by Zoe Chant
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Epilogue
Further Reading: Hollywood Shifters Complete Box Set
Silver Dragon
Zoe Chant
Published by Zoe Chant, 2019.
While every precaution has been taken in the preparation of this book, the publisher assumes no responsibility for errors or omissions, or for damages resulting from the use of the information contained herein.
SILVER DRAGON
First edition. March 5, 2019.
Copyright © 2019 Zoe Chant.
Written by Zoe Chant.
Table of Contents
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Epilogue
ONE
BIRD
“This is the most beautiful stretch of beach for miles. It’s perfect for a corpse!”
Godiva spoke with somewhat breathless satisfaction, the pompom on her purple knit cap bouncing as she looked around. In a lower voice, she added, “Whew, that was quite a hike.”
Bird knew how much Godiva hated admitting to her age, which had to be mid-eighties. Godiva was the oldest of the four friends in the writers’ group, but she made up for that in vigor.
Bird leaned her hands on her knees, wishing for the thousandth time that she got more exercise than tooling her bike around town. After the arduous trek down a tiny path that had looked too dangerous for goats (assuming there were any goats along the California coastline), she couldn’t see much past her own breath steaming up her glasses.
As she tried to catch her breath, she thought ruefully of what her children would think if they could see her now. Her two practical, responsible, loving kids—though she could scarcely call them kids, could she? Both of them were older than she’d been when she married. Still, just the idea of them catching her on this expedition made her start coming up with mental excuses for where she was, what she was doing, and how she looked, though they weren’t even there.
When she was young, she had always heard, A reputation for being odd is a recipe for spinsterhood . . . A lady doesn’t draw negative attention . . . No gentleman worth the name would ever look twice at a girl whose name gets bandied about . . .
And after she married the gentleman worth the name, she heard, Now, dear, a little eccentricity might be good for publicity, but within reasonable bounds, and, Think of my standing. A wife gossiped about as peculiar will kill any chance of advancement, you know how cutthroat college politics are, and of course the sharpest guilt-bullet of them all, Think of your children!
She had tried to be so very good . . .
But not good enough.
Now that her beloved children were back in her life, she hoped that neither of them would show up unexpectedly and decide that she was too odd, too messy, too impractical, too ... the word “barmy” would do. It hurt less than the crueler terms she’d heard in the divorce court, before she lost her children altogether for twenty-seven long years.
She sighed quietly, and with practiced habit mentally pushed the past to the back of her mind. Her glasses had cleared enough to see that Godiva had been right about the beauty of the beach. To the left lay a picturesque tumble of rock from the recent earthquake. Above it loomed towering cliffs full of hollows that reminded her of melting candles. To the right lay the picturesque lagoon, full of little boats tied to the floating docks, their masts a forest of sticks gently swaying on the rippling tide.
And straight before her stretched the Pacific Ocean, pewter-colored this early in the morning, and deceptively peaceful at low tide. Sand birds hopped along, pecking at the wet sand. It seemed a shame to mar the pristine sand with their footprints.
Privately, Bird thought that it was far too beautiful to be the setting for a bloody murder. But Godiva’s popular mystery series always began with a corpse in a gorgeous setting. And she took her research seriously.
Very seriously.
Case in point: the four women standing in the chilly pre-dawn air after picking their way past the gigantic NO TRESPASSING and UNSAFE PATH signs, with Bird dressed in ill-fitting men’s clothing rescued from the donation bin at Doris’s synagogue.
“We’d better hurry,” Doris said briskly. “Before we get busted.”
Godiva was as brown and wrinkled as a walnut, her face dominated by expressive black eyes. She gave a loud snort. “What are the cops going to do, toss four old battleaxes in the slammer?”
“Technically they could,” Doris said as she took out her cell phone. “We are trespassing.”
“Nah, the lockup only has two cells.” Godiva shrugged a bony shoulder. “Tiny ones, single bedders. They can’t legally toss two in a cell with a single cot. If they arrest a gang of four hooligans like us, they’d have to pull in the county sheriff.”
She would know. Godiva had probably researched Playa del Encanto’s tiny police station before most of its current police force was born.
Godiva whipped off her purple cap, and her thin white braid unrolled to flap against her back. She wiped her arm across her face, wound up the braid that had been a thick, glossy black during her wild hippie days, shoved it back under her cap, and grabbed her cane.
“But it’s colder than a politician’s heart out here, so let’s get cracking.” Godiva turned to Bird. “You look great, but straighten that tie.”
Bird loathed ties. They reminded her of Bartholomew, her ex-husband. He’d had a huge collection of them, all made of pure silk. He’d even worn them on the weekends if he thought someone important might drop by their house.
The tie Bird wore now was traffic cone orange except for the giant soup stain in the center, which was an unpleasant shade of green. (At least, Bird hoped it was soup.) She’d picked it as the opposite of anything Bartholomew might have worn. She snugged it up above her collarbones, its cheap polyester slick against her fingers, then tucked the flapping ends into her pants.
“Why do men still wear these things?” Bird mused. “It’s such a stupid fashion, you wouldn’t think it would have lasted for more a hundred years. They have no actual purpose, and they feel like a noose.”
“Why do women wear stiletto heels?” Doris asked as she checked the camera lighting on her phone. “I thought we got rid of them forever in the seventies, then they came right back, busting our feet all over again.”
Godiva snorted. “They make girls’ legs look good. Ties? Hah! Never met a man yet whose neck was improved by one. Got your blood, Bird?”
Bird had been unable to find a man’s wig, so she’d brought a brown yoga wrap. She tied it tightly around her head to hide her mass of curly graying hair and hopefully make her look more mannish. Also, to hide the bag of stage blood. “Tucked right here.” She tapped the side of her head.
Godiva scowled at the yoga wrap. “Will it spurt from under that thing?”
“Oh, yes,” Doris said calmly. She was always practical, unsurprisingly as she’d been reining high schoolers for more than a quarter of a cen
tury, and dealing with her eccentric family all her life. “We use them all the time in school plays. You can trust them to do the job.”
Godiva turned to Jen, the fourth in the group of writer friends. Jen stood quiet and imperturbable, the only one not shifting from foot to foot or rubbing her arms against the brisk breeze coming off the Pacific. Jen was the tallest of them, and the second youngest in the group. She had dressed for her role as the killer in a bulky jacket, black sweat pants, a black ski mask, and leather biker gauntlets.
Bird, who at almost fifty-five was the youngest and spryest, generally played the victim in Godiva’s scenarios. Jen served as drug-crazed biker killers, mafia hit men, deranged survivalists, and other male murderers. Short, curvy Doris could never pass as a man, so she played female killers, in which case Jen did the camera work.
Up on the street level, the early morning sun had already come out, but down at the beach the damp chill of night still lingered. Bird hugged her arms to her sides.
“Where do you want us?” Doris asked briskly as she thumbed her phone into video mode.
Godiva motioned her to one side. “You can shoot from here. No. When the sun comes up, you’ll be shooting right into it. Over there. Bird, you get right up next to the water, and Jen, you come at her from this side.” Gleefully, she said, “I want to see the blood splatter on the wet sand!”
Bird stepped to the edge of the sand, glad the tide was low. While she never minded being a crash test dummy for Godiva’s mystery novels, she drew the line at throwing herself into icy seawater. She fingered the stage blood pack, making sure it was in place.
“I hope you can get it on the first try, Jen,” Bird said. Smiling, she added, “Godiva needs her authentic-looking splatter.”
Godiva clapped her hands. “Hear, hear! Listen to her, Jen. If we have to do ten tries, you get to answer the fifty helpful letters from A Fan informing me that blood doesn’t do that.”
“Okay.” Jen hefted the prop baseball bat that Doris had liberated from the high school drama department.
Doris squinted into her cell phone. “Lights! Camera! Action!”
Jen advanced menacingly, her bat held high.
Bird threw up her hands pleadingly. “Don’t kill me!” Then, trying for some extra realism, she yelled, “No! Argh! Yargh!”
Jen lunged and swung dramatically. The foam baseball bat tapped Bird on the side of her head, light as a feather.
Bird started to throw herself backward, then paused.
“No, that was too fake.” She returned her hands to a pleading position. “It felt wrong. The bat wasn’t giving me direction. See, the blood pack didn’t even move. Jen, you’ve got to smack me harder.”
“This is harder than the fake dagger in the last murder.” Jen weighed the bat in her hand, her somber expression unchanging. “I’m afraid I’ll hurt you.”
“It’s foam. You can’t possibly hurt me. Especially not with all my hair, plus this yoga thing.” Bird pointed at the wrap around her head. “Okay. Ready? I’ll start.” She cleared her throat, then bellowed, “Argh, argh, don’t kill me, ARRRRRRGH!”
Jen stomped forward, scowling more fiercely than all the villains in Game of Thrones combined, and whacked the foam bludgeon against Bird’s head.
The blood pack gave a satisfying splurp! next to her ear, and the bat’s gentle velocity pushed against her just enough to help her twirl away and fling herself dramatically onto the sand, just like she had practiced falling onto her bed at home.
“AWE-some!” Godiva bellowed. Bird had to fight to keep the grin off her face. Corpses didn’t smile. She managed to keep her face still as Godiva added, “Now, Jen, you whack her again, for a just-in-case, then steal her wallet—what the hell?”
“Awk!” Jen squawked. It was a much more realistic yell than even Bird’s best “argh.”
Two bodies thumped into the sand scarcely two yards from where Bird lay in her artistic pose of death.
“Do not move,” a male voice commanded. A warm, slightly husky male voice that, even angry, somehow sounded like sunlight splashing on water.
Every nerve in Bird’s body lit up as if that liquid sunlight had poured into her body, warming her in a way she’d never felt in all her life.
She sat up abruptly, turned her head, and found herself gazing into a pair of astonished eyes. They were silvery gray, with the depth of a stormy sky and the sparkle of sunlight breaking through. And though she’d never believed before that it was possible to read character merely by looking into someone’s eyes, as she looked into that gleaming silver, she perceived wisdom, courage, and passion. And the entire force of their gaze was on her.
Bird couldn’t move. She couldn’t even breathe. It was only when those winter-cloud eyes crinkled into a questioning glance was she able to take in the rest of him. He was a tall, slim man whose handsome face could have been any age from fifty to a very well-preserved seventy. His hair was pure silver, long and tied neatly back. A neatly trimmed beard in that same bright silver accentuated the fine bones in his face. He held himself in a way that would have told Bird that he was strong and agile...
...if she hadn’t already figured that out, given that he’d arrived out of nowhere so fast she hadn’t even seen it, and was currently holding poor Jen pinned face-down in the sand with nothing more than one hand on a polished walking stick.
“Help,” Jen wheezed.
“Uh.” Bird heard her voice, a faint bat squeak, as if it came from far away. “Can you let my friend up? She wasn’t trying to hurt me. Or anyone. We were... um... acting out a scene.”
The man looked from Jen’s gray hair to the stage blood dripping down Bird’s head, then lifted the walking stick with a quick turn of his wrist, releasing Jen.
“I am truly sorry. I seem to have misjudged the situation entirely.” His husky voice had a warm timbre that made Bird shiver. But not from the cold.
She snuck a furtive gaze at his long limbs, from his broad shoulders to his fine hands. He gripped the beautiful curved handle of his walking stick with grace and strength. His body was lean, with whipcord muscles and not an ounce of fat.
And he was still looking at her. At her, not at Jen or Godiva or Doris. Time seemed to have suspended in a way that she had never experienced before, so she felt as if she and the man were alone together in a moment that was also an eternity. It was a moment that Bird wished would never end.
The spell was broken by her friends’ voices.
Doris gasped. “Where did you come from? I just blinked, and there you were!”
“Same,” said Godiva. “Who the hell are you, Mr. Appear Out Of Nowhere And Jump On Harmless Old Women?!”
Godiva’s voice would have commanded the attention of the Devil himself. But the silver-eyed man didn’t so much as blink, let alone turn to her. His attention was still fixed on Bird and Bird alone.
“Are you certain you’re not harmed?” The man addressed Bird cautiously. He seemed as dazed as she was.
“I’m fine. Just . . . sticky.” She couldn’t meet his silver eyes. Her face felt so hot that it was probably scarlet as the stage blood splattered over her face and neck and—argh!—breasts. At that realization, she felt as if she might actually burst into flames.
He stepped forward and held out his hand to her. Bewildered, she realized that he intended to help her up. Now her face felt like a blast furnace. But as he stood there patiently, arm outstretched, she realized that the quickest way to take his attention off her and her red paint and redder face was to just take his hand. She grabbed it, planning to accept his gesture but stand up by herself.
His fingers closed around hers, strong and warm and sure. That was a grip that would never break unless he chose to release it. At his touch, a shock of desire went through her, so strong as to be impossible to deny, even to herself. She was so flustered that she nearly yanked her hand away. But before she could, he pulled her to her feet, with a gentle touch but irresistible strength.
And on
ce again, she found herself in that bubble of halted time and strange intimacy, holding hands with a stranger she felt like she’d known all her life. Bird gazed into the silver depths of his eyes...
...until she remembered the paint, the hideous tie, the sheer barminess of an old woman like her trekking out to a beach at dawn to pretend to be murdered. Her face flaming again, she released his hand.
The bubble burst. The man blinked, then turned to look down at Jen, the person he’d flattened, as if he’d only then remembered that she existed. He stepped to her side—Bird realized that no more than a few seconds could have passed, though it had felt like hours—and held a hand down to her. “Madam, please accept my heartfelt apologies.”
He spoke with a slight accent, one which Bird didn’t recognize but found pleasant.
Jen reached up cautiously, and his long-fingered hand gripped her biker’s gauntlet. She was only an inch or so shorter than him and a whole lot wider, especially with all her padding. But he hauled her to her feet with no apparent effort.
The man gave a short but graceful bow, then addressed them all. “My apologies for my untimely interruption. I assure you it was well meant.”
Godiva cackled. “If it looked real enough that you decided to swoop in to save the day, then by damn we got it right. C’mon campers, time to hump our asses back up the hills. Coffee’s on me when we reach the top.”
And as Bird brushed damp sand off herself, suddenly—and for the first time in years—aware of how the wet fabric was clinging to her body, Godiva added, “You’re pretty fast, there, bucko. I didn’t see you coming until all of a sudden, you tackled Jen here like it was Superbowl Sunday. Where were you?”
“I beg your pardon,” the man said. He wore a light safari jacket over jeans. His well-cut but casual outfit was incongruous next to his gilt-edged carved walking stick, which was like something a king would carry in the days of old.
A spurt of depression washed over Bird. It was so unfair that a man could look great at any age, while she had always been dumpy and now was dumpier. The way she’d “let herself go” after the birth of her children was just one of the long catalogue of shortcomings that Bartholomew had felt obliged to relate, in exquisitely painful detail, in court twenty-seven years ago.