Twiceborn Endgame (The Proving Book 3) Read online

  Around me the screams were fading, replaced by whimpers and the soft sound of crying. I shut my eyes. Someone was repeating “no, no, no” over and over again. It wouldn’t be one of the queens, nor any of the dragons who’d come with them. This felt much worse than the time Kasumi had stabbed me. I’d just started to wonder if maybe bane leaf could be fatal to humans in strong enough doses when my body gave up the struggle and I blacked out.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  When I woke, Patel was standing over the body of Xu, admiring his handiwork. Not all the shifters were down; his men surrounded the ones who were still standing, covering them with real guns now, not dart guns. It was remarkably quiet in the ballroom, and I wondered how long I’d been out. Why had no one responded to the noise of the door blowing out and the subsequent screams? Had they secured the whole hotel? Taskforce Jaeger must have thrown everything they had into this mission.

  I stared blearily at Patel, wondering how it had come to this. The taskforce could only have existed for a few weeks at the most. They’d escalated from investigations to wholesale slaughter at breathtaking speed. Surely the government couldn’t have authorised this? I knew people were scared by the revelations of shifters in their midst, but this seemed way out of proportion. And Patel was a shifter himself. It didn’t make sense.

  He moved to check out Maria, collapsed on her throne. She was still alive, though probably not for much longer, judging by the look of her. Sweat ran down her pale face, and her lips stood out starkly blue against her skin. She groaned as I watched, and shifted her head restlessly.

  Patel considered her, scrawny arms folded. No white lab coat today; he wore dark clothes, as if he fancied himself some kind of ninja, though he wasn’t armed that I could see. As he stood there, he absentmindedly pushed his glasses up onto the bridge of his nose, and the action tickled at my memory. A terrible suspicion took hold of me.

  Trying not to draw his attention, I looked around for my own glasses. They’d slipped off when I fell. I groped around on the floor until I found them. Fortunately they were still in one piece. I slipped them on and suddenly Dr Patel sprouted a mop of dirty orange hair, and a face I knew all too well replaced the Indian doctor’s features.

  “Blue! You bastard!”

  He grinned and came to crouch at my side. “Hello, Kate. How are you? Feeling a bit off, perhaps? What a shame.”

  “I can’t believe it.” Although I could, actually. It made a twisted kind of sense when I thought about it. He’d never hidden his dislike of dragons. But to actually join the humans in hunting us down! “What the hell are you doing?”

  “Ridding the world of a great evil,” he said. “We’ll all be so much better off without you lot lording it over everyone and treating us as disposable serfs.” He waved a hand that took in the bodies on the floor and the general destruction. “This is just the beginning. Oceania will be the first dragon-free domain, but the others will follow soon enough when they see how much better off we are without the lizards.”

  I convulsed, trying to bring up something when there was nothing left in my stomach. The pain in my gut was so bad it was like giving birth all over again. I could hardly think through the agony.

  He laid a comforting hand on my shoulder. “Don’t worry, it shouldn’t be much longer. I’m a little surprised you’ve lasted this long, actually. I distilled the brew until it was extra strong. Used up my whole stock of bane leaf, but it’ll be worth it.”

  No way. No way was I dying here, covered in vomit, and letting this dirtbag win. I tried to find trueshape again, but the pain blocked me. It felt as if the connection between the parts of myself had been severed, and a hard knot of panic formed in my breast. Calm down, I told myself. You’re immune to bane leaf. I had to believe it was still true. It was the ace up my sleeve, because Blue hadn’t been around for that revelation.

  “And then what? Who are you going after next, once the dragons are all dead?”

  He shrugged. “I doubt I’ll need to go after anyone. Now the names are out there, I can leave it to the humans to take care of.”

  The list. Of course. No wonder there’d been so many shifters from Oceania on that list, and only the overseas queens and a handful of other prominent people. Blue had given them the list. They were all the names he knew.

  “You bastard. How long have you been working for Taskforce Jaeger?”

  He grinned, baring his sharp teeth at me. “Haven’t you figured it out yet? I thought you were smarter than that. Taskforce Jaeger wouldn’t exist without me. I started it.”

  “But why? You’re a shifter too. People are dying already out there. How could you do that?”

  “I’m just a goblin. Hardly even a person in a dragon’s eyes. What’s the point of being a shifter at all when you get so little respect?” He leaned closer and whispered. “I’ll let you in on a secret. It’s a shit world out there unless you’re on top of the heap. No one likes goblins—not even other goblins. And mages are kept like animals, whipped into working.”

  There was something really offputting about his intensity. I shrank back, as if his hatred would infect me if he got too close.

  “That’s why I’ve decided to aim high,” he said in a more normal tone. “Time to be top dog for a change, see what it’s like not to be everybody’s bloody whipping boy.”

  He looked at me as if expecting a reaction, but I had no idea what he meant. I could hardly focus on him, lost in the grip of the pain that engulfed me, much less figure out his cryptic utterances. He was going to have to call a spade a spade.

  “What the hell are you talking about?”

  He blew out an impatient breath, ruffling the lank orange hair of his fringe.

  “Let me spell it out for you, Kate. I’m going to cut that funny little stone out of you. You know the one, right? It sits on your rib, just over your heart, and it lets you change into a dragon.”

  My channel stone? What the hell?

  “I tried using Faith’s, but there was something wrong with it. Or maybe there’s more to it. Maybe the anaesthetic we used on her interfered with the magic, or maybe it only worked in your case because Leandra had been poisoned with bane leaf first.”

  “But …” But he hated dragons. Was he talking about making one by stealing my channel stone? I was lost.

  “See, I was trying to be nice, knocking Faith out before I cut it out of her.” His face twisted as he pulled his shirt aside to show me a small scar above his heart. “But it ruined everything. It didn’t work. It’s just a lump of useless rock.”

  Holy hell. I’d seen that scar before, back in the goblin’s cave. The guy was a certifiable lunatic. He thought that just shoving a channel stone into his chest could make him into a dragon?

  “So I won’t be making that mistake again. I’m afraid you’ll have to be awake for the whole experience when I cut it out of you.”

  Except I wouldn’t be pushing my essence into the thing before it left my body, if it came to that. He’d never be a dragon.

  “If you hate dragons so much, why do you want to be one?”

  “I never said I hated dragons.” He readjusted his shirt to hide the scar. “I just hate the fact that they can push me around. Even you, with all your pious worrying about the poor shifters I’ve betrayed to the humans—you’re just as bad as the rest of them. You used me, same as all the others. ‘We’ll tell your family where you are, Blue. Work for me or else, Blue.’” He pitched his voice high in a childish imitation of mine. “Not so caring then, were you? Well, now it’s my turn.”

  “Was that your whole reason for creating Taskforce Jaeger and starting this vendetta against shifters?”

  “You sound like you don’t approve. Never said I was Mother Theresa either.”

  “Seems a bit short-sighted.” The pain in my gut had eased in the last few moments. I hope it didn’t occur to him that I was taking an awfully long time to die. “Won’t the humans come gunning for you next?”

  He waved hi
s hand dismissively. “It’ll all die down soon enough. And you’ll notice that my name wasn’t on that list.”

  Someone behind me cleared their throat. I lay still, not wanting to give away that I now felt well enough to roll over and see who it was.

  “Sir, I think we have a problem.”

  I recognised that voice. Wilson, who’d led the Taskforce Jaeger raid on Thorne’s house. I’d assumed he was the commander of the taskforce, but apparently not.

  “What?” Blue’s voice was sharp.

  “We don’t seem to have enough dragons here.”

  Blue spun on his heel, checking the circle of queens, then letting his gaze rove the rest of the room, over dead male dragons and other assorted shifters.

  “You told me they were all assembled! I specifically said to wait until they were all in the room!” He turned an accusing glare on me. “Where are your sisters?”

  He sprayed me with spit with the word “sisters”. I wiped my face, and his eyes widened as he saw the ease of my movements. Yes, I was feeling a lot better. So much so, in fact …

  “Find them, you idiot! And give me that dart gun!”

  He snatched the gun out of Wilson’s hand, but he was too late. I surged to my feet, reaching for trueshape as I went, and felt the blessed thrill of union as the parts of my soul rushed back together. Blue screamed, a high-pitched wail that held the death of all his hopes.

  The scream cut off abruptly as I bit him in half.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  I felt the impact as dart guns hissed out their deadly little missiles, but they fell harmlessly off my scales. I swung my great head round to glare at the offending men, and they backed away, trembling. They huddled together against the far wall, no longer so sure of their superiority. Numbers were nice, but manpower meant nothing up against dragon power. One of them unloaded a handgun into my chest, but the bullets had no more effect than the darts had.

  Behind the mass of terrified taskforce men, the wall exploded, spraying them with bits of plaster board. The lights died abruptly, and large bodies shouldered their way into the room through clouds of dust and bits of ripped-out wiring. Large dragon bodies, glinting silver and golden and copper in the half-light from the foyer behind them. My sisters had decided to join the party.

  I spat the two halves of the goblin’s corpse out, and saw the glitter of silver in the remains of his chest, peeking out from beneath all the blood. Silver veins on a black stone. Faith’s channel stone, stolen by this imposter. My blood boiled, and I turned to the soldiers, a song of vengeance singing through my veins.

  What followed was a bloodbath. With seven dragons in the room, the soldiers stood no chance, and I lost myself in the pleasure of ripping into my enemies, feeling their blood spurt in my mouth and run down my chin. Some of the other shifters joined the fray too; they had no love for these men who had killed their queens. I saw a leshy turn into a bear and tear a man’s arm off, gun and all, and a wolf leap for the throat of another who was trying to fight off two mermen.

  All too soon, there were no more enemies to face, and I came out of my killing frenzy. That wolf was Garth. Now I recognised his night-black coat, and felt a fierce pride in the blood coating his muzzle. He was a killer, same as me. Our eyes met across the room and he gave me a wolfish grin.

  As the dust settled my sisters gathered in a loose semicircle around me, crouched low, tails still lashing. The ballroom was big, but with seven full-sized dragons in it and a crowd of shifters and corpses, it was almost cosy. Most of them were golden like me, though one—Charity?—was silver, and Valiant had such a red tinge to her gold it could hardly be called gold any more. More like rust.

  Valiant held a body between her front feet, and chewed absently on its leg. It was Wilson.

  “We could have used him,” I said, my voice reverberating in my chest and coming out in a deep growl. “Someone needs to report back to the government on the folly of attacking dragons.”

  “Sorry,” she growled back, and my lips curled back in a snarl of amusement. She wasn’t sorry at all. I guess I wasn’t either. The corpses would probably be just as effective as a deterrent.

  “You looked like you needed a hand,” said a golden dragon in Hope’s voice.

  They must have seen what happened on their TV feed and hurried down to help. Of course they would have missed the part where I turned dragon and chomped Blue, but there was no need to be ungracious. We needed to build a working relationship, after all, and this had been an excellent bonding exercise. The family that slays together stays together.

  “I had it pretty much under control by the time you got here, but I appreciate the assistance.”

  The black wolf trotted past the crouching dragons, with no apparent concern for the size of the jaws looming over him. He sniffed my bloodied claws, gave them an exploratory lick, then settled himself comfortably between my front feet.

  I glanced down at his furry trusting head and felt a wholly undragonlike rush of love.

  “Time to shed your fur and get to work, wolf,” I said. “You can’t laze around like that. We’ve got a lot of clean-up here.”

  He rolled his yellow eyes at me and began the bone-crunching contortions to shift back to his human form. The other dragons watched him like cats watching a mouse, and I rose, a warning rumble vibrating its way up from my belly as I stood over him.

  Valiant tore her eyes away and made an effort to refocus our sisters’ attention. Everybody’s bloodlust was still up. Time to talk them down.

  “Do you think this is all of Taskforce Jaeger?”

  I surveyed the mess of corpses and body parts scattered over the bloodied floor.

  “I’d say so. Seemed like this was a big step in the goblin’s plans. He would have wanted to make sure of it.”

  She cocked her giant bronze head at me, and I realised most of my conversation with Blue had probably taken place after they’d left the suite with the TV feed, so I filled them in on what had been said. That distracted them from the vulnerable werewolf completely.

  They were all shocked; Hope seemed positively outraged.

  “He meant to make himself a dragon? The only dragon?” The spurs on her golden head trembled with anger as her gaze swept the room. “Is there anyone else here who’d like to see the end of the dragons?”

  The assembled shifters hurried to assure her that no, they were all very happy to bend the knee to dragonkind. Maybe they were even sincere. Certainly no one was brave, or foolish, enough to say otherwise.

  “Looking on the bright side, this gives us some ammunition in the PR war,” I said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “When word of this gets out, the government will have a huge scandal on its hands. A taskforce they set up to investigate goes totally rogue and starts conducting secret experiments and killing shifters. And word is definitely going to get out.”

  A naked man stood now between my feet. He still smelled of wild wolf and blood, but he looked like a Greek statue come to life, all strong muscled limbs and sculpted torso. The urge to take human form and jump those gorgeous bones nearly overwhelmed me as bloodlust surrendered to plain old garden-variety lust instead. Only the knowledge that it would be a bad idea to expose my weak human form to six riled-up dragons gave me the strength to hold back.

  “You want to be careful how much you say about those secret experiments,” he said, nodding at the top half of Blue’s corpse. The channel stone had disappeared beneath the blood now, but I knew what he meant. The fewer people who knew the secret of dragon transformations the better.

  “I think we can manage something suitably incriminating without giving too much away.” I gave him a gentle nudge, which still managed to make him stumble. “Go and put some clothes on before I eat you.”

  He grinned at me, and I saw a promise in those clear grey eyes. Later. We could both be as predatory as we liked when this was over. A thrill ran through me, right down to the tip of my tail, which lashed in anticipati
on.

  I turned to the remaining shifters, who’d gathered in a wary knot to one side of our discussion.

  “I’m sorry for the death of your queens. Now there are six more empty thrones in the world. And here before you are the last remaining queens to fill them.”

  A short silence greeted this thought. A voice came from the back of the group, safely anonymous. “What if we don’t want to live under a queen any more?”

  Hope and Charity shifted restlessly, but I rumbled at them until they quietened.

  “That’s a good question. Maybe some of you agree with the goblin, and think that dragons should be left to die out.” No one was brazen enough to nod, but I daresay a few of them were thinking it. “If that’s what you think, let me just pose you one question: if there are no queens to rule, who will control the male dragons?”

  I said nothing else, just let them stew on that. Male dragons left to their own devices were so territorial they became monstrous—well, even more monstrous than normal. It was not unusual for lone males to turn rogue and go completely mad, laying waste to vast tracts of land and killing everything they could find. It hadn’t happened in modern times, but all those tales of knights being sent to slay ravening dragons hadn’t sprung out of people’s imaginations. An unchecked male was a very dangerous beast. Only the soothing influence of the queens kept them in check. It was why male dragons usually took a place at court; they felt the pull to be near the queen.

  “It would be a bloodbath,” said the leshy who’d been fighting as a bear.

  There were murmurs of agreement from all sides, and the twitching tails of my sisters settled to the floor again.