“No,” said Tess. There was a hard glittering in her eyes, a determination.
“Tess,” said Lachlan in his quiet voice, “if we could only—”
“No!” she said, gripping the arms of her wheelchair tight. “Coming for me. Coming for me.” Her voice was loud now, carrying throughout the room.
“Shh, it’s okay,” I said.
“Coming for me!” Her knuckles were white from how tight she was clutching the arms of her chair. She began to thrash, letting out a guttural cry and spasmodically kicking her legs. “Coming for me. Coming for me!”
The nurse reappeared. She rushed forward. “Hush, now, hush.”
Tess started to scream. She let go of the wheelchair and dug her fingers into her eye sockets. “Coming!”
The nurse rounded on us. “What did you do to her?
* * *
Well, that had gone remarkably well, I thought dryly.
It was first thing in the morning, and so Lachlan and I headed into work after getting a whole lot of nothing from Tess Frazier. Well, except for the fact that the Executive Board was apparently so terrifying that Tess had lost her grip on reality.
It didn’t make me feel great about the fact that we were all going to have to go up against them in no time whatsoever.
I was ready to give up, call Tess Frazier a dead end and move on, but Lachlan was intrigued. He sat at his desk, turning a pen over and over in his fingers. “Doesn’t make sense.”
“No,” I said. “It doesn’t.”
“Why would she be making jokes about the Executive Board over drinks at a holiday party at one point and then have her brains scrambled at the mere mention of them now?” said Lachlan. “We’re missing part of the story.”
“I guess so,” I said. “But I don’t think she’s going to fill in the pieces for us.”
Lachlan turned to his computer and started typing. “Maybe she will.”
“Lachlan, you saw her. She was terrified.”
“Got it,” he said, sounding satisfied.
“Got what?” I said.
“Her address,” said Lachlan, turning away from the computer. “She owns a house in Delaware. You want to check it out?”
“That’s out of our jurisdiction.”
“And this isn’t police business,” he said. “Besides, considering we’re breaking in, it’ll be illegal either way.”
I cocked my head at him. “Sometimes, sweetheart, I think I’ve corrupted you. When I met you, you were all about following the law to the letter.”
He chuckled softly. “So, it’s your fault, then? Marvelous. I’m glad I’ve got someone to blame.”
* * *
Tess’s house was a modest size, tucked off Delaware Route 54 in a grove of pine trees. The house had brown siding and white shutters and a little flower garden in the front, which looked like it had been choked out by weeds before the frosts of autumn set in.
Lachlan and I parked in the driveway and made our way up to the front door.
There was a window in the middle of the front door. I peered through it. All I saw was blue carpet and the arm of a recliner.
Lachlan knocked.
No answer.
He tried the door. Locked.
“What’s your genius plan to get inside?” I said. “Break a window?”
“Magic,” said Lachlan, closing his hand over the lock. “See I’m just going to reach in here with some telekinesis and try to move the tumblers around…”
I folded my arms over my chest. “That’s not going to work.”
“Give it a second,” he said.
I did. I gave it more like five minutes. Then I got bored and started wandering around the house.
In the back, there was a patio with a covered grill and some plastic lawn furniture. I ran my fingers over the table.
Eww. Wet. Cold.
I wiped the wetness on my pants.
On a whim, I tried the back door. It was locked too, but only by a deadbolt. The doorknob turned in my hands. Lachlan’s little magic trick would probably work great on a deadbolt. I reached out with magic, found the turnkey on the inside of the door and used my power to turn it until the deadbolt opened.
Nice.
I let myself in, emerging in a kitchen with brown and white tiles on the floor and a round wooden table in the center of the room. The kitchen opened onto the living room, where I could see that same blue carpet I’d seen before. I marched over to the front door and opened it.
Lachlan gaped at me. “How did you…?”
“Your trick works better on deadbolts,” I said.
He pursed his lips.
I shut the door behind him. “So, what are we looking for exactly?”
“We’re hoping she kept a diary in which she described every moment of her life in excruciating detail.”
“Oh, come on, that’s a long shot,” I said.
“A cell phone would be great,” he said. “Or even her computer.”
I surveyed the living room. Besides the recliner, there were two loveseat-sized couches on walls perpendicular to each other. Between them, there was a table shoved into the corner. There was a lamp on it and a box of tissues. It was a perfect place to leave a laptop or a phone. But there was nothing there. I wandered over to have a better look.
Nope. Nothing.
Lachlan was heading down the hallway that ran in between the living room and kitchen.
I went after him.
We passed an open door, which led to a bathroom decorated in various shades of purple, with clusters of purple candles on the sink and the back of the toilet.
We passed another room, which was probably meant to be a bedroom. But Tess had it set up as an exercise room with a treadmill, some small weights and a TV on the wall.
Her bedroom was at the back of the hall.
The bed hadn’t been made. The covers were askew. The rest of the house looked spic and span, but this room was chaotic. Covers off the bed, clothes flung all over the floor, all over the bed, all over the dresser.
“Laptop,” said Lachlan, picking up a pair of jeans from the dresser where they were covering the computer. He tossed the jeans on the bed.
“Turn it on,” I said.
He tried. “Must be out of battery.”
“Well, there’s got to be a cord to plug it in somewhere.” I whirled, looking around the room. “There.” I pointed to the outlet beside the closet. “That’s it, isn’t it?”
“Yeah,” said Lachlan. “Grab that.”
I went over and picked it up.
Lachlan started opening drawers in the dresser, laptop underneath his arm.
“What are you looking for?” I said.
“I told you, a diary,” said Lachlan.
I rolled my eyes.
“Seriously, I’m just looking,” said Lachlan. “For anything that might help.”
I spied something on the bedside table. A leather bound book. A planner? I snatched it up. “She’s got an actual planner, Lachlan. A physical, pen-and-paper planner.”
He grinned. “That’s helpful, then.”
I paged through it. It was full of appointments at the beginning of the year, but around August, they seemed to peter out. She had a few things scheduled for September, even fewer in October, and none for the rest of the year.
“I think she must have gone into the hospital around August,” I said. I began to look through the appointments in the book. “Here,” I said. “Third Wednesday of the month. ‘Executive Board meeting, 8:00.’”
“Does it say anything else?”
“There’s an address,” I said. “Looks like it’s somewhere along the bay.” I paged forward. The pages were more blank than full. I paged backward. “Here’s another one. July. Also a Wednesday. Also the third Wednesday. Says the same thing. ‘Executive Board meeting, 8:00.’”
“Check June.”
I did. “Yup. Same thing.” I paged back. “And May. And April.” I shut the planner. “She went every
month. What spooked her?”
“Who knows?” said Lachlan. “Let’s head back to the living room and plug in the computer.”
“Assuming there’s power in the house still,” I said.
Lachlan flipped a light switch. The room was bathed in light.
“Oh,” I said. “Well, good.”
He grinned at me.
We went back to the living room. We sat down on one of the couches together, plugged in the laptop, and Lachlan opened it.
We were greeted by the sight of the desktop. Lachlan moved the mouse around. “She’s got her Internet browser open,” he said, clicking on it. A search results page full of pink high heels came up. Lachlan minimized it. “Uh, she’s got an Excel file up.” He clicked on that. “Budget for shoes,” he read aloud. “Okay. So, she likes shoes.”
“Anything else open?”
“Nope.” He clicked back to the Internet. “Let’s go snooping in her history, hmm?” He scrolled through. “Shoes. Shoes. Email. Facebook. Tickets to California.”
“That’s interesting,” I said. “When?”
He clicked to the page. “Uh… looks like she was searching for a one-way ticket at the end of August.”
“Well, I don’t think she went.” I looked through the planner. “She’s booked solid with meetings that last week. Maybe she was trying to run, to get away.”
“Maybe,” said Lachlan. He clicked on the icon for Microsoft Word, which was pinned to the taskbar. It pulled open a blank document. “Let’s see what she’s got in recent documents, huh?” He drew back. “Oh. This looks interesting. Escape plan.”
“Escape plan?”
“Yeah, what’s that all about?” He waited while the document loaded, and then began reading aloud. “How I will get free of Eaglelinx. 1) Write up a tell-all email to newspapers explaining that the eagleclaws make dragons shift and that the Executive Board feeds on the energy released when a dragon shifts out of water.” He looked at me. “Holy hell.”
“Holy hell,” I breathed. “I guess it makes sense that energy would be released. It’s the human form that’s essentially dying. It’s like the Executive Board eats people.”
Lachlan turned back to the screen. “And explain that the Executive Board are not human, but ancient water creatures that take the form of an eagle and a lynx.”
“Like the things that attacked us,” I said. “Only they didn’t have a form exactly.”
Lachlan kept reading. “2) Do not send out the emails, but make sure that you have them ready to send. Mention them in your letter of resignation. 3) Write letter of resignation. In it, make sure that the boss understands that you will go public with information if your moving expenses are not covered by the company. 4) Buy ticket to California.” Lachlan looked up. “She was trying to blackmail Eaglelinx with the information that she had.”
“I bet that didn’t go over so well,” I said.
“But it’s maybe why they left her alive?” said Lachlan. “Maybe she had the emails set to go out if she didn’t stop it, so they just scared her really badly?”
“Too badly,” I said. “I’m surprised she was able to stop the messages being sent. You know how she was when we saw her.”
“Yeah, but only after we mentioned the Executive Board.”
“They obviously threatened her,” I said. I took a deep breath. “Well, that’s one more reason we have to get rid of them. So that someone like Tess doesn’t have to be afraid anymore.”
CHAPTER NINETEEN
“I don’t understand,” said Connor. “Where did these water creature things come from?”
Connor, Felicity, Lachlan, Scott, and I were all sitting around the table in my kitchen. It was just after sundown, and we were talking over our options.
“I don’t know,” I said. “But if that theory is true about the nightmares from another world being sent to this world instead, maybe they were one of those things.”
“They sound like the same water monster things that Wyatt’s supposed to be fighting,” said Felicity.
“I don’t know if they do,” I said. “We don’t know anything about those monsters. Only the vaguest of descriptions. And these things are apparently shaped like an eagle and a lynx.”
“And they’re old, too,” said Lachlan. “They were mentioned in that book your great-grandmother gave you.”
“Right,” I said. “So, for all we know, they’ve been at this for hundreds of years.”
“Or longer,” said Lachlan. “Maybe they’re so old that they’ve been here thousands upon thousands of years.”
“The Eagle and the Lynx,” I murmured. “Ancient creatures that have found a way to use modern commerce to feed.”
Scott held up a hand. “Uh… I don’t think I understand any of this, to be honest.”
“It’s a lot to take in,” said Felicity, interlocking her fingers with his. “And it’s a lot to explain. I don’t even know where to start.”
Scott shook his head. “No, you know what? I don’t know if all of that matters. The important thing to me is that I want to stop these things. And that’s what I thought we were here to talk about.”
“It is,” I said. “So, we know that these things live in water and that they force the water to take certain shapes. That’s what they did when they attacked us.”
“Right,” said Lachlan. “And together, with your power and the power I have, which is bolstered by a talisman, we were able to take one of them out.”
“But it took Wyatt’s dragons to take out the other one,” I said. “We were tapped out after that.”
“And those things didn’t look like an eagle or a lynx,” said Felicity. “They were just… shapes.”
“They were probably lackeys,” I said. “They were sent to do the dirty work, but they’re probably a fraction as dangerous as the real thing.”
“We have to assume the real Eagle and Lynx are going to be ten times as strong as that,” said Lachlan.
Scott raised his eyebrows. “So, how are you going to fight them, then?”
“Well,” I said. “That’s why we called the meeting. We want to talk about options.”
“Do we have options?” said Connor. “You know that I’m willing to chip in however I can, but I can’t breathe fire.”
“None of us can,” said Lachlan. “Except for Penny.”
“But it tapped out your magic last time,” said Felicity. “On the lackeys.”
“Well, I can shift,” I said. “If I’m in dragon form, I have an endless supply of magic. It never gets tapped out. I mean, I eventually have to eat and sleep and all that, but I produce magic just by existing in that form.”
“But that’s not going to be enough, is it?” said Connor.
Felicity chewed on her lip. “What if you didn’t shift? What if you and Lachlan used whiteflame?”
“No,” I said.
“We’d rather not do that,” said Lachlan.
“Because it turned them into huge dickbags last time,” said Connor, glaring at Felicity. “How could you even suggest that?”
“Well, they did use it during the experiment,” said Felicity. “When Penny was still pregnant?”
“Yeah, I remember,” said Connor.
We had used the whiteflame as an experiment to see if it was the thing making us more powerful or if drinking blood was. The whiteflame had been the culprit. We’d had Felicity and Connor stand by with tasers to zap us if we got out of hand.
“Couldn’t we do that again?” Felicity asked.
“I don’t think so,” I said. “Because Lachlan and I would need a lot of power to conquer these things. We could probably get it, if we really charged up the whiteflame. I mean, last time, we were able to control the minds of like fifty drakes at once, plus like thirty vampires or something. We were crazy powerful. And we let people die. We can’t do that again.”
“But if you don’t, Scott and Asia are going to die,” said Felicity. “Not to mention all the dragons that are being forced
to shift by those awful candies. You need to use it to save people. And if you go overboard, we’ll reign you back in, just like we did last time.”
Lachlan raised a finger. “You know, Penny, it was you that stopped us from going too far last time. You put on the brakes. You were horrified by what we’d done. I was lost to it, but you found us again. You brought us back to ourselves.”
“But only after we’d caused so much destruction,” I said. “And we can’t count on that. Plus, we might do horrible things before we came back from that. I don’t know that I can handle being that kind of a person. I can’t do it again.”
Lachlan nodded. “No, it’s not an option. We need to find another way.”
“But there’s only one other thing I can think of,” said Connor, “and that’s to bring Wyatt without his talisman.”
“No,” I said.
“No,” said Lachlan.
“We’d keep him out of it,” said Connor. “Guard him. But his dragons could come and wipe out the Eagle and the Lynx. And that would be kind of poetic, wouldn’t it? Killed by the monsters they made?”
“Poetic, maybe,” said Lachlan. “But happening? Not remotely. This is way too dangerous, and Wyatt won’t be anywhere near this. He’ll be safe at home, tucked into bed, because he’s a baby.”
“Yeah, let’s not even discuss that anymore,” I said. “Wyatt stays out of this.”
“Well, then,” said Felicity, “I don’t know what we’re going to do.”
I turned to look at Lachlan. “The spell to transfer Wyatt’s power to you?”
“You think I should do that?” said Lachlan. “I thought you said that you didn’t want me to do dark magic.”
“I don’t,” I said. I sighed. “Never mind.”
Felicity threw up her hands. “It seems to me that there are solutions here, but that you guys aren’t willing to try anything.”
“Because there are consequences, Felicity,” I said. “I know you’re worried about Scott and Asia, but we will find another way.”
“How?” she said.
“I don’t know yet,” I said.
Fire Brand (City of Dragons Book 6) Page 15