“Neither,” she said softly. “Neither is better.”
“Probably right. Not that either of us had a chance to pick.” The bitters of the orange caught in the back of his throat. “The Dorados didn’t send me into the desert, didn’t hold me to task for my line’s treachery. I can’t forget that I owe them.”
“And that’s why you’re willing to go after Ashcraft.”
“The Nox Incendi clan is more vulnerable now than we were during the feud. Bale is barely holding off the final stages of the petralys.” He put his hand in the stream of water from the dragon’s mouth—the opposite of fire. “At least Rave found his solarys. Piper saved him from his brother’s fate, and he’s next in line to be our liege.”
“But Piper told me that even though your kind are immortal, Rave’s bond to her means he’ll die when she does. Which means…you’d be the next king of the dragons?”
The disbelief in her voice matched the long-ago looks from the other dragon-kin when Bale had claimed him under the Dorado name. He let out a sharp laugh. “See? I told you we’re fucked.”
“No, that’s not it. It’s just…” She shook her head. “Kind of ironic that your family was banished and then you got exactly what they wanted.”
“I don’t want it.” The dragon in him twisted, forcing him to add, “I want what Rave has.” He’d almost wished he was infected with the stone blight just so he’d know when he found a female to make his ichor run hot.
Anjali bit at her lower lip which blushed with the same darkness as the blood orange. “A…solarys.”
“The heart of a dragon’s treasure.”
She frowned. “You don’t have anything at all in your aerie. Why do you need a heart for nothing?”
“What better place to start than the heart?” But his dragon had frozen at her question, intrigued. “You think I need my hoard
before
I can find my solarys?”
Her frown deepened. “How would I know?”
“Well, you’re a female. What would draw a female to a dragon’s den and trigger the mating fever?”
“Cars, cash, clothes.” Her tone was brusque.
He waved his hand. “This should be easy then, since I can get those things whenever I want.”
“Must be nice,” she muttered.
“That would be the point of a treasure, yes.” His phone in his back pocket chirped impatiently. “We’ll continue this convo later. I think we’re on to something here.”
She grumbled something else under her breath, but even his dragon couldn’t decipher the words, so he checked the text.
His pulse leaped and he swung toward her with a toothy grin. “We’ve got the root of Ashcraft’s black oil. Now to burn it all down.”
Chapter 13
On the back of the zooming bike, clinging to Torch’s broad shoulders with the evening wind stinging her eyes, Anjali admitted to herself that she was jealous.
All this was waiting for some lucky solarys bitch who didn’t even know dragons were real.
Not fair. Not that life was ever fair, but some injustices bit deeper than others.
For the first time, she actually felt sympathy for the desperate suckers who crept into her uncle’s shop to finger the tumbled quartz pebbles and listen to some motivational CD samples and walk out with a few sticks of incense tied in rice paper with some random runes stamped in purple ink. Who didn’t want to believe—just long enough for the incense to burn out—that they could do
something
to guide their own fate?
Instead, they were all shallow, rudderless boats trapped in a nowhere pond in the middle of a desert.
Pushed around by dragons and warlocks. Oh man.
Or
not a man
, as the case might be.
But then, she wasn’t a man either.
The spring sun was slipping behind the hills when they returned to the Keep, and even Torch’s heavy leather jacket couldn’t hold back the chill. He left the bike with the same valet and a hearty back slap plus some enthusing about the ride while she waited with her arms wrapped around herself. He might not be a man, but he was definitely a guy.
Once inside, she handed him the jacket. “I don’t need this.”
He cast a careful glance at her as he took it. “You okay?”
“If we’re one step closer to finishing this awful business,” she said, “then yeah, I’m good.”
He obviously didn’t believe her, but they whisked up to the same conference room where he’d fed her, like, a million years ago.
And she’d thought she’d been desperate to get away from him back then.
Being dropped through the middle of a thunderstorm was nothing compared to…
Compared to what? What had she been thinking? That she was anything other than a hole in his security system? Well, he’d plugged her all right.
Piper and her dragon-shifter were already in the room, Piper seated at the table with a sealed glass beaker in her hand, Rave pacing in front of the window where the light was fading to a smoky blue that matched his narrowed eyes. Though she cradled the beaker with the same caution as a bomb technician, Piper was watching her mate and smiling softly, as if all the rest of everything meant nothing when he was near her.
She pursed her lips though when she saw Anjali. “Where were you? I tried to text you.”
Anjali tried not to squirm as if she had sand in her panties. “I didn’t have my phone on.” Or with her, or even think about it. Not while she’d been…otherwise occupied.
Rave had turned to face them, and his nostrils flared, giving his otherwise elegant face a distinctly predatory look. Aw hell, she didn’t want to know what he smelled. Maybe the orange and mineral water would make him think they’d gone juicing.
But the sharp glance he exchanged with Torch told her she was lying to herself.
Maybe she shouldn’t blame her uncle so much. Sometimes lies were the only comfort left.
As if in response to something Rave had said, Torch gave a short nod, his dishwater blond hair spiked from the wind. “So what have you two got?”
“The dragon trap that Ashcraft gave to Anjali—” Piper pointed to the beaker and then held up the finger in a wait-for-it gesture. “It’s almost identical to the stone blight. The mixture is mainly the chemical elements mercury and antimony, but in alchemical texts, it’s called mercurius vitae. In humans, the compound causes symptoms like the worst flu ever, with fever and purging. But in dragonkin, instead of triggering such an exaggerated response, it shuts everything down.”
Torch frowned. “I got hit with one of those black smoke bombs. It hurt like hell and froze me in place long enough for the ash-hole’s minion to almost eviscerate me, but my ichor isn’t contaminated like it would be with the petralys.”
Piper bounced lightly in her seat. “That’s the interesting part. While the petralys just gets worse and worse, slowly turning the dragon to stone, the toxin in this trap broke down. It has to break down because a stone dragon is useless to an alchemist that wants to butcher it for ichor and other elements. But how?” She looked at them meaningfully.
Anjali knew this expression well from their college days. “Well, how does it?” she asked with more enthusiasm than she really felt—it was hard to think past Torch’s comment about hurting like hell and almost being eviscerated.
That had been her fault. This was all her fault. The least she could do was give her friend a chance to shine.
“The black oil in the trap is
nearly
identical to the petralys contamination, but not exactly,” Piper said. “Rave found the difference.” She gestured to him, her dark eyes shining with her love of discovery. And of her dragon.
He smiled back at her. “It was obvious once Piper pointed out that the solarys somehow breaks down the petralys too. So what’s the commonality?”
Torch sighed with frustration. “Can you just skip to the important part of how we’re going to destroy Ashcraft?”
“We can’t kill him,” Piper said. “Not until we get the element he used to make the black oil toxin temporary. Then we can synthesize it ourselves and treat the petralys until we find solarys mates for all the Nox Incendi.”
Torch spat out a curse at the can’t-kill-him part, but Anjali asked, “What is the element? Can’t you just make it yourself now?”
The smile faded from Rave’s eyes, leaving his expression bleak. “We might be able to reverse engineer it. If we had enough time.” He glanced at Piper, and Anjali knew they were both thinking of Rave’s brother—the cave-bound crippled creature who was king of the dragons. From the fleeting glimpse she’d had of him, Anjali wondered if anything—magical or chemical—could bring him back.
“It’s a complex brew,” Piper said. “We need all the ingredients plus the recipe if we’re going to make a solarys in a bottle.”
“A love potion,” Anjali murmured.
“Kind of,” Piper said. “But I’ve been going back through the records Rave kept from ancient alchemists, and they were definitely focused on their Magnum Opus, which was more about gold and eternal life and perfect enlightenment than anything as basic as love.” With a shake of her head, she mused. “It’s hard to believe Ashcraft was able to imagine such a thing. He always seemed like an emotionless snake to me.” She peered at her mate. “Unlike dragons.”
With chilling certainty, Anjali said, “Ashcraft didn’t imagine it.” She repeated one of Torch’s curses under her breath. “Uncle Gwain did.”
Torch crossed his arms over his chest, his jaw clenched as hard as his fists. “You think your uncle would help Ashcraft to that extent when he was being blackmailed and threatened?”
“I think he would see Ashcraft’s power and want what he could get for himself.” Anjali looked out the windows where the mountains were starting to blend with the darkening sky. No difference. She was sure they were looking at her the same way: no difference between her and her greedy, lying uncle.
He’d told her he was in trouble, that Ashcraft would kill him and her if she wasn’t able to catch and kill one of the monstrous dragons that had murdered her mother. But all that time, he’d been another of the warlock’s minions.
She forced herself to face them. “The alchemists may have been focused on high-minded philosophical pursuits, but the bayou magics were all about practicalities like love, revenge, zombies, that sort of thing.”
Rave rumbled low in his throat. “That would explain the spell on Esme. Bale has been studying the diamond in her engagement ring. He said there are flaws in it that expand during her nightmares.”
“Ashcraft,” Anjali said. “Reaching through it to control her like a zombie voodoo doll.”
Piper nodded. “And you already warned us not to hurt Ashcraft before Esme was free of his influence. She could shatter like the stone.”
Anjali took a deep breath. “Then that’s what we have to do next. Tomorrow I have to go see Uncle Gwain and find out what he really did. So I can do it too.”
***
It was late. She was tired. She wanted to cry. Maybe scream too. But Anjali followed Torch to his aerie without a sound. Then she just stood there, staring through the triangle panes of crystal at the mountains beyond. The odd treatment on the dome enhanced the faint glimmer of starlight so that everything outside looked ethereal, magical.
Not that magical meant anything good anymore.
Torch looked at her a long moment. She couldn’t meet his gaze, knowing he must think the worst of her, but she listened for the hush of his breathing.
When his arms enfolded her from behind, she closed her eyes and let her spine curve against the taut muscles of his chest.
“I don’t blame myself for my ancestors getting banished,” he said. “Don’t blame yourself for what happened to your mother. You aren’t responsible for your uncle’s actions then or now.”
“How about my own?” She let out a ragged breath. “I hurt you. I could have…I
would have
killed you.”
“Do I have to drop you again to remind you that we both made mistakes?” He spun her in his arms so hard she had to shake the flying dreadlocks out of her face. “Because of you, we might have found a cure for the petralys.”
“Because I tried to kill you with it,” she muttered.
He scowled down at her. “So you delight in reminding me.”
She returned his glare. “So you’ll remember how bad I am.”
Suddenly his lips quirked. “Apparently I like bad girls.”
That never lasted. She’d walked away from enough one-night stands to know that. She’d never had Esme’s princess purity or Piper’s loveable spirit. Hadn’t ever wanted it.
Until now. When she wanted to give it to him. And he only saw the part of her that had gotten her in all this trouble.
She stared up at him. “Why aren’t you out looking for your solarys?”
His eyebrows arched. “Uh, because I’m fighting a warlock.”
“Not right now you’re not. But even before that, you weren’t looking for your solarys or your treasure.”
His grip around her loosened. “Before Rave and Piper, there hadn’t been a Nox Incendi dragon with a solarys mate for centuries. I guess I had other things to do than wish for something so rare.”
She set her jaw. “But once Rave found Piper, didn’t you wonder?”
He shrugged. “I didn’t need either. I have all the Keep to watch over—that’s too much treasure even for a dragon. And the stone blight hasn’t struck me yet, so I’m not dying.”
Why was she even asking him all this? “Never mind.” She slipped out of the circle of his arms.
But he grabbed her elbow and swung her back. “Why? Are you wondering?”
“About what?”
He tucked his chin, staring at her warily. “Whatever you thought I was wondering about.”
She scoffed and shook his hand loose. “Definitely not.”
He let her go. “Well, okay then.”
She wrapped her arm across her belly to clamp her hand over the place he’d grabbed her. Her skin felt cold. “Good.”
His lip writhed up in a soundless snarl. “Dammit, now I’m wondering.”
He slammed one boot across the step between them and anchored his arm behind her back, yanking her close. She had a split second to bring up her hand, to brace herself with a flattened palm over his pounding heart, before he brought his mouth crashing down on hers.
The smell of their ride across the desert was still on him plus the mineral tang of the water and something that was just him: all wild.