Not for Wynter, I don’t. She’s the one that has been hurt the most. And thank you for giving me the information about the loss of wages and the home they’d been kicked from. That’ll make things come to light, proving that the cop in charge was high on himself or some shit. Tristan asked him what had happened to him. He’s in jail at the moment. He’s being held on charges stemming from an attempted rape of a suspect. This will help our case too. It shows that he’s neither upstanding nor a good guy at all. But you’ll have to talk to Winnie. She’ll have the information that you need. If not, I’ll help you when I’m finished here.
You have a good afternoon. And I know that Wynter appreciates everything that you’re doing for us. Hudson said it was his pleasure. Thanks so much.
Just as he was reaching out to Winnie, she appeared in his office. Wynter joined them a few minutes later with warm scones and tea. They sat at his conference table and told her everything that Wynter had seen in her dream.
“Flame would have been watching over your biological parents’ grave. I can see if I can send Rose for her. That would show her that it’s not a trick to get her to leave her duty.” Winnie looked at Wynter as she continued. “I knew your father well. Not your mother so much. But he was a good dragon, Briton. He was in charge of forces to keep the humans out of the caves that they hid in most.”
“Do you know what my mother’s name was?” Winnie grinned, and Tristan laughed. Whatever her name had been, it was going to be a good one. “Why do I have the feeling that I’m not going to like your answer?”
“You will. Your mother was Winter, but spelled with an ‘i,’ not a ‘y.’”
Wynter didn’t look like she was going to believe her. Standing up, she hugged Winnie so tightly that she looked at Tristan.
She is very happy right now. Just go with it.
Winnie nodded and sort of hugged Wynter back. It was strange to see such a powerful being not sure of herself. Winnie didn’t like to be touched for various reasons, and this emotion that was going with the hug was overwhelming to her, Tristan thought.
Rose arrived a few minutes later, and was told what was needed of her. She looked at him for a second, then back at Winnie. Something was going on. Rose either didn’t want to break the news, or she wasn’t allowed to do so. Finally, after Winnie told her to say it, she sat down on the big table.
“Flame has been replaced at the garden, my lord. She was doing a good job, but Queen Aurora thought her to need a break. When she refused, she was put into a sleep so that she could rest. It had been a few decades since she’d been with her kind or had any kind of food. It was said that she was nearly insane with the need to watch over her mistress.” Tristan asked her what they could do to get some information. “Allow me to talk to the queen. As I said, it has been a few years. Perhaps she will think that she is rested enough.”
“Did you know my parents?” Rose smiled and said that she had. “What were they like? Was my mother beautiful?”
“Oh yes. I have seen your dragon, and you are a different color than her. Your father was a very dark dragon. He was in charge of so many things. Briton gave up his life to save your mother. I wasn’t aware that she was having a baby until just recently. She hid you well, my lady. They were all that kept you safe, your parents. They gave up their lives just for you.” Wynter said that she’d not realized how much they’d sacrificed to keep her safe. “Your father died defending his den for your mother. As I said, I wasn’t aware that you were also someone that he was trying to save. He died in battle, something that all dragons hope to do with their last breath when they fall to the death.”
After Rose left, telling them that she would go straight to the queen, Winnie left as well. She said that she had some things that she could look up, and that she’d be returning too. Wynter sat at the table not saying anything, but looked down at her hands.
“When I was a little girl, I remember thinking that they didn’t love me. In fact, I think that was in my mind all the time. That they didn’t love me enough to keep me, just like I think other children believe. Now I find out that not only did they want me, but they gave their lives to keep me safe.” She looked at him. “Such love. I don’t know that it’s all that common among humans, do you?”
“There are some, I think. Your mom included.” Wynter nodded. “How about we head to the bank and get the book, and something for your mom for her new home?”
“I’d like that. Do you think we can just walk around, too? I would like to see the town that I’ll call my own.” He told her that it was almost winter, that people would be decorating about now. “I’d like that too. Do you decorate for Christmas?”
“I haven’t in the past. I’m not sure why, but I didn’t. Now that I have you, I believe I’d like to go all out.” He laughed. “If we allow the faeries to do it, you can bet that it’ll be spectacular. They have a tendency to go well overboard when it comes to the holidays. I’ll have to show you pictures of Cooper’s house from last year. It was amazing that his electric bill didn’t triple.”
“I don’t know if I’d want to go that far, but I would love to have the house all sparkly and shit.” They both laughed, and Tristan thought it was the most he’d laughed in his life. “I know we have a while yet, but I think it’ll be a blast, don’t you? And we have to send out Christmas cards. I’ve not done that in my entire adult life.”
“Cards and fun. I think that’s a perfect combination. We’ll have a huge meal too, and invite anyone that wishes to come.” She asked about his family. “I’ll make sure they know that Christmas Eve is here at our house this year. We usually celebrate Christmas morning at Cooper’s house. The pack goes to his house then, and there are so many people that it’s hard not to have a good deal of fun.”
He could tell that she was thinking about the information that Rose would bring back for them. Tristan knew what she was going through. Having no information was all right, he supposed, but only having a little of it was harder to take. It was like there wasn’t anyone to fill out the blanks in her life, and now that Wynter knew some of it, she wanted it all. He just hoped that she got good information.
Chapter 6
Eric looked over the obituary page three times. There was no mention of either a child dying or any women dying in childbirth. He wasn’t entirely sure that they would say that in the paper, but he looked all the same. Not even the Internet told him anything.
About ready to give up, he glanced at the headlines again and saw that another one of the Mannings had taken a wife.
“How many have gotten wives, I wonder?” Doing a search on the Mannings and wedding, he found that five of them, counting this one, had taken the leap at marriage. That only left him one. Christ, he was really behind if he didn’t find this baby soon.
He wondered at the women that these men took into their lives. Eric knew on some level that he might have missed the one that was going to marry the child. The woman that he was supposed to kill before she got to that age was either out there or it was yet to be born. His balls tightened up when he thought of failure.
After searching the marriage pages of the five of them, he looked for any mention of any of the men having children. That was when he really started to get nervous. They had several children between the five of them. Reading each article, he was glad to see that most had been adopted. But one child, a single female child, had been born to one of them.
“I have to figure out which one is Cooper Manning. It could be for naught, but I have to keep looking.” Something in his mind was pushing him to get information, but all he could do was sit in his chair, nearly paralyzed with fear. “What will happen to me should I fail?”
He didn’t know for sure, but Eric was sure that he’d be a dead watcher. Never, in all the years that he’d been watching for the child to be born, had anyone come to see him. He would receive a nice bonus in the form of cash and gems, but not a word from the people that were supposed to be looking over him. Eric wondered if
any of them were alive now.
“What if I just killed the last dragon? Surely he has to be the one that will be wedding this child.” He thought on that, and wondered how one went about killing a dragon. Eric was sure that it was much harder than it sounded. To simply kill a dragon would be anything but simple, he told himself. “I suppose that I could call them and ask what their mates’ names were.” Not that he knew who the child was that was coming to them. “Or I could simply kill all the females and be assured that none of them are this child.”
That wouldn’t pan out, he realized. The child had been born. The magic that called to him had been there, and these women had been with the dragons for a long time, according to the paper.
“With the exception of the last one. She is an adult now, so she couldn’t be the child.”
Eric looked over his extensive notes. They were mostly gibberish. Anyone that would have picked up the notebook that he was using would have been confused. Since he wasn’t able to read, even after all this time, he doodled pictures of things that he thought about, like a picture of an egg. A dragon with a wedding veil on. Things that back then he had understood completely.
Allen joined him just as he was putting his things away for the day. Eric asked him if he’d been able to find out anything more than he had yesterday. Allen told him that he’d not even found out that anyone had been admitted to the hospital at the time of the magic.
“I don’t know what’s going on, do you?” Allen said that he didn’t, but he’d not been gifted any magic to find them. “No, I guess you weren’t. You weren’t even born back then. I do have to figure this out. I’ve a feeling that I’ll be out of a job if I don’t find her.”
“You’ll die.” Eric asked him why he’d say such a thing. “It’s in that book I found a few years ago. It talks about this baby being born and all the crap it’s supposed to do. Did you know that the dragons have several books that are nearly impossible to open? A few have tried, too.”
“Why didn’t you tell me you had this book?” Allen reminded him that he’d said he could have full use of the library, and he had been just reading things when he came across it. “Show it to me now, please. I would like to know if there is an image of this babe, or who the dragons are that birthed her.”
“There isn’t. There are a few pictures of the Manning dragons, but they’re not very good. And they’re of when they were only dragons. Also, and this is really funny to me. Once they all six have their other halves, the world will once again be in alignment. I don’t know rightly what that means, but I took it to say that we’d all be happy or something like that.” Eric remembered that part too now that he was reminded of it. “Also, this child will be born to dragons in the dead of the night. She will carry a mark of her kind.”
“What sort of mark?” He showed him the drawing that was in the book. “It looks really big, doesn’t it? I mean, something that large, it would be hard to hide on a newborn. Don’t you think?”
“Yeah, I thought so too when I saw it. Also, it’ll be in only black when the child is born, and when she meets her mate, the dragon will become as it should be.” Allen looked at him. “The dragon will become as it should be? I don’t have any idea what that means either, do you?”
“Yes, it means that it’ll come into its full power. What else does it say about her? Is there any information on where it might be taken or even hatched?” Allen told him that all it said was that she’d be marked, and that her mate would bring her the magic. “What about faeries? Is there any mention of them?”
“Faeries? I didn’t see anything. But there are some lightning bug looking things in some of the drawings in this.” He flipped through the book. “It doesn’t say what they are, but as you can see, there are a lot of them flying around the big dragons. You suppose they take care of the little things or something?”
“They’re friends of a sort. The faeries are there to care for the dragons. I’m not sure how or why. The dragons are big ass suckers, so why would they need a little bug around? I have seen them, however—the faeries. They get up really early in the morning to work on the flowers and stuff.” Allen looked at him like he was nuts, but Eric was remembering more and more things all the time. “There was this man. He used to live here. I never knew his name, but he was a short little man with long gray hair. When he was killed, I took over this house. It’s been taking care of itself—mowing the lawn and washing or even replacing the windows when they’re broken. I’ve often wondered if that meant that he had someone watching over me.”
“His picture is in here, if I can find it.” Allen went page by page looking for it as he continued. “It’s not marked the book or anything like that, so you have to look for it. I have thought that it moves around in the book, like it doesn’t want you to see it. But I know that’s just silly.”
Eric didn’t think it was silly at all. And when Allen found the picture, he handed him the book. It was him. He looked at the face of the man who had trained him to do what he was doing—finding the dragons that were born and destroying them. It was not a job for the squeamish, he thought with a shiver.
“That’s him. Does it mention his name anywhere?” He said that his name was Lord Cunningham. “Cunningham? Are you sure? That sounds sort of lame, if you ask me. For the amount of power that he had, I expected his name to be something that would state what he was. Lord I kill dragons. Or even Dragon Slayer.”
“That’s what he’s called too. Slayer. I guess he was the first of his kind. He’d go into a town and rile people up to kill off the dragons, telling them scary stories about how they’d eat them if there was no other food left. He said that crops would be destroyed in order to feed them.” That was what he’d told the Howells when he’d visited their home, Eric remembered. “There is mention of waterways too, but I didn’t understand that. It said that it would boil over the rims and drown what people would be left. First of all, how the hell would one heat up an ocean to the point of boiling? Secondly, what do they do if they kill off all the people and boil the water? I think that’s just stupid.”
He had thought the same thing at one time. However, he never thought of what the dragons might do to the world. Eric only thought of his one job, so that he’d not end up dead like Cunningham had. He still had a lingering feeling that he’d been wrong about the body all this time. Allen asked if he knew how to get in touch with Cunningham.
“I believe he’s dead, as I said.” Allen said that he wasn’t. “Of course he is. Why else would I be in his home if he was alive?”
“The book says that he was going to find him a good place to rest after he got someone to do his job for him. I’m assuming that would be you.” Eric nodded, his fear now doubled from what it had been before. “I’m betting he comes around soon enough. To tell you what a great job you did with finding the baby. Right?”
“He didn’t come around before.” Allen nodded and stared down at the picture of the dragon slayer when he handed him back the book. Eric needed time to think, and he wasn’t able to do that with Allen there. “I have a couple of things that I need for you to do for me. I’d like to auction off some of these things so that I don’t have them cluttering up the house. What do you think about finding someone to do that for me?”
“Sure. I can do that.”
When Allen left, eager to have a job, Eric realized what a good idea that would be. Long after the door shut, Eric was ticking off things that he could simply sell to someone. He’d have money, and if things became too hot for him here, he’d just leave. It wasn’t like he thought anyone was going to hold him to the contract that was older than anyone he knew. Eric looked down at the mark that had been burned into his wrist when he’d been nothing more than a kid. It was a mark within a circle that had blistered and festered for years after the man had touched him. Inside the circle it was divided into three equal parts. A sword was in one of the places; the second was a flame that engulfed what he could only assume was supposed to be a drag
on. The last one had a broken eggshell, smashed into tiny pieces and surrounded with blood, the color as red as real blood pouring around the entire circle. He’d never thought of the implications of what this meant to him.
Eric had been marked. And in doing so, he’d bet anything that Cunningham or someone higher up could find him at a moment’s notice. He’d been a fool for doing this. A royal fuck up in taking a job that he really didn’t believe in, to do things that he thought he was above. Eric was so screwed right now.
Long after his normal bedtime, Eric made his way up to his room. It was about as sparse as the house that the Howells had lived in. Only here, he had not just running water, but heat too. The house never was cool enough for him to be happy with, but he’d also not had to pay for its upkeep or anything that went wrong. For that he should have been grateful. But he was not.
Picking up the newspaper again, he read over the pages that were marked with such things as births and deaths. Somewhere at some time in the last few weeks, the dragon had been born. Finding it, however, had become something that he’d not been able to do. Eric had a feeling that it was going to be the death of him. He was almost sure of it.
All he wanted to do now was to leave this all behind and find him a place that he could live out the rest of his days, however long that might be. Which he really didn’t think was going to be all that long.
Going to his closet, he pulled things out that he thought he’d wear when he left—if he left, he revised. He was afraid that if someone came knocking soon, he was going to be buried in one of the outfits he’d pulled free from the hangers.
Going to bed that night, Eric thought of all the things he’d seen over the years. And how much stuff had changed. He didn’t want to spend his last days, so sure that was what it was leading up to, sitting behind a desk. Tomorrow he was going to take a long walk, perhaps never to return. It was what he thought about even as his body began to prepare for the night of rest.
Tristan: The Manning Dragons ― Paranormal Dragon Shifter Romance Page 7
