She sighed. “But some people win. Just…never me. From the time my mom died and Uncle Gwain and I snuck out of New Orleans in the middle of the day because he said it was safer than being out at night, I realized the universe doesn’t favor everyone equally. There are winners and losers. And I’m the latter.”
His jaw flexed. “You can change.” When she shook her head stubbornly, he grunted. “I’m a shapeshifter. I think I’d know about change.”
“I’m not a shapeshifter,” she pointed out. “I’m stuck forever like this.” She swept one hand down her body.
His gaze followed the path of her gesture. “Seems like I hit a jackpot then.”
Despite the little burst of pleasure at his regard, she scowled. “I’m trying to tell you not to count on me. Esme and Piper did, and look where it got them.”
She felt like she’d tried to warn him, but they were at the Amber Suite. He reached for her again, wrapping one hand at her nape under her dreadlocks. She leaned toward him, her knees a little wobbly.
“Don’t sell yourself short,” he said. “You’re not done yet.”
“Last night, I almost was.” She hooked her fingers over the taut muscles in his forearm. “If not for you.”
His wicked grin flashed like lightning. “Any time.”
And then he was gone, taking the lightning with him.
She sighed and turned to the suite doors.
Obviously he’d decided she wasn’t going to run away anymore. But at the thought of facing Piper and Esme without him, she really, really wanted to. Instead, she knocked softly.
It was a long minute before the door opened to Piper’s flat expression. Anjali suspected her erstwhile friend had watched her through the peephole for part of that time.
“Hey,” she said when it was clear Piper wasn’t going to step back. “Can I come in?”
Piper glanced past her as if looking for an excuse to shut the door. “Ez is sleeping. She…had a bad night.”
Anjali winced. Considering the night she’d just had… “I just wanted to stop in and tell you, I’m on your side.”
For a moment, Piper stood blocking the doorway. She was dressed in soft yoga pants and a cozy sweater with threads of gold running through that matched the jeweled hair clips highlighting the burnished bronze in her loosely curling locks. With her jaw thrust out, she looked a million miles from the nervous young co-ed who’d insisted on taking the smallest bedroom in Esme’s swank apartment.
Now she’d found a dragon, but more, she’d found herself.
She studied Anjali. “I never doubted that, actually. You’ve always been true to your friends. But I’m Rave’s solarys now, and my circle is bigger than when it was just us three trying to figure out what we were doing with our lives.”
“I know,” Anjali said. “And when I say I’m on your side”—she let out a harsh breath—“I mean I’m with the dragons too.”
Piper tilted her head. “Just like that? Last night you were still willing to kill Torch.”
Anjali twisted her lips. “Well, I might still want that.”
Strangely—or maybe not—that made Piper open the door wider with an answering wry grin. “He’s kind of a beast, isn’t he?”
She stepped back, making room for Anjali. It felt like old times. If old times had included warlocks, dragons, and thousand-dollar-a-night suites instead of a day-old pizza and trying to find someone to buy beer for their underage asses.
Or maybe that was just her since Esme had care packages of ninety-year-old scotch from her grandmother and Piper had been too busy studying to drink.
The floor-to-ceiling windows of the suite looked out to the city, but the bustle of traffic and ant-sized bodies seemed very far away, idly interesting maybe but not important.
Anjali wondered if this was how Torch saw the world.
Was it how he saw her?
She shook off the wondering because that wasn’t important either.
“Have you had breakfast?” Piper asked from the kitchen area.
Anjali glanced back at her and shook her head. Piper brought a tray of cheese and chocolate-drizzled croissants to the coffee table. By the time Anjali had assembled a plate for herself, Piper had brought her own cup and a clean mug along with the French press to the couch.
Anjali looked at the extra mug Piper had left on the counter. Rave’s, probably. There was a time they might have giggled about their mornings-after while Esme shook her head in fond exasperation.
“Is it…” She cleared her throat. “What’s it like being a dragon’s mate?”
Piper leaned back, staring out the window for a moment. The early spring light cast a metallic sheen over her deep brown eyes. “I’ve known him for just a few days. And it feels like forever.”
Forever… “Torch mentioned that dragon-shifters are basically immortal, and maybe that’s why Ashcraft wants their ichor.”
Piper nodded. “We talked about that. Seems like a possibility. What megalomaniac doesn’t seek immortality?”
Anjali looked at her wonderingly. “So…since you are a dragon’s…solarys, are you immortal now?”
“No, I’m still me.” Piper took a casual sip from her coffee, as if Anjali had asked her about the weather. “But sharing Rave’s ichor has some benefits beyond creating a bond between us. Like better healing, some heightened sensory perception, and…uh, other things.” She smiled secretively down into her mug.
After last night, Anjali thought she could guess—with one try, even—what those unmentionable
other things
were.
Piper lifted her head, her smile turning misty. “In the absence of warlocks and other dragonslayers, we’ll live longer and stronger than most. But in the end, I will die. And Rave will die with me.”
Anjali flinched. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean…”
“No, it freaked me out too. As his solarys, I’m the heart of his treasure. That sounds so romantic and beautiful. And it
is
. But when I’m gone, the core of his dragon hoard—
his heart
—will be lost too.” She brushed a fingertip over her trembling lips. “He says not all the gold and gems in the world would be enough to fill the break. He’s told me there are secret shrines around the world where Nox Incendi dragons have turned to stone over the graves of their solarys. An everlasting marker of their true love.”
Silence pulsed, and Anjali swore the sun shone a little brighter.
Or maybe that was a refraction off the sheen over her eyes.
Piper gave herself a little shake. “Anyway, according to Rave’s notes from medieval alchemists, dragon blood and ichor conferred all sorts of magical properties, including the ever-popular transmutation of lead into gold.”
Anjali was more than willing to focus on the one being that needed to die. “The ash-hole has plenty of money.”
Piper shrugged. “Once you find something you want, nothing seems like enough.”
Peering at her friend, Anjali looked for the sixteen-year-old college freshman who’d once hoped only to land a good-paying job so she could help pay her family’s bills. At the time, in some sick way, Anjali had envied her for
having
family that needed her. Uncle Gwain had been too secretive to let her close after her mother’s death.
Now she wished she’d never found out why.
Her throat tightened. “I…I wish I’d told you what was happening. I couldn’t believe it myself.” She took a hasty sip of the hot coffee to clear away the choking lump. “But now you’re throwing around dragons and transmutations like a lifer.”
Piper’s lips curled. “Crazy, right? All those years when we were making fun of Papi Herne’s House of Hazy Daze, only to find out the weird stuff in his shop was legit.”
Anjali shook her head. “Only some of it. But now that I know what to look for, I still can’t believe the things he left out for any undergrad stoner to stumble over.”
“Now that you know what to look for…” Piper mused. “So how are we stopping Lars?”
Anjali wilted back on the couch. “I already told Torch everything I can think of.”
“Right, you said. But what can you
do
?”
Blinking at her friend, Anjali repeated weakly, “Do?”
“Magic,” Piper elaborated. “What magic can you do?”
“Uh… How about
nothing
?”
“But your uncle is a magic user.”
Anjali’s fingers tightened on the mug, as if she could choke it. “He stole it. And got my mother killed.”
Piper touched her hand in sympathy. “That must’ve been so terrible to hear. But maybe you inherited the ability.”
“To steal?” Anjali glared at Piper. “And get people killed? Yeah, apparently I didn’t fall far from the tree.”
“No,” Piper said with a hint of impatience that was as new as her rocking the hair jewelry. “Being a witch.”
Anjali recoiled.
Growing up in New Orleans, she’d heard the talk around her parish about who had the best love potions and who was mucking with gris-gris, but it had been as much background noise as the jazz—just part of her world. After her mother’s death and their flight to the desert, the memories had been glossed over like the brochures luring tourists to the French Quarter, not reality.
But after everything Uncle Gwain had told her…
“I don’t know,” she murmured. “Wouldn’t I know something like that?”
“Maybe you did,” Piper said. “Bale said the rings you made for me and Esme have magic in them.”
Anjali scowled down at her hand with the opal ring. She’d struggled over the rings in her metal-working class, and she’d searched for exactly the right stones for each of them—but magic? “Who’s Bale? And why would he know more about it than I do?”
Piper nibbled at her lower lip, as if maybe she’d revealed more than she intended—she’d done that a lot in college too. “He’s Rave’s brother,” she said at last. “Torch’s cousin.”
He was more than that obviously. “So, another dragon-shifter,” Anjali prodded.
Piper nodded. “And he’s the leader of their clan. Their king, actually.”
What kind of beast ruled among powerful shapeshifters? He had to be the oldest and strongest of them. So okay, maybe he did know more than she did. And Torch came from their royal line?
No wonder he was so arrogant.
Piper held out her hand. The coppery flecks in the sunstone caught the light and flashed a warning. “Bale told me he could…read the rings, I guess. He said they had power.”
Anjali shifted uneasily on the soft cushions. “Lots of people believe crystals and gems have magic. We sell all sorts of stones in the shop, but…” She shrugged. “Don’t you think if they had real power, someone would’ve noticed by now?”
Piper smiled. “You’d think dragons would be pretty hard to miss too.”
With a snort, Anjali put her mug down and twisted off her ring. She held it up to the light. The braided silver and gold looked half-assed to her. Hers had been the first she made, then Piper’s, then Esme’s. She would’ve submitted Esme’s for her grade if she hadn’t had to drop out to go work at the shop.
“So what kind of magic does it have?” she wondered.
Piper shook her head. “Bale used it to tell me where to find you when you and Esme left the Keep. But I think that was mostly his natural ability to home in on sparkly things.” She touched the clip in her hair. “Dragons like sparkle.”
“So it’s not so much the stones that have power but the person who has power over them,” Anjali said. “Or not person, as the case may be.”
“Seems like if anybody might have that ability, it would be the niece of Papi Herne, voodoo priest extraordinaire.”
Anjali scowled. “That’s just the name he puts on the door of the shop.”
“Do you remember the time we snuck into the shop and you set that serpent illusion on April Fool’s Day to surprise him?”
A smile tugged at Anjali’s mouth. “He was furious.”
“And maybe scared? What if he thought it was you, using your power?”
“Then why wouldn’t he tell me?”
“Because then he’d have to admit what happened to your mother.” Piper spun her own ring on her finger. “Because he was afraid what happened to her might happen to you.”
Reluctantly, Anjali remembered her mother leaving the last time she’d been alive. She’d taken Uncle Gwain’s old beater car, swearing it was hers because she’d bought it for him when he couldn’t ever make it to the bus on time to get to his intermittent jobs. There’d been the fiery car crash… Fiery because of a dragon, she knew now, in an attack that had been aimed at her uncle who’d wanted only to be respected in the parish, sought after for his charm. And his charms.
How had she forgotten the neighbors who’d gathered on the front porch to touch her hands in grief and whisper over her small head that they couldn’t believe death had found Queenie Herne without a fight, that shiftless Gwain would never command the parish as his sister did. But her uncle had taken her away the very next day, and with the deep roots of her life torn up, no wonder she hadn’t considered what it all meant.
Uncle Gwain had wanted what his sister had—he’d wanted magic.
“But
I
don’t have power,” Anjali insisted, stuffing down the painful memories welling out of her like mold from a flooded basement. “If I did, I wouldn’t have let Ashcraft fuck with us.”
Piper’s jaw jutted, just a little bit. And Anjali remembered that sometimes Pipsqueak put her foot down. “I think he chose you
because
you have power. Even if you didn’t know it, or how to use it.” She held up her fist, knuckles out, the sunstone sparking. “He saw your ring, and he knew, just like Bale did. That’s why he gave the dragon trap to you, not one of his minions.”
Anjali sucked in her lower lip to keep from swearing. She didn’t need another reason to hate Lars Ashcraft, but apparently she had one anyway. “Great, so they all know, but I don’t, so how does this help us?”
Piper narrowed her eyes. “I’m not sure. Yet. But give me a minute.”
There was no riddle that the indefatigable Miss Ramirez wouldn’t solve. Maybe that was why she’d taken to the idea of dragons so easily when the rest of the world would’ve been pulling the covers over their heads.
Unlike her. She’d been pushing back the covers to let a dragon into her bed.
Well, his bed…
A low, anguished moan jolted her upright. “What—?”
Piper’s lips pinched. “Esme. She has nightmares. During the day.” She stood. “I just have to wake her enough to break their hold. I’ll be right back.”