Twiceborn Endgame (The Proving Book 3) (6 page)

“How about we pay you by not handing your sorry arse back to your clan?” Luce suggested.

Blue shot her a killing look, but I waved her to silence.

“Look, Blue.” I leaned forward, letting my claws disappear. “You’re the expert. I want my son back. You tell me what I need, and you will be well and truly compensated.”

“Where is he?”

“I don’t know.”

“Well, that’s your first problem right there, isn’t it?” He jumped up. Out of the corner of my eye I saw the ever-protective Garth stiffen, ready to leap to my defence, but Blue made no move toward me. “Can’t rescue the poor kid if you don’t know where he is. I’ll need to scry for him. You got something of his? Something personal, I mean. Blood or hair is best.”

“Is that all you need?” The prospect of finding Lachie had me suddenly as energised as the goblin. “When can you do it?”

He strode toward the French doors. Garth moved to block his way with an enquiring look at me, and I waved him back. We followed the goblin out into the sunlight. Already the stones of the terrace radiated heat; it was going to be another hot day. Below, the beach glittered in the sun and the shrieks of small children playing at the water’s edge drifted to us on the wind.

Blue took the wide stone steps down to the garden and made a beeline for the central fountain. It featured mermaids and mermen waving tridents, surrounded by pouting fish that spat water when the fountain was turned on. At the moment nothing disturbed the pool of water around the central statues except the occasional goldfish. Blue parked his bony butt on the fountain’s stone edging and took off his shoes. His feet were as long and narrow as the rest of him, and his toenails were filthy.

“Right now, if you like,” he said.

“You need bare feet to perform magic?”

“Nah. I just like to feel the grass.”

He wiggled those hideous toenails and I turned away, sending Mac to Lachie’s room for his hairbrush. The pink-haired werewolf had spent plenty of time playing Lego with Lachie and, even though he’d barely moved into this house before he’d been snatched, she knew where it was.

Sure enough, there were so many hairs caught in his brush it looked like it had a nest of spiders living in it. I pulled one curly brown hair free, careful not to disturb any of the others. Hair, nail clippings, bloody handkerchiefs—even snotty ones—were all grist to the goblin mage’s mill, and I didn’t want him having any more than he needed.

I passed the hair to Blue, and he turned and dropped it in the still waters of the fountain’s basin.

“I’ll need a knife,” he said. “My own would be preferable,”—he shot an accusing look at Ben—“but any knife will do.”

Garth stepped forward and pulled a throwing knife from inside his shirt. Trust the big werewolf to have a knife on him. His love of edged weapons was almost as great as his love for
Star Wars
. He said nothing, but there was a new alertness to his stance as he passed the weapon across. When he stepped back he positioned himself so that his large body shielded mine from the now-armed goblin. I knew that wasn’t an accident.

But Blue showed no interest in stabbing me. Instead he turned the knife on himself, drawing the sharp blade across a skinny arm that bore the scars of many previous occasions. Strange that the scars remained. Most shifters only scarred from really savage wounds. Supernatural healing was one of the perks of an otherwise often dodgy lifestyle.

Blood dripped into the water as Blue muttered under his breath, too softly even for my sharp dragon hearing to catch. It spread across the water’s surface like a bloom of red algae, thick and viscous, instead of dissolving and disappearing as I’d expected.

Blue’s arm began to shake. He’d gone deathly pale. Beads of sweat stood on his forehead and dripped from his mat of orange hair. He swayed, as if he might topple into the water, and I stepped forward. Garth stopped me, his big hands closing on my upper arms.

“Don’t touch him. You’ll break his concentration.”

“Is he all right?” He hadn’t lost that much blood. Why did he look like he was about to pass out?

“Goblin magic is hard on the mage,” Luce murmured. “Just watch.”

Blue laid the knife on the stone beside him, and Garth wasted no time in retrieving it. The blade was as clean as if it had never been used, and it sparkled in the sunlight. Blue’s arm had stopped bleeding and he cradled it against his chest. He leaned forward and placed his other hand above the still-spreading bloodstain, not quite touching it, but so close an ant would have had trouble fitting through the space between.

I folded my own arms across my chest. I hated not knowing what was going on. The blood made me uneasy. There hadn’t been that much. How could it now cover more than half the fountain’s basin? It crept around water jets and past lilies whose bright green pads made an eye-popping contrast to the crimson stain, as if it were alive. It gave me the horrors.

It’s just blood, for God’s sake. It can’t hurt you
. No one said a word as the red stain continued its march across the fountain’s wide basin. When at last the final stretch of clear water had been conquered, Blue cried out in the harsh goblin tongue and plunged his hand into the foul water.

There was a blinding flash. Someone swore, and several of the thralls reached for their guns. I blinked the after-effects from my vision and saw that the blood was gone. Shapes moved in the depths of the pool now.

I leaned forward, straining to see against the glare of sunlight on the water. Blue was still muttering under his breath, and the shapes resolved into a picture. The surface of the water flickered like a badly tuned TV screen. Interrupted by water lilies and bits of plumbing, faces came into focus. People moved in a large room whose background faded into darkness. Lachie was there, and Jason too. I clenched my fists. Pity this wasn’t a portal. I’d reach right through and punch that smug face if I could.

And then I’d grab my boy and hold him tight. He looked like he needed it. Tiny in a large armchair, he sat with his legs curled beneath him. He was hunched over, as if trying to make himself smaller. His little face was pinched with worry as his eyes moved between his father and the others in the room, following a conversation we couldn’t hear.

“Can we get sound?” I whispered to Luce. I’d wring Jason’s neck when I got my hands on him. How dare he put his ambitions before Lachie’s welfare? Lachie should be safe with me, playing with his Lego, his biggest worry whether he could manage to sneak a cookie from Dave without me noticing.

She shook her head, her eyes roving over the scene. Probably memorising every detail. Luce was good at details; that was part of the reason I’d survived this long. Just as well, too—I was too distracted by that look on my baby’s face to pay as much attention as I should have.

“Who’s that?” she asked. The central fountain took a huge chunk out of the picture. We could see the legs of two people sitting on a couch, but the rest of them was cut off. “I wish they’d move.”

A couple of men I didn’t know were also in the room, standing by the wall. They were short but solid, and their faces were completely blank, as if they stood the world’s most boring guard duty. Though they stood in the shadows, no aura lit the area around them, unlike the faint red glow surrounding Jason, so they were human.

The most interesting thing about them was that they were Japanese. I glanced back at the legs of the seated figures. One was a woman. Now more than ever I needed to see her face.

“Blue. Can you zoom in a little?”

“I’m not a bloody camera.” The goblin’s voice sounded strained. He moved the hand that was still in the water, ever so slowly. Tiny ripples quivered through the bottom of the picture, but the viewpoint began to shift. The picture followed the moving hand like a dog on a leash. A window came into view.

The room was high up. We could see the tops of buildings and glimpses of roads far below. Lachie was the most brightly lit thing in the image, as if the spell focused on him as much as I did, and the edges of the image blurred and faded. Jason disappeared as the viewpoint continued to move slowly across the scene. More of the world outside the window came into the frame, with a familiar harbour, and the beginning of a very recognisable sweep of iron girders.

“They’re still in Sydney, then,” Garth said, with satisfaction in his voice, as the Harbour Bridge slowly revealed itself.

And then the woman came into view. Even in the blurriness of the goblin’s image I recognised her. She was one of the most famous shifters in the world.

Daiyu, queen of Japan.

Silence fell on the garden, broken at last by the goblin’s nasal laugh.

“You should see your faces.” He grinned as he shoved his glasses up to their normal resting place again.

Garth snarled, as if he’d like to jam those damn glasses somewhere sideways. The thought held a certain appeal.

“Bad news, is it?” Blue continued. “Has she come to steal your crown?”

He lifted his hand and shook the blood-red water from it. The picture in the pond dissipated as the flying droplets struck it.

“I think I liked you better when you were drunk,” I said.

The goblin’s smile widened. “Well, that’s easy enough to fix. Just point me at the nearest bottle and I’ll get on with it.”

“Nobody told you to end the scrying,” said Luce, indicating the now-clear water.

“Sorry, love, couldn’t hold it much longer anyway.”

This was the most cheerful I’d ever seen the goblin mage. His good mood seemed in inverse proportion to the black expressions around him. He lounged on the stone coping of the fountain, his gaze flicking with obvious pleasure between all the grim faces surrounding him.

Bastard. A wholly dragon rage swept over me, an urge to smash his grinning face into ruins. I drew a deep, shuddering breath. Seeing Lachie so miserable made me want to lash out and hurt someone. He’d looked so pale, as if he was suffering from one of his headaches. I’d bet anything that Jason wouldn’t remember that tablets made him gag, and he had to have soluble painkillers instead.

“It doesn’t matter,” I said to Luce, forcing myself to concentrate. Worrying wouldn’t help Lachie, only action would. I needed to be more than his mother now.
Focus, Kate
. “We know they’re in the city. It shouldn’t be too difficult to track them down.”

I even had the police helping with that now. No, the problem would be what to do once we’d found them. Dragons were very hard to kill. Lately that had been working to my advantage, since I’d faced more than my fair share of attacks. It took something so catastrophic that the body’s supercharged healing powers couldn’t cope with it, like a beheading or a bomb blast. Dragonfire would do it if the victim was in human form, but no dragon was going to stand around in human form long enough to be blasted with dragonfire. Certainly not a dragon as old and cunning as Daiyu of Japan.

That left poisoning, and there were only two poisons known to be fatal to dragons. One was bane leaf, which Jason had used to kill Leandra in her original body, and the other was even harder to come by, which was saying something, since bane leaf was so rare it was just about extinct. The second poison was called du, and the secret of its manufacture was known only to the Chinese queen—who was Daiyu’s sister.

The queen of Japan wasn’t Japanese at all. She had been locked into an exhausting proving for the throne of China with her last remaining sister when an opportunity had come up to assassinate the queen of Japan. Problem solved: now there were two thrones available for the two warring sisters. I don’t know how they had settled who took China and who took Japan, but Daiyu had moved in before the true Japanese queen’s body had even had time to cool, and the coup had been presented to the other queens as a fait accompli. Celeste Rousseau, who ruled all of Europe from her throne in France, had made a rather half-hearted attempt to unseat her, but it had come to nothing, and Daiyu had remained unchallenged since.

Not that I particularly
wanted
to kill Daiyu. Or at least, I hadn’t until now. When all she’d done was try to manipulate her way to my throne, it hadn’t been personal. Now that I’d seen her so close to my precious son, killing her seemed like a damned good idea. If it wasn’t for her and her scheming, Lachie would still be safe with me. I could hold him until his headache went away and distract him with silly stories, like I used to do when he was little. He wouldn’t have to sit in a room full of strangers and worry about what was going to happen to him.

And so we were back at the whole
kill or be killed
thing, like the proving but with the heat turned up a notch. Fantastic. For such a supposedly superior race, dragons sure had a primitive grasp on diplomacy.

“So can I go, then?” Blue asked. “You can find them without my help. I’ll just take my gold and head back to my cave, and leave you people to get on with your little war.”

“What, afraid Chief Trimboli will find you if you stay above ground too long?” Ben said, a jeering note in his voice that sounded completely unlike him. “That could still be arranged unless you co-operate, you know.”

“I
am
co-operating! What more do you people want?”

“What I
want
is my son back. What I want is to defeat all these damn enemies that keep popping out of the woodwork.” I held the goblin’s gaze, and kept a firm grip on my temper at the same time, though the delay chafed at me. I wanted to run to Lachie
now.
Intellectually I knew that would achieve nothing, but my heart didn’t want to listen.

Focus, Kate.
I clung to that like a mantra, armouring myself against the tide of frustration that threatened to sweep me away
. You can’t help Lachie if you fall apart now. Time to be a dragon, not a mother
.

Behind his glasses the goblin’s eyes were huge. His vision must be shocking. “What I want is for you to help me achieve all this. As you said yourself, I’m a rich woman now. I can make it worth your while.”

“Well, what
I
want is to stay alive, since we’re chatting so frankly. And getting involved in a dragon war isn’t the best way of achieving that. Doesn’t matter how much gold you pay me if I’m too dead to enjoy it, does it?”