Fireborn (The Dark Dragon Chronicles Book 2)

by Ripley Harper

  He waved a hand at the women sitting next to him. “This is my mother, Anne, and next to her is her sister, Catherine. You can feel honored; they hardly leave their rooms for any reason these days.”

  I guessed the women to be about Ingrid’s age, in their seventies or thereabouts, and they looked the way women do when they grow older without plastic surgery: their faces were lined, their skin was saggy, and their hair was gray. But they were still strikingly beautiful. Both of them had the same purple eyes, the same aquiline nose, the same arresting bone structure. They looked regal and elegant and somehow not quite of this world, like alien queens abandoned on a strange planet.

  He pointed to his other side. “And these two lovely ladies are my sister, Michelle, and my cousin, Elizabeth. They knew your mother rather well, although the friendship, unfortunately, ended in disaster.”

  Both women have perfect features, porcelain skin, thick blonde hair, and startlingly beautiful green eyes.

  “Last, but not least, this is my lovely wife, Robyn,” he said, pointing to the woman I saw in the photograph. “And the pretty girl sitting next to Jonathan is my daughter, Amber.”

  I looked from the one to the other, not knowing how to react. Jonathan’s sister and mother were the most beautiful women I’d ever seen, to the point where they didn’t look quite human anymore. There were no flaws to them, no humanizing imperfections, no character or warmth. Their beauty was almost abstract—a dream of physical perfection that didn’t fully translate into flesh and bone. I found it hard to look at them, and yet I also found it hard to look away. Their beauty was mesmerizing, but their dead eyes terrified me.

  “I never knew you had a sister,” I said to Jonathan when I finally got my mouth to work.

  “Nobody knows about her except the people in this room.” He didn’t look at me when he spoke. His head was bowed, his gaze focused on the wood grain patterns on the table which he was tracing with one finger. “She has never left this house.”

  “Have any of them?”

  “My sister attended school when she was a girl,” Jack Pendragon said, nodding to the cool blonde beauty across the table. “It was against our ways, but my father thought he should make this one exception, seeing that your mother would be in her year.” He gave Jonathan’s grandfather a mocking look. “I believe he wanted them to be friends.”

  “It worked too,” the old man said gruffly from across the table.

  “And what a mess that turned out to be.”

  I suddenly remembered that I’d heard of Jack Pendragon’s sister before. The story was famous in our town: how she’d been brutally kidnapped and never seen or heard of again, and how that tragic event explained the Pendragons’ paranoia about security and privacy.

  “So she wasn’t actually kidnapped?” I asked. “She was here all the time?”

  Jack Pendragon gave a self-satisfied smile. “Of course. We would never let any harm come to her. We look after our women very well.”

  I stared at the thick iron manacles around their wrists, at the way it ate into their pale, delicate flesh so that I could see both the old scars and the raw wounds underneath.

  “When my sister became… unfit to be seen in public any longer,” Jack Pendragon continued, “we had to concoct the kidnapping story to explain her disappearance. We found it was far easier to make people forget about the existence of people they’ve never met than to make them forget someone they’ve known their whole lives.”

  It was only then that I realized why I’d never thought about Jonathan’s mother before. It hadn’t been an oversight on my part: they had Enthralled me, and everyone I knew, to put the idea of her out of our minds. I remember being awed by the amount of magic they must be able to wield. To Enthrall so many people for so long!

  From the corner of my eye, I saw Jonathan glancing at his mother, just once, before bowing his head again. For the first time in my life I felt sorry for him. What was the point of all the wealth in the world when your mother and your sister had to live like this?

  “What’s wrong with them?” I asked.

  “There’s nothing wrong with them!” The surprise on Jonathan’s grandfather’s face made me suspect that nobody had ever asked this question before. “They’re perfect! The most beautiful women in the world.”

  “Yes. They’re very beautiful.” I looked at Ingrid for help. “But I mean, what’s wrong with them? Why are they chained up like that? And why don’t they speak or…” I didn’t know how to say it without sounding cruel.

  She gave me a weary smile. “What do you see when you look at them, little one?”

  I didn’t understand what she wanted from me, so I told the truth. “There’s something missing from their eyes. I don’t think they can see me. Or anybody. I don’t think they even know where they are.”

  “Astonishing!” Jonathan’s grandfather leaned forward too quickly, a reptile-like movement that reminded me of his son. “Can her blood really be that pure?” He laughed, clapping his blotchy, veined hands together in delight. “Even Bella was blinded by their shine, and she was the strongest of the lot. Who is your father, child?”

  “Back off, George!” When I looked at Ingrid again, there was no trace left of the old, tired woman she’d been just a moment ago. She had pulled the magic of the Black Clan around her like a shield, and her voice was pure authority. “You will not mention Bella’s name in my presence again. And you will never, ever ask my ward about her father.”

  “Or you’ll do what?” he challenged.

  “Or I’ll leave right now and never come back.”

  There was a brief, tense moment before the old man laughed. “You can’t blame me for being curious. I’ve never met anyone with such pure ancestry before. She can have almost no human blood in her if she is unaffected by the shine in this room.”

  His words made me feel ill. I couldn’t follow everything he said, but I understood one thing all too well: this man did not think I was human, and it pleased him immensely.

  “What is he talking about?” I asked Ingrid.

  But it was Jonathan who answered. “Most people can’t see what you see. To them, my mother and my sister seem like angels. Or gods.” His mouth pulled down in a bitter line. “They cannot see the chains around their necks or the shackles on their legs. They’re completely blinded by their beauty. Enslaved.”

  “Why are they chained like that?” I asked. “Are you keeping them prisoner?”

  He shook his head. “They put the collars around their own necks and the shackles around their own feet. It was a choice they made.” Again, that bitter line. “They knew their duty.”

  “What sick sense of duty would make them do that?”

  “My, my. What a perfectly charming little chat.” Jack Channing looked from me to Jonathan, smiling widely, obviously pleased. “If I’m not mistaken, I see young love blossoming before my very eyes.”

  The idea of anyone reading our painful, uncomfortable discussion as a sign of “young love” was so absurd that I began to wonder if Jack Pendragon was one hundred percent sane. But then his smile disappeared and his expression changed to one of snake-like cunning.

  “I only see one little problem. The kitten might be immune to the shine—which certainly reflects well on her parentage –” he winked at Ingrid, “but unfortunately she seems immune to the magic too. If she really had been on the path of blood, her power would’ve been sparked by now.”

  “Not necessarily,” Ingrid said.

  “Oh, but I disagree. Where in the world will you find more bloodmagic than in the Pendragon women? It’s unthinkable!”

  “Magic calls to magic,” Ingrid said. “Let her touch them, skin to skin.”

  Her suggestion hung in the air for a moment before George Pendragon leaned back in his chair, nodding. “She’s right,” he said. “Let them touch her. Then we’ll know.”

  Chapter 27

  O serpent heart hid with a flowering face!

  Did ever dragon keep
so fair a cave?

  Beautiful tyrant! Fiend angelical!

  Dove-feathered raven, wolvish-ravening lamb!

  Despisèd substance of divinest show,

  Just opposite to what thou justly seem’st.

  From Romeo and Juliet (Act III, Scene II), by William Shakespeare (1597)

  The first time I met someone filled with the power of magic, I almost fainted with pleasure. The Blue Lord, leader of all the Seakeepers, came to Ingrid’s house unexpectedly, and even after just a couple of minutes in his presence, I knew that touching him would change me forever. So I didn’t.

  The second time I met someone filled with magical power, I touched her hand by accident. The person was Daniel’s mother, and that quick touch changed all our lives in ways we could never have imagined.

  In a sense, then, I must’ve known exactly what I was doing when I agreed to let the Pendragon women touch me, but my desperation made me reckless. I needed my magic and I couldn’t face the drills again.

  I just couldn’t.

  I remember feeling nervous and unsure of what would happen while the six women approached me. But I wasn’t terrified. At the time, I was still naïve enough to think nothing could be as bad as the drills had been.

  They walked closer in complete silence and slowly spread out to form a circle around me. Up close their beauty was extraordinary, but I was also horribly aware of the deadness in their eyes, the dullness of their expressions, the chains around their necks.

  Years ago, when I was living in Africa with my mom, I once saw a leopard chained up in a shed. The “owner” had an illegal little zoo on his farm, and he charged people a few cents to look through the narrow, high window at the predator chained up inside. Up close, the animal was more beautiful than I expected, but when it sensed my presence, it snarled at me, its eyes flashing with a fierce, raw hatred that made me cry out in terror. Directly afterward, however, it sank its head back onto the floor and a terrible, defeated dimness settled over its eyes. It knew it had been beaten.

  Standing there, surrounded by the Pendragon women, I vividly recalled that experience, perhaps because I recognized in them many of the qualities I’d seen in that trapped leopard years ago. The same astonishing green-eyed beauty. The same sense of a deadly menace barely leashed. The same heartbreaking acceptance of defeat.

  When the women formed a perfect circle around me, their chains firmly held by the three Zigs, Jack Pendragon stood up from his chair. Then, using exactly the same voice a lion tamer would use in a circus, he loudly slammed his hand on the table, the sound like a whip, and told them to touch!

  At first nothing happened, which didn’t surprise me. Despite Jack Pendragon’s confident tone, I didn’t really think that the women would obey him: their expressions remained too distant, their eyes too dead. But just as I was about to walk away, they slowly lifted their hands, in a spooky unison that made my stomach turn, and reached out toward me.

  A gentle hand touched my shoulder. Another my arm. My back. My head. My hands.

  l tried my best not to flinch at the contact, my skin crawling—at first it took every last shred of my willpower not to shake them off and run away in horror. But, strangely, after a few seconds I relaxed under their touch. Their palms were soft and fragrant, their skin very cool, and I found the weight of their hands so comforting and familiar that my eyes began to well up.

  I felt safe for the first time in months.

  We stood like that for a long time, and when they were finally ordered away, I had to wipe the tears from my eyes. Jonathan frowned at my silent weeping, but nobody else seemed to notice. They were already arguing, their faces angry and disappointed and frustrated.

  “If that didn’t spark her, there’s no way she can be on the path of blood. Which means that her magic isn’t in flux. She’s simply defective.”

  “There’s nothing wrong with her magic. It will come to her as it must, in its own time.”

  “I’m sick of listening to your ridiculous theories, old woman.”

  “Then walk away, George. I don’t know what you’re doing here anyway. Isn’t Jack the Alpha now?”

  “You know nothing about us, keeper.”

  “And thank God for that.” Ingrid stood up from the table. “We’ll be leaving now. Whatever’s wrong with her magic cannot be fixed in this house.”

  “Sit down.”

  Jack Pendragon’s terse command had so much bloodmagic in it that I sat down immediately, even though his words weren’t aimed at me. But Ingrid remained stubbornly standing. “Oh, please,” she said contemptuously. “Are you honestly trying to Enthrall me? I pledged myself to Black before you were even born.”

  When Ingrid drew the power of the Black Clan to her, she was always impressive. But perhaps never more so than at that very moment, when she stood alone among enemies in a room full of magic. She suddenly seemed ageless, completely indestructible. “Come,” she told me, “we’re leaving.”

  But I didn’t move. Not because I was Enthralled, but because I didn’t want to go. I looked straight at her and I openly defied her for the first time in my life.

  “No. Not before I know what’s going on. Who are these women, and why do I feel like I know them?”

  “You don’t know them.”

  “But I feel…” I couldn’t find the rights words, perhaps because I didn’t quite recognize my own emotions. It had been a long time since I’d felt safe and cherished and loved.

  “They are nothing to you. Trust me.”

  I could see the urgency in her eyes. But her words rung hollow because the truth was that I didn’t trust her anymore. Not after what she’d let those masked monsters do to me.

  “I’m not leaving here until I find out who they are.”

  “I’ll tell you later. It’s too dangerous to stay here.”

  “It’s dangerous everywhere. I was attacked in my own bedroom.”

  “This is a different type of danger. Please. Come with me.”

  “Not before you tell me what’s going on.”

  “What’s going on?”

  I was surprised when Ingrid, who usually controls her emotions so tightly, suddenly snapped. At the time I thought she lost her temper because she was unused to me rebelling against her, but I realize now that she must’ve been terrified. I remember the dangerous way her blue eyes flashed, the way she banged her fist on the table and the way her voice wavered as she spoke, overcome by emotion.

  “What’s going on is that they want you to become one of those women. Do you understand? They want to keep you here and marry you to Jonathan and then, once you’ve given them a child or two, they want to push you so deeply into your power that you’ll be lost in a constant state of shine like those poor creatures. And then you’ll never need to rest again, so your power will be available for their use at any time, constantly, day and night. But you’ll also have to live like them: soulless, witless things, fully controlled by the voice of the strongest male.”

  She waved a hand towards Zig and his family, her face tight with emotion. “And once you become too much for the Alpha to handle, there will always be a Siegfried or a Sigurd of a Sigmund ready to end your life. They see themselves as heroes, these men. Those who will rule you as much as those who’ll kill you when you grow too powerful to control.”

  Zig’s father spoke for the first time, his voice just as icy and his eyes just as menacing as his son’s. “Save us your judgment. The Black Clan has used our services far, far longer than the Pendragons ever did.”

  Ingrid ignored him, focusing all her attention on me. “Do you want to end up like this, little one? Because that’s what’s waiting for you if we stay. Jack Pendragon draws his power from these women, and together they’re so strong that even I might not be able to stand against them.”

  I could see she really believed it. She was almost shivering with the urgency to get away. I had never seen Ingrid truly frightened before, so I knew we were in real danger. But I also knew these wome
n were important to me. I couldn’t leave them. My need to know more about them was just as strong as Ingrid’s need to go.

  “Are they like me?” I asked. “Are they, like, part of my family?”

  “They share some of your blood, yes,” Ingrid said. “But the line has been polluted –”

  “She’s lying,” Jack Pendragon said. “These women are your sisters. You’re exactly like them, no matter what your keeper would like to believe.”

  I looked at the dead-eyed, beautiful women standing in chains before me.

  “Will I end up like that too?”

  “No,” Ingrid said firmly. “It’s my sworn duty to prevent that from happening and I will never, ever forsake my duty. What the Pendragons did is unforgivable. They stole one of the Black Clan’s most vulnerable young wards, and used her to enhance their own –”

  “We didn’t steal anyone; she came to us willingly and of her own accord.”

  “Morgaine was a bloodmaster, and her husband was trueborn! Together those two were the most powerful Red keepers in centuries, their mastery of Seduction unequaled before or since. How could a sheltered young girl resist such a pair?”

  “She wasn’t a girl, keeper. And neither is this one.” He looked me up and down slowly. “No matter how powerless you insist on keeping her, her real nature will always shine through in the end.”

  “Her nature is more complicated than you could ever understand. With the right training –”

  “Black’s tortures are nothing but distractions. At least in this house she’ll be allowed to claim her full power.”

  “You’ll claim her power.” She pointed at the dull-eyed women. “That’s how she will end up. Or else you’ll call in the slayers to clean up your mess. I haven’t forgotten Ruby, even if you did. Nor Jane. Nor Marguerite. Nor –”

  “Enough! You will not use the names of the women we loved against us, keeper.” George Pendragon’s face was livid with anger. “What a hypocrite you are! The Black Clan has called on the slayers a thousand times more often than we ever did. Do you want me to start naming names too?”