city of dragons 03 - fire magic (29 page)

I didn’t say anything.

“Penny, answer me,” said Darla.

“I understand,” I muttered, my voice like broken glass.

“Thank you,” she said. “Now, let’s talk, if you don’t mind.”

I didn’t want to do anything that she wanted. I wanted to be defiant. But I didn’t have it in me. It was misery simply trying to breathe.

“I don’t want to hurt you,” said Darla, coming closer. “I want us to be friends.”

I let out a hoarse laugh. “You’ve got a funny way of showing that.”

“That was because you wouldn’t stop,” she said. “I didn’t have a choice. You forced my hand. You must see that.”

I didn’t answer.

She sighed. “It’s so hard, I have to admit. The things that keep rattling around my brain, they confuse me. I didn’t know where they were coming from, but when you said it to me the other day, I had to admit to myself that you must be right. It’s him. That Cooper man. Somehow, there are bits of him in me, and I can’t tell which is which.”

“You did kill Alastair,” I said.

She tilted her head to one side. “After all this, you aren’t even sure of that?”

I forced myself into a sitting position. “No. I’m sure. I know that you did it. You did it for power. How long have you been head of this organization, sucking up the magic of all of the prisoners here? How long did it take before you wanted a bigger taste? Before you wanted even more power?”

“That’s not how it is, not at all,” she said. “Cooper was dangerous. He had more magic than we could contain. It was seeded into him somehow. I’ve never seen anything like it.”

“Dragon sacrifice,” I said.

“Ah,” she said. “Well, I suppose that explains it. No matter what spells we used on him, we couldn’t get it all. I needed to find a way to take the magic, take every last bit. It was for the good of the organization.”

“Sure,” I said. “Telling yourself that help you sleep at night?”

She knelt down next to me so that we were eye level. “Killing him was an accident. Getting these parts of him in me? I didn’t intend that at all. I only wanted to take his power. I only wanted to do the right thing.”

“Well, do the right thing now,” I said. “Let us go.”

“Let you go?” she said.

“You’re more powerful than God,” I said. “So, a little thing like the SCPD shouldn’t be a big issue for you. We have evidence that you killed Alastair. Video evidence. That’s enough to clear us. Sure, they’d come after you for the murder, but you could find a way to deal with that. If you’re really such a good person, and you really do want to be my friend, just let Lachlan and me go.”

She turned to look at Lachlan. “Him. You’re always so preoccupied with him.”

“I’m in love with him.”

She turned back to me. “How about this, Penny? I let him go, and he can clear his own name, but you stay here with me. We’ll have to uproot the Order again, which is sad, considering we just got settled in here, but you and I can be together. Right now, that’s all I think I want. I suppose it’s because of that Cooper man, but I don’t know if I care. Just say you’ll come with me. Please.”

“What if I can’t come with you?” I murmured. If this was the only choice I had or she would kill Lachlan, I supposed I’d play along. I’d get him free and then find some way out myself later.

“Can’t?” she said. “Or won’t?”

“Darla, if what you’re saying is true, then it’s all an unfortunate accident,” I said. “But whatever is making you want me, it’s just Alastair. It’s not real. And I… I hate Alastair.”

“Yes,” she said, sighing. “That is the problem. He hates you too. It’s so very confusing. Wanting you. Thinking of you. Loving you. And…
abhorring
you.” She turned to me with a sneer. “And you pregnant with that
thing’s
spawn.” She pointed at Lachlan. “I can’t have that.”

I put my hands protectively over my belly.

She reached for me. “No,” she said in a soothing voice. “Here’s what we’ll do. We’ll get rid of it, and then you’ll be free of him.”

I evaded her grasp. I tried to get up, but my body ached and smarted, still in pain from whatever she’d done to me. I needed to shift. That way I could heal. That way I could fight.

But there was no water nearby. I couldn’t shift. And I wasn’t strong enough to fight her.

Maybe together, maybe Lachlan and I could fight her, but he was unconscious, and I remembered before that touching him while he was unconscious did strengthen me, but not enough to really fight.

Still, it was better than nothing. I started to crawl toward Lachlan.

Darla let out a derisive laugh. “Oh, my silly, silly Penny. You can’t think that you can still save him? Besides, I told you that I would let him go if you stayed. I keep my promises.”

“I need…” I gasped. It hurt to move. “To say goodbye.”

“No,” she said.

“Please,” I said. “You owe me this much. If I’m going to stay with you, if you’re going to take my baby, you must give me just one moment with him. If you really care about me, you’ll let me.”

She hesitated.

I kept crawling, getting closer to him with every step. Fresh agony jolted through my limbs, but I kept going, closing the distance between us. I would reach him soon. If I just kept her off me, kept her confused.

“No,” she said again. “You can’t touch him. You’re bonded, and you must not touch.”

And then searing pain shot through me again, ten times as bad as it had been before, so harsh and awful that I couldn’t scream. I couldn’t even breathe.

CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

The pain was too much. Too intense. So intense that it seemed as if it was outside of me. Like I was in one place, and the pain was somewhere else.

It was getting farther and farther away.

And that was when I realized that I was inside the dark tunnel from before. The death tunnel.

I started to struggle. I had to get back to the pain, back to my body.

Back to my baby.

Because I could feel him. Could see him too. Not literally or physically, but I could see the bright light of his existence. It glowed warm and pink, and it was a beacon to me.

I reached for that light, grabbed tightly to it, curled myself around it.

And the pain was back. It was coming in hot, throbbing waves that racked my body and made me twitch and jerk spasmodically.

But the baby was okay. The baby was trying to tell me something.

He wanted something.

He needed…?

No,
I
needed.

The baby sent me the smell, the taste, the sensation of hot blood in my mouth. He was telling me to drink blood.

I don’t have any blood, sweetheart,
I thought at him.

And the pain was overwhelming, and I was separating from it again.

No
.

I struggled to stay where I was.

The baby sent me another wave of sensations, feelings. A soapy smell, a smell of aftershave and a hint of sweat. Strong arms wrapped around us both.

Father
.

Lachlan’s blood? The baby wanted Lachlan’s blood?

We had never done that. He had drunk my blood, but I had never taken his. I didn’t have fangs for one thing. But now that the idea had been proposed to me, it made sense. That was how I could have the power of the blood bond. Sharing blood charged it up. If I couldn’t give my blood to Lachlan, then I could take his blood.

I tried to open my eyes.

I could hardly move. I managed to barely open them a tiny bit. Just to let in little slits of light.

At first, I couldn’t see anything. It was bright and blurry and strange, an alien universe.

But then, slowly, things came into focus.

Darla was standing over me, her body at a sharp angle upward. From my perspective, her feet were enormous, and she stretched up into the heavens, where her tiny head was practically out of sight.

She wasn’t looking at me. She was staring off into the distance. “Damn it,” she whispered.

I shifted my gaze to Lachlan, who was lying only two feet away from me. He was bleeding. A cut in his forehead. It must have happened when Darla dropped him. His head had caught the corner of the desk. If I could get there…

“Went too far again,” Darla said, sounding regretful. “Can’t seem to stop taking it too far. I don’t see how that Cooper managed it so well. It’s as if the power has a mind of its own.” She sighed.

If I moved, she’d see. I only had one shot at this.

“Damn it,” she said again. And then… she turned away. “Got to get someone to clean this up. Compel them to forget about it. Damn it, damn it, damn it.”

I couldn’t believe my good luck. She wasn’t watching me! I rolled over onto my stomach.

The pain was excruciating.

Okay, maybe I wasn’t so lucky after all.

I reached for Lachlan, using my arms to drag myself over the floor.

Darla turned back around. “Penny?”

Fuck.

I gave a mighty heave, dragging my body to Lachlan’s and latching my mouth onto his wound.

“You’re alive?” Darla was delighted. “I didn’t go too far, after all? Oh, thank goodness, Penny, I thought I’d lost you.”

I sucked the salty liquid that was Lachlan’s blood into my mouth, and I felt the pull of our connection immediately. We were tied together by strong bonds, and I was at one with everything. I could feel the inside of Lachlan’s body, his wounds, his sleeping consciousness. I could feel the baby, triumphant that I had understood his message. I could feel everything outside of us as well. The room. The magic that traveled through the walls to the bars of the cells. The way that the magic of the prisoners was being drawn into Darla. The way that this whole building sat inside the warehouse, even though it was bigger than the warehouse. They had… shrunk it somehow, manipulated the molecules…. That was why there were tunnels down there. They hadn’t been built for Sea City after all, just thrust into the ground here. The had forced the ground to accept—

“What are you doing?” Darla was suddenly angry. “Get off of him. You belong to me.” She pushed her magic into me, the painful excruciating magic.

I fought it off. I peeled it back, like pulling away one finger of her fist at a time.

She shrieked in rage.

I shot our magic at her—the white-hot bolt of it.

But my aim was still shit.

It hit just next to her, pulverizing another piece of the wall, a piece right next to the door.

Darla used magic to yank me off of Lachlan.

Didn’t matter. I had his blood in me. The power was there now. Dragon and vampire mingling together within my body. I suddenly remembered the old book that I’d read. The stories about blond bonded couples. Whiteflame. I could feel it blaze bright, and I knew it wouldn’t last forever. I could only contain this much inside me for a short time.

So I gathered it all up and threw a bolt of it at Darla.

It caught her right in the chest and she writhed there, stuck by it. It should have reduced her to ash, but she was so powerful that it only knocked her out. When the bolt stopped, she hit the floor in a heap.

I waited for a minute, waited for her to move, to speak. She didn’t.

I crawled over to Lachlan. I touched his face.

His eyes fluttered.

“Lachlan?” I whispered. “You okay? You awake?”

He groaned. “Awake, yes. Wish I wasn’t.”

“Do you need blood?” I asked. I had just taken his. Had that weakened him?

He forced himself into a sitting position. “No, I’m okay.”

Movement.

My head snapped up to see that the men we’d shut out before were coming back into the room through the hole in the wall that we’d pulverized.

They clutched at their talismans.

I summoned my fire magic, breathed a ball of fire at them.

They ducked. They swerved. They kept coming.

I got to my feet. “Stop where you are unless you want us to do to your heads what we just did to that wall.”

The men faltered.

I reached down for Lachlan. He gripped my hand. I tugged him to his feet, using magic to bolster myself.

“We just want Ms. Tell,” said one of the men. “Let us come and get her, and—”

“No,” I said, shaking my head. “Darla Tell is a murderer, and she needs to answer for her crimes.” I pointed at her body, and it floated into the air.

“You can’t take her,” said the man.

I gripped Lachlan’s hand, making sure I could still touch our whiteflame. I addressed the men. “I gotta warn you, we don’t have the best aim when it comes to this power, so you might want to duck.” And then we unleashed another bolt of the fiery power.

It blew over the men’s heads, singeing their hair, taking out chunks of the ceiling.

The men all yelled, falling to the floor, covering their heads.

I started for the exit, still holding onto Lachlan, Darla’s body floating behind us. “We’ll be leaving now. Don’t try to stop us.”

No one did.

* * *

Christiane Dirk, the detective from Baltimore, was sitting at Lachlan’s old desk. She’d transformed it into a shrine to a pair of collie dogs, whose names were apparently Lala and Booboo. I could see that because the pictures had engraved frames. She surveyed us all, making a tent of her fingers. “I don’t know what to say, I have to admit.”

We’d met Jensen, Felicity, and Connor at the station about ten minutes ago. According to them, Caleb was already being transported to Roxbone, where he’d be locked up for good.

“You saw the video,” said Lachlan.

“Have
you
seen the video?” said Dirk.

“Well, actually…” I said.

Dirk pivoted and grabbed her mouse. Her computer screen sprang to life. She hit play on a video window that was up on her screen.

The video was grainy. It showed Alastair, standing in his cell. He was shouting at Darla, who was outside the cell, but there was no sound.

Alastair threw himself at the bars. They came to life, sparking. They were so bright that they whited out the entire image for several moments.