Page 6 of Queens Ride Horny Dragons
"Why?" I choked out. I peered around his bulk, and terror punctured my heart with a skeletal finger.
Oliver. I recognized the salty color at his temples, but that was all. He'd been more than shot with a bullet. His torso sat against the wall, and his spine had been plucked free like a wishbone, dragged upward, and held there by what looked like a cross. His head dangled near the top of the wall and stared down at us with his face frozen in death.
I whirled around and deposited my stomach contents on the ground. When I finished, a tremble cut down my spine again and again, constant waves of cold and more cold.
Calhoun said something then, something that took several minutes for me to comprehend but that I already realized deep down: "It's the Queen's Cross."
The cross that was meant for the queen, so the goddess Léas and I could communicate. It was supposed to have been left at the castle for me. But it was here, stabbed into a dead dragon shifter.
A noise like stones rubbing together sounded, and when I turned, Calhoun had his hands wrapped around the cross and was pulling.
"No. Don't," I whispered.
He did. The rest of Oliver's body fell in a heap, and I couldn't watch. I couldn't look at it anymore. My feet had already moved me backward, away from the scene, but not the image of it seared into my eyeballs forever.
Calhoun followed quickly, his steps heavy behind me like the weight of what he'd seen hung around his shoulders. "That's not… A dragon shifter would never do that. Not with the Queen's Cross. It's sacrilegious."
To him, maybe. But I didn't trust myself to speak. Dragon shifters had no problem sacrificing human children every month. A grisly murder of one of their own hardly seemed a stretch. That wasn't some stereotype or racism coming from inside my head; that was fact.
When we were just feet away from the secret door in the office, a figure stepped out of it, so suddenly that I spun to the steps below, a buzz of panic between my ears before it registered who it was.
Petra, a beautiful dark-haired dragon shifter wearing the same royal blue ball gown as last night, almost exactly like the one I still wore. She leaned against the doorframe as if it were the only thing keeping her upright, her skin pale as clouds, and flicked a curved dagger so it shone in the dim light.
"Fuck, Petra." Calhoun barely sidestepped her, too, and handled the steps down to the dungeon floor more gracefully than I had. Behind his back, he secured the broken Queen’s Cross in his jeans. "What are you doing popping out of the walls like that?"
"I saw you two come in from across the street.” She advanced toward us, her gown trailing over the dirty steps behind her. "Why are you here? Or did you leave something behind when you killed dear old Oliver?"
"Neither of us killed him," I countered. Accusing me of stealing was one thing, but killing? I’d only ever thought about it.
"Shut up, youfilthyhuman," she snapped, her voice shrill and cold.
"Petra," Calhoun hissed. "She's your queen."
"She is not my queen." Her blue eyes flashed lethally and then lifted behind us. "Rio agrees with me. A first."
I glanced over my shoulder, and sure enough, Rio was slowly stalking toward us from a bend at the end of the dungeon, her eyes crazed, her face streaked with mascara. Her red gown from last night was ripped and stained, baring a great deal of her huge breasts, but she didn’t even seem to notice. What had happened last night to make it seem like the stovetops had walked through a warzone?
She fisted her hands at her sides, and a gleam of silver broke through. A pistol, I realized. "How dare you show your face again, you bitch."
At least now I knew who’d been searching for me here with the dragon fire—my fan club.
Even though we were surrounded by crazy, a surge of anger simmered underneath my skin. I wasn't a bitch or a murderer, but if they continued with the name-calling, I wouldn't make any promises. More importantly, we needed to get the fuck out of here.
"We're just here to find out what happened at the full-moon ritual last night." Calhoun moved in front of me, trying to block me on all sides from the coming storm of pissed-off, and armed, shifters. "We didn't get our power surge from Léas. Did you?"
Petra descended the last step to the dungeon floor, closing in on us as we backed away from her and Rio at once. Soon, they’d be upon us.And I couldn’t see any way out of here that wasn’t blocked by them.
Think.Think.
Petra tilted her dagger so the wall torches between the dungeon cells accented its sharp edge as she approached. "No one got their power surge. Léas is gone. Vanished from the rooftop just after you left while in mid-sentence."
"What?” Calhoun hissed. “She’s gone?"
“A panicked mob afterwards,” Rio added, her blonde curls tumbling around her shoulders as her back wilted some. Like the force of gravity was too much. “Everyone ran and trampled over each other to get out because we had no idea what was happening.”
Petra pointed her dagger at me. "That one probably had something to do with it."
"If I knew how to do the vanishing act, then why am I here right now instead of doing just that?" I snapped. "And here I thought dragons breathed fire, not sucked aerosols. Your logic sucks ass."
