“Freaking hypocrite,” I repeated, grinning. “Well, I’m going to need one of these, too. This one actually works for you?”
“It lets me pass Herotto Gates. We’ll have to try it out on a water ward before we walk into the Mabiian Heritage Museum, though.”
“You know that we’ll be powerless in there, right? Have you ever gone that length of time without your aspects?”
“No,” he said.
“It’s not fun. Also, this is a very flimsy button on this watch, if we accidentally close it and our aspects come back while we’re in there, I don’t know what will happen. We might die.”
“You don’t think I thought of that? Press the lever down and forward to lock it,” he said, chuckling.
“Oh,” I said, locking the button into the open position. “This is pretty smart,” I admitted, “Way less obvious than taking the bracelet on and off every time.”
“Actually, I had the first one made for you while I was here last time; it was a present.”
“You said you didn’t buy me anything,” I said, not looking at him.
“I wasn’t going to give it to you for your birthday. I was going to give it to you when I took you for dinner a few days later.” From the corner of my eye I saw him grin at me.
I handed him back his watch. “Well, it’s lucky, I guess. You always seem to be a step ahead of me.”
“But that’s not where I want to be,” he said.
I had nothing to say to that. Turning away, I laid my head on my knees and closed my eyes. When I woke, Wyvern had me in his arms and was maneuvering me into the front seat of his Vevari.
“Huh?” I asked.
He kissed my hair. “Go back to sleep.”
I woke again while we were pulling up to my mom’s eastern-style mansion rental. It was still titled ‘the mansion monstrosity’ in my mind, but now that the rent and utilities were paid regularly, it was growing on me.
Wyvern parked, then came around to my side.
I hurriedly climbed out myself. I made a beeline for the house, but Wyvern stopped me with hands on my shoulders before I made it to the door.
“Dakota, we need to talk,” he said.
“Right now?” I asked, yawning.
He grinned. “Not right now. Tomorrow.”
“I have school tomorrow,” I told him.
“I thought I ruined the public school for you and you’re never going back,” he said.
“I might have said that, but if I don’t get my act together I’m going to end up becoming a super-senior. Hopefully this crisis will be over soon, and then I’ll really regret having stopped going.”
“All right, then we’ll talk after school,” he said.
“After school, we’re meeting with Ailani.”
“In the evening then. I’ll finally take you out for that dinner,” he said.
“I have to—”
“Dakota,” he growled, though it sounded a little amused.
“What?” I said.
He pulled me to him and wrapped me in a hug. “I’m not going to take you out so I can beg you to take me back, I just need to talk to you. Also, I’d like us to spend some time together—as friends, if that’s how you want it to be. I enjoy being with you, and I’ll take time with you any way you’re willing to give it.”
Still pressed to his chest, I inhaled him, smelling that all too familiar sweet pepper scent. “Fine,” I said, voice muffled by his shirt. “We can talk tomorrow evening.”
The rest of the night dragged on. Thankfully, Wyvern didn’t try to climb into bed with me again. But back in my room, I laid in bed and stared at the walls, unable to fall back asleep. The events of the night just ran in repeat through my head. Harrison’s words kept haunting me: master manipulator, devious, and maybe the worst of all, what I ate for dinner a couple nights ago. I knew that if I had been able to deny any of them, they wouldn’t stick to my mind like super-glue. But they were true, the first two would always be true.
The way Harrison held me, that moment in the end where I thought he would kiss me, that was all for an innocent human—someone he could have chosen to mistreat with no one looking twice, but instead Harrison chose to honor and comfort me. That whole tender interaction was for someone I would never be.
I didn’t know Harrison; he was just someone with a compelling face that I’d had a tender interaction with. In a week or so, I would probably forget him. But I guess the whole thing bothered me because I knew that because of the person I was, I would never be held and cherished by a guy like that.
At the same time, I could never go back to being innocent. I had left innocent behind long ago. If I had a choice, I wouldn’t go back anyhow. Innocent and sweet would not keep the people I loved alive.
In the early hours of the morning, my mind finally gave me respite. All too soon my alarm was blaring, and I was seriously regretting my whole ‘I don’t want to be a super-senior’ speech.
Peeking into the dining room, I found Annie locked in a tense conversation with Sophie. Wyvern stood to one side, holding a low conversation in another language on the phone, his expression caught in a tense frown. There were four computers on the table where Teddy and Brian were furiously typing on theirs.
Not wanting to intrude on an obviously very tense situation, I stepped back and headed for the kitchen. Andrew was not standing in his usual place in the kitchen, and when I kept walking, I saw him standing beside the couch that held my mother, and sister. All three stared intently up at the television. The night-time scene showed a group of witches standing outside a resort I recognized, crying. At the bottom of the screen, the news line read ‘Over Eight Hundred Confirmed Dead at Resort in Mailua Due to Massive Attack.’
“What?” I said. “That’s the Mailua Volcano Resort.” It was one of my grandfather’s most popular supernatural resorts, I’d been there eight times on assignments.
“It’s horrible,” my mother said, crying. One look at my mother and I could tell she was already blitzed. She was clutching onto Stacy, whose eyes were open so wide that white ringed her pupils.
“Mom, Stacy shouldn’t be watching this before school,” I said. I walked around the couch and grabbed my sister out of my mother’s limp arms. “Did you miss the school bus, Stacy?”
She looked at the clock. “No,” she whispered.
“Good, do you have a lunch?” I asked.
“Yes.” A tear fell down her cheek.
I wiped the tear away. “Go get on the bus Stacy, and don’t think about what you saw on the news.” I leaned down and stared intently into her eyes. “Think about school and friends and stuff like that, okay?”
“Okay.”
“Promise?”
She stuck out her lower lip, but she nodded her promise.
When she’d left the house, I rushed to get my phone out of my backpack and called Glacier.
He answered on the second ring. “Everyone is accounted for, no family casualties,” was his greeting.
I sighed into the phone. “Are you—”
“I can’t talk.” The line went dead.
Re-entering the dining room, I found Wyvern off his phone but locked in an intense conversation with Sophie.
“Do you know what happened in Mailua?” I asked.
Five faces turned to me. Wyvern stepped forward, touching my arm. “Let’s go out here,” he said.
He was dressed in a suit and freshly showered, but from the look in his eyes, I could tell he hadn’t had much sleep, if any. He rubbed the back of his neck, and exhaled heavily. “Last night a group of three Castalan dracons, some of the great-great grandchildren of the Drac Rex, released poisonous spores at a cultural dance competition performance. It was in an indoor event center and everyone but them died almost immediately.”
“Why?” I asked.
“No one knows. They kept producing the spores, the negotiators couldn’t get in there to talk to them. Eventually the Draconic Bureau just had to shoot them or risk more fataliti
es.”
“Isn’t Castalan a New Anglo ally?” I asked.
“Not officially. They were part of the negotiations, but they wanted a little more time to be officially added.” I’ve been on the phone with the Castalan ambassador, he says that they didn’t sanction the attack.”
“A foreign dracon attack on this island chain days after what happened with Lorelei? It’s too much of a coincidence,” I said.
“How so?”
“Do you know of anything that could force dracons to lose control of their aspect?”
“Dracons lose control of their aspects all the time. Sometimes it’s because they’re inexperienced, or it could be because they’re in pain, also mental or physical illness can cause it.”
“Yeah, but more than one dracon simultaneously? Bobby and Lorelei, and then the three dracs, each losing control together.”
“I’m not sure.” He shook his head. “Perhaps it was a chain reaction because of the situation.”
“Or someone made them lose control,” I said. “What if one of those humans who attacked Lorelei had some kind of human power, like Keanu? Why else would they tear out her earrings unless they knew they could make her soul-sing? All of them could have this power. That could be what the tattoos mean.”
“Whatever those tattoos mean, I’m hoping we’ll find out later today. I have to fly over to Mailua for a meeting and a speech, but I will be back in time to go with you to meet Ailani.”
“You should sleep,” I told him, looking up into his beautiful pale face.
He wrapped his arms around me, holding me to him. “I’ll sleep on the flight back.”
“It’s a one-hour flight,” I said.
“On days like these, I’m lucky for an hour of sleep. I need to go meet my jet and people. I’ll miss you.” He kissed the top of my head.
“Friends don’t say that to each other when they’re only going to be apart for a couple hours,” I said.
“I’ll miss you, it’s the truth,” he said, walking away from me and out the front door.
Chapter Fifteen
My entrance to public school today could not have been more different than the day before. When no crowd waited for us outside the school, Mele, my security team, and I walked together in a loose group.
The school had a much more subdued feel, people stood quietly. At the open entrance, we passed a girl crying on her friend’s shoulder.
The crowd was waiting inside the school, but they couldn’t have cared less about us. Flower bouquets and folded papers littered the ground in a ring around eleven framed photographs. People knelt or held each other, most were crying.
“Oh gods,” Mele said, under her breath. “Do you think they were in Mailua?”
“I don’t know,” I said.
Except for a girl crying in the corner, my first class was silent as I entered. We waited in silence as the room filled with students. Right before the bell rang, my cousin Avery fell into the seat caddy-corner to me, his face red and puffy.
“Hey Dakota,” he mumbled.
“Hi Avery.” I reached over and rubbed his back. “Do you need anything?”
“Thanks,” he said, a tear falling down his face. “No.”
After the second bell rang, we spent the entire class talking about the students who had died. Ms. Akamu told us the students had been part of a statewide cultural dance school, and they’d gone to the Mailua resort for their yearly all-school winter performance.
When the bell rang, signaling the end of class, Avery turned to me. “I’m surprised you’re here, I thought you’d be sent out there.”
“Out where?” I asked.
“To Mailua. I thought Dad sent everyone out there.”
“I was suspended,” I said.
“Sorry. My dad’s a dick,” he said, stuffing his things into his backpack.
“Sometimes. But seriously, he sent everyone?”
“That’s what it sounded like. I guess people are freaking out over there, especially the vampires. An entire coven was comped tickets by Aunt Liza, and were killed by those Dracs. The three other covens on the island and a lot of other people are blaming the resort,” he said.
“Shit,” I said.
“Right? Well anyway, I got to get to class,” he slung his backpack over his shoulder and trudged out of the classroom.
“I hope your cousin is exaggerating,” Sophie said as we re-entered the hallway.
“Me too. I hate my uncle, but I honestly think that Reeves is way too smart to send all our defenses to one location at once,” I said. “You were there, Sophie…” I lowered my voice to a whisper, “Did Bobby disappear at the same moment Lorelei started sing?”
“No, a minute or two before,” she said in a low voice.
“Do you think it’s possible that someone made them lose control? Maybe even one of the humans?”
She stayed quiet for a long time. “I think it’s improbable... I’ve never heard of anything like that and if that was a power out there, the Draconic Bureau would know about it.” She paused. “I did think there was something unusual about the way your uncle vanished. Usually he’ll say something, or pause conversation, or get a look on his face, but this time he was in the middle of a word when he just vanished. Now that I think about it, it was the first time all night that I had seen him let go of Lorelei. He’d brought his hands together to indicate the size of something in the joke he was telling.”
“He wasn’t supposed to lose contact with her. And those servers were directly behind him.”
“I’ve never heard of any power like that, Dakota,” she repeated.
The rest of the school day was pretty much the same, every class except PE focused on the tragedy and the classmates who died. Not wanting to be intrusive, as I didn’t know the people and I had a huge entourage, I didn’t look at the memorial, though I passed it between every class.
On the way out to the car, though, I paused and took a look at the faces in the photographs. Most of them were Mabiian, a couple weren’t. Most of them looked about my age, but one girl looked a lot younger than the others. I wondered if she was the one Avery had tears for. When more students started gathering around, I signaled for my security team that we should leave.
“It’s weird how when I heard that eight hundred people died, it didn’t feel half as awful as when you actually see the faces of eleven of them,” Mele said as we drove back to her apartment.
“Eight hundred doesn’t feel real; eleven faces make it real,” I said.
She sighed. “Well, I’m off to work.”
“Oh, I’m such a bad friend! How do you like your new job?”
“It’s good. My boss flirts with me, which is kind of annoying. But other than that, yeah, good. I still want you to come eat there, though.”
“I will, I promise. Maybe even tonight, Wyvern is insisting on taking me to dinner and if we’re at your restaurant—”
“You are not using me as a buffer between you and your man,” Mele said. “You are coming to my restaurant for me, or not at all.”
“Fine,” I said, “I’ll go another night.”
“Good.” She closed the car door and blew me a kiss before she walked away.
Annie shot an excited glance over to me from the back seat. “This is going to be fun,” she said with a huge smile on her face.
“What’s going to be fun?”
“The Rex told me to transform you into someone new, and I have been thinking all day about it. I have big plans for you, Hun.”
“Why am I scared?” I said.
“I would be scared if I were you,” Sophie said.
“Wow. Sophie, that was almost a joke,” I said.
Annie smacked Sophie’s arm lightly. “Ah, you two. And Dakota, nothing to be worried about, this will be fun.”
Twenty minutes later, I was sitting facing away from my vanity mirror as Annie painted something wet on my face. With a colossal effort I kept my face still though it tickled like hell.
<
br /> “Annie, you sort of remind me of my sister,” I said, “My older sister. She always helped fix my work if I needed a disguise.”
“I’ve met your older sister, so I take that as a big compliment!” she said, smiling down at me. “Now stop moving.”
“You know Clara?” I leaned forward toward her.
Annie pushed me back toward the chair with a hand on my shoulder. “Well, no, I don’t know her. I guess I’d more say I saw her around the court while I was on guard. She said hi to me a couple times and that sort of thing,” she said.
“Oh. Does she seem happy?” I asked.
“I think so. She’s always smiling,” Annie said.
“Good,” I said, “I was worried that people would be rude to her.”
“Oh no, they wouldn’t dare, she’s your sister. She’s probably the most popular woman in court right now.”
“People have heard of me?” I asked.
“You must be joking with me. Of course they’ve heard of you. Now sit back or there’s no way I’ll finish this in time.”
The thought that all the dracons in the high court had heard of me had left me speechless anyway. If they were judging what I was like from my sister Clara, they were in for a rude awakening when I attended all those parties with Wyvern. The thought instantly made my head hurt. Or, the massive amount of chemicals Annie started spraying into my hair could be the culprit for my headache.
She sprayed, brushed it out, repeat, like eight times. “All right, now let me see your hands,” she said. She pulled up a chair beside me and laboriously painted red and blue veins, then covered that with foundation. Over it all, she brushed a grayish powder. After about ten minutes, my hands looked as if I was an eighty-year-old woman.
Annie pulled the sheet that had been wrapped around me to protect the dress I was wearing away. “You ready for this?” she asked.
“Yes.” Excitement started rushing through me. I had no idea what I would look like.
“Okay, Hun, you can look,” she said, smiling.
Standing, I turned around. In the mirror, an elderly lady with a shocked expression stared back at me. Skin sagged in places it hadn’t before and light varicose veins crisscrossed over my skin. It wasn’t grotesque though, I actually looked rather nice. My hair was quaffed in a neat bun and a little lipstick was dabbed on my lips. I looked down, and now the heavy floral dress made sense.
Rex (Dakota Kekoa Book 2) Page 14