Twiceborn Endgame (The Proving Book 3)

by Finlayson, Marina

  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.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  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 br
eath. 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?”

  Luce fixed him with a hard stare. “I have Chief Trimboli on speed dial. Just say the word and I’ll press the button.”

  He looked at me, then Ben, then Garth, and back to Luce. Every face was stony. His bravado collapsed and he slumped down on the edge of the fountain again.

  “Fine.” He sounded as sulky as a three-year-old. “Whatever. What else do you want me to do?”

  “I’ll let you know. In the meantime you can stay here.”

  “So I’m a prisoner?” His cheerful mood had evaporated.

  “More of a houseguest.” One that would have to be closely watched. Letting a hostile goblin mage roam free in your house wasn’t a winning plan.

  From the corner of my eye I saw Steve coming down the steps from the terrace, but the goblin held most of my attention.

  “I’ll need some things from my cave,” he said. “You can’t make magic from nothing, you know.”

  “Make a list and we’ll send someone out to get them.”

  Steve offered a shallow bow, more for the goblin’s benefit than mine. I didn’t like to stand on ceremony. Having people bowing to me felt wrong.

  “Mistress, a herald.”

  “Where’s the message?”

  His hands were empty.

  “The herald comes from the Japanese queen.”

  Speak of the devil. My anger surged again. This woman stood between me and my child. I had to breathe deeply until I had mastered myself again.

  Messages from royalty required the herald to hand the message directly to the person addressed. I glanced at Ben, who shrugged.

  “I’ll go and check it out.”

  Ben knew all the local heralds, having been one until recently. I waited while he and Steve went inside. In a moment they returned, escorting another man between them. He was average height, with sandy brown hair and a growth of stubble that hadn’t made up its mind yet if it wanted to be a beard. There was a sharp intake of breath from the goblin, still seated on the stone coping of the fountain. Now he was sitting up straight, looking almost eager.

  “This is Ken Thomas,” said Ben. “He’s an old friend.”

  The herald went down on one knee and offered me the usual thick beige envelope. I glanced again at Blue. What was his problem? He’d had such a look of anticipation on his face for a moment there, as if waiting for a show to start. He stared back, now all butter-wouldn’t-melt-in-his-mouth.

  Had Ken hunted him down for a job he didn’t want to perform, just as Ben had? But that smile had a gloating quality to it, as if he knew something I didn’t.

  I turned back to Ken and studied him for a moment. His herald’s charm, a tiny silver representation of Hermes, messenger of the gods, hung in full view on his chest. As far as I could tell, it was genuine, but Ben would have checked that.

  Besides, Ben knew him. I met Ben’s gaze, unaccountably troubled by that look on the goblin’s face and his involuntary gasp. It was fairly safe to assume at this point that anything that would please the goblin probably wasn’t good news for me. I wasn’t exactly his favourite person at the moment.

  “How old a friend? Like Nada?”

  He frowned. Nada had been no friend of ours. But she had worn a goblin seeming to the Presentation Ball. Fortunately Ben was smart enough to make the connection.

  “I haven’t seen Sarah in ages,” he said to the man still patiently kneeling at my feet. “I hope she’s well?”

  Ken’s eyes flicked to the side. Chitchat in the middle of a delivery was an odd departure from the usual routine.

  “Fine, thanks,” he said after a moment.

  In reply, Ben launched himself and drove the herald to the ground. I leapt back, nearly landing on Blue’s lap. The man wriggled like a fish on a hook bene
ath Ben. I saw something flash silver in the sunlight as his hand came up, but then Steve and Garth joined the fray, and he was no match for their combined muscle.

  Ben climbed to his feet and brushed grass off his clothes. “You okay?”

  “Fine.” It hadn’t been me rolling around on the grass. His face was pale. He’d probably hurt his bad arm with that little manoeuvre. At this rate it was never going to heal properly. “Who’s our visitor?”

  Garth had the man flat on his face, his arms pulled back at a painful angle, with one of the big werewolf’s knees in his back. Steve’s gun was out, aimed directly at his head. The herald—or whoever he was—lay still. Sensible guy.

  “I don’t know, but it’s not Ken. I’m sorry, he had me fooled. I should never have let him in.”

  “Who’s Sarah?”

  “Ken’s wife. She’s been dead for years.”

  “Oh.” So someone had had the same idea as me—a goblin seeming. Jason had probably called in the real Ken on some pretext and managed to swipe a hair. “Is he armed?”

  Ben gave me a reproachful look. “We searched him before we brought him out.”

  “Search again,” I said to Garth. What was that flash I’d seen?

  To my surprise—and to Garth’s—the man began to struggle. Garth punched him in the side of the head and he lay still again. Garth didn’t believe in pulling his punches. When he punched someone, they stayed punched.

  “He’s clean. Just a ring.” He pulled a black signet ring from the man’s unresisting hand.

  “Give me that,” said Luce.

  I cocked an eyebrow at Blue, who’d lost that anticipatory smile. “Well? You saw something, didn’t you? How could you tell he wasn’t the real deal?”

  Blue had probably just saved my life. He’d be kicking himself later.

  He pushed his glasses nervously up to the bridge of his nose. “Don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  Liar. I could tell by the way his gaze shifted away. On an impulse, I reached out and snatched those annoying glasses off his face.

  “Hey!”