DRAGON SECURITY: Volume 2: The Complete 6 Books Series

by Glenna Sinclair

  He kissed me, his touch gentler now than it had been all morning. My chest ached as my lower belly tightened, my nerves all concentrating on the pleasure his body was sending through the very core of me. I thought I knew who I was, what I was supposed to do with my life. I thought I understood my path. But this ... this man, with just a look, with just a touch, was sending me careening off the road.

  Tears filled my eyes as I arched up against him, as pleasure turned to ecstasy.

  I didn’t even hear the rattle of the door or see the envelope someone shoved underneath.

  Chapter 7

  Kasey

  “Do you recognize the handwriting?”

  Karma rolled her eyes, reminding me that I’d asked that question half a dozen times already. She was curled against the pillows at the head of the bed, the sheets a mess around her legs, my shirt barely covering those majestic breasts. She looked like a woman who’d just been thoroughly fucked, a woman who’d be open to the idea of more of the same. I had to turn away and pace at the end of the bed to keep my thoughts on the business at hand.

  “I don’t know who sent it.”

  “You don’t recognize the paper or the sentence structure?”

  “The paper is the stationery they give out for free here.”

  I picked up the note again, cursing the fact that I hadn’t noticed the hotel’s logo at the bottom of the paper. The note itself was short and to the point.

  Rosalie Matthias did not leave of her own free will. She was abducted.

  It was hard to guess who might have written the note from those two short sentences. But it was worth a shot.

  “Who would be in a position to have this information?”

  Karma shook her head. “It was an investigative night. Almost everyone was out in the woods, running their equipment. There’s always a few people missing—people who decided not to go that night or people who decided to set up in a different place, hoping they’d get more results away from the crowd. But I don’t remember who was missing that night.”

  “Besides Rosalie.”

  “Rosalie was supposed to meet me and Shane in our regular spot, but she never showed.”

  “What did you do?”

  “I went to her room at dawn and she didn’t answer. I thought she’d fallen asleep.”

  “Did she do that often?”

  Karma shrugged, reaching up to brush her hand over her face. “She had these days when she was a little lethargic. And she’d been sick right before she left.”

  “What kind of sick?”

  “She had bad headaches sometimes. And she was fighting off a sinus infection.”

  I remembered the antibiotics, the pain meds, and the decongestants I’d found in her bathroom. That explained those.

  “You gave her prescription pills?”

  A shadow danced over Karma’s face. “I had some decongestants left over from a cold I had last winter. She thought it might help the headaches.”

  I stared at the note again, my thoughts whirling.

  “Do they mean someone abducted her, or that aliens came and ...”

  Karma laughed. “We’re really freaking you out, aren’t we?”

  “I can’t take anything for granted around here.”

  She inclined her head slightly. “We were having some interesting results from our investigation the week before Rosalie disappeared. I thought that was why she didn’t show up that night, because she was often exhausted after she used her gifts.”

  “You keep talking about her gifts. What gifts?”

  “Rosalie could talk to aliens.”

  “And she spoke to aliens before she disappeared?”

  “She’s done it thousands of times,” Karma said, her voice rising a little with exasperation. “I’ve seen her.”

  I didn’t want to show Karma my open disbelief, but ... come on! Aliens were not real.

  I didn’t have to speak for her to see it, though. She sighed, climbing off the bed to step into my pacing path. She took my wrists and pulled me to a chair, making me sit as she settled on the corner of the bed.

  “Look,” she said, “I realize you don’t believe in all this. But there are millions of people around the world who not only believe in aliens, but who believe there is a colony of aliens living right here on earth, impregnating women with children who have alien DNA in an attempt to make this world more hospitable to alien manipulation. They believe these aliens are good and that they are attempting to make the world a better place for both aliens and humans.”

  I snorted, unable to quite wrap my mind around that. But that didn’t discourage her.

  “My organization believes that aliens are here and are investigating us just like we are investigating them. My group believes that, eventually, the aliens will reveal themselves to humans. We want to be there when they do.”

  “And Rosalie would be, what, your translator?”

  “Something like that.”

  I stood up again, finding it nearly impossible to reconcile this seemingly intelligent woman with the crap she was spouting.

  “I know it seems farfetched—”

  “Farfetched? It sounds stupid. It sounds like a group of uneducated people indulging in a snipe hunt out of choice, because they don’t know how to survive in the real world.”

  Karma was quiet for a long moment. I turned and found her staring at her hands, picking at her cuticles.

  “Look, I’m sorry. I know you believe this stuff, but I—”

  “I don’t expect you to believe. I just want you to give me the benefit of the doubt.” She stood, wrapping her arms around her chest in a movement of modesty, unaware that she was inadvertently pulling the shirt up to reveal a very distracting peek at her inner thighs. “You are trying to help a woman who believes these things.”

  “I know that. But I also know that Rosalie is bipolar and that her illness can cause her to believe things that aren’t real.”

  “True.”

  “But the rest of you ... you can’t all be clinically insane.”

  “We aren’t. We all have our own reasons for being here.”

  “And what’s yours? Do you really believe in aliens?”

  “I think believing in aliens, in anything better than humanity, is a relief. At least aliens can’t break your arm or put you in jail for something that wasn’t your fault.”

  That seemed oddly specific. I turned to her, wanting to touch her, wanting to wipe that look of disappointment out of her eyes. I wanted to toss her back into the bed and forget I was here to solve a mystery. But I couldn’t do any of that.

  I snatched up the note again and studied it a long moment.

  “What if Rosalie was abducted? What if she’s being held by some sadistic human being right now?”

  “Why do you think I agreed to work with you?”

  “But you’re not telling me everything.”

  To my surprise, she nodded. “You’re right.”

  She pulled her legs up under her and adopted a yoga-like pose, her focus somewhere outside of this room. I watched for a moment, wondering if she was about to burst into some sort of chant. But then she looked up at me and began to talk.

  “I met Rosalie three years ago in Colorado. She was working with a group from Texas, searching an area where there were some unexplained crop circles.” She paused like she expected me to comment on that, but I didn’t say a word. “I had just started working with the Society. They put me on a team with a well-respected para-psychiatrist. He was instantly attracted to Rosalie. He claimed he could sense her power and knew she would make an important contact someday. He pushed me to talk to her, to find out about her history and make sure she was serious about what we were doing.”

  Karma dragged her fingers through her long, knotted hair, taking a second to work out a particularly gnarly knot. Then she sighed and continued.

  “When he found out that Rosalie was diagnosed bipolar, he lost interest. But I liked her. I thought she was highly intellig
ent and her work on the paranormal activities was insightful. I was thrilled to run into her again six months later in Alabama. From that point on, we looked for each other any time there was a big investigation going on. We saw each other every few months for years. And then, two months ago, I found her here.”

  Karma paused again, her fingers worrying her hair. “I knew she was having trouble. I knew she’d been hearing voices and seeing things at the last investigation—an alien sighting in New York five months ago. I was surprised to see her here. But then she introduced everyone to Jake. She said she’d been working with him for a while and was a skeptic, but that he worked her instruments like a violinist worked his strings.” Karma smiled. “I should have known then that she had a crush on him. Should have known how things would go.

  “Jake was a loner. He often disappeared for days at a time. Rosalie would get depressed when he wasn’t around, moping here in her room, refusing to get out of bed. I got a key from the front desk so that I could go into her room whenever she wasn’t answering my knocks, just to make sure she was okay. But then the key disappeared from my room.”

  “When?”

  “A couple of days before she disappeared.”

  “Was Jake around then?”

  She shook his head. “He’d gone on one of his disappearing trips and Rosalie was beyond herself about it. She was sick and she thought he’d left because she was avoiding the nighttime voyages into the woods to avoid the cold. She thought he’d lost interest in working with her.”

  “She was depressed.”

  “She was teetering on the edge. I’d, seen her fall into a dark depression before. We stayed locked up together in a motel in Kansas once while she fought the demons. This wasn’t that bad, but she was headed down that road.”

  “Why didn’t you call her sister?”

  Karma bit her lip. “Because her sister would have hospitalized her. She would have forced her back on the medication when Rosalie didn’t want that.”

  “But that’s what is necessary to treat her illness.”

  “Rosalie responded well to natural remedies.” Karma looked up at me, defiance in her eyes. “She could handle her mood swings as long as she had loving support around her.”

  It snorted. “Now you’re a doctor?”

  “No. But I knew Rosalie.”

  She got up and stepped into my pacing path again, forcing me to look at her.

  “There is more to health and happiness than Western medicine and Western conventions. Sometimes all a person’s body needs is a little natural support.”

  “So if I get cancer, all I need is red clover?”

  Her eyebrows rose. “It doesn’t hurt.”

  I snorted again, moving around her to throw myself into a chair.

  “Who took the key to her room?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Was it Jake?”

  “It could have been. Or it could have been someone else.”

  “That helps.”

  “I don’t know what you want from me, Kasey. All I can tell you is what I know.”

  That was true, but I still felt like she was holding back on me and that irritated the crap out of me. I leaned forward, my hands resting on my knees, and stared at the pattern on the floor, trying to figure out how much of what she’d already said I could trust.

  “I think Jake came back that night. I think he came back for her.”

  “Convenient, seeing as how we have a witness and security footage that shows exactly that.”

  “Security footage?”

  I gestured wearily behind me. “There are cameras at either end of the hallways. The place is a little primitive, but they don’t want to be sued for someone’s missing iPad.”

  “Then someone might have gotten footage of whoever broke into my room.”

  My head snapped up. “It’s possible.”

  “Do you think they’d still have it after all this time?”

  “It wouldn’t hurt to check.”

  I tugged my phone out of my back pocket and texted Waverly. She responded by telling me to send my request to another number.

  That was odd. Seemed things weren’t just insane here. Something was going on back home, too. But I didn’t have time to deal with it now.

  I re-sent my request and then focused on Karma again.

  “Tell me about the night she disappeared.”

  She shrugged. “I stopped by her room before I left for the woods. She was dressed for bed and about to take her medications. She said she was going to stay in one more night, just to make sure the antibiotics had kicked in. She also said she was thinking about calling her sister.”

  “I bet you tried to talk her out of it.”

  “No. I actually suggested she do it. Told her that she could use a little TLC back at home.”

  I studied her for a second, surprised, but not really surprised, by her consideration. Karma really had cared about Rosalie if she’d gone against her own beliefs for the betterment of another person.

  “She did call her sister.”

  “I figured as much when the cops showed up a day later.”

  “Did you know she was missing when the cops showed up?”

  She hesitated. “I went by her room to check on her, but she didn’t answer the door and I didn’t have my spare key.”

  “But you got inside somehow.”

  She looked a little sheepish as she settled back down on the end of the bed.

  “I need to know everything, Karma. The cops might not be interested now, but if we find Rosalie and something’s happened to her, you might be one of the first people they come to question.”

  Her shoulders slumped a little at the thought. “I know.”

  “Then tell me so I can help you if that should happen.”

  “You don’t want to do that, Kasey. If they find her and she’s not okay ... you don’t want to be anywhere near me.”

  “Why?”

  She didn’t answer, and that scared me more than anything she could have told me.

  “Damn it, Karma, I want to help you, but you’re making it damn difficult!”

  “You’re here to save Rosalie, not me.”

  She was right about that. Yet the case had gotten a little muddy and I was quickly losing track of who I was supposed to be championing and who I was supposed to be persecuting.

  “You don’t care what happened to Rosalie,” I said, flicking my hand over her head as I stood again. “If you did, you’d tell me everything you know.”

  “Of course I care!”

  “No. You haven’t told me about the marks on the locks. You haven’t told me enough about this Jake fellow. You haven’t told me everything you know about what happened that night.” I spun around and stared down at her. “You haven’t told me anything I can use!”

  “I told you someone other than me had a key to her room! Doesn’t that mean anything?”

  “Maybe it was the little green men. Maybe they broke into her room and spirited her away.”

  She jumped to her feet and charged at me, slapping me hard across the face.

  “Get out! Get out of my room!”

  “Gladly.”

  I walked out—half naked and barefoot—angry enough to tear the damn door off the hinges. How dare she get pissed at me? I was trying to help her, for goodness sakes! Yet she was the one lying to me and holding back the truth. She was the one who knew something she was afraid to tell me.

  Why the fuck was she lying?

  ***

  I went back to my own motel and paced my room for a while until the nervous energy slowly began to recede. Only then could I sit down, read through the emails Hayden had forwarded to me, and look at the security footage the tech guy sent me.

  Hayden’s email explained that they couldn’t find information on a Karma Myers, but that they’d guessed from my inquiry that she was staying at the same hotel as Rosalie, so they’d done a check of the security footage and found a match for a woman named Erin
Myers-King.

  I knew the name the moment I saw it.

  Anyone who grew up in Houston knew the name Myers-King. Randolph Myers-King was a real estate mogul who, at one point, owned most of greater Houston and a lot of its outlying areas. If someone wanted to buy property in Houston, they had to go to Myers-King. And he supported many of the non-profit organizations in the area with his yearly donations. If you had a charity and you wanted to survive in Houston, you had to have Myers-King on your side. The universities, the sports teams, somehow they all owed their existence and/or survival to Randolph Myers-King.

  Randolph Myers-King had a son, his only child. And his son was a disappointment, to put it nicely. Myers-King made headlines when he cut his son out of his will and decided to leave his fortune to an illegitimate son no one had known anything about—apparently not even Myers-King’s wife—until the ink was drying on the new will.

  Outraged, his son fought the will in court and lost—obviously, because he had no standing to contest a will before the deceased had become deceased—and quickly found himself destitute as Daddy also took away his trust fund based on some sort of moral clause in the original documents. The son became a raging alcoholic, apparently torturing his wife and children to the point that they disappeared after only a year or two, and the son died a very public, very humiliating death.

  It was all very scandalous. My grandmother had deeply enjoyed reading about it every time a little tidbit appeared in the local papers. It was like a bedtime story when I was growing up.

  And then it all began again when the son’s wife turned up and sued Randolph Myers-King for wrongful death, claiming his decision to take away the trust fund had directly led to her husband’s addiction and subsequent death. To prove what a hardship her loss had been, Mrs. Myers-King paraded her children out in court: ten-year-old Randolph Myers-King III and eight- year-old Erin Myers-King.

  Again, the story made headlines and, again, my grandmother was captivated. At thirteen, I hadn’t cared all that much about it, only paying attention when it meant avoiding some conversation about my grades or my bad behavior in school. But I heard enough to know that it was a bad situation that would have been better off taking place behind closed doors. Needless to say, Mrs. Myers-King lost her case and returned to obscurity with her children.