Even though she’d enthralled him to act like an animal, and had abandoned him with her dogs, Daisy still treated him with more respect than any of the other weird people he’d met so far. More than her father. More than Ivan-the-Terrible. Definitely more than all the weird-ass morphers.
More than Rysa, for that matter. Daisy, at least, had the manners to tell him what was going on.
Slowly, he twisted his outstretched hand and extended his fingers.
He offered Daisy his palm.
“Of course I’m her mother.” Cecilia hooked her hand around Daisy’s and yanked her close to her side. “Amazing opportunities don’t happen often. This is Daisy’s moment to prove her worth.”
“Opportunity to do what?” Gavin stepped closer. The corgi wagged her tail and circled his legs, obviously unaware of the animosity between the three humans. The dog must think she was in the middle of a reunion.
“You have no idea how hard I’ve worked, little normal. The pains I’ve suffered.” Cecilia Reynolds stared at Gavin. “No one fucks with me.”
“Let go of my hand.” Daisy tried to pull away, but the morpher would not let go.
“You leave. Go tell Pavlovich to back off.” Fake Cecilia pointed at Gavin with her free hand. “When I’m satisfied, I’ll let his girl go.”
Fake Cecilia’s eyes flashed, and for a moment Gavin thought he was looking at a Burner.
“No.” He would not abandon Daisy. He would not run away and let crazy drag away his friend. He stepped closer.
“Gavin!” Daisy yelled. “Stay back!” She glanced down at her boots.
Why would she want him to—
The corgi sneezed. A little shake worked from her head to her tail and the light coat of dust she’d picked up off Daisy’s clothes flicked into the air.
Gavin smelled the dust the moment the little dog’s back wiggled. The same acrid stench he’d smelled when that Burner took Rysa. The same stinging hints of acid in the air.
Burndust.
“Leave! Now!” Fake Cecilia yanked Daisy forward.
Gavin’s eyes watered. He blinked. He sucked in a breath even though inhaling this close to dust wasn’t a good idea.
“What are you? Deaf?” Fake Cecilia twisted her head to the side, and giggled.
Daisy yanked on the morpher’s hand. “Let go!”
The morpher’s hand flicked between the flap of her leather bag, and her fingers squirmed inside.
Panic edged into Gavin’s mind. Would his throat close off again? Was he going to die? What was the morpher about to pull out of her bag?
A long hunting knife. She pulled out a knife.
She said something but Gavin didn’t hear her words. He did, though, fully understand her intent.
The knife swung around.
If Gavin stayed back, he wouldn’t get the dust in his throat and he’d be okay. But his brain wasn’t thinking about his safety.
He wasn’t thinking at all.
The pretty female needed him.
Chapter Twenty-One
Hoping to unbalance the morpher, Daisy swung her entire weight toward the lockers. The woman and her knife pulled right and away from Gavin.
He wheezed. The dust triggered another reaction and if she didn’t get him out of the locker room, his throat would close up.
She’d let him down. She hadn’t explained the situation well enough and now the cute normal guy with the big blue eyes and the good heart was about to stop breathing because he had silly chivalrous thoughts about helping.
“Gavin! Go!” If he ran out the door now, he’d be out in the main hall with the other normals. Someone would help him. “Please!”
“Oh, he’s special, is he?” The morpher giggled. “So many special pretty boys making their women do special things.”
The morpher shoved Daisy into the lockers. “I took this fucking knife to my brain!” She danced around before smoothing her free hand over the tiki gods infesting her shirt.
The knife hung from her fingers. “I know how to prepare myself for my trials. Only an idiot would pass up an amazing opportunity like this one.” She patted her leather bag and the fragment inside it. “I have all the pieces I need now. I deserve my prize.”
Someone banged on the door. It must have locked again after Gavin came through.
The woman let go of Daisy and stepped over the bench in front of the lockers. She swung the knife up toward the front of the room as another bang hit the door.
Gavin pointed over his shoulder. “I hear Ivan,” he croaked. Slowly, he inched his way toward the door, doing his best to breathe while not catching the notice of the morpher.
He brought Ivan? “Is my dad here?” Daisy yelled.
Someone needed to heal Gavin. She couldn’t get close enough. Not with the burndust on her clothes.
Yes, Gavin signed.
She had to keep the morpher’s attention. Gavin needed to get to the door. “Hey!”
The morpher blinked and snorted, but her focus shifted to Daisy. “Ivan? Now there’s a bad son for ya. I remember his mother. No one fucked with Mom’s shieldmaidens.”
The morpher shook. A massive shudder flowed through her body like a wave, and her scent changed. Daisy’s sense of mother vanished into a freshness that reminded her of Minnesota—plants, cool lakes, breezes—which shouldn’t happen. Her hair changed color. Her cheekbones sharpened and her face elongated into more of a Scandinavian oval. Her skin lightened.
This morpher was capable of mimicking on a level Daisy didn’t think possible.
The morpher tapped the flat side of the blade against her forehead. She blinked twice, once at Daisy and once at Gavin. “I think I’ll let you live,” she mumbled. “It’ll be my gift to those three scary fucks.”
Three scary fucks? Oh my God, Daisy thought. She’s working with Aiden and his sisters. Who else could it be? “Did Fates—”
The morpher’s eyes swirled as she stared at Daisy, brown moving through orange and yellow before settling into green. “I do my research.”
She blinked one last time, her eyelids drooping slowly. The knife dropped, its aim moving away from Daisy. The morpher swung it around, her arm arching first toward Gavin and the door, but she didn’t stop there. She flicked her wrist one more time.
And aimed at the corgi.
Chapter Twenty-Two
Gavin heard the morpher’s wrist as she threw the blade. He heard the whoosh as it sliced through the air.
The corgi screamed. She whirled, thrown by the force of the knife ripping through her haunch, and smashed against the bank of lockers. Her little corgi voice yipped out pain and shock and why?
Why did the human hurt her?
Why did her back leg just shatter? Why was she bleeding?
The morpher’s head swung in a circle. Her face changed as her nose traced an arc in the air, flattening, then filling out. Her bones creaked. Her tendons snapped. Gavin heard her re-forming her spine.
Daisy screamed too, her voice full of the intent obvious on her body: Save the dog.
I have to save the dog.
She lunged across the aisle, her body sliding along the concrete floor, and both her hands locked onto the little corgi’s back leg.
The morpher stepped backward at the same time her too-big Hawaiian print shirt flicked off her shoulders. But she ran out of sight, toward the back of the locker room, before Gavin got a glimpse of what she wore underneath.
Outside the room, Ivan yelled again.
Gavin slid along the outside of the lockers, his clothes catching and pulling, but he forced his body to move. One hand gliding along the lockers for stability, the other on the bench next to him, he staggered toward the door.
The handle pressed downward. The door clicked. The hinges groaned and Ivan wrapped her arms around his waist when he almost fell over.
On the other end of the locker room, Daisy yelled something he did not understand. Next to his face, Ivan swore.
Acoustics vanished into a tsun
ami of sound and the world ripped and strained and ground against itself so loudly Gavin understood nothing. He drowned in the opposite of silence.
Ivan yelled at Daisy, who yelled back. Ivan nodded, then touched his cheek before looking over her shoulder.
Ivan vanished from his perception and a masculine version of Daisy’s voice expanded into the vacant space. The man’s deep baritone rolled through the din and through Gavin’s head and sinuses. Sounds of gloves releasing from hands followed. Two large male hands wrapped around his neck—and stale locker room air pumped into his lungs.
The hands pulled back.
Why didn’t you tell us of your burndust allergy, Mr. Bower? the hands signed.
Gavin shook his head. “I don’t know,” he groaned.
But he did. He forgot. Forgot to say, Oh, by the way, I can’t be around Burners. As if he truly understood what a Burner was or what all this meant.
Behind him, the corgi’s yips changed from shattering pain to fear to thankfulness. Daisy must have healed the little dog.
Not that he understood Daisy’s abilities, either.
Or, for that matter, Rysa’s. Why did she give him the numbers but not a warning?
Maybe, like him, she forgot. Shifters and Fates and Burners were more than he could think about at one time. Maybe it was more than she could, too.
The din of Mount Rushmore washed through his bones. The waves of his new life flooded his eyes and his nose and his ears.
What the hell have I gotten caught up in? he thought. Who the hell are these people?
The corgi walked over, her fur bloody but her body, it seemed, mended. She looked up at him with her big brown puppy eyes, her big tan puppy ears erect. She’d once been the pet of a psychopath. But now, it seemed, she wanted to choose a new life.
“Hey, girl,” he said, and scratched her head. “Looks like Daisy saved you, too.”
She woofed and her intent rode out as clear as a bell on her doggy voice: I like humans.
Gavin chuckled. Behind him, Mr. Pavlovich smiled. Daisy, now covered in corgi blood along with the burndust, stayed back.
Ivan stepped around the far end of the bank of lockers, her shoulders tight and her step belligerent. She yelled something Gavin didn’t understand and punched the closest locker.
The morpher must have gotten away.
“I think I want to go home,” Gavin said.
On the other side of the room, Daisy nodded.
The corgi jumped up on the bench. She swiveled her head, first looking at Gavin, then at Daisy and Ivan.
The little dog padded along the bench. She stopped in front of Ivan, her butt moving so fast her tail fuzzed out. Ivan’s face showed her shock at the corgi’s interruption of her anger, and rubbed both of the little dog’s sides, the bloody and the not bloody.
When she bent forward, the little dog licked her face.
The tiniest smile moved across Ivan’s lips. “I… call you…” Ivan said, “Emergency Rations!”
Gavin laughed even though, deep down, he felt as if he and the dog had a lot more in common than he wanted to admit.
Chapter Twenty-Three
Gavin watched Daisy squirm on the uncomfortable nylon weave of the waiting room chairs. She wore knee-length stretchy leggings or yoga-something-or-others along with sandals that looked more like Roman military footwear than anything comfortable. Between the laces wrapping around her calves and the taut, dark gray fabric smoothed over her lower half, Gavin found paying attention to his Praesagio Industries “hearing technology weekly survey”… difficult.
He kept his difficulties to himself. After that crazy morpher vanished with the Fate artifact, Ivan disappeared to God-knows-where and left her new corgi friend with Mr. Pavlovich. They’d all sat in the back of his limo, Daisy’s boys at her feet and the corgi on her father’s lap, the Shifters refusing to say anything beyond “the Seraphim will pay.”
Mr. Pavlovich rented hotel rooms in Rapid City, to allow them to clean up and recoup. Daisy spent several hours that evening in the room adjacent to Gavin’s, talking softly with her father, then yelling, then talking softly again.
He’d tried not to listen. Most of their words he couldn’t make out, but their intent came through the wall loud and clear: Dmitri Pavlovich Romanov would not rest until he found the real Cecilia Reynolds. There’d been more yelling after that, and whispers. And, perhaps, tears.
Prying didn’t seem polite, so he’d only asked Daisy if she wanted to talk. Four hours later, he’d learned a lot about her hometown of Perth, and she’d begun to smile again.
On the plane, though, when he asked if she wanted to catch a movie and maybe get some dinner, she watched him for longer than he liked. Her face did all the little pulls and pushes women’s faces do when they’re running through their lists of male pros and cons. Sitting next to Daisy in the cushy seats of her father’s very expensive plane, he saw her move from “he’s cute,” to “he’s young,” to “I’m almost done with my professional degree and he’s a pre-med undergrad.”
So friendship it would be, for Mr. Gavin Bower.
She insisted on checking his place when they returned and sniffed around for signs of Fates or Shifters. And she’d insisted on accompanying him to his follow-up audiologist appointment. “Just in case,” she said.
The stretchy yoga knee-length pants were distracting. The lobby’s fluorescent lights glared. Gavin couldn’t understand the nurses when they called, so he looked to Daisy, who shook her head yes or no, her lusciously wavy black ponytail bouncing with each movement of her head. Then she’d squirm, as uncomfortable as he was, and sigh.
The truth was, he shouldn’t complain. She was so far out of his league she looked down on him from high orbit and he should count himself lucky she wanted to be friends.
He should also count himself lucky that Rysa still considered him a friend. All the changes she’d gone through had turned her into some sort of super-Fate and now she spent her days in Wyoming engaged to a badass and his shimmering dragon.
Daisy had seemed as shocked as Gavin.
Shocked like jealous-shocked, though Gavin easily could have been projecting his own feelings onto her blinking, round-lipped response. But all his rationalizing did nothing to calm his fears about this Ladon guy showing up at the end of the summer, all pin-up boy handsome and ready to add Daisy to his I-already-stole-Rysa harem.
Which was probably the stupidest fucking bit of jealousy that had ever stomped through Gavin’s head. It left a bad taste and made him feel as if Daisy would punch him at any moment for being the jerk that he was.
No punches followed though, or slaps. She sat next to him on the bus ride over from the St. Paul campus to the hospital complex on the Minneapolis side, smiling and practicing her rusty American Sign Language, and now she wiggled on the neighboring waiting room chair.
Gavin forced himself to return his attention to his phone. With the week’s distractions, he’d forgotten to fill out his survey before coming over for his follow-up with Dr. Montgomery, so he started it now.
He tapped the link in his last e-mail from Praesagio. After entering his password, he held up his phone. “Want to see the survey?”
Turned out Mr. Pavlovich had developed quite an interest in Praesagio Industries, including several promises to “get to the bottom of who interfered with your hearing, Mr. Bower.”
Gavin figured that his Fate friend would be the most interested, but it seemed she had other worries. No one had yet shared any interesting corporate gossip, Rysa included.
Daisy perked up and scooted closer. She peered at his phone, her eyes narrow, and sat back, grinning. “Doesn’t look nefarious to me.”
Gavin chuckled. “It’s all ‘On a scale of one to ten, one being significant degeneration and ten being significant improvement, how well do you feel you have experienced high-pitched tones this week?’”
Daisy smiled and looked right at him, so he could read her lips. “On a scale of one to ten, o
ne being significant degeneration, and ten being significant improvement, how freaked out are you by your new life, Mr. Bower?” She friend-punched his shoulder.
Gavin opened his mouth to tell her that his life was what it was, and that the hell they’d just gone through wasn’t worse than waking up without his hearing. Or learning that the doctors had amputated his little brother’s leg.
Behind him, someone walked down the clinic’s corridor toward the waiting area. When he glanced over his shoulder, Dr. Montgomery waved him back.
He glanced at Daisy. They’d already talked about her accompanying him into his appointment, but frankly, he didn’t want a babysitter. Her nose twitched and her eyes hardened for a microsecond. Then she nodded, indicating she didn’t sense anything out of the ordinary with Dr. Montgomery.
At this point, he’d happily give up his super-hearing. Reading lips was exhausting and he wanted his understanding of spoken language back. “This will take about an hour.”
Daisy squeezed his arm. “I’ll get us coffee and meet you here later, okay? If you get out early, text me.”
Gavin nodded as he stood. Dr. Montgomery said something, but he missed it. I didn’t catch that, he signed.
She nodded and stepped into the corridor’s doorway, waiting.
Daisy pulled the straps of her red bag onto her shoulder. “You want… sugary?”
Gavin nodded yes and watched her walk toward the elevators.
“… dating, Gavin?” Dr. Montgomery grinned like a nosy aunt.
Gavin snorted. “Friend,” he said. “I haven’t filled out my survey yet.”
She waved him forward. That’s fine, she signed. I’ve been on the phone with the lab all week. They apologize and sent a new update.
She handed him a piece of paper. The omnipresent Praesagio Industries: Making a difference for the world to see logo and tag line rolled across the top of the page, along with two sub-logos. Special Medical he recognized, but the second, Customer Heuristics and Relational Logistics Environmental Services, he did not.
Bonds Broken & Silent (Fate Fire Shifter Dragon Book 4) Page 31