Kissed by Fire

by Shéa MacLeod

  The room was too small for both of us to enter at one time, so Kabita wheeled the cleaning cart into the hallway and we both started loading it up. We used our trips into the closet to hide our conversation as much as possible.

  “Dex said the door to the archives is at the other end of the building, basement level. There aren’t any gaps in security there, so we’re going to have to figure something out.”

  “Okay,” I whispered back. “I have an idea. I’ll see if it will work when we get there.”

  “Fine. But it will look suspicious if we go straight to that part of the building.”

  “So, we start at this end. There are only a couple of rooms.”

  She nodded, so I slowly wheeled the cart to the first door. I angled my body slightly so anyone watching us on CCTV couldn’t see the card as I swiped it. I shouldn’t have worried. The door opened immediately. Obviously, the twins had gotten the hang of things.

  We made quick work of the two rooms. The cleaning company was probably going to get complaints. We moved out into the lobby.

  “Evening, ladies. New, aren’t you?” The security guard looked like he should be in the WWE. Thick muscles strained at his polyester uniform and he walked with that strut men had when they knew they could beat the ever living crap out of just about anyone they came across.

  If I opened my mouth, we were goners. There were plenty of Americans in London, but the coincidence would be a little too much. Fortunately, Kabita spoke up.

  “Hello, yes we are very, very new.”

  It was all I could do not to wet myself laughing. She’d put on the heaviest Indian accent I’d ever heard. The guard didn’t even bat an eyelash.

  “Your friend doesn’t talk much.”

  “Oh, she be not speaking English. I try to teach her, but it be taking time, you know.” She bobbled her head from side to side. Damn, she was good.

  “Really. Damn foreigners. Ought to learn English if they want to live here.” He glared at me.

  I pretended to look intimidated. In actuality, I was furious. I’d have liked nothing more than to punch the bigot right in his smug face.

  Kabita edged us across the lobby, keeping up the cheerful immigrant act. “You are right, sir. Of course! That is why I teach her.”

  She hurried us up to the door on the right hand side of the lobby. The door popped open and we slid through as she gave the security guard a little wave.

  We both sucked in a deep breath, but we weren’t out of the woods yet. I pushed the cart to the end of the hall while Kabita kept up her ridiculous impression routine.

  The door to the basement archives was dead ahead in clear view of the CCTV camera. Fortunately, there was a door perpendicular to it, which led into the women’s bathroom.

  I angled the cart in front of the women’s room so that it blocked the view of anyone coming or going from the bathroom. If, that was, the person was crawling. Which is exactly what I planned to do.

  Kabita propped open the bathroom door as I grabbed an armload of toilet paper rolls. Inside the bathroom, I dropped the rolls and handed her the key card.

  “OK, here’s my plan. You walk out there and stand at the cart. Rustle around like you can’t find something and make sure your body is blocking the archive door. I’ll crawl to the door and you use the swipe card to let me in. Then you can clean the bathroom while I see what I can find in the archives. Security will think I’m still in there.”

  “OK, fine. How about I give you fifteen minutes then I’ll do it again so you can crawl out.”

  Fifteen minutes wasn’t a lot of time, but there wasn’t much we could do about it. Muscle Head knew where we were, and I’d just bet he was watching us nice and close. Any more than fifteen minutes and he’d be down wanting to know what we were up to.

  Our plan went off flawlessly and five minutes later, I was in the belly of the whale. So to speak.

  Honestly, I had no idea where to begin. The archives were a mess. Sure, there were plenty of shelves with neatly labeled boxes, but the labels made no sense. On top of that, there were additional unlabeled boxes stacked haphazardly around the room and topped with stacks of files and papers. There was a single long table obviously meant for sorting through the archive boxes, but it too was covered with dusty files.

  “Crap.” Where to start? I only had fifteen minutes to figure out what Alison had been researching down here.

  My mind cranked over, running through the possibilities. Alison had been a smart woman. She wouldn’t have just left her research for anyone to find. Not that anyone would be able to find anything around here.

  I headed to the back of the large room, darting quickly through the shelves and around more piles of boxes. There were a couple of desks shoved up against the far wall and piled just as high with paperwork as the front table had been. Seemed like the perfect place to hide an ongoing investigation.

  I scanned the files and papers noticing that one stack had significantly less dust than the others. Good place to start.

  The top file was still a bit dusty, so I ignored it and pulled one from the middle of a stack on the desk and flipped it open. Bingo. Inside the file was a hot pink sticky note with some writing on it. I didn’t bother to read any more. I couldn’t imagine too many MI8 agents using hot pink sticky notes. The note was Alison’s. I was sure of it.

  A quick scan through the rest of the pile yielded no results, so I unzipped my coverall and stuffed the file down into the top of my jeans. The coverall was loose, but not loose enough to stand up to close examination.

  I checked my watch. Nearly out of time. I scurried back up the steps just as Kabita opened the door so I could crawl back to the bathroom.

  “Did you find anything?”

  “Yeah.” I unzipped my coverall enough so she could see the file.

  “What’s in the file?”

  “Didn’t have time to look. What next?”

  “We need to get out of here without tipping off the asshat.”

  I snorted with laughter at that. “Any ideas?”

  She gave me an evil grin. I had a feeling I wasn’t going to like this.

  ***

  “Where are you two going? You haven’t finished yet.” Muscle Head stormed down the stairs, buttons ready to pop, suspicion written all over his face.

  “It is my friend. It is Ingrid. She is ill.”

  Ingrid? Seriously?

  I sagged a little more against Kabita. She grunted under my weight and gave me a look that told me I was going to pay for it later.

  The guard took a step back. “What’s she got?”

  “I not be knowing. One minute she is fine. The next,” she made a sound like somebody throwing up.

  Muscle Head frowned. “You have to be joking.”

  “Oh, no, I not be joking, sir. I need to be getting her home. Here.” She thrust me at the guard where I sagged tragically in his arms.

  “I be right back, sir. Need to be putting this away.” She waved at the cleaning cart before disappearing through the door.

  The guard must have gotten a whiff of me. “Jesus, you stink.” He made a face and shoved me down onto the first step. “You better not be contagious.”

  I made a gagging sound like I was about to throw up. Muscle Head jumped back about a foot, swearing up a storm. It was all I could do not to bust up laughing.

  The thing about making a lie convincing is to cover all your bases. Most people are good at thinking about sound and sight, but they forget smell. Nothing will get a guy like Muscle Head to back off like the smell of puke.

  I am not an advocate for self-induced vomiting. It’s a waste of perfectly good food. But as a disguise, it totally worked.

  Kabita came bustling back through the door, heaved me off my feet (I made a few gasping sounds, just for effect.) and got me out the front door of MI8 pronto. “Not to worry, sir!” she shouted at Muscle Head, “we be sending someone to finish cleaning. Not to worry.”

  And we disappeared into the ni
ght with Muscle Head staring after us, looking slightly green around the gills. Points to us.

  ***

  The first thing I did when we got back to the hotel was brush my teeth. The second thing I did was gargle with mouthwash. Twice. The third thing I did was to ask Kabita about the file. She’d hidden it in her own coverall so Muscle Head wouldn’t feel it when she threw me at him.

  She flipped through the pages as I collapsed on the bed. “Looks like we’ve got the information we were looking for. These are the birth records of a Dragon Hunter.”

  “Let me see that.” She handed me the file. “So, Sandra was right. There is a Dragon Hunter on the loose and MI8 is covering it up.” And apparently Alison had found out about it.

  “I don’t think MI8 are the ones covering it up. I think it’s my father behind the cover up. It’s his style.”

  “But why?” There was so much crazy going on, the possibilities were endless.

  “No idea. What do the files say exactly?”

  I leaned back against the pillows as I scanned the documents. “This one is a birth certificate. It looks like a girl was born on the first of June twenty-three years ago right here in London. She was given the name Dara Boyd. No father’s name and the mother’s name is redacted.”

  “Excuse me? Redacted?”

  “Yep. As is pretty much everything else. I seriously doubt Boyd is her real name.”

  She thought for a moment. “I doubt she uses Dara anymore. She most likely has an entirely new identity. What else?”

  “It looks like MI8 kept pretty close tabs on her. There are school records, names and addresses of foster families, even medical and dental records.” I scrutinized the documents, filing everything away in my brain for future reference. “There are notes on her friends. She didn’t have many. No boyfriends. One girlfriend.” I squinted at the pink sticky note. An address. I’d bet anything it was the girlfriend’s.

  “Maybe she knows something,” Kabita suggested.

  I shrugged. “Maybe, though from what we know of Hunters, Dara may not have been aware of her nature. At least until she was older. Even then I doubt she knew exactly what she was.”

  “Unless someone told her.”

  There was that. I flipped to the last page of the file. “Huh. The records end shortly after her eighteenth birthday.”

  “They stopped tracking her?”

  “No.” I shook my head. “It looks like they lost her. She disappeared off the grid.”

  “Impossible.” She snagged the file out of my hands, sinking down onto the desk chair to peruse it. She bit her lower lip as she read. “She had help.”

  “How do you know? Maybe she just moved or something.”

  “No. MI8 knew what she was and they were keeping very close tabs on her. It wasn’t just a matter of surveillance. They had her tagged.”

  “What? Like on those wildlife shows where they stick a GPS in the ear of a rabbit or something?”

  She grimaced. “Pretty much. Any suspected Hunter born on British soil is tracked that way from birth. Those that show promise as Hunters are recruited. Those that don’t are still kept under surveillance. Permanently.”

  “Geez. Glad I wasn’t born here.” I touched my ear. “Uh, they didn’t put a chip in me when I was in the hospital, did they?”

  She gave me an eye roll. “Don’t be ridiculous.” She went back to reading the file.

  “I’m serious, Kabita. Did they chip me?”

  She was quiet a moment. “My father wanted to, but you’re American and Americans don’t chip their Hunters.”

  “Like that would stop Alister.”

  She snorted. “It didn’t. Aunt Angeline did.”

  Ah. The aunt who’d saved me from MI8’s tender mercies. “Thank the gods for Aunt Angeline.”

  She grinned at that before returning to the file. “They’d have never just let Dara Boyd go. Not unless … ” She flipped through the file, a frown forming. “It looks like the system was shut down for routine maintenance, only the backup didn’t kick in. By the time it came back online, she was gone. Somebody definitely helped her.”

  “MI8 didn’t try to find her?”

  Her face was grim. “No they didn’t. Look.” She handed the file back, open to a yellow duplicate page.

  It was a simple document ordering that the search for Dara Boyd be terminated and her file destroyed. It was signed by one Alister Jones.

  “Damn.”

  ***

  Breakfast the next morning was a tense one — each of us lost in our own thoughts and each of us still pissed off about Alister. I was pretty grateful he wasn’t my father right about then. Honestly, the more I learned about him, the less I liked him.

  What I really wanted to know was exactly what game he was playing at and why. Between his crazy witch hunting obsession and his lying about there being a Dragon Hunter on the loose, there was definitely something up.

  After breakfast, we both needed to burn off some energy, so we took a walk through the streets of Mayfair. The pretty brick buildings with their arched and curlicue facades turned that part of London from an ordinary city into something out of a fairy tale. Or maybe Mary Poppins.

  The American Embassy was mere blocks away, but we didn’t go there. Instead, we wound up in the little park just in front of it. Grosvenor Square was a mini playground for the office drones in the area to picnic and catch some rays, or zzz’s for that matter, during lunch. At that time of day it was nearly empty.

  “He’ll never tell the truth you know.” It was the first Kabita had spoken since we left the hotel. The first time we’d discussed what we’d found in the files since the previous night.

  “Nope,” I agreed. “We can hound him from here to eternity and he won’t tell us anything. We’re going to have to figure this out on our own.”

  “And then what?” Her voice was unusually dull.

  “Then we do what we have to.”

  She nodded. “OK.”

  What else was there to say, really?

  “Next step?”

  She shook her head as though to clear it. “We need to track this girl. Find out where she is, what she’s calling herself, get a description. I think I should have a chat with her girlfriend. What was her name?”

  I pulled up the memory of the hot pink sticky note. “Simone Williams. According to Alison’s notes, she was the last person to see Dara before her disappearance. Her last known address is in Willesden Junction, but she could be anywhere by now.”

  “I’ll get Adam to track her down. I’m going to have a little chat with Simone. She might know something, have seen something. Even if she didn’t, she should be able to give me the names of some of the other people in Dara’s life.”

  “Great, while you do that … ” I was cut off by the ring tone on my mobile. It was Sandra.

  “Morgan, can you come to my shop this afternoon?”

  “Sure,” I said. “What’s up?”

  “I’ve found someone who might be able to translate the diary.”

  Chapter Seventeen

  This time on my way through Soho there wasn’t a sidhe in sight, which was something of a relief. Thank the gods for small favors. My life was complicated enough without the sidhe.

  Sandra’s shop was shut, the closed sign dangling in the window. I rapped once and the door swung open. Sandra waved me in, her eyes darting up and down the street as though she was afraid someone was spying on us. I couldn’t imagine what she had to be nervous about. Unless her translator was some kind of criminal or something.

  “Thank you for coming so quickly, Morgan. It’s not good for … my guest to be out among people for very long.”

  Oh, boy. “Of course. Thanks for helping me. I really appreciate it.”

  She gave me a look that reminded me there was backbone underneath the sometimes loony exterior. “I’m not doing it for you. I’m doing it for my friends.”

  What could I say? I nodded and followed her into the back room. />
  I didn’t know what I was expecting. Maybe a cerebral professor type complete with tweed jacket and smoking pipe. The man lounging in Sandra’s desk chair was pretty much the exact opposite.

  He was big. Really big, with broad shoulders straining at a battered black leather biker jacket. What looked like size sixteen combat boots were propped up on her desk, massive arms crossed over his chest. He made Muscle Head the security guard look undernourished.

  He was handsome, I’d give him that. His cheekbones would make a romance cover model weep with envy. Sapphire blue eyes ringed with ink black lashes the same color as his shoulder length hair swept over me and dismissed me all in one go.

  Oh, no he didn’t. Nobody dismissed Morgan Bailey like some kind of bug. Especially since I knew exactly what he was. I’d had no idea until that moment that dragons could take human form and I wasn’t sure I liked the idea.

  “So, you’re the one who can translate dragon tongue.” I sniffed the air. “Barbecue any sheep lately?”

  He was out of the chair with a snarl before I could blink. I probably should have backed down, but there wasn’t anything that irritated me more than a man who treated a woman as inferior. Even if he could, quite literally, eat her in one gulp.

  Then his eyes shifted, turned silvery gold, pupils elongating. I realized that it wasn’t a gender bias. It was one species treating another as inferior. Much like a human might view a dog. I swallowed hard, but stood my ground.

  “Drago, please.” Sandra laid a calming hand on his arm. He didn’t budge. Not just any dragon, then, but a dragon king.

  “Drago is your title.” I made it a comment, not a question. Meanwhile I held his eyes with mine. They were familiar, those eyes. Not his specifically, but something about them. My mind tried to catch the thought, but it slid away.

  “Yes.” His voice was deep and grumbly. I knew that voice.

  “Do you often play with the dreams of humans?”