Keri Arthur: Mercy Burns

“Do it,” he said, “or I walk out of here now and you’ll never get your answers.”

I looked around the room, seeing no one looking our way or showing any undue interest. That might change given what I was about to do, but there wasn’t much I could change about that. Not if I wanted my answers.

If this guy could provide answers and wasn’t just yanking my chain.

I mean, the voice on the phone that had given us this lead had been oddly familiar, and that alone had raised questions. But Rainey had convinced me that we needed to take the chance if we were ever to get some answers. And now Rainey was dead and I was here talking to a stranger who might not only be connected to her death, but who might well be here to trap me—the one who had escaped from their little “accident.”

And while Leith and his people were doing the background check on Angus, I simply didn’t have the time to sit back and wait for the answers. Hence the reason I was here, taking this god-awful chance.

I had no other choice if I wanted to save Rainey.

I pushed the Coke back then held up a hand, keeping it close to my chest so that there was less likelihood of anyone else noticing.

Then I reached deep down into that place in my soul where the dragon resided. She came roaring forward in answer, heating my skin and making it tingle. But she was all flame and no substance, as usual. I focused on the energy burning through my body, controlling and restricting it until it was little more than flickers dancing joyfully across my fingertips.

Few dragons could do that with their fire. Most had full flame or nothing.

I met Angus’s gaze. “Satisfied?”

He nodded, but oddly he didn’t seem to relax. In fact, the tension that was knotting his shoulders and arms seemed worse than ever.

“So tell me,” I added, “what you know about the cleansings.”

He laced his fingers together, then leaned forward. “I know where the bodies are.”

His voice was little more than a husky whisper and, for a moment, I wasn’t sure I’d heard him right. “How can there be bodies? After death, a dragon’s flesh is incinerated by the touch of the day’s first rays.”

His smile was grim. “The sun has to touch the flesh to incinerate it. If the body is underground by then, no amount of sunshine will burn it.”

As a dragon—or half-dragon—I was horrified at the thought of flesh being left underground to rot. It wasn’t only a sign of disrespect, but utter and total disregard. “Why would anyone do that? Hell, if nothing else, it’s leaving evidence behind for others to find.”

“Aye, but when a dragon dies and is gifted the sun’s caress one last time, is not the passing of his or her soul felt by those close to them?”

I nodded. It was the only reason that Rainey had realized something had happened to her sister, and one of the major reasons behind my desperation to find Rainey’s killer. She’d only had the one sibling and, unlike me, wasn’t close to her mother. In fact, she hadn’t seen her since she was five. This wasn’t rare in our clique, as children tended to be raised in crèches rather than family settings, but my mom had made the effort to be involved in both my and Trae’s upbringing, so we knew not only her but her relatives—although I doubted they actually realized we were half dragon. But most other mothers—whether human or dragon—didn’t bother with their children. For Rainey, this meant that there was no one who cared enough to find out what had happened or to try and save her soul.

Only me.

“Then why,” Angus continued, “would the people behind these slaughters risk the sun setting the souls of their victims free and thereby notifying their kin that something had happened?”

“I guess they wouldn’t.” But it meant something had gone wrong when it came to Rainey’s sister, because Rainey had definitely felt her passing.

“Exactly. So the remains are there to find. It’s just that no one has been left alive to tell the tale.”

It also meant that the men behind these slaughters were experts at covering their tracks. We’d certainly seen nothing that had looked like graves—or even freshly dug earth—at either Stillwater or Desert Springs.

But was that so surprising? If the people behind this were clever enough to make the population of two small towns disappear without anyone getting suspicious, then they were clever enough to disguise the graves.

I took a drink. The remaining ice clinked merrily against the sides of the glass—a sound at odds with the somber feel of the bar. “So you really did survive one of the cleansings?”

“Aye, I did.”

“Then why have you never come forward to tell your story before now?”

He snorted softly and leaned back in his chair. “Who was I going to come forward to? The council? They wouldn’t have given a damn. Outcasts are outcasts because the cliques don’t want them. And I could hardly go to the human authorities, now, could I?” He took a long drink of beer then added, “Besides, I was only fifteen when it happened.”

“Fifteen? But that means it had to have happened years ago.” And if that were the case, then there wasn’t likely to be much in the way of evidence left.

“Thirty-one years ago, to be precise.”

“But—” I stopped. We might have been operating on the assumption that the two destroyed towns we’d seen were the only ones involved, but there was no logical reason why this couldn’t have happened before. After all, dragons had a long history of not wanting too many draman around. “So why agree to this meeting now?”

“Because I heard whispers that the killings had started again, and it needs to be stopped.” His expression was an odd mix of guilt and anger, but the glint in his blue eyes was something else entirely.

Cold determination.

It sent another chill down my spine—though again, I wasn’t entirely sure why.

“Meaning you’re trying to stop them yourself?”

He gave me a smile that was part sadness, part grief, and a whole lot of anger. And again, I got that odd feeling of something deeper going on here. Something I just wasn’t catching.

“No. I’m afraid sea dragons generally aren’t the brave-soldier type. We leave that up to our fiery cousins.”

But Leith was a sea dragon, and he could fight with the best of them. “Then you’re not actually offering to help hunt down these people?”

“No.” He shrugged—a casual motion that seemed at odds with the tension still riding him—and added, “But if telling you what I know helps bring these bastards down, then that’s a small price to pay for the nightmares remembering brings. Just be careful, that’s all I ask. I don’t want another death on my conscience.”

I leaned back in my chair and wondered if he meant Rainey or someone else entirely. While I believed he was telling the truth as far as it went, I also believed there was a whole lot more that he wasn’t saying.

And that intrigued me—even as all the senses honed by years of watching my back and recognizing trouble before it hit were warning that this man was just that . Trouble.

It was a damn shame they couldn’t actually tell me whether he was a major instigator or merely a foot soldier.

“The problem is, you’re not telling your story for free, are you?”

His sudden smile was grim. “Nothing is free nowadays, lass. And the money will come in handy for the booze it’ll take to drown the memories again.”

“How much do you want?”

He pulled at his beard for a moment, as if considering the question, although we both knew he’d had a figure in mind from the moment he’d walked in the door.

“A thousand will do.”