Fire Born (City of Dragons Book 5)

by Val St. Crowe

  “You’ve got documentation of this, then?”

  “Oh, yeah,” said Dustin. “You want me to go and get it? I know this is all, uh, what do you call it? Circumstantial, I guess? But it’s weird, isn’t it? It’s a strange coincidence.”

  “Very strange,” said Lachlan. “Hmm.” He rubbed his chin for a moment. “We’ll definitely need to see what kind of proof you’ve got.”

  “A log,” said Dustin. “I don’t know if it means anything, because anyone who works here has access to the file and can change it.”

  “But why would someone change it?” I said.

  “Oh, I don’t know,” said Dustin. “Maybe you accidentally forgot to get payment from the last guy who came in, and now your drawer of money isn’t going to balance. Maybe you get into the system and erase the fact that the guy was even here.”

  Lachlan raised his eyebrows. “Sounds like you speak from experience.”

  “Nah,” said Dustin. “It’s only that there might be a lot of reasons why someone would want to modify the file.”

  “But not to add this guy you saw to the log, right?” I said.

  “No, I guess not,” said Dustin. “Do you think it’s him?”

  “Well, we’ll need to find out more,” said Lachlan. “Maybe he has a perfectly good reason for being here on those nights.”

  * * *

  “Are you Silas Gordon?” said Lachlan to the man who’d opened the door to his house to us.

  “Who wants to know?” said the man. He was tall, burly, with a shaved head. He was wearing a tank top, even in the cold, and there were tattoos all up and down his arm.

  Lachlan flashed his badge and introduced us. “We got your name from a parking garage on the south side,” he said.

  “You can do that?” said Silas. “You can force the parking garage to give up my information?”

  “We didn’t force the garage to do anything,” said Lachlan.

  Silas scratched the top of his bald head. “Look, you got a warrant or something? Am I being detained?”

  Lachlan narrowed his eyes. “Why would you ask something like that?”

  “Basically—and officer, I’m really not trying to be rude here, I swear—I’m not going to talk to you if I don’t have to. And the reason for that is not that I’m hiding anything, it’s only that I’m a busy man with extremely valuable time, and I can’t waste it on whatever you want to waste it on right now. I assure you that I’ve got no information you’ll find helpful about anything criminal. I really am sorry, but if that’s all, I’m going to close the door now.”

  “I only want to ask a few questions,” said Lachlan.

  “No thanks,” said Silas. And he pulled the door closed firmly in our faces.

  We both stood there, quiet.

  I looked at Lachlan. “Can he do that?”

  “Unfortunately, yes,” said Lachlan. “I can force the issue if I need to, take him down to the station, try to question him there. But he’s already made it clear that he doesn’t want to say anything. Guy seems like he’s had experience with law enforcement. Let’s go back to the station and pull his records. I bet he’s got a rap sheet a mile long.”

  * * *

  “Nothing,” said Lachlan, glaring at the computer. “Not even a speeding ticket.”

  “Wow,” I said.

  “And that house he lives in?” said Lachlan. “Doesn’t own it. Rents it. The car he drives? Leases it. No property records. No job, near as I can tell. It’s like the guy doesn’t exist.”

  “Well, that’s suspicious,” I said. “Isn’t it?”

  “You bet it is,” said Lachlan. “I have to admit, he doesn’t quite look the way I would have pictured the killer to look. The muscles and the tattoos, that’s so aggressive. These killings are passive and manipulative. I expected someone who was more unassuming and scheming, not so straight forward. But maybe I’m wrong about all of it.”

  “We’ve got to follow the trail of the case, right?” I said. That was what Lachlan was always saying.

  “Right,” he said.

  “Should we tell Dirk about this guy?”

  “No way,” said Lachlan. “Don’t tell Dirk anything.”

  “But what if this is the guy, and she’s off chasing false leads?”

  “Let her,” said Lachlan, glowering.

  “Okay,” I said. “What’s our next move?”

  “We have to find out anything we can about this guy,” said Lachlan. “What does he do all day? Who does he associate with? What does he eat? What’s his routine? Everything we can.” He shook his head. “Dude should have answered my questions. Doing it this way, he makes sure that I’m all over him. I’m not going to stop looking until I figure out what he’s hiding.”

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  Lachlan put some uniformed officers on Silas Gordon, had them stake him out and follow him around. Until we could get a report on them, Lachlan did what he could trying to track down Silas’s information online, and I went home early.

  I tried to get some more work done on the baby’s room, but it was exhausting work trying to move things around, even using magic. I really needed to go shopping anyway. I needed things, I realized. I needed a dresser and a changing table and a diaper pail and a bunch of stuff that I hadn’t gotten.

  I decided I would go out and pick some things up from Target. But first, I was tired, so I lay down on the couch to rest for a bit.

  While I had my eyes closed, my phone rang. It was Clarke.

  “Hi,” I said. “What’s up?”

  “Uh, I have a rogue,” she said. “You wanted me to call you if I found one?”

  “Right,” I said. “Where are you? I’ll be right over.”

  She gave me the address, and I got in my car and drove to her location. I’d go out to Target afterward.

  Clarke was shivering outside behind a grocery store off Atlantic Avenue. The dead rogue was stretched out on the ground, arrow through its skull. It had dark, dark green scales, almost black.

  I whipped out my phone and started taking photographs of it.

  “Hey, what are you doing?” said Clarke. “You can’t take pictures.”

  “How else am I supposed to figure out if this is the same dragon as one that’s gone missing recently?” I said. “Look, I found something about a talisman forcing a shifter to shift the minute he touched it, even if he wasn’t in water. I thought it might explain the rogues. Maybe someone’s wielding this talisman, turning dragons into rogues, and if I can figure out more, maybe I can stop it.”

  “Huh,” said Clarke, looking thoughtful. “That might make sense, actually. If the shifters were being forced to shift, destroying their human form, then maybe that would account for all the rogues. But why would anyone want to do that? Who would benefit from making rogue dragons?”

  “I don’t know all that yet,” I said. “The first thing I have to do is try to prove where the rogues come from. So, I need to identify this one. If I can, I’ll go from there.”

  Clarke nodded. “Let me know if you need help, all right?”

  “All right,” I said.

  “Oh,” she said. “I almost forgot.” She pulled out an amulet. “This is what you asked for. It glows different colors for different magical levels. Blue is low, yellow is medium, red is high. There are also hues in between like greens and oranges. Pretty self-explanatory.”

  “Thanks,” I said. “How much do I owe you?”

  She told me.

  “Wow,” I said. “That much, huh?” But I forked it over. “Keep the change.”

  “Thanks,” she said, riffling through the bills I’d handed her. “Not like I’m actually a cash register, anyway.”

  “I appreciate this, Clarke,” I said. “Really, I do. We maybe don’t always see eye-to-eye, but you’re a decent person, and I respect you.”

  She shrugged. “Thanks, I guess.” She turned to look at the dead dragon. “You done with this corpse?”

  “Yeah,” I said.


  * * *

  I didn’t make it to Target. Instead, I spent the rest of the day calling around, trying to match up missing dragons with the rogue. I didn’t have any luck. There weren’t a lot of dragons that had gone missing in the area. Only four. I called every single mother of every single missing dragon to get a description of what her child looked like in dragon form. And none of them were even close. None of them were even green.

  I was disappointed. It hadn’t been easy, anyway, talking to those mothers. It was hard, hearing the despair in their voices. I didn’t lie to them, though. I said that a dead dragon had been found, and that I was trying to determining its identity. So, at least I left them with the knowledge that the rogue wasn’t their son or daughter. That there was hope that their child was still alive.

  Listening to them hit close to home, because it reminded me of my miscarriages, of losing my own babies.

  I ended up curled up on my bed, clutching my stomach and crying, and talking to the baby inside me, begging him to live, begging him to be okay. “Don’t leave me too,” I sobbed at him over and over again.

  Lachlan found me like that. I was a mess.

  He gathered me into his arms and let me cry.

  By that time, I didn’t have a lot of tears left in me, so I ended up sniffling into his dress shirt while he stroked my hair.

  He asked me what was wrong.

  I didn’t know how to explain it, so I went through everything I had done that day, everything about Clarke and the rogue. And then he was confused, so I had to go back and tell him about the stuff I’d found in the book.

  “Eagle and Lynx?” he said. “Like Eaglelinx?”

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  “Weird,” he said.

  “Very weird,” I said. And then I finished telling him everything about the rogues.

  He thought that my reasoning was solid, but it didn’t surprise him that I hadn’t found that the rogue and the missing dragons matched up. He said it was a long shot that I’d be able to make my theory stick.

  I figured as much.

  Then he found the amulet that Clarke had given me. “What’s this?” he said, lifting it from where I had it around my neck, where it glowed a rosy orange.

  When Lachlan touched it, the amulet immediately grew even rosier. With both of us touching it, there was more magic, so it was redder.

  Then I had to explain about Arabella and the letter and the whiteflame and the whole reason I’d been reading that book in the first place.

  He let go of the amulet. “I don’t know, Penny. I don’t think we should mess with this.”

  “I know,” I said. “Look, we can see that the amulet can measure how much magic we have together, right?”

  “Sure,” he said. “And if I drink your blood, we’ll have more magic, because it will increase my magic. It’s not going to tell us anything.”

  I furrowed my brow. Maybe he was right.

  “What we’d have to do,” he said, “to know for sure, is for me to drink your blood and note the level it got to. Then we’d have to use whiteflame. If the whiteflame increased our magic, we’d know it was the culprit. Frankly, I don’t think it is, because I feel like using the whiteflame actually drained our magic.”

  “Did it?” I said. “Or did time drain it?”

  “We know that drinking blood charges up the blood bond, because we can’t use whiteflame if we haven’t shared blood. Blood sharing starts it all.”

  “No, I know that.”

  “We can’t test it, anyway. Using the whiteflame, even for testing processes, it’s too dangerous. If the bond gets its claws in us again...”

  “I know,” I said. “I know.” I clutched the amulet anyway.

  Lachlan sucked in breath. “God damn it.”

  “What?” I said, looking up at him.

  He was standing up. “If we’re going to do this, we need some witnesses—objective witnesses who can read the data. And we’ll have to give them something… tasers! I can get tasers from the office. If we go nuts, they tase us.”

  “What are you saying? Are you saying we’re going to try this?”

  He bent down and kissed me—quick, hot, and fierce. “Penny,” and his voice was low and urgent, “you have no idea how much I want you all the time. Keeping away from you is torture, and if there’s any way that we can be close again, I want it.”

  “Me too,” I said, fresh tears slipping out of my eyes. “God, I miss you, Lachlan.”

  “So,” he said. “You think Felicity and Connor can handle it?”

  * * *

  “So, you’re both comfortable with this?” I said, handing the tasers off to Felicity and Connor. “Because if you guys think it sounds like a crazy idea or a bad idea or anything like that, I’m going to trust you this time. I won’t do it.”

  We were all standing in the lobby of the hotel, which was as empty as it had been all month.

  Felicity turned the taser over in her hands. “If we use this, will it hurt the baby?”

  “Shouldn’t,” said Lachlan.

  “Well, you didn’t go completely crazy after you used the whiteflame one time, right?” said Felicity. “We won’t have to use it on you.”

  “Yeah, you guys used it on Alastair, and you were fine, right?” said Connor.

  “And Darla Tell,” said Felicity.

  “We don’t know,” I said. “We don’t know if it’s something that builds up over time. Maybe we started to be a little… off after using it on Alastair.”

  “I think you can risk it,” said Connor. “We’ll watch you.”

  “Okay, good,” I said. “Then let’s do this.” I turned to Lachlan. “Ready?” I held out my wrist.

  He licked his lips, looking nervous. “Yeah, okay, it’s only that we don’t usually don’t this with an audience.”

  “Lachlan, get over your vampire shame,” I snapped.

  He laughed. “Yeah, that’s what it’s about.”

  When I first met Lachlan, he hid the fact that he was a vampire. He didn’t even want to drink blood in public. But I was guessing that he didn’t want to drink my blood in front of Felicity and Connor because when we shared blood, it was fairly… intimate.

  I put my wrist in front of his mouth. “Um, keep your eyes open,” I said, but my voice had dropped several registers.

  Lachlan nodded. His lips parted, and I could see his fangs.

  “Is, uh, this going to be like watching you two have sex or something?” said Connor.

  “No,” said Lachlan, glaring at my wrist.

  “No,” I said, glaring at Connor.

  “Maybe we should look away,” said Felicity.

  Lachlan grasped my wrist and sunk his teeth into it.

  I felt a wave of warmth tug at me, like the ocean tide in the summer. It wanted to pull me under, wrap me in the sensation of being with Lachlan.

  But I struggled against that sleepy, slow feeling and kept my eyes on him.

  His gaze bored into mine.

  And then… well, suddenly that was even more intimate. I’d never watching him drink my blood before, and it… excited me a little bit, the way his mouth was working at my flesh, the expression of pure bliss on his face, and—

  “That’s probably enough, huh?” said Connor.

  “Yup, the amulet’s stable,” said Felicity, seizing it where it hung around my neck. She snapped a picture of it with her phone. We’d use the photos to compare the color.

  With effort, Lachlan detached from me. He turned away from us, skimming his fingers over his jaw line.

  “What color’s the amulet?” I said.

  “It’s orange,” said Felicity, showing it to me.

  I took it from her and looked. I reached out for Lachlan. “Hey, touch this with me, let’s see what color it is if we’re both touching it.”

  “Well, it was kind of orangey-red when you guys were touching,” said Felicity, showing me the photo.

  Lachlan put his hand on the amulet. Its color i
mmediately surged to match the shade of the photo.

  “All right,” said Lachlan. “Now we go and throw some whiteflame into the ocean.”

  I took a deep breath. I was nervous. “Let’s go.”

  The four of us all trooped through the hotel. We went out by Vivica’s room. She popped her head out when she saw us. “Hey, what’s going on?”

  “Stay in there,” I said. “It could be dangerous.”

  “What?”

  I gave her a very serious face. “Shut the door and lock it. Someone will tell you when it’s safe.”

  She furrowed her brow but pulled herself back inside and shut the door.

  We opened the door and walked out onto the patio. The pool was empty, and all the outdoor furniture had been packed away.

  The cold wind hit us, taking our breath away. We fought against it, hands flung up over our faces to keep the blowing sand from striking our skin.

  When we were far enough away from the hotel that we didn’t think we’d be able to do any damage, Lachlan and I took hands.

  Felicity and Connor flanked us, tasers at the ready.

  “Okay,” I said, looking at Lachlan. “Ready?”

  He nodded.

  I reached for it, and I felt our power tumbling down like a gush of water released when a dam broke. The whiteflame crashed into us—crashed through us—and burst out of our bodies. It traveled out as a white beam of power, sizzling when it hit the ocean. Steam rose from the icy water. The waves churned.

  Elation shot through me like a lightning bolt. I had missed this. I had missed this power.

  But it wasn’t good.

  And so I tore my hand away from Lachlan, breaking the power, stopping the whiteflame.

  Immediately, I grabbed the amulet with one hand and held it out to Lachlan. “Touch it,” I said breathlessly.

  He turned to me, and he was so beautiful that it hurt. He put his hands on the amulet.

  I wanted to rip off his clothes and ride him, make him scream, make him make me scream.

  The amulet was bright red, the reddest red I’d ever seen. Much brighter red than it had been a moment ago.

  And then the amulet started to get hot. It was burning me.