Celtic Dragons

by Dee Bridgnorth

  No kind of captor did that. Ever.

  But if she was wrong and he wasn’t a danger to her, why had she felt every cell in her body go on the defensive the moment that she had walked off the elevator? Something was wrong. She didn’t doubt that. He might not be the source of the evil that she was feeling, but there was definitely evil, and it was all around them.

  Chapter Six

  Grady

  He was suddenly rethinking his instinctive, irresistible, incredible attraction to Moira as she stood in front of him, having a very bad reaction to something that he didn’t understand at all. Her whole body was tense, her eyes flashing with warning, and her lips set in anger, and she seemed to think, somehow, that all of that emotion was validly directed at him. She seemed to think that he was bringing her down here to trap her or harm her somehow, and there was absolutely nothing—that Grady was aware of—that should have made her think that.

  Was the beautiful, aloof, intriguing woman actually utterly insane? The more important question—was he about to get dragged into a he-said-she-said situation where she claimed that he was trying to entrap her and he got branded an abuser? It happened all too often to powerful, wealthy men, and he wasn’t about to walk straight into it by lingering for another second alone with her in the second-level basement of his office building.

  She had said something generic about how he must just not be feminist enough—at least, that’s how he’d heard it—and he didn’t bother to respond directly, instead pressing the button for the elevator again. “I’m going,” he repeated. “I’m not having this conversation with you alone.” As he spoke, in the back of his mind he was cursing the elevator for not appearing instantly and dreading the possibility that someone on one of the upper floors had already signaled the elevator to return, meaning that there could be long moments of awkward-at-best and dangerous-at-worst waiting before he managed to make his escape.

  “Hold on.”

  Grady let out a quick laugh. “Well, I don’t have much of a choice until the elevator returns, but trust me, I’m not having anymore conversation with you. Whatever game you’re playing, I’m not interested.”

  “I think there’s been a mistake.”

  “You think so?” he asked, his voice dripping with sarcasm. He dared to look directly at her again and was annoyed by the fact that he still found her to be breathtakingly beautiful, despite his anger over what she was trying to pull on him. “I could have told you that from the beginning. I don’t appreciate being played for a fool, Ms.…? He realized suddenly that he didn’t know her last name.

  “Brennan,” she said, still sounding wary but far less defensive. “But call me Moira, and I’ll call you Grady. I’m sorry, Grady. I think that I may have misinterpreted something.”

  He didn’t let his defenses down, but he did look at her as he waited for her to continue, shifting his stance slightly so that he looked less ready to run the hell away from her as soon as possible.

  “I’m a very intuitive person,” Moira said slowly, every word dripping with hesitancy, as though she was worried about revealing something that she could never take back. “I pick up on…feelings, so to speak. Vibes, maybe. It’s a gift, I guess. The point is, as soon as we stepped into this hallway, I was hit by this terrible feeling, and I think that I might have jumped to the conclusion that it was because you were luring me down here.”

  Grady raised an eyebrow, his arms folding over his chest. “That’s quite an assumption.”

  “Well, to be completely honest, I haven’t exactly gotten the best feeling from you, ever since we first met.”

  That would explain, he supposed, the touch of ice that was often in her tone when she spoke to him. He might have been captivated by her, but he wasn’t blinded enough to miss the fact that she had definitely not had the same reaction to him. “Why do you suppose that is?”

  “Honestly?”

  “I prefer that to blatant lies, yes.”

  “You come off like an entitled rich boy with too many toys and too much privilege to be relatable.”

  For a moment, the force of her honesty made him speechless. Although Grady worked in a world in which people had to deliver hard truths to each other on a regular basis, he was successful enough to not often be on the receiving end of those hard truths. Even when someone had to give him bad news, they usually did it with deference and a certain amount of concern with how he would receive the information. Moira clearly had no such tendencies, and her bald answer, delivered in a matter-of-fact tone that was not cruel, but not gentle either, made him blink several times before he could regain his voice.

  “I see,” he managed, his proclivity for eloquence suddenly gone.

  “No offense.”

  That made him laugh, the sound sudden and loud in the small space they occupied. “No offense,” he repeated, chuckling through his words. “Right. Sure. None taken.”

  “Anyway,” Moira said, glancing around and rubbing one arm with her opposite hand. “I know that you must think all this is very weird. You’re not wrong. I think I just misinterpreted the vibe I was getting. I’m sorry.”

  Misinterpreting a vibe rarely led to accusations of attempted imprisonment or assault in Grady’s experience, but he felt his anger fading in spite of the fact that, taken at face value, the entire situation was off. Something about Moira had such an effect on him, and he found himself offering her a slight smile of reconciliation. “Don’t worry about it. But…I think I will call someone down here with us. Just because, well, that’s probably the smart thing to do anyway, isn’t it?”

  She nodded, swiping a hand through her hair in a way he found very distracting. “Yeah, sure. No problem.”

  Grady nodded, and the elevator doors opened behind him, finally ready to take him back aboveground now that the urgent need to flee the situation had passed. He stepped inside the elevator, pressing the button for the doors to stay open and reaching for the elevator’s phone to make a call upstairs. Requesting the presence of one of his assistants, he hung up and turned back to Moira, tilting his head in confusion as he watched her.

  She really was a strange woman. Fascinating, but very strange.

  As he looked on, Moira ran her hands over the smooth surface of the left wall of the hallway that led toward the supposedly-secure vault. Her fingers trailed over the metal as though she could use them to read secret messages etched there, and her face had such a look of concentration that he wondered if her brow would actually knit together, forcing her features to stay scrunched that way.

  When Moira closed her eyes though, a shudder seemed to pass over her, and he got some inkling that she wasn’t just acting oddly. She was experiencing something of which he was totally unaware—and what was more, it was affecting her deeply.

  Exactly what kind of agency is she with?

  “Moira?”

  She started, as though she had forgotten he was there, and looked back at him, her gaze shuttered. “Yes?”

  “What…are you doing? The vault is down this way.” He gestured down the long hallway, though they couldn’t see the vault from where they stood. It was around a bend, purposefully kept out of sight of the only entrance to the underground space. “Shouldn’t we be looking more in that area?”

  Moira turned back to the wall, as though fascinated by the completely smooth surface. “Yes,” she said, though her body language indicated that she wanted to stay exactly where she was and continue inspecting her subject. “We should. Is your friend coming?”

  “Oh.” Grady glanced back toward the elevator, which was still closed. “Yes, any minute.”

  “We’ll wait for him then,” Moira said. “Or she, of course.”

  “It’s a he,” Grady told her, moving to lean against the wall opposite from the one she seemed fascinated with. “I’m going to ask again—what are you doing exactly? Is there something important about that particular part of the wall? Don’t tell me you’ve found a trapdoor.”

  She glanced bac
k at him again. “No, there’s no trapdoor. I’m just being…thorough. As requested, yes?”

  “Yes,” he agreed, still watching her carefully. “By all means, be thorough. I just don’t see what there is to be thorough about, given that it’s just imported steel.”

  Moira didn’t answer him directly, instead she gave him a brief smile before turning away to begin inspecting the wall again, moving gradually down the hall as her hands moved over the surface. She offered no explanation, and he didn’t ask for one again. Instead, Grady just watched her and wondered what on earth he had gotten himself into this time. The day had started off on such sure footing, and yet here he was with a strange woman, standing in the underground space that led to his vault, watching her stroke steel walls after having accused him of attempting to kidnap her, and none of it was giving him any kind of confidence that he might find the answer as to who was stealing his property.

  Under normal circumstances, his no-nonsense business sense would have kicked in, causing him to summarily fire Moira from the job she had yet to begin and move on to better, more efficient services. After all, he was the customer, and he needed to be satisfied with the services he was paying for.

  He was hardly sure he was getting a service at all, and yet he wasn’t about to fire the woman who puzzled him so completely. If anything, he was more determined now to figure her out than he had been when he first met her.

  It was uncharacteristic, but he didn’t question it. His gut had gotten him pretty far in life, and there was no need to start doubting it now. There was something about Moira that he needed to pursue, no matter what path it led him down.

  Chapter Seven

  Moira

  There was no way to explain to Grady what she was experiencing without divulging information that was none of his business—like the fact that she was part of the Dragon Clan, had immense supernatural power, and was picking up on something so dark in his underground hallway that it was shaking her to her unperturbable core.

  She could hardly tell him any of that, nor could she come up with some other more reasonable explanation while her mind was so consumed with deciphering what was triggering her supernatural protective instincts. Her behavior was strange, and she wouldn’t deny that. But she also couldn’t do anything about that at the moment. All she could do was try to figure out what was making her feel so afraid, and the source seemed to be behind the far wall of the tunnel.

  Moira was drawn to the space, wishing that she could somehow claw the steel off the walls and dig behind it to figure out what energy was pulsing there. She ran her hands over the metal instead, trying to get a better sense beyond just darkness and fear, but there was nothing that could give her any clarity, and so there was nothing she could use to explain herself to Grady.

  Behind her, the elevator doors dinged, but she didn’t turn her attention away from the wall until she heard Grady clear his throat.

  “Uh, Moira, this is one of my personal assistants, Jason.”

  He had more than one personal assistant. Of course he did. Of course, now that she had reacted so strongly to the evil she’d felt in this space and essentially accused him of trying to lock her up and abuse her, Moira had a lot less space to be judgmental of what she might call Grady’s quirks, but she still noted how casually he’d volunteered the fact that he had a whole staff of people whose job it was to cater to his every need.

  Was she on that staff now? She supposed she was, and Moira wasn’t exactly sure how she felt about that. But there was no way she was walking away from the case now—not after what she had experienced when she stepped into the hallway.

  “Hello, Jason,” Moira said, keeping any alarm she felt out of her voice as she turned and greeted Jason with a smile. “Thank you for your help.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  The young man was very polite, and quite good looking as well. Moira felt a flicker of surprise that Grady had hired a man as a personal assistant rather than a beautiful woman and that he had hired a young man who was plenty good-looking enough to provide Grady with competition. Granted, Grady had a ruggedness and toughness about him that Jason, with his pressed suit, pocket square, and dignified glasses, lacked, but even so, Jason would draw more than his fair share of female attention. It didn’t fit with Moira’s impression of Grady, and she briefly wondered if she might need to keep a more open mind about the man she was currently working for.

  “Jason originally wanted to be a chef,” Grady said, gesturing toward the man. “But I convinced him that the business world was the best bet. After all, he’s going to make more money handling my affairs than cooking up risotto and spreading coffee grounds on steak.”

  And just like that, Moira realized she’d been right the first time. Grady was all about money and success, and it was way more important to him than personal fulfillment or a balanced life. Moira had to stop herself from shaking her head, partially in judgment and partially in pity. It had to be sad to be that one-dimensional. She hoped that someday Grady learned that there was more to life than business, money, and how much of each he had.

  “I still cook,” Jason said, nodding to her politely.

  “I’m glad,” Moira said, nodding back. “If we’re ready…can we see the vault now?” The feeling she had gotten and had been experiencing ever since stepping off the elevator was starting to fade, and she found herself wanting to follow it, grasp it, and understand it. This case had gripped her already, and she wasn’t working it for Grady anymore. She was working it for herself, because of the impact of that blast of emotion she’d felt. That sensation was moving away, toward the vault, and she was eager to follow it.

  Grady nodded, shoving his hands in his pockets. “Yeah, absolutely. Let’s go this way.”

  He led the way down the hall and around the corner, and as they walked, Moira noted the cameras that were hidden discreetly along the corridor, ready to pick up any movement. It would be difficult for any person to avoid being picked up on the screen, and although Moira knew better than to make assumptions and rule out possibilities too soon, she instinctively felt that nobody was walking down this hallway, avoiding the camera lenses, and somehow entering the vault. There had to be some other explanation, and she would bet her life on it being connected to the power that lurked behind the wall by the elevator.

  It would be far from the first time that she had taken on a case only to discover that the root of the problem was supernatural. So many people passed through their daily lives with no idea of the intricate supernatural world that existed all around them, but she knew all too well that humans coexisted with all sorts of forces that they didn’t understand. Even as a supernatural herself, she knew she didn’t understand all that was out there, lurking in the shadows.

  What perplexed her was not that there might be a supernatural cause, but that whatever supernatural force was at work was targeting money. That wasn’t something she’d seen before.

  As they turned the corner, Moira looked ahead of her and saw a large, circular door that looked like it could have been created specifically for a movie set. It was so stereotypical of a vault door that she wondered if it was somehow a decoy.

  “I thought it looked cool,” Grady said, shrugging wryly as he read the expression on her face. “It was only a few thousand dollars extra to get it done this way.”

  Moira lifted an eyebrow at him, his frequent references to his own wealth becoming less obnoxious as she got more used to them. “Of course it was.”

  “It’s also a security measure,” Jason volunteered. “This kind of structure is almost impossible to weaken or tamper with.”

  “What do you have in here that’s so important?” Moira asked, nodding politely to the guard who stepped up to the door as they approached. “I mean, isn’t it pretty unusual to have a vault like this in the first place? If it’s money you’re storing…banks are a lot safer.”

  “It’s gold,” Grady said. “My accountant, the one who I accused of stealing the money,
suggested that I build a structure like this and put a few million dollars into gold bars. Something to do with the market and investment—I don’t know. He’s in charge of all of that. I had the vault built, and we put the gold bars here. And I also have some of our family valuables. A few paintings, a pretty extensive jewelry collection, and our important documents.”

  “And none of those things have been tampered with?”

  Grady shook his head. “No. Just the gold.”

  “That suggests that you’re not being targeted for personal reasons,” Moira pointed out, stepping aside as the guard followed Grady’s instructions to open the vault for them. She watched carefully as he entered a code so complex that she couldn’t follow it, then initiated a series of mechanical releases that each required a new code. Only when he was finished did the lock on the door open with a resounding pop, allowing the man to ease it back and reveal a hollow area in the steel wall.

  Moira stepped inside the intimidating space, Grady close behind her, and Jason close behind him. Inside, the vault opened up into a large square room, and there were shelves on the far side that were stacked with more gold bars than Moira could ever have imagined. It felt almost as though she had stepped into a cartoon or some kind of over-the-top action movie where a band of men was going to break in and smuggle the bars out under their shirts. She might be hiding the secret that most nights she flew above the city in the form of a dragon and existed within a world in which she was one of the few remaining members of the Dragon Clan, sworn to protect humanity against evil supernatural forces, but somehow the fact that Grady had an underground vault brimming with gold bars seemed more ludicrous.

  “God,” she said, walking slowly over to the closet shelf and reaching a hand out to touch the smooth gold. “Exactly how rich are you?”