Naomi stretched out her naked toes, wiggling them against the silky softness of her sheets. She opened her eyes to find Makani lying beside her in bed, his gold eyes watching over her. His scent folded around her, that comforting aroma of sweet, hot spices burning with life and magic. He smelled of forest fires and primal threats, of forbidden secrets and scaled armor. He smelled of dragon—and all the wondrous things that came with it.

“Hi,” she said, smiling.

“How are you feeling?”

“Rested.”

“I should hope so. You slept the whole day.”

Naomi glanced out the window. The sun was setting, its rays painting splashes of red across the indigo and orange sky.

“That’s ominous,” she said, noting the red splashes. They looked like spilled blood.

“Such things only hold power in the spirit realm, where the environment and the people are so interconnected by magic,” he replied, his face completely serene. “Here on earth, storm clouds mean only that it will likely rain. And a red sky occurs because the sun is close to the horizon.”

“I hope you’re right.”

He wrapped his arm around her, turning her, pulling her in closer. The hard wall of his chest pressed against her back like a shield. “I won’t let anything happen to you, Naomi.” His breath whispered against her ear.

“Have we found any signs of Firestorm or Darksire?”

“No, but they have too much magic to stay hidden for long. We will find them,” he said, silk and steel interwoven in his voice. “And then we will end this.”

“Firestorm was scared. Back at the castle.”

He grunted. “As she should be. She has a lot to answer for.”

She’d betrayed him. She’d hunted down and killed the other Dragon Born. And she’d finally topped it all off by making a deal with the demon princes of hell, thereby selling out the earth and every single person who lived here. But that’s not what Naomi had meant.

“I mean, she was afraid of the baby,” Naomi said. “But why would she fear an unborn child?”

“Because he is powerful.”

“He?”

“Yes.”

Naomi’s heart did a little flop. She didn’t question Makani’s assertion that he knew the baby was a boy. He could sense magic—and all the delightful intricacies of it. He’d once told her that the magic of male and female supernaturals smelled different.

“His magic is different than anything else I have ever felt,” Makani said. “Dragon magic and spirit magic intertwined—a beautiful, seamless blend unlike anything I have ever felt before.”

As he spoke, he stroked her belly, a belly that hadn’t even popped yet. She sure didn’t look pregnant, but all this talk made it real. Frighteningly real.

“Our child is a Spirit Warrior?” she asked.

“Yes.”

“And Dragon Born?”

“Yes.”

Being Dragon Born had some serious consequences associated with it. It wasn’t as dangerous as it had once been; the Magic Council no longer considered them abominations to be killed on sight. But being Dragon Born made things complicated. It meant their child was not one child, but two—two souls in one body. They would have to separate them after birth, performing a spell to give each baby his own body.

This explained why she and her magic were always tired. She was growing two magic powerhouses.

Something downstairs rattled softly. Someone was fiddling with the lock on the front door. There was the click of the door opening, then the soft whisper of footsteps.

“Stay here. I’ll check it out,” Makani whispered in Naomi’s ear. The mattress shifted as he rose from the bed.

He stepped quietly down the stairs of the loft, creeping down to the house’s lower level. Magic whistled. Light flashed. A wind spell slammed the front door shut.

Naomi got out of bed and peeked over the edge of the banister. Down below, Makani and Firestorm were locked in vicious combat. He threw a punch, but she evaded, hammering him hard in the head. Shaking it off, he cast a spell. Jaws of earth magic burst out of the ground and grabbed the intruder, trapping her.

Naomi walked down the stairs, lamenting her ruined floor. There went her deposit on the house. At least Makani had contained Firestorm before she could burn down the building—and everyone in it. Dragon fire was volatile. It spread fast and was almost impossible to extinguish. It could have spread to the neighboring houses. It might have eventually set the whole city ablaze.

Naomi stopped at Makani’s side. A few steps away, Firestorm glared out of her earthly cage. Her disheveled dark hair fell over her face, covering half of it. Her skin was flushed, like she’d just been running.

“Makani.” Firestorm’s voice was hard but brittle, like a suit of armor about to break.

Makani grabbed one of his swords off the wall, then stalked over to her.

Firestorm held up her hands in the air. “Wait. Stop. I didn’t come here to fight you, Makani.”

He positioned himself in front of Naomi like a shield.

“I didn’t come here to fight Naomi either,” Firestorm sighed. “We need to talk.”

He slanted a hard look her way. “Come to offer us a deal?”

“Yes.”

Makani let out a short-lived laugh. Then his face clicked back into battle mode. “We don’t make deals with demons.”

“I am not a demon.”

“Forgive me if I don’t take your word for it.”

Firestorm’s gaze shifted to Naomi. “You are a Spirit Warrior. You can use your magic to prove that I’m telling the truth, that my body is not playing host to a demon.”

“Or we could just kill you,” Makani countered, lifting his sword.

Naomi stepped forward, her hand closing on Makani’s to gently nudge his sword aside. “I’ll do it.”

Hope sparked in Firestorm’s eyes. What the hell? What was she playing at?

“They just want you to waste your magic, to weaken you,” Makani told Naomi.

Maybe. But Firestorm sure hadn’t put herself in the best position.

“If I wanted to deplete her magic, I would have come here with an army and attacked,” Firestorm said impatiently. “I would not have allowed you to capture me.”

Makani’s dark brows lifted. “Allowed me to capture you?”

“Yes, allowed,” she sneered, then blasted her magic through the barrier, disintegrating it to smoke. “Or did you think trapping me was so easy?”

Lightning sizzled across Makani’s sword.

Firestorm folded her arms across her chest, viewing him with mild annoyance. “I came here to talk, not fight.” She returned her gaze to Naomi once more. “But first, let’s get the formalities out of the way. I am ready, Spirit Warrior.”

“This is a trick,” Makani warned Naomi.

“Perhaps. But if there is a demon inside of her, I have to expel it before I send it back to hell anyway.”

Naomi hurled her magic at Firestorm, bombarding her with one spirit spell after the other, over and over again. Buried beneath the weight of Naomi’s spells, Firestorm dropped to her knees, pain etched across her face.

“If she had…a demon inside of her…it would have been…forced out by now,” Naomi declared between deep, staggered breaths.

Her body quivering, Firestorm rose to her feet. “Just as I said.”

“Just because there is not a demon inside of her, that doesn’t mean she isn’t working with the demons,” Makani pointed out.

As always, his points didn’t only come at the end of a very long sword.

“Why are you here?” Naomi asked Firestorm.

“After the battle, we got to safety. Darksire told me…” She shook her head, as though the memory hurt. “I had to get some air. So I came here.”

This was the most incoherent—the most stressed out, the most broken and afraid—that Naomi had ever seen Firestorm.

Makani watched the rapid fire of emotions flit across her face with cool indifference. “She is an accomplished actress. She had us all fooled—up until the point she betrayed us and helped Darksire and their master hunt down the Dragon Born.”

“She isn’t acting. Something happened tonight. Between her and Darksire.” Naomi had always been good at reading people. She hoped her special power wouldn’t fail her now. “Tell us what happened.”

“When Darksire was trapped in hell, he made a deal with the demon princes Paladin and Paragon,” said Firestorm. “They gave him powerful magic, even more powerful than the magic Damarion bestowed upon him so long ago.”

Yes, they’d seen those powers. Powers like controlling the hell beasts, manipulating their bodies, turning them into a single fighting unit, a single beast—a beast that could regenerate, no less.

“The demons did not give you similar powers,” Naomi realized.

She thought back to Firestorm’s actions in the battle. She hadn’t used powers beyond anything she’d wielded before.

“No,” Firestorm stated, her eyes hard. “They did not.”

“And now you’re feeling cheated and betrayed,” Makani said.

“I was cheated. And I was betrayed,” countered Firestorm. “But not by the demon princes. I knew exactly what we were getting into, that they would give powerful magic to Darksire, so he could take over the demon Septimus, so he could come to Earth—and bring the demons with him. On that night at Monster Lake, the demon princes came to earth. But that was only the first step of their battle. They knew they would not last long in this world unless they found powerful hosts. And they knew they would surely be discovered by the Spirit Warrior if they took normal living hosts.”

“So they possessed the dead?” Naomi said, frowning. “That isn’t sustainable. A dead body cannot hold a demon. The body would rot in a matter of seconds. Unless the demons have discovered a new kind of spell?”

“No, such magic is impossible.” Firestorm shook her head. “You’re right. Demons cannot possess the dead. They require too much life force to exist in this realm without a living body to sustain them.”

Necromancers could control the dead, but they could not possess them. They remained in their own bodies. A demon had no earthly body to speak of. They needed a host body to remain on earth.

“When I said the demons did not choose normal living bodies, I meant they took hosts who had not even been born,” Firestorm said. “They latched onto the most powerful beings in their vicinity—two beings who were not only powerful, but that the demons knew would be protected at all costs. Two souls just coming into being. Twins with the power of the Dragon Born and the Spirit Warrior, masters of earth and hell.” She looked at Naomi’s belly. “Your babies.”