked like a Greek statue come to life, all strong muscled limbs and sculpted torso. The urge to take human form and jump those gorgeous bones nearly overwhelmed me as bloodlust surrendered to plain old garden-variety lust instead. Only the knowledge that it would be a bad idea to expose my weak human form to six riled-up dragons gave me the strength to hold back.

“You want to be careful how much you say about those secret experiments,” he said, nodding at the top half of Blue’s corpse. The channel stone had disappeared beneath the blood now, but I knew what he meant. The fewer people who knew the secret of dragon transformations the better.

“I think we can manage something suitably incriminating without giving too much away.” I gave him a gentle nudge, which still managed to make him stumble. “Go and put some clothes on before I
eat
you.”

He grinned at me, and I saw a promise in those clear grey eyes. Later. We could both be as predatory as we liked when this was over. A thrill ran through me, right down to the tip of my tail, which lashed in anticipation.

I turned to the remaining shifters, who’d gathered in a wary knot to one side of our discussion.

“I’m sorry for the death of your queens. Now there are six more empty thrones in the world. And here before you are the last remaining queens to fill them.”

A short silence greeted this thought. A voice came from the back of the group, safely anonymous. “What if we don’t want to live under a queen any more?”

Hope and Charity shifted restlessly, but I rumbled at them until they quietened.

“That’s a good question. Maybe some of you agree with the goblin, and think that dragons should be left to die out.” No one was brazen enough to nod, but I daresay a few of them were thinking it. “If that’s what you think, let me just pose you one question: if there are no queens to rule, who will control the male dragons?”

I said nothing else, just let them stew on that. Male dragons left to their own devices were so territorial they became monstrous—well, even more monstrous than normal. It was not unusual for lone males to turn rogue and go completely mad, laying waste to vast tracts of land and killing everything they could find. It hadn’t happened in modern times, but all those tales of knights being sent to slay ravening dragons hadn’t sprung out of people’s imaginations. An unchecked male was a very dangerous beast. Only the soothing influence of the queens kept them in check. It was why male dragons usually took a place at court; they felt the pull to be near the queen.

“It would be a bloodbath,” said the leshy who’d been fighting as a bear.

There were murmurs of agreement from all sides, and the twitching tails of my sisters settled to the floor again.

“Good. Then all that remains is to decide which queen takes which domain. When you have had time to bury your queens you may send a delegation to me, and we will discuss the most suitable distribution of domains.”

My sisters eyed me, some speculatively, others with a more resentful gleam in their eye, but no one questioned my right to dispose the dragon empires of the world as I saw fit. Sometimes it was good to be the queen.

Morning sun slanted through the gap under the half-closed blind and fell on the clothes abandoned on the floor, making a trail from the door to the bed. I grinned and snuggled down under the sheet. My partner grunted sleepily and flung a muscled arm around me, pulling me closer.

Last night had been my reward for all the crap I’d had to put up with in the last couple of months. Last night and the night before that and the night before that … Obviously I needed a lot of rewarding.

I’d thought the negotiations over the division of Oceania had been bad, but they were nothing compared with the bickering over which sister got which of the vacant thrones. Between the jostling for prime real estate from my sisters, and the manoeuvrings of the interested parties in each domain, it had been enough to try the patience of a saint. And clearly I was never going to be a candidate for canonisation.

We’d managed to settle some of the disputes early, which had fooled me into thinking this might be simpler than I’d feared. Valiant had laid claim to South America straight away. She said she’d always been fascinated by that part of the world. Of course it didn’t hurt that Spain was part of the package. Charity, rather surprisingly, had gotten quite chummy with two male dragons from Africa, and her decision to take the African throne seemed to make all parties happy.

The problem was Europe, Celeste’s old domain. Head and shoulders above the others in terms of riches, it was the most fiercely contested. At one stage Hope and Prudence almost came to blows, and in the end it was only settled when I threatened to pull names out of a hat if they couldn’t come to an agreement another way. The European male dragons and some of the higher shifters eventually chose Prudence over Hope, which I can’t say broke my heart.

I annexed Japan into Oceania, which made sense geographically. Japan had always been a tiny domain, and it only existed separately for historical reasons, which were hardly relevant any more considering the Japanese line had died out years ago.

I rolled over and burrowed my face into the crook of Garth’s neck. He smelled of wolf and wind and blood, as he always did, that wild scent that was part of his nature, but he also smelled of sex and hard-earned sweat. I took a deep breath of him. I could wake up next to that smell every day.

“Whassa time?” he grunted.

“It’s still early. Go back to sleep.”

For answer his arm tightened around me, and the other hand buried itself in my hair. Yes, it had been an interesting few weeks. It was a wonder we’d found any time for ourselves amid the madness. Our revelations about Taskforce Jaeger had almost brought down the government, and had forced a change in prime minister. He’d stepped down with bad grace, then watched, scowling, from the back bench as his successor rescinded his controversial anti-shifter legislation. The new guy was a vast improvement. He’d invited me to become the official representative of the shifters, and I’d given my first official press conference last week.

Luce had helped me write my speech, which was still being replayed all around the world.

“We have always lived among you,” I’d said, doing my best to hide my nerves. This was a big deal, and first impressions were so important. I’d worn a simple shift dress in a dark green that complimented my eyes and set off my auburn hair. Nice, but not too dressy. I wanted to look like an ordinary person. “We always will. Nothing has changed except that now you know about us. We are you. Your child’s kindergarten teacher, your dentist, that helpful mechanic at the local garage. Were you scared of the woman on the checkout at the supermarket before? Of course not. There is nothing to fear but fear itself.”

I was quite proud of that speech, and I thought Roosevelt wouldn’t mind if I appropriated one of his best lines. It seemed to fit the circumstances so well.

Of course things weren’t going to be as easy as all that. There was still a large and vocal number of people who thought we should all be burnt at the stake. You didn’t have to look too far to find some nutter calling down God’s wrath on the unholy, but an encouraging number of people seemed to be coming around to the idea of peaceful coexistence with the monsters.

The fashion industry was in mourning for Maria. The fact that she’d been a dragon didn’t stop the tributes from pouring in, and the many heads of fashion houses talking about the great loss to the world of haute couture. In fact, it didn’t seem to bother them at all that she’d been a dragon. It seemed only secondary to the consideration of her talent as a designer.