Celtic Dragons

by Dee Bridgnorth

  He laughed to himself, wondering when the last time he had thought the phrase cool chick.

  “What are you smiling about?” Siobhan demanded. “You just had a vision about a murderous creep trying to get revenge on his mother by brutalizing and killing her. Have some shame, man.”

  It was true—she was right. He had been terrified of his visions at first and burdened by them later, but right now, with her there to face them with him, they didn’t seem like anything he couldn’t handle. Maybe he could live a life of righting the wrongs that came to him in shadows in his mind. There were worse existences. And if it meant he had to keep working with Siobhan…

  “Clearly, shame is not your forte,” Siobhan concluded, getting up, her plate in hand. “Okay, so, anyway. Enough about your naked girlfriend and the sex we’re not having tonight. I want you to meet up with Moira at the warehouse she found and see if it’s the one you keep seeing. She’s moving ahead on looking at a list of employees there now to try to be ready for whenever you confirm. I think our next steps are to check into our theory that Melanie is this guy’s mom, and then locate the guy.”

  “Are we going to confront him?” Julian asked. “I don’t really know how this crime-stopping thing works.”

  She waved her fork. “Not my forte either. I usually come onto the scene after someone has done something wrong. But—I have an idea. I like to be straightforward with people, right?”

  “That’s the understatement of the year.”

  Siobhan pointed the same fork at him. “That was a rhetorical question. Anyway—I like to be straightforward. So I say that when we find this guy, we just tell him we know what his plans are. That we know he’s planning to murder his mother for revenge, and we’re not going to let it happen.”

  Julian blinked at her, not sure if she was serious. “What? Just like that? Just, ‘Hi, we know you’re a murderer. Please don’t. Bye.’”

  “List our other options.”

  Julian thought for a moment, circling the top of his wine glass with one finger as he considered all the possibilities. They could detain him. But…if he hadn’t done anything wrong, that made them kidnappers who were unlawfully detaining a citizen they couldn’t accuse of a crime. They could…watch Melanie and take him down when he finally went after her. But his visions were no longer operating on a pattern, and he had no idea what the timeline for these events were. They couldn’t just watch Melanie indefinitely. They didn’t have the time or manpower for that, and even if they did, it wasn’t practical. They could report what they knew to the authorities and let them handle it, but they had no proof, and the reason that he hadn’t gone to the police in the first place was that he didn’t want them to call him crazy and dismiss the whole thing.

  So that pretty much left confronting the man and trying to handle the situation with him first.

  “Huh,” he finally said, looking back at her. “I see what you mean.”

  “I’m a genius. You should get comfortable with that concept.”

  He rolled his eyes at her. “Yeah, okay. Just so you know, I’m in this now. I want to be involved in every single step. So if you’re going to confront this man, I’m going to be there too. This is personal for me now. I thought I could keep it from becoming part of me, but this is my life now, and I’m not going to sit and watch people get murdered in my mind and not be a part of stopping it.”

  To his surprise, Siobhan walked over to him and extended her hand, smiling. “Welcome aboard.”

  Chapter Fifteen

  Siobhan

  “Aha!” Siobhan rapped her hand against her desk, leaning back in her seat as she smiled triumphantly at her computer. She had been hunched over her desk for the last several hours, doing research—her least favorite part of the job—and she had finally found something useful.

  Kean poked his head into her office, eyebrows raised. “Breakthrough?”

  “Yep. Wait—I thought you were watching Melanie.”

  “No. Ronan is taking a shift for a few hours,” Kean told her, walking in and sitting down. “I gave him grief, by the way, for being so out of touch lately. From you personally. He sends his apologies.”

  Momentarily distracted from the case she was wholly invested in now, Siobhan frowned. “So you talked to him? Did he give you any explanation?”

  “He says he’s busy…and that things have been stressful.” Kean shook his head, his own expression betraying worry. “He may be in over his head with this thing. Maybe we pushed too hard, too soon on making the change from arranged marriages within the clan to all of us taking human partners all at once. It’s a lot.”

  Siobhan bit her lip, feeling a range of things that she wasn’t sure how to deal with. “There’s no going back now, is there though?”

  Kean shook his head. “Not for me. I won’t give up Dhara. But I hate that it’s doing this to Ronan.”

  “Me too.”

  “What breakthrough did you have?”

  Siobhan had to think for a moment, her mind still focused on her concern for her friend and their leader. “Oh…uh, with Melanie. I found birth records for her when she was sixteen. It confirms a theory that Julian and I have that this guy who wants to kill her is actually her kid. At least, it’s a step toward confirmation.”

  “Nice,” Kean said. “So…Julian. He’s back in, huh? You guys are good now?”

  “Yeah, actually we are,” Siobhan said, lacing her fingers and resting her chin on them as she leaned further back in her chair. “It’s strange. We started off so badly, and then last night, he just invited me over to his apartment. He had this nice dinner made, and he apologized for his part in everything. He said he wanted to be a part of the case. That it was personal. And the crazy thing is that I didn’t want to strangle him every time he opened his mouth.”

  “That’s a bonus.”

  “The real bonus came when his ex-booty call showed up in a trench coat and nothing else, then freaked out when she saw me and made a fool of herself.”

  Kean chuckled, reaching across the desk to high five her. “Nice. Dinner and a show.”

  “That’s exactly what I said.” Siobhan smirked, shaking her head in amusement as she remembered what a disaster of a night it had been for Caroline—and it was only her own fault, so she didn’t have sympathy for the woman. “Anyway, we’re good. He’s at work this morning, but he’s talking to his boss this afternoon about taking some paid leave for medical purposes. We figure that experiencing murderous visions qualifies as a medical issue. That’ll give him more time to work with us.”

  “Sounds like you have it all figured out.” Kean was looking at her strangely, a slight smile on his face.

  Siobhan’s brow knit together. “Okay, what gives?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Bullshit.”

  “Nothing…”

  “You literally look like the cat who swallowed an early bird.”

  Kean laughed, sitting up and leaning forward. “That’s not the phrase. The cat who swallowed the canary.”

  “There’s a cat and a bird and one of them gets eaten. Why is that how you look?”

  Still chuckling, Kean shrugged a shoulder. “I just think it’s interesting.”

  “What’s interesting?”

  “You and Julian.”

  Siobhan narrowed her eyes, though she had known this was the direction they were headed. “Okay, don’t start with that. With my luck, he’ll walk in right as I’m denying it again.”

  “Why deny it?”

  “Because,” she said firmly. “After last night, I do know that he’s a nice guy. But that doesn’t mean that he’s the one everyone—including me—is now waiting to have walk into my life. He’s not my Dhara, or my Grady, or my Autumn. He’s drop-dead gorgeous, sure. I’m not saying I’m not attracted to him. Or that he’s not a nice person. Or that we don’t have fun together, now that we’ve come to a better understanding. I’m just saying…he’s not my guy.”

  “Okay.”

&nb
sp; “Seriously, Kean. He’s not the one.”

  “Okay.”

  “Kean.”

  Laughing, Kean threw his hands up. “I’m not arguing with you, Siobhan!”

  “You’re still eating canaries,” she muttered, then quickly changed the subject—at least a little. “Listen, since you’re here, there’s something I need to tell you. Julian had a vision last night while I was there, and in that vision, he saw a golden dragon.”

  Kean’s teasing, light mood vanished, and he immediately grew businesslike. “In what context?”

  “Looking through a window in the warehouse he keeps seeing, watching the man who is supposedly going to murder Melanie.”

  “How did he react?”

  Siobhan gestured with one hand. “Confused, of course. It made him doubt his visions a little, because he doesn’t think that dragons can be real, and so maybe the rest of it isn’t real either. He thought it was random, which, without context, it definitely is.”

  Rubbing his chin, Kean nodded. “Must have freaked you out.”

  “I barely kept a straight face, yeah.”

  “Well,” Kean sighed. “You have to be prepared for the fact that being around a guy with psychic visions could very well lead to him finding out not just that secret but any others you might have. That’s par for the course. I would say, don’t bring it up again unless he asks, and just be careful. There’s not much else you can do.”

  Siobhan got up, walking over to the window and adjusting the blinds that were letting in too much of the summer sun. “I wonder though. Do I have a choice about being outside that window in dragon form? Are his visions predictions of things that must happen? Can they be interfered with? What happens if I’m not there? What happens if I am?”

  “The future can always be altered,” Kean told her, standing up too. “Nothing is ever written in stone. Listen, I’m meeting Dhara for lunch. Come over one night soon, okay? We’ll just hang out.”

  “When this case is done,” she agreed, turning back to look at him. “Thanks.”

  He waved to her. “Yeah, anytime. Catch you later.”

  He was gone from her office, and Siobhan sat down at her desk, printing off the documentation she had found about Melanie’s first pregnancy. She placed it in her open manila folder that held all of her documentation on the case, then went back to her computer, tackling her next task. She needed to figure out what had happened to that child. Had he stayed with Melanie for a time? Had he been adopted? Taken away from her? Had he always lived with her and been a healthy, well-adjusted adult living somewhere else, totally unaware of what was in the works for his mother?

  She couldn’t say for sure yet, but if this child was now the balding man with murderous urges, then her best chance of tracking the man down was to follow him through the system.

  “Please be in the foster system…” Siobhan muttered to herself. “Normally I wouldn’t wish that on anyone, but I need you to be easy to track…”

  She spent the next thirty minutes hunting through the internet, trying to pick up the trail on the child Melanie had at sixteen years old. And as she did, she didn’t let her mind wander. She didn’t let herself think about what Julian was doing right then, or the many times that their eyes had caught and held the night before, or the fact that all of his nitpicky ways were starting to grow on her, or the fact that Kean seemed convinced, as did Moira, that this guy had the potential to be her fated partner, destined to know her secrets and share his life with her.

  Siobhan wasn’t convinced that Julian was the one. After all, they were fundamentally different, even if there was clearly an attraction there. And maybe she and everyone else just wanted so badly to find her mate that they were willing to land on the first cute guy that walked through the door. She didn’t want to jump to conclusions and end up with her heart broken or end up with the person she wasn’t supposed to be with.

  And anyway, all of these thoughts were so premature. She and Julian had only been able to stand each other for the past eighteen hours, and that was hardly anything to build a life of love and destiny on. She needed to keep her thoughts guarded and her heart walled off with so many questions still unanswered.

  She would do that. She was stubborn enough to follow through.

  The problem was, though, that even in her walled-off state, she kept checking the time on her computer to see if Julian would be coming by soon.

  Chapter Sixteen

  Julian

  “I haven’t had a vision all day.”

  Siobhan looked up from her computer, her eyes resting on Julian as he stood in her doorway. She blinked at him, then sat back in her chair, unhunching her back from its uncomfortable position. “Okay…why is that bad? Also, it’s three o’clock. Give it a minute.”

  He sighed, walking in and sitting down, his hands sliding down over his denim-clad thighs. “I know. I know.” Pausing his internal thought process, he looked at her for a moment. “What are you wearing?”

  “Is this a dirty game you’re starting, or are you blind?” she asked, smirking. “I’m wearing overalls. What are you wearing?”

  “Not overalls.”

  She looked down at herself and frowned. “What’s wrong with them? They’re cute.” Standing up, she showed off the whole outfit, her loose-fitting overalls ending in tiny shorts that once again showed off those svelte, tanned legs. Underneath the overalls, she was just wearing a cream-colored tank top that accentuated her toned arms and fit snuggly against her chest.

  Julian found his mouth actually watering as he imagined undoing her overalls and letting them slide down until they hit the floor.

  “Cute,” he agreed, swallowing hard. “Yep. Just unusual. That’s all. Forget I asked. Back to my visions. I’m not having them.”

  She studied him for a moment, frowning. “You’re a weird dude. You know that, right?”

  “I’m becoming aware of it, yes.”

  “Well, as long as you know.” She sat back down and promptly ignored his concerns over his lack of visions. “Did you get a few days off work?”

  “Ten days, actually. I have a lot of vacation time stored up,” Julian told her, trying not to stare at the messy bun of blonde hair sitting on top of her head, loose strands slipping out of the updo to frame her face and resting against her long neck.

  God, how had she suddenly gone from a gorgeous girl to an utterly delectable, irresistible girl?

  “Sweet,” Siobhan said, pushing the open folder beside her toward him. “I’ve been making progress, and you’re just in time, because we are going on a mission. I used our database that we pay for to look up Melanie’s history, and like we suspected, she did give birth young. Sixteen years old, actually. And that baby stayed with her for three years.”

  Julian let out a low whistle. “Long enough for him to have maybe a memory or two.”

  “In theory,” she agreed. “I also discovered that Melanie moved out of her parents’ home at nineteen years old, because she enrolled in college classes and signed up for a dorm room. Her roommate, fun fact, was named Darcy Darby. I think that’s cruel and unusual.”

  “I agree with that.”

  “Kid couldn’t go with her.”

  “So where did he go?”

  Siobhan leaned over the desk, tapping the folder. “It’s all in here. Documentation. But there are gaps. I don’t know where he is between three and seven years old. With her parents, perhaps? I don’t know. But at seven years old, he shows up in the foster system?”

  “Hold on, hold on,” Julian said, holding up a hand. “You forget I don’t do this every day. How do we know it’s him? I mean, where do you see his name?”

  “Oh, sorry,” Siobhan said, flipping the paperwork backward. “I skipped that step. So, two years after he was born, Melanie registers a kid at a publicly funded daycare. Has to be him, right? And the name …Xander Blanchard.”

  Julian winced. “Yikes. That’s a name.”

  “Okay, Julian Giordano. You’re one
to talk.”

  “Hey!”

  “Anyway…” Siobhan didn’t stop to let him linger in his indignation. “So, we know that she named her kid Xander Blanchard. I also found a few medical records, which confirm the name. So Xander Blanchard shows up in the foster care records when he’s seven years old, and he changes houses every single year. Every. Single. Year.”

  “Wait, every single year?” Julian asked dryly, mocking her emphasis.

  “Yes, that’s what I just said.”

  “I know. I was making fun of you.”

  She pursed her lips at him. “Oh, well, don’t. You’re not funny.” There was a smile on her lips that told him they were bantering back and forth, and he found that his own smile matched hers. “Sometimes it was more than one year, by the way. I can trace him all the way to his eighteenth birthday, and then …bye-bye, Xander Blanchard.”

  “He’s just off the grid?”

  “Or he changed his name.” She shrugged. “Or he’s dead and this guy is not him. Either way, I don’t see a record. I can’t pick up that name anywhere, even on a name-change form filed with the state.” Siobhan got up from the desk, rounding it and perching on the edge, seemingly unaware of what the sight of her long legs did to him. “So you need to have another vision.”

  He gestured back toward the doorway. “Did you not hear what I said when I came in? They’ve stopped.”

  “For the minute, they’ve stopped,” she agreed. “But you just had one last night. I don’t think it’s time to panic now. What I do think is that it’s time to try to trigger one.”

  Julian frowned, not liking the sound of that. “I thought Ophelia said that they weren’t something you could control.”

  “They’re not,” Siobhan agreed, sitting down in the chair beside him and tucking one leg beneath her. “You’ll get them when you don’t expect them. You can’t control what you see or alter the visions from within the visions. They’re images sent to you, like video clips that are for your eyes only. But…with practice and through channeling power, you can sometimes prompt one.”

  “Of Melanie specifically?” Julian asked, still feeling skeptical about the whole thing. “All of my visions have been of her lately, so I guess they would continue to be.”