city of dragons 03 - fire magic (22 page)

Not of revenge, not exactly. But of one last stand against him. Of beating him once and for all, proving to myself that he had no power over me and that I was stronger than him.

Something about his just being dead made things feel incomplete.

Brian had done what I couldn’t. He had stood up to his abuser and ended the abuse forever. Maybe I felt I needed to do this for him because of that. Maybe it completed things.

When we got home, I pulled into a parking space and turned off the car, but neither Connor nor I got out.

I turned to look at him. “I don’t think we need to bother Brian with this.”

“What?” said Connor.

“Let’s just tell him that Darrell wasn’t there when we got there,” I said.

“But then he’ll think that Darrell wasn’t really dead, and that his abuser could be coming back for him,” said Connor. “He’ll be afraid.”

Connor was right. Besides, if we lied to Brian, then we were stealing from him the knowledge that he’d ended the man who hurt him. I sighed. “I was thinking about how it would be if the police came around asking questions. How it would be better if Brian really knew nothing. But I guess that’s just a risk we’ll have to take.”

“We did enough to protect him,” said Connor.

I nodded.

Connor studied his knuckles. “Thanks for doing it. For helping with everything. But… I have to ask, Penny, why? This isn’t your fight. You barely even know Brian. And burning a body, it’s not… it’s…”

Disgusting. It was disgusting, dirty work. Both Connor and I were sweaty and tired. And I felt a nasty twinge in my stomach that had nothing to do with being pregnant and everything to do with my conscience twitching in confusion.

I turned to look at Connor. I didn’t know if I could properly explain about Alastair and coming full circle and everything else. So, I just said, in a quiet voice, “It needed to be done. Guys like Darrell shouldn’t get to win.”

Connor nodded slowly. “No,” he said. “They shouldn’t.”

* * *

Lachlan was in the lobby of the hotel.

“Hey,” I said.

He looked me over. “Where have you been?”

I pushed sweaty hair away from my forehead. “At the gym.”

He raised his eyebrows.

“Come upstairs with me,” I said.

So, we all trooped upstairs—me, Lachlan, and Connor. When we got there, Brian was awake and watching TV.

He switched it off when he saw us, nervously getting to his feet. He fiddled with the remote control. “Where did you guys go?”

I took a deep breath, and I addressed both Lachlan and Brian. “We went to your apartment, Brian. We were looking for Darrell. We got rid of him, so that no one else who’s looking for him will ever find him.”

Brian licked his lips. “You got rid of the… body?”

“Wait a second,” said Lachlan. “What are you telling me here?”

“Brian defended himself against his abusive boyfriend and got the upper hand,” I said. “He accidentally went too far.”

Lachlan rubbed his forehead. “You, um, you covered up a murder?”

“We made things better for Brian,” I said. I gave Lachlan a look. “What if it had been Alastair and me, Lachlan?”

“Yeah, what it if it had?” said Lachlan. “You would have just taken care of it yourself, I guess. You didn’t even think to call me about this? What did you do with the body?”

“We burned it,” I said. “It’s gone. We used magic to burn hot enough to turn the bones to ash.”

“Jesus,” said Lachlan.

Brian sat down hard on the couch.

“Lachlan,” I said, catching his arm, “I told you this because I love you, and because we’re together now, and I don’t want secrets between us. Please don’t say we need to go to the authorities or—”

“No,” he said. “I wouldn’t say that.”

“Before, when I’ve done things that weren’t strictly legal—”

“Penny,” he sighed.

“You haven’t been happy,” I said.

He cupped my cheek. “If you think following the letter of the law is more important to me than you are, you’re insane.”

I smiled at him.

“Besides, you try to do the right thing. I can see that.”

“But you’re angry?”

“I’m…” He let his hand drop, sighing. “I wish you would have called me to help.”

“I didn’t even think to do that,” I said.

Lachlan turned on Connor. “And you? You didn’t think of it either? She’s pregnant, for God’s sake. She shouldn’t be lugging around bodies.”

“Well, I did the, uh, lugging,” said Connor.

Brian suddenly thrust himself at me and hugged me. “Thank you,” he said. “Thank you, Ms. Caspian.”

I hugged back. “Call me Penny, Brian.”

He released me, and there were tears in his eyes. “I never meant for this to happen, you know.”

“I do know,” I said. “But it wasn’t your fault that he hurt you. And you had to fight back.”

He swallowed.

Connor put his arm around Brian. “Come on. I’ve got some bourbon downstairs in my room. I could use a drink. You?”

Brian nodded. “Definitely.” He hugged Connor as well. “And thank you, too. Thank you both.”

The two said their goodbyes and left my apartment.

And then it was just me and Lachlan.

I twisted my hands together. “Did you find out anything from your friend?”

He nodded. “They’re putting the time of death in early June. And we were right, they theorize Alastair died from magic. Something concentrated around his heart, just like Clarke said.”

I nodded slowly. “Okay, well, it’s good to have confirmation on that.”

Lachlan massaged the bridge of his nose. “Where did you burn the body?”

“A remote place in the woods,” I said.

“So, you transported it?”

“Yeah.”

“In your car?”

“Yeah. So?”

“Well, we need to clean the car out,” he said. “Maybe we need to bleach it. Bleach kills DNA, you know.”

“Bleach it? That’ll take the color out of the carpet.”

“Better to have colorless carpet than stray DNA,” he said. “And I should probably go to the scene of the murder. Did you clean up there?”

“We did,” I said. “But, we didn’t use bleach.”

“I should go by,” he said. “I can clean the place thoroughly. I know what the police look for, so I know what to clean.”

“O-okay,” I said. “I guess that’s good.”

He nodded. “All right. So, where is it?”

“You’re going now?”

“No time like the present,” he said.

I took my phone out of my pocket. “I got an email from the testing place.”

His lips parted.

I thrust the phone at him. “I didn’t look at it.”

He swallowed. He looked down at the phone. And then, slowly, his hand came up to take it. He gripped the phone and touched the screen. “It’s… it’s, um, locked,” he said in a choked voice. “You need to—”

“Oh,” I said, snatching the phone back and unlocking it with my pattern. I started to hand it back.

“Y-you do it,” he said.

I nodded.

I opened the email. My heart was pounding. “Uh, I’ll just read it.”

“Yeah?” he said.

“So, it says, ‘Dear Ms. Caspian—’”

“Skip that part.”

“‘The results of your test are as follows: Lachlan Flint, markers show—’” I let out a little laugh. “It’s you. It’s yours. The baby’s yours.”

He snatched the phone from me. His hands were shaking. “That just doesn’t… How did that…?”

“It had to be you, right?” I whispered. “Because there was no evidence that Alastair even...”

He shut his eyes.

There was a lump in my throat.

He opened his eyes, and then he smiled at me, a huge ear-to-ear grin. And then he pulled me against him, wrapping me in his arms.

And I held onto him as tightly as I could.

* * *

“Maybe the result of the test shouldn’t matter.” Lachlan’s voice reverberated through his chest. He had his arms wrapped around me.

We were sitting together on the couch. “But it does, though. Because it changes things somehow.”

“How does it change things for you?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “But it does.”

He kissed the top of my head. “It’s good. It’s really good.”

I picked up the phone again to look at the message. There were no markers that indicated it could be Alastair. It was obviously Lachlan’s baby. I was definitely having a vampire hybrid baby. “I wonder if the baby will be able to shift into a dragon.”

“I didn’t think babies could shift. I thought it didn’t happen until puberty.”

“Well,” I said, “I meant that. When the baby is a teenager, will it be a shifter? Because I know that if humans and dragons have babies, they’re almost never shifters, just human.”

“Humans and dragons can do that?”

“They can. It practically never happens, though,” I said. “Because of the mating bond and all.”

“Right,” said Lachlan.

I turned to peer at him. I smiled. “You’re right. It
is
good.”

His arms tightened around me. “It didn’t feel real until now. There was all this evidence piling up, but I just kept thinking that it was impossible. And now… well, we still don’t know how it happened.”

“But it did.”

“And we’re having a baby.”

I grinned wider. I scrolled down through the message. “Oh!”

“What?” he said.

“The test figured out the gender too.”

“Already?” he said.

“Yeah, apparently they can do that.”

“And?”

“And, it’s a boy.” I giggled, handing him the phone.

He took it from me. “A boy, huh?”

I snuggled into him. “A little boy,” I whispered, thinking of tiny onesies decorated with trains and trucks. I put my hand on my stomach. Was this really happening? Could anything this good really be happening to me? I had been through so much tragedy in my life, I didn’t even know how to deal with something like this. With everything working out so well for me. A baby boy with a man I loved, a good kind man who loved me too. I felt a little teary. “That’s why I did it,” I whispered.

“Did what?” he said.

“What I did for Brian,” I said. “I got rid of that body so that things would go well for him for once. Because he’d been through too much darkness. And now things are going well for me—for us—and I… I feel like I shouldn’t trust it. Like there’s got to be some catch, something lurking just around the corner that will ruin everything.”

“Something like us going to jail for Alastair’s murder?”

“Oh,” I said. “There is that.”

“We can’t let that happen,” he said.

“We’ll find the murderer,” I said.

He handed the phone back to me. “We will. But we don’t have to talk about that right now.”

I looked at the message one last time, afraid that it would have switched somehow, that all of this would have been a misunderstanding or a dream. But it was real. There it all was in black and white.

“Listen,” Lachlan said, resting his chin on my shoulder, “I want you to understand that I’m yours. As long as you want me. Forever and always. And I know in a situation like this, it would be customary for a man to ask a certain question. But I don’t have any real desire to get married again.”

I twisted in his arms. “What? Did I say I wanted to get married?”

“I sort of assumed that maybe—”

“I don’t want to get married either,” I said.

“No?”

“No, not really,” I said.

“Why not? Because of Alastair?”

“No,” I said. “No, just because I don’t need it. I don’t need there to be this institutionalized, formal
trap
—”

“Trap?” He laughed.

“You said you didn’t want to get married either.”

“Yeah, but I don’t think being married to you would be a trap.”

“So, why don’t
you
want to do it?”

“I just don’t really associate anything good with the whole idea of it anymore, I guess.”

“Because of what happened in the past to you?”

“Because… I don’t know, I guess it’s just like you said. Unnecessary. I know how I feel about you and I know how you feel about me, and we can be together without bringing all of that into it.”

I nodded. “Yeah. I don’t need to tell the state that I love you. I just need to tell you.”

He kissed me. “I do love you.” His fingers inched over my belly. “Both of you.”

I loved how that felt. “Me too,” I said. “We can be our own little family on our own terms.” I kissed him again. “And—for the record—I don’t feel trapped by you at all. I only feel lucky to be with you.”

His lips found mine again. Our kiss deepened. His fingers began to stray from my belly to other parts of my body.

I sighed. And then I yawned.

He chuckled, pulling away. “You must be tired. You’ve been through a lot tonight already, and it’s past your bedtime.”

“A little bit,” I said, turning to face him and pressing close. “But I could be convinced to stay awake.”

“Nah,” he said, pressing his lips into my forehead. “You go to bed. I’ll go and clean the scene up at Darrell’s. We’ll both get some rest, and then wake up in each other’s arms.”

“Mmm,” I said. “Sounds nice.”

“Yes,” he said his voice getting deeper. “I will bring you protein in bed, and then I will ravage you.”

I giggled, arching an eyebrow. “Ravage?”

“Ravage,” he said in a somber voice. “Until you scream.”

I kissed his nose. “Promise?”

He put his mouth to my throat. “Until you scream and scream and scream.”

I gasped.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

“I really don’t have any more information than what I already told you,” said Darla. “I’m sure it must be traumatic, knowing that your ex-husband is dead—”

“It’s not that,” I said. Lachlan and I were in Darla’s office at the Order. “The truth is that the police are convinced we killed Alastair. And we didn’t. We need to find the real killer and prove our innocence. So, since this is the last place that anyone saw him alive, we think there might be clues here to what happened.”

“I suppose,” said Darla. “But I don’t think so, honestly. He was alive when he left here. I was fairly sure that a slayer killed him. When we found his body, he was being loaded up by a group of them with an arrow in him.”