Celtic Dragons

by Dee Bridgnorth

  Grady wanted to argue with her, but he knew it wasn’t the time or the place. It was his opinion that what was between them was too strong for either of them to ignore, but if Moira was ever going to agree with him on that, it was going to have to be on her own time. “Okay,” he agreed. “We’ll take that out of the equation.”

  She looked surprised that he agreed so quickly, and he wondered about the brief disconcertment that flickered over her expression. “Great,” she said, the flicker gone. “Those are the three ground rules. Well, that and one more. You need to understand that I may be in over my head here. Whatever we’re up against is brand new to me, and I know absolutely nothing about it.”

  “You know more than I do,” Grady pointed out. “All I know is that my things are disappearing, and there’s nothing on camera to suggest how or why.”

  “Have you had any thefts since…the incident two weeks ago?”

  He gave her a look. “How would I know? I’m still in the process of reconstructing the vault after you and your friend destroyed everything in there.”

  Moira winced slightly. “Okay, that’s fair. But have you noticed anything else that doesn’t add up? Anything at all? Have you continued the surveillance?”

  “We haven’t noticed anything,” Grady told her, standing up again, but this time reaching a hand down to bring her up with him. “But we don’t know what we’re looking for and without being able to do a full inventory—yet—we don’t know. Come on. Let’s go back to the office.”

  “It’s after six.”

  He looked at her over his shoulder, already starting to lead her back toward the parking lot nearby. “So? You don’t work after hours? I can’t go back knowing there are supernatural…things there. We need to handle this now, Moira.”

  Slipping her arm from his grasp, she smiled slightly. “I was just pointing out that I’m going to need dinner.”

  “Oh. Fine.”

  “On you.”

  “Fine.”

  “Brought to the office. Not here.”

  Grady threw up his hands. “Yes, fine. Anything you want.”

  “Anything?” Moira challenged him.

  “Sure…”

  She patted his arm, walking past him. “I need to be done tonight by ten o’clock. I have an appointment with a friend to go flying over the harbor.”

  “Flying like…”

  Moira looked back at him as he stood there, staring after her. She chuckled. “Yeah. Like.”

  Chapter Seventeen

  Moira

  It was strange, being back in Grady’s office space. It had only been two weeks since she’d last been there, but a lot had changed during that time and they had learned a lot about each other. At least, Grady had learned a lot about her, and to Moira’s surprise, that didn’t feel as terrible as she would have thought. He’d had a lot of questions on the way back to the office as he tried to better understand her world, and Moira had found it easy enough to open up gradually, explaining to him what it was like to go through life knowing that you were carrying the secret that you had an entire different form and set of powers that nobody could ever know about.

  She had never gotten to share stories with anyone before and see the look of amazement on his or her face as she described what it felt like to go flying through the night sky and then, moments later, dive deep below the surface of the water, using her strong, flame-red wings to cut through the ocean currents.

  The only downside was that, from a practical perspective, she needed to keep her emotional distance from Grady if she didn’t want to land herself in deep water. But sharing these private things with him felt strangely intimate to Moira. All the angst that he had stirred up in her initially seemed to be fading and they were falling into an easier pattern of talking to each other.

  As she moved around his office, getting all of her information and equipment in order, he sat at his desk, working and occasionally saying something to her. It seemed natural to just answer him and go about her business, completely at ease with the shared space.

  Moira sat down at her makeshift desk that Jason had helped her set up, her TV monitor on the left and the files of data on her right. In front of her was the laptop she would be using to make her own notes as she watched the old security feed and went through the interviews with the old security team. She had started this process before, but everything had been aborted when the disaster in the vault had happened, and now she was ready to start over with a completely fresh perspective. The advantage this time was that she knew better than to look for any explanation that would be normal, so to speak. She would be looking in the corners of the screen, watching the lighting, noting every flicker of the lamp, and reading between the lines in the way that only a person familiar with the supernatural world could.

  “Moira.”

  She had just begun playing the new footage of the vault through her headphones when Grady called for her. Frowning, she took the headphones off and turned to look at him. “What?”

  “I had them put a rush on that accounting job in the vault.” His face was grim. “There’s over five hundred thousand dollars missing now. I might be a rich boy, but we have crossed the line into territory where the money is now an issue for me. What the hell is happening here?”

  “I don’t know yet,” she said, gesturing toward her desk. “I’m only just getting started. I have no experience with any sort of supernatural force that targets money this way. It’s not typical. All I know to tell you is that you have to have everything moved out of the vault immediately.”

  “But if I do that, whatever is happening down there will stop.”

  “Presumably.”

  “And then how will you figure out what it is?”

  Moira shook her head. “I might not. So you have to choose. Remove it all and risk the villain disappearing to hunt elsewhere or…risk the money so that I can keep observing the activity.”

  Grady groaned, leaning back in his chair. “Damn it. I’ll leave the money in there and just take out the family stuff. Don’t you need to be down there though? You know, with like …sensors or something? Tap out the source of the power?”

  She rolled her eyes at him, turning back to her monitor. “That just shows how little you know about what’s happening here. We’re not on a ghost-hunting television show, Grady. And if I go poking around down there with no information, the most likely thing that will happen is that I will end up like Eamon, out of control of my powers and transitioning in the middle of the vault. He doesn’t want to admit it, but he’s still a little off after that incident, and it took him days to recover his strength.” She shook her head, pressing play on the footage again. “I’m not going in there without some idea of what’s going on.”

  Apparently, Grady had no problem with her logic because he didn’t argue. She could just barely hear him on the phone, giving the direction to move all of the family belongings out of the vault but to leave the gold there as bait. She knew he hated to risk his money, but there was little choice at the moment. They couldn’t risk having whatever force was at work lose interest before they could figure out what it was.

  The problem was that there was absolutely nothing on the footage that gave her any indication of what was happening. Everything was quiet, the lighting didn’t change, doors didn’t crack open, and even the air resonated with stillness. She desperately needed some hint about what was happening down in the vault, but she didn’t know how she was going to get that without exposing herself to its power. It wasn’t that she was unwilling to take the risk—she was just not willing to take it yet, mostly because she would have to be very careful before risking having another transition caught on camera again.

  An hour went by, and then another. Moira was lost in her footage, hardly aware of Grady moving around the office, working. Her eyes were growing tired and her hand held the pencil so tightly, ready to jot down the timestamp the moment she saw something, but there was nothing to see. Without her realizing it, he
r eyelids began to droop, closing slowly, then jerking back open as she jolted in her chair.

  For a few minutes, she was more alert, and then she felt herself drifting again, hardly able to focus on the utterly still room, the only motion on the screen the slow crawl of the clock in the corner, marking the minutes. Her eyes closed, then opened, then closed again, and somewhere in the middle of trying to force herself to stay awake, a whisper of movement caught her attention.

  Suddenly, her sleepiness was gone, and she was sitting straight up in her chair, laser focused on the far-left corner of the screen. It was small, yes, but she had definitely seen it, and as she rewound a few seconds, she saw it again. Then again. She didn’t know how she had noticed it after hours of staring at the same room while minutes ticked by, but she chalked it up to luck. There, on the wall of the vault, there was a movement so tiny and subtle that it looked more like the movement of an insect walking along the steel groove than anything significant, but it was the first thing she had to go on, and she zoomed in, breathless with anticipation as the wall grew closer and closer, moving toward her until…

  “Damn it.”

  Grady picked up his head, looking over at her. “What? What’s wrong?”

  “I got excited about an insect.”

  “What?”

  She gestured to the screen, pulling off her head phones. “An insect. I was falling asleep, and there was a movement, and I had my victory dance all planned out until I realized that I was literally zooming in on a cockroach—with bated breath the whole time.”

  Grady leaned back in his chair, shaking his head. “It’s no good, Moira. You know that. I’ve had entire security teams assigned to watch that footage. They never see anything. Not anything.”

  “Yeah, but they’re looking for human activity,” she pointed out. “I’m not.”

  He shook his head, dragging a hand over his hair. “I don’t know. I’m thinking I need to move to a whole new building. Sitting here, knowing that there are…things…below me. Supernatural things. Ghost things. It freaks me out. Ghosts are stealing my money.”

  “It’s not ghosts,” Moira said, turning back to her screen to hide her eyeroll. “Ghosts have a physical presence. They’re transparent, not invisible.”

  “Really?”

  “Really,” she promised him. “At least…most of the time.”

  “That’s comforting.”

  “I’m going to figure it out,” she told him, hoping that she sounded more confident than she felt. “But I’m done for tonight. Or at least for now. I need to go meet Kean, and I need to take a break from staring at this monitor.”

  He got up from his desk, moving around to the other side of it, bringing himself closer to her. “You’re going…flying?”

  “Shhh,” she chided, even though they were alone in the room. “But yes. I am.”

  “Can I go with you?”

  Surprised, Moira turned her chair around and looked up at him. “Come with me? Why?”

  “I want to see,” he said, shrugging a shoulder and looking more earnest than he ever had. “Maybe I need a break too. I need to get my mind off of things. That would work, wouldn’t it?”

  “Well, yeah, but…” Moira trailed off, trying to assess her own feelings. Even though she knew that she shouldn’t, when he made the suggestion, all she felt was eagerness. She wanted to show him what she could do. She wanted to invite him along. She had never felt that before, and she didn’t know if she would ever feel it again. Kean should be the last person in a position to judge her for bringing a human along to such a thing, and she knew he never would. So she didn’t hesitate, standing up and grabbing her purse. “But nothing. Let’s go.”

  “Seriously?”

  “Yes,” she said, nodding to the door and smiling. “Before I change my mind. Get a move on it.”

  Chapter Eighteen

  Grady

  When he’d asked to join her, Grady hadn’t really expected her to agree, and now that he was standing in a clearing of trees, deep within the forested areas on the outskirts of Boston, he wasn’t sure where to stand or what to do with his hands. Moira and Kean were off in the distance, talking quietly amongst themselves, with Moira no doubt having to explain to her friend why she had brought a stranger into the mix. After all, one of the ground rules she had set was that he would only interact with her, and she was already breaking that. Explanations were in order.

  But it did give him hope that she would soon be willing to disregard the ground rule that things were not going to get personal between them. The more time he spent in her presence, the more he was drawn to her, and learning the truth about the secret she was keeping did nothing to dissuade that growing feeling.

  Strange, given that usually just learning that a girl had baggage from her childhood or financial difficulty was enough to warn him off of getting involved with her. Given his lifestyle, he found it in his best interest only to involve himself with stable, secure, well-established women, even if just on a casual basis. It avoided a lot of sticky business, where women tried to use him for his money or position. Normally, getting involved with a woman so complex was something he’d avoid like the plague.

  But the last thing he wanted to do with Moira was avoid her. Those initial fantasies he’d had of exploring her face with his fingertips still played over and over in his mind, except now they were developing into far more intimate explorations.

  “Okay,” Moira said, walking over to him, Kean staying where he was, under a far group of trees. “We’re good. You can stay.”

  “Is he upset?” Grady asked, nodding toward Kean.

  “No,” Moira promised him. “But he needed to understand what was going on. Out of all of them, he would be the most understanding for sure.”

  An uncomfortable thought occurred to Grady, and he frowned. “Is he your…?” He gestured between them. “Are you guys together?”

  Moira laughed, lifting an eyebrow at him. “What difference does that make?”

  “It makes a difference,” Grady said, his voice low and deep without him meaning for it to be.

  The effect on Moira was obvious though. She licked her lips, the possessiveness in his voice clearly giving her a thrill, even if she didn’t mean for it to. “Grady…”

  “Are you?” he asked, pressing her to answer. He looked toward Kean, recognizing the man as one who would be incredibly attractive to women. He knew that he was as well, and he rarely felt intimidated by another attractive man, knowing that his ash-blond hair, strong jaw, broad shoulders, and slim hips were a combination quite capable of enchanting any woman. But he felt intimidated now—just by the possibility that this man was somehow in competition with him for Moira’s affections.

  “No,” Moira said, glancing over her shoulder at Kean. “Definitely not. We might as well be siblings. We grew up together, and he’s recently fallen in love and plans to marry the girl. So…no.”

  Instantly, Grady felt better, a weight lifting off his chest. He smiled down at her. “I’m glad to hear that.”

  “Grady, we have rules.”

  “The rules say nothing about whether or not I’m glad to hear that a man is in love and marrying…someone else.”

  She gave him a pointed look but didn’t push the conversation any further. He did detect, however, a hint of blush in her cheeks as she turned away.

  “So,” she said, not looking at him. “This is how this works. We’re going to go into the middle of the clearing and transition. We use this space a lot. Nobody ever comes here. When we transition, the swift change in our body rips off our clothing…if we’re wearing any.”

  Grady’s eyebrows shot up. “Oh. That’s interesting.”

  “You would have seen that on the video.”

  “I wasn’t really paying a lot of attention to where the clothing ended up,” he pointed out, his eyes scanning her up and down. “Are you going to…undress first then?”

  “That’s the usual plan,” she said dryly, drawing his ey
es back to her face just with her tone. “We turn our backs to each other, undress, transition, and then return here to our clothing when we’re done. Otherwise we ruin a lot of good outfits.”

  Grady leaned up against the fragrant bark of the tree behind him, his hands slipping into the pocket of his dark-washed jeans. “Well, go ahead then.”

  “Grady.”

  His eyes locked on hers, the same spark between them as always. But despite their mutual desire and the memory of their aborted kisses, Moira held up one finger, motioning for him to turn around.

  Sighing with dramatic resignation, Grady followed her instructions, turning to face the tree he had been leaning against. He heard Moira take several steps back, her shoes crunching against the forest ground, and then there was the rustle of fabric.

  It took all of his self-control to remain facing the tree, knowing that Moira was slowly removing her clothing behind him, exposing her skin to the night air and soft moonlight. He wanted to turn around and take her in his arms, covering her body with his, but she wasn’t ready for that, and despite how much he wanted her, he wasn’t going to push.

  “Count to ten,” she said quietly, right behind him. “Then turn around.”

  He did as she said, closing his eyes as he counted slowly. But he only made it to eight before he couldn’t wait any longer, and so as he turned, he caught the last movement of Moira’s transition, and it took his breath away.

  One moment, he was standing in a lusciously green open circle amongst the trees, the dark sky above him lit by the faint glow of city lights from miles away. The trees towered over them, casting shadows and providing a sense of other-worldliness with their total enclosure of the space. It was already the kind of experience he had never had, but when he turned and saw the majestic sight of a fire-red dragon unfurling its wings and lifting into the air in a slow, languid spiral, his mouth dropped open and his eyes fastened onto Moira. He couldn’t look away from how beautiful she was—how powerful she was as her wings swept through the air, taking her higher and higher.