The Twiceborn Queen (The Proving Book 2) (12 page)

I shrank away from the fury and disgust on his face, lit by the floodlights from the veranda. I struggled to understand.

“They’re my sisters. What should I have taken?”

“A gun? A knife? Poison, perhaps.” The front door of the farmhouse opened, and two thralls stepped out onto the veranda and stood with folded arms. Clearly they were just waiting for me to come slinking home, tail between my legs.

“What difference does it make if you were going to stop me anyway?”

“But I wouldn’t have.”

I stared at him. He made an impatient gesture. “Oh, go inside. I can hardly stand to look at you.”

I fumbled for the door handle, stung by the look on his face and the weight of his words. He wouldn’t have stopped me if I’d intended to kill my sisters?

I slammed the door and marched past the waiting thralls, head held high though my legs were trembling. Safe in my own room again, I locked the door and threw myself on the bed.

The episode hadn’t been a complete waste of time. I learned two valuable things that night. The first was that I wasn’t safe in my own home. If one of my sisters decided to try to kill me, Thorne would let them make the attempt, would even applaud it.

The second thing was that I hated Thorne. I vowed to dedicate myself to preparing for the proving. I’d show him—and my mother—that I could be the strongest, most ruthless fighter ever. I would be queen, whatever it took.

And then Thorne would pay.

Ben, of course, wanted to come. Being unable even to cut up his own food hadn’t done anything to affect his protective instincts, which were as strong as ever.

“I can still fire a gun one-handed,” he said.

“Let’s hope it doesn’t come to that.” I leaned in and rested my face against his for a moment. The bright light from the window showed the unhealthy yellowish tinge to his tanned skin. Dark shadows lurked under his eyes. He was still a long way from his usual strength. “Stay here and look after Lachie for me instead.”

Lachie was lying on his tummy in front of the TV, chin propped in one hand. Totally absorbed in some superhero cartoon. His new theory was that all the superhero stories were real, and that they were actually all shifters. I’d asked him how many shifters he knew who wore their undies on the outside and were allergic to kryptonite, but he’d waved away my objections.

“Details, Mum.”

“Dave and Thommo are here,” said Ben. “Rob too. The house is full of people. He doesn’t need me.”

“They’re not family,” I said.

“And I am?”

“You know you are. Family isn’t about blood.”

“Oh? What is it about then?”

“Love.”

His breath caught as he gazed down at me. Somehow this conversation had gotten very serious.

And then he laughed. “Damn you, woman, how can I argue when you say things like that?” He swept me into a fierce one-armed hug. “You know I can’t refuse you anything. Fine. I’ll stay home and be good, even though the little turkey won’t notice if the house explodes as long as the TV’s on.”

I kissed him, glad to see him smile. “You need the rest anyway. I worry about you.”

He snorted. “Well, that only seems fair. I worry about you too.”

In the end I left Steve behind as well. The away team consisted of Garth, two of the ex-thralls, and the two werewolf girls. It was kind of cosy, even in the big car, with six of us.

Eric and Alex, the two ex-thralls, were armed to the teeth. Their jackets concealed a number of suspicious bulges. Leandra was a lot more comfortable with firearms than I was, but even I had to admit they were a necessary evil in the current situation. The three werewolves probably all had knives hidden away somewhere. A knife was a daytime wolf’s best friend. At four o’clock in the afternoon they wouldn’t be able to change if we ran into trouble. Not that traumatising a bunch of office workers with rampaging werewolves in a busy place like North Sydney would ever be a preferred option anyway. Shifters had had quite enough publicity already.

We crossed the Bridge, joining the stream of traffic leaving the city. Peak hour was already underway, though being school holidays it was nowhere near as bad as usual. With a bit of luck we might even be able to find a parking spot when we got there.

The address Carl had given me turned out to be a low-rise office block on the outskirts of North Sydney. The ground floor housed a dentist and an empty rug shop with
Closing Soon! Hurry, last days!
still plastered across the front window. The parking gods smiled on us; there was an empty spot a few doors down, which was even more of a miracle considering a busy building site was right next door. A multi-storey office tower was going up, its concrete and steel reaching for the sky behind the white hoardings that blocked it off from the street, and the thunderous rat-a-tat of jackhammers filled the air.

Eric got out and fed the meter, looking like any businessman on his lunch break in jacket and tie, his short beard neatly groomed, while Garth and Alex moved warily down the street. Garth wore his usual T-shirt and dark jeans; he said he only dressed up for weddings and funerals. Today the T-shirt featured the Death Star and the words “Home Sweet Home”. Alex trailed in his wake, looking uncomfortably warm in his jacket. Summer in Sydney was no place for a jacket; his face glistened with sweat, bright red. He looked like a retired boxer, or maybe a footballer. He’d probably been quite handsome before someone had spread his nose half over his face.

Plenty of cars passed, and there were several people on the street; I could see Garth’s tension in the way his head moved from side to side, trying to see everything at once. The noise from the building site would be adding to his stress, assaulting his sensitive hearing and making it impossible to hear the approach of enemies. And if there was one thing werewolves hated, it was being sneaked up on. They disappeared into the foyer while the other two wolves and I waited in the car.

“Do you think it’s a trap?” Jerry asked.

I swivelled in my seat to look at her. Chewing gum, she looked the picture of casual who-gives-a-toss with her tatts and her flaming pink hair. She was dressed all in black, with black combat boots that laced halfway up her shins. One arm lay casually along the back of the seat, but beneath the surface I sensed an undercurrent of nerves, which wasn’t a bad thing. Nothing wrong with nerves if they kept you alive. Some shifters figured they were bulletproof, and found out the hard way they weren’t.

“It’s always a possibility.” I shrugged. “But Davison’s not stupid. Elizabeth won’t last forever. It makes sense to hitch his wagon to someone else’s star.”

“Wish it was dark,” Mac muttered. She shifted restlessly on the seat next to Jerry. I had trouble picturing Mac as a ravening beast, despite her clothing matching Jerry’s tough look. If she made as cute a wolf as she did a girl, she’d have preschoolers lining up to pat her and kiss her fluffy nose.

“He probably picked the time so you guys couldn’t change,” I said. Any dragon who followed the proving would know by now of the werewolves in my camp. Jerry cast me an anxious look. “But that doesn’t prove he’s planning a double-cross, just that he’s taking precautions. You know how paranoid dragons are.”

She nodded, and we got out of the car at Eric’s signal. The thunder from the building site pounded my sensitive dragon hearing, and I saw Jerry flinch as the wall of sound hit her. The three of them watched the street, while I ignored the noise and the butterflies fluttering in my stomach as best I could and tried to recall everything I knew about Carl Davison.

He was young for a dragon; only about a hundred years old. It was a measure of his ambition that he’d risen so high in Elizabeth’s court in that relatively short amount of time, shouldering aside older dragons. According to some sources, he was a regular visitor in her bed, but that was hardly surprising. The combination of long life and healthy sexual appetites meant that, for the older dragons like Elizabeth, there would hardly be a male dragon left she hadn’t slept with. And probably quite a few of the females too.

The human persona he’d adopted was that of a businessman who’d taken the stock market by storm with a start-up software company a few years back. It had been so successful it now had the big market players looking nervous, and Carl’s fortune was made.

In fact, he’d most likely already amassed a fortune in a previous “life”. One of the drawbacks of living for centuries without ageing was that you had to arrange regular “deaths” and reinvent yourself in a new place. That had been easier before photography became widespread, but the real problems had only started with the rise of the Internet. With facial recognition software and global connectivity it was much harder to start over if your face was already well known.

Still, no one had been caught out yet, and people like Carl continued to build their fortunes and enjoy the high life. He was a regular in the society pages, a real hit with the ladies with his dark good looks and goatee that proclaimed him not just some boring businessman, but an artistic soul. An artistic soul with money. He had B-graders lining up to hang off his arm.

His other big claim to fame from a shifter point of view was the number of wyverns he had on staff—three that I knew of. Wyverns generally preferred to keep to themselves. He must have a lot to offer if he could coax three of them into joining him.

Garth waved us in, and it was a relief to put a closed door between us and the thunder of the jackhammers next door. I glanced around as we entered the foyer, a narrow space between the dentist and the empty shopfront. A faint smell of urine lingered, as if no one came here but homeless people and drunks. The space opened up further in, to a lift lobby with three lifts and a door to the stairwell. A board on the wall listed the building’s tenants. Level two, where we were meeting Carl, housed a firm of solicitors.

If Carl owned the building I bet it wasn’t one of his more profitable investments. The décor of the foyer was dated, and it looked as though the cleaner worked with one eye shut. Only two of the lifts showed lights on their display; the third one appeared to be out of order. More likely, the place had nothing to do with him, and that was why he’d chosen it as a rendezvous point.

“Stay here,” Garth said to Alex. “Make sure no one sneaks up on us.”

Alex nodded, his sweating face serious, and took up position where he could see the lifts and the two doors. Eric called the lift and the rest of us stepped in. It smelled a little musty, and the worn carpet was badly stained, as if they’d had a water leak that no one had bothered to fix. I certainly wouldn’t feel too confident of my lawyers’ skills if they worked in a place like this.

Confidence was in pretty short supply at the moment. All of us were on edge. Garth looked positively grim. Werewolves didn’t like enclosed spaces, and he burst out of the lift the minute the doors opened like the cork from a bottle of champagne. If anyone had been waiting for the lift he would have scared three years’ growth out of them.

But no one was there, and it wasn’t hard to see why. The double doors opposite the lift were locked. The lawyers’ company name was still written on the glass, but the rooms beyond held nothing but carpet, showing darker patches where furniture had once stood.

Garth turned a full circle in the foyer area in front of the doors. “So where is he?”

Eric tried the doors again, but they were definitely locked.

“Maybe he’s late,” I said, trying not to feel insulted. Wolves weren’t the only ones who played dominance games. Usually the person who arrived last had the most power.

Jerry pulled something from her back pocket that looked like a Swiss army knife, but turned out to be a set of lock-picking tools. In a moment she had the doors open. Luce would have been proud.

“May as well have a look,” she said. Without waiting for orders she strode inside. Mac and Eric hurried after her, and after a minute, so did Garth and I.

It didn’t take long to confirm our initial impression: the place had been abandoned, probably some time ago. The air smelled musty and stale. The only sign of life was the odd cockroach, skittering for cover as we disturbed it.

Garth checked his watch as we filed back out to the lifts, clearly uneasy. “Where the hell is he? If he’s not here in two minutes, we’re leaving.”

I caught his eye, knowing what he was thinking. If it was a set-up, we’d taken the bait. Enemies could be closing in right now to spring the trap. I had my mouth open to tell him to call Alex when the lift pinged. I turned toward the sound with relief. Davison was here.

It took me a second to react when the doors opened. Yes, Davison was here. A body lay on the floor of the lift, its head kicked into the corner like a discarded soccer ball. Underneath all the blood the head sported a natty little goatee and a look of surprise.

Frozen with horror, I was still staring when the door to the stairs flew open and bodies started pouring through.

Garth snarled and hurled himself on the first man through the door. The guy’s gun went flying as he hit the floor, and he scrabbled at Garth’s big hands as they closed around his throat. The next two managed to get shots off before Eric took them both out with a neat bullet to the head, his feet planted wide and his arm unwavering, a look of calm concentration on his bearded face. At least the racket from the building site next door should hide the noise of gunshots from the outside world. And that was the last coherent thought I had for the next few minutes.

In front of me Jerry collapsed with a howl like a wounded animal.

There were too many bodies for the small space. My claws snapped out between one breath and the next as I leapt for one of the attackers. His gun roared and I felt a stinging pain in my shoulder.

I stumbled as I landed, but my claws still caught him, half severing his head. His blood sprayed me as he went down, and another took his place. My ears rang from the gunfire and the terrible unearthly screeching noise Jerry still made. What was wrong with her? I couldn’t spare a second even to look.

I could hear Garth shouting. From the corner of my eye I saw dainty little Mac tackle a guy twice her size. I turned to help her, but I wasn’t needed. The man was dead before he even hit the ground, blood fountaining from his slashed throat. Mac stood over the body, teeth bared, dripping knife in hand. I caught her eye and she gave me a feral grin.