by Willa Hart
“Please,” I pleaded, inching even closer, “please let us in.”
I could see in his face the moment the hook set deep, the moment he relaxed and decided to comply. His thin lips turned the tiniest fraction upward and he threw open the door.
“Okay, fine. Come in.” He shot one more look at the sky, then backed away from the door. “But not for long.”
“Thank you very much!”
The moment I stepped over the threshold and broke eye contact, I sensed his confusion and wariness return. Whatever spell I’d unwittingly cast had broken. But I was already inside, and the boys were right behind me. Enoch shut the door quickly and stuffed his hands into his pockets, glaring at us.
During my years in foster care, I’d been placed in some pretty crappy homes, but nothing compared to Enoch’s hideout. No other word described it better than shithole. Tiny, cluttered with overflowing garbage sacks, not even fit to be called a house. The smell of the place didn’t quite overpower Enoch’s pungent scent, but it came close. It took all my self-control not to wrinkle my nose.
“Phone’s in the kitchen,” Enoch grumbled, looking every bit the cornered rat he was.
The kitchen was actually just a hot plate and a microwave sitting on a board straddling two sawhorses. Phone in hand, Enoch turned to hand it to me, but Ash and Hale had quietly moved in behind him, blocking him in. The fire returned to his eyes as he stared at them with alarm. He tried to dash around them toward the door, but Hale grabbed the back of his dirty tank and jerked him to a stop.
“I knew you fuckers were lying!” Enoch screeched as he futilely fought against Hale’s firm grip. “Who sent you!”
“Calm down, man,” Ash said. “We’re not here to hurt you.”
“Like hell you aren’t! Let me go!”
He continued flailing, so Ash grabbed one arm, while Hale clutched the other. They dragged him over to a stained sofa that looked as if it had spent more than a day or two on the curb before finding a home in the strawberry field shack. They shoved him onto the sofa and glowered over him, preventing his escape.
“Relax, Enoch,” I said, moving between the twins. “We aren’t here to hurt you, I swear.”
“Sure, just like you only wanted to use my phone. Triple-A. What a joke! That’s what I get for trusting anybody in this fucked up world.”
I sighed heavily, growing increasingly irritated with his bitching. “Save the whining for your therapist, Enoch. Right now, we have some questions, and you’re going to answer them.”
The twins exchanged a brief, impressed glance at my toughness. Hell, I was impressed as much as they were. Might as well continue my winning streak.
“Tell me about that ruby you stole.”
“Shit,” he hissed, then he leaped up to run, but Ash only had to use one hand flat against the man’s chest to push him back down. Enoch dropped his face into his hands and rocked back and forth.
“Here, let me refresh your memory,” I sneered, irritation turning into frustration. “Huge, shiny, bright red, probably worth about a gazillion dollars? Remember now?”
“Fine!” he snapped, looking up at me with a thread of snot dribbling from his nose. “I stole it. I confess. Happy?”
“Not even remotely. Why did you steal it?”
He gave me a pleading look, similar to the one I’d given him a few minutes earlier. “It was just a job, okay?”
Now we were getting somewhere. “Who hired you?”
He dropped his gaze and shrugged miserably. “Dunno. It was a blind hire.”
I didn’t even need my special sense to know Enoch was lying. The guy’s bad acting almost made me laugh in disgust, but whatever skill I had at sniffing out dishonest dragons at least confirmed my natural human instinct.
“Don’t lie, Enoch.”
“I’m not!”
“You are,” Hale and Ash said simultaneously.
“Screw you,” he snorted.
Inexplicable rage flared with such intensity in my heart it almost frightened me, but the fury overrode the fear. Lunging forward, I shoved Enoch hard enough on the chest he fell back against the grungy cushions of the couch. Pressing against him with all my strength, I got in his face, until we were barely an inch apart.
“Tell me, you fucking coward!” I demanded, spittle splattering against his cheeks.
He blinked, and again, that certain knowledge I’d won washed over me.
“Fine,” he stammered, leaning away from me in fear. “It was some Russian guy, okay?”
I pushed off him and crossed my arms, looming over him as if I was some actual threat. As skinny as Enoch was, I was still smaller than him. He could have kicked my ass with both hands tied behind his back, yet he looked terrified of me. I’d never felt so powerful.
“Russian?” I demanded.
Enoch shrugged, looking defeated, which only served to further piss me off. “I dunno. Sounded Russian. Couldn’t understand anything he said, and he didn’t speak much English, so we resorted to the ancient dragon tongue to make the deal.”
“What deal?” I shouted, lunging toward him again.
Four strong hands grabbed my biceps to hold me off Enoch. The blazing fire of hate that had grown in my chest immediately faded away. My furiously pounding heart started to slow, followed by my frantic panting. I blinked up at Ash, then Hale, both of whom seemed worried.
“You okay?” Hale asked quietly, the softness in his gaze melting me.
Their touch soothed me. I had no idea why, it just did, and it wasn’t until they grabbed me that I realized I’d been out of control. Strange, because I’d learned to keep a tight rein on my emotions during my youth. Nothing could get you kicked out of a foster home faster than pitching a fit.
As my heartbeat returned to normal, I became acutely aware of something throbbing against my lower back. The blob with the rock inside. It pulsed in time with my heart, causing it to beat faster again. Or maybe the blob was beating faster. Whichever it was, it set off a fight-or-flight response in me. Total, gripping, eye-watering fear.
I closed my eyes and took a deep breath, grasping Ash and Hale’s hands in hopes their touch would calm me again. It didn’t. Maybe if the Novak brothers were with us, I’d relax, but they were over an hour south of us. But damn, I wished they were there.
Creeped out by the pulsing in my backpack, I let it slide from my shoulder and set it on the floor. Instantly, the anger I felt toward poor, pathetic Enoch eased. Residual gloomy feelings remained, but I could deal with that.
Lowering myself until I perched on the edge of the old wire spool that now served as a coffee table, I gave Enoch an apologetic smile. “Enoch, we’re not cops. Bertram sent us. He’s worried about you. And we have reason to believe you’re in grave danger.”
His expression didn’t change.
“But you already know that, don’t you?”
“Duh. Why do you think I’m hiding out here?”
“Fair enough. Tell me what happened with the ruby.”
He groaned and rolled his eyes up to the ceiling, as if weighing his options. The anger had completely left me, but I couldn’t shake an uneasy sense of foreboding. Whatever. I needed to stay in the moment so we could extract every ounce of information from Enoch. Finally, he looked at me, ready to talk.
“A friend of a friend of a friend reached out and hooked me up with this Russian freak. Dude paid me twenty grand to steal Archibald Thrush’s ruby. I may not be good at much, but I’m a damn good thief. Easy money.”
“Give me a name, Enoch.”
He shrugged. “No idea.”
I arched a skeptical eyebrow at him. “Is that your final answer?”
He was lying, but about what? Enoch’s entire life was so full of deception it was tough to figure out which was a lie and which was truth. Or maybe my lie detector skills just hadn’t manifested fully. Whatever the case, I let his answer slide in hopes we’d learn more details.
“Listen, I don’t know the asshole’s nam
e. Don’t want to, neither.”
“How did you get the stone to him?”
He sniffed and gave a half-shrug. “Left it under a garbage can in a park in San Bernardino, just like he said. Job well done. Or so I thought.”
“What did this nameless Russian look like?” I asked, trying not to let the anxiety rising in me trickle into my voice.
Enoch rolled his eyes and sighed heavily, as if I was asking him to unload the dishwasher or clean his bedroom. “I dunno. In his human form, he looked about forty, which means he’s probably six hundred, give or take. Big. Big-ass dude. Looked a lot stronger than he was smart, but who knows. Short hair, maybe blond? Something about his eyes though…”
“What?” Ash asked.
“They looked…evil. One second they were brown, the next they were yellow. Flipping back and forth like that? That’s not a good sign for a dragon. Not a guy I ever want to see again, that’s for sure.”
I glanced up at the twins and nodded, confirming he was describing the Romanian who’d attacked Archibald.
“Hey, I heard about what he did to Archibald,” Enoch added. “I feel real bad about that. That wasn’t part of the plan. Nobody was supposed to get hurt. I may be a thief, but I ain’t no thug. I don’t do bloodshed.”
“Yeah, you’re a real saint,” Hale said.
Ignoring them, I leaned in, my eyes burning into Enoch’s. “The Roma— er, Russian kept asking Archibald where the ‘real one’ was. Any idea what he was talking about? Any chance you stole the wrong gemstone?”
Enoch looked positively insulted. “You kidding? No way. The guy hired me to steal the ruby, and that’s exactly what I took. Unless it was fake or something, which it most definitely was not.”
I’d held the jewel in my hand, and though I didn’t know much about expensive gems, even I could tell it was real. Archibald had even confirmed it.
Enoch dropped his head into his hands again and moaned. “And now they’re gonna hunt me down like it’s somehow my fault. Totally not fair!”
Ash snorted. “Right, because you’re such an innocent.”
“Hey,” Enoch said, whipping his head up to glare at Ash. “I don’t appreciate the sarcasm, pal.”
“Well, I don’t appreciate liars,” Ash said.
“Or thieves,” Hale added.
As the three traded barbs, the tendril of dread I’d been trying to ignore snowballed into a mountainous heap of primeval terror. My veins burned with the adrenaline pumping into my system thanks to the staccato drumbeat of my heart. Breathing normally became a distant memory when my lungs didn’t want to inflate fully, leaving me panting for oxygen. Chills skittered across my skin, raising goosebumps and the hairs on the back of my neck. This wasn’t some crazy reaction to sitting face-to-face with a criminal, it was pure intuition that something very not-good was about to go down, and I wasn’t about to ignore it.
Lunging for Enoch, I pushed him back into the couch again. “What did you do?” I screamed into his surprised face. “Who’s coming?”
His gaze shot over to Ash, then Hale, as if pleading for them to pull the hysterical woman off him. “What that hell are you talking about?”
“Who did you send for?” I shouted, shaking him so hard the back of his head bashed against the wall. I wasn’t angry, I was petrified.
One of the twins, maybe even both, finally pulled me off Enoch. The miserable wretch on the sofa rubbed the back of his head and gave me a petulant glare.
“I didn’t call nobody, you crazy bitch! What the hell? I told you everything I know, okay?”
Ash and Hale’s gazes remained fixed on me as I stared at Enoch, wishing he was lying, but knowing he wasn’t. I knew it just as I knew the sky was blue. Dread hammered like a second heartbeat next to mine.
“We have to go,” I said, turning to Ash.
“Why?” He wasn’t questioning the truth of my words, I could tell, he just wanted more information. I wished I had it to give.
Turning to Hale, my volume increased with every word. “We have to go. We have to leave! They’re coming! We have to get out of here! NOW!”
Chapter Nineteen
I never really understood what it meant to run as fast as your legs could carry you until that moment. My panic pushed me to move faster than I ever thought possible, taking me to the very edge of my limits. Still, I wasn’t moving fast enough. If we didn’t get out of the house…
What? I had no real idea, yet…I knew. And as soon as I made it outside and looked up into the sky, my worst fears were realized. A bird circled overhead, barely visible from the ground. Only it was no bird. Maybe to other humans it might have looked like a vulture, but I knew better.
“Oh shit,” Ash breathed as he joined me in the dirt patch in front of the structure.
“What the hell?” Hale muttered next to me.
I glanced back to find Enoch standing in the doorway, watching the circling dragon with an intensity that matched my own. By the time I returned my attention to the beast, two more not-birds had joined the first. My entire body shook — partly from fear, but mostly from the rage and hate falling on me like hail.
“How can they do that?” I asked. “It’s broad daylight! People will see!”
“Humans will see what they want to see,” Ash replied. “They’ll think they’re kites or wayward balloons. Anyone who claims otherwise will be labeled a lunatic.”
The biggest of the three dragons tilted its wings to one side, just as a plane might do when trying to get a better look at something on the ground. That something was us.
Three dragons in the sky, three dragons on the ground. Even with Enoch being emaciated, I suspected the Campbell twins could more than make up for what he lacked, but I’d also seen the Romanian in action. Playing by the rules didn’t seem to be super important. Still, it would be a reasonably fair fight, if that’s what they were looking for.
Just as the thought entered my brain, two more dragons joined the flock, or whatever a group of flying dragons was called. They circled us like vultures waiting for an animal to die. Which I suddenly realized was exactly what they were doing.
“Stay close,” Ash and Hale said at the same time, stepping close enough each one pressed against my arms.
Hale leaned forward to glance at his brother. “Think I should go see what they want?”
Ash frowned. “You mean like a parley?”
Before Hale could answer, I shouted, “No! More could be on their way. Stay with me.”
Confidence imbued my demand, which was bizarre because I felt anything but confident in that moment. The next, I understood why.
An all-too-familiar spot of light appeared in the sky, freezing the blood in my veins. I’d seen that light before, almost every night of my life since I was five.
“Run!” I screamed, bolting toward the truck, as if it could offer any protection against a dragon’s fireball.
Ash, Hale, and I managed to take cover on the other side of the truck and watched in horror as Enoch realized too late why we’d run. The fireball hurtled toward the shack like a guided missile, and by the time Enoch willed his wasting muscles to move, it was too little, too late.
He’d barely made it ten feet before the house behind him disappeared in a yellow cloud of flame, silhouetting him for a moment before consuming him as well. The force of the impact rocked the truck and sent us flying backward as a wave of scorching heat rolled over us.
Shielding my face with my arm, I looked back at the inferno, amazed at how completely the fireball had decimated the shack. Total annihilation. In the span of just a few seconds, it had been reduced to a blazing pile of rubble. And about thirty feet away lay Enoch, flat on his face.
Smoldering.
My heart snapped in half at the sight, a desperate need to reach Enoch consuming me. But before I could move, Ash barked, “Let’s get airborne, bro!”
He scrambled to his feet. As he glared at the squadron of dragons overhead, he started to grow larger, his eye
s flashing a green so bright it didn’t look natural, vertical slits already forming.
“We can’t,” Hale said, helping me stand.
“We’ll get incinerated if we stay down here,” Ash argued.
Hale jerked his head toward me. “We can’t leave Favor here alone, completely defenseless. Too dangerous.”
“We’re sitting ducks down here.”
“We’re flying ducks up there. We can’t keep track of five dragons, much less engage them all. If we go up there, not only will they overpower us, but Favor will be completely unprotected. We might be able to defend her—“
“I don’t think they’re after me,” I croaked, choking on the smoke billowing from the engulfed shack.
We all glanced over at poor Enoch, lying motionless on the ground. Grief gripped me in a tight fist, for reasons I couldn’t understand. All I knew was that every cell in my body yearned to go to him, to see if he’d survived the blast. That seemed impossible, even for a dragon shifter, but if there was a chance…
A furious screech drifted down to us from on high, drawing our attention back to the killer dragons. Another one streaked toward the others, with two more following close on its tail. Eight dragons flying over Ventura County farm country in the middle of the day. Because why not?
A split second after coming to terms with my impending death by dragon fire, relief and happiness blew up inside me much like Enoch’s house. The new arrivals weren’t more bad guys. The Novaks had arrived!
“What the…” Ash stuttered, recognizing his cousins as quickly as I did. “How the…”
Hale leaned over, never taking his eyes off the brood in the sky. “I think the words you’re trying to find are… What. The. Fuck.”
Ash and I nodded mutely as Kellum — I knew it in my bones — shot flames at the nearest bad dragon, challenging the entire pack to a throw-down. He veered off to confront one of the flanking dragons, moving faster than the others seemed to have expected. His massive, sleek form dove into the bad dragon hard enough I thought I heard the crack of their oversized bones slamming into each other.