The Twiceborn Queen (The Proving Book 2)

by Finlayson, Marina

  The woman turned and offered a formal half-bow.

  “I am Yamada Kasumi,” she said. “I hope you are no worse after your adventures last night.”

  Her English was excellent, but held a trace of an accent that suggested it wasn’t her first language.

  “I’m Kate O’Connor. I’m sorry to keep you waiting, Ms Kasumi.”

  “Apologies.” Again she bowed, but this time her formality was tempered with a smile. It lit her whole face, making her look much less severe. “I am forgetting your English conventions. Kasumi is my first name.”

  I sat down and waved her to the armchair opposite. “What can we do for you, Ms Yamada?”

  She sat on the very edge of the chair, hands on knees, and leaned forward. “Please, call me Kasumi. I wish to join you.”

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  “Really?” I sat back in my chair and settled in for a longer interview. She looked hot in her biker’s leathers, though the library was air-conditioned, but she’d made no move to take off her jacket. “Would you like some tea?”

  “Thank you.”

  I nodded to Garth and he left the room reluctantly, but I knew Steve had the only gun, and I wasn’t ready to let down my guard yet. Bet that would be the fastest pot of tea the big werewolf had ever made. I could tell he didn’t trust her from the way his eyes followed her every tiny movement, as if he was ready to leap on her at the slightest provocation.

  “Tell me a bit about yourself.” Her yellow aura was so faint in the sunlit room I couldn’t be a hundred per cent sure it wasn’t my imagination. I’d been trying to place it since I saw it on the monitors, but her trueshape eluded me.

  “I am kitsune.”

  Good God. I sat up straighter. One of the fabled foxes of Japan! No wonder I didn’t recognise the aura. I’d heard of the kitsune, but I’d never met one before. They rarely travelled outside their own country.

  Some of the stories made them out to have nearly godlike powers, particularly the older ones. They were supposed to be able to spit lightning, possess people, fly or take fantastic shapes, maybe even turn invisible. If only half the stories were true, having one on my side could be a huge advantage. It was rumoured they could take on the appearance of anyone at all—imagine what I could do with an ally like that.

  “I had heard your people didn’t like to leave Japan.”

  She bent her head in that curious, half-bowing way she had. “That is true, but sometimes there is necessity.”

  “Did the Japanese queen send you?” If the overseas dragons had decided to take part in the proving, things could turn ugly very quickly. The Japanese queen would be a particularly nasty threat. Not only was she closest geographically, and therefore more likely to have ambitions of widening her territory, but she wasn’t Japanese at all. She was the sister of the current Chinese queen, and had stolen the Japanese throne in a coup in the middle of the eighteenth century rather than fight her sister any longer for the Chinese one, so she came with a powerful built-in ally. Not a lady I wanted to come up against.

  “No. My business here is purely personal.” She could be lying, of course, but her direct gaze suggested sincerity. I found myself drawn to her. Maybe that was just gratitude for yet another rescue last night. “I came in search of my sister.”

  “And have you found her?”

  “Yes.” She looked down at the carpet. “She is dead.”

  Garth came back in with a tea tray. I saw Dave’s hand at work there. Garth would never have got out the best china and embroidered napkins. He set it on the big square coffee table and I poured for both of us; Ben refused a cup. He found doing things left-handed awkward, and probably didn’t want to look like any more of an invalid than he had to in front of our guest.

  “I’m sorry to hear that,” I said, as Garth took up a position behind my shoulder, watching the kitsune with a hostile eye. I took a sip of tea, milky and sweet. The cup’s shape and colour reminded me of a dove’s breast, the white china so delicate it was almost luminous. “What happened to her?”

  “She wanted to win favour, so she took a job with your queen Elizabeth. A very simple job, she was told, though the payment was huge.”

  The hairs on the back of my neck began to prickle. Behind me Garth shifted uneasily.

  “Perhaps that should have been a warning to her. I told her not to get involved in the local politics, but she had followed a man here, and the man wanted her to do it.”

  I swallowed a hot gulp of tea, and it burned all the way down my throat. Carefully I set the delicate cup down on its saucer. I had a very bad feeling about this. A simple job with a large payment: sounded like a bounty. And what would be simpler for a bounty hunter than to attack a man lying helpless in a hospital bed?

  Suddenly that strange attack made a lot more sense. If that nurse had really been a kitsune …

  Ben sat closer to the kitsune than I would have liked. Steve and his gun were over by the window. I flexed my fingers in my lap. If things got ugly I’d have to protect Ben myself.

  “And so she attacked your friend here.” She indicated Ben with a tip of her head. There was the tiniest clink of china as she placed her own cup and saucer on the side table by her chair. Her eyes held mine, but they were flat and expressionless; she could have been reciting a grocery list. “And was killed.”

  By me.

  Though she made no threatening move, I rose to my feet. Garth leapt in front of me, a knife appearing in his hand as if by magic. Steve pulled his gun and moved to give himself a clear line of sight. My heart thundered in my chest as the silence lengthened.

  She folded her hands in her lap and regarded us all unblinking.

  “Why have you come here?” My voice came out in a harsh croak.

  “As I said, I wish to join you.” She didn’t move, yet I felt threatened. It took balls for her to sit there so calmly, hands clasped loosely in her leather-clad lap.

  “But you must know …” I couldn’t finish the sentence. You must know I killed her. If I said it out loud, surely her unnatural calm would dissolve into violence. Ben was on his feet now too. Every muscle in my body tensed, ready for action. Yet still she sat.

  She picked up her cup and took another sip of tea, her dark eyes watching me over the rim of the cup.

  “Please sit. I am aware of the circumstances, yes.”

  Warily I lowered myself back into my chair, though Garth still loomed in front of me, looking as if he’d like nothing better than to sink his knife into her flesh.

  “When someone is cut, do you blame the knife or the hand that wielded it?” she asked.

  I drank from my own tea, though the clatter of the cup in the saucer betrayed my shaking hands. I didn’t know how she could sit there so calmly. I had killed her sister!

  “Are you saying I am the knife?”

  She nodded. “Precisely. Your queen sent her to kill Mr Stevens without giving her all the information she needed. Without, most importantly, warning her that he was under the protection of the Twiceborn. Elizabeth knew this meant almost certain death for my sister. But she was prepared to throw my sister’s life away on the chance that she might succeed.”

  “The Twiceborn?” I hadn’t heard that one before. Guess it beat being called the abomination.

  She inclined her head again in that courtly half-bow of hers. “I am determined Elizabeth shall die. Who better to succeed her than one who has already cheated death? So I come to offer my services to you, the Dragon Twiceborn. I believe our goals are aligned.”

  “Wait.” This was crazy. If someone had killed my sister, I wouldn’t be so forgiving. She’d already helped us twice, but I couldn’t wrap my head around the fact that she wanted to work for me, knowing what I’d done. “You blame Elizabeth for putting your sister in harm’s way, but you don’t blame me for actually … You’ll forgive me for saying that doesn’t make a lot of sense.”

  “It makes perfect sense to a kitsune. Family is everything to us.” Well, that I could
relate to. “But higher even than family comes honour. I am bound to avenge my sister’s death. But you killed her in an honest fight, defending your own family from an unprovoked, even cowardly, attack. It was beneath my sister to accept such a task, but she was blinded by what she thought was love. In fact it was the manipulation of dragons who thought a kitsune would be the ideal tool for their job.” She fixed me with a steely glare. For the first time I saw emotion in her dark eyes. “And kitsune hate dragons.”

  Garth looked from one to the other of us, a wild light in his eyes. I could almost smell the suspicion rolling off him in waves, and his aura flared bright orange.

  “You can’t seriously believe her, can you? Turn your back and she’ll bury a knife in it faster than you can say lying fox bitch.”

  “Garth. Put your knife away, please.” And leave the talking to those of us with better impulse control. But I didn’t tell Steve to put away his gun. She spun a good story, but I hadn’t lasted this long by trusting every stranger that happened along with a convincing line of rhetoric. I’d love to believe she blamed Elizabeth rather than me for her sister’s death, but that seemed a little enlightened for a shifter. They were usually more heavily into mindless vengeance.

  Garth sheathed his knife with obvious reluctance and took two paces back so he stood beside my chair again instead of in front of it.

  “You can’t trust her,” he warned. He was nothing if not persistent. “If she’s telling the truth, why wouldn’t she go to Alicia, and destroy you as well as Elizabeth?”

  Ben moved to stand behind me on the other side, his good hand resting on my shoulder. A gesture of support, or just giving Steve a better line of sight on the fox woman? None of us were in a trusting mood.

  “My friend is outspoken,” I said, “but he raises a good point. I am a dragon myself, and you have every reason to hate me. Why would you take my side over Alicia’s?”

  She leaned forward, red-streaked hair swinging loose by her face. She looked about my age. Thirty-five, tops. Lord knows how old she really was, though. It was notoriously difficult to pick a shifter’s real age, and I knew very little about kitsune.

  “Because you are something new, something the world hasn’t seen before. Yes, you are a dragon, but your spirit is tempered with humanity. You fought for your child, in a way no true dragon would. I have never understood that attitude, as if all responsibility ends once the egg is laid. A woman who understands that, a woman who hasn’t been brought up steeped in the belief that the world and every person in it exists to be used, is a woman I would like to see on the throne.”

  Garth remained unconvinced. “If you hate dragons so much, why do you want any of them on the throne?”

  “I don’t.” She flashed him a tight grin. “But I am only one woman. I cannot change the whole course of shifter history. It will be enough for me to bring down Elizabeth, and see a change for the better.”

  I cleared my throat. “Not that I’m not grateful for the assistance, but how did you know I would be attacked last night?”

  “I didn’t. But I have been watching you for some days. When I saw you needed help I decided to step in. You cannot take Elizabeth’s throne if you are dead.”

  Well, she’d certainly been following us the day we went to meet Carl Davison. I recalled the woman in the white car who’d followed us the day we’d collected Lachie’s Lego. Could that have been her too?

  “And what happened to the woman you were fighting when we left?”

  “Lucinda Chan?”

  “Yes. You know her?” Not for the first time, I wished she were here. Her long centuries of experience and web of connections would come in pretty handy right now. Leandra knew next to nothing about kitsune.

  “She is well known in many places. I disabled her, but she suffered no permanent harm. Kitsune are not so quick to squander lives as dragons. Besides, once you escaped there was no point in prolonging the fight.”

  Well, that was a relief at least. These were strange times when I was grateful for an enemy’s survival.

  And when my mother was trying to kill me.

  “Tell me more of your abilities,” I said. “I’m not familiar with what the kitsune can do.”

  “I only have three tails,” she said, “so I am not very great among our people. But I can shift form more or less at will, and I can appear as a particular person, of any age or gender. I can manipulate the dreams of others if I am very close, but I do not yet have the kitsenubi.”

  “Which is?”

  “The ability to generate lightning. Only the nine-tailed have that power.”

  She sounded almost apologetic, as if that were a great let-down, but my mind was already turning over schemes for using the other abilities she’d mentioned. I reckoned I could live without nine-tailed lightning power.

  “How convincingly can you copy another person?”

  “So well not even their own mother could tell the difference.”

  “Even their voice? Their height? Exactly the same?”

  “Exactly.”

  “And is there anything special you need to perform this transformation?”

  “Something personal of theirs. A hair or fingernail clipping is best, but a piece of jewellery can work as long as it is significant to them and they wear it frequently.”

  A smile threatened to tug at my lips, but I forced myself to remain poker-faced. Oh, but this could be so good!

  “In that case I propose a little test. If you can perform a certain service for me, I’ll take you on.”

  Garth shot me a furious look, his aura fizzing like fireworks, but I ignored him. Ben said nothing, which I took for agreement.

  “Certainly,” Kasumi said. “What is the nature of this test?”

  “There is a woman who is causing me problems. A policewoman.”

  Her brows drew together ever so slightly. “You want me to kill her?”

  “No! I want you to become her.”

  “And then what?”

  “One step at a time, Kasumi. She will be here soon. Then you can show me your impression of her.”

  “It will be flawless,” she said. “You won’t be able to tell it’s not her.”

  “I hope so.” I stood, signifying the end of the interview. “Garth will take you to the kitchen. You can wait there until you’re needed.” And he and Dave can keep an eye on you.

  She bowed, and followed Garth from the room.

  Ben waited till the heavy oak door shut behind them, then turned to me with a frown. “You’re playing with fire.” Okay, so maybe he wasn’t totally on board after all. But I was sure this would be the answer to at least one of my problems, and then he could stop yelling at me about taking trueshape. “What the hell are you going to do?”

  “Detective Hartley’s on her way.” The big goofy grin I’d been suppressing burst free. “I’m going to rewrite history.”

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  “I hope you know what you’re doing,” Ben said.

  One hour later, almost to the minute, we stood at the window of the formal lounge room, watching Detective Hartley’s car sweep up the long drive. She was certainly punctual. Ben held the heavy curtain back with his good arm; the other was out of its sling today, but he carried it curled against his body as if to protect it. Clearly he refused to play the invalid any longer, despite still being far from comfortable. He was nearly as bad as Garth. God save me from stubborn men.

  “Relax,” I said, forcing a lightness I didn’t feel into my tone. “Kasumi’s a godsend. What could possibly go wrong?”

  He rolled his eyes and refused to dignify that with an answer. Okay, so there were risks, but I’d done some reading while we waited—Leandra’s library had proved useful after all. Kitsune, despite a reputation for slipperiness, had a highly developed sense of personal honour. Their word, once given, was good. Their abilities varied greatly depending on how old they were, but they could all disguise themselves as someone else, which was the skill that most int
erested me.

  Things were looking up for the first time since I’d sent Valeria plunging into the harbour. Kasumi could be the key to success—if I could trust her. The next hour or two would go a long way towards answering that question.

  Detective Hartley and her shadow, Detective Franks, got out of their car. One big, one small, proving that size means nothing. I was convinced the small, wiry Hartley was far more dangerous than her larger companion.

  Always alert, she looked up as I pulled Ben back from the window, with a gaze that noticed every detail. No doubt she was very good at her job. It was almost a shame to play a trick on her such as the one I had planned.

  I heard the front door open and Garth’s deep voice rumble in the foyer. No, not a shame. A necessity. My survival, and Lachie’s, Ben’s—everyone I cared about—depended on this deception. It was the first step in digging my way out from under a suffocating mountain of problems. Sympathy was something the old Kate would have felt. The new one couldn’t afford such luxuries.

  “Detective Hartley!” I turned to greet her as the door to the lounge opened, a cool smile on my lips. “Thank you for coming all this way.”

  She nodded. “Ms O’Connor. I hope you’re ready to leave.” Straight to the point, no polite but fake you’re welcome. The belligerent tilt to her chin proclaimed her feelings on being dragged out here: she’d gone out of her way to humour me and now she expected full co-operation.

  “Not quite. I’ll just be a moment. Won’t you sit down?”

  The two detectives perched together on the antique lounge under the window like a couple of storm crows. Admittedly the furniture in here was built more for looks than comfort, with its hard wooden arms and straight floral-covered backs, but they both sat with the look of people who were eager to be on their way.