city of dragons 03 - fire magic

by crowe, val st

  Brian sat down hard on the couch.

  “Lachlan,” I said, catching his arm, “I told you this because I love you, and because we’re together now, and I don’t want secrets between us. Please don’t say we need to go to the authorities or—”

  “No,” he said. “I wouldn’t say that.”

  “Before, when I’ve done things that weren’t strictly legal—”

  “Penny,” he sighed.

  “You haven’t been happy,” I said.

  He cupped my cheek. “If you think following the letter of the law is more important to me than you are, you’re insane.”

  I smiled at him.

  “Besides, you try to do the right thing. I can see that.”

  “But you’re angry?”

  “I’m…” He let his hand drop, sighing. “I wish you would have called me to help.”

  “I didn’t even think to do that,” I said.

  Lachlan turned on Connor. “And you? You didn’t think of it either? She’s pregnant, for God’s sake. She shouldn’t be lugging around bodies.”

  “Well, I did the, uh, lugging,” said Connor.

  Brian suddenly thrust himself at me and hugged me. “Thank you,” he said. “Thank you, Ms. Caspian.”

  I hugged back. “Call me Penny, Brian.”

  He released me, and there were tears in his eyes. “I never meant for this to happen, you know.”

  “I do know,” I said. “But it wasn’t your fault that he hurt you. And you had to fight back.”

  He swallowed.

  Connor put his arm around Brian. “Come on. I’ve got some bourbon downstairs in my room. I could use a drink. You?”

  Brian nodded. “Definitely.” He hugged Connor as well. “And thank you, too. Thank you both.”

  The two said their goodbyes and left my apartment.

  And then it was just me and Lachlan.

  I twisted my hands together. “Did you find out anything from your friend?”

  He nodded. “They’re putting the time of death in early June. And we were right, they theorize Alastair died from magic. Something concentrated around his heart, just like Clarke said.”

  I nodded slowly. “Okay, well, it’s good to have confirmation on that.”

  Lachlan massaged the bridge of his nose. “Where did you burn the body?”

  “A remote place in the woods,” I said.

  “So, you transported it?”

  “Yeah.”

  “In your car?”

  “Yeah. So?”

  “Well, we need to clean the car out,” he said. “Maybe we need to bleach it. Bleach kills DNA, you know.”

  “Bleach it? That’ll take the color out of the carpet.”

  “Better to have colorless carpet than stray DNA,” he said. “And I should probably go to the scene of the murder. Did you clean up there?”

  “We did,” I said. “But, we didn’t use bleach.”

  “I should go by,” he said. “I can clean the place thoroughly. I know what the police look for, so I know what to clean.”

  “O-okay,” I said. “I guess that’s good.”

  He nodded. “All right. So, where is it?”

  “You’re going now?”

  “No time like the present,” he said.

  I took my phone out of my pocket. “I got an email from the testing place.”

  His lips parted.

  I thrust the phone at him. “I didn’t look at it.”

  He swallowed. He looked down at the phone. And then, slowly, his hand came up to take it. He gripped the phone and touched the screen. “It’s… it’s, um, locked,” he said in a choked voice. “You need to—”

  “Oh,” I said, snatching the phone back and unlocking it with my pattern. I started to hand it back.

  “Y-you do it,” he said.

  I nodded.

  I opened the email. My heart was pounding. “Uh, I’ll just read it.”

  “Yeah?” he said.

  “So, it says, ‘Dear Ms. Caspian—’”

  “Skip that part.”

  “‘The results of your test are as follows: Lachlan Flint, markers show—’” I let out a little laugh. “It’s you. It’s yours. The baby’s yours.”

  He snatched the phone from me. His hands were shaking. “That just doesn’t… How did that…?”

  “It had to be you, right?” I whispered. “Because there was no evidence that Alastair even...”

  He shut his eyes.

  There was a lump in my throat.

  He opened his eyes, and then he smiled at me, a huge ear-to-ear grin. And then he pulled me against him, wrapping me in his arms.

  And I held onto him as tightly as I could.

  * * *

  “Maybe the result of the test shouldn’t matter.” Lachlan’s voice reverberated through his chest. He had his arms wrapped around me.

  We were sitting together on the couch. “But it does, though. Because it changes things somehow.”

  “How does it change things for you?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “But it does.”

  He kissed the top of my head. “It’s good. It’s really good.”

  I picked up the phone again to look at the message. There were no markers that indicated it could be Alastair. It was obviously Lachlan’s baby. I was definitely having a vampire hybrid baby. “I wonder if the baby will be able to shift into a dragon.”

  “I didn’t think babies could shift. I thought it didn’t happen until puberty.”

  “Well,” I said, “I meant that. When the baby is a teenager, will it be a shifter? Because I know that if humans and dragons have babies, they’re almost never shifters, just human.”

  “Humans and dragons can do that?”

  “They can. It practically never happens, though,” I said. “Because of the mating bond and all.”

  “Right,” said Lachlan.

  I turned to peer at him. I smiled. “You’re right. It is good.”

  His arms tightened around me. “It didn’t feel real until now. There was all this evidence piling up, but I just kept thinking that it was impossible. And now… well, we still don’t know how it happened.”

  “But it did.”

  “And we’re having a baby.”

  I grinned wider. I scrolled down through the message. “Oh!”

  “What?” he said.

  “The test figured out the gender too.”

  “Already?” he said.

  “Yeah, apparently they can do that.”

  “And?”

  “And, it’s a boy.” I giggled, handing him the phone.

  He took it from me. “A boy, huh?”

  I snuggled into him. “A little boy,” I whispered, thinking of tiny onesies decorated with trains and trucks. I put my hand on my stomach. Was this really happening? Could anything this good really be happening to me? I had been through so much tragedy in my life, I didn’t even know how to deal with something like this. With everything working out so well for me. A baby boy with a man I loved, a good kind man who loved me too. I felt a little teary. “That’s why I did it,” I whispered.

  “Did what?” he said.

  “What I did for Brian,” I said. “I got rid of that body so that things would go well for him for once. Because he’d been through too much darkness. And now things are going well for me—for us—and I… I feel like I shouldn’t trust it. Like there’s got to be some catch, something lurking just around the corner that will ruin everything.”

  “Something like us going to jail for Alastair’s murder?”

  “Oh,” I said. “There is that.”

  “We can’t let that happen,” he said.

  “We’ll find the murderer,” I said.

  He handed the phone back to me. “We will. But we don’t have to talk about that right now.”

  I looked at the message one last time, afraid that it would have switched somehow, that all of this would have been a misunderstanding or a dream. But it was real. There it all was in bla
ck and white.

  “Listen,” Lachlan said, resting his chin on my shoulder, “I want you to understand that I’m yours. As long as you want me. Forever and always. And I know in a situation like this, it would be customary for a man to ask a certain question. But I don’t have any real desire to get married again.”

  I twisted in his arms. “What? Did I say I wanted to get married?”

  “I sort of assumed that maybe—”

  “I don’t want to get married either,” I said.

  “No?”

  “No, not really,” I said.

  “Why not? Because of Alastair?”

  “No,” I said. “No, just because I don’t need it. I don’t need there to be this institutionalized, formal trap—”

  “Trap?” He laughed.

  “You said you didn’t want to get married either.”

  “Yeah, but I don’t think being married to you would be a trap.”

  “So, why don’t you want to do it?”

  “I just don’t really associate anything good with the whole idea of it anymore, I guess.”

  “Because of what happened in the past to you?”

  “Because… I don’t know, I guess it’s just like you said. Unnecessary. I know how I feel about you and I know how you feel about me, and we can be together without bringing all of that into it.”

  I nodded. “Yeah. I don’t need to tell the state that I love you. I just need to tell you.”

  He kissed me. “I do love you.” His fingers inched over my belly. “Both of you.”

  I loved how that felt. “Me too,” I said. “We can be our own little family on our own terms.” I kissed him again. “And—for the record—I don’t feel trapped by you at all. I only feel lucky to be with you.”

  His lips found mine again. Our kiss deepened. His fingers began to stray from my belly to other parts of my body.

  I sighed. And then I yawned.

  He chuckled, pulling away. “You must be tired. You’ve been through a lot tonight already, and it’s past your bedtime.”

  “A little bit,” I said, turning to face him and pressing close. “But I could be convinced to stay awake.”

  “Nah,” he said, pressing his lips into my forehead. “You go to bed. I’ll go and clean the scene up at Darrell’s. We’ll both get some rest, and then wake up in each other’s arms.”

  “Mmm,” I said. “Sounds nice.”

  “Yes,” he said his voice getting deeper. “I will bring you protein in bed, and then I will ravage you.”

  I giggled, arching an eyebrow. “Ravage?”

  “Ravage,” he said in a somber voice. “Until you scream.”

  I kissed his nose. “Promise?”

  He put his mouth to my throat. “Until you scream and scream and scream.”

  I gasped.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  “I really don’t have any more information than what I already told you,” said Darla. “I’m sure it must be traumatic, knowing that your ex-husband is dead—”

  “It’s not that,” I said. Lachlan and I were in Darla’s office at the Order. “The truth is that the police are convinced we killed Alastair. And we didn’t. We need to find the real killer and prove our innocence. So, since this is the last place that anyone saw him alive, we think there might be clues here to what happened.”

  “I suppose,” said Darla. “But I don’t think so, honestly. He was alive when he left here. I was fairly sure that a slayer killed him. When we found his body, he was being loaded up by a group of them with an arrow in him.”

  “You found his body?” Lachlan said.

  “Well, we wouldn’t allow a prisoner like that to roam free. We tracked him down to bring him back here, but by the time we found him, he was dead,” she said.

  That made sense.

  “But he didn’t die here,” she said.

  “We’d still like to ask around a bit,” said Lachlan.

  Darla shrugged. “Of course. Anything I can do for you.” She turned to look at me. “Penny.”

  I licked my lips. Sometimes, this weird attraction thing that Darla had for me was a wee bit creepy. “Thanks,” I said.

  “So, who had contact with Alastair while he was here?” said Lachlan.

  “It’s actually a rather short list,” she said. “Sid brought him in. I did his intake work—”

  “What’s the intake work?” I said.

  “Well, as you know, we strip magic from these prisoners when they arrive,” said Darla. “There’s a ritual we perform that funnels all their magic into the Order.”

  “And after he left?” I said. “Would he still have been tied to the Order, or did his magic come back?”

  “Of course he was still tied to us,” said Darla. “How do you think we found him after he escaped?”

  So, that was why Clarke said he’d been drained of magic, then. But it still didn’t explain the surge of magic in Alastair. Was Clarke right? Had he been killed by magic? A magic spell that stopped his heart?

  “Who else had contact with him?” asked Lachlan.

  “Only the other prisoners on his wing,” said Darla. “Which really only amounts to Caleb. You met him before.”

  “Short list,” said Lachlan. “You sure no one else interacted with him?”

  “Most of us in the Order find the prisoners we keep rather unpleasant,” said Darla. “We’re not eager to visit them and have a chat. We do the intake and then we lock them up. Their needs are seen to by people in positions like Sid’s. We call them jailers, and they bring the prisoners food and escort them to the showers and things of that nature. There’s simply no reason for anyone else to have seen Alastair.”

  “All right,” said Lachlan. “Then I suppose we’d like to speak to Sid.”

  * * *

  “You aren’t accusing me of killing Alastair, are you?” said Sid.

  “That’s not what I said at all,” said Lachlan, giving him an easy, relaxed smile. “All I want is for you to walk me through how you found him.”

  “Well, there’s not much to tell,” said Sid. “I got a call from Darla, telling me that she’d traced his magical tether to a particular spot. When I got there, he was dead already. There was an arrow in him, and some slayers were loading him into a truck.”

  “From that, you assumed he’d been killed by the slayers,” said Lachlan.

  “He wasn’t?” said Sid.

  “It doesn’t appear that way,” said Lachlan. “The evidence seems to point towards him being killed by magic.”

  “Well, I’m not magical in the least,” said Sid. “I’m human through and through.”

  “Darla’s human,” I said. “She’s a mage.”

  “I’m not a mage,” Sid chuckled.

  I reached out and took hold of the talisman dangling around his neck. “You have magic.”

  “I use this for protection,” said Sid. “Even though the prisoners around here are sucked dry of their magic, we can’t be too careful. This talisman keeps them from being able to compel me, assuming they could cobble together enough magic to do so.”

  “What did you think of Alastair?” said Lachlan.

  “Think of him?” said Sid. “He was an evil fuck, that’s what I thought.”

  Lachlan and I exchanged a glance. Hard to argue with that.

  “That doesn’t mean I killed him, though,” said Sid. “Every single prisoner in here is an evil fuck. And, anyway, there’s no point in killing them, is there? Because at least, locked up here, their magic is being funneled into the Order, where it can do some good. But if I kill him, then he’s not doing anyone any good at all.”

  Lachlan and I exchanged another glance. Hard to argue with that either.

  “Well,” said Lachlan, “thank you for your time, Sid.”

  “Sure thing,” said Sid. “You still want to go in and talk to Caleb?”

  Lachlan nodded. “We certainly do.”

  “He’s a serial killer, you know,” said Sid.

  “H
e was right there,” said Lachlan. “He may have seen the escape.”

  “I’ll just go and check on him, then,” said Sid. “I’ll make sure he’s prepared to see you.” He disappeared from the room.

  I sighed. “We’re right back to square one, but we don’t have any suspects.”

  “No,” said Lachlan. “We know more now than we did before. We need to follow this trail where it leads. We haven’t gotten to the end of it yet. We don’t know what it will reveal.”

  “What if it’s a dead end? What if we can’t figure any of this out?”

  “And what if we can?” said Lachlan. “Doesn’t hurt anything to think positively, right?”

  I pursed my lips. “Aren’t you the ray of sunshine today?”

  He shrugged, grinning at me. “Well, lately things have been going okay for me, you know? I met a pretty girl, I managed to knock her up—”

  “You can’t say that you knocked me up,” I said, glaring at him.

  He laughed. “Oh, I can’t? I just did.” He reached for me.

  But then Sid came back, and we both turned away from each other, clearing our throats.

  * * *

  Caleb Kinnan smiled darkly at us through the bars of his cell. “Well, well,” he said. “You’re back again. And looking just as delectable as last time, if I do say so myself.” He dragged his gaze lingeringly over Lachlan’s body. “I could just eat you up.”

  Lachlan folded his arms over his chest, surveying Caleb, unruffled. “Did you eat people or something? That why you’re locked up in here?”

  Caleb’s lip curled. “Wouldn’t you like to know.”

  My stomach turned over. Eew. Was he some kind of cannibal serial killer? Yuck, yuck, yuck. Of course, I guessed that the last serial killer that I’d had to deal with ate people too. But at least Anthony Barnes had been a drake, who ate dragon flesh for its magical properties. Eating people just because seemed worse for some reason.

  “As fascinating as it might be to speculate on whatever it is that you did to get in here,” said Lachlan, “that’s not really why we’re here.”

  “Oh,” said Caleb, “of course not. A man like you doesn’t simply drop by to chat. You’re here on a mission. A square-jawed, justice-finding mission. You’ve got that hero look about you.”

  Lachlan polished his fingernails on his shirt and studied them. “Yeah, a lot of people find me attractive.”