The Twiceborn Queen (The Proving Book 2) Read online

  I kissed him goodnight and hustled Lachie out into the hall while the nurse was still making notes on the chart. We marched down the sterile corridor, Lachie’s small hand warm in mine.

  Once we left the air-conditioned hospital the heat hit us in the face like a wet sock. Beautiful Sydney, so humid in summer it was like walking round inside a sauna some days. The earlier rain had cleared, leaving the evening air hot and sticky as we trudged to the multi-storey car park.

  I’d got as far as the ticket machine and started scrabbling around in my purse for change to pay for parking when I realised that something else was missing.

  “Where the hell are my car keys?”

  I stared at Lachie as if I expected him to pull them out of his ear.

  “Did you drop them?”

  Maybe. My bag had hit the floor, and Amy or Amanda or whatever her name was had snatched it up so fast half my belongings could have been left behind. The keys were probably still under the bed.

  “Come on. Let’s go back.”

  The lift seemed to take ages to arrive, and then we had to wait for an old lady on a walking frame to stagger her way in and dither over which button to push. I forced myself to breathe deeply and smile at her. I seemed much more impatient since Leandra and I had merged—or whatever had happened. Clearly she hadn’t been the kind to suffer fools gladly. I had to make a conscious effort not to let her attitudes colour my view on life.

  We hurried down the corridor on Ben’s level, my heels tapping an impatient rhythm on the vinyl floor. His door was shut, and I threw it open without knocking.

  Amy/Amanda stood there, holding a pillow over Ben’s face.

  For one astonished moment I stared, unmoving. Ben thrashed wildly, his feet drumming against the mattress, the sheet tangled around his legs. The nurse stared back at me, her face showing no emotion. She might have been still taking his temperature instead of trying to kill him.

  Then I spun, shoving Lachie out into the corridor. “Nurses’ station! Quick, get help!”

  I slammed the door on him and dived straight across the bed, hands outstretched for the woman’s throat. She sidestepped with a single-minded focus on the job that chilled me to the bone. Ben’s struggles were growing weaker. He made surprisingly little noise. No one passing in the corridor would guess a man was fighting for his life in here.

  “Get off him, you bitch!” I snarled, rolling off the bed.

  I threw a punch that would have taken her head off if she hadn’t dodged it, still without releasing the pillow. Desperate, I swept the water jug off the rolling portable table and slammed it into her face. That knocked her aside at last, and I snatched the pillow and threw it into the corner of the room.

  Ben lurched up off the bed and heaved in desperate breaths, his face bright red. I only had time for a quick glance before the nurse scrambled upright and launched herself at me. A knife appeared in her hand as if by magic, and I sidestepped just in time. Neat party trick. I guess we were lucky she’d gone the pillow route first, or Ben would be dead already. Probably trying to make it look more natural. Hacking someone up with a knife did tend to raise a few questions.

  I kicked out, catching her in the knee—always a good strategy in a fight. It’s hard to run with a busted kneecap.

  She was strong, though, and it barely slowed her. Behind me Ben half-staggered, half-fell off the bed, and I heard the ding of the nurse-call button. Wouldn’t want to be the poor nurse answering that call. You expect a request for a bedpan and you walk in on a knife fight.

  She bared her teeth in a savage grin and circled round, trying to get between me and the door. Closer to Ben.

  “Who the hell are you?” Not just Amy/Amanda the nurse, obviously. But she wasn’t a shifter, or I would have been able to see her aura. One of the perks of being a dragon—only we could see the coloured glow that surrounded each shifter. I backed away. As far as I could anyway. The room was barely big enough for visiting in, much less staging hand-to-hand combat. She must be on somebody’s payroll. “Who sent you?”

  She said nothing. I watched her eyes and backed up as far as I was willing to go, watching for her next move, trying to plan my own. I could feel Ben right behind me. I hunched over a little, trying to look non-threatening, maybe a little scared—though if she knew who I was that probably wasn’t going to fly. Worth a try, though.

  She feinted with the knife and I flinched back, waiting for the real move. I opened myself to the other, felt the familiar welcoming tug of trueshape. My breast warmed as the channel stone inside me flared with the magic of transformation. Only a little, though. This room wasn’t big enough to hold a full-sized dragon even if I wanted to go all the way. A little was all I needed.

  I heard running feet in the corridor, and Lachie’s voice shrieking, “Mum!”

  She lunged as my eyes flicked toward the sound, sure she’d caught me off guard. Instead my claws burst from my fingertips, as long as swords but stronger than any steel. I’d slashed her throat before she’d even realised what was happening.

  Behind me Ben gave a strangled cry as blood sprayed from her throat. As I retracted my claws the door burst open behind me. She fell against me, then the knife slipped from her hand and she collapsed at my feet.

  A woman screamed, and I turned to find two horrified nurses staring at me, with Lachie desperately trying to see around them.

  “You killed her! You killed Amy.”

  “Keep him out! Don’t let him see.” I sank to my knees on the bloody floor, only now beginning to shake. What the hell was that? Like a faint yellow mist rising from the body? “She attacked us. Out of nowhere. She was trying to kill Ben!”

  The first nurse hesitated, her face a mask of shock. “Amy would never … Why would she …” She swallowed hard, glancing between me and the body on the floor, and pulled herself together with an effort. “Are you hurt?” Then, to the other nurse: “Where the hell is security?”

  She knelt beside me and tried to urge me to my feet. I must have looked a sight, spattered in blood, hair across my face like a madwoman. Ben said something to the other woman, who nodded and drew Lachie gently away.

  The door snicked shut behind them. No sign now of the yellow mist. Had I imagined it? Everything had happened so fast. I gave the nurse a brief, mainly true version of events.

  She kept shaking her head, her eyes drawn over and over again to the body of her co-worker on the floor, as if she couldn’t make sense of my story. I was having trouble myself. If she wasn’t a shifter, how was she connected to the shifter world? It wasn’t as if shifters had human moles planted all through the community, just in case they needed to assassinate someone. Not even a dragon like Elizabeth had that kind of reach.

  Could it be a goblin seeming? One of Elizabeth’s people—or even Alicia’s—wearing a borrowed face to get close to us? In which case things were going to get mighty interesting when the spell wore off and the dead body suddenly looked like someone else. But it was the best explanation I could come up with.

  I finished by saying I’d accidentally cut the woman’s throat as we struggled over the knife. The nurse didn’t even bother to take the would-be killer’s pulse. It was painfully obvious she no longer had one.

  “The police will be here soon. It will be all right,” the nurse kept saying, though the expression on her face said different. Clearly she was having trouble imagining how anything could be all right in a world where such strange and random slayings could occur. She wrapped me in a blanket, as if she expected me to go into shock. The poor woman looked as though she needed it more than I did.

  I tried my best to act shocked, but now the danger was past I felt nothing but the deepest satisfaction. That woman had threatened my mate, and if I could kill her again I would.

  Perhaps that was the most shocking thing of all.

  CHAPTER TWO

  We spent two more hours at the hospital, answering the questions of every uniform that went past, watching the parade of police and
hospital staff coming and going. Photographers and forensics, and whole hordes of other people whose jobs I couldn’t even guess at, made their way into the room, then reappeared, checking me out as they went past as if they couldn’t quite believe what I’d done. The nurses gave me a wide berth, though eventually one came with a wheelchair and took Ben off to be examined, ignoring his protests that he was fine.

  A uniformed officer showed me to a tiny room that boasted a ripped-up couch and a microwave that had seen better days, then lurked uncomfortably outside the door. I’d cleaned the blood off my face and hands, though my clothes were a mess, and I sat, still wrapped in my blanket, with Lachie on my lap. His head drooped onto my shoulder—by now it was close to nine o’clock at night, and high time he was in bed.

  The cop at the door stood up straighter as someone appeared: a small hard woman in plain clothes. She waved him away with a flick of the hand that spoke of authority and entered the room. A large man followed her.

  “Good evening. I’m Detective Hartley and this is Detective Franks. I’m sorry for the delay; we got here as fast as we could. We’d like you to come with us to the station.”

  I eyed her suspiciously. She wore no jewellery apart from a wedding ring, but her dark trouser suit looked expensive. That, combined with her confident air, gave the impression she was higher up the food chain than the people I’d already spoken to. “Why? Are you arresting me?”

  “No. We just want to do an interview while the details are still fresh in your mind.”

  “Can’t it wait until tomorrow?”

  Her polite expression didn’t change, but a sharpness entered her voice. “A woman has died here, Ms O’Connor. I think that warrants a little inconvenience.”

  I nodded and went to find Ben, Lachie slumped against my shoulder like a drugged monkey, arms and legs dangling. He was really too big to carry around like a toddler, but I didn’t care. I couldn’t get enough of him, the weight and shape and feel of him in my arms, half-afraid he might disappear from my life again if I let him go.

  The lights were still on in the corridors, but most of the rooms were in darkness. Blue-grey vinyl floors stretched ahead of us, empty now that visiting hours were over. I followed the sound of voices to the nurses’ station and found Ben in a small waiting area next to it, his face grey with fatigue in the stark light. He still wore his pyjamas.

  “Get dressed,” I said. “The police need to speak to me at the station. We’re leaving.”

  Both the nurses behind the desk looked up at that.

  “You can’t do that!” said one.

  “He still needs to be here,” said the other. “We’re just waiting on another bed.”

  I glared at them. “What he needs is to be somewhere where people aren’t trying to kill him. And no offence, ladies, but your hospital isn’t doing such a great job on that front.”

  “I’ll have to call the registrar on duty,” said the first one.

  “Call anyone you like. But as soon as he’s got a pair of pants on, we’re out of here.”

  “And shoes,” Lachie mumbled sleepily into my shoulder. “He might hurt his feet.”

  Ben hauled himself out of the chair. “I’m good to go. Got nothing but pyjamas here anyway.”

  “Mr Stevens, please wait for the registrar. I’m sure he’ll advise against this.”

  “Sorry.” He didn’t sound it.

  The officious one stood and came around the desk. “You’ll have to sign a form saying you’re discharging yourself against doctor’s orders.”

  “If you’ve got one right there, he’ll sign anything you like,” I said. “Otherwise, we’re leaving.”

  “But—”

  I turned my will on her, reaching into her mind and taking control. I might have sworn off enthralment, but I had nothing against a temporary compulsion. She stood frozen like a deer in the headlights, helpless in my gaze.

  “We. Are. Leaving.”

  And we did.

  ***

  “Are you okay?” Ben asked, breaking the long silence in the car. Oncoming headlights flashed across his face like strobe lights in the darkness.

  “Fine. You?”

  “You killed that woman.”

  Oh. I changed lanes and wondered how to answer that.

  A week ago I would have had a hard time killing a person, even in self-defence. If I’d had to, I’d have been a blubbering mess afterwards. Ben probably thought I was heading for a mental breakdown, alarmed by my cool.

  In fact, deep down—or maybe not so deep—a new resolve had hardened. Leandra wouldn’t have thought twice about destroying a threat, and now neither did I. That didn’t mean I didn’t regret the necessity. But I wouldn’t be falling apart any time I had to eliminate some low-life who threatened me or the people I cared about. Shifters saw such things differently to regular humans.

  “She was trying to kill you. And me. I didn’t have much choice.”

  “If you’d held her off till the nurses came—”

  “What? She might have knifed one of them? Or Lachie? Would that have been better?”

  “We might have been able to question her.”

  Detective Hartley would have liked that. Hell, I would have liked that. Bad enough to have people lining up to kill you. It was even worse when you didn’t know who was at the head of the queue.

  “I doubt she would have told us anything.”

  “But at least we wouldn’t have been driving to the police station now, would we? Are they going to charge you?”

  “I don’t think so. It’s pretty obvious it was self defence.” At least, that’s how it should look to someone who didn’t know about shifters. “Detective Hartley said they just wanted to do a formal interview. She seems like the type that wants everything done by the book.”

  He made a noncommittal noise and stared out the window. Detective Hartley had told me to meet her at Chatswood police station, which wasn’t far away. We were soon cruising down Archer Street looking for a parking spot.

  The police station loomed on the corner of Archer Street and Albert Avenue, a big glass and concrete box that spilled golden light onto the dark street. I felt a shiver of apprehension as we entered. The Leandra side of me sneered at my nerves. What did a dragon have to fear from human law enforcement?

  “Pretend you’re my nephew,” I whispered to Lachie as Detective Hartley came to greet us. No point taking chances. Accidental deaths were hard enough to explain without adding miraculous resurrections as well.

  “Mr Stevens! I didn’t expect to see you here. I thought you weren’t well enough to leave hospital yet.” Her glance travelled across his bandaged arm in its sling before coming to rest on his face.

  He shrugged. “Hospital didn’t seem so appealing any more.”

  “Well, since you’re here, we can take your statement too.” She led us from the reception area to the interview rooms. “If you could go with Detective Franks, Mr Stevens, you can talk to him while I ask Ms O’Connor some questions.”

  Ben followed Detective Franks, and Detective Hartley smiled at Lachie.

  “What about you, young man? Would you like to wait with Constable Eaton here while I talk to your mum?”

  “She’s my auntie, actually.”

  A young woman in uniform offered Lachie a friendly smile. “Would you like a jelly bean?”

  That sealed the deal. Lachie went off with her without a backward glance, while I followed Detective Hartley into the small interview room.

  We faced each other at the table and she pressed the button to start the recording. After she’d recited the standard warnings and asked a few preliminary questions she got stuck straight into it. “How well did you know Amy Johnson?”

  “Not well at all. I’d seen her a couple of times before, when I was visiting Ben.”

  “And how did you get on with her?”

  “Fine. To be honest, I didn’t pay her that much attention.”

  “So you never argued with her? There was
no friction between you?”

  “No, nothing like that. I don’t think I ever said more than hello.”

  The guy who’d taken my initial statement at the hospital had asked this too. Was all this checking and double-checking standard procedure, or had Detective Hartley decided something seemed screwy?

  “Please tell me again what happened.”

  “I came back into the room—”

  “Where had you been?”

  She interrupted a lot more than the first guy. No detail too big or too small. Maybe that was how you got to be lead detective on a case.

  “I was going home, but when I got to the car park I couldn’t find my keys. We were coming back to check if I’d dropped them in Ben’s room.” They had been under the bed, against the wall. One of the police officers at the hospital had retrieved them for me.

  “And where was Ms Johnson when you came in?”

  “Standing right next to the bed, holding a pillow over Ben’s face.”

  “What did you do then?”

  “I told my nephew to run to the nurses’ station, and then I tried to stop her.”

  “Did you shut the door?”

  “What?”

  “Did you pause to shut the door before you tried to stop Ms Johnson suffocating Mr Stevens?” She pulled out a notebook and flipped through until she found the page she wanted. Must have belonged to the officer who’d questioned me at the scene. “The two nurses who came to your aid said the door was shut when they arrived.”

  She looked up, an expression of polite interest on her face. I paused. No telling what was going on behind that attentive mask, but I had a feeling she didn’t miss much.

  “I … guess I must have, then. I was probably trying to stop Lachie from seeing what was happening. He’s only ten, you know.” I didn’t actually remember shutting the door, but it was a smart move if you knew you were probably going to use unusual methods of winning a fight. Unless, of course, some detail-obsessed detective decided to take it as an admission of premeditated murder or something.