Keri Arthur - Destiny Kills

“So do you think it’ll be a boy or a girl?” he asked, amusement crinkling the corners of his bright eyes. “And will they take after their mother or their father?”

“I don’t know, and I don’t care.”

He kissed my nose, and gave me a smile that was happiness itself. “Well, there’s one thing I do care about. I’m just about to have my nuts frozen off, so if we want to have more than one child, we had better be getting out of this water.”

I sighed softly. “I’d love to move right into bed, but we have kids to look after first.”

His smile faded. “It’s not going to be easy to find all their parents. Especially little Carli’s.”

“It’s not even going to be easy to get them out of Scotland. Not with the remaining scientists still sniffing around.”

He kissed my nose, then splashed out of the water with me still in his arms. “Let me worry about all that. Right now, we need to get dressed, then get back and see if the vultures have left us any pizza.”

In the end, getting the kids out of Scotland wasn’t the problem I thought it would be. I’d forgotten that Trae was a thief by trade, and any thief who could get a will-o’-the-wisp to steal a ring wasn’t going to find it all that troublesome to get help transporting stolen kids back to their country of birth.

Nor was it hard to find most of their parents. Jace and Cooper had both been snatched when they were older, and knew their home addresses. Their reunion with their parents had been a joyful thing, and just as many tears had flowed down my cheeks as theirs—especially when it came time to say good-bye.

Tate and Marco were both several years younger, but they’d also been captured more recently. Armed with their surnames and the descriptions of their cliques and the surrounding lands, Trae and his friends had tracked down their families pretty quickly.

Sanat was tougher. The littlest of the boys, he’d come into the cells only six months after Carli, and he really couldn’t remember all that much about his family. We had their names, of course, but that wasn’t a whole lot of help when it was a common surname. And all he could recall about where he lived was a bell. A shiny silver bell that had rung out every dusk.

It took us a month to find his home—a tiny cliff-top village. His clique was not connected to any of the thirteen major ones. He’d been the only son in a family of fourteen, and the party had gone on for days.

Which left us with little Carli, who couldn’t remember anything except her mom’s pretty smile and long brown hair, and her dad’s blue eyes and bad singing voice.

Then one of Trae’s friends came through with a list of missing air dragons—how, I have no idea, when all the cliques seemed determined not to help out more than necessary—and there she was. Carli Symmonds, whose small clique owned a two-thousand-acre ranch over near Wolf Creek in Montana.

We stayed there for a week, and leaving her was probably one of the hardest things I’ve ever had to do. In so many ways, that little girl had kept me sane in a place of madness, just as she and all the kids had kept me going once I was out. If Egan had been my rock and my strength, then the kids had been my sanity.

I’d miss them all—which is why I made them promise to write to me. And why I told their parents to contact me if there were ever any problems.

Which left us with one task—returning the ring.

And I just had to hope that the two-month delay in finally getting the ring back to his father hadn’t affected Trae’s sister in any way.

I looked out the car’s side window, seeing nothing but the shadows of dusk and huge redwood trunks. We’d taken the fastest and quickest route to get his clique’s base in Stewarts Point from his home in San Francisco, and had been driving for nearly two and half hours. Now, we were finally on clique lands. And better yet, I could smell the sea.

“Is your mother still planning a meet and greet with the rest of your family?” It was a question I’d probably asked before, but I swear the pregnancy was sapping brain cells, because my memory just wasn’t up to scratch lately. And if it was this bad now, how bad was it going to be when I neared full term?

He snorted softly. “She’s planned a whole damn party, and invited every relation she could think of. Some of them I don’t even remember.”

I glanced at him. In the growing dusky light of the oncoming evening, his hair gleamed with slivers of sunlight, and gold speckled his unshaven chin.

It was a look I was seeing a whole lot more of lately, simply because I loved it. And, gorgeous man that he was, he was willing to indulge my fantasies.

“I thought you told her we didn’t want anything big?”

His smile touched his eyes, crinkling the corners and easing the tension that had been gaining ground since we entered clique grounds.

“Oh, I did, but when she gets something in her mind, there’s no persuading her otherwise.” He glanced at me, blue eyes bright. “You know she thinks it’s twins. A boy born of water and a girl born of sun. Her words, not mine.”

I touched my stomach, and the barely there bulge. “If she’s right, you’ll be doing your fair share of diaper changing.”

“Love to.”

I snorted softly. We’d see how positive he was when actually faced with the task.

We came out of the trees and into the fading remnants of the day. The rugged coastline curved away to our left and the surge of the sea was high, the waves riding high up the cliffs. A weapon I could call if things went wrong with Trae’s dad.

We swept up a slight incline and, at the top, the heart of the clique became evident. The buildings were a mix of wood and stone structures and, in many ways, the whole place reminded me of an ancient walled village. It even had a wall, in the form of a post and wire fence that separated the housing area from the rest of the valley.

The main house was a two-story stone affair that was big and formidable looking. The houses that clustered closest to it were also stone, but as the ring of houses moved farther away, they became a mix of wood and stone, and then finally just wood. The outer ring looked just like houses you’d see in any suburban city.

“This is more feudal than what I expected,” I said, after a moment.

“Yeah, the Jamieson clique is one of the originals.” His voice was dry. “If my father had his way, there’d only be originals. He can’t abide having the line diluted.”

“So he’s not going to be happy about you further diluting the precious bloodline by mating with a half-breed sea dragon?”

“Not at all.” His voice was decidedly cheery, although the look he gave me was full of concern. “If you’re at all worried about him, you can stay in the car. Or go see Mom.”

“No, I want to meet the bastard who made your and Egan’s lives such a living hell.”

He nodded, and drove into the nearest parking space. He helped me out of the car, then, with an arm around my waist, guided me into the cavernous stone entranceway. The huge wood and iron doors were open and led into a room that could have easily stepped out of the medieval era. Stone walls, huge tapestries, and heavy wooden furniture that looked worn with time and living.

Our footsteps echoed as we crossed the room, but no one came running out to see or greet us.

“He does know we’re coming?” I whispered, studying the growing shadows uneasily.

“Yeah, but he’s making a big deal of it,” Trae said, his voice filling the silence with contempt.

“This isn’t exactly what I’d call a big deal,” I muttered. “I think it’s more the cold shoulder the unwanted relatives get.”