The Twiceborn Queen (The Proving Book 2) (3 page)

I nodded and went to find Ben, Lachie slumped against my shoulder like a drugged monkey, arms and legs dangling. He was really too big to carry around like a toddler, but I didn’t care. I couldn’t get enough of him, the weight and shape and feel of him in my arms, half-afraid he might disappear from my life again if I let him go.

The lights were still on in the corridors, but most of the rooms were in darkness. Blue-grey vinyl floors stretched ahead of us, empty now that visiting hours were over. I followed the sound of voices to the nurses’ station and found Ben in a small waiting area next to it, his face grey with fatigue in the stark light. He still wore his pyjamas.

“Get dressed,” I said. “The police need to speak to me at the station. We’re leaving.”

Both the nurses behind the desk looked up at that.

“You can’t do that!” said one.

“He still needs to be here,” said the other. “We’re just waiting on another bed.”

I glared at them. “What he
needs
is to be somewhere where people aren’t trying to kill him. And no offence, ladies, but your hospital isn’t doing such a great job on that front.”

“I’ll have to call the registrar on duty,” said the first one.

“Call anyone you like. But as soon as he’s got a pair of pants on, we’re out of here.”

“And shoes,” Lachie mumbled sleepily into my shoulder. “He might hurt his feet.”

Ben hauled himself out of the chair. “I’m good to go. Got nothing but pyjamas here anyway.”

“Mr Stevens, please wait for the registrar. I’m sure he’ll advise against this.”

“Sorry.” He didn’t sound it.

The officious one stood and came around the desk. “You’ll have to sign a form saying you’re discharging yourself against doctor’s orders.”

“If you’ve got one right there, he’ll sign anything you like,” I said. “Otherwise, we’re leaving.”

“But—”

I turned my will on her, reaching into her mind and taking control. I might have sworn off enthralment, but I had nothing against a temporary compulsion. She stood frozen like a deer in the headlights, helpless in my gaze.

“We. Are. Leaving.”

And we did.

“Are you okay?” Ben asked, breaking the long silence in the car. Oncoming headlights flashed across his face like strobe lights in the darkness.

“Fine. You?”

“You killed that woman.”

Oh. I changed lanes and wondered how to answer that.

A week ago I would have had a hard time killing a person, even in self-defence. If I’d had to, I’d have been a blubbering mess afterwards. Ben probably thought I was heading for a mental breakdown, alarmed by my cool.

In fact, deep down—or maybe not so deep—a new resolve had hardened. Leandra wouldn’t have thought twice about destroying a threat, and now neither did I. That didn’t mean I didn’t regret the necessity. But I wouldn’t be falling apart any time I had to eliminate some low-life who threatened me or the people I cared about. Shifters saw such things differently to regular humans.

“She was trying to kill you. And me. I didn’t have much choice.”

“If you’d held her off till the nurses came—”

“What? She might have knifed one of them? Or Lachie? Would that have been better?”

“We might have been able to question her.”

Detective Hartley would have liked that. Hell, I would have liked that. Bad enough to have people lining up to kill you. It was even worse when you didn’t know who was at the head of the queue.

“I doubt she would have told us anything.”

“But at least we wouldn’t have been driving to the police station now, would we? Are they going to charge you?”

“I don’t think so. It’s pretty obvious it was self defence.” At least, that’s how it should look to someone who didn’t know about shifters. “Detective Hartley said they just wanted to do a formal interview. She seems like the type that wants everything done by the book.”

He made a noncommittal noise and stared out the window. Detective Hartley had told me to meet her at Chatswood police station, which wasn’t far away. We were soon cruising down Archer Street looking for a parking spot.

The police station loomed on the corner of Archer Street and Albert Avenue, a big glass and concrete box that spilled golden light onto the dark street. I felt a shiver of apprehension as we entered. The Leandra side of me sneered at my nerves. What did a dragon have to fear from human law enforcement?

“Pretend you’re my nephew,” I whispered to Lachie as Detective Hartley came to greet us. No point taking chances. Accidental deaths were hard enough to explain without adding miraculous resurrections as well.

“Mr Stevens! I didn’t expect to see you here. I thought you weren’t well enough to leave hospital yet.” Her glance travelled across his bandaged arm in its sling before coming to rest on his face.

He shrugged. “Hospital didn’t seem so appealing any more.”

“Well, since you’re here, we can take your statement too.” She led us from the reception area to the interview rooms. “If you could go with Detective Franks, Mr Stevens, you can talk to him while I ask Ms O’Connor some questions.”

Ben followed Detective Franks, and Detective Hartley smiled at Lachie.

“What about you, young man? Would you like to wait with Constable Eaton here while I talk to your mum?”

“She’s my auntie, actually.”

A young woman in uniform offered Lachie a friendly smile. “Would you like a jelly bean?”

That sealed the deal. Lachie went off with her without a backward glance, while I followed Detective Hartley into the small interview room.

We faced each other at the table and she pressed the button to start the recording. After she’d recited the standard warnings and asked a few preliminary questions she got stuck straight into it. “How well did you know Amy Johnson?”

“Not well at all. I’d seen her a couple of times before, when I was visiting Ben.”

“And how did you get on with her?”

“Fine. To be honest, I didn’t pay her that much attention.”

“So you never argued with her? There was no friction between you?”

“No, nothing like that. I don’t think I ever said more than hello.”

The guy who’d taken my initial statement at the hospital had asked this too. Was all this checking and double-checking standard procedure, or had Detective Hartley decided something seemed screwy?

“Please tell me again what happened.”

“I came back into the room—”

“Where had you been?”

She interrupted a lot more than the first guy. No detail too big or too small. Maybe that was how you got to be lead detective on a case.

“I was going home, but when I got to the car park I couldn’t find my keys. We were coming back to check if I’d dropped them in Ben’s room.” They had been under the bed, against the wall. One of the police officers at the hospital had retrieved them for me.

“And where was Ms Johnson when you came in?”

“Standing right next to the bed, holding a pillow over Ben’s face.”

“What did you do then?”

“I told my nephew to run to the nurses’ station, and then I tried to stop her.”

“Did you shut the door?”

“What?”

“Did you pause to shut the door before you tried to stop Ms Johnson suffocating Mr Stevens?” She pulled out a notebook and flipped through until she found the page she wanted. Must have belonged to the officer who’d questioned me at the scene. “The two nurses who came to your aid said the door was shut when they arrived.”

She looked up, an expression of polite interest on her face. I paused. No telling what was going on behind that attentive mask, but I had a feeling she didn’t miss much.

“I … guess I must have, then. I was probably trying to stop Lachie from seeing what was happening. He’s only ten, you know.” I didn’t actually remember shutting the door, but it was a smart move if you knew you were probably going to use unusual methods of winning a fight. Unless, of course, some detail-obsessed detective decided to take it as an admission of premeditated murder or something.

She regarded me steadily. “Most people would have stood there and screamed for security. You’re remarkably cool under pressure, Ms O’Connor.”

It sounded more like an accusation than a compliment. I’d have to try harder to be unremarkable.

“There wasn’t time to wait for help. I had to do something.”

“And you’re positive Mr Stevens didn’t know Ms Johnson either before he was admitted to hospital?”

That was about the fifth time someone had asked me that. Some of my irritation crept into my voice. “Asking me again won’t change my answer, you know.”

Detective Hartley smiled, a professional expression that didn’t reach her eyes. “You’d be surprised how often things come back to people afterwards, once they’ve gotten over the shock. It doesn’t hurt to jog their memory.”

I had a feeling Detective Hartley was never surprised by the things people suddenly “remembered”. Perhaps I was too calm for someone who’d supposedly just killed an attacker with their own knife. Or maybe it was the not-screaming thing. Note to self: scream blue murder next time you get attacked in public. It makes the cops happier.

“Why do you think Ms Johnson attacked Mr Stevens?”

I sagged against the hard plastic chair. That was a damn good question. If only I knew the answer. “I have no idea.”

“According to her co-workers, Ms Johnson was a dedicated nurse, and not the violent type. They’d never even heard her raise her voice to anyone.” Detective Hartley glanced down and read from another page of the notebook. “Divorced, two grown children, never been in trouble with the law. We checked: one speeding ticket seven years ago. Went to church every Sunday.” The sudden snap of the notebook closing made me jump. “Why does a person like that take it into their head to kill someone they hardly know? It doesn’t make sense.”

“Plenty of bad people go to church every Sunday. She had that knife. That seems like she must have been planning something.”

“True.” She eyed me as if she’d like to ask about my own church-going habits. “But if she planned to smother him, why did she need the knife?”

Well, damn. Should have kept my mouth shut instead of sending her chasing after more riddles. I didn’t need someone like her poking around at the moment. I had enough to deal with.

“Does Mr Stevens have any enemies? Can you think of any reason why someone would want him dead?”

Half a dozen off the top of my head, but none she needed to know about. Hell, I’d been so sure Elizabeth would leave him alone. Could it have been Alicia, trying to get to me through him? A supporter of Valeria’s looking for revenge? Or, God forbid, even Jason?

I’d described everything twice already, but Detective Hartley walked me through the rest of the scene again, lingering over every detail, before finally agreeing I could leave. Ben and Lachie were waiting outside the interview room. I half expected her to tell me not to leave town, the way they did on TV, but all she said was that she’d be in touch.

“Here’s my card,” she said.
Detective Senior Constable Ellen Hartley, Chatswood Criminal Investigation
. “Call me if you think of anything else.”

“Sure.” Not a chance, lady.

The drive home was quiet. Home. Wherever that was these days. Leandra owned two Sydney properties, one a townhouse in The Rocks, the other a much larger place out the back of Arcadia, an hour’s drive from the city. Both were way more luxurious than the rundown suburban house Lachie and I had called home. Both held troubling memories from Leandra’s point of view. The country place had been the site of Jason’s first assassination attempt. The townhouse was where she died, after he got it right the second time.

And of course where she tricked her way into my body, leaving her own to die. So not exactly bursting with happy memories from my point of view either.

Nevertheless, we were staying in the Sydney townhouse, partly for its closeness to Royal North Shore Hospital, and partly because it suited Garth’s paranoia—it was small enough to defend with the handful of security we had. If he’d had his way we would have gone completely to ground, somewhere anonymous with no association with either Leandra or Kate, but I’d had enough of hiding in cheap motels. To win the proving I had to re-establish my dominance fast, and hiding wouldn’t do that. With the great game at a shell-shocked standstill for now, it seemed a good time to regroup. Let Alicia waste time licking her wounds. I would be forging ahead, growing stronger every day.

Unless … I stopped at a set of lights on the Pacific Highway and frowned at the lone car heading across the intersection. Unless this
was
Alicia, back in the game already?

Normally I wouldn’t even consider it. When Valeria had taken trueshape and come arrowing out of the heart of the bushfire like an angel of fiery death, where had Alicia been? Struggling hand-to-hand against Valeria’s forces with the rest of us, choking on smoke and blistered by a hundred flying sparks? Or even up in the roiling sky, taking on Valeria dragon to dragon?

Not bloody likely. She’d been hiding in her special fireproof bunker, waiting, as usual, for someone else to do the dirty work until she could emerge, make-up unsmudged. It was hard to believe she’d hatched from the same clutch as the rest of us. Her whole strategy so far had consisted of “hide and hope the others kill each other off”.

But now she had Luce on her side. My hands clenched the wheel till my knuckles whitened. Luce was
my
security chief, but now she was bound to Alicia by an arcane ritual, forced to aid her instead of me. Just thinking about it made me want to hurt someone. Preferably Alicia.

Luce wasn’t the type to cross her fingers and hide. She was a wyvern with all the natural wiles of her kind, plus a go get ’em attitude that made her as unstoppable as a force of nature. Luce would be prodding Alicia into action, making her own luck as usual.

“People say I’m lucky,” she’d told me once, not long after we started working together. “But I’ve noticed the harder I work, the luckier I get.”

So I could totally see Luce dragging Alicia out of her comfort zone and making her actually do something for a change. The tricky part was seeing why Luce would think attacking Ben would be the best move for my sister.