Valeria’s second was a griffin with a mean streak a mile wide—perfect for Valeria, in fact—and a burning desire to prove herself as good as a dragon. Not a person to be taken lightly, despite her laughable ambitions. She’d killed my sister Monique at the Presentation ball and come close to taking me out at the same time.
Luce nodded. “So he said. With a couple of thralls.”
“What’s she hanging around for?”
Jason shrugged and grinned at Luce. “That’s what Luce wants to know. I said I’d go with her.”
I pouted. “Send Garth instead and come back to bed. It’s still practically my birthday.”
He laughed and kissed the tip of my nose. “It was your birthday yesterday, and I already gave you a present.” My new alarm clock, modelled on a clock owned by Marie Antoinette, gold-plated and studded with diamonds. It was a beautiful piece, and supposedly the alarm was something special. My favourite song? A recorded message from him, maybe? He wouldn’t say. “Stay in bed and wait for the surprise.”
“I hate surprises,” I grumbled. “Why don’t you just tell me?”
He wagged a finger at me. “That would spoil all the fun. Now go back to sleep. This shouldn’t take long.”
He strode out. Luce lingered in the doorway, her gaze roaming the room as if she expected to find an assailant lurking beneath the four-poster bed or hiding in the shadows of the walk-in wardrobe.
“I’ll take Dean and Charlie,” she said, “and leave you Garth and the others.”
“Really? Only ten men to keep me safe?” Luce took her job as head of security very seriously. “Are you sure that’s enough?”
“Maybe I should be worried about keeping them safe from you,” she muttered as she followed Jason out.
Fancy that—a joke from Luce. She mustn’t be feeling well.
“Are you coming, Luce?” Jason roared from downstairs as I snuggled down into the blankets. It was good to see him taking an interest again. He’d been jumpy and difficult lately. I suppose it was to be expected—his child had been dead mere weeks. Though it had only been half dragon Jason had taken its loss hard.
At least it meant he no longer had to see its mother. Not that I was jealous, of course. Dragons weren’t monogamous and I didn’t spend too many lonely nights. But Jason was one of my favourites.
I rolled over, trying to find sleep again, but the sheets were cool without Jason. Damn it! Thralls couldn’t lie, but the magic that enthralled them made them dull-witted. The thrall was probably mistaken, and Jason and Luce off on a wild goose chase.
If it was true, however … Nada’s being so close practically constituted a declaration of war. Valeria usually liked to work more subtly than that. Poor Monique had died without even knowing what had hit her: one minute waltzing, big puppy-dog eyes laughing up at her partner, the next smeared in little tiny pieces all over the ballroom. If not for Luce’s quick mind, I would have been right behind her.
Why would Nada risk coming this far into my territory? Was it some scheme of Valeria’s, or was she working on her own?
Thoroughly awake now, I gave up on the idea of more sleep. My beautiful clock, standing proud on the mantelpiece, said I had five minutes before the alarm went off. Enough time to duck downstairs for coffee. I could start my day with coffee in bed, listening to my birthday surprise. Maybe I’d get one of the thralls to get the fire going in the hearth, too. Naked flame was so much more satisfying than air-conditioning.
Sunrise was peeking through the big kitchen windows as I entered, the clear pink sky promising another fine day. Moving out here had been a good decision. Apart from the stables and the garage, I could see nothing but fields and trees. The property was so big, and the neighbours so far away, I had room to breathe. Security was easier too than in the city.
Three of the thralls were gathered round the coffee machine with Garth, gossiping like old grandmothers. The word must have spread about Nada. They fell silent when I came in, except for Garth, who offered me coffee. The thralls were just interchangeable bodies. They watched my every move with single-minded devotion, but I didn’t take enough notice of them to be able to tell one from the other. Garth, on the other hand, was a wolf, an outcast from Trevor’s pack. There’d been some trouble over a woman, as there so often was with wolves. Passionate creatures, but not always the brightest. Still, it worked out well for me. I gained a follower so grateful to find a place that his loyalty was as fierce as if I’d enthralled him—but with the bonus that he could still think for himself, unlike the thralls. He was Luce’s right-hand man these days.
He made a mean coffee, too. Though the rest of them were drinking out of mugs, he got out the fine china for me. A thoughtful touch.
“Sugar? Milk?”
“Just make it strong.” Like my men.
He nodded and passed the coffee across, his big hands careful with the delicate china. I eyed him as he checked his watch and sent the thralls off to their duty. He could have been mistaken for a soldier, with his short greying buzz cut and well-muscled body. He was taller than me, and powerfully built, with a fine pair of shoulders. I did like a man with strong shoulders. It might be worth getting to know him better.
He leaned back against the gleaming steel of the kitchen bench, arms folded. The fingers of one hand drummed an impatient rhythm on an impressive bicep. When he checked his watch again I laughed.
“Stop fretting, Garth.”
“They’ve been gone nearly half an hour. What’s keeping them?”
“Don’t worry so much. That’s what I pay Luce for. They can take care of themselves.”
Luce was the most competent person I knew, and Jason was old and cunning, a lethal combination in a dragon. Still, it took me a few moments to settle Garth, and time was ticking away. I hurried back upstairs, spilling hot coffee into the saucer, hoping I hadn’t missed the alarm.
I realised I had when, halfway up, an explosion rocked the house and my bedroom door blew into the hallway.
I hurled the cup and saucer aside and took the stairs two at a time. Garth and two thralls pelted up the stairs after me. Debris lay scattered across the upper steps. I coughed, waving a hand in a vain attempt to clear the clouds of dust billowing from my room. Rubble had blasted from the door in a wide semicircle. Beneath my bare feet the carpet felt gritty with pieces of brick and plasterboard.
Garth held me back with one arm. “Get away. There might be another bomb.”
That would be clever, wouldn’t it? One explosion to draw a crowd, another to finish them off. But I didn’t think that was the intent here. One bomb, one victim.
I stood in the doorway and surveyed the gaping hole in the side of the building that used to be my bedroom. There wasn’t much left. The four-poster bed had been obliterated. The chairs, the dressing table, the window with its heavy brocade drapes—all gone. No sign remained of the mantelpiece or the beautiful clock which had stood there—in fact, the fireplace no longer needed a chimney, as half the roof had blown off. Early morning light streamed through the hole and lit the swirling dust and smoke, incongruously cheerful. A few scraps of carpet clung to the scorched floor by the door. I stared at the place where the bed had been. Where I should have been lying, waiting for my birthday surprise.
I was surprised, all right—surprised how much it hurt.
Garth, with singular presence of mind, already had his phone out. “Luce isn’t answering,” he said after a moment. “Or Jason either.”
“No, I imagine not.” I felt listless but stirred myself to instruct the thralls to stamp out the fires starting in the wreckage and secure the building. Garth gave orders too, sending others out to check the grounds and one to review the security tapes.
But I knew the tapes would show nothing. I’d been betrayed. It happened to us all in time. Dragons were a backstabbing race by nature. But this was my first time, and though I’d expected the rage, the pain truly surprised me. I hadn’t realised how fond I’d grown of Jason.
; And Luce too. Was she a willing participant in this, or had Jason betrayed her as well? If he had she was likely dead by now. I clenched my fists so hard my nails cut into my palms. The pain helped me hold back shameful tears.
“It’s lucky for him his child is already dead,” I said when I had mastered myself. “Otherwise I’d wring its neck with my bare hands.”
Then I remembered the female. “But there’s still the wife …”
Garth’s face was white with shock and something that looked like fear, but he drew me back downstairs and urged me into a chair in the sunlit kitchen. I stared at my bare feet, cold on the tiled floor, and didn’t realise I was shaking till he pressed a fresh cup of coffee into my hands. Little ripples trembled on its surface, its delicious aroma strangely out of place in this new, darker world.
“They split a while ago—before the kid died,” he said. “They hate each other now. You might be doing him a favour if you got rid of her.”
Well, that would never do. I drew in deep shuddering breaths, trying to think. The steel benches gleamed in the first light of the day; the cheery red appliances looked the same as they had five minutes ago, but everything had changed. “Call Trevor. Get the pack out here to hunt him down. Find out where he’s gone, and if Luce is involved.”
Garth recoiled. Clearly he believed her innocent, but I could rule nothing out.
“I’ll kill him myself if he’s hurt her,” he said, his grey eyes fierce.
I nodded, barely listening, dreaming already of vengeance for my battered heart. When I was queen, Jason would pay.
CHAPTER TEN
Déjà vu. Another night journey on the M1, this time heading south. A tense silence filled the car. Ben’s body pressed against mine, but his warmth did little to reassure me.
The smell of smoke filtered in from outside. Fires in the national park again, most likely. Summer was peak bushfire season. At this point a bushfire almost seemed preferable to whatever Nada had in store.
No one spoke. The road unrolled before us, the steady drone of the engine the only sound. The lights of passing cars whooshed past like little beacons of normalcy in the darkness. I edged a little closer to Ben.
After a time I realised I could see other lights. In the tense darkness of the car, the nimbus around each of our kidnappers glowed softly. All three were different colours. Damn. I wished I’d had more time to find out what Ben knew about this.
Micah shone with a faint orange tint, like the man I’d seen at the shops in Curtin Road. Was that really only yesterday? So much had happened since then. The werewolf who’d attacked me had also carried that same faint orange aura. Were they all werewolves? Or were the colours random? Another question to add to the list.
Nada’s aura was blue, a pale arctic shade. Suited the cold bitch. Maybe she was a were-polar bear.
I frowned, something struggling to the surface of my mind. As if a bubble popped, the knowledge suddenly appeared. She was a griffin, blue as all the lesser creatures of air were. And I’d seen her before.
What the hell? I shivered, my skin crawling. Where had that come from?
I sneaked a glance out of the corner of my eye at the man next to me. His aura shone a dull muddy brown. No miraculous bubble-popping this time. He could be anything. Or maybe his soul was just dirty. Not surprising, if he made a habit of kidnapping people at gunpoint.
He’d put the gun away now, but I daresay he could draw it fast enough if he needed to. Not that either of us were much threat with our hands tied in a car travelling at 110 kilometres an hour. What were we going to do? Open the door and jump out? It’d be certain death.
Where the hell were they taking us? Sydney, or further south? The cable tie was already cutting into my wrists. Sydney was an hour away. That would be bad enough. What if we were headed for Melbourne? Ten hours in the car with these clowns and jumping out might start looking a whole lot more attractive.
I glanced at the door. If they had any sense they probably had the child-safe lock on anyway. I went back to staring out the window and reading road signs as they loomed out of the dark. Anything to avoid seeing those strange coloured auras around my fellow passengers. I tried not to think about what might happen when we got wherever we were going. I tried not to think at all.
After nearly an hour of this my wrists had passed through agony into blessed numbness, and at last we turned off on to the Pacific Highway. In a couple of hours the city would start to stir, and this road would be choked with traffic, funnelling toward the Harbour Bridge and the central business district, but for now it was quiet. As the skyscrapers of the CBD appeared glittering out of the night we turned off down Military Road, whizzing past silent shops and restaurants.
I hadn’t been this way since last time I took Lachie to the zoo. We did our animals proud in Sydney—Taronga Zoo had a prime piece of real estate right on the northern shore of the harbour, with million-dollar views across to the Opera House and the city. Funny how tame even the most exotic of Taronga’s residents looked now compared to the creatures in the car with me.
We joined the right-turn lane down towards Taronga. Wherever we were going must be close; much further and we’d end up in the harbour.
At the big roundabout before the zoo we turned off and purred through the dark side streets. The closer we got to the water, the bigger the houses grew. This was Mosman, enclave of the offensively wealthy. You wouldn’t get much change out of three or four million for any of these places, with their city views and their “architect-designed” structures. Some of the oldest ones sat on huge blocks and looked more like small country estates than suburban houses. The land alone probably cost more than I’d earn in my lifetime. Old money.
At last we turned into a driveway barred by high iron gates. The sandstone wall on either side looked so old it might have been built by the convicts. The gates slid open and the car crunched across gravel into a huge courtyard featuring a fountain to rival the Trevi in Rome. Behind it loomed a house that looked as if it had come straight off the set for Gone With the Wind, complete with huge portico and massive Corinthian columns.
No grand entrance for us, though. We followed the drive around to a separate garage the size of a small barn. From the back the house was no less huge, though not as imposing, and it tickled at my memory. Micah and his mate hustled us out of the car and we crunched across more gravel—there would be no sneaking up on this place—to a side door of ordinary size, and suddenly I had it. I’d been here before, dropping off one of those mysterious envelopes.
“Valeria’s house,” Ben whispered as Micah shoved us inside. “Don’t tell them anything.”
Well, that should be easy. I couldn’t tell what I didn’t know.
We entered a huge kitchen/eating area, all gleaming steel and granite. Utensils hung from ordered racks and two outsized ovens stood side by side. Jamie Oliver would have been proud to call it home. At least twenty chairs were spaced along a long table. How many people lived here?
Our captors marched us down a carpeted hall till we arrived at a large lounge room. One long wall made entirely of glass offered a stunning view of the Opera House and Bridge across the water, with the lights of the city behind them.
A man rose from a chair by the windows. The short hair threw me for a minute, but then he turned, and the shock of seeing that face again felt like a kick to the gut.
This just got better and better. What in hell was my ex doing here?
Jason looked as shocked to see me as I was to see him. We stared at each other for a long, horrified moment, then he whirled on Nada.
“What’s she doing here?”
Ben moved closer. Funny, though; he didn’t look a bit surprised. I glared at him, and he looked away, abashed. Clearly, if this relationship was going to last, we had to work on his communication skills.
Nada looked like the cat that ate the cream. She stalked forward in her designer heels, all fluid and smug and ready to pounce.
“Why don’t you t
ell me?” she purred.
“What are you talking about? I haven’t seen her in months.”
I stared at him. The last time we’d met had been at Lachie’s funeral, when I’d still been so angry with him I couldn’t even bear to look at him. With that new haircut he looked as he had in my dream. And with the dark glass behind him—what the hell?—I could plainly see the faint red glow pulsing off him. You have got to be kidding me. What next? If someone had told me my mother was an alien I couldn’t have been more surprised.
“And yet here she is, turning up in such unexpected places, with that low-life friend of yours. Very suspicious.”
Jason glanced at Ben, as if he’d just realised he was there too. Emotion flashed across his face, too fleeting to identify. Fear? Anger?
“He’s a herald, Nada. What do you think you’re doing? Why are they tied up?”
“Kate’s a herald too,” said Ben.
I doubt Nada even heard him. She was too busy giving Jason the death stare. I felt like joining her. It was hard to believe I’d ever loved this piece of scum. Was there no end to his betrayals?
“Very convincing.” Her voice dripped with sarcasm. “You play the innocent so well. I hope Valeria finds your act as entertaining. You told her you poisoned Leandra. You were the golden boy then, weren’t you? But word on the street is that this thrall of yours stabbed her to death. What game are you playing at, Jason?”
Ben leapt to my defence. “She hasn’t stabbed anyone!”
“You’re out of your mind. If she’s anyone’s thrall, it’s not mine. She hates me. There’s a reason we’re divorced, you know.”
He shoved his hands in his pockets and stared out over the harbour as if the conversation held no further interest for him.
Nada clenched her fists. “We’ll let Valeria be the judge, shall we?”
His glance was contemptuous. “I’m sure Valeria will be simply thrilled at your assault on two heralds. Do what you like. It’s your funeral.”
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