Monsters, Book Two: Hour of the Dragon

by Heather Killough-Walden

  Conall gave him a wise nod. “Very well.”

  “And the sanction,” Cain said. “State it now.”

  So Conall did. “He works for me for two months.”

  Cain blinked. Now, that actually surprised him. He studied Conall more closely, and considered brushing his mind for his surface thoughts. But in the end, he realized he probably didn’t need to. Conall Tiarnahn was a warden. Cain knew that he was a smart man and a good man. Having Antares work for him would cover a whole lot of bases at once.

  It allowed Conall to get to know the man who was so interested in Faith, make sure he had her best interests in mind. She must have meant quite a lot to Conall, which meant she was important to the clan.

  Cain was tempted to read his mind again as he wondered why. But it was bad form. Plus, the man had wards over his mind, like all wardens did. If he happened to notice Cain easily slipping past them, it wouldn’t be good.

  Having Ares work for Conall would also allow Antares to be close to Faith, which would keep him from acting out again and absconding with one of clan Draco’s wardens. And last but not least, it meant Annaleia would remain under Conall’s watch, right where he wanted her until this was all sorted out.

  Cain couldn’t blame a man for taking care of his team. True, Mace had only absconded with Faith because Cain had intervened and given him the direct order to do so. But Mace probably wouldn’t nitpick. This was an acceptable compromise.

  “Done,” Cain said with a nod. They clasped each other’s hands in a warden’s grip and then Cain, Crow, and three other Monsters members stepped into their portal, exiting the meeting room and leaving the Draco clan to exit through their own.

  As they moved through the portal, Cain addressed his second. “You okay?”

  Crow glanced at him, but it was clear he was distracted. “Angel’s in Austin. We’d agreed to meet up tonight. She’s resourceful, so of course she found the alley where Mace lost his shit. And now she’s with Graham Campbell.”

  Cain nodded and bit back a smile. He knew all of that already. He’d been capable of sensing each mind at the kidnapping site. But having Crow say it out loud explained why he’d been so agitated. Jacob Crow didn’t want his mate, Angel, around another clan leader, not after the shit he’d had to deal with when it came to Angel’s own clan leader, Gabriel Santiago. Crow didn’t want Angel around any clan leader, but maybe especially the Texas clan leader, Graham Campbell.

  Graham Campbell, or “Gray,” was as tough as they came. He’d lost his son to a supernatural attack, and the event had turned him toward the warden life he’d led for the last few decades. Now he was hard. But because he’d been raised right, he was ever the gentleman – and women could sense that kind of thing. How he would behave toward Crow’s mate was a toss up. Angel was stunning and smart. But she was also a vampire. One mark for, one mark against as far as Gray was concerned.

  The fact that Crow’s tension could be chalked up to jealousy was amusing to Cain. Angel really got under the man’s skin. Cain wondered if that would ever fade.

  Time did funny things to people who lived forever.

  The lights and colors at the end of the portal’s tunnel shifted and solidified, opening to a familiar scene. Cain and his men stepped out of the portal, allowing it to shut behind them. Cain approached the red-haired woman who seemed out of place amongst the group of hardened or seasoned fighters and spell casters. Amusingly, she was more powerful than most of them put together.

  “Cain,” greeted Katrielle. He nodded at her, and she handed him a note that had been rolled and tied with a red string. “This appeared by object transport just after you left tonight. The transport spell was untraceable.”

  Cain took the note and felt his expression go grim. He knew he’d smelled blood when he’d exited the portal. The string wasn’t originally red. It had simply been soaked. The fact that it was still tied meant the others hadn’t wanted to screw with the string in case Cain recognized the scent – and they also just simply hadn’t wanted to touch it in general. Kat had probably read the note through more magical means.

  But now Cain snapped the string and let it drop, partly out of impatience and partly because he felt disgusted. He didn’t recognize the owner of the blood based on its scent, but he recognized the fear lacing it. It was heavy with adrenaline. He unrolled the paper and read the messily scrawled letters, also written in blood.

  Then he lowered the note.

  It didn’t look like Mace was going to get the time he wanted with his girl after all.

  “We could handle this on our own and deal with the casualties,” said Kat, “as it’s unwise to negotiate in hostage situations. Even humans seem to understand that.”

  “But they’re Faith’s friends,” he said. “I get it. She deserves to make the call on this one.” Cain dropped the note, and it erupted into flame, burning away to ash before it hit the ground. He glanced down at the ash.

  The tiniest, most miniscule portion of his power had escaped from him.

  Before he could apologize, Katrielle smiled in understanding. “No one minds,” she assured him.

  “I’ll get Faith,” he said. “We’ll meet up at the Austin safe house in fifteen.” He looked up at the people standing around him until Graham Campbell met his gaze. The man nodded in understanding and Cain nodded back.

  Without having to speak a word, Cain vanished in a transport he’d perfected long, long ago.

  Chapter Twenty-six – Santorini, Greece

  He walked in to find Annaleia reaching for two different things, one several shelves above her, and one several shelves below. The shelves would normally adjust to allow an individual to reach whatever it was they wanted – but leave it to her to put them in the one predicament where they couldn’t meet her demands.

  “For the love of – just grab them individually,” Ares told her, joining her in the enchanted closet.

  “I wanted to see if it could still give me both items,” she told him, grinning up at him through a curtain of hair. Her grin was delicious. It was impish, wild, and highly carb-loaded.

  He shook his head and strode toward her, reaching for the arm that was raised toward the taller shelf, but she stood up abruptly and tried to pull away just when his fingers closed around her wrist. When she yanked, the cuff of her sweater sleeve slid down, exposing most of her forearm.

  Antares went still, and his grip tightened. His eyes zeroed in on the scars.

  Annaleia had gone still as well, frozen in his grip. When he pulled his gaze from her scars to her eyes, he found her looking away. Her smile was gone.

  His guts clenched, and one of his hearts beat a slow, mournful beat.

  “Leia, how did you get these scars? What happened?” He waited a second, then out of desperation, he did something he would have done when they were in school together. He glanced at the shelf she had been reaching for. “If you tell me right now, I’ll get the almond M&M’s down for you.”

  Annaleia blinked. Her chin lifted a touch. As he watched, the corner of her mouth that he could see very slowly curled into the slightest smile. He found his grip on her arm letting up, as if he could meet her half way.

  And he could. He would always be able to with her.

  She took a deep breath and let it out in a sigh as she gently pulled her hand away and turned to face him. “Fine,” she said. “But just so you know Ares, talking to you right now is like talking to someone on a porn meet-up site who doesn’t want anyone to see their face.”

  All he really caught from that was “porn site.” He tried not to smile when he asked, “How would you know this, exactly?”

  She shrugged. “I have a fantastic imagination.”

  But then it hit him. She’d called him Ares. She believed him! Now he couldn’t help the smile that claimed his face. It felt like something had been sitting on his chest before, and now it had lifted away and he could finally – finally – breathe. After fifty years of suffocation.

  But she
wasn’t smiling. Instead, she looked resigned.

  She turned away from him, wrapped her arms around her chest, and paced the length of the candy closet. Ares found himself held rapt in her emotion, in her every movement. “Leia… what happened that night?”

  Annaleia stopped and looked up at him. She sank to the floor and sat cross-legged. “Hand me the M&M’s.”

  Without taking his eyes from her, he reached up behind him, grabbed the bag, and gently tossed it to her as he joined her. She caught it, also without looking, and tore the end off one side.

  Ares sat down across from her and crossed his legs the same way.

  “What you guessed earlier was mostly right” she said. She shook out an M&M and rolled it between her fingers absently. “Jarrod Sterling came to the diner one night when you weren’t there. It was November of that year. He told me that I had something he needed, and in exchange he would give me something I needed as well.”

  Her voice took on a hollow quality, one filled with memories and the past.

  “He was telling the truth on both counts. But more so on mine.” She looked up at Ares, meeting his gaze. “He told me that there would be an accident. The accident would kill me. But it would also kill my mother – and my unborn brother, Joshua. It was going to happen in the early hours of Christmas morning.”

  Holy hell.

  “I’m telling you, I have the worst luck during the holidays,” she said, shoving the candy into her mouth and then pouring half the bag into her mouth right after it. She chewed hard, swallowed, and Ares knew she’d be thirsty. He was in his own home; his spells were simplified here, verbal and somatic components no longer strictly necessary.

  Annaleia glanced down when the drink appeared on the floor beside her right thigh. It was a Mountain Dew, in a bottle, which was wrapped in a thick koozie, and stored at 32.05 degrees Fahrenheit. Droplets of slush slid slowly down the sides of the bottle. It was cold.

  It was her favorite non-alcoholic drink. She would always joke about wanting it at 32.05 degrees, just a hint above freezing.

  “Damn,” she whispered, reaching down and grasping the bottle by the koozie. She seemed lost for a moment, her expression unreadable. Then she said softly, “You remembered that too.”

  Ares didn’t know what to say. The absolute truth was, he did remember everything about Annaleia. Especially right then and there. It was as if she’d never left, she’d never vanished. As far as he and time were concerned, they could simply be hiding out in his closet, not wanting to study for tomorrow’s economics exam.

  Leia put the bottle to her lips and took a long pull. But after she swallowed, she winced. Then she laughed. “It’s a lot sweeter than I remember it being.”

  Ares chuckled too. As he spoke, he surreptitiously switched the drink out for another one with a twitch of magic. “You know, I’ve noticed that about humans. You don’t look much older than you did fifty years ago, but as far as your taste buds are concerned, you’ve been around for seventy-plus years. And for humans in general, as time passes they enjoy sweet liquids less and less, but their taste for sweet foods remains the same.”

  She nodded. “Yeah… I’ve honestly wondered if that’s because the human body can’t digest sugar the same when it’s older, nor the saturated fat that’s sometimes attached to it. Maybe that’s why we actively begin disliking sweet drinks. It’s way too easy to down a lot of liquid in a very short period of time, so it’s more important for the body to make us dislike it right off the bat.” She shrugged. “Before we can drink too much. But with sweet food, we don’t have that same reaction because it takes us longer to eat it, so our body has a chance to adjust and send us other warnings against eating more. Like… acid indigestion and gas.” She smiled.

  “Leia? Has your body ever in your entire existence sent you a warning of any kind whatsoever against eating more candy?” he asked with only a little sarcasm. “Ever?”

  She grew very serious. “No,” she said point-blank. “It has not.” Then she dumped the remainder of the bag of M&M’s into her mouth and crumpled the wrapper. He willed it to simply vanish, and it did. She grinned again, revealing a smile filled with the multi-hued mess of chocolate and various colors of candy shell.

  He couldn’t help but laugh.

  As he did, Annaleia looked down at her drink again and he was rewarded with another expression of pleasant surprise. “Damn, Ares. You’ve got some nifty tricks.”

  They could be yours too, he thought. Stay with me.

  He blinked as the thought moved like the sober police through his head and Annaleia upended the bottle and downed several swallows of the not-quite-as-sweet caffeinated beverage. His little dragon wanna-be was going to be bouncing off the walls any second now.

  “Anyway…” she continued. “Sterling told me that he could help me save them both. He told me how he was a seer – I bet you didn’t know that about him.”

  Ares frowned. A seer, huh? That would actually explain a lot – like how in the nine hells the bastard had managed to track Annaleia down. The first time and the second time. “No, I didn’t.”

  “Well, he is. Incubus, warlock, seer. He’s a whole hat trick of magic. That night he told me about everything, the supes, the realms... and he made sure to show me proof here and there. I think he could tell I’d be a hard sell otherwise. I learned about the world and everything that was really in it. Like vampires, wardens, fae… dragons.” She looked at him meaningfully, then looked away, licking her lips nervously.

  Ares cleared his throat.

  “Then he told me that my brother would stay alive long enough that if I could save my mother, I would be saving him. So I asked him how the hell I was supposed to do that if I was dead too.”

  Ares leaned forward and very softly brushed his fingers across the light moon-shaped birthmark on her temple. He heard her breath catch when he did. “And he told you about Withered.”

  She stared up at him as he lowered his hand. When she nodded, he saw more questions in her eyes. She was wondering why Ares hadn’t told her first. She was wondering whether he had known all along. The truth was, he hadn’t had a clue. Withered weren’t discovered by the general supernatural population until years later.

  She took another drink from her bottle and cleared her throat. Her voice was soft. She was slipping into the past again. Her gaze was on the floor between them, but he knew she was seeing things from long ago. Unpleasant things. “Then he told me that I didn’t have to be afraid. Things were going to change, but he would be there to help me through the process, and in return I only had to give him one thing.”

  Antares didn’t want to hear this part. He didn’t want to go there. Not now. Probably not ever, but definitely not right now. He lowered his head and closed his eyes, pinching the bridge of his nose as sudden hard tension reached the point that his head was actually hurting. That almost never happened.

  It was just that… he really didn’t want to know. Because he already fucking knew.

  Here he was with the woman he’d fallen in love with, the woman who’d caused him to die inside a little, sitting in front of him two feet away, real and breathing and driving him as nuts as she always had – and this? This was the one goddamn thing he didn’t think he could do right now. Talk about how another man wanted to have sex with – and got to have sex with – his girl.

  “You’re wrong, you know,” she told him.

  Ares looked up, meeting sharply cut amethyst, perceptive as ever.

  “He didn’t just want to sleep with me. He needed to sleep with me – to save a life. The life of a child, no less. A warden’s child, Ares.” Her tone was clear and crisp, her voice as hard as that amethyst, and as serious as the shards it had become. “He doesn’t just subsist on sex, Ares. He takes the power offered to him through that act, an ability he perfected long ago, and he turns around and uses that power to save lives.”

  Chapter Twenty-seven – Santorini, Greece, Candy Closet

  “The same day I
was fated to die, a warden’s family in another state was going to be attacked.” She sighed. “He wanted to warn them of course. Over the years I knew him, I watched him do this time and again. But too many times, either no one believed him or his vision came to fruition anyway or, worst of all, it came to pass because he warned them. After a while, he learned that fate was called fate for a reason. He stopped trying to warn people about what was going to happen and just tried to fix what went down once it did.”

  She took a final drink from her bottle, emptying the last of its contents. Antares waved it away as well. “Anything else to drink?” he offered.

  “Water?” she asked. “And maybe a toothbrush?”

  He grinned. Again, he could have done all of this without speaking or moving, for the most part, but sometimes it was nice to put on a little show. He raised his hand, finger pointed upward, and made a circular motion with it. Anna’s eyes went wide. She straightened. He watched her run her tongue over the front of her teeth, and he had to fist his hand and press it into the cold, hard marble underneath him.

  “You cleaned my teeth!” she exclaimed when she was done checking them out.

  “It’s a beginner’s trick,” he told her. “I’m surprised you haven’t learned it yourself.” It was one of the basic survival-in-the-field spells the clan heads normally taught their wardens.

  “Oh, I do know it! But I didn’t think I’d be able to cast any magic in your house.”

  He blinked again. Come to think of it, she was right. She probably couldn’t have. Damn. She was ahead of him again.

  “Thanks for the cleaning,” she said as she grinned with her newly cleaned, white and adorably crooked teeth and twisted the top off the bottled water he’d also set beside her leg. “According to Sterling’s vision, the warden’s family would be attacked around ten to twelve hours after my car accident. Give or take. It was a tight fit, but that gave us just enough time for… well, for me to die and come back from the dead, and for Sterling and I to clean up the mess that would inevitably form because of what I’d become.”