A strange sound behind her, metallic, like the falling of coins, followed by a low roaring-rumble like distant thunder, almost made her turn. But nope, she was getting out while the glow was still good.
If she slammed the gate a little harder than was really appropriate considering the thing was probably worth millions of dollars, well, probably all poor fairy tale girls had a temper, just nobody ever mentioned it.
The black marble stairs were more of a pain in the ass going up than going down, and she wished she’d asked about an elevator. Sheesh, did he make this climb all the time? No wonder he was such a hard body. Wait, not going to think about his body too much, or she’d just be bummed she left him back there. Because that had been the best orgasm of her life, such fire and force exploding through her and leaving every nerve shimmering like a shattered diamond.
She paused next to one of the stupidly dangerous sconces to catch her breath and took a swig of the wine.
“Once burned,” she grumbled at the flame.
Did it flare a little higher at her complaint? Weird. Probably just because she’d breathed on it.
She marched on.
At the top of the stairs, she peeked out through the door. Rave had said it was his secret place, and she wanted to honor that.
But she didn’t see anyone around so she whisked out and—
“This hall is out of bounds for guests,” growled a voice behind her.
With a muffled shriek, she bounded upright, her hand over her pounding heart. Where had
he
come from?
The man was as big as Rave but dressed like an enforcer in black leather instead of Rave’s sleek linen. The short sleeves of his black t-shirt revealed full-sleeve tattoos. Not black ink, or even bright colors, but strangely metallic so that they flashed visible only when he turned a certain way into the light. Like Rave’s.
Were all the men of the Keep required to have sexy, mysterious markings like this? Were they gang members of an underground mafia? And she’d given herself to one of them?
Whatever, it wasn’t like she was going to see him again.
“I was just leaving.” She squelched the automatic
sorry
that tried to squeak out. Maybe Rave had broken her of her knee-jerk politeness. That was really just fear that she didn’t belong.
Well, technically she
didn’t
belong here.
And the scowl on the enforcer’s face made that very clear. “Don’t move.”
She edged around him. “I was just going back to my room—”
“Do. Not. Move.” His eyes gleamed ferociously.
She swallowed as her knees locked in place, like her Danskos were glued to the floor.
His glare pinned on her, he tapped something into his phone. One quick glance at whatever came back, an irate grunt, and then he stepped back. “You can go.”
She lifted her chin and marched past him.
“Stay in the lighted areas. There are things behind the curtain you don’t need to see.”
She refused to answer that.
It was too late anyway.
She felt his gaze boring into her back as she hustled down the hallway. The maze of the casino that had seemed like such an adventure when Rave was holding her hand now seemed interminable and frustratingly confusing. To her dismay, her eyes prickled with tired tears when she finally found the elevator to the Delphi wing where their rooms were.
She remembered from her chemistry classes that the Greek oracle at Delphi may have taken “divine” inspiration from hallucinogenic gases rising from the spring waters. Maybe there were party drugs in the geothermal springs under the Keep. That would explain why she…
No, she wasn’t going to make excuses. Esme and Anjali might have excuses for why they were giving up their dreams, but—wine aside—she’d known exactly what she was doing. And exactly who she was doing it with.
She swiped the back of her hand across her eyes—she was
not
going to be one of those girls who cried after awesome sex—wishing she could just pack up and leave. But first she had to make things right with Ez and Anj.
Tomorrow, though. As she made her way down the quiet hall, the chaos of the casino felt a million miles away. And considering how far she’d walked, it practically
was
a million miles away. The room door yielded to her key, and it was elegant as hell but there was no lush waterfall or sexy, powerful man…
She glugged down the last of the wine. There, that was done. And everything would be all right tomorrow.
Chapter 6
Everything was fucked.
Rave stared at the flasks in front of him, partly filled with dragon ichor, but all he saw was the half-empty wine bottle swinging jauntily in Piper’s fist. His fingers rested on the knife he’d used to take his latest sample—the blade was cast from the iron ore of a meteorite and the hilt from polished bone—but all he felt was the silk of her skin, finer than the rare weave of his robe. His cock knocked at the back of his fly, thinking it was time to come out and play, but he was stuck in his laboratory in the lowest bowels of the Keep, waiting for—
“What the hell were you thinking?” Torch slammed through the lab door.
Rave kept staring at his experiments for a long minute, waiting for his erection to sullenly subside.
Only then did he swivel on the high backless stool to face his cousin. “I was thinking you weren’t going to show, so I took a sample of my own ichor. You can just leave.” He swiveled back to stare blindly at his pointless, hopeless task.
Torch stomped up beside him, his blunt features warped in a scowl. “You shouldn’t stick yourself when you can’t afford to lose any more ichor. You know you’re almost as bad off as Bale.”
“Not quite yet.” But almost. When he’d told Piper it had been awhile for him, he hadn’t actually done the math. But he had this morning, and it was…a long time. How had he not realized how long it had been since he took pleasure in anything?
He’d been so focused first on amassing his treasure and then trying to find a way around the stone blight that he hadn’t realized how far the cold stillness had crept over him.
Hadn’t noticed until Piper left and it came slithering back.
The agony had sent him to his knees with a choked cry. The dragon had swept over him, spreading its wings against the threat it couldn’t see. But that only made the petralys worse. To protect him and its treasure, the dragon would take over completely, and then his fate—like a tomb—would be sealed.
If Bale felt it worse… Rave couldn’t imagine the torment.
“Well, I’m here now,” Torch said. “You might as well stick me.”
Helpless fury twisted in Rave’s belly. “I told you to go. It’s too late. It’s done.”
Torch slammed his palm down on the table, making the flasks jump. “I was late because I was watching to make sure your conquest from last night stayed in her room and didn’t go sneaking back to take a memento or two.”
Without conscious thought, Rave was off the stool, on his feet, and in Torch’s face. He was a fraction taller but Torch had a few kilos on him.
The fight would be fucking epic.
Behind him, the ichor flasks chimed delicately though nothing was touching them, and Rave and Torch were utterly still. The scent of scorched metal swirled in the closed room.
“Stay away from her,” Rave whispered. “Don’t touch her. Don’t look at her. Just…don’t.”
After a long moment, Torch put up his hands and took a step back. “I didn’t know.”
Rave let out a slow, hissing breath. “You never know shit.” But then he couldn’t stop himself from asking, “Didn’t know what?”
“That she is your solarys.”
Rave flinched back, gripping the table to steady himself. The crystal flasks clanked a warning. “She… What? No. Piper isn’t my true mate. She’s just a human female passing through.”
Torch crossed his massive arms over his chest and shrugged. “I dunno. You’ve never freaked out about a female before. You’ve never let one into your garden. Shit, I’ve wondered sometimes if you’d forgotten you were a beast.” He stared hard at Rave. “Did you let her see you shift?”
“No!” But if she’d turned around before passing through the golden gate… “Of course not,” Rave said in a more measured tone. “As I said, she’s a human. She can never know.”
“But if she’s your true mate—”
“She’s not. That’s impossible. The Nox Incendi solarys are extinct.” As the Nox Incendi dragons would soon be if he couldn’t reverse the petralys.
But Torch had on his obstinate face. “Why can’t she be your mate?”
“She is human,” Rave said with exacting slowness, as if to an idiot. Which he sometimes thought Torch liked to play, if only to cause trouble. “The solarys were…special. But that was a long time ago.”
“This Ramirez chick is special too,” Torch said, speaking almost as slowly as Rave had. “Special to you.”
“No she’s not.”
“Oh. My mistake. Then I guess I’ll go fuck her—”
With a roar, Rave charged his cousin and drove him across the room with a forearm braced across his throat. Letting no more of those foul words pass his lips. Rave would kill him first.
But Torch didn’t fight back, just eyed him with one brow cocked. “See?” he croaked. “Special.”
Rave realized the iron knife was in his other hand and he jerked back with a curse. “Idiot.”
Torch smirked at him. “Which makes you what? Because I still saw it before you did.”
“There’s nothing to see.” Rave shoved him, but his cousin was too mountain-like to be moved by a mere punch. “Because she isn’t my mate. Now get out of here before your ridiculousness infects my samples.”
He stalked back to his experiments.
The alchemists of old had listed many uses for dragon blood, dragon teeth, dragon scales, dragon breath. They had endless recipes and incantations, each more implausible than the last. Few of them had ever seen much less killed a dragon. But it was Nox Incendi ichor where the real magic happened.
And the death.
Only the purest crystal flasks could contain ichor which had all the most dangerous properties of molten lava, corrosive venom, and toxic gas. But ichor could also heal, induce visions, transform the elements—lead into gold, anyone?—plus much more.
Right now, though, he was using it merely as a barometer of how much longer Bale could survive.
The largest flask had only a few drops within. But the substance that should’ve looked like translucent, opalescent quicksilver, moving restlessly of its own accord and shooting off the occasional incendiary spark, instead resembled a motionless chip of half-melted tar, dull and cold.
When it froze entirely…
But he wasn’t going to let that happen.
He’d tried various methods of invigorating the ichor: adding reactive chemicals, setting it on fire, chanting spells at it,
swearing
at it. He’d tried that last one a lot. Without positive results. Hell, without
any
results.
When he’d come to the laboratory this morning, he’d wondered why he’d never lost hope.
Then he realized he’d stopped feeling hope. Stopped feeling anything at all. He was just going through the motions.
Eventually, even the motion would stop. And then he’d be like his liege, trapped in the dark, frozen, doomed.
Torch was a bastard as well as an idiot to try to give him back that hope.
In a vicious twist of retaliation to show Torch how wrong he was, Rave reached for the flask that contained his own ichor that he’d drawn earlier. He’d set it aside, waiting for it to settle into its quiescent state before he started another round of tests, but where had he put it?
The only unlabeled flask on his bench was one from a much younger dragon, less stone-bound even than Torch…
Rave stared at the flask then slowly drew it toward him. The quicksilver shimmered with miniature bolts of lightning at the disturbance, barely settling when he centered it in front of him.
The flask opening was fitted with a crystal stopper aligned perfectly to the hole so nothing could escape. This morning, he’d noted that though the containment was properly sealed, the stopper had an almost imperceptible crack in the crystal. Nothing to cause a problem, but the tiny flaw had caught the light with a cheery sparkle and made him think—for no good reason—of the imperfect gap in Piper’s smile. How he’d wanted to see it again…
This was
his
ichor.
Which was impossible.
With a shocked oath, he scrambled for the huge, leather-bound journal where he’d kept notes going back before the advent of computers. He’d known he might have to pass his work to another if the stone blight overtook him first.
He flipped quickly through the pages. When was the last time he’d taken his own ichor?
There. He slammed his finger on the entry, as if he could pin the memory down exactly.
New bakery in the Keep. Can’t remember the scent of cinnamon but staff says it smells divine. Collected another deep draw. Ichor is darkening. Ash colored with oily streaks. Sluggish and non-conductive except with most highly reactive compounds. Sample destroyed in alchemical trial #147.
Rave didn’t bother consulting the outcome of trial #147. It had been a failure, whatever it was. All the trials had been failures.
But now… This ichor—
his ichor
—was throwing off the corruption of the petralys.
“How?” he whispered.
“The solarys,” Torch said. “I told you.”
Rave twisted around. He’d forgotten his cousin was even there. “Humans can’t touch the ichor. They don’t have any magic.”
Torch spun slowly on the stool he’d claimed. “Witches and warlocks have magic,” he pointed out as he came around again.
Rave frowned. “Humans don’t believe in magic any more than they believe in dragons. Those days are gone.”
“We’re still here.” Torch spread his big hands. “Even if we’re in hiding. Maybe they’re in hiding too.”
Bolting off his seat to get away from the changed ichor, Rave scraped one hand down his chin as he paced. “Piper is not a witch.”
Torch pursed his lips. “You’re probably right about that,” he agreed reluctantly. “As far as I can tell, Piper Ramirez is exactly what she seems to be: daughter of a migrant farm worker, first kid to college on financial and merit scholarships, made good, paid to bring over some close family members. Seems like the weirdest thing she’s ever done is become friends with a rich bitch and a hippie love child.” He peered at Rave. “Now aren’t you glad I looked her over for you?”