Mercy Burns

across to the car. The curtains in the house opposite twitched—an obvious sign we were being watched. While the trees hid some of his shape-shift, there was little hiding the explosion of air as he launched skyward. But he was a black dragon surrounded by night, and I doubted the eyes of an old woman would even be able to see him.

And even if she could, who would actually believe her?

I climbed into the car and drove off. I was barely two blocks down the road when a police car screamed past, its flashing lights almost blinding in the darkness. While I knew Damon and Coral had already left, it didn’t stop the tension crawling through me. Luck really hadn’t been in our corner, and while the old woman probably hadn’t seen Damon clearly, she would have been able to see me.

I restrained the impulse to speed up and kept my pace sedate. The quickest way to attract unwanted attention was to do something idiotic—like speed away from an accident.

I switched cars in Sebastopol and continued on, making my way—with the help of the street directory stolen from the first car—to the Bodega highway and toward Bodega Bay.

I couldn’t immediately find them when I arrived, so I parked the car, then grabbed the pack and walked down the marina. Both he and Coral were sitting at the very end of the dock. He had his arm wrapped around her shoulders, and even though I knew there would be nothing intimate in the gesture, something inside me still twisted. Which was ridiculous, given I meant as little to the man as Coral did.

I walked down and sat beside her. “Did you get the transmitter off your neck?”

She pulled down her turtleneck. Only a red-raw strip of skin remained. “It took a while, but we managed it.” Her bright gaze met mine. “Thank you. Both of you.”

I sighed. “We’re here for a reason, Coral, and not just because Angus asked us.”

“I know. And because I owe you the debt of my life, I’ve resisted the call of my lover’s soul. But you need to ask your questions now, because I cannot stay long.”

“Why did those men snatch you and Angus?” Damon asked before I could say anything.

It seemed like a pointless question, because we already had the answer from Angus. But maybe Damon was simply making sure the old sea dragon had been telling the truth.

“You’ve seen his scars?” Coral asked, picking up a long splinter of wood and twirling it absently in her fingers.

“Yes.”

“We found one of the men responsible in a bar. Only it turned out it wasn’t him. He just sounded the same.” She grimaced, her gaze on the twirling splinter and tears bright in her eyes. “As luck would have it, although he hadn’t been involved in Whale Point’s destruction, he’d taken part in the more recent ones. So we paid for Angus’s mistake by being snatched, beaten, and almost killed. It was only when Angus mentioned he’d been contacted by a reporter about the recent cleansings that they let us live.”

“So he’d lied.” And convincingly, because Rainey and I hadn’t contacted him until the night they’d tried to run us off the road. And that was the contact they’d arranged to send us into their trap.

She raised an eyebrow. “Wouldn’t you?”

Well, yeah. “But why would Angus even think to give our names to them?”

“Because he’d heard from the friend of a friend that there were some reporters asking about draman from Stillwater.” She shrugged. “In the end, the lie didn’t really help us.”

And it certainly didn’t help us, I thought bitterly.

“You were always living on borrowed time,” Damon said.

“We knew that. And we did try to escape. But these men are smart, and we were each held accountable for the behavior of the other. Even when they released Angus, they watched him like a hawk. If he even looked like he was manipulating the sea, they would have killed me. It made escape extremely difficult.”

“So who is the man Angus thought he’d recognized?”

“I don’t know his name, and I don’t know whether he’s a major player or just another heavy. I’ve only ever seen him once. He was a tall man, with thinnish features, blue eyes, and reddish hair. He sometimes had a very cultured voice.”

“Sometimes?” I asked, eyebrows rising.

She glanced at me. “Yeah. Sometimes it slipped, revealing a more guttural, earthy tone. That was the voice Angus recognized.”

Seth had a guttural, earthy tone. But then, so did a lot of dragons in our clique, including our king. “Was he draman or dragon?”

“Dragon.”

Seth didn’t have red hair or blue eyes, but he was at least a dragon. Of course, he might very well be dead, so I had no idea why I kept going back to him as a suspect.

Except that whoever it was knew me, and they’d known about the freezer. And there were only five people who knew about that particular incident—me, Rainey, Seth, and the two thugs he’d used to help lock me in there. And neither of the thugs was bright enough to be in charge of this sort of operation.

Coral flicked the piece of twig from her fingers, watching it spin through the air before adding, “There is another man, but I’ve never heard his name. He was the one who gave the guards most of their orders.”

“Do you have any idea how we can find him?”

“Not really.” She paused. “But I think they did most of their business through some sort of club. I heard it mentioned a few times. Decadent, or something like that.”

Which jelled nicely with what the draman had already told us.

“And you can’t tell us more than that?” Damon asked.

“I wish I could,” Coral said. “Now, if you have no further questions, then I really need to go.”

“Angus called your family before he was killed,” I said. “They won’t be far away.”

She closed her eyes and whispered, “Then at least I’ll have someone with me when his soul moves on.”

Unlike Rainey, I thought, with tears suddenly in my eyes. I blinked them away, but the pain would not be so easily pushed aside this time. I hugged my knees close to my chest and tried to ignore the ache.

“I wouldn’t suggest hanging around long after dawn,” Damon commented. “These men appear to be cleaning up loose ends, and they will come looking for you.”

“Oh, have no fear of that. I’ll be heading home, and away from these shores.” She tucked a strand of multicolored hair behind her ears and gave us a wan smile. “Thank you again for what you’ve done. And for what you tried to do.”

She pushed to her feet. The sea reacted to her movement, the gentle waves suddenly splashing upward, reaching for her with foamy fingers, like a lover reaching for his mate after a long absence.

I glanced up at her. “Coral, don’t kill them.”

Her bright gaze met mine, then she nodded once and dived into the water.

Relief spun through me. Though she could do what she wanted to those men and I’d be none the wiser, something suggested that she’d keep her word.

“Those men do not deserve your pity,” Damon said, rising to his feet and brushing dust from his rear.

I followed the movement of his hands, admiring the way his jeans clung to the curve of his butt.

“What you’ve done to them is probably worse than death, Damon.” God, the mere thought of someone stealing my fire had my stomach churning. “How would you like to live like that? Knowing that the very thing that made you what you are had been snatched away?”

“They deserved the punishment.”

“Maybe, but they don’t deserve death on top of it.”

He studied me for a moment, his expression unreadable, then shook his head. “After all those scars, you can still live up to your name? I think that makes you truly unique.”

“Yeah,” I said dryly. “So unique you’re going to report me to the council and make them deal with me, and everyone like me. Meaning little old unique me will probably end up just like those men on the boat.”

“The council isn’t likely to steal the fire of every draman capable of it. But if the dragon gene is overriding the human one, we need to be aware of it.”

“Because we wouldn’t want all those half-breeds diluting the glorious bloodlines, now would we?”

“I have never said that,” he said, with more than a little exasperation in his tone, “so I’d appreciate it if you’d stop making statements like that.”

It was oddly satisfying to discover that Death could be annoyed, and I couldn’t help the smirk as I said, “So,