Eager hands shot up instantly.
Topher’s smile widened, and he nodded at Abe.
Worth it, all worth it.
That was when he realized the pigeons were gone. That was when the wall shook.
46
Saffyranae
The process of shifting to other winged creatures was not unlike that of changing to human form. Other than, of course, the fact that balancing in say, a bird or bat still allowed one to keep the semblance of one’s physical structure, and there was a great deal more shoving of one’s bulk into the pocket dimension.
Who noticed a few pigeons in the city? Had they anticipated magical traps, a strategy like this may have been deployed out of the gate. After all, who noticed a few pigeons in the city? Their remaining team was on alert for anyone.
But then, the senator burned through that wall. The time for observations was over. They at least knew where three eggs were, and Lia and Gor had been tasked with finding the others, the ones Saff could feel crying for her. Everyone else, along with Saff, were to get the guards disabled when they came and rescue the three eggs Senator Jorgenson had. And while they were at it, try to contain that monster.
Nehemaiah puffed up his bird chest and landed on the grass. They all followed suit, and Saff was glad of it. The cover of darkness had been a boon for her because she was sure in daylight that she’d have made a bizarre sight, a pigeon with scattered dragon scales and bright, unevenly sized blue eyes, maybe even a touch of sharp fang. Holding her human shape was hard enough. Pigeon was more a suggestion than true copy.
Taking a deep breath, she let her form return to her, the stretching of her bones and elongating of her flesh, the safety and wholeness being dragon fully again brought her. She looked around and the others were all completely ready beside her.
Maiah gave a brisk nod. Now!
With pleasure, Saff tore the window they’d been perched on apart and half the wall with it.
Senator, this is over, Saff said.
The man bellowed at her and a flash of dark, inky veins pulsed out against the skin of his face. It was only an instant, but it was enough to tell Saff they were dealing with someone who wasn’t fully human anymore.
She should have known with access to that much power that the Senator would take some for himself.
Fan out, Nehemaiah said. Lianeesa. Goralula. Check the basement for additional eggs. Saffyranae, detain Jorgenson and secure the eggs here. Everyone else, we stop the guards.
The men who had been gathered round the table were cowering in the far corner of the room. One in a truly unfortunate outfit, even by human standards, had been moving his fingers up and down, side to side in front of him, muttering something about his mother Mary. A few had urinated on themselves. Saff had that effect on people.
An entire room full of dragons did, too.
Senator Jorgenson didn’t panic, didn’t react beyond his rage and that flash of veins. He pressed a button on the wall and a claxon blared. Lia and Goral didn’t wait any longer before tearing down the hall toward the source of the eggs, those children crying for help. Aerynth, a shaman in her own right when not Searching, followed them, ensuring they’d be both protected and able to locate what they needed.
Nehemaiah and Koro roared thunderously as a phalanx of large, black-eyed men and women burst into the tiny board room. The space cleared out quickly as the humans who’d soiled themselves—presumably the senator’s buyers—ran for the exits. The guards rushed on the dragons, forcing them out into the expanse of the garden.
Saff managed to stay in the room and rounded on the senator who merely laughed at her.
“You dumb bitch. You think I didn’t get damage reports on every accident? Every time you ruined my business in Los Angeles, my deals, you think I didn’t study up on you?”
Saff looked over shoulder where a few guards encircled her. She thought of Yuffy, of the pain of so many, of the children who died. It was more than enough rage to fuel a blast of Arctic air that froze them from the neck down where they stood.
I do not care. I know of you, too, Senator, and you have hurt my kind badly. You have started a plague you cannot hope to understand or imagine. Come with me now, come to the dragon Council for justice, and you can live.
“Not a chance, you icy cunt,” he said, reaching into his pocket and yanking out a small metal box. “You can die.”
Saff arched her neck back, prepared to breath out another blastoff ice, when he flicked open the box and a massive flame shot from it. She lost her blast immediately in her chest and stumbled back, tripping into the guards she’d frozen.
The senator laughed, the black veins popping up under the surface of his skin. “I found a way to enchant, whatever you call it, my Zippo. I have lighters everywhere. I’d have upped the heat in this room already but the lack of a wall kept me from using that safeguard tonight. What kind of a dragon are you?”
He stepped closer to her, the flames threatening to engulf her, whirling and spiraling in an inferno from one, tiny spot. They never even licked him, and she knew he spoke the truth, that he’d used dragon magic to protect himself and doom her.
Saff rolled away from the flames as best she could and outside, into the expansive garden of the property. Each of her companions were busy. Koro swiped at two guards at once with his massive talons, and Nehemaiah was a sight to behold with his fire blazing and giant tail slinging against the almost dozen guards rushing for him. Eight bowled over when his spiked tail hit them, but four continued on, undaunted.
She stumbled and swept out with her own tail, shrieking in pain when it was charred by the flames, but gratified when the flames died out and the small, metal box flew from the senator’s hands.
Saff bellow and lost control of her form. The pain was too great and her great white scales on her tail a ruined, burned mess. Against her will, she shrank and changed, her human form and usual jeans and tee covering her. She jumped to her feet and readied herself in a fighting stance. With Maiah’s fire and the flames that had burned her real body, she couldn’t call back her true form so soon.
Oh gods.
But she would not panic. She would follow the senator’s moves and meet him blow for blow.
He grinned and raced for her, moving faster than she anticipated, and Saff blocked the blow even as her heart sank. He’d made more modifications to himself, albeit in a different way than he had with the others. It made her uncertain of his strengths. The first punch he threw, she dodged, but the second crunched hard into her temple.
Saff stumbled back as stars burst before her eyes. She recovered fast and kicked him in the chest. The senator flew backwards and then roared as he hopped to his feet. Black veins laced up and down his body now, making a checkered pattern in his skin as he rushed for her. Saff dodged left, and she managed to miss his next punch. The next blow, however, she couldn’t miss, not as an uppercut landed against her chin and knocked her onto her side in the grass.
Her head swam, and she thought of Yuffy dying in her arms, of the little girl lost and rotting in the bathtub, of the fear and utter disgust racing through her when she thought Minerva had perished on the pier.
She wasn’t ready to die. Not until the Senator had faced justice.
Spitting out blood, she struggled to her feet, only to be kicked hard in the solar plexus. Saff fell to her side and, this time, desperate to protect herself, she curled into a ball. The senator loomed above her, brandishing his little, metal box. He must have had time to find it when she’d been felled the first time.
He flicked the top up and down and smirked at her. She understood this type of smile now too, understood that he was a predator about to move in for the kill and reveling in the ultimate satisfaction of it all. “Ice queen, you shouldn’t have gotten in my way.”
Then there was a flash. A bright blast of light so incandescent that Saff had to shield her eyes. The blast seemed to have a form, to bend at the corners almost like a dome. It pushed hard into the senator, sending
him spiraling to the ground and leaving a thin line of smoke pouring from his exposed skin.
“Not today, Satan.” Minerva stood on the other side of the garden, her head held high and her hands on her hips.
Saff had a million questions, most of them spiraling around how Minerva had done that, but she pushed them aside and hopped to her feet. Her muscles screamed, and at least a few bones cracked and moved in ways they shouldn’t have. Didn’t matter. She could not let the senator use fire again. He would not be allowed to flee and escape the Council’s verdicts.
She ran across the expanse of the grass and backhanded the senator hard. He flew again, this time landing back inside the house, against what had been left of the boardroom table. Saff strode toward him, gathering what ice she could to contain him. Minerva trotted up next to her, keeping a good pace, even though her short legs had to take two or three strides for each of Saff’s.
“Are you…?” Minerva started. “God, you look like hell.”
Saff kept her focus trained on the senator. Later. She could reassure Nerv later. This all ended now.
They both passed through the rubble that had been the wall at the same time, even as the senator stumbled toward the box with all three eggs. He grabbed them all at once, clutching the three to his chest. His eyes went red. Not dark, not black, but blazing, bloody red, blotting out the iris, the white and the pupil. There was nothing but the pulse of garish hellfire.
It was nothing like Saff had ever seen.
“Holy shit!” Minerva said. “Dude…Topher Jorgenson, I think you’d better put the eggs down! It’s not a good look for you, and it can’t be safe.”
Senator Jorgenson spoke, his voice a booming growl that echoed through what was left of the room. “No. You ruin my night, my money. I needed that. I needed… You don’t even know.”
Saff shook her head. “But we do. We’ve met Clay, and we know he’s sick. My people can help him, but corrupting the eggs’ magic won’t help either of you.”
“You’re liars. The last people I’d trust are the ones who ruined my deal. I spent years on this… Years! And now all that money. I’ll never get it back. Those cowards will never come back to the table after a hoard of dragon thugs
She frowned, not quite sure even now, even with how she could read most humans, if it was the lucrative nature of the arms deal that he missed more or his chance to help Clay. She honestly didn’t think the senator knew either.
“Don’t do this,” Minerva said.
“Too late. You played with everything, thought it was a joke to ruin me. Well, payback’s a bastard and so am I,” he said, and then he hefted the eggs up, pointing them in their direction.
Saff lunged, expecting a stream of light, the abused powers of her siblings to blast out and kill Minerva. She wouldn’t let that happen. Couldn’t. She tackled Nerv to the ground and looked up. The burn of the beam hadn’t happened, and it confused her.
Then she heard the scream. Then she smelled the charring of human flesh.
Both she and Minerva scrambled to the far side of the room as the blue and red light from the eggs grew to blinding levels and covered Senator Jorgenson. He screamed as his skin bubbled and black ooze from his veins erupted from every pore. He melted and twisted, the stench emanating from him of rot and something else, something unworldly and beyond even corrupted dragon magic.
Saff knew that scent!
He’d experimented with Clay’s blood. He must have injected himself with it, tried to infect himself with some of Clay’s illness, too. He must have seen Clay working with the egg’s magic back at Brentwood and known that he could, in turn, handle the magic better if he borrowed some of his little brother’s pain. That subtle wrongness in Clay had grown in Topher in new and unforeseen ways. Had it made the plague worse? Was that why each new group of magic enhanced guards that they encountered seemed more stable and more lethal?
As he burned to nothing, Saff rushed forward, desperate to clutch the eggs before they fell to the floor and sustained anymore injuries. Before she got there, however, that same curved look of the light, that lens that bent the air and glow around it appeared, and the three eggs landed safely on it.
Saff hurried and scooped up the children, holding them tightly to her chest. Turning around, she looked at Minerva, who waggled a few fingers at her I salute.
“I had a really busy night, and can I just say, everything about you people is crazy?”
Letting out a breath of relief, Saff smiled. “I was about to say the same with regards to humans.”
47
Clay
He’d seen it. The end. The flashes of how his brother had changed and screamed, the madness that drove him. The greed, too. That frothing hunger for power and money and control over all, without any regard for the lives sacrificed for his gain. And all Clay could think of, even through his fever dreams and the visions he could never quite tell from reality, was that this was all his fault.
He’d caused it all. He’d gotten too close to something that day on the dock, and now Topher was dead. His body was rot. There was barely enough to bury, and there would, of course, be no wake. No viewing of the body. Now his niece and nephew and their mother had nothing but memories. All of which were paper thin and prone to easy destruction, if the right wind came blowing with the truth. Clay bit his lip until it bled whenever they were near.
Not that he’d been around any of them much. Topher had always kept his brother separate from them, and Clay had understood. The children were afraid of him. He spoke of dark wickedness that the openness of youth allowed them to know as real.
If he’d been normal, he might come together with his brother’s family, properly mourned the man, and tried to grow around the hurt that was his absence.
But he was Touched, and even after Saff had helped him that night everything had gone so wrong, his mind was still so fuzzy, hurt, and faded… Things still skittered at the corner of his vision, the wormy things that watched and the shadows waiting with crimson eyes to feed again.
The funeral came and went. He sat in his chair and tried to ignore the shadow creatures, hoping they wouldn’t hurt anyone else as they had Rog. He was now perhaps less frightened of them than he was terrified to know he could call for them. There was power in that, something dark and dangerous, and he’d spent his whole life since he was six being weak.
But he didn’t trust the skittering things. And he truly didn’t trust the shadow creatures. Nothing that hungered so intensely could be trusted.
After the funeral, everyone but his current nurse and guard, paid for by his brother’s estate, were gone. Naomi did not ask him to come with his niece and nephew. He knew why. He’d already stayed silent for an hour, and the skittering things with the wormy faces were getting restless. He couldn’t hide his tics much longer, could not stay silent.
With the nurse and the guard, he didn’t have to.
At least this one didn’t think of him as “retarded.” Their feelings seemed to linger closer to the arena of sympathy for a profound mental illness. He wasn’t sure that was better, but it was something.
He took off his hat and set it in his lap. Then, he gripped the wheels at the sides of his chair. “I’m sorry. I tried to warn you. But you don’t… I have things to say too. It’s not just the things breathing at the foot of my bed. It’s not the blackness over your veins. I saw that too, and it was real.”
The guard picked up his cell phone and started to play with it. His nurse coughed and looked away. People always looked away.
“Toph, you just had to listen. Why couldn’t you ever listen?”
But he knew that answer. He was Touched. Broken. And he had broken Topher with him.
There were footsteps in the grass behind him and the guard bellowed out first. “You can’t be here. This is for Mr. Jorgenson privately.”
Clay maneuvered his chair well enough to look behind him, to see the tall woman with her almost white hair in a high ponytail and the spunky, b
runette beside her, her long hair flaring out in long, loose curls.
Saffyranae and Minerva.
He’d been expecting them somehow; those thoughts that weren’t completely his had whispered they’d come.
Clay held up one hand. “It’s okay. I want them to stay.”
The guard eyed the nurse, who shrugged and said, “As long as Clay isn’t actively agitated, then it’s all right.”
The guard eyed both Saffyranae and Minerva closely. “Take that as a warning.”
Saffyranae nodded. “We do not wish to harm Clay. We merely want to speak with him.”
“As long as you keep him calm,” his nurse conceded.
“We totally will,” Minerva said. “In fact, we wanted to see if was in the mood for some ice cream.”
Clay shook his head. “Last time worms with too many faces and teeth crawled through it.”
Saffyranae put a hand on his forehead and the warmth of her touch spread through him. For an hour or so, he knew what he’d feel, that focus he hadn’t felt in years, the sharpness of a full mind.
Clay blinked up at her, the pain of his brother’s death cutting fresh into him with a clear brain. “Would it still be bad…? I… I would I see things.”
She shook her head. “For a while, you’re fine to eat as much ice cream as you wish.”
“Actually,” Clay said slowly. “I’d prefer frozen yogurt.”
His cup was mammoth, a vanilla base teaming with Oreos, gummy bears, and Reese’s Pieces. It was the first time he’d had a dessert in years that other things hadn’t wriggled through. For whatever reason, those worms didn’t eat regular food, just the candies or cakes he’d try. He’d given it up, except for his birthdays when Topher insisted on something huge and decorative for him to eat. Well, try and eat. He’d seen so much fondant melt over the years.
But when his mind was clearer, he could keep most of the creeping things from coming to him automatically. It was like being on a vacation from himself.
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