Chapter 31
Thorne was knocked backward several feet. Blaze watched in horror as a dark hole opened in his chest, burning blue fire at the edges and dripping blood. He howled, a gout of flame shooting into the air, and he dropped Rebel, who rolled away from him.
Her stasis spell had slipped away. Thorne’s dragon form seemed to resist magic more strongly than his human form, and she was still weak. Another wave of dizziness rolled over her and she had to grab on to Zane until her head cleared.
Thorne snapped his teeth at Tempest. With an outraged roar, Tyr leaped off the roof, still in dragon form, his claws outstretched to attack Thorne.
Thorne’s barbed tail whipped around and slammed into Tyr, knocking him sideways into a maple tree. Rebel had managed to make it over to Tempest and crawl to her feet. Thorne lunged at them and Tempest fired again. Thorne ducked his head just in time and the magic bullet went past, almost hitting Tyr.
Zane jumped off the roof, yelling at Tempest. “Don’t shoot!” Rebel whipped around and went into a fighting crouch, knife at the ready.
Thorne darted his head at Tempest, his mouth opening wide to show sharp, wicked, six-inch teeth. Tyr landed on Thorne’s back, raking his claws into it.
Zane raced to get in between Thorne and the women, yelling at his brothers. Blaze could do nothing but watch, her heart in her throat. Those teeth could bite Tempest in half, and right now Thorne didn’t seem to care who he hurt.
Then Tempest, the shy, nervous girl who could barely talk to Blaze in her shop, hauled off and smacked Thorne’s dragon on the side of the nose with her gun. “Stop that!” she demanded. “Don’t you dare hurt my sister.” Her voice seemed to reverberate through the yard, and she began to glow with a faint golden light.
She glared around her. “All of you, just stop it right now!”
Blaze felt a blast of power surge out of Tempest. Astoundingly, all the dragons froze. Tyr turned human and dropped to the ground, staring.
Blaze jumped off the roof, using a small levitation spell to give herself a soft landing. She was still weak, though, and the impact jarred her from head to toe.
Thorne was growling, his head weaving back and forth slightly and his eyes whirling with that eerie red light, but at least he wasn’t attacking.
What had Tempest done? Blaze had sensed no witch power in her when she visited the shop, but she’d frozen three dragons in their tracks.
She walked up behind the sisters. Immediately, they trained their weapons on her—Tempest with the Colt and Rebel with the knife.
Zane growled.
“It’s okay,” Blaze said to him.
“No, it’s not,” Rebel snarled. “You attack us with dragons, you don’t get to say it’s okay.”
Oh, hell. This was a hot damn mess. And nothing she said was going to make it any better. “Sorry,” she said. “My name is Blaze McKenna. We met the other day, in your store? I looked different.”
Rebel gave her a sharp look. “And this is your idea of a social call? Get the hell out of here before my sister shoots you, and take your dragons with you.”
Thorne made a pained, strangled sound.
“Unfortunately, I don’t think I can. At least, not while Thorne is having a meltdown.” She gave a deep sigh. “We need to talk.”
It took some serious persuading to get Rebel and Tempest to hear them out. Finally, though, they were all sitting in plastic chairs on the porch. Rebel and Tempest were on one side, Rebel with her feet propped up on the railing and the gun in her lap, and Tempest clutching her notebook and pen in a death grip. The power and authority she’d radiated a little while ago had faded, and she was just a shy, anxious young woman with frizzy hair and a dragon t-shirt over her yoga pants.
Blue dragons, Blaze noticed.
She and Tyr were sitting across from the sisters. Thorne’s temper seemed to have riled Zane up as well, and he was pacing back and forth behind their chairs. Thorne, still a dragon, was doing his pacing in the backyard, favoring his front leg where Rebel had stabbed him, blood oozing slowly from the wound on his chest. He never took his eyes off Rebel.
“Is he okay?” Tempest asked for the fourth time. “I didn’t mean to hurt him.” Her pen hand kept twitching, as if she wanted to write in her notebook and was just barely stopping herself.
“He should be all right,” Zane said. “It depends what kind of spells are on that gun.”
He looked expectantly at Rebel.
“Oh, so now I’m supposed to tell you so you can neutralize my only weapon? Do I look like an idiot?” she snapped.
“Are you sure he’s not badly hurt?” Tempest sounded anxious now.
Rebel slammed her feet to the porch floor, making it shake. “They sent a dragon to fucking attack us! And you’re worried you hurt it?”
Tyr said to Tempest, “Honestly, Thorne wouldn’t hurt your sister.”
“He’d only kidnap me,” Rebel snarled. “That’s fine, though. Everybody thinks kidnapping’s okay.”
“We did come to stop him,” Zane pointed out.
“Oh, is that what that was?” Rebel said. “Nice job. Maybe you should have tried smacking him on the nose with a magic Colt.”
A rueful smile tilted the corner of Tyr’s mouth. “I’ll keep it in mind for the future.”
Tempest shifted her attention to him. “You’re Tyr,” she said. “You come in my store sometimes and talk about legends and fairy tales. And now you’re a dragon. Dragons are real and you didn’t tell me. You just let me…”
She trailed off, and Blaze wondered what she had been about to say.
“I couldn’t tell you,” Tyr said. “We can’t just go around revealing ourselves to humans.”
“And yet—” Rebel gestured toward Thorne.
“Well, obviously,” Zane said, “he’s not supposed to be doing that.” He still sounded angry, and Blaze wasn’t sure why he couldn’t calm down.
Tempest fixed her eyes on Thorne. “He’s so beautiful.”
He was. His midnight-blue scales caught the light, making him shimmer like he was covered in sapphires. They shaded to deep purple on his underbody, almost black.
Rebel said flatly, “Stop admiring him. He wants to eat you.”
Before she could stop herself, Blaze murmured, “He wants to eat you.”
Zane glared at her, his expression saying, ‘not helping.’ “No, he doesn’t,” he said. “He thinks you have an important artifact—one that should belong to us.”
Rebel turned to him, surprised. “That idol? I thought you had that.” She shifted her attention to Blaze. “You took it last night. I saw you grab it before the doors blew.”
“Not the idol,” Tyr said. He described the Seals to Rebel. “Have you ever seen anything like that? Or anything with one of those symbols?”
She rolled her eyes. “Dragonflies, dolphins and phoenixes? Can you be a little more vague? There’s only about a zillion art pieces in the world with one of those animals on it somewhere.” She tilted her chair back, toying with her Colt. “More to the point, even if I had seen your Seals, why should I help you?”
“Maybe to save a couple million lives?” In quick, sharp sentences, Zane told her about Vyrkos and the Guardians. It wasn’t helping that he still seemed angry. It was like Thorne’s ‘treasure fever’ was rubbing off on him.
Blaze could tell Rebel was still skeptical, but Tempest was listening intently.
When he was finished, Tempest said softly, “But what makes you think Rebel has these Seals? She didn’t steal them.”
She was speaking directly to Tyr. Blaze saw him meet her eyes, and it was like a spark flashed between them. Tyr’s face softened, and Tempest’s hand went reflexively to her chest.
Blaze felt that same place in her own chest get warm—the part that seemed to glow every time Zane touched her. The gold necklace he’d given her vibrated in response.
Tyr leaned forward in his seat. Without taking his eyes off Tempest, he told the story of Maia, Corwyn and Arkyld.
When he was finished, there was silence. Then Rebel said slowly, “So… you’re trying to tell me that you think I’m one of these Three Mates of Destiny with a magical Seal in my back pocket?”
“Actually, both of you are,” Tyr said. “And Blaze. The Rogue, the Rebel, and the Storm.”
Rebel stared across the porch at the trio of lunatics facing her.
“You’re insane,” she told them flatly. “I don’t have any Seal, and I don’t believe any of this shit.”
“I do,” Tempest said quietly. She was looking down at her notebook.
Of course she did. Rebel loved her sister, but she believed in all kinds of things that weren’t necessarily real.
Except when they were. She looked at the midnight-blue dragon in her backyard.
Okay, that was real. But that didn’t mean either of them was a legendary figure out of a fairy tale. It was ridiculous. She looked around the porch again. “Do any of you seriously think two normal human women are going to drop everything and just let themselves be carried off by dragons? What have you been smoking?”
She looked at Zane, who had his hands possessively on the back of Blaze’s chair, and then at the way Tyr was looking at Tempest. Then she looked at the one that had grabbed her. “And to top it all off, you’re trying to palm the crazy one off on me? No thank you.”
“I don’t think it’s any of our choice,” Tempest said.
Rebel turned to Blaze. “And you’re going along with this?”
There was a long silence. Zane’s face was impassive, but Rebel could see him holding his breath, waiting for her answer. So, even with the two of them, it seemed this whole mating thing was not a done deal.
“I want to talk to you,” Rebel said to Blaze. “Alone.”