With her two attendants, Anjali couldn’t help but feel like a queen—or at least a princess—for a little while. As they packaged up her choices, she tried to remember that Torch Dorado was a beast.
But he was a beast who knew her taste.
Damn it, now she was thinking of him tasting her…
“Ma’am?”
She jerked around. “Sorry. I was…”
Thinking of getting licked by a dragon
. “Distracted.”
The salesgirl dimpled knowingly. “I was wondering where you’d like me to send the bags. Which room?”
Anjali felt her cheeks heat. Which room? Her unmarked cell, the parapet of the Keep, Torch’s crystal dome… “Uh. I’ll just carry them.”
As if she’d conjured him, Torch took her elbow. “Send everything to the Dome Suite. Except the shoes.” He peered down at Anjali’s feet. “I, uh…see you found something.” His gaze traced back and forth over the narrow pink ribbons that crisscrossed her instep to tie around her ankles then snapped back to the salesgirls. “Thank you for your help, ladies.”
“Any time, Mr. Dorado,” they chimed.
He marched Anjali out, his gaze drifting down to her feet again.
She couldn’t help but ask, “You do that a lot?”
“What?” he said distractedly. “Thank the employees?”
“Take random women in there,” she said tightly, “with the implication that all the rest of their clothes are mysteriously missing.”
He peered at her. “No. All my females are deliberately chosen, and there’s never a question where their clothes went.”
The haughty assurance made her bristle. “I would kick you right now, but these shoes are too expensive.”
He flashed her a toothy grin. “I thought you said no heels.”
She scowled at him. “They only
had
heels. Which I’m sure Mr. Dorado”—she twittered in a falsetto—“knew perfectly well.”
“I didn’t know,” he protested. He swung her out to the length of his arm, as if they were dancing and let out an admiring wolf whistle. “But they do fit
you
perfect well. You went for six inches, hmm? Good to know you can handle the heights.” His grin turned positively wicked. “But is six inches really enough…?”
She sniffed dismissively though her traitorous knees weakened. “At least these won’t come off if you drop me again.” When he reeled her close, she caught her breath, inhaling the musky heat of his scent. “And they serve as a good weapon too.”
He pursued his lips at the not-so-subtle threat then hefted a paper bag in his other hand. “Don’t attack me when I come bearing gifts. While we eat, you are going to tell me everything you know about Ashcraft.”
He took her up a long elevator ride to an empty conference room that overlooked the city lights. The long, mahogany table and the circle of executive chairs seemed so mundane she actually flinched when he closed the door and said, “About the warlock.”
“I didn’t know who—or what—he was.” She sank into the chair closest to the window. A chill seeped through the glass, and she tried to pull the cold remoteness of the view around her. Like she was a CFO—Certifiably Fucking Out Of Options—of a bankrupt company facing hostile takeover. “He came to my uncle’s shop one day. Said he was looking for dragonsbane.” She glanced at Torch. “I thought he meant some strain of marijuana. Uncle Gwain dabbles. But dragonsbane is a real thing.”
“I know it’s real.” He stared at her. “He used it to make the black oil orb you threw at me when you were going to cut my throat for my ichor.”
She huddled in the chair. It had actually been another one of Ashcraft’s minions wielding the knife… But she didn’t think that distinction mattered to Torch.
“When Ashcraft realized I didn’t know what he was talking about, he…” She swallowed hard. “I didn’t believe in magic. I was just working there because I had nowhere else to be. I was trying to sell my jewelry on the side, and Lars said…it was good. He said he could get my work into some galleries. And I…” She laughed harshly. “I believed that. Now I know black magic is more believable.” She lifted her chin. “I slept with him.”
Torch, who had taken the chair across the corner from her, sat back. His hand, resting on the table, fisted. “Did he hurt you?”
She gritted her teeth. “Would that have made it better? If I’d been frightened and innocent?”
Torch glared at her. “No. But I would kill him slower.”
The tension cramping her spine for weeks finally eased, and she exhaled shakily. No one had ever threatened to kill on her behalf. That was criminal, wrong. And kind of sweet. “I slept with him because I was bored,” she said at last. “And lonely.” She bit the inner flesh of her lower lip before admitting, “And thinking about those galleries. I invited him to a new exhibit at the art museum in Salt Lake, and we saw Esme there. Of course I introduced them, but they’d actually met before, although neither could remember where. When they were trying to figure it out, I realized they were the better couple. I left.” She hesitated, then revised, “I stormed out. At the time I was so hurt because neither one seemed to notice. Now I know he chose her to be his lure. His dragon bait.” She looked up at Torch, misery twisting in her gut. “I left my friend with a warlock.”
“You didn’t know.” He sat forward, his gaze drilling into her as if he could dig out her remorse. “You couldn’t have known.”
“By the time I realized my uncle was in debt to him and Esme was enthralled, Ashcraft had decided I could be useful too.” She let out a sharper breath, not quite a curse. “To get my uncle and Esme free, all I had to do was kill a dragon. You know the rest.”
“Not even close. Why did Ashcraft want dragon ichor?”
“He never told me.” She wrinkled her nose. “I…might’ve told him he was insane to believe in dragons.”
Torch snorted. “That must’ve gone over well.”
“He blew some strange dust on my car and it rusted like an old tin can—when really it was a fairly new tin can—right before my eyes while he calmly explained that he didn’t give a fuck what I believed.”
Torch nodded sharply. “That gives me a sense of what he can do. What else?”
For the first time, Anjali felt a tiny glimmer of hope. “Have you fought warlocks before?”
“Hell no. I didn’t believe in them either.”
She tucked her chin and shot him a withering glance. “You’re kidding me.”
He sat back, spreading his hands wide. “You gotta admit. Black magic. Enthrallment. Sounds kind of far-fetched, right?”
She sputtered. “To a dragon?”
He let his hands fall to the arms of the chair. The metallic tattoos over his forearms glimmered when his hands clenched, and he swiveled to stare out the window. “So much magic has left the world. We make believe with places like the Keep, but…” In profile, his pensive expression captivated her like the hard gems and soft metals she’d used in her art, morphing in front of her eyes into a new shape: not dragon, not man, just…a being, like her. “Sometimes I think the Nox Incendi dragons are dying out because we don’t believe anymore ourselves.”
Anjali stared at him. Maybe she’d been blinded by all that hard muscle—not her fault considering the way those tattoos gleamed aaaall the way down when he stripped. He was half beast, half thug. He’d terrified her and let her fall.
But…he had a touch of poetry in him that drew her to him like a…like a jeweler to a sparkle. Even though she’d flunked out of her poetry class since it had been too early on Monday mornings.
“Lars Ashcraft is the real deal,” she said. “Which sucks. But I guess because of him, I’ve realized that magic isn’t something separate from our world, just…mostly forgotten.”
He studied her a moment. “You seemed to believe dragons have no place on this Earth. Do you blame all of us for your mother’s death?”
She twisted her chair so she didn’t have to look at him while she stared out the window. “I didn’t even know you existed until my uncle confessed. I guess…” She shrugged. “I probably wasn’t thinking clearly.”
“Blame Ashcraft for that,” Torch said darkly.
But she shook her head. “If I do something stupid, I own it. I should never have gotten mixed up with Ashcraft. I knew something was off. Nothing that good is real.” She slanted a glance at him. “Which is why I guess I have to admit dragons exist.”
His lips twisted in a smirk. “Because we aren’t good?”
“
You
aren’t, at least.”
He inclined his head, jagged blond locks bristling. “I won’t lie.”
And maybe that was why—even though he was half monster and wholly scary—she trusted him. He might drop her through the clouds, but he wouldn’t lie to her.
She twisted her chair square to the table and leaned across to grab the takeout bag he’d brought. “Okay, so how do we destroy Ashcraft?”
***
Torch had to give her credit: when Anjali Herne decided to do something, she did it.
While they ate their midnight snack, she relived every interaction she had with Ashcraft, both before she knew what he was and after he’d tricked/blackmailed her into helping him kill a dragon.
“He was
too
slick,” she said. “He decided where we went, what we ate. But I couldn’t object because he always got what I wanted. Like he was reading my mind.” She peered at him. “Can warlocks do that?”
“I probably know less about warlocks that you do.”
She stared at him incredulously a moment then scoffed. “A man admitting he doesn’t know?”
“Not a man here,” he reminded her.
She narrowed her eyes at that, and he realized she
had
sort of forgotten he wasn’t
only
what he looked like at the moment.
Or hadn’t wanted to remember.
His dragon didn’t appreciate her inattention and it twisted upward. He flexed his fingers and speared a veggie pot sticker on the one gleaming talon that appeared. He held it up to admire the morsel of golden fried goodness then popped it in his mouth and chewed.
Her eyes narrowed another degree, hazel shadowed by the dark thicket of her lashes. “I had the impression dragons always consorted with magicians. The witch doctor who went after my uncle was able to call on a dragon to do his dirty work.”
Torch swallowed the pot sticker and a mouthful of the Chinese beer he’d brought along as accompaniment. “My clan is small, and we’ve been isolated a long time. Our focus has been on survival.”
She looked down at her salad then nodded. “The petralys. Piper told me a little about it. Said it was a toxic contaminant that was fatal to your kind.”
He peered at her. “She told
me
you thought it was a good thing, that if Ashcraft took the ichor himself, he’d be killed by the petralys.”
She winced. “At the time I was thinking about getting Ashcraft to release Esme, not what it meant to you.”
Was she taking that into consideration now? He sat back with his beer. It shouldn’t matter what she felt. He needed her only long enough to learn what he could about this new threat facing the Nox Incendi. As if a poison in their veins trying to kill them wasn’t bad enough, they had an evil warlock looking to speed up the inevitable end.
“What exactly is the essence of a dragon? What can it do?” Anjali pushed away from the table, taking her beer with her.
For some reason it pleased him that she’d chosen the second beer and not the sparkling water or the wine. Not that their matching preference in beverages mattered any more than her changing attitude toward dragons.
“Humans have always stolen the bodies of beasts,” he said. “Our skins, teeth, claws, fucking gall bladders, you name it. But alchemists ascribed special power to dragon blood, dragonfire, and our ichor.”
Her brow furrowing, she crossed her legs out in front, her new shoes tapping impatiently. “Ichor…is not blood?”
His dragon focused on the tapping, twitching to pounce. The pricey pink ribbons emphasized the delicate bones of her ankles, and he hung onto his bottle lest he reach for the swank curve of her calf. The strength he sensed under that lush flesh reminded him she wasn’t just kidding about using her sharp heel as a weapon.
He shook his head. What the hell were they talking about? “Ichor flows through our body like blood, but not the same.”
Letting out the dragon just enough to shift another lone talon, he set the razor tip to his forearm and carved a shallow path.
Anjali sucked in a harsh breath and stiffened. She grabbed a paper napkin as scarlet welled in the cut.
But his dragon was restless and roused, and before the blood could spill, the opalescent glimmer of ichor flashed across the wound.
Her gasp was louder this time. He nudged his hand under her slack fingers to grab a napkin, and he wiped away the thin line of blood to show her the pale mark of healing flesh underneath.
“Our inhuman strength and speed comes from our beast, like any shapeshifter, but the ichor is something else. It powers the essence of what we are—a Nox Incendi dragon.”
“Nox Incendi,” she repeated softly. “The burning night.”
He nodded. “But the petralys—the stone blight—turns ichor to stone. And us along with it.”
He showed her the sheen of ichor on the napkin then wadded the blood-dotted paper in his hand and tossed it upward. With a click of his teeth and one beer breath, he ignited the paper in midair.
Even that tiny smear of ichor was enough to erupt in a tiny fireball with all the hues in the visible spectrum of light and more than human eye could see.
Instead of flinching back, Anjali had leaned forward, her fingers gripping the edge of the table. The fireball reflected in her wide eyes before vanishing without even a puff of smoke.
Torch took another draught of his beer to hide his surprise at her lack of fear. Then he thought of how far he’d had to drop her. Anjali Herne wasn’t intimidated by him or his dragon.
Why that should please him so…
After a long moment, her dazzled gaze shifted to him. She cleared her throat and matched him, drink for drink. “So, Ashcraft wants to be able to belch rainbows?”
He spread his fingers away from the beer bottle in an acknowledging gesture. “Who wouldn’t? But that, plus all our treasure, probably. And immortality.”
That did make her slump back in her chair. “You’re immortal,” she whispered.