Forbidden Embers

by Tessa Adams

  Even her hair was different. Instead of flowing down her back in its usual straight style, it was completely out of control. Wavy, curly, snarled in some places, it looked like someone had spent hours plunging his hands through it. Immediately, her mind jumped back to Logan and their kiss by the lake. He had grabbed on to her hair, had wrapped it around his fist, and she had loved every second of it. And now, standing here, she loved knowing that in doing that, he had marked her in a tangible way—even if a shower would take care of it.

  Her sex clenched at the thought of being marked by Logan in a more permanent way, and she heard him whisper again—as her fantasy lover had the night before—that he would spank her if she didn’t listen to him. Her knees turned to jelly at the memory, and she would have fallen if she hadn’t grabbed on to the counter to catch herself.

  God. She was insane. Absolutely crazy. This whole thing with the factionnaires was driving her completely around the bend. What other explanation was there for what she’d been thinking and fantasizing about?

  Can the real Cecily Fournier please stand up? she demanded, shaking her head as if doing so would get her sluggish brain back on the right channel. She had a meeting today—probably the most important meeting of her life—and she couldn’t afford to be muddled, sex-drunk, horny. She needed to be sharp, to focus, or the Conseil would walk all over her. That was something that Cecily—new or old—would never allow.

  Stripping off her nightgown, she dropped it in the hamper against the wall and stepped into the steaming hot shower. She washed quickly, refusing to be distracted by her tender breasts or the ache between her legs. Last night had been strange, fantastical, fantastic, but it was daylight now and she had much bigger things to worry about than her nonexistent sex life. It was time to get her head in the game.

  Six hours later, she wasn’t nearly so sure she wouldn’t have been better off lying around the house and fantasizing about Logan. If she thought the meeting had gone badly yesterday, when they’d been unprepared for her, then she was sorely mistaken. Because now that they’d had twenty-four hours to think and strategize and unite, the factionnaires were coming after her—and they were loaded for bear. Or dragon, as the case may be.

  “With all due respect, Cecily, you don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  Julian’s voice rang, loud and clear and condescending, through the meeting room. Just the sight of him earlier that morning had set her teeth on edge, and nothing he’d done since had endeared him to her.

  Not that he cared. The more time she spent around the narcissistic asshole, the more she realized he cared about nothing but his perceived position in the clan. How he failed to realize that alienating her was not going to get him what he wanted, she didn’t know. But, obviously, he was nowhere near as shrewd as her father had given him credit for. That, or he really didn’t think she had any power.

  Of course, on that point, he was dead-on, but that didn’t mean it was going to stay like that. It wasn’t. She really didn’t care what three thousand years of tradition and fourteen factionnaires said; it was more than time for her to have an active role in the Conseil. After all, not one person sitting in this room cared more about the future of this clan than she did.

  Not trusting herself to answer Julian’s latest put-down—it was the sixth or seventh of the day—she counted to ten, then back down to one, then to ten again before she felt it was safe to open her mouth. And even then she wanted nothing more than to kick him out of the room, off the Conseil and out of the clan.

  She couldn’t do that, though. Not now and probably not ever. Especially not with the way Remy, Acel and Etienne were backing just about everything he said, looking for any chance to kick her out of the room once and for all. Which meant, for a while, anyway, that she would be better off working with him instead of against him. It grated—God, did it ever—but she had no doubt she would have to do worse for her clan than make nice with Julian before this nightmare was over.

  “I understand that I have a lot to learn,” she finally told him in the calmest voice she could manage. “That’s why I’m here, asking to be filled in on the clan’s inner workings. I’ve been watching things since my father’s death, and I’m not nearly as inept as you all seem to think I am.”

  When no one butted in to tell her they thought differently, Cecily buried her hurt and anger behind a layer of unbreakable ice and told herself that it was okay. If she was at rock bottom in terms of their trust, then up really was the only way she could go.

  Shrugging off the fact that none of the men she’d considered her friends—not even Gage or Thierren—had come to her defense, she said, “Let me tell you a little of what I’ve figured out since my father died.”

  She held up one finger and began ticking off her observations. “One, we’re on the brink of a full-scale war with both the Dragonstar and Shadowdrake clans. In the past five months, we’ve lost nearly a hundred dragons in battles with them—including my father and my brother. Jacob was killed in what I’m assuming was a raid on the Dragonstar compound.”

  “They don’t actually have a compound,” interjected Wyatt. She stared at him, unsure if he was trying to make her look even more ignorant than she was or if he was genuinely trying to help. Either way, she didn’t stop him, as she wanted to know, to learn as much as she could. “It’s more of a city in the middle of the New Mexican desert. They’re a lot less war oriented than we are—or, at least, they’re set up that way. Their behavior lately, however, couldn’t be more at odds with peace.”

  She let his last comment go, as she had her own theories about it and wasn’t quite ready to discuss them yet, and focused instead on what he’d said about the way the Dragonstars lived. The news that they had a civilian setup instead of a military one surprised her, especially considering how much violence had passed between the Wyvernmoons and Dragonstars in the past couple of years.

  “Where are they located exactly?” she asked.

  “A little outside of Las Cruces, New Mexico. They have a town out there, along with a huge network of underground caverns that they live in.”

  She nodded, jotting yet another note in the journal she’d brought with her to the meeting. They’d been talking for only an hour and already she’d filled close to twenty pages with things she should have known but hadn’t. Things she needed to know if she had any hope of keeping the Wyvernmoons from extinction.

  “And where is the Shadowdrake clan from? I know they’re in California, but—”

  “San Diego,” Gage said, in the slow, deep drawl that always reminded her of her childhood. “They’re about an hour and a half outside of the downtown, and they live on a compound similar to ours.”

  “Thanks.” She shot him a quick smile. He didn’t return it like he normally would have, but he did nod, and there was a gleam in his eyes that none of the other dragons had. It made her feel a little better, though she couldn’t have said why.

  She added the information he’d given her to the notebook and then turned to Wyatt. “And thank you,” she added, before continuing with her earlier train of thought. “So, Jacob was killed on some kind of raid of this town in New Mexico?”

  “Yes.” This time it was Dash who spoke up. “He took twenty or so dragons with him and attacked the woman who is now the Dragonstar queen.”

  “Why?”

  “Excuse me?” She didn’t think he could have looked more surprised if she had asked him to strip naked and crow like a rooster. Which told her a lot more about the Wyvernmoon state of mind than she wanted to believe.

  “Why did he do it?” she repeated. “It’s not like we don’t have enough problems here at home with years of bad crops, poor food distribution to the civilian clan members and a war brewing with the Shadowdrakes. Why would he deliberately go down and antagonize the Dragonstars? Have they been attacking us and I’m just not aware of it?” she demanded.

  “Noooo—”

  “Yes.” Acel interrupted Dash with a fierce frown
. “Cecily, we’ve been engaged in skirmishes with both of those clans for decades now. You know that. Trying to understand one battle in the overall war is almost impossible.”

  “So now it’s a full-scale war?” she demanded. “You actually consider us at war with these clans?”

  “No, of course not,” Remy said at the exact moment Julian responded, “Of course.”

  She raised an eyebrow and looked in astonishment at the other factionnaires in the room. “Well, which is it? Are we at war or aren’t we?”

  They all began talking at once, and after a minute, she gave up trying to follow a conversation that resembled a three-ring circus much more than it did a rational discussion. Instead, she reviewed the notes she had already taken for the day and waited for everyone to wind down so they could pick up where they’d left off.

  Withdrawing from the conversation also gave her a chance to process the absolute shock she’d felt that half of the Conseil really believed that they were at war. How could that be? What had her father said to make them believe that he felt like war was a viable option at a time when they could barely feed their people?

  And if he had said something, how could the rest of the factionnaires not pick up on it? How could they believe that the clan wasn’t at war? She would’ve wondered if all this confusion—all these different definitions of war—had come about after her father’s death, except for the fact that he had died in battle. As had Jacob. Which she had to believe meant he’d truly thought they were fighting for something important, so important that he was willing to risk his life and the lives of his son and his factionnaires to obtain it.

  But what was it? What had he been trying to gain—or defend? she wondered as she concentrated on listing her thoughts in her notebook, no matter how random some of them were. This was how she thought things through, how she saw evidence of emerging patterns, by recording—by hand—all the information and ideas she ran across.

  She was totally aware of the condescending way most of the Conseil had looked at her when they’d seen her pen and paper, as if she’d barely entered the twentieth century, let alone the twenty-first. She knew from the looks they’d shot one another that they thought her lack of computer savvy meant she was stupid.

  It didn’t, any more than her use of a notebook meant she didn’t know her way—intimately—around the various computers and equipment that lined one long wall of the meeting room. She did. But this was her party, and she would do things her way. If that meant they underestimated her, well, then, they had nobody but themselves to blame.

  As she kept her mouth shut and continued writing, she picked out a few choice phrases from the argument her factionnaires were still waging—just enough to let her know that there were two main schools of thought on the current issue. Either the Dragonstars and Shadowdrakes were provoking them and the Wyvernmoons were simply responding in kind, or the Wyvernmoons were doing the provoking.

  She weighed the probabilities of both scenarios in her head, based on the information she currently had—which, she had to admit, was sorely lacking. She looked at them in combination with the things she’d already written down throughout the day and didn’t like the conclusions she came to.

  “Why have we been provoking them?” she asked when the room finally fell into a seething kind of silence.

  “We haven’t—” Julian started again, but she held up her hand to cut him off.

  “I’m not aware of any raids from either of those clans on our compound in the past year. Longer, really, but let’s go with the past twelve months, just to be clear. Except for the one where my father was killed.”

  “Like that wasn’t enough?” Luc demanded. “They came here and killed our king. We should already be at war, instead of just contemplating it behind closed doors. What kind of a message does it send if we don’t avenge Silus’s death?”

  “We’ve tried,” Remy answered. “Brock got his neck snapped for the privilege, as have numerous others.”

  “That’s because we’re going at this piecemeal,” Julian said firmly. “Everyone is doing their own thing, leading their own little faction. Whether it’s Wyatt’s group or Acel’s or even mine. We all have our own agendas and we’re not working together, when what we should be doing is uniting under one leader and going after them full force. This cloak-and-dagger stuff is ridiculous, especially considering the fact that we have the numbers to do it.”

  “But why do we want to do it?” Cecily demanded again. “I know they killed my family. I understand that, believe me. Nobody in this room misses Jacob more than I do. But I keep trying to figure this out, and every way I look at this, the blame is on us. We attacked them.”

  “That’s not strictly true,” said Garen. “Remember, they came here and killed Silus.”

  “Because we had Dylan MacLeod’s mate!” Thierren answered. “Are you forgetting that?”

  “The whys aren’t important,” Remy said with a wave of his hand.

  “I beg to differ,” Cecily objected. “The whys are everything here. Are we responsible for the situation we find ourselves in? Did we cause this enmity with the Dragonstars?”

  An uncomfortable silence, one that had her stomach sinking as her worst fears were confirmed, filled the room. “And what about the Shadowdrakes? Did we also kidnap Rafael’s mate?” she asked, referring to the Shadowdrake king.

  “He has no mate,” Devin answered.

  “Because he hasn’t found her yet, or because we killed her?”

  “Cecily! You’re being ridiculous!” Julian burst out.

  “Am I, Julian? Am I, really?” Taking a deep breath, she spent a long minute trying to figure out what she wanted to say—and how she wanted to say it. Their battles, their raids, their war—whatever they wanted to call it—had systematically been weakening the clan for years, taking money and resources away from the civilian dragons in an effort to gain . . . what? She didn’t have a clue, but whatever it was they were hoping to achieve, it hadn’t happened so far. All they’d done was hurt themselves—hurt the clan—almost beyond repair.

  But she couldn’t say that, not now. After all, there really was no good way to accuse the men in the room—and her father—of treason. Or, at least, the closest thing to it. Because the longer she sat there looking at the evidence, the more it began to seem like that was exactly what had been going on.

  Letting that fight go, for the moment, anyway, she asked, “What did we do to get the Shadowdrakes all worked up? They’re pretty reclusive over there in California, and I have trouble imagining them killing sixty or so of our clan mates without provocation.”

  “It’s not that simple,” Nicolas said.

  “On the contrary, I think it is exactly that simple. I have a hard time believing that two formerly peace-loving clans, acting independently of each other, suddenly have it out for us. Not for each other, not for anyone else, just for us. If we haven’t done something to provoke this, then what the hell is going on?”

  No one answered her, and no one looked her in the eye. Even Gage suddenly found his shoes a lot more interesting than her words. “Come on,” she added impatiently. “Until I know exactly what caused all of this, how am I supposed to be able to stop it?”

  “You think you’re going to stop it?” Acel burst out incredulously. “When your father couldn’t? That’s—”

  A well-placed elbow from Remy shut him up, but as she looked around her, she realized that nearly every man in the room was staring at her just as dubiously.

  “Cecily, darling.” Dax spoke up for the first time. “While we all very much appreciate your desire to be involved in the clan politics, the fact of the matter is, you’re out of your depth here. You don’t know all the history, you don’t know the particulars and you don’t know the players beyond the most superficial level. How, exactly, do you propose to devise a strategy to extricate us from this mess?”

  His voice was soft, his body language nonconfrontational, but she knew when she’d been put in he
r place. Her father had certainly done it to her often enough.

  The blood drained from her face as embarrassment filled her, along with a hopeless fury. Dax was her friend, had been for nearly her entire life. If he didn’t have any faith in her, how was she supposed to win over the other dragons like Remy and Acel and Luc, who had been around for well over half a millennia and who didn’t believe she had any right to even be in this room, let alone planning strategy for the clan?

  For a minute, she reeled under the weight of just how much she had to do. A part of her wanted nothing more than to run back to her house and hide, never to be seen in this room again. She didn’t need this—didn’t need the suspicion and the sarcasm, the maliciousness and the doubts. She’d gotten more than enough of those things growing up as Silus’s daughter.

  But she couldn’t just leave them to their own devices, either. With the route they were going, the clan would be under a full-scale attack in a matter of months. After all, you could pull a dragon’s tail for only so long before it showed you its teeth. She had a feeling Dylan MacLeod and Rafael Vega were on the brink of doing more than just showing their teeth—the two kings were about to gobble up the Wyvernmoons once and for all. And while the factionnaires would pay—more than likely with their lives—so would the clan’s civilian dragons, who would be dragged into the fight.

  That she couldn’t tolerate, not if there was any way she could stop it.

  She had to try, had to say something profound right now, or any progress she’d made—which was, admittedly, almost nonexistent—would disappear and she’d end up even further behind than she had been when she’d marched in here yesterday.

  “Diplomacy.” She groped for a better explanation, something that would prove she at least had a clue about how this game was played. “We need to reach out to Rafael and Dylan, show them that we’re not—”