Then a black shadow engulfed him, and the guard disappeared from sight. I pushed away from the car and walked toward the fence. The dark-haired woman still lay on the grass where’d she’d fallen, her breath rapid and clothes soaked and bloody. I couldn’t see a wound on her back, but that didn’t mean there wasn’t one.
“Coral? Are you okay?”
She shifted and glanced up at me. Even in the darkness, her eyes seemed to glow with an unearthly sea green fire. “Who are you?” she said, her voice scratchy and holding only the slightest hint of a Scottish accent.
“Angus sent us,” I said. “He wanted us to rescue you.”
“But no one can rescue him now,” she said, her voice breaking a little. She pushed to her knees and tucked a wet strand of hair behind her ear. “You were with him when he died?”
“Yes.” I hesitated. “We caught the men who shot him. They’re on the boat with his body.”
That unearthly glow got brighter. “They’re alive?”
“Yes.”
“Good.”
Though there was little emotion in her voice, it still sent a shiver down my spine. Those men were not long for the world if this sea dragon had anything to do with it.
And while I hadn’t actually saved them from Damon just so they could face this woman’s wrath, part of me could understand her need for revenge. If anything happened to my brother, I’d shift heaven and hell to find those responsible.
Heck, I was doing that now for Rainey.
The front door of the house opened and Damon appeared. Coral spun, her hand raised and the sensation of power suddenly surging across the night.
“No,” I said quickly. “He’s with me.”
She glanced at me, then lowered her hand. The energy died, and with it went the water that had been jetting through the roof. The guard fell with a scream that ended abruptly as his body snagged on one of the jagged rafters, hanging there like a limp piece of meat.
I tore my gaze away, trying to remember that these men really deserved what they got.
Damon walked toward us, his gaze on me rather than the woman kneeling in the grass. His clothes were wet but otherwise he seemed okay. Some of the tension still filling me slithered away—but not all of it. We still had to get out of here before the cops arrived.
“You okay?” he asked, his nostrils flaring as his dark gaze swept me.
“Yeah.” There was blood running down the inside of my sweatshirt, but only a trickle, so obviously I had just been grazed. “We’d better get out of here.”
“I can’t,” Coral said, and pulled down her turtleneck. Around her neck was a band of leather, to which a small black box had been attached. “I’m wired. I can feel the thing now—it’s like a dull fire waiting to explode into my brain. If I get any closer to the boundary, it’ll set this thing off. And it’ll kill me if I go past it.”
“Then we need to remove it,” Damon said, stopping just behind her.
She was shaking her head even before he’d finished.
“I tried that. Unless you’ve got the proper key, the thing just goes off.”
Damon frowned. “Do you know what sort of signal it is?”
“No, but the radius is a quarter of an acre, which is the size of this property, if that’s any help.”
“Maybe.” He glanced at me. “Meet us in the parking lot near the Bodega Bay marina. There are two, so look for the one with the RVs parked in the lot. It’s right near the beach off Highway One, so you shouldn’t have any trouble finding it.”
“The car is stolen,” I reminded him, crossing my arms and wondering what the hell he was up to now. “And the owners will probably be noticing its absence.”
“So steal another.”
He said that just like my brother would have. But then, a cavalier attitude toward other people’s property did seem to infect the dragon population. Even draman weren’t immune to it. “Why would I need to? Where are you going?”
“Most of these devices have a horizontal rather than vertical boundary. Rather than trying to break the lock, I think I should just fly her straight up and unlock it once we’re free.”
“You’re going to change form in the middle of a suburban street?” And he thought I was crazy?
“We have little choice.” He glanced at Coral. “It’s your neck. Are you willing to take the risk?”
She took a deep breath then released it slowly. “I need to get to Angus before dawn, so yes.”
“And you need to answer some questions first,” Damon said, then glanced over his shoulder as the wail of sirens began to shatter the silence. “You’d better go, Mercy.”
I didn’t move. “You’ll wait for me there?”
He hesitated, obviously knowing that I was referring to his questioning Coral, then nodded.
Something inside me relaxed a little. At least he was making an effort to treat me as a partner some of the time. As the blue fire began to crawl across his skin, I turned and walked across to the car. The curtains in the house opposite twitched—an obvious sign we were being watched. While the trees hid some of his shape-shift, there was little hiding the explosion of air as he launched skyward. But he was a black dragon surrounded by night, and I doubted the eyes of an old woman would even be able to see him.
And even if she could, who would actually believe her?
I climbed into the car and drove off. I was barely two blocks down the road when a police car screamed past, its flashing lights almost blinding in the darkness. While I knew Damon and Coral had already left, it didn’t stop the tension crawling through me. Luck really hadn’t been in our corner, and while the old woman probably hadn’t seen Damon clearly, she would have been able to see me.
I restrained the impulse to speed up and kept my pace sedate. The quickest way to attract unwanted attention was to do something idiotic—like speed away from an accident.
I switched cars in Sebastopol and continued on, making my way—with the help of the street directory stolen from the first car—to the Bodega highway and toward Bodega Bay.
I couldn’t immediately find them when I arrived, so I parked the car, then grabbed the pack and walked down the marina. Both he and Coral were sitting at the very end of the dock. He had his arm wrapped around her shoulders, and even though I knew there would be nothing intimate in the gesture, something inside me still twisted. Which was ridiculous, given I meant as little to the man as Coral did.
I walked down and sat beside her. “Did you get the transmitter off your neck?”
She pulled down her turtleneck. Only a red-raw strip of skin remained. “It took a while, but we managed it.” Her bright gaze met mine. “Thank you. Both of you.”
I sighed. “We’re here for a reason, Coral, and not just because Angus asked us.”
“I know. And because I owe you the debt of my life, I’ve resisted the call of my lover’s soul. But you need to ask your questions now, because I cannot stay long.”
“Why did those men snatch you and Angus?” Damon asked before I could say anything.
It seemed like a pointless question, because we already had the answer from Angus. But maybe Damon was simply making sure the old sea dragon had been telling the truth.
“You’ve seen his scars?” Coral asked, picking up a long splinter of wood and twirling it absently in her fingers.
“Yes.”
“We found one of the men responsible in a bar. Only it turned out it wasn’t him. He just sounded the same.” She grimaced, her gaze on the twirling splinter and tears bright in her eyes. “As luck would have it, although he hadn’t been involved in Whale Point’s destruction, he’d taken part in the more recent ones. So we paid for Angus’s mistake by being snatched, beaten, and almost killed. It was only when Angus mentioned he’d been contacted by a reporter about the recent cleansings that they let us live.”