by Tricia Owens
Forged
In Fire
Moonlight Dragon
Book 4
Tricia Owens
Copyright © 2016 Tricia Owens
All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof
may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
Cover art by Ravven
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.
Acknowledgments
To my dream team: Samantha and the lil' Mama.
Read more from Tricia Owens at http://www.triciaowensbooks.com
Moonlight Dragon series
Descended from Dragons
Hunting Down Dragons
Trouble with Gargoyles
Forged in Fire
Rise of the Dragon (coming soon)
Forged
In Fire
chapter 1
"Hey, dragon—bite this!"
When the guy threw the contents of his cup at me, I figured the chances were fair it was either Budweiser or gasoline. Though they tasted pretty much the same in my opinion, only one of them was meant to set me on fire.
If I called up my magickal familiar, a Chinese dragon I named Lucky, then it was bonfire time and I'd be in for a world of hurt. But that was where my attacker went wrong. He'd assumed that my sorcery only came out in the form of a fire-breather.
Shame on him for not thinking outside the box.
I called up Lucky as a blast of wind that slapped all that flying liquid right back in the guy's face. He screamed and two ridged, curving horns burst from his temples. Fortunately, he still had the presence of mind to fling his hands up to cover the horns until he could transform them away.
"A goat shifter," I drawled upon seeing them. "Of course that's what you are."
He blinked madly against the liquid dripping down his face. Since he wasn't screaming in pain, I took it to mean that he'd doused himself in Bud. Still a pretty miserable experience.
"Shut your mouth," he gritted out. "I'm a satyr!"
"That may be what you tell the ladies, but you and I both know you're just an average goat."
"I'm a satyr!"
"Uh huh. Baaaah."
Red-faced, still covering his horns, the guy shoved his way through the crowd, trailing curious looks. Those looks turned to me for an explanation but I just shrugged like I had no idea what had just happened. I wish that were true, but I knew better. I was now Public Enemy Number One amongst the magickal community of Las Vegas. Life from now on was apparently going to suck.
Up until then, the night had been going pretty well. My friends and I were at First Friday, the arts festival held in the streets of downtown Las Vegas the first weekend of every month. I'd closed Moonlight Pawn to attend the festival because I was a terrible shopkeeper. I used the excuse that if I saw some cool painting or a funky statue for sale I'd buy it and either re-sell it at Moonlight or use it to draw in foot traffic from Fremont Street.
My friends had all nodded, but none of them had bought it. They'd all guessed, correctly, that I wanted to pig out at the food trucks and drink some beer (preferably craft and not Bud). However, I also wanted a chance to let go with my friends after everything that had happened with Xaran and the Oddsmakers. I was feeling particularly possessive and protective of them ever since the Oddsmakers threatened to torture and kill them.
Thanks to goat-boy, unfortunately, I now had proof that the Oddsmakers weren't my only problem.
"Maybe this was a mistake," I murmured to Vale as depression tried to seize hold of me.
"You have the right to be here," he told me calmly, simply, like no other truth existed.
Vale could be about absolutes. You looked at him and you sort of stared because he radiated intensity, but there was much more to him than that. I didn't know if it was because he was a gargoyle who transformed into a stone statue during the daylight hours, but there was a weight to him and everything that he said. He was something immovable that I trusted and which I could cling to when I felt on the verge of being swept away by stress or my emotions. Like now.
"People think I killed your brother on the Oddsmakers' orders," I argued, though I did so tiredly, because this was a subject I lived with twenty-four hours a day and it never grew any easier even though Xaran was alive and in hiding. "They all hate me. Why provoke them by showing my face in public?"
"Why provoke them by simply existing? That's hardly fair to you, Moody."
"If I were in their shoes, I'd hate me, too. No one likes a traitor."
"That may be true." Vale's breath was warm against my ear. "But one day you'll prove yourself their hero. You can hold out until then. The people who matter to you know the truth."
I wasn't interested in being a hero—I hadn't done anything with that in mind—but I clutched Vale's words because I had to. It was that or barricade myself in Moonlight and slide money beneath the door whenever Dominos dropped off pizzas.
"Thank you," I murmured back. I found his hand and squeezed it, though a part of me worried that I was drawing attention to him and making him a target, too. But that was stupid. Those who knew I was Anne Moody knew I was with Vale. They hated him and called him a traitor, too. Worse, they believed he'd shacked up with his brother's killer. When I thought about it that way, he endured more scorn than I did, and yet he never let the pressure of it show.
Time to get a grip and stop feeling sorry for yourself.
I swung our hands between us like we were little kids. "I have every right to be here and raise my cholesterol level and damage my liver just like everyone else."
He smirked. "There you go."
"Anne!"
My best friend Melanie didn't know how to be discreet, so her yelling my name through the crowd and alerting everyone I was there was just her being her. I cringed but quickly pulled back my shoulders. No one was going to make me afraid or ashamed. Especially since I hadn't actually done anything bad.
I saw Melanie's blue hair a moment before she broke through to reach Vale and me.
"Anne, someone's getting beat up!"
I tensed. "Why are you telling me?" It was a lousy response, but I genuinely feared digging my hole any deeper than it already was. I couldn't keep sticking my nose into other peoples' business.
"I think he's a shifter!"
I groaned. It wasn't like I was going to ignore this even if the victim wasn't a member of the magickal community, but this just ensured I'd end up butting heads with the exact same people I was trying to ignore in order to have a nice evening out.
"Where?" Vale demanded.
Melanie pointed ahead of us. "In an alley. I saw it happening as I was coming back."
"Alright." There was no ignoring this. "Where's Christian?"
"In line getting us macaroni and cheese on a stick!" Melanie wrung her hands. "He's going to lose his place and I sooo wanted to try those, but—fight! Ack!"
"Macaroni and cheese on a stick? Your boyfriend is trying to kill you, Melly. It's better if you stop him before he succeeds."
"Okay, I'll go grab him!"
She darted off, weaving through the crowd easily because she was small and, though on the chubbier side, still maintained some of the characteristics of her monkey shifter form even as a human.
"This is not good," I said to Vale. "Fights attract atte
ntion." I rubbed at the goose bumps that had jumped onto my skin despite the warm Vegas night air. "If people are taking photos, that's one thing. No one believes anything that's posted on the internet anymore. But if the cops intervene…"
"It can't happen." His dark-haired head turned on a swivel, as if searching for signs of law enforcement or worse, the government. "Let's go see what's happening."
He led the way through the crowd, pulling me along with him so I wouldn't be subjected to any more cheap shots. As we weaved through the crowd, I thought I heard someone say, "Monster."
It wasn't directed at me. The girl who'd said it, an Asian girl, wasn't looking at me but at her two male friends, who were studying a phone. She and they looked perplexed, like they were questioning themselves. That just spelled trouble in my book.
"People have seen!" I hissed to Vale.
He just shook his head, unwilling to comment until we'd reached the scene.
Vale could be annoyingly mellow. He'd seen and lived through so much crap that not much could ruffle his feathers anymore. I liked that about him. It kept me from freaking out too much. But sometimes you needed someone to wig out with. So you didn't feel like you were alone in your inability to cope.
I hoped Melanie had been wrong and witnessed just an ordinary scuffle between ordinary people. But the fact that she'd said shifter meant she'd seen some fur or hair or a tail. Three people talking about a monster added fuel to the fire. People could see all sorts of things and come to the wrong conclusion. There were entire communities built around that very phenomenon. But the word "monster" being used sent up red flags in my book.
Monsters weren't supposed to exist in Las Vegas. Not real ones. But they did, along with a whole host of other magickal beings such as shapeshifters, warlocks, sorcerers, water fey, and more. Crack open a book of fairy tales and you had a pretty good idea of what was lurking throughout the city. For the most part, we all lived together in relative harmony. Murders and battles occurred every once in a while, I assumed. No one really knew the details of that because the Oddsmakers always swept in and cleaned up the messes like they never even happened.
Some said it was good that the Oddsmakers were around to ensure that our community remained a secret. But I wasn't one of them. Just the thought of them had me grinding my teeth and wanting to blast something with my dragon. However, there was one thing I'd learned about them recently that did lift my spirits.
The Oddsmakers didn't know jack.
They weren't omniscient, god-like beings as many of us had feared, otherwise they would have seen through my ruse out in the desert. They would have known that Xaran had survived a fiery death and that he hadn't done it by accident. And they also would have known that I'd lied about it right to their disembodied faces.
But they didn't know. They used pixies and other spies to ferret out their information, maybe some other supernatural eyeballs, but that was it. That boast about seeing and knowing everything that occurred in Vegas? Yeah, nothing but a bunch of baloney.
And I couldn't be happier about it. If I could keep secrets from them, that meant I could gain an advantage over them.
The festival was packed, with tents selling artwork, food, music, and clothing lining either side of the street and tons of people milling around them. The air smelled of a variety of meats thanks to the food trucks, along with cigarette smoke and the occasional whiff of marijuana and incense.
Melanie called out and I raised my hand so she could see us and catch up. I couldn't linger to wait for her; Vale tugged me along with rising urgency. He had great hearing, so he must have picked up the sounds of the fight.
He pulled me between two vendor booths, along behind a third, and then into an alley. At the other end of it, where it intersected another alley, two people kneeled over a third figure that was sprawled on the ground.
"Hey!" I yelled.
The two people didn't look back; they bolted to the right. Vale and I sprinted down the alley, but by the time we reached the victim, his attackers had vanished.
I groaned when I saw the condition of the victim. It was definitely a shapeshifter. He had either been in the midst of transformation or had been one of those shifters I'd seen in the Keyhole speakeasy who got a kick out of walking around in mid-shift. He still had grayish-brown wolf ears sprouting from the top of his head and thick fur covered his back and shoulders and ran down both arms. The rest of him was naked and human. I didn't see any injuries, but his gray eyes were open and sightless.
"We're too late," I said, devastated. Fury filled me. I started in the direction that his attackers had gone, thinking I might use Lucky to catch them, but Vale grabbed my arm.
"Later, Moody. We have a greater concern."
I spun when I heard the sound of running feet, but it was only Christian and Melanie catching up to us.
"It's a good thing we're here," Christian declared with a shake of the head when he saw the body. "If the police had gotten hold of this—"
"They still might if we don't get it out of here," I muttered. We had to keep this body out of the hands of authorities at all costs.
Something caught my eye, prompting me to squat beside the body. The shifter lay on his side with his arms curled up in front of him like he'd been about to go to sleep. Both hands were clawed, and in the left lay the thing that had caught my attention. I reached down and delicately plucked the folded piece of paper from within the frozen grasp. When I unfolded it, I saw that it was a handwritten note.
"'Anne Moody'," I read aloud. I shook my head with disgust. "Why is it that guys aren't interested in you until you have a boyfriend?"
"Oh, my god," Melanie gasped. She spun around, all hyped-up, searching the alley. "This could be a trap, Anne!"
"It's sure taking a long time to close," I said critically. I pocketed the note and rose to my feet. "None of us knows who this guy is? Never seen him before?"
"Not my scene." Christian pointed at the body. "He doesn't have a mark on him. Shifters don't just fall down dead like this."
That gave me some food for thought. "What, like you think this might be a setup? I get caught with the body so everyone blames his death on me?"
"Could be," he said with a shrug. "You're not very popular these days."
"As true as that is, I have trouble believing that the Rebellion would kill one of their own just to frame me. And who would prosecute me? The Oddsmakers are judge and jury and everyone thinks I'm their lapdog."
"The Rebellion," Melanie repeated with a crooked smile. "I hope that means I get to be Princess Leia."
"I was thinking Yoda, since you're both the same height."
"Anne, that's mean!"
"I'm glad you're able to crack jokes at a time like this," Vale said sternly. "This is a serious problem."
"Look, I'm not pretending it isn't. I'm just clueless as to what's going on right now." I considered the body. Oh, man, a dead body. While I'd had plenty of experience with the old, rotting corpses of the miners that Dearborn had reanimated, a fresh body was a whole 'nother ballgame. I resisted taking a step back from it because that seemed disrespectful and rude. "We should ask Lev if he knows this guy."
Melanie hopped up and down. "Good idea! Lev probably knows all the wolf shifters in town."
"I'll fly it out." Vale had already begun stripping out of his T-shirt and jeans. I gathered up his clothes and didn't bothering hiding the fact that I checked him out. Hey, benefit of being his girlfriend, right? "I'll meet you at Celestina's," he told us.
In a blink he was gone. In his place squatted his gargoyle, which in the semi-dark of the alley could have been mistaken for a hairless, juvenile gorilla. But his gargoyle was much cooler than that, in my opinion. How many beings could change into an inanimate object? I thought what he could do was pretty damn awesome.
Well, admittedly it wasn't awesome when I wanted to go to lunch with my boyfriend and he was frozen solid, but I'd learned to shift my plans around accordingly.
Vale's gargoyle easily hefted the dead shifter in its muscular arms. With a powerful beat of its leathery wings, it launched them both into the night sky and dashed out of sight. If any non-magickal had seen, they would have assumed they'd witnessed the world's fastest and largest bat zoom by. Or Batman.
"You there!"
I turned and groaned beneath my breath when I saw the Asian girl and her two guy friends who had been in the crowd, talking about a monster. They were leading a yellow-shirted Metro bike cop. Melanie eeped, but Christian muttered, "Just relax," to her, and amazingly that seemed to help. As mismatched as the two of them were physically—Christian could probably rest his elbow on the top of Melanie's head—they were good for each other.
"There was a body right there, Officer," said the girl once the four of them reached us. She pointed at the ground behind me and then held up her phone's screen so the officer could see it. "See? Here's the proof. That same oil stain is right there. You can't see the faces of the guys leaning over him but I swear they were scary."
I tensed upon learning she'd taken a photo, but I reminded myself that Photoshop had raised the bar. These days you needed actual DNA evidence to convince anyone of anything.
The police officer looked over the ground, but of course there was nothing there. No blood droplets, nothing. Which was part of why I was confused about what exactly had gone down here with that shifter.
"What are you three doing here?" he asked my friends and me. He had a thick, blond beard, nicely trimmed to give him a strong jawline. It was a surprise to me that cops were allowed to have beards but I was glad they'd loosened their rules if they were all going to look like this one did. He was muscular and tall, though I wasn't a fan of his small, dark eyes. Well, everyone had to have a flaw or two.
"We were just trying to get out of the crowd," I said with a shrug. "We thought we'd walk back to our car using the alley rather than Main Street."
