Hidden Embers (2 page)

He was across the room, his hand reaching to open one of the cupboards, before he finally regained control, finally stopped himself as the dragon screamed inside him. He thought of Dylan and Phoebe, Gabe and Logan, Michael and Shawn and Tyler—and despised himself for even thinking of taking the coward’s way out. He might have lost all hope, but his friends, his
clan mates
, hadn’t. Was he really selfish enough to off himself and take even that small grain of hope away from them?

His hand fell back to his side, sharp talons poking through his fingertips before he could stop them. No, he wasn’t that selfish. Wasn’t that pathetic.

At least not yet.

He wouldn’t kill himself and leave Dylan to clean up the mess. He owed his king far too much to take the easy way out.

And yet the despair swamped him, overwhelmed him, until all he could see or hear or feel was the utter darkness of it. Sinking to the floor, he laid his head on his knees and prayed for some idea of what he should do next. But as with so many of his prayers of late, this one went unanswered.

CHAPTER ONE

“T
hat was the worst one yet.” Quinn kept his voice level through sheer will, though everything inside him was screaming for release, for revenge.

“Each case seems to be a little worse than the one before it,” agreed Phoebe Quillum, his research partner and the clan’s soon-to-be-queen. Her normally clinical voice was tempered with so much sympathy, it nearly suffocated him. “As if every full-blown infection mutates the virus just enough to make the suffering worse for whoever contracts it next.”

“Not surprising when you think of the bastards who created this thing. Silus probably had his mad scientists do it on purpose.”

“There’s no ‘probably’ about it, Quinn. They had to have engineered it this way. There’s no other explanation for how this is happening—sure, viruses mutate, change, all the time. But this one does it in an incredibly complex pattern. Its abilities have to be manufactured, the result of genetic engineering.”

He hadn’t thought he could feel any worse than he already did. Trust Phoebe to change that. She always knew just what to say.

“This can’t keep going on.” His fist came down so hard on the crash cart that he dented the thing. “If we can’t get inside its walls, then we have to find a way to immunize against it. I don’t know how many more of these deaths I can sit through.”

“It’s far too sophisticated for a virus—even one that was manufactured in a lab.” Phoebe hadn’t even heard him. She was muttering now, taking notes on the small pad of paper that went everywhere with her, and he knew she was talking as much to herself as she was to him. “It has the brutality and quickness of Ebola coupled with the sophistication of lupus. Which doesn’t make sense, even after looking at it under a microscope and taking it apart for months like we have. If they could create this damn thing in a lab, we should be able to tear it apart in much the same way. I can’t believe the Wyvernmoon scientists are really that much further ahead medically than we are.”

Quinn didn’t respond, but his entire body tightened at the mention of the enemy clan. For centuries the Wyvernmoons had been trying to wipe the Dragonstar clan out of existence, but it wasn’t until recently—until their king had hit on this damn virus as a weapon of annihilation—that they’d had any success. Of course, Silus was dead now, killed by Phoebe a few weeks before, but the virus was stronger than ever. The Wyvernmoon council obviously wasn’t letting a little thing like losing a king affect their long-term goals.

He started to apologize to Phoebe for not being able to come up with a solution, or facts that either supported or debunked her opinion, but, judging by her expression, she wasn’t looking for a response, just someone to bounce ideas off of.

Not that he was surprised. He’d heard her express the same sentiment a million times in the few months she’d been with his clan, and she was right. That didn’t make the devastation wrought by the disease any easier to swallow.

Unable to bear a reexamination of the fucked-up state they were in, he concentrated instead on cleaning up the patient. He could do that if he thought of the man lying there as only a patient. Or at least, that’s what he told himself.

The bleed-out had been quick and ugly, death coming even faster than usual. Quinn tried to tell himself that a death this fast—only eighteen hours from the onset of the symptoms—was a blessing, but he didn’t really believe it. How could he when he’d seen Michael scream in agony and had been unable to do anything? Though Quinn was trying his best to compartmentalize, the wall he’d built around his emotions crumbled, leaving him feeling raw and exposed.

“I’ll do it, Quinn.” Phoebe’s hand stroked his back gently, cutting off his self-destructive thoughts, while she removed the blood-soaked rag from his hand. She rinsed it in the basin of warm water on the table next to the bed, then reached forward to stroke the rag over his younger brother’s still and bloody face.

His fingers curled into his fists, his talons poking through his fingertips and scoring his palm. He wanted to argue with her, to tell her that Michael was his responsibility and no one else’s. But the beast was too close, and if he opened his mouth right now, he was certain that only a growl would come out. He wanted to lash out at something, at someone, and Phoebe was a convenient target.

As the scent of fresh blood—Michael’s blood—permeated the room, Dylan stepped between the two of them. His gaze was steady but rife with warning, and it was clear he was no longer content to observe silently. “You don’t have to be here. Not for this.”

Again, Quinn didn’t answer, and Dylan didn’t push him—though his king had every right to expect an answer. They’d been friends since childhood, long before either had suspected that Dylan, a second son, would have to take up the reins of ruling their clan. But friendship—even four centuries of it—got them only so far. Especially when the king’s mate was involved and the threat against her was coming from one of Dylan’s sentries, who was sworn to protect her.

Instead of arguing, Quinn backed off—as much as he was able. Let his clenched hands open, forced his claws back under the surface, tried to calm his breathing. It wasn’t much, but it seemed to reassure Dylan, whose shoulders relaxed even as he kept himself between his mate and his best friend.

“I’m not leaving.” His voice was much harsher than usual, weighed down by too much loss and too many years of failure.

“Of course you’re not,” Phoebe soothed, as she rinsed out the bloody rag a second time before moving back to the body.

Back to Michael.

Quinn and Phoebe both knew the nurses could have done this—it was their job, after all. In fact, two were currently hovering at the door, waiting to be called in. Normally Samantha, the older of the two, would have come in and demanded to take over, even without Quinn’s instructing her to do so. But Dylan’s presence must have intimidated her because she simply watched and waited instead.

As he observed, Quinn told himself he should stop her. Phoebe administering to the body. She had a PhD in biochemistry from Yale and a medical degree from Stanford—this should have been beneath her. But she was doing it for him. Even as the rage ate him from the inside, he recognized that—and tried to keep the dragon under control. She didn’t deserve to have his fury, his utter and complete hopelessness, leak onto her. Not when she was only trying to help.

Silence stretched between the three of them, tense and forbidding and overwhelming. He closed his eyes and imagined killing everyone involved in the creation of this virus, imagined ripping them open with a quick strike of his talons and then leaving them to bleed out as Michael had done.

As so many Dragonstars had done.

For years now, this virus had ravaged his people. The first case had shown up a few decades before, but it hadn’t spread, and while he’d saved samples for research, Quinn and the other clan doctors had considered it nothing but a bizarre anomaly. At least until it resurfaced a decade ago, spreading and killing off clan members in larger and larger numbers. By the time they’d started to take it seriously, to understand that a disease could actually bring down the normally impervious dragons, it had been too late. The thing had gotten a stranglehold on the clan.

Even then, as he’d fought the thing day and night, Quinn hadn’t realized what it had taken Phoebe only a few weeks to pick up on—that the disease had been manufactured specifically to attack the Dragonstars. That it had been created to bring the clan to its knees.

The Wyvernmoons were the likely suspects—how could they not be, as they’d spent centuries attacking the Dragonstars? A brutal clan with little money and almost no status among the four dragon communities in North America, the Wyverns wanted the land, resources and power that the Dragonstars had—badly enough to kill for it. Badly enough to die for it, as any head-on attack was met with brutal force by Dylan.

But this disease, this insidious little virus, was doing what centuries of fighting couldn’t, and if it continued at this rate, their clan would be nothing more than an empty shell, one that was ripe for conquering.

The loss of his brother combined with his rage at the Wyvernmoons ate at his control, making matters worse until Phoebe finally spoke.

“I want to call someone. I have a friend who works for the CDC in the infectious diseases department and specializes in fast-working hemorrhagic viruses. I think she might be able to see something that we’ve missed.”

Quinn stiffened as an instinctive protest rose within him. He didn’t want someone else in his lab—
anyone
else, let alone another human woman. It had been hard enough for his beast to accept Phoebe’s constant presence when she’d first arrived—dragons were territorial, and the lab, not to mention the health of his people, had been Quinn’s exclusive responsibility for as long as he could remember.

Eventually, his dragon had accepted Phoebe because she was a brilliant scientist, and, even more important, because of her relationship with Dylan. But bringing someone else in—someone who didn’t have ties to the clan—was out of the question.

He looked to Dylan for support, certain that his king would feel the same way. After all, their clan—and all the dragon shifters, for that matter—had survived for millennia by keeping their presence shrouded in secrecy. The idea that they should bring yet another human into their confidence was as laughable as it was impossible.

But Dylan didn’t immediately shoot down Phoebe’s suggestion. Instead, he seemed to be mulling it over, something Quinn couldn’t understand.

“Are you insane?” Quinn demanded. “You want to bring the CDC in? They’ll be all over this in seconds, and we’ll all end up in government labs somewhere.”

“I didn’t say we’d bring in the entire CDC,” Phoebe told him quietly. “Just Dr. Kane.”

“Like that’s an improvement? You bring one, you bring them all, Phoebe. You know that as well as I do.”

Dylan growled low in his throat. It was a definite reprimand for how Quinn was speaking to his future queen. It was also a threat, but he was too pissed off to care. Besides, theirs wasn’t a clan that stood on ceremony.

“It’s a stupid idea, Dylan, and if you weren’t blinded by your feelings for her, you would know that. Yes, you brought Phoebe in and it worked out pretty well, but then again, she turned out to be a dragon. How many humans are you going to let in on this? Sure, we could use a specialist in hemorrhagic viruses, but I’m learning as much as I can about them as fast as I can.”

“Reading doesn’t substitute for experience, Quinn.” Phoebe’s voice was soft and reasonable, a direct contrast to the violent emotions ripping through him. “If it did, you never would have agreed to let Dylan bring me here.”

“He didn’t.” Dylan’s voice cut through the tension. “I did it against his will, against the will of most of my sentries. Part of the reason he’s arguing so hard now is because he knows that if I think it’s the right thing to do, I’ll do it again—with or without his approval.”

“Fuck you, Dylan.” The rage was a living thing inside of Quinn now, tearing into him from all directions. He focused on it, used it. Anger was much better than the grief and helplessness that lay right beneath it. “You aren’t always right—you just think you are.”

Dylan’s laugh was anything but amused. “How many people have you lost to this damn disease, Quinn? How much time has passed since we first found it? No matter how hard you work—how hard Phoebe works—we’re still empty-handed.” He paused, ran a frustrated hand through his long black hair. “I would think you, of all people, would be interested in pursuing every avenue possible. But if you’ve got a better suggestion, then please let me hear it.”

Quinn’s silence said more than he wanted, but Dylan didn’t rub it in. He wasn’t that kind of king—or friend. Instead, he spread his arms wide and said, “Look, we can’t keep losing people, not in these numbers. Not if we want to survive. We’ve already tried raiding the Wyvernmoons, looking for the doctors that created this thing, but we’ve had no luck so far. And after we burned half the compound to get Phoebe out last month, they’re locked down tighter than ever.”

Dylan’s voice smoldered with leftover anger that his enemies had dared take his mate in an effort to weaken him. But he didn’t let it distract him—proof that he was slowly getting over the ordeal that had nearly ripped him apart a few short weeks before. Quinn could admire him for it, even as he disagreed with the decision he knew was coming.

“You and Phoebe are making advances, no doubt about it. But you’re too slow.”

Quinn protested, “You can’t rush science, Dylan. Avenues have to be explored, hypotheses made.”

“Believe me, I understand that. Which is why I think that the more people we have exploring those avenues, the better the chance we have at solving this thing.”

“More isn’t always better. Bringing in another human—especially one connected to the CDC—isn’t the answer. Can’t you both see how risky that is?”

“What’s risky is allowing this to go on, Quinn.” Phoebe paused from cleaning up Michael long enough to turn to him. “The clan is dying. This virus isn’t picking out the weak, the sick, the submissive. It’s preying on the strongest, most vital members of the community—as if it was designed to do just that. How many more people have to die before you acknowledge that we can’t do this alone?”