“You can’t tag along everywhere I go. We were fine.”
“We need more men,” Steve said, in his deep, slow voice. “We can barely protect you here, much less when you go out.”
I huffed out a frustrated breath. He was right, of course. The problem was how to find them.
“Oh, for God’s sake sit down, Garth. You’re going to wear a hole in the carpet.”
The werewolf sank into a chair with bad grace. Its delicate lines had been built for smaller people, and he looked enormous in it. Enormous and grumpy. “Anyone we recruit now is suspect. Alicia or Elizabeth could plant someone on us.”
But if we couldn’t find allies they’d have little trouble finishing us off. Catch-22.
“Unless we take people we already know,” Steve said. “What about the rest of the old team?”
Only six of Leandra’s eleven thralls had signed on again. Two Garth hadn’t been able to locate and the other three obviously didn’t like my chances, as they’d refused to have anything to do with me. I’d offered bucket loads of cash, but money could only buy so much. Since I’d refused to enthral them, I couldn’t force them to change their minds. They were lucky they’d only been enthralled by Leandra for a few months, or they would have been left comatose when she died.
Apart from them, the old team had consisted of Jason, now playing for the other team, and Luce, ditto. Oh, and the werewolf pack whose alpha had already refused to help me last week.
Garth shook his head. “No go.”
Steve hesitated. “Maybe … some more thralls?”
“Seriously?” He knew how I felt about thralls. The world looked very different when you’d been on the other end of a dragon’s mental powers, and I was a changed woman. No more thralls for this dragon. “You’ve been a thrall. You think that’s any way to live? Unable to do anything except follow orders? Barely able to think for yourself?”
He shifted in his seat, clearly uncomfortable, like a puppy that knew it had done something wrong and was waiting to be kicked. He’d been pretty happy to hear I’d had no intention of enthralling him again. “I’m not saying it’s the best answer. Maybe just for a little while. They wouldn’t know any different—and we need the manpower.”
“No. Not an option.”
I missed Luce. She’d made a great head of security. As Leandra I’d hardly had to think of such things before, she made everything run so smoothly. And now she was trapped in Alicia’s camp, bound by magic to my worst enemy. Or maybe my second-worst enemy. I had a few to choose from.
Not only did I miss her advice and her strong, capable presence, she was now actively working against me. In fact I was more afraid of Luce than of Alicia. Luce would be hatching some diabolical plot while we flailed around here.
“Goblin magic,” said Garth. “If we bought a seeming, we could get close enough to Alicia to get rid of her, and then Luce would be free. Problem solved.”
Well, it was a nice idea, if not quite as simple as he made out. Goblin magic was complex stuff, and there weren’t too many mages around with the necessary skills. It couldn’t be any old seeming. Valeria’s pet griffin Nada had used a seeming to sneak into the Presentation Ball and bomb Monique into tiny little pieces, but that had been a big, busy occasion, and the seeming had only been a general one, designed to disguise her real features, but not make her look like anyone else in particular.
To get close to Alicia we’d need a particular seeming, and for that we’d need hair or fingernails of an actual person in Alicia’s camp. With that, an experienced mage could make a disguise that looked exactly like the targeted person—except for their aura. The spell couldn’t disguise auras, which made it a lot less useful, since Alicia would immediately see a problem if, say, one of her leshies suddenly turned up with the orange aura of a werewolf.
“The problem is finding a clan willing to deal with us,” said Ben. “Most of them don’t have a powerful enough mage, and the ones that do are sitting out the proving.”
“I know a guy,” Garth said.
“Right. You know a guy.” Ben looked supremely unconvinced. “A goblin mage.”
“Yes. Blue Munroe.”
“I thought he was dead?” said Steve.
“Nobody’s seen him in months,” said Ben. “Not even the heralds know where he is.”
“I do. Or at least, I did.” Garth shrugged. “I reckon I could find him again.”
Last time I’d had dealings with Blue he’d still been living with his clan. He’d done the security work on this house and the Arcadia property for Leandra, nearly a year ago. After what happened to Monique at the Presentation Ball, Luce had insisted on a security upgrade. She hadn’t been too impressed with him, though, and had given him the third degree.
“So the security system is only triggered when a hostile crosses the property boundary?” she’d asked once he’d finished his explanation of the magical defences he’d put in place. For an exorbitant price, I might add. Not that he’d see much of the money: the clan chieftain who’d negotiated the fee would probably keep most of it.
“That’s right.” He was a skinny guy with big round glasses and a floppy orange fringe that made him look a little like a red-haired young John Lennon, and nothing at all like someone capable of working complicated magic.
“So what if someone fires from an adjoining building?”
“Well … nothing, I guess.”
“Or if they land on the roof? Does the protection extend above the ground?”
“Ah … Not as such.” He pushed his glasses back up to the bridge of his nose, looking as though he’d rather be anywhere else.
She folded her arms and gave him her trademark glare, eyes narrowed. Luce was built like a delicate Chinese doll, so tiny that she had to look up at him to do it. “So basically this spell of yours is pretty limited.”
“Well, yes—no!” He jiggled from foot to foot, wilting under her gaze. She might only be small, but no one did intimidation like Luce. “It’s my best spell. Not many mages can manage a spell of this intricacy, you know.”
I took pity on him and sent him away soon after. Months later I’d heard he left his clan.
“Didn’t he skip out on a wedding or something?”
Garth nodded. “He was supposed to marry the clan chief’s daughter. He wasn’t too keen on the idea, so he went into hiding.”
“I remember that!” Steve grinned, teeth very white against his dark skin. “Blue the Reluctant Bridegroom, they called him. Apparently the bride had a face like the back of a bus.”
“I think the problem was more that he didn’t want to be under the thumb of the chieftain’s family,” Ben said. “Any more than he already was, that is.”
Some clans treated their mages like princes. Others acted as if they were no more than performing monkeys, a resource to be used up by the clan rather than a person. From memory Blue’s clan had been one of the latter.
“So how did you find him?” I asked Garth.
He shrugged and looked down at his feet. “Got lucky. I knew him from before.”
The way he said “before”, I knew he meant before he became a wolf. Interesting. Garth hated talking about his past.
“You think you could find him again?”
Another shrug.
“How much use is he going to be, even if you do find him?” Ben asked. He ran a hand through his already tousled curls. “Getting something he could use in a seeming would be almost impossible. And if we can get that close to Alicia in the first place, why do we need the seeming?”
“You got any better ideas?” Garth growled.
“What about Trevor and the pack? They worked with Leandra before.”
Right. Being in hospital, he hadn’t caught up on all our adventures. Garth and I exchanged a look. “We tried to get him on-side last week. No deal.”
“Although that was before he knew about Leandra,” Garth pointed out, forgetting to glare at Ben as the thought struck him. Poor Garth probably misse
d Luce even more than I did. He made a great second, but he didn’t like being in command.
Well, we were all in unfamiliar territory here.
“True.” Blue seemed a dodgy option at best: if we could find him, if he could work any useful magic for us. “Set up a meeting,” I told Steve. No point antagonising the pack leader by having Garth do it. Even if he hadn’t been exiled from the pack, he would never win any awards for diplomacy. “Tell him Leandra’s back and wants to see him.”
Ben shifted uneasily in his chair. “But she’s not … You’re not—”
I sighed. How many times were we going to have this discussion? “Yes, I am.” The fact he didn’t like it didn’t make it any less true. I hadn’t exactly asked to be in this situation myself, but there was no point pretending I was the same person I’d always been. Hell, I doubted I even qualified as human now. “I’m not the same old Kate O’Connor any more. There’s no going back.”
CHAPTER FIVE
Nevertheless, there were times I felt a lot more Kate than Leandra. Leandra would have run screaming from the scene at the breakfast table next morning. Dragons just didn’t do family. Case in point: my lying scum of an ex-husband. However lousy he’d been as a husband and father—and trust me, he defined a new low in lousy—he’d probably done the best he could given the staggering self-centredness of most dragons.
Lachie was shovelling Coco Pops like there was no tomorrow when I entered the kitchen. A chocolate-brown milk moustache was smeared across his upper lip, and the guilty look on his face said he knew full well he should have been eating something healthier. Judging by the speed at which he was chomping through the bowl, he’d probably figured on destroying the evidence before I came downstairs. Or maybe he thought that if Garth could get away with eating sugar-coated crap for breakfast, he should be able to as well. The big werewolf sat beside him, a chocolate-smeared bowl the only sign of his crimes against breakfast.
I smiled at Lachie and decided to overlook the sugar explosion in his bowl. Parental discipline had kind of gone out the window lately. It was so good to have him back I was turning into one of those pushover mothers who let their child do anything they wanted. Soon I’d have to bring us both back to reality—but not yet.
Ben sat on his other side, reading the newspaper. This back part of the house was a modern extension, open-plan and full of light. It looked out on the Japanese-inspired garden where Leandra and I had had our fateful meeting. It was only a small garden, though big by the standards of The Rocks. From here I could see the spreading jacaranda tree where she’d waited for me, and the patch of grass where she’d died. I shuddered and turned my attention to pleasanter things.
Sunlight streamed in the big windows behind Ben and Lachie and gleamed in the reflections on the polished table. It lit their curly heads, one big, one small. They could have been father and son having breakfast together. There was a superficial resemblance—they were both tall and lean with curly hair, though Ben’s was black where Lachie’s was a mid-brown. I paused in the doorway, my heart caught for a moment by might-have-beens. What would our lives have been like if I’d married Ben instead of Jason?
But then Lachie wouldn’t have been Lachie, and I couldn’t regret the choices that had brought him into my world. As for Ben … we were together now. Better to look to the future than dwell on the past. Assuming we survived long enough to have a future, of course.
He looked better this morning. He’d shaved, and in clothes instead of pyjamas he no longer looked like he might collapse any minute. The arm in its sling and a little bruising on the right side of his face were the only signs left of his injuries.
Ben smiled at me, but Lachie’s expression was troubled. He hunched over his bowl as if he carried the cares of the world on his slight shoulders.
“Did you sleep well?” I dropped a kiss on his hair as I headed for the coffee machine.
“All right.” He slurped up the last of the chocolate-coloured milk in his bowl and pushed it away. “How long are we going to stay here?”
Uh-oh. I’d been expecting a conversation like this. “In this house, you mean?”
He nodded. “I want to go home.”
“Don’t you like it here?”
“It’s okay. But it’s not home. I miss my Lego, and my old room.”
His eyes flicked to the side, to Garth, and Dave, who was unstacking the big dishwasher. And there are all these strangers living with us. The poor kid had been living in a boarding school for the last seven months, for God’s sake. He’d probably had it with sharing his living space with crowds of people.
I met Ben’s eyes over Lachie’s head, and saw sympathy there. Just the three of us—a little family together—sounded pretty good to me too. But we both knew there was no going back to that little green house in the suburbs, at least not any time soon, and maybe never. I took my time making the coffee, then sat down opposite at the long wooden table. Its gleaming surface was the colour of honey, warm and golden. The matching chairs were a touch too modern for comfort, and I shifted on the hard surface, trying to get comfortable.
“We could get you new Lego, you know. All the Lego you wanted.”
His frown deepened. God, he looked like his father when he did that. “It wouldn’t be the same. They don’t sell some of the old stuff any more. All my old Ninjago, and the Star Wars sets. Why can’t we just go home?”
His voice wobbled a little on the last word. An overwhelming desire to punch Jason right in his smug face seized me. If he hadn’t started this with his scheming, Lachie and I could still be living our quiet little lives, untouched by all this shifter madness.
I took a deep breath. “Honey, what did Dad tell you about why you had to go to boarding school all of a sudden?”
He sniffed. “I told you, he said you’d died.”
“I know, but why couldn’t you stay with him? Most people don’t move into boarding school when their mums die. Did he say?”
His bottom lip started to tremble. He looked down at his bowl, unwilling to meet my eyes, and played with a drop of milk on the table, smooshing it around with the tip of his finger. “He said he was too busy working to look after me, and that Uncle Ben was going to keep an eye on me. He said I should tell everyone my name was Lachie Stevens, so no one would say Uncle Ben wasn’t allowed to visit.”
A single tear rolled down the soft curve of his cheek. Poor little guy. My heart broke all over again. He must have felt so abandoned, when his own father didn’t have time for him, and even his identity was stripped away. But Jason couldn’t have left his surname unchanged for fear other dragons would find him.
I reached across the table and took his clenched fist in my hands, cradling it between them, smoothing his small fingers straight. Dave clattered around, putting away cups and plates and cooking implements with enough noise to give us at least the illusion of privacy, carefully not looking our way. Nice guy, Dave. Cooked like a pro, too.
“And now you know that was a lie. I wasn’t dead—but I thought you were. Dad used magic to stage an accident and convince everyone that you were dead. Me, Gran, Auntie Simone, your teachers, all your friends at school—we all believed it. And Dad changed your name and hid you away so no one would know it was a trick.”
Except Ben, of course. I didn’t look at him, not wanting to see the guilt on his face. He’d been coerced into being part of Jason’s scheme with typical dragon ruthlessness. No need to burden Lachie with the details. Let him harbour whatever illusions about his father he still could.
“Why did he do that?” His brown eyes swam with unshed tears.
“He was trying to look after you. He’d done some bad things, to some powerful people, and he was afraid they might pay him back by hurting you.”
In an interesting twist of fate, one of them was me. Me, Leandra, that is. In fact it was more of a pre-emptive strike on Jason’s part. He’d been planning to change sides, so arranged Lachie’s “death” before he betrayed her.
It seemed likely he was more worried about Valeria, though. If all had gone to plan, Leandra would have been dead as soon as he left her, so who was he hiding Lachie from? Ever-pragmatic, he’d decided Valeria had the best chance of winning the proving, so he’d switched sides—but he didn’t trust her, and wanted to make sure she couldn’t use Lachie as a hold over him if it didn’t work out.
Maybe one day I’d ask him, if he ever showed his face again. Right before I killed him for all the pain he’d caused us. For months of loss and grieving. For Lachie’s lonely nights in his boarding school bed.
For making me have this conversation with our son.
“Some of those people are still mad at Dad. And now they’re mad at me too, for killing Valeria. We need to keep you safe. That’s why Garth and Steve and Dave and all these other guys are living with us now. We wouldn’t all fit in our little house in Rembrandt Street, would we?”
Garth snorted, and got up to take his bowl to the sink. He’d seen how small that house was.
“Couldn’t they be like guards, and go sleep somewhere else?”
“No, honey.”
“Well, what about when the bad guys stop being mad? Can we go home then?”
He turned pleading brown eyes up to me and I sighed. It nearly killed me to dash his hopes. “You know, everything’s a bit messed up now. I’m a dragon and you’re a ghost. What do you think people will do if we go back and tell them you’re not dead after all?”
He sniffed and scrubbed one hand across his eyes. “They’ll say, ‘hey Lachie, we’re glad you’re not really dead’.”
Ben laughed. I smiled too, some of the tension leaking out of me. “Well, sure, but after that? They’re going to want to know why Dad tricked them—and then they’ll start asking how he tricked them—and then all sorts of things are going to come out that we’d rather they didn’t know.”
He was a perceptive kid. “About dragons and stuff, you mean?”
“Yeah. About dragons, and who killed Valeria, and why. I might have to go to jail if the police find out it was me. There’d be people following us around with cameras all the time like they do with movie stars, and scientists asking questions and wanting to do tests on us.”
The Twiceborn Queen (The Proving Book 2) Page 4
