Celtic Dragons

by Dee Bridgnorth

  Grady sat beside her, and under the circumstances, he put aside Moira’s potential disapproval of him getting too close to Felicia. He put his hand on her back and rubbed gently, the girl’s grief so potent that it filled him the way it was filling her. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m sorry you lost a friend, Felicia. It’s time to make sure you don’t lose anymore.”

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Moira

  “I’m sorry,” Moira said, the moment that she and Grady were alone. They had gotten their own room at the hotel after deciding that they would stay put there for the night, though Kean had gone home to be with Dhara, telling them to consider him on-call if anything went down. As they settled in, both a little unsure of what to say, Moira knew she just needed to jump right in. “I know that you were confused by the way I was looking at your earlier—I must have seemed upset. It wasn’t you. You did nothing wrong. I just had a moment.”

  “What kind of moment?” Grady asked, sitting down in the chair positioned by the window. “Because …I was kind of confused. You were angry, and I had no idea why.”

  “Me either,” Moira said, perching herself on the small round table nearby. It wasn’t a luxurious hotel room by any means, and she could only imagine that Grady felt way out of his element in a budget room. The comforter looked thin; the windows were grungy; and the paintings on the wall smacked of discount store deals. “I had this strange feeling when I saw you hugging Felicia, and it’s not a feeling I liked. I got jealous and insecure…I started doubting you and your intentions. I wondered if you were just schmoozing me the way you were schmoozing her.” She shook her head, looking away. “It was like this torrent of irrational, unattractive feelings, and I know it was all over my face. I’m embarrassed.”

  For a moment, Grady didn’t say anything, and Moira wondered if her confession was going to change things between them. Maybe he could handle a girl who lived a second life in the form of a dragon, but not one who suffered from irrational jealousy. It would be difficult to blame him for being turned off by it.

  “Maybe the same thing would happen to me if I saw you getting close to another man, even if I knew you didn’t mean it that way.”

  Moira looked up at him in surprise. “It would?”

  Grady lifted a shoulder, shrugging. “I don’t know. Maybe. When I asked you about Kean, I felt an intense jealousy at the thought you might be with him. I would be lying if I didn’t say that your closeness is something I have to get used to. Not that I don’t trust what you’ve told me—I do. But I think that maybe …what we feel for each other is intense. Maybe it makes us a little less logical and reasonable sometimes.”

  It was a relief that he wasn’t judging her, even though she did still judge herself just a little. She smiled at him. “Maybe. I can be okay with that if you can be.”

  “I’m okay with it.” He smiled back, then got up and moved toward her, guiding her away from the table and into his arms. “I’m glad that you wanted to get a room together.”

  “I’m glad you wanted to,” she murmured, tilting her face up for a kiss as he leaned down and brushed his lips over hers. “And you were great with Felicia. We make a good team, don’t we?”

  “The best kind of team,” he agreed, kissing her once more. But then he stepped back, and seamlessly, they both transitioned back into work mode. “I don’t like her being in that hotel room by herself for too long. I think she’s on board with us, but if he calls and we’re not there, or if she starts to question herself …we could lose her, and then we’d have nothing again.”

  Moira nodded. “Yeah. We need to keep someone with her at all times, even if we have to take shifts. Let’s head back over there now and start figuring out what the next step is. If Felicia can tell us where they’re based and Darren doesn’t realize she’s working with us, then we may be able to eliminate this problem more easily than expected.”

  “I wouldn’t count on that.”

  “I wouldn’t either,” Moira agreed, twirling a curl around her finger as she thought. “We have to hope for that, but plan for any number of scenarios. The fact of the matter is, Darren has a lot of power and absolutely no morals. That’s a seriously dangerous combination.”

  Grady nudged her chin up. “But we’re smarter and more determined.”

  She smiled at him, but as they walked down the hallway back to Felicia’s room, Moira’s mind was working overtime. Even in their best case scenario, they were going to show up at Darren’s house unannounced and take him out. There were at least four shifters in the house, and even though Felicia had said that many of them were not loyal to Darren, they had to be considered enemy combatants—at least at first. That was four people who could take on any variety of forms, shifting with ease at will. They would quickly expend their energy, but surely not before being able to do serious damage. If all five of the Dragon Clan went, surely they would be able to hold their own and turn the tables, but the problem with that was the potential exposure. Even though the house was supposedly remote, a battle between four constantly-shifting entities and five huge dragons was going to draw a lot of attention.

  It would be even worse if Darren brought the battle to them though. He could shift into a harmless fly and disappear with no one being the wiser. The Dragon Clan was far more conspicuous and couldn’t afford to get caught in a public battle.

  Moira realized that they had never faced quite this type of battle before. They had worked on any number of supernatural cases, but they had never been at war with another group who had similar powers to them, and if they got out of this one with their lives and their secrecy, then it would be more than they should expect.

  It was a dark thought to dwell on as Grady knocked on Felicia’s door.

  The tiny woman opened it, clearly having peeked through the peep hole first. She ushered them into her completely dark hotel room, hushing them after every step they took.

  “Shhhh,” she whispered. “We could be under surveillance.”

  “Did something happen?” Moira whispered back. “Since we left? Did you get word?”

  Felicia shook her head, barely illuminated by the street lamp outside the window. “No, but I’ve been thinking.”

  Moira and Grady exchanged looks, knowing this was exactly what they had been worried about—Felicia alone, thinking.

  “I’ve been thinking that you can never assume what Darren does and doesn’t know. He sends Vaughn out all the time to spy on people. Why would he trust me to just stay here in this hotel room all night, alone?” Felicia jerked her head over her shoulder, as though afraid something was behind her.

  Moira felt a tug of sympathy for the woman, who was clearly scared out of her mind. “Why wouldn’t he trust you, Felicia?” she asked, and she was immediately shushed. She lowered her voice and repeated the question. “Why wouldn’t he trust you? You’ve done what he said, right? As far as he knows.”

  “Darren knows everything,” Felicia whispered, crawling into the center of the bed and curling her legs up to her chest, wrapping her arms around them. “It’s so vulnerable, as a shifter, knowing that you can’t escape into another form. When your energy is drained and you’re recovering …knowing that you can’t save yourself.” She shuddered. “It’s the worst feeling ever. If he materializes here …there’s nothing—nothing—I can do to keep him from killing me. And he will. He killed Cade. His brother!”

  Again, Grady and Moira exchanged glances, though the darkness of the room prohibited their nonverbal communication. Still, they seemed to agree that Moira would be the one to talk Felicia down this time. She sat on the edge of the bed and took the girl’s hand in hers, pressing firmly. “I know how scared you are, and I don’t think that it’s for no reason. But I need you to understand that we are going to protect you from him. If he were to materialize right now in this room, you might not be able to shift, but I can, and I’m going to stand between you and him. Let him try to take out a dragon, Felicia. He couldn’t do it last time, and h
e won’t do it this time.”

  Felicia continued to stare down at her lap, but she didn’t pull her hand away from Moira’s. “You don’t know what he’s like. You can’t know that. But I can’t turn back now, either. If I went back to him, he would know that I’d betrayed him. Either way, I die. If he finds me here, I die. If I go to him, I die.”

  “But if we defeat him, you live,” Moira said gently. “Let’s focus on that. I need you to tell us everything you know about where Darren is right now. We’ll start there—one step at a time, okay?”

  “Like the address?”

  “Yes,” Moira said. “But more than that. I need you to describe it to me, so I know whether or not it’s safe to take him on there.”

  Grady sat down with him, reaching out and turning on the bedside lamp. Felicia glanced at the light and frowned, but she didn’t turn it back off. “We need to know what the battleground looks like, basically,” he told Felicia. “How secluded is it, for instance?”

  “It’s on a plot of land that’s just under five acres,” Felicia said, leaning back against the pillows and staring up at the ceiling as she talked. “Darren liked it because there would be nobody else around. He said it was like a fort. The house …it’s three stories, if you count the basement. Does a basement count as one story?”

  “We know what you mean,” Grady assured her. “Two floors and a basement.”

  “Yeah.” Felicia nodded, still focused on the ceiling. “It’s five bedrooms. Nina and I share, because we’re the two girls. And Vaughn preferred to sleep in the basement. I don’t know why. Vaughn is a loner, I guess. He’s odd, even amongst us. He never quite fits.”

  Moira nodded, patting the woman’s hand to encourage her to keep going. “Okay, this is good so far. What about entrances?”

  “Front door, back door, and …” Felicia paused to think, her eyes closing as she visualized the place. “Eleven windows altogether. There’s only one set of keys. Darren carries them. The rest of us work around when he’s going to be home to let us in …or we just shift into something small enough to crawl in, if we need to.”

  “Weapons?” Grady asked. “In the house? Guns? Knives?”

  Felicia chuckled slightly. “No, we don’t need guns to defend ourselves. Knives …yes. If kitchen knives count. We’re vegetarian though—obviously.”

  “Obviously?” Moira interjected.

  Felicia looked at her, arching an eyebrow. “Could you eat a dragon, if you had to?”

  Taking the point, Moira nodded. “Understood. You shift into animals—you don’t eat them.”

  “Even Darren is vegetarian.” For some reason, perhaps because she was exhausted and strung out, that thought made Felicia laugh, her giggles becoming almost hysterical. “He’ll murder people in cold blood, but he won’t eat a chicken because he might have to become one someday. Oh God!”

  Quietness was clearly off the table as Felicia grew more agitated. She gripped Moira’s hand again, leaning forward.

  “Do you see how messed up that is? Do you see?”

  “It’s messed up,” Moira agreed. She didn’t try to tell the girl to calm down. It was clear that years of fear and anxiety were all coming to a head, and if Felicia needed to get it all out of her system, then she should. If Darren was somehow spying on them, then he was going to come after them regardless, just because she and Grady were in here.

  “Yet he’s going to kill you two for killing Callum,” Felicia continued. “It’s all about him. In his world, it is all about him.” She sat up, then swung her feet down off the bed, beginning to pace the room. “Do you know that I once thought he was in love with me? Yeah. I really thought that big, bad, scary Darren was softhearted for me—me!”

  Moira looked over at Grady, the sympathy she felt for Felicia echoed in his expression. “What changed your mind?” she asked, shifting on the bed so that she could keep watching Felicia as she paced up and down the room.

  “He raped me,” Felicia told her, making the statement casually. “I mean, I didn’t realize that at the time. I thought it was just sex gone bad. But, no. I know what it was now. I’ve known for a while. I tried to understand him, change him, love him—I just wanted to be with someone. I just wanted to know what it would be like to be held. To not worry about losing control in the heat of the moment and starting to shift. I mean, I’d never dared go near a human. When we get emotional, we can shift without warning. At least when we’re still new to it. I thought it would be perfect to be with Darren for my first time, because if one of us did, then it wouldn’t be a big deal. We would just stop and calm down and hold each other.” She laughed again, throwing her head back. “Oh God. I thought we would hold each other.”

  “What happened instead?” Grady asked quietly.

  “He’d been nice to me for long enough that I thought it must be different with me,” Felicia said bitterly. “I knew that he did a lot of bad things and that he came off to a lot of people as mean, but he would be kind to me often enough that I thought he must care. That he must love me. Or that I could make him love him in time, if I kept supporting him no matter what. Then one night I went to him and I told him I was in love with him.” She laughed without amusement, turning her face away. “I told him I wanted to be with him. That he should be my first. So maybe it wasn’t rape since I initiated it. But it felt like it.”

  “It was rape if you wanted to stop and he didn’t let you,” Moira told the girl, instinctively knowing not to approach her, even though she wanted to offer comfort. “Even if you said yes at first, if you said no later, then that means no.”

  “Oh, I screamed no,” Felicia said. “I screamed it over and over. It hurt so much. It was my first time, and I was scared, and…” she trailed off, obviously not wanting to go down memory lane any further. “I left his room that night, and the next morning, we both acted like it never happened. We’ve never acknowledged it since. Maybe that’s why he trusts me to be here. He still thinks he has the power over me that he had then.”

  Grady stood up, but only moved to the foot of the bed, without directly approaching Felicia. “But he doesn’t have that power, does he?”

  “No.” Felicia looked up at him, slowly shaking her head. “Not anymore. I know who he is.”

  “Then isn’t it time to show him that you’ve taken your power back?” Grady asked her gently. “You’re going to help us take him down, Felicia. You’re going to get justice.”

  This time, when Felicia smiled, there was no manic edge to it. She nodded. “Yeah. I am. I’m going to get it for all of us.”

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Grady

  It was almost unbelievable the turn his life had taken in the past few weeks. Grady had gone from a dedicated businessman concerned with small thefts in his vault to a man who was in a relationship with a dragon shapeshifter, defending himself against vengeance another group of shifters was carrying out after he had murdered one of their own while attempting to kill a cockroach. He had stayed up all night, not charting online reactions to new PR initiatives or researching new theories on how millennials viewed trigger points, but constructing a blueprint of Darren’s hideaway house based on the memory of the woman who had been part of a plan to lure him to his death but who was now on their side, helping them take down the real enemy.

  After all of this was over, he was going to need a long vacation to try to process his new reality, but there was no time for that now. Felicia had called Darren every hour, enduring his complaints that she was waking him up and his insistence that she continue to check in. Now the sun had risen, a new day had begun, and they were ready to use that day to take out someone who was a proven threat to public safety. Any guilt that Grady had felt about killing the cockroach that had been Callum had evaporated once he knew what kind of person the man had been. He wasn’t for vigilante justice by any means, but given the circumstances, he wasn’t going to lose sleep over it.

  “Okay,” Moira said, tapping the chart they had drawn and
redirecting his attention to their conversation. Felicia lay asleep on the bed, pale and absolutely worn out, but Grady and Moira were still working. “This is what we have. Five acres, mapped out. A shed over here that can provide shelter on the outskirts of the land, but no shelter at all as we move from the shed toward the house.” She traced her finger along that part of the rudimentary map. “This is all flatland. This is our most dangerous area. If they see us before we get there, they flee or they prepare, and neither work well for us.”

  “You keep saying us.”

  She looked up at him, not understanding. “Yeah?”

  He shrugged a shoulder. “How much use am I going to be? I mean, yeah, I helped with Felicia because she needed to be sold on helping us. I doubt that I’m going to be able to talk Darren into forgetting the whole thing and moving on with his life to bigger and better things. How do I fit into something that’s going to turn into a battle between dragons and who-knows-what faster than I can blink?”

  Moira blew out a breath, her hair lifting off her forehead. “I don’t know. But this is your fight as much as ours—more than ours. You were their target, and it’s you that Darren wants revenge on and tried to kill. I’m not trying to fight your battles for you, Grady, but …well.”

  Reaching out, he touched her arm. “I’m not complaining. I don’t feel cut out. I’m a practical man, Moira, and I know that I don’t have what’s needed to fight this battle. You’re the fighter between us, and that’s fine. I can be part of the planning, but I don’t think that I need to be there for the actual …showdown. You’ll be worried about me, and it may distract you.”

  “Wow.” Moira slid her hand across the table, taking his. “A lot of people wouldn’t be so …fine with that.”