“Are you sure?” Shane asked.
Shamira shrugged and then shook her head. “Burnt stone and a building that got hit by something big. I mean, we have no idea about the missing vamps from the boat. The building could have been hit by an explosion of some kind, but it doesn’t explain what tripped the alert wards in both cases.” She gripped her hands tightly together. “But we know they’ve had the eggs for a while, and it isn’t completely unreasonable to think that they had a plan for hatching them. And Jonas DID mention an insurance policy.”
“But a dragon?”
Alessandra stood next to Shane, but her face gave nothing away, so Shamira was not sure if she believed this theory or not.
“Shane, remember when you asked why it was so easy for me to understand that I was a vampire?”
He nodded. “If it walks like a vampire and talks like a vampire . . . Ockham’s Razor. If you have competing theories then, all other things being equal, choose the simplest. But is the insurrection of a species that’s been dead since before Stonehenge was ever built by a unstable drug addict really the simplest solution?” He shook his head. “Yet I find myself in agreement with you, or at least am willing to entertain the notion.”
“I will contact the Tribunal,” Alessandra added. “We must proceed with great urgency if there is any chance that this is true.”
“Has anyone tried to do what he’s being trying?” Shamira asked. “I mean surely he’s not the first to try.”
“Not to my knowledge. To bring dragons back as a race into this world would have been disastrous for the magical races. The Great Dragons, as opposed to the smaller kind that we have today, would be impossible to hide away, and no one wanted to risk them taking up their old arguments.”
“I want you to head back down to Savannah,” Shane continued. “Take Clara and Lillian with you. Trying to bring back the Great Dragons may require some science, but it will also require great magic. They should be able to help determine what magic is being used and hopefully counter it.”
Shamira started to open her mouth and object to sending Clara into a field situation, but she quickly snapped it shut again. Shane smirked, because he knew what she had been thinking. If Shamira had tried to protect Clara like that, the Native American shaman would probably kick what was left of her ass. Everyone who played this game was at risk.
“We’ll leave about four o’clock this afternoon,” she muttered. She loved being around Clara, but that instinct she’d always had for protecting those she cared about was sounding alarms all over the inside of her brain. Did Clara even have battle armor? She remembered seeing Lillian in it once. “I’m going to go visit Banshee,” she finished, then whirled her wheelchair around and made her way to the assassin’s room.
She and a werewolf on loan from Lord Pritchard had gotten buried in the collapsed building and while both survived and would be just fine, both had suffered broken bones and would be out of action for a few days while their magical bodies healed themselves. Banshee had been on a one-woman crusade to avenge Shamira being tortured and paralyzed by a man working with Lacroix’s chief of security, a man named Jonas.
The slight Asian woman was obviously not happy about being told to stay in bed. When Shamira rolled in, Banshee was angrily throwing whatever book she’d been reading at the dresser, where a pile of books was accumulating.
“You read all those already? You’ve only been here for a few hours!”
“They’re all boring,” Banshee replied grumpily. “I have read them all once already, so I get a few pages in and then want something else.”
“Would you like me to get you some new books? Or you can read books on your laptop now.”
Banshee forced herself to sigh. “I should not be complaining. My injuries are a mild inconvenience compared to yours.”
Shamira met the assassin’s gaze. “What happened to me wasn’t your fault. You know that, right?”
Banshee was quiet for a moment, then, “I was the senior partner and I was not there to back you up.”
“WE made the decision for me to go after those fake cops, and there was no way you could stop me from doing what I did. You wouldn’t have been able to get there in time no matter what.”
“The call to let you go was mine to make. I made it and –”
“– and it was the right call,” Shamira interrupted. “Clara was right about that. What happened to me is something I’ll have to live with, but it’s what we’re here for. We knew that those guys were up to no good and would have hurt other people. And yeah, now that I’m done feeling sorry for myself, I know I would do it again. Would YOU want those five people dead and bled out if it got me out of this wheelchair? When it happened, that’s what I told myself . . . that I wished it was them instead of me.”
“You did?” Banshee asked.
Shamira nodded. She had not made this common knowledge, with only Clara and Shane and the Representative knowing. “I have to live with that, even though some people have been trying hard to remind me that people have wished for worse after suffering less. But that’s what we’re here for. We put ourselves in harm’s way to get other people out of it. And you did have my back. You punished the wicked.”
“I have not been able to get to Jonas,” Banshee muttered. She was embarrassed, and it was not a pretty side of her.
“You will. Or someone will. Maybe I will. I can’t walk, but I can still Shadow Jump and I still have Shadow Claws. All he needs to do is slip up,” she said coldly, “and I won’t let anyone else get my revenge for me.”
Banshee’s mouth quirked up. “Even if Shane tells you to let someone else handle it?”
Shamira outright grinned. “Hey, until he gets a wheelchair accessible cell, what’s he going to do if I ignore him?”
“You are an intensely single-minded woman. Now help me out of bed so I can go check on my spiders.”
——- ——————-
The next night . . .
——- ——————-
“Holy shit!” Henry exclaimed after the van had disembarked all passengers. “Shane said it was happening but I didn’t believe him. Clara in the field? What’s next? A rain of toads?”
Clara made a petulant face. “I can arrange that.” She looked across the lot at the front grounds of Lacroix’s plush estate. “One of those times I wished I was a sorcerer. Maybe just fireball the place.”
“Wouldn’t work,” Sebastian said. “I don’t know who he got to set up his defensive spells, but he’s got some of the best stuff I’ve seen. More than a normal Lord would or should need.”
Shamira fixed her handgun into a carrier attached to the side of her chair and checked out her sniper rifle. She had been practicing everyday with it, but it certainly was not her preferred form of combat. She did not like the idea of staying still that long. “Any other weird incidents?” she asked.
“Let’s just say I’m glad that our magical wonder-twins are now here, because the barrier wards have been getting some really weird power fluctuations.”
Instantly, Clara and Lillian were in their elements, setting up circles of bone and earth to cast their respective magics, analyzing the wards and the defenses and just about anything else within line of sight.
“How’s Banshee?” Reaper asked, kneeling next to Shamira’s chair as they both stared at the estate.
“She’s bored, pissed, and will probably have talked Shane into letting her come back down sometime tomorrow.”
“She is like you that way,” the big man replied. “She needs something to do. Did you bring a silencer?”
“Yeah. Why?”
“If it might make you feel better, take a couple of shots at the building. There are some windows on that side of the house we haven’t destroyed yet.”
“Won’t that let them know where we are?”
Reaper shrugged. “They already know that. This just reminds them.”
Shamira and Reaper wound up playing tic-tac-toe on the side of Lacroix’s garage with sniper rifles because it turned out that the remaining windows could not withstand the bullets that well. Who knew? Things went on like that for the rest of the night and into early morning. About two hours before dawn, all hell broke loose.
Sebastian was actually the first one to notice the eerie silence that prefaced the attack. He had been looking over some maps, when his head shot up and he started looking around.
“Shamira,” he said quietly,” look into the night sky and tell me what you see.”
She understood his tone for what it was and immediately looked up as everyone else started to scramble.
“Something’s broken the inner wards,” Lillian shouted as she hid in the armored car that had been acting as their command post. She was not a fighter.
“Outer wards breached,” Clara shouted, standing behind Shamira for a moment.
“Get in the car,” Shamira whispered, staring up into the dark. Clouds had rolled in, and it was black as pitch in that little corner of Georgia. Something flickered by, blasts of light occasionally marring it’s perfect silhouette. “Good God!”
She had seen pictures in books, many owned by her and her brother back in their role-playing days, and she had seen images on movie screens and paintings, but nothing compared . . . nothing could have prepared her for this. Wings of leather carrying aloft of muscular reptilian body . . . legs tucked underneath the body with a long, barbed tail coming out the back and a serpentine neck coming out the front. And those eyes . . . even in Shamira’s Shadow Sight, they glowed an angry red.
“Dragon,” she said in an awed voice barely louder than a whisper, but it carried throughout the group like wildfire. Voices were raised, cover was sought out, communications relayed through the radios to the other groups. No living or undead being currently walking the planet had ever seen one, and even the legends were mired in obscurity. This was real; it was big, and it was headed straight for them.