Twiceborn Endgame (The Proving Book 3)

by Finlayson, Marina

  “Are you saying you’d be prepared to split Australia?” Hope joined the conversation, her big blue eyes alight with the possibilities. “I’d heard you were … different … but that seems positively undragonish.”

  “Sure. Why not? I’d keep New South Wales. I’ve always lived in Sydney, and I’m not interested in moving. The rest we can sort out later, if you’re interested.”

  I could tell that some of them were for sure. Faith and a couple of others had a different sort of gleam in their eye, though. Stupid teenagers. They thought I was offering because I was too scared to fight.

  They thought I was weak.

  I sighed, and was about to set them straight when I noticed search lights swinging crazily in the dark beyond the pool. In our soundproof room we could hear nothing from outside, but heads were turning among the partygoers.

  Luce noticed it too. At a nod from me she moved to the window and opened it. Noise rushed in from outside: cries of alarm and the tread of heavy booted feet on the paving around the pool.

  “What’s going on?” I asked.

  The distinctive thumping of a helicopter’s blades somewhere close nearly drowned out my words, then it set down on the grass beyond the pool, its lights raking the scene.

  “Who else did Thorne invite?” I asked, but before anyone could answer, the door behind me burst open, and suddenly the room filled with men in black riot gear. Men who waved serious assault rifles around and yelled at everyone to get down.

  I snatched at Garth’s sleeve just in time. “Garth, no!”

  He glared at me, his eyes fading back to grey from violent yellow. No one else had moved, but the sisters looked as shocked as if this was a surprise to them too, and the men wore badges on their arms proclaiming they were Australian Federal Police. I didn’t want to turn dragon and toast a whole bunch of policemen just for doing their job, so I waited—and kept a firm hand on Garth’s arm to encourage him to be patient too. His muscles were tense in my grip.

  In a moment I was very glad I had. The police fanned out around the room, and a new figure strode in, an older man with a military bearing, though he wore civilian clothes.

  “Ladies and gentlemen, these guns are loaded with silver bullets, so I’d advise you not to do anything rash.”

  Surely he was the one being rash, bursting into a dragon’s home and waving firearms around. Though the fact they were loaded with silver meant he at least knew what he was facing. I stepped closer to Garth, still fighting nausea, but worried about those silver bullets. Getting shot was no walk in the park for any shifter, but for werewolves it was invariably fatal. Even the tiniest amount of silver in their system was enough to kill them, in the most gruesome way, too. Thorne’s death was nothing to it.

  “Who are you?” I pushed into his mind as I spoke, meaning to compel him, but he blocked me so well he could have been a dragon. That was weird: according to his aura he was nothing but human. “This is a private residence. What are you doing here? I hope you have a search warrant.”

  He tapped the breast pocket of his grey business suit. His clothes made him look more like a banker than a policeman. “I am Commander Wilson of Taskforce Jaeger. I have a warrant right here. I’ll be only too happy to show it to the owner of this house, Mr Gideon Thorne. Where is he?”

  I felt my face flush with heat. Oh, God, I was such an idiot. I’d completely forgotten Thorne’s corpse stretched so incriminatingly on the floor behind me.

  “He’s right here,” said Faith, a vicious smile curving her red lips.

  If Commander Wilson was shocked to find a dead body on the floor, he didn’t show it. He stepped closer and gazed down at Thorne’s contorted face dispassionately. His men began to fan out through the room, and I felt Garth tense under my hand. I squeezed his bicep hard. It was like squeezing rock. A policeman with a gun trained on us stood just out of reach, and I was terrified one of those bullets might end up in my hot-headed werewolf. He had many fine qualities, but impulse control wasn’t one of them. I’d already seen one werewolf die of silver poisoning, and I never wanted to repeat the experience. And the thought of losing Garth opened a pit of horror in my stomach that I couldn’t examine too closely, for fear of what I might discover. I pressed closer to his warmth, ready to shield him with my body if I had to.

  Wilson looked up from his examination of Thorne’s body. “Would I be right in assuming Mr Thorne didn’t die of natural causes?”

  What a comedian. Said it with a straight face, too.

  Faith flung a triumphant hand in my direction. “She killed him.”

  “Is that so?” He turned that unblinking gaze on me, then nodded to someone behind me.

  Pain exploded through my head, and the world went black.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  I woke with a lingering headache and a peculiar taste in my mouth. My tongue felt like it was covered in peach fuzz, and about three times bigger than normal. I spent a moment trying to process that taste. Was it the after-effects of the bane leaf? I didn’t remember that from last time.

  My eyelids were crusted together, and I opened them with some difficulty. The room was unfamiliar, small and white. The glare of the fluorescent tubes in the ceiling hurt my eyes, and I rolled my head forward, feeling a strange resistance in my neck.

  A figure swam into view. A face loomed over me, dark hair swinging forward to brush my skin. Luce? I blinked, trying to focus, and saw it was Corinne, the selkie woman.

  “Mistress? Don’t try to move. Keep still.”

  Naturally as soon as she told me to keep still, moving became the only thing I wanted to do. I tried to move my arms, but something prevented me. I was having trouble even turning my head. A red light blinked somewhere in the bottom of my peripheral vision, but I couldn’t see properly.

  She laid a hand on my arm. “Please! Don’t move.”

  The fear in her voice jolted me fully awake, and I managed to focus on her face, so near I could smell the scent of the shampoo she used. Something with apples. There was no furniture in the room except the chair I sat in. I wriggled my hands, and realised I was tied to it.

  “What the hell’s going on?” I jerked my hands harder, adrenalin surging through my veins, and she grabbed my shoulder.

  “Keep still! There’s a bomb around your neck.”

  I stared into her terror-filled eyes for a long moment, then tried to see what she was talking about, but my head was held firmly in some kind of neck brace. I strained to get a good look at the little red light, but trying to see something that’s around your neck is like trying to lick your own elbow. No matter how hard you try, it’s never going to happen. That’s why they invented mirrors.

  “Someone put a collar bomb on me?” It certainly wasn’t the craziest thing that had happened to me lately, but it hadn’t been high on my list of possibilities of how the night at Thorne’s might end either. Who would dare? “Was it that Wilson guy?”

  Last thing I remembered was getting knocked out, just after the cops had burst in. Or were they really cops? Wilson had said something about a taskforce, and they’d looked like cops, but their whole modus operandi smelled more of Mission Impossible than the staid old Australian police force. And now I was wearing a collar bomb? Something was very wrong here—and not just the fact that I might be about to get my head blown off.

  “I don’t know who they were, mistress.” The selkie’s face was white with fear. She raised a shaking hand to brush her hair out of her face, and I saw both hands were shackled in silver handcuffs. There were angry red welts around her wrists already from the poisonous metal. “They caught us with silver nets, then they brought us here and separated us. I was left in this room on my own until two men in white coats wheeled you in a few minutes ago.”

  “In a wheelchair?”

  “No, on a hospital bed. You were unconscious. Drugged, I think. Then they strapped you to this chair and fitted the bomb around your neck. They said I would be a familiar face when you woke up to stop you d
oing anything stupid, and I was to tell you that if you tried taking trueshape they’d detonate the bomb.”

  Well, that was a smart move. Whoever was running this show—and I seriously doubted it was Wilson—knew quite a bit about me. They’d used silver nets to capture a roomful of shifters without casualties, and had Corinne bound in silver, so they obviously knew that shifters couldn’t take trueshape or access their other powers while constrained in silver. And somehow they’d discovered that silver no longer had that effect on me, alone of all the shifters. Since Leandra’s consciousness had transferred to my human body through that damn channel stone that had started the whole ball game, I’d been immune to silver. And bane leaf, of course, which was a side effect that had saved my life twice already.

  So, how to stop a dragon taking trueshape when you couldn’t use the dampening effects of silver? The collar bomb was quite a neat solution. I would have been all admiration if it hadn’t been my head in the firing line.

  “How would they know? Have they got some way of measuring magic flow or something?”

  “I don’t think it’s anything that sophisticated.” She pointed to the camera mounted in the corner of the room. “They’re watching us.”

  I glared at the camera. Its blank eye stared back, unconcerned. “Are we still at Thorne’s place?”

  “No. They took us somewhere in a helicopter. I was blindfolded, so I didn’t see where we landed, but it wasn’t a short trip. We could be back in Sydney. Or even Canberra, I suppose.”

  The nation’s capital, where Parliament House proudly flew the Australian flag from atop its green hill. I suppose secret detention facilities for shifters weren’t out of the question, though they’d never come up on any of the tourist guides I’d seen. They’d have to be pretty recent, too.

  Or perhaps we were in a hospital. Corinne had mentioned a hospital bed. What had they been doing to me? The back of my head ached where I’d been knocked out, but only mildly. My dragon healing powers had mended that while I slept. Nothing else seemed sore. I had visions of being opened up in some kind of mad scientist’s lab while people poked and prodded at my supernatural insides, but I would be hurting now if I’d been in surgery, so clearly that hadn’t happened. What, then?

  I strained my enhanced hearing to its limits, searching for any clues. I heard someone walking down the corridor outside, in high heels from the tapping sound of it. Each step echoed in a way that suggested lots of concrete. Further away I heard the boom of a heavy door closing. Again, concrete and echoes. We could be underground.

  “Are there any windows?” The harsh fluorescent light in the room suggested not, but I couldn’t see the wall behind me.

  “No, but there’s something like a TV screen back there.”

  “Turn me around so I can see it.”

  “I don’t think we should move you.”

  “Corinne, they don’t want their star prisoner blowing up by accident. I’m sure this thing will only go off if they deliberately detonate it.” “Sure” might have been a little too strong, but I was fairly confident. “They’re just trying to scare you.”

  “Well, it worked,” she grumbled, but she tipped my chair and swivelled it carefully on its back legs till I was facing the far wall. Not an easy thing to do when she was wearing handcuffs, and she hissed as they bit into her skin.

  The screen was set into the wall, not sitting on top of it, and if it was a TV there were no buttons to work it. It looked more like one of those one-way glass windows you see in interrogation rooms in movies, but since movies were my only experience of such things I couldn’t be sure.

  “What do you think’s going on?” Corinne sat down on the floor and leaned against the wall, her silk ball gown puddling around her. She looked exhausted, with dark rings under her big brown eyes, and horribly overdressed for our current situation. Was it the middle of the night? How long had I been out?

  “God knows. People have been getting pretty jumpy about shifters lately.”

  She nodded. “They’re about to pass that new bill in Parliament, like the anti-terrorist one. Arrest without charge, detainment for seven days. Just on suspicion of being a shifter.”

  It was true. The government had responded to public hysteria with a show of force. Parliament had been recalled early from its summer recess. They had to look like they were doing something to combat the new menace, even if what they did was basically useless. It hadn’t bothered me because I didn’t see how they were going to arrest anyone when they couldn’t tell who was a shifter and who wasn’t. Besides, most dragons had politicians on the payroll. We were the last people who should have needed to worry. The new laws were more likely to be used against poor homeless guys as an excuse to get them off the streets.

  I closed my eyes, wishing I had a wall to lean against too. “But why target Thorne’s party?”

  Someone had told them who’d be there—basically the cream of Sydney’s shifter society. When they’d even known about my immunity to silver, it was obvious they had very specific inside information. Betrayal was nothing new for dragons, of course, but it seemed a dangerous game for a shifter to play. How could they be sure they wouldn’t be caught in the trap themselves?

  Perhaps it was Daiyu’s latest move against me. She certainly had the most to gain from the sudden disappearance of the domain’s queen and the seven women with the only other claim to it. But the new laws would only allow our captors to hold us for seven days without charge. What could she accomplish in seven days?

  But then, it seemed pretty damned unlikely that the new laws allowed for strapping collar bombs around suspects’ necks. If this taskforce was legit, they were certainly playing fast and loose with the rules. Could they even be in league with Daiyu?

  God, things were always so complicated when you were dealing with dragons. My brain felt too woozy from the drugs to attempt to work it all out. It didn’t seem likely that Daiyu would have that sort of pull away from Japan, but who knew?

  A crackling noise from the camera made us both jump.

  “Ms O’Connor, we would like to ask you a few questions.”

  I couldn’t see the speaker, but the sound was so distorted I couldn’t even tell if it was a man or a woman.

  “Sure. Come in for a chat. You might have to bring your own chair, though.”

  “That won’t be necessary. I can see you perfectly well from where I am.”

  I glared at the dark glass in front of me, but I could see nothing, not even the suspicion of a movement. “But I can’t see you. I don’t care for talking to disembodied voices.”

  “No need to take that attitude. Your associates are depending on you to be co-operative.”

  The black glass flickered, and a picture appeared, of a familiar glowering face. Garth stood, arms folded across his bulky chest, inside a cage whose bars shone with the familiar glint of silver. Two guards stood opposite his cage, guns levelled at him. Geez, Louise. Garth was good, but not that good. They didn’t need the guns with that much silver surrounding him. There was no way he’d even be able to touch those bars, much less break through them. I suppose they might get scowled to death, but otherwise those guards were completely safe.

  “Those guns you see are loaded with silver,” the voice continued. Well, der. Of course they were. “If you do not co-operate fully, Mr Maclaren will be shot.”

  Now, at last, fear cut through the fog of drugs in my brain.

  “Just like that? No charges, no trial, nothing? I thought you people worked for the government. You can’t just go around murdering people.”

  “Yes, Ms O’Connor, just like that. Why, did you think dragons were the only people who got to kill whomever they please with impunity? I’m sure Mr Thorne would be interested in your opinion.”

  Fear sank its icy claws into my heart. How could I deal with this person? Whoever it was seemed to know everything, and I knew nothing, not even their identity. And Garth just stood there, so vulnerable. All his strength meant nothing
against the threat of silver. The memory of Jerry’s face, horribly contorted in death, sent a shiver down my spine.

  “What proof do I even have that he’s still alive?”

  “Are your eyes not proof enough?”

  “You could have recorded this hours ago. He might already be dead.”

  There was a crackling sound, then an amplified tap, like someone testing a microphone.

  “Mr Maclaren, Ms O’Connor wishes to confirm your wellbeing.”

  Garth obviously heard the voice too, for on the screen he lifted his head, searching for the source of the sound.

  “Oh, yeah? Let me talk to her then.”

  “Garth!” Oh, God, please let him be safe until I could get to him. My panicked heart pounded in my throat, and I had to swallow hard before I could speak. “Can you hear me?”

  Garth’s grey eyes softened as he turned to face the camera. “Loud and clear.”

  “Are you okay?”

  His mouth twitched into a hard line. “I reckon you could call this a glass-half-empty moment. What about you?”

  “Don’t worry about me. Just don’t do anything stupid, okay?”

  “When have you ever known me to do anything stupid?”

  Only about three times a day, you daft bastard. The picture disappeared from the screen before I could say anything else. Just this once, let him make the smart decision.

  “Satisfied?” said the voice.

  “What do you want from me?”

  “Don’t be so quick to assume I want something from you—other than information, of course. It’s possible I might be able to offer you something very dear to your heart.”

  He meant Lachie. My stomach lurched. Oh, shit, he must be working for Daiyu. Was it Jason? My fists clenched at the thought. I’d kill him.

  “Don’t you want to know what it is?”

  Corinne was watching me, wide-eyed and scared. I swallowed my fear and put on a brave face.

  “Not particularly, but it sounds like you want to tell me, so knock yourself out.”