There was a pause, as if the speaker were hoping I’d cave and ask him. Probably spoiled his big moment. Pretentious jerk. My heart hammered as I waited for his response.
“Your humanity, Ms O’Connor.”
“My—what?” Not what I was expecting. I let out a relieved breath. He didn’t have Lachie after all. “What are you talking about?”
“You know what I’m talking about. You started life as plain Kate O’Connor, then became entangled with Leandra Elizabeth, and now—now you are unique among dragons. A human with the strengths of a dragon. A dragon with some unusual human advantages. I want to know how you did it.”
“Why? I thought you only cared about hunting down shifters. What does it matter how I became one?”
“Because if you tell me, I might be able to undo it. And I think that might interest you very much.”
CHAPTER TWELVE
As the speaker fell silent, the door opened, catching us both by surprise. Corinne scrambled to her feet as three men entered the little room. They each carried a baton tipped with a silver-plated spike. One took Corinne by the arm and hustled her out the door. She looked back over her shoulder as she left, her eyes wide and desperate.
“Where are you taking her?” I didn’t really expect a reply, but it was worth trying.
“She can rejoin the others now you’re awake,” the taller man said. “We weren’t going to risk a human in here until you knew the situation.” He jerked his head at the collar bomb.
Presumably it would have been fine with him if I’d accidentally blown Corinne up, since she was a shifter.
I studied them as they unbound me from the chair and hauled me to my feet. They were both human. The one who’d spoken wore a pair of glasses like something out of the fifties, with thick black rims. Real glass or goblin glass? I was suspicious of everything now. The other man had grey hair and the beginnings of a pot belly sagging over his belt. Both wore dark blue uniforms. They looked like policemen, but I was past believing everything I saw.
“Move,” Glasses Guy said. “Don’t do anything stupid, and the commander won’t have to press the button.”
My captors prodded me out into a concrete corridor that echoed to the sound of their booted feet. It was grey and poorly lit, and looked like something out of a B-grade spy movie.
“What is this place?” I asked.
“Somewhere that knows what to do with freaks like you.” Pot Belly shoved me in the back with his baton, so I started walking.
“And where’s that?”
“Wouldn’t you like to know.”
Excellent. My prison came complete with schoolyard taunts.
We arrived at a door painted with a large number three. Glasses Guy opened it to reveal a stairwell, and we clattered down, passing door number four and stopping at number five. Definitely underground, then. And everywhere I turned there were more cameras, so I gave up any idea of compelling these guys. Big Brother was watching.
Level five had blue lino on the floor and more effective lighting. But the long corridor that stretched out from the stairwell was just as deserted as the one on level three, which I’d now begun to think of as the prison level. There was an antiseptic smell here that gave me the uneasy feeling that this was the medical level.
The uneasiness increased as my escorts took me into a room that looked like a doctor’s surgery, complete with an examination table and a selection of medical instruments. A scalpel gleamed invitingly, but the ever-present cameras were watching. Besides, I wanted to know what the hell was going on, so I let them shove me into the chair by the desk.
There was another door opposite the one I’d come through, and in a moment this opened and two men walked in, at which point my escorts left the way we’d come.
One of the men was Commander Wilson, still dapper in his grey suit, and he took the chair on the other side of the desk. The other was a small Indian man wearing a white lab coat over his scrubs. I’d never seen him before, but his aura gave him away.
“You’re a goblin!”
Commander Wilson didn’t blink an eyelid, so it obviously wasn’t news to him.
“That’s right,” said the goblin.
“What are you doing working for these people?”
The goblin shrugged. “A man has to eat.”
“But they’re attacking shifters. Don’t you care? What if they turn on you next?”
“Dr Patel is in no danger,” Wilson said. “My organisation is charged with protecting the general public from dangerous shifters like yourself. A doctor is a benefit to the community, not a danger.”
“But he’s a goblin.”
“And therefore not inherently powerful.”
“Then why are you holding Corinne?” I demanded. “She’s a selkie. What’s she going to do? Turn into a seal and bark at you?”
“Your selkie friend will be released as soon as we have finished questioning her on recent events. Now, if we could move on, please. I believe you know that we’re interested in how you became a shifter in the first place.” He opened a folder that lay on the desk in front of him and read from the first page. “Up until recently you were fully human, correct?”
“That’s right.” There was no point lying when they obviously already knew. I couldn’t risk anything happening to Garth or one of the others. For all his apparent businesslike manner, I didn’t trust Wilson. Anyone who collared a prisoner with a bomb and threatened to blow their head off was not a man who operated by the book.
“And that changed the day Leandra Elizabeth died?”
For people who claimed to hate shifters, I found it quaint that they persisted in referring to Leandra as “Leandra Elizabeth” in that old-fashioned dragon way, with her matronymic instead of her regular surname.
“That’s right,” I said again.
Dr Patel gave me an encouraging smile. “Please tell us how this change was achieved.”
This part I could lie about, since it wasn’t public knowledge. I was tempted to say she gave me a magic potion or something stupid. But there was that damned bomb to consider. And also I liked my favourite werewolf without silver poisoning. Really, that was more of an issue than the bomb. If I’d been the only one in captivity I could have been out of this collar faster than you could say “dragon on the loose!”, but Garth was here, and Luce and Yarrow and Corinne. Blue, too. I’d almost forgotten about him. Probably my new sisters as well. I hadn’t actually thought to ask Corinne, but presumably the raid hadn’t been aimed solely at me. They would have rounded up everyone at the ball. And if I didn’t exactly owe them anything, it didn’t seem right to leave them to the commander’s tender mercies if I could help it.
“Think carefully before you lie to us,” Wilson said, as if he’d been reading my mind. “We know it has to do with that stone in your chest.”
I blinked, and barely managed to stop myself asking how they knew about that.
Dr Patel leaned over and removed an x-ray film from my file. He stuck it to the light box on the wall and turned it on.
“We took the opportunity to run a few scans while you were asleep.”
Asleep. Yeah, right. Drugged to the eyeballs, more like. He sounded quite cheerful, as if he saw nothing untoward in his behaviour. I bet the new anti-shifter laws didn’t give them the right to drug people and run medical tests without permission. He was just as much of a maverick as Wilson, despite the white coat and chatty bedside manner.
“Your x-ray showed up this odd mass here.” He pointed to a lump on one of my ribs. “We can’t be sure without opening you up, of course, but it looks remarkably similar to the strange stone found on Valeria’s ribcage post mortem.”
The coroner’s report, which I’d seen courtesy of Kasumi’s impersonation of the lead detective on the case, had mentioned it. That hadn’t bothered me since the human coroner had no way of knowing what he was looking at. But the report had also mentioned Taskforce Jaeger, which had hardly even registered at the time. I’d been u
p to my armpits in bounty hunters trying to kill me, and some nebulous taskforce hadn’t seemed much of a threat by comparison.
I might have been more concerned if I’d realised they had shifter traitors on the payroll.
“What do you get out of this?” I asked the goblin doctor. “What have they promised you to betray your people?”
His cheery mask slipped, and the hatred that peeked out in its place chilled me. “Dragons are not my people. Dragons are the scourge of the shifter world—and the human one too. The humans just didn’t realise it until now.”
Maybe that was how the taskforce had managed to move against people so highly placed in society. The politicians had found out just who was pulling their strings, and it had given them a nasty scare.
Wilson stirred restlessly in his chair. “Please confine yourself to answering the questions, Ms O’Connor. We’re on a timetable here.”
“Really? What’s the rush?”
He scowled. “The stone, please. Or should we shoot the werewolf?”
The hairs on the back of my neck rose at his matter-of-fact tone.
“Where do dragons get these stones from?” Patel asked.
“They don’t get them anywhere. They’re born with them, same as their ribs and hearts and lungs. It’s just a part of dragon anatomy.”
He looked disappointed, as if he’d been expecting a less prosaic explanation.
“Tell us how this one got into your body, then. You were not born a dragon.”
“I put it there.”
God, the pain. I put a hand on my chest as I relived the moment. Flat on my back, bleeding out. Jason had just laid me open from shoulder to hip with his wicked claws. Knowing I was dying, that there was no way left to save Lachie from Valeria’s clutches, yet still struggling for a way, any way. And Leandra in my head like a broken record, nagging me to use the stone, to let her take control.
“I was wounded in the fight at Valeria’s house. There was a deep cut in my chest, and I pushed the stone in.”
I’d felt it burrowing through my torn flesh like a hideous tick, munching its way to its current home on the rib above my heart. The pain was so fierce I’d blacked out, and when I’d woken Kate was gone, replaced by a Leandra exulting in her new body.
It should have been the end of me, but my love for Lachie was stronger than both of us. A new person had emerged in the struggle to save him. Not quite Leandra, but more than Kate, I was a world first—a messed-up kind of human/dragon hybrid.
“And that allowed Leandra to take over your body?”
“Yes.”
But there was one crucial point I wasn’t telling these guys. As she lay dying Leandra had poured her essence into that stone. That was what it was for. It was called a channel stone because it allowed a dragon to channel her mass between her human form and her trueshape. Leandra had merely found a new use for it. Enough of her was in the stone when I swallowed it originally to allow her to colonise my body, and that little piece had been enough to re-establish the connection with the rest of her essence once the stone found its rightful place nestled next to my heart.
“But how did you take the stone from her in the first place?”
“She wanted me to. She was dying, and thought it might give her a chance to live on in my body.”
And that wild gamble had paid off, though not exactly as she’d hoped. Under a compulsion, she’d forced me to cut the stone from her dying body and swallow it. Sadly for her, I wasn’t ready to let some damned lizard steal my body, and she wasn’t strong enough to take it outright. And once I’d thrown up the stone she had even more trouble. Not until I surrendered to her and shoved the stupid stone into the gaping hole in my chest did she gain full control.
“Have you considered,” said the goblin doctor, “that taking it out again could transform you to your fully human state?”
“No.” That was a lie, of course. If I was human again, all my problems with Ben would disappear, and we could have that life I’d been dreaming of—the little house in the suburbs, the family of three. If I was human again, this whole dragon mess would be someone else’s problem, and I wouldn’t have to worry any more that my every decision was dooming the people I loved. Naturally I’d had the odd daydream of being able to turn back time. Who wouldn’t?
The doctor watched me, his dark Indian eyes full of fake concern. “I’m sure it bothers you, knowing that you will outlive your son by hundreds of years.”
Ouch. Touché, doctor. To watch my baby grow old and die, while I lived on through the lonely centuries without him, was the stuff of nightmares. I’d wept over his dead body once already; I didn’t think I could do it again.
“Wouldn’t you like to go back to a nice uncomplicated life with your boy and forget all this supernatural drama? Just think of it, Ms O’Connor. You could be human again.”
Human again. True, it had a certain ring to it. No more living with the constant threat of death, no more watching my friends die. Friday nights on that battered old couch, curled up with Lachie and a bowl of popcorn, our biggest decision which movie to watch. And maybe Ben at my side? It was a delicious dream, but it could never be more than a dream, surely.
Leandra had been present since the minute I swallowed the damned stone. Even after I’d chucked it up again—even when it had been stolen and was physically miles away from me—Leandra had still been there inside me, fighting for control. If removing the stone hadn’t been enough to unseat her then, when her hold on me was so tenuous, how could it help now that we’d melded into one personality?
“What’s in it for you? What do you gain from helping me?” If helping me was really what it was. It seemed more likely that removing the channel stone now might simply take away my ability to take trueshape, and leave me stuck somewhere between dragon and human, but with the benefits of neither.
But oh! if it worked …
“We could set you up in a nice little house somewhere safe,” Wilson said, as if he sensed the turn of my thoughts.
I folded my arms. He hadn’t answered my question. “And what would you expect in return?”
“Your co-operation. That’s all, Kate.” Patel leaned in, almost friendly. “If it works on you, we will have a humane way of removing the threat that the dragons pose to all humanity.”
My eyebrows shot up. “You mean you’d do this to other dragons?”
I couldn’t see that being a popular option among dragonkind. The good doctor might find it a little more challenging than he expected.
Although, the taskforce had managed to round us up with little trouble. Maybe they really could do it. Why did that send a chill through me? I had no love for dragonkind.
“That seems the best option for everyone.”
The best option? He had no idea what cutting a dragon’s channel stone out might do. It could kill them. And all my teenaged sisters would never make it to adulthood.
“And if I co-operate, you’ll let the other prisoners go?”
“Well, not the other dragons, obviously.” He chuckled as if I’d made a joke. “But the selkie, your werewolf friend and the other shifters can leave.”
My werewolf friend, who made no secret of his admiration of the dragon inside me. Did I even want that small life with Ben any more? Every time I tried to picture his dark brown eyes, a pair of grey ones kept interfering. And in my heart I knew the suburban life was lost to me. I’d made too many enemies as a dragon. Lachie and I wouldn’t last a week if I were human.
Besides, how could I trust this smiling traitor to keep his word about anything? What if they didn’t let Garth go, but turned their silver bullets on him instead? Without my dragon powers, I’d be helpless to save him.
And right now, saving that stubborn, irritating, gorgeous werewolf seemed to have made it to the top of my to-do list.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
“This way,” said Patel.
He and the two guards had marched me a short way down the corridor. I’d thought we
were heading for the stairs and the little white room on level three, but we stopped just short of the stairwell at a pair of double doors with windows inset in them.
He held the right-hand door open and waved me through. Inside was a fully equipped operating theatre. A cold frisson of fear ran down my spine. No way was he cutting me open, bomb or no bomb. But before I could do more than take a short, panicked breath, I realised that they already had a patient.
A woman in a long black evening dress lay unconscious on a gurney. Faith.
An orderly moved her gurney closer to the operating table, and gloved hands reached out to help move her across.
“What are you going to do to her?”
Patel smiled. “Remove her stone, of course.”
“You can’t turn her into a human; she’s never been one. You have no idea what removing her stone will do.”
At best, she’d be a crippled dragon. At worst …
“We need to find out where the power resides. Is it in the stone, or in the person? Your own experience would suggest it is in the stone, but how can we be sure without running some tests? It’s our job to keep the people of Australia safe from the shifter menace, and to do it we have to know as much as we can about shifters and their magic.”
“The shifter menace? How can you say that with a straight face? You’re a friggin goblin!”
“Exactly. And a less menacing shifter would be hard to find. Dragons, on the other hand …”
“You can’t just take out her channel stone.” A few tendrils of blonde hair had escaped Faith’s formal hairstyle, and now curled sweetly around her pale face. She looked about twelve years old. “What if it kills her?”
“If it kills her, there’ll be one less dragon for the world to worry about. I should think you’d be pleased. Isn’t she a rival of yours?” He watched with satisfaction as Faith was hooked up to various machines. Someone—an anaesthetist, presumably—placed a mask over her face while the others waited. I could hear the soft hiss of her breathing through the plastic. “But I doubt she’s in any danger. Leandra died from other causes, not because you removed her stone. Why should the removal of such a small body part be a problem? It’s not an essential organ. Nobody dies if you cut off their little finger, do they?”
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