Mercy Burns

by Keri Arthur

  I tore my gaze away, trying to remember that these men really deserved what they got.

  Damon walked toward us, his gaze on me rather than the woman kneeling in the grass. His clothes were wet but otherwise he seemed okay. Some of the tension still filling me slithered away—but not all of it. We still had to get out of here before the cops arrived.

  “You okay?” he asked, his nostrils flaring as his dark gaze swept me.

  “Yeah.” There was blood running down the inside of my sweatshirt, but only a trickle, so obviously I had just been grazed. “We’d better get out of here.”

  “I can’t,” Coral said, and pulled down her turtleneck. Around her neck was a band of leather, to which a small black box had been attached. “I’m wired. I can feel the thing now—it’s like a dull fire waiting to explode into my brain. If I get any closer to the boundary, it’ll set this thing off. And it’ll kill me if I go past it.”

  “Then we need to remove it,” Damon said, stopping just behind her.

  She was shaking her head even before he’d finished.

  “I tried that. Unless you’ve got the proper key, the thing just goes off.”

  Damon frowned. “Do you know what sort of signal it is?”

  “No, but the radius is a quarter of an acre, which is the size of this property, if that’s any help.”

  “Maybe.” He glanced at me. “Meet us in the parking lot near the Bodega Bay marina. There are two, so look for the one with the RVs parked in the lot. It’s right near the beach off Highway One, so you shouldn’t have any trouble finding it.”

  “The car is stolen,” I reminded him, crossing my arms and wondering what the hell he was up to now. “And the owners will probably be noticing its absence.”

  “So steal another.”

  He said that just like my brother would have. But then, a cavalier attitude toward other people’s property did seem to infect the dragon population. Even draman weren’t immune to it. “Why would I need to? Where are you going?”

  “Most of these devices have a horizontal rather than vertical boundary. Rather than trying to break the lock, I think I should just fly her straight up and unlock it once we’re free.”

  “You’re going to change form in the middle of a suburban street?” And he thought I was crazy?

  “We have little choice.” He glanced at Coral. “It’s your neck. Are you willing to take the risk?”

  She took a deep breath then released it slowly. “I need to get to Angus before dawn, so yes.”

  “And you need to answer some questions first,” Damon said, then glanced over his shoulder as the wail of sirens began to shatter the silence. “You’d better go, Mercy.”

  I didn’t move. “You’ll wait for me there?”

  He hesitated, obviously knowing that I was referring to his questioning Coral, then nodded.

  Something inside me relaxed a little. At least he was making an effort to treat me as a partner some of the time. As the blue fire began to crawl across his skin, I turned and walked across to the car. The curtains in the house opposite twitched—an obvious sign we were being watched. While the trees hid some of his shape-shift, there was little hiding the explosion of air as he launched skyward. But he was a black dragon surrounded by night, and I doubted the eyes of an old woman would even be able to see him.

  And even if she could, who would actually believe her?

  I climbed into the car and drove off. I was barely two blocks down the road when a police car screamed past, its flashing lights almost blinding in the darkness. While I knew Damon and Coral had already left, it didn’t stop the tension crawling through me. Luck really hadn’t been in our corner, and while the old woman probably hadn’t seen Damon clearly, she would have been able to see me.

  I restrained the impulse to speed up and kept my pace sedate. The quickest way to attract unwanted attention was to do something idiotic—like speed away from an accident.

  I switched cars in Sebastopol and continued on, making my way—with the help of the street directory stolen from the first car—to the Bodega highway and toward Bodega Bay.

  I couldn’t immediately find them when I arrived, so I parked the car, then grabbed the pack and walked down the marina. Both he and Coral were sitting at the very end of the dock. He had his arm wrapped around her shoulders, and even though I knew there would be nothing intimate in the gesture, something inside me still twisted. Which was ridiculous, given I meant as little to the man as Coral did.

  I walked down and sat beside her. “Did you get the transmitter off your neck?”

  She pulled down her turtleneck. Only a red-raw strip of skin remained. “It took a while, but we managed it.” Her bright gaze met mine. “Thank you. Both of you.”

  I sighed. “We’re here for a reason, Coral, and not just because Angus asked us.”

  “I know. And because I owe you the debt of my life, I’ve resisted the call of my lover’s soul. But you need to ask your questions now, because I cannot stay long.”

  “Why did those men snatch you and Angus?” Damon asked before I could say anything.

  It seemed like a pointless question, because we already had the answer from Angus. But maybe Damon was simply making sure the old sea dragon had been telling the truth.

  “You’ve seen his scars?” Coral asked, picking up a long splinter of wood and twirling it absently in her fingers.

  “Yes.”

  “We found one of the men responsible in a bar. Only it turned out it wasn’t him. He just sounded the same.” She grimaced, her gaze on the twirling splinter and tears bright in her eyes. “As luck would have it, although he hadn’t been involved in Whale Point’s destruction, he’d taken part in the more recent ones. So we paid for Angus’s mistake by being snatched, beaten, and almost killed. It was only when Angus mentioned he’d been contacted by a reporter about the recent cleansings that they let us live.”

  “So he’d lied.” And convincingly, because Rainey and I hadn’t contacted him until the night they’d tried to run us off the road. And that was the contact they’d arranged to send us into their trap.

  She raised an eyebrow. “Wouldn’t you?”

  Well, yeah. “But why would Angus even think to give our names to them?”

  “Because he’d heard from the friend of a friend that there were some reporters asking about draman from Stillwater.” She shrugged. “In the end, the lie didn’t really help us.”

  And it certainly didn’t help us, I thought bitterly.

  “You were always living on borrowed time,” Damon said.

  “We knew that. And we did try to escape. But these men are smart, and we were each held accountable for the behavior of the other. Even when they released Angus, they watched him like a hawk. If he even looked like he was manipulating the sea, they would have killed me. It made escape extremely difficult.”

  “So who is the man Angus thought he’d recognized?”

  “I don’t know his name, and I don’t know whether he’s a major player or just another heavy. I’ve only ever seen him once. He was a tall man, with thinnish features, blue eyes, and reddish hair. He sometimes had a very cultured voice.”

  “Sometimes?” I asked, eyebrows rising.

  She glanced at me. “Yeah. Sometimes it slipped, revealing a more guttural, earthy tone. That was the voice Angus recognized.”

  Seth had a guttural, earthy tone. But then, so did a lot of dragons in our clique, including our king. “Was he draman or dragon?”

  “Dragon.”

  Seth didn’t have red hair or blue eyes, but he was at least a dragon. Of course, he might very well be dead, so I had no idea why I kept going back to him as a suspect.

  Except that whoever it was knew me, and they’d known about the freezer. And there were only five people who knew about that particular incident—me, Rainey, Seth, and the two thugs he’d used to help lock me in there. And neither of the thugs was bright enough to be in charge of this sort of operation.

  Cora
l flicked the piece of twig from her fingers, watching it spin through the air before adding, “There is another man, but I’ve never heard his name. He was the one who gave the guards most of their orders.”

  “Do you have any idea how we can find him?”

  “Not really.” She paused. “But I think they did most of their business through some sort of club. I heard it mentioned a few times. Decadent, or something like that.”

  Which jelled nicely with what the draman had already told us.

  “And you can’t tell us more than that?” Damon asked.

  “I wish I could,” Coral said. “Now, if you have no further questions, then I really need to go.”

  “Angus called your family before he was killed,” I said. “They won’t be far away.”

  She closed her eyes and whispered, “Then at least I’ll have someone with me when his soul moves on.”

  Unlike Rainey, I thought, with tears suddenly in my eyes. I blinked them away, but the pain would not be so easily pushed aside this time. I hugged my knees close to my chest and tried to ignore the ache.

  “I wouldn’t suggest hanging around long after dawn,” Damon commented. “These men appear to be cleaning up loose ends, and they will come looking for you.”

  “Oh, have no fear of that. I’ll be heading home, and away from these shores.” She tucked a strand of multicolored hair behind her ears and gave us a wan smile. “Thank you again for what you’ve done. And for what you tried to do.”

  She pushed to her feet. The sea reacted to her movement, the gentle waves suddenly splashing upward, reaching for her with foamy fingers, like a lover reaching for his mate after a long absence.

  I glanced up at her. “Coral, don’t kill them.”

  Her bright gaze met mine, then she nodded once and dived into the water.

  Relief spun through me. Though she could do what she wanted to those men and I’d be none the wiser, something suggested that she’d keep her word.

  “Those men do not deserve your pity,” Damon said, rising to his feet and brushing dust from his rear.

  I followed the movement of his hands, admiring the way his jeans clung to the curve of his butt.

  “What you’ve done to them is probably worse than death, Damon.” God, the mere thought of someone stealing my fire had my stomach churning. “How would you like to live like that? Knowing that the very thing that made you what you are had been snatched away?”

  “They deserved the punishment.”

  “Maybe, but they don’t deserve death on top of it.”

  He studied me for a moment, his expression unreadable, then shook his head. “After all those scars, you can still live up to your name? I think that makes you truly unique.”

  “Yeah,” I said dryly. “So unique you’re going to report me to the council and make them deal with me, and everyone like me. Meaning little old unique me will probably end up just like those men on the boat.”

  “The council isn’t likely to steal the fire of every draman capable of it. But if the dragon gene is overriding the human one, we need to be aware of it.”

  “Because we wouldn’t want all those half-breeds diluting the glorious bloodlines, now would we?”

  “I have never said that,” he said, with more than a little exasperation in his tone, “so I’d appreciate it if you’d stop making statements like that.”

  It was oddly satisfying to discover that Death could be annoyed, and I couldn’t help the smirk as I said, “So, what’s next?”

  “Next, Miss Most Irritating, we find somewhere to stay for the night. It’s been a long day, and I need some sleep.”

  The sudden twinkle in his dark gaze suggested sleep was the last thing he had on his mind right now, and the thought made my stomach clench with excitement. He reached down and offered me a hand. His fingers were warm against mine, his grip like steel and yet somehow gentle as he pulled me upright.

  “We can’t walk into a hotel looking like something the cat’s thrown up,” I commented, halfheartedly trying to tug my fingers from his and not succeeding.

  “I never said anything about staying in a hotel.” He turned around and tugged me alongside him. “There are plenty of vacation homes around, and at this time of year they’re not likely to be occupied. We’ll just pick one and help ourselves to the amenities.”

  “And hope the cops don’t wander along to arrest our asses.” I didn’t actually expect an answer to that, and I didn’t get one. Normal dragons had an easy disregard for human law at the best of times, and Damon was far from normal. “How does one become a muerte?”

  He raised an eyebrow, the beginnings of a smile teasing the corner of his mouth. “You do like asking the unexpected, don’t you?”

  “It stops me from getting bored.”

  “I’ll bet it annoyed the hell out of your brother when you were growing up.”

  “That was part of the fun of doing it.”

  He snorted, then released my fingers and wrapped his arm around my shoulders. Although the action was casual, my reaction was as far from that as you could get. My whole body hummed with anticipation.

  “Sometimes it’s a family tradition,” he said eventually. “Sometimes it’s simply talent.”

  “What sort of talent?”

  “My clique has an innate ability to blend with the shadows. Those who become muerte have a higher degree of this skill than most.”

  His fingers were teasing the top of my arm near where the bullet had clipped me, and it was inevitable that he’d eventually touch the patch sodden with half-dried blood. Sudden concern rippled through the air. “Why didn’t you tell me you’d been hit?”

  “Because it’s barely a scratch, and definitely not worth worrying about.” I shifted my shoulder back a little, forcing his hand to drop closer to my breast. “So which one were you? Tradition or talent?”

  “Both. And that wound needs cleaning, even if you do have dragon-fast healing.”

  “So we’ll clean it once we find a house for the night,” I said, a touch impatiently. The man wasn’t going to wriggle out of telling me at least something about himself. Not this time. “Your father was a muerte?”

  “Yeah. I was his only son, so I’ve basically been trained for the position since I could walk.”

  The edge in his voice surprised me. I glanced at him, but his expression was as unreadable as ever. “It almost sounds like it wasn’t something you wanted to be.”

  “I love what I do, but that’s not the point. I was never given the choice.”

  “And if you had been? Would you have chosen to walk this path or not?”

  “I don’t know.” He released me to jump off the marina, then grabbed my waist and lifted me down. We walked in silence through the dark RVs, and it wasn’t until we reached the road on the other side of the park that he added, “There was a time I contemplated a life that was more than shadows. A life filled with warmth and family and children of my own, but that foolishness vanished years ago.”

  I raised my eyebrows. “Why would you consider wanting love and a family foolishness?”

  “Because such things are not for the muerte.”

  “Why the hell not? I mean, you exist, so somewhere along the line, love and family must have come into the equation.”

  “I come from a long line of muerte who breed for necessity, not for love. My father bred three daughters from different women before he produced me. He had nothing further to do with the mothers of his other children. I became his sole focus.”

  We crossed the road and moved through the trees lining the sandy hill. He obviously had a target in mind, even though we’d passed several perfectly good houses. Of course, they could have been occupied—a dragon’s senses were usually keener over long distances than a draman’s.

  “Why the hell would your father’s other partners even put up with that?”

  His mouth twisted and became a bitter thing. “Because in our clique, it is considered an honor for a woman to bear the chi
ld of a muerte—especially if that child is a male who goes on to become one of the shadow ones.”

  “And I thought my clique had attitude problems.” These men were using dragon women as little more than incubators—and had them convinced it was a good thing! “But just because you come from a long line of men who refused to settle down doesn’t mean you’re destined to do the same. You have a choice, you know.”

  “A muerte’s life is nomadic. And it is dangerous.”

  “So?”

  “So,” he said, slanting me a glance that sent a chill down my spine—and not because it was his usual scary, death-in-residence glance, but rather one that was briefly filled with a resigned and aching acceptance of a barren future. It was a familiar feeling—simply because it haunted the darkest of my dreams, too. “There are those who do not like what we do, and there is an active—if underground—plot to erase us. My father was murdered, as was his father. I have no doubt that will be my fate, too.”

  “So you live like a monk until then? Why restrict yourself that way?”

  His grin was sudden and decidedly wicked. “Oh, monks and I have nothing in common. As you’ll no doubt discover soon enough.”

  “There you go again, getting ahead of yourself.” I let my hand slide across his butt until it slipped into the back pocket of his jeans. Even through the material I could feel the heat of him, the ripple of muscle as he moved. I wished it was skin-on-skin contact, but it was probably better that it wasn’t. Things might have gotten heated a little too quickly if it had been, and we still had to find somewhere decent to stay. Sandy soil was not a good bed, no matter how sexy the partner. “And we still haven’t gotten to the bottom of that whole respect thing yet.”

  “Oh, I respect you,” he said, his voice a whisper through my soul. “In fact, I intend to respect every single inch of you. And more than once.”

  Heat surged through my limbs at the thought, and I resisted the urge to fan myself. I needed to get this conversation back on track. Otherwise we were going to get down and dirty right here and now—sand or no sand.