The Twiceborn Queen (The Proving Book 2)

by Finlayson, Marina

  I looked past her to Lachie, huddled against the wall, and trueshape rushed away, leaving me naked and staggering. He was curled into a tight ball with his arms wrapped around his skinny frame, eyes squeezed shut. Was he hurt?

  In front of him a familiar body lay unmoving. Alex. I dropped to my knees. The carpet squelched with his blood. Too much blood. His blond hair ran red with it. My heart sank as I reached out to turn him over.

  Kasumi bent over, hands on knees, heaving in air. “Don’t,” she gasped as my hand touched Alex’s still shoulder. “The boy …”

  The boy would see.

  The boy had seen. I lay a hand on Alex’s arm. His skin was already cooling. Lachie had seen Alex die right in front of him. Trying to protect him, as I’d asked. Tears stung at my eyes, and I turned away and gathered Lachie’s shivering little body into my arms. This was a nightmare I couldn’t wake up from. How many more people had to die?

  Kasumi pulled a blanket from the bed and covered Alex’s body. Lachie wound himself tightly around me and sobbed into my shoulder. I rocked him as Kasumi retrieved a gun from the floor and limped to the door.

  “I’ll make sure we got them all.”

  “Steve’s in the hallway. He’s hurt.” I forced each word past the lump in my throat.

  “Dave?”

  “I don’t know.” He’d been on the roof with me when the wyverns struck. He was probably dead too. So many dead. “I haven’t seen Ben either.” Worry for him gnawed at me.

  Kasumi frowned. “I saw him drive out about an hour ago when I was doing a tour of the perimeter. I don’t believe he came back before the attack.”

  Thank God for that. I dropped my head to Lachie’s hair, grateful beyond all telling for the warm, live weight of him in my lap. Alex had given his life for this precious bundle of humanity. Somehow I had to find a way out of this mess and make that sacrifice mean something.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  Eventually I rose and carried Lachie to my room. He’d cried himself to sleep in my arms, but woke again with the movement and started crying again.

  “Where are you going?” he asked as I set him down on my bed. He grabbed at me, desperation in his panicked grip. “Don’t leave me!”

  “Shh.” I stroked his hair, but he kept crying. “There are things I have to do.”

  I tried to pull away, but his panic mounted, so I caught his chin and forced him to meet my eyes. “Be calm. You will go to sleep.”

  At once he sagged like a rag doll, and I laid him down and covered him with the sheet. It was only a light compulsion, and I felt absolutely no compunction about using it. Sleep would be the best thing for him.

  An envelope lay on Ben’s pillow. My name was scrawled on the front in his messy handwriting. If I hadn’t been in such a panic when the attack began I would have seen it before.

  The message inside was terse.

  Gone to find Blue. I can’t sit around doing nothing any more. Back when I can. Ben.

  Oh, for God’s sake. I screwed it up, shrugged on a pair of shorts and a T-shirt, and went downstairs.

  I found Dave in the comms room.

  “You escaped the wyverns?” I should feel glad, but my emotions were in such a turmoil already. Ben was alive—thank God—but he’d taken off on his own to find a goblin I didn’t even want, which made me crazy. Half of me was giddy with relief that he was alive, and the other half wanted to punch his stupid face the minute I saw him again. The wolves were safe, but at the same time I couldn’t help feeling I’d made a big mistake in letting them go. Alex and Thommo might still be alive if I’d put my foot down. What kind of leader was I if no one listened to me? Leandra would never have tolerated people running off and doing their own thing.

  “Luckily for me they were more interested in you. Gave me time to duck back inside.” He looked ten years older than normal, his face drawn and deathly pale, with none of his usual good humour. Probably shock. “Kasumi’s out patrolling the grounds. I said I’d watch from in here.”

  “Good.” With only two of them, there was little else they could do. And whose fault was it that half our strength was gone when we needed them? I was so busy trying to be consultative and not your typical dragon that I’d brought us to the brink of ruin. “Steve?”

  “Concussed, but not too bad. He went out to dig a firebreak around the pool house.”

  Something I should have thought of. Dragonfire would burn till it ran out of fuel, and we didn’t want it anywhere near the house. At least the night was still, with no wind. Hopefully that, and our location in the bottom of a secluded valley, meant that the fire brigade wouldn’t be arriving on our doorstep any minute. Our nearest neighbours, tucked on the other side of the hills, wouldn’t be able to see the flames, so as long as there was no wind to spread the smell of smoke, we should be safe from having to answer awkward questions.

  “I’ll go check on him.”

  Outside it was still dark, though the blazing pool house provided plenty of light to see by. It couldn’t be more than four o’clock in the morning, and the sun wouldn’t be up for a couple of hours. The moon hung low in the sky. Not long till Garth and Mac returned.

  I found Steve in the barn, putting the tractor away. He’d used it to gouge a wide circle out of the ground all around the fire, leaving nothing but bare dirt, not even a blade of grass for the fire to feed on.

  “How’s the head?” Someone had tied a bandage around his head, which showed a small bloodstain.

  “Not too bad. Feeling a bit sick.”

  I didn’t tell him he shouldn’t be working, though it was true. Tasks needed doing, and there was no one else to do them. I looked at the goblin bodies scattered across the yard and clenched my fists. What would Detective Hartley have to say about this?

  Screw Detective Hartley.

  I was done with playing by the human rules. No more police investigations, no more awkward questions. No more letting everyone steer their own course. I was the captain. If I was a dragon, it was time to act like one, and Ben could take it or leave it.

  I removed my clothes and handed them to Steve. He didn’t blink an eyelid, just stood there holding them like some old-time valet. Smears of ash and blood decorated his dark face.

  Lit by flames, I eased back into trueshape and felt some relief from the storm of anger and regret raging inside me. I always felt different in this form—still me, but better. Different parts of me came to the fore in trueshape. More decisive, more commanding. Less tangled in painful emotions. Choices became clearer.

  I scooped up the nearest pile of goblins and took to the sky. I saw Kasumi in the shadows at the front of the house. And where had she been when the attack began? Out checking the perimeter, she’d said. Another one wandering round doing her own thing. Her upturned face was a white oval in the dark as she watched me fly over. Nothing moved anywhere else. It seemed we had been lucky—in this form I could consider it lucky—and beaten back the attack at the cost of only two lives. No one had called the police or the fire brigade. Our neighbours were all too far away to notice any disturbance in our hidden valley. Probably tucked up safely in their beds. I flew a circuit of the boundaries of the property, then wheeled back toward the fire. Even up here I could feel its heat, though the flames burned lower now, barely the height of a man. When I was right above it I dropped the goblins, and watched their bodies disappear into the flames.

  The pool house was nearly consumed by now, and the fire was dying down. I fed it every goblin I could find with a grim satisfaction. There would be nothing left of them when the fire died out, no inconvenient evidence left lying around for Detective Hartley to harass me with.

  I went inside, shrinking down again to fit through the door, and brought out the goblins who’d died there and added their bodies to the fire. And then I made two more trips, first for Thommo and then Alex. Steve said nothing as he watched me drop Thommo into the blaze, as aware as me that we’d reached crisis point. All or nothing now.

 
; I felt a pang as I leapt skyward with Alex’s body hanging limp in my claws. I lifted him and nuzzled his cold face, his blood-soaked blond hair, but he smelled like any other piece of dead meat. The man who’d given his life for my son was gone, and this was only his shell. Only humans bothered about what happened to the shell once the life within had fled. I was a dragon.

  I consigned his body to the fire too, then flew down to join Steve. He handed me my clothes in silence once I’d transformed, then we stood and watched the flames together. Kasumi came out to join us. She’d changed clothes and cleaned up, so only the edge of a bandage peeking out from her top showed where her shoulder had been hurt.

  “They died bravely,” she said.

  I answered through gritted teeth. “They died needlessly.”

  Maybe there was a reason dragons were such autocratic arseholes. At least they didn’t have to deal with people wandering off on their own like I did. I could cheerfully have strangled Ben at that moment, and my feelings for Garth and Mac weren’t much kinder. But my strongest loathing was reserved for myself. I should have been firmer, should have handled my people better.

  The moon had slipped below the horizon as I worked, and now the sky to the east began to glow with the faint promise of dawn. We stood there as the fire dwindled and the sky blushed pink and then orange. We stood there as the sun lifted over the horizon, and the fire sank into glowing embers. The snap and crackle of flame faded away, replaced by the sound of currawongs warbling in the trees.

  “Do not worry for your son,” Kasumi said. “Children are remarkably resilient. He will recover.” The first pale light of day lit her face. She turned a frank gaze on me, sympathy in her eyes. “My own children have seen atrocities you would not believe. But still they laugh and play.”

  I nodded. Time would tell, I guess. The sound of a car coming up the drive broke the stillness. Steve twitched nervously, but I laid a hand on his arm.

  “It’s Garth and Mac.”

  The four-wheel drive rounded the corner of the house but stopped short of the garage. The two werewolves leapt out and rushed over to us.

  “What happened?” Garth’s gaze took in Steve’s bandage and the bloodstains on the paving out here, then flicked to the smouldering ruin of the pool house. “The gate—?”

  “Rammed. We were attacked.”

  His eyes blazed. He looked as if he’d like to pat me down and check for injuries. “Who?”

  I shrugged. “Goblins and wyverns. I imagine they were Carl Davison’s. No one else has three wyverns on staff, and they probably thought revenge would be all the sweeter with a bounty as reward.”

  “Any injuries?” Mac cut to the heart of it. Any losses? she meant. Her eyes still showed the pain of losing Jerry.

  “Thommo and Alex are dead. Steve’s concussed. Ben’s buggered off somewhere. The rest of us are fine.” For certain definitions of fine, of course.

  Garth sucked in a shocked breath. “I should have been here. You were right. We should have stayed.”

  “Yes.” My voice was bleak. “You should have.”

  “I would have enjoyed killing a few goblins.” His lip curled in a snarl.

  “The mistress barely needed our help,” said Steve.

  Odd. It had been a long time since he’d called me “mistress”. Not since his thrall days. Had he seen the change in me?

  “How is Lachie?” asked Mac, her blue eyes hard with repressed anger.

  “Sleeping. He’s frightened. He saw things he shouldn’t have.”

  “But not hurt?”

  “No.” Not in any way you could see. The memory of his sobs tore at me, that frightened way he’d curled into a ball as if to shut out the horror happening right in front of him.

  I sighed, and scrubbed wearily at the dirt and ash on my own face. I might never get the stink of smoke out of my nostrils. God knows the damage that had been done tonight to the poor kid’s psyche. I hoped Kasumi was right.

  No matter. I couldn’t allow myself to be distracted by such thoughts. At least he still had a psyche to be damaged, and wasn’t ashes in a fire. My only goal now was to keep him from the flames that were eating up my world.

  “Come inside. Once I’m cleaned up we need to talk.”

  “And see about getting that gate fixed,” Garth said.

  “No need,” I said. “We’re moving on.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  Dave passed around coffees and plates heaped with bacon and eggs. The smell of the food turned my stomach, but I forced myself to take a serving. Then he left to relieve Steve in the comms room. Having a concussed man watch the screens was hardly ideal.

  We made a subdued group around the large pine table. Early morning sunlight streamed in the kitchen windows, sparkling on the steel bench tops, but it did nothing to lighten the mood. Only five of us sat around the table now—me, Steve, Kasumi and the two werewolves—and the empty spaces felt huge.

  While we ate I filled the wolves in on what had happened while they were gone.

  “I want everyone packed and ready to go in half an hour,” I finished. The bacon tasted like ash in my mouth. I washed it down with coffee, black and bitter. Despite the shower, I still didn’t feel clean.

  “Where are we going?” Garth asked. His cheeks bulged with food like a chipmunk. He and Mac had probably spent all night running. They were the only ones with much appetite this morning.

  “You three and Dave are taking Lachie into hiding. Kasumi and I are going to visit my mother.”

  Garth choked and nearly spat bacon. “What?”

  Kasumi said nothing, merely laid down her knife and fork and waited expectantly.

  “We’re out of time,” I said. “We can’t keep facing these attacks, being whittled away little by little. Every time they hit us we lose someone else. If we don’t do something bold, right now, while they think we’re still licking our wounds, the next attack could kill us all. We have to take the fight to them.”

  “But … Elizabeth? How can six of us take on the queen?”

  She had the resources of all Oceania at her fingertips. He didn’t need to say it; we all knew.

  “Not six. Just me and Kasumi. The rest of you will keep Lachie safe.”

  “Just her?” He looked at Kasumi, his gaze full of hostility. “Why her? She’s been with us all of five minutes. How do you even know you can trust her?”

  “This is not a democracy, Garth.” I challenged his glare with one of my own. No more arguments. “She could have killed us all several times over last night. Why shouldn’t I trust her? She kept Lachie alive for me while you were off chasing rabbits in the bush.”

  Garth looked down at his plate. Okay, that was a low blow, but I was past caring.

  “What is your plan?” Kasumi asked. Her stillness spoke of a coiled spring, ready for action. Garth shot her a resentful glare, but her attention never wavered from me. There might have been no one else in the room.

  “I’ve sent Alicia a broken scale. She doesn’t cope well with death threats. She’ll most likely sit tight and hope that one of the bounty hunters can take me out without her having to risk anything. So that removes one enemy from the equation, at least until Luce can coax her into action again. Elizabeth won’t move overtly against me—but she doesn’t need to, having set every bounty hunter in Sydney onto me.”

  Kasumi’s mouth curved into an approving smile, though Garth still looked confused.

  “So what are you going to do? Beg Elizabeth to call them off?” His expression showed exactly what he thought of that idea.

  “No, of course not. I’m going to kill her.” I locked eyes with the kitsune. “Or rather, we are.”

  Kasumi gave me an approving nod, as if she’d expected no less. There was a stunned silence from the others.

  “But she’s the queen,” Steve said at last in his deep rumble. No one was eating any more, not even the werewolves.

  “Exactly. And if I kill her, I will be queen, and the bounty hunters will
have no reason to kill me. Or Ben. There’ll be no more bounty.”

  Problem solved. A neat solution, if I said so myself. And one that I hoped would save Ben’s exasperating arse before he managed to get himself killed. Every time I thought of him running around out there, alone and all but defenceless, anxiety closed its fist on my heart.

  “How in the hell are you going to do that?” Garth said.

  I ignored him and focused on the kitsune. She didn’t seem bothered at being asked to assist in a regicide, though if it went wrong her death would be horrible. In fact, she hadn’t seemed bothered by anything I asked of her. She truly was a godsend. With her unique abilities, I might actually be able to pull this off.

  “Davison’s dead and Jason’s disappeared, which means Elizabeth herself and Gideon Thorne are probably the only two dragons at court at the moment.”

  “Davison’s servant said her master had spent a lot of time recently with Gideon Thorne,” Kasumi commented.

  I shrugged. There could be any number of innocent explanations. It didn’t matter now what Davison had been up to.

  “Who’s Gideon Thorne?” Mac asked.

  “A very influential dragon in Elizabeth’s court,” I said.

  “I’ve never heard of him.”

  “He likes to keep a low profile. Prefers to work in the shadows.”

  “He’s her spymaster,” Kasumi said.

  “Really?” Mac looked as surprised as if she’d just discovered the Easter Bunny was real. Maybe it did sound old-fashioned, but such things were necessary, especially in a paranoid world like the shifters’. Even human governments had spies, though they didn’t like to call them that any more. “Agents” sounded so much more appealing.

  Kasumi turned to me. “She also told me that the bounty on your head has gone up to two million, with a bonus if they bring you in alive. Elizabeth hankers for a good old-fashioned execution.”