C
ecily felt the explosion a second before she heard it. The ground beneath her feet rumbled, and she had a moment to think, improbably, of earthquakes before a deafening roar filled the air. A bright glow burned against the night sky to her left, and she knew.
Logan had blown up the lab. She wanted to blame it on the Shadowdrakes, knew they’d had at least as much opportunity as her lover had had. But deep down inside, she knew it hadn’t been them. Logan had done it.
The knowledge was one more blow in a day full of them. The attack was over, the remaining Shadowdrakes taking to the air a few minutes before, as if they had known that the lab was going down. As if destroying her father’s shining glory had been their purpose all along.
And maybe it had been. She didn’t know what went on there, because no one had ever told her. She’d planned on finding out, had been on her way to the lab to investigate when news of the Shadowdrake attack had found her and she’d returned to help fight in the only way she knew how.
The provocation for this unending war between her clan and the others had been in that lab. She knew that now, but it was too late for her to do anything with that knowledge. She looked around at all the dead at her feet. It was way too late.
And Logan—was he one of them? It was obvious to her now—when it no longer mattered—that he had come to destroy her clan, destroy her. Was he a Shadowdrake? It made sense, but she had seen him kill some of the attackers today. Had seen him defend Wyvernmoon lives against the Drakes, which seemed impossible if he was one of them. Was he Dragonstar, then? It made a twisted kind of sense.
He had betrayed her, had come into her life for the express purpose of destroying her clan—and her—from the inside. It was a good plan. A very good plan, and one she couldn’t even fault him for. Not when she was the one who had invited him in. The one who had given him means and opportunity on a silver platter. She had to assume her father had given him motive.
So, what now?
she wondered as she fought back the tears that were incredibly close to the surface. She wanted nothing more than to retreat to her house, to bury her head and pretend that the past week hadn’t happened. She wanted to curl up on Gage’s lap like she had as a little girl and ask him for advice. He would know what to do.
But she couldn’t forget that he had tried to drug her that afternoon—an attempt to keep her out of the way of the battle, she could only assume. Just like she couldn’t forget that he had been in charge of security assignments for years. It had passed to Julian a couple of years ago, but the guards still respected Gage. Still listened to him. And if he told them to take a couple of days off, to leave their posts undefended, that was exactly what they would do.
He had turned traitor. She didn’t know why, didn’t know when. But she would find out. After she dealt with the crisis caused by this latest attack.
And deal with it, she would. Queens didn’t run away when things turned to shit around them. She’d wanted to take control of her clan, had wanted to fix what was broken. Now she had to live with her mistakes and the people she had let die because she had clued in to what was going on too late to save them.
The guilt of her failings burned like acid.
Not knowing what else to do, she walked through the streets with the emergency workers, looking for survivors of the bloody battle. There weren’t nearly as many as she’d hoped there would be. The Shadowdrakes had been thorough. And though there were empty spaces on the street from where Shadowdrakes had fallen during battle and then disappeared, as their death magic flashed them home, there were many more spaces taken up by Wyvernmoons. Everything she’d done had been too little, too late.
She turned the corner, hoping for relief, and only found more bodies. Looking over them, she froze, as she saw Sebastian laying in the street, his neck broken and his eyes staring vacantly into the night.
The tears came then. She couldn’t stop them, couldn’t fight them as she stumbled through the bodies of the dead. Maybe it wasn’t the right look for a queen, maybe she was making the biggest mistake yet, but she had no more fight in her. Not right now.
Even knowing it was useless, she checked Sebastian for a pulse. Nothing. She reached up, gently closed his eyes, and prayed that his wife and child were still safe at home.
“Help me,” a faint voice said, and Cecily looked around wildly, searching for the person who was still alive in the midst of all this destruction. She found the young boy, no more than eighteen or nineteen, trapped beneath a car one of the Shadowdrakes must have rolled during the battle.
“I need help over here!” She raised her voice as she ran, made sure it carried to the various rescue workers. As soon as a few started for her, she crouched down beside the boy and stroked his hair. “Help’s coming. I promise.”
His pupils were dilated with shock, his skin so white that she was amazed there was any blood left in him. “What’s your name?” she asked.
“I’m James.”
“Hello, James. I’m Cecily.”
“I know who you are. You’re the new queen. My mom was very excited when she saw you up there fighting today.”
“Your mom? Is she around? Can I get her for you?” Cecily looked up and down the desolate street.
“She’s over there.” He nodded toward one of the small shops that lined the street.
The bakery,
she thought. “They got her at the very beginning of the attack. I dragged her inside, tried to help her, but I’m not a healer. She died hours ago.”
If she’d been standing, her legs would have gone out from under her. God, how much more was she supposed to take? How much more guilt could sit on her shoulders without crushing her completely?
“I’m sorry, James.” She reached for his hand, held it, because she could do nothing else. “So sorry that I couldn’t save her.”
“You didn’t kill her. The Shadowdrakes did.”
And then he didn’t say anything more, because the emergency crew shifted the car off his leg and the pain made him pass out in her arms. His leg was crushed and bleeding in three places.
“Can you save him?” she demanded of Lucy, one of the clan healers. The other woman had crouched beside his leg and was running her hand over the pulverized bones.
“Save him? Absolutely. Save his leg? I don’t know. We need to get to the clinic, where I can work on him.”
Cecily stepped back so that they could get James on a stretcher. “I want to know what happens with him. Call me after you’re done and let me know what he needs, and I’ll make sure he gets it.”
Lucy eyed her curiously for a moment, but then James moaned and she began to see to him, administering to his pain. Cecily backed away and let them do their jobs.
She stayed on the street with the rescue workers—with her people—for hours. Dawn came and went and the sun was directly overhead before they had found all the survivors and cleared away the dead. In the middle of the search, Wyatt, Dax and Dashiell had found her, looking exhausted and banged up, but alive.
She froze at the sight of them, overwhelmed by the knowledge that they had not hidden away like so many of her father’s
factionnaires
. They had stayed and fought with her, with her people, even though they’d known it was a losing battle. That loyalty, in the wake of so much pain and betrayal, did what nothing else had been able to do. It brought her to her knees.
Dashiell was there in an instant, pulling her up and into his arms. “A queen doesn’t belong on the ground,” he murmured softly in her ear as he began striding down the street with her, Wyatt and Dax on either side of them.
“Yeah, well, I’m just a princess,” she answered, laying her head on his chest, because suddenly she was so tired, she could barely think. “And not a very good one, at that.”
“I don’t know about that.” He stroked a soothing hand down her back. “You’ve exceeded my wildest expectations.”
She didn’t exactly consider that a compliment, seeing as how the clan was currently in ruins. If this exceeded his expectations, she couldn’t help wondering just how badly he’d expected her to mess up.
“What are we going to do?” she asked. “I should know, but I don’t. How do we come back from this? What do we do?”
“First thing we do is get some rest,” Dax said softly. “And then we regroup and see where we stand.”
“Where we stand?” she choked out. “Please tell me where, exactly, we stand, considering you’re the only three
factionnaires
who bothered to stick around to fight. I knew they were bastards, but even I couldn’t have imagined this level of betrayal.”
“It gets worse,” Wyatt told her. “Gage is dead. He was killed in the lab blast. From what we can piece together, some of the others were there, as well—Julian, Etienne, Acel, Thierren. We’re not sure who else.”
“Are they dead, as well?”
“We can’t find their bodies, and a few of the survivors said they saw them fleeing into the hills.”
Cecily nodded, unsurprised. “What was in that lab, Dash?”
She felt him tense underneath her, saw Dax and Wyatt do the same. “Don’t you think I have a right to know? I watched my people die because of it tonight, and we’re at war because of it. Surely I need to know what’s been going on there.”
Dash shook his head. “We’re not sure. We’ve been shut out of the place for two years now. Silus let only a precious few into that lab, and we weren’t among the chosen.”
“Still, you have a good idea. I know you do. What kind of weapon was he building?”
“He wasn’t building anything. He was using the best scientists in the world—human and dragon—to manufacture some kind of virus,” Dax told her grimly.
“Virus? Like biological warfare?”
“Exactly.”
She was glad Dash was carrying her, because she knew she would have ended up on the ground a second time. She’d known her father was a bastard, known he hadn’t cared about anything but himself, but this? This was beyond anything she could ever have imagined. “How did the Shadowdrakes know about it? Was there a leak?”
“You could say that,” Dash answered. “I don’t have proof yet, but I’m pretty sure he’d been using it on them.”
For long seconds, she forgot how to breathe. And then she was struggling against Dash, demanding that he put her down. “You’re telling me that you’ve suspected for years—”
“Months. We’ve suspected for months,” interrupted Dash.
“Whatever! You’ve suspected for months that we were engaging in biological warfare against other North American dragon clans and you didn’t bother to tell me?” Her voice had risen to a shriek, but she couldn’t help it. Would the lies never end?
“In our own defense,” Wyatt said coolly, “up until a few days ago, we didn’t know you’d care. And for the past week, ever since you started talking diplomacy, we’ve been trying to get proof for you. We couldn’t let you go to the other clans completely uninformed about what was causing the war.”
“And yet you treated me like shit in the meetings. Made me feel like a bumbling idiot.”
“Damn straight. There was no way we could publicly take your side—not until we’d found out what we needed to know.”
“What about what I needed to know? This is why we’re at war, why the Shadowdrakes and the Dragonstars keep coming at us. Because we’re attacking them with this monstrosity.”
“Yes.” Dash’s face was grim, his eyes pained as he refused to meet her eyes. She turned and started walking again. They were almost at her house, and she could feel exhaustion tugging at her, along with an overwhelming horror. Her father had been an even bigger monster than she ever could have imagined. And her ignorance of his actions wasn’t an excuse.
For five long months, she’d been a party to the most despicable crimes imaginable—war crimes, really—and she hadn’t even cared enough to get involved. She’d known something was wrong. Not this wrong, but still, she’d known things were bad. And she hadn’t tried to fix it.
No wonder Logan betrayed me.
The last thought brought crippling pain, so crippling that she almost fell while climbing the stairs to her front door, and would have if Dash hadn’t reached out and grabbed her arm to steady her.
“Thank you,” she murmured, pulling away from him as soon as it was polite to do so. She felt dirty, disgusting and evil. Physical contact was suddenly too much for her to handle.
Turning to look at the three
factionnaires
that had been loyal to her through everything, she forced a smile she was far from feeling. “Go home. Get cleaned up. Get some food and some sleep. We’ll meet back here tonight around nine o’clock to start trying to figure out what to do. I don’t want to wait until tomorrow. Not with everything that’s still unsettled.”
“We’ll be here,” Dax told her.
“Good. I do have one favor to ask. I know you’re all exhausted, but I need to know about the others. I need to know where every
factionnaire
is and where his loyalties lie. If they’re not with me, fine. But are they with Julian or Acel or someone else? They won’t let this go unchallenged, and we can’t afford to be caught unawares again. Or everything we fought for today will be for nothing.”
Choked up all over again but determined not to show any more weakness in front of them, she turned and let herself into the house. Closed the door behind her and rested against it, too exhausted to go any farther. She wanted to cry, but she was too numb. Her tears had all dried up somewhere on that street, surrounded by the bodies of the people she was supposed to take care of. She felt like it was the end of the world.
Through sheer will alone, Cecily made it to the sofa in the parlor. She kicked off her shoes and had started to curl up when her instinct for self-preservation kicked in—about five minutes too late. She whirled toward the door, already reaching for a storm, for lightning, before her dragon registered who was in her house.
Despite everything that had happened, Logan had returned to her.