by Kimber White
“I’m okay,” I said. “Really. I haven’t even shifted around her.”
“Great,” Milo said. “Sounds like you need to.”
“You need to trust me,” I said. “Someday...you’ll be in my place. At least I hope so. It’s better if we don’t talk about her anymore. It’s easier for me to…”
“Chill out,” Milo said. “Fine.”
“Did you bring what I asked you to?”
Milo reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out a red flash drive.
“It’s from Gemma,” he said. Gemma was married to Gideon Brandhart’s brother, Finn. He too was a dragon shifter.
“Thanks,” I said. “Have you taken a look at it?”
“Yeah,” he said. “Gemma wanted me to tell you this was all she can part with. It goes against her oath to her coven to copy the text verbatim. She said she was sorry but hoped we’d understand.”
“I do,” I said. It probably cost her something to even give us that much. Things were better than they had been, but shifters and witches still didn’t mix well.
“This diamond,” Milo said. “If it’s the Kingsblood, it’s got some powerful juice.”
“So why had we never heard of it?”
Milo shrugged. “Who knows. Gemma says the thing was ensorcelled by a coven that died out centuries ago. Personally, she doesn’t believe it exists anymore. She figures what Meg has is probably a hoax. Anyway, the Kingsblood Diamond is supposed to give extra powers to whoever wears it. Magic users anyway. Witches. Shifters. Fae.”
“What kind of extra powers?”
The thing was, I knew. I’d felt it back at Meg’s shop after Alonzo Fry’s spell. For that brief moment, I’d felt...invincible.
“Like, you can’t be killed if it’s on you,” Milo said. “I don’t buy it. I told you. Gemma doesn’t even buy it. But, it seems like there are factions out there who are interested in trying it out.”
“Someone sent that Fry guy into Meg’s shop. I told Payne he was boobytrapped. We need to know who he met with. Do we have any more leads on that?”
Milo sighed. “Still trying to track that down. Gemma’s putting feelers out too. There are some dark covens she knows about.”
“That’s what I’m afraid of. Meg’s been contracted to sell this thing. Our job was to keep it safe until she did. Now...we need to know exactly what it is before we let it out of our control.”
“Have you told her that yet?” Milo asked. “Your girl?”
I felt my nostrils flare. Duty. Honor. Loyalty. Two weeks ago, those words had simple meanings for me. Now…
“Just...help me figure out what that stone actually is.”
Something changed in Milo’s eyes. I couldn’t read his mind, but I knew him well enough to know when he was hiding something.
“Gemma says...look...there’s really only one surefire way to know whether this hunk of rock you have is this legendary Kingsblood Diamond or whatever. You have to test it.”
“Test it?”
Milo curled his fist. I had the urge to grab him and throw him against his car again. This time, I kept it under control.
“Milo, tell me what you know. That’s why you’re here.”
“You’re not thinking straight!” he yelled. “And if you say one more time how you’ve got all this under control…”
I focused on my breathing. Not now, wolf. I needed to prove to my cousin that I could handle myself. Being near Meg hadn’t sent me all the way over the edge.
Milo swore under his breath then reached into his jacket pocket again. He pulled out two things, palming one and holding the other out to me.
It was a dagger. Its gilded hilt gleamed in the sun. I took it from him, whistling low at the quality of the craftsmanship. The metal held an intricate and flawless Damascus pattern. The blade had a characteristic heat and weight to it.
“Dragonsteel,” I said. “This from Gemma too?”
The blade was forged with Dragonfire. That made it the strongest metal on earth. A shifter wounded from one cut would never heal. Unless…
Milo opened his palm. In it, he held a small vial of thick, red liquid. Blood. My jaw dropped. Dragon’s blood. It was the only antidote to a wound made from Dragonsteel.
“Test it,” I said.
“I hate this,” Milo said.
Gemma’s plan was simple and ingenious. If the stone had the power Meg thought it did, a cut from this dagger wouldn’t wound me. And if it did, the Dragon’s blood would be my failsafe.
“It’ll be fine,” I said.
“Payne doesn’t know about any of this,” Milo said. “That’s why I don’t like it.”
“He can’t know about it,” I said. “He’ll want to know where the blood came from.”
“Just having it in the first place puts you at risk. Leo, I don’t care who this girl is. You can’t tell her about the Dragon’s blood.”
I nodded. Duty. Honor. Loyalty. It seemed I would be tested at every turn.
“You forget,” I said. “Grace is my sister. Gideon is my brother-in-law now. I’ll protect him too.”
“Yeah,” Milo said. “And I’m pretty sure Gemma didn’t tell Grace what she was up to. That isn’t Gideon’s blood in that vial. It’s Finn’s, Gemma’s husband. Gemma figured the fewer people who know about that Kingsblood Diamond, the better. At least for now. Even if they are on our side.”
“She’s right,” I said. “And thank you.”
“Let me come with you,” Milo said. “Whether you like it or not, you need backup.”
“No,” I said. It was a struggle not to shout it. “It’ll be that much harder for me if you’re around. If you’re around...her.”
Milo reared his head back. “Leo, I’m not going to try and steal your girl. I’d like to meet her though. She’s got to be something special.”
My fangs dropped. I snapped my jaw. It came unbidden.
Milo put his hands up in surrender and took a step back. “All right. All right. I see how it is. For now, I’m gonna trust you.”
“Thanks,” I said. “This is...new to me. I hope to God you find it too.”
Milo’s face took on a pained expression. I hadn’t meant to hurt him. I think he knew.
“I’ll call you...after,” I said. “Once I know about that diamond for sure, then we’ll have some hard decisions to make about it.”
“Leo,” he said. “There’s something else you need to know. Payne’s operating under the assumption that your gemstone has dark magic. It doesn’t even matter to him what it does. It’s enough that you’ve got witches throwing boobytrap spells to get to it. It’s not just a dark coven he’s worried about.”
“What do you mean?”
Milo looked at his shoe. “Last year, when Val took that job out in Virginia. We can’t forget about what he found out. He crossed paths with that organization called the Ring. Payne’s still trying to gather intel, but it’s enough that we know they were behind a mate-trafficking ring. That’s what Willow, Val’s mate, almost got caught up in. Payne thinks this Ring is into more than just trafficking. He thinks they may have even been the ones backing that asshole Tyrannous Alpha who took over Kentucky way back when. He’s still trying to connect the dots.”
“Shit,” I muttered.
“Anyway, just be extra careful. Don’t trust anyone but us. It bothers me that this girl of yours had access to that stone if it’s as powerful as it might be. I mean, are you sure she’s not the one with the dark connections?”
I squeezed my eyes shut. The truth was, I was sure of nothing. No, that wasn’t true. I was sure of only one thing. Meg Crossley was my fated mate. Whatever else she was didn’t matter. Only, I couldn’t say that to my cousin. Not yet.
“I’ll watch my back,” I said. “You have my word on that. I’ll be in touch in a day or two. I swear it.”
“You’d better,” he said. “I can give you a day or two. But then, we’re coming to get you, Leo. I won’t be able to stop it.”
I
knew what coming to get me meant. If my cousins and Wolfguard thought I’d succumbed to mating sickness, they’d bring me in. I’d end up in a Dragonsteel cage for the foreseeable future. I couldn’t protect Meg that way. And I knew in my heart I’d put up a hell of a fight before I let that happen. As Milo stared at me, he knew it too.
I shook his hand and uttered my promise again. I put the knife and the vial in my back pocket. I waited for Milo to pull away before getting back in my car.
Duty. Honor. Loyalty.
Now, I just had to convince Meg to stab me through the heart.
Chapter Thirteen
Meg
“You want me to what?”
We stood on the back porch. It had to be the hottest day of the year. Oppressive humidity made the air feel heavy. Leo stood, leaning against one of the porch pillars, tapping his fingers against it.
He’d given me the flash drive from his contact in the Brandhart family. I hadn’t yet had a chance to review it, but he told me the highlights of what his cousin had to say about it.
“The Kingsblood Diamond,” he said. “If it’s the real deal, they say it’s got a spell on it that can make a shifter invincible.”
“That’s crazy,” I said. “It’s a legend. Llywelyn the Great wasn’t a shifter.”
“You sure about that?” he asked me, one dark brow raised skyward.
“I...he was...I guess I don’t know. But there’s never been any speculation that he was. That kind of thing would have been known. In the thousand years since, I would have at least heard a rumbling of that.”
“Meg, it’s got something. Don’t stand there and tell me you didn’t feel what I felt. That day in the shop, I’m not saying that gas would have killed me. But, I was going down. It was strong enough to at least knock me on my ass or out cold for a second.”
A shudder went through me. It was hard to think about. I couldn’t without also thinking about what else that meant. I could feel him. He was right. I felt him fade as I waited twenty yards away down the street. That should have been impossible too.
“You can look under as many microscopes as you want, but the only surefire way to know what we’ve got is to test it. You and me. Today. Now.”
I turned. I didn’t know what to do. Pace? Yell? Punch something?
“Leo, I can’t. It’s too great a risk.”
His nostrils flared as he sighed. He’d been doing that a lot ever since he got back.
“There’s no risk,” he said. “You have to trust me on that. I can heal myself.”
“Not from a Dragonsteel blade through the heart you can’t.”
His jaw dropped. “How do you know it’s made from Dragonsteel? I didn’t tell you that.”
“You didn’t have to,” I said. “I’ve seen one like it before. My grandfather came into possession of one a few years ago. You don’t forget what something like that looks like. He made something like fifty grand in commission on that sale. Then he turned around and used that money to bail my dad out of whatever bad loan he’d taken.”
Leo’s face went red. “Your grandfather’s been dealing in Dragonsteel? For crying out loud, Meg. There’s no good purpose for that stuff. Whoever bought it had to have wanted to hurt shifters with it. What other kinds of things has he sold like that? To whom?”
“He’s dead,” I reminded him. “It doesn’t matter now.”
“It matters to me! I know how much you need the commission from this diamond. But, I have to know what it is once and for all. This is the best and pretty much the only way of knowing for sure.”
“What if…” I didn’t want to finish the sentence. Just the fragment of an idea of Leo getting seriously hurt made my heart twist. And he expected me to be the one to deliver that kind of pain?
He took my wrist and flipped my arm over so my palm pointed up. He slapped the hilt of the dagger into it and closed my fingers around it.
“It’ll be easy,” he said. “And quick. Then we’ll know.”
That was bad enough. I recognized the undercurrent of his plan. If this diamond really was the Kingsblood and if it had the powers his witch friend suspected, I knew Wolfguard would try to block the sale.
“Leo,” I said. “I’ll be careful. I agree we need to vet any potential buyer thoroughly. But we have to go forward. The alternative is even more unthinkable. Dorothea Davies isn’t equipped to keep this thing anymore. When she dies, who knows what could happen to it?”
“One thing at a time,” he said. “Let’s just figure out what we’ve got.”
“Now? Here?”
He gritted his teeth. “Not here. It’s not safe enough here. I want to be out in the woods somewhere. I know a place. We’ll leave in an hour. That should give you just about enough to time to look at whatever Gemma Brandhart sent on that flash drive. I’m going to pack a few things just in case.”
“In case of what?” I wasn’t sure I wanted the answer. Leo’s response was little more than another grim-faced nod. Then, he left me on the porch and headed for the garage.
I held the dagger in one hand, the flash drive in the other.
Dragonsteel. Dragons had been extinct for almost a thousand years. There were some who believed they never really existed at all. They believed fire mages had just made the legends up and cast spells on the metal during forging and that’s what gave them their extraordinary power.
For now, it didn’t matter. I just could not believe Leo actually wanted me to try to drive this thing into his chest.
I went inside and set the dagger on the coffee table. I grabbed the small laptop Leo had left behind. I fired it up and popped the flash drive into the USB port.
There were just two files on it. A .jpeg and a document. I opened the picture first. It was a crude drawing, but I recognized my diamond. The setting was different. In this rendering, the diamond was set into the head of a scepter.
I opened the document. Gemma Brandhart’s translation was low on details. Most of it echoed what I’d already read about the diamond. She recounted the Welsh Battle of Aberconwy and what happened to Llywelyn’s defeated uncle Dafydd. Then, she left a small note on the bottom.
“The diamond was used in a spell that doesn’t exist anymore. The coven who cast it got wiped out in the shifter/witch war at the turn of the last millennia. They took the language they used to cast it with them. Some of the text refers to the diamond as the Shifter Killer, but I don’t believe that’s accurate. That’s a newer translation. In the older texts, the word used for killer has a broader meaning. It means to transcend death. The diamond is supposed to make a shifter unable to be killed by any means.”
Shifter killer. Lord, what if she was wrong?
Chapter Fourteen
Meg
I couldn’t believe this was happening. That I’d agreed to it. That Leo even thought this was a good idea. I held the wooden box containing the diamond in my lap. For the first time since my grandfather first mentioned the thing, I regretted having it.
Leo drove about an hour out of town. Just as he promised, he turned off to a dense, wooded area surrounding a large inland lake.
He pulled off, concealing the car deep behind some shrubs. He grabbed a flashlight from the glovebox and handed it to me. It was dusk now. The heat had lifted just a bit, but I could still feel the sweat on my upper lip.
“Come on,” he said. “Let’s this over with.”
“I hate this,” I said.
“I’m not super excited either, Meg. But I cannot let that rock out of my sight until I know what it is. And maybe not even then.”
I opened the box and took out the diamond. Even in the dim light, it shimmered.
“How does it work?” I asked. “I mean, do you just hold it? Do you wear it?”
“It shouldn’t matter,” he said.
“Shouldn’t? Great.”
He took the diamond from me. He clutched it in his right fist and slid out from behind the wheel. I turned on the flashlight and tucked the dagger in my back poc
ket. Then, I had to practically sprint to keep up with Leo.
We came to a clearing. The area was framed by two fallen, rotting logs on either side of us. The ground was damp here.
“I should have brought bug spray,” I said. A hungry mosquito landed on my arm. I slapped at it.
Leo went to the center of the clearing. He turned to face me, squaring his shoulders. He had a stoic, determined expression on his face. He thumped his chest just like a gorilla.
“Let’s just do it,” he said. “If I overthink it, I’m going to lose my nerve.”
“Trust him, he says,” I muttered.
Leo held the diamond up. He squeezed it so hard I wondered if he might be strong enough to crack it. He hissed through his teeth.
“Wait,” he said. He pulled off his shirt and cast it aside.
The man took my breath away. Sweat made his skin glisten. He was perfect. Hard-cut muscles, an eight-pack. He had a small tattoo just below his right shoulder. I forgot myself and reached for him. I traced the outline of his ink.
It was a wolf’s head on a shield. “Wolfguard,” I whispered.
“Meg,” he said, his voice ragged.
I moved around him, letting my fingers trail around his waist. Heat skittered up my spine. My heart thundered in my ears.
My heart. His heart.
I came around to his chest. Leo picked a small indentation in the ground to stand in. It put me almost eye to eye with him. From this angle, it would be easier for me to strike the blow he’d asked for.
Easy.
There was nothing easy about any of this.
Leo reached for me with his free hand. He brought the dagger up. I clutched the hilt with both hands. Leo put the tip of the blade just over his heart.
“Leo,” I whispered.
He pressed the point against his flesh. I felt his heartbeat. Both beneath the blade and inside of me. It matched my own.