Page 46 of Mikhail
“Surveillance,” Meg answered. “I need to file a codeorange.”
The woman on the line paused. “Code orange?” she clarified. Orange wasn’t the highest level, but it signified that the hunter deemed an incident to be significant and required furtherinstructions.
“Yes.” Meg stared at the house, knowing that everyone at headquarters in Detroit would be scrambling. As a supernatural hunter for the Brotherhood of the Blood Moon, she was always on guard against creatures who posed a threat to humans. The dragons in England had been her latest assignment. And it was clear after tailing Randolph Belishaw that something was very wrong. Whatever this was, it went beyond inter-clansquabbling.
“Please stand by. I’m connecting you to MacQueen,” the womanreplied.
A few minutes later her boss, Damien MacQueen, was on theline.
“Meg, everythingokay?”
“I’m fine, but there’s something crazy going down in London. I don’t likeit.”
“What are you seeing?” Damienasked.
“I had eyes on one of the Belishaws yesterday, and he was attacked by…well, you’re not going to believeit.”
“I think you forget what line of work we’re in, Stratford. Tellme.”
“It was a member of Parliament. Not his security detail, but the Right Honorable Conrad Sinclair himself. Alone. He shoved Belishaw into a car and drove off. I followed them to an unregistered location, a townhouse with no ties to the government that I could find. I waited twenty-four hours outside. Sinclair left twelve hours ago, but Belishaw only emerged from a side door in an alley half an hour ago. He was in rough shape, Damien. Sir, I don’t have Sinclair down on any of my records as an SLF. And whatever happened in there, it didn’t happen over a polite cup of tea.” SLF was code for supernatural lifeform.
“But a dragon’s healing ability should have kept himunharmed.”
“Shouldhave. But he wasn’t healing. He’d been tortured, from the look of it. I know we aren’t supposed to interfere unless humans are in danger,but—”
Her boss’s usually laid-back tone turned gruff. “Meg, what did youdo?”
“I had to help him. He saw me. It might have been suspicious if I didn’t react to him stumbling and bleeding everywhere, right? I gave him aride.”
“Towhere?”
“A townhouse nearby, rented by an American woman named Jodie Harkness. She has no SLF connections that I know of. But then, neither did Sinclair. Belishaw went inside her place and hasn’t come back out,” shesaid.
“And Mr. Sinclair justtookhim?” Damien’s disbelief was evident, but Meg was positive about who she’d seen shove Belishaw into thecar.
“Yeah, that’s the most messed up part of this. I mean, politicians have made alliances with shifters before, but how did he subdue and torture one on hisown?”
“Fuck,” Damien cursed. “I’ve had my suspicions about him for a while. Looks like I wasright.”
“Suspicions?” She didn’t like where this was headed. If her boss was worried, then she was too. Very few things upset DamienMacQueen.
“I have reason to believe Conrad Sinclair might be a dragonshifter.”
“We don’t have any intel on a Sinclair line. Why wasn’t I informed?” Meg was positive. Before she’d taken on her current assignment, she had studied all the noble lines of dragon shifters in England and mainland Europe. She knew almost as much about Randolph Belishaw as he did abouthimself.
“The last Sinclair dragon we know of vanished five hundred years ago. He was a close confidant of Queen Elizabeth,” Damien said. “But then one day he justdisappeared.”
“Any idea whathappened?”
“A hunch. We have records of Elizabeth imprisoning a dragon of the Barinov line several years earlier, though how she did it was a mystery. Then around the time Sinclair disappeared, Barinov was moved to more comfortable quarters, and an unnamed man took his place. I suspected that was Sinclair, but there was no record of him ever beingreleased.”
“Wow,” Meg muttered. “A human queen stuck it to two dragons. Pretty impressive. Wonder how she didit?”
Damien’s laugh lacked mirth this time. “That’s something we’d like to know as well. Conrad Sinclair has all the right papers proving his birth and citizenship, yet we could find nothing about him from his youth, not even a yearbook photo. Word is he has eyes on becoming the next prime minister. Perhaps that’s what this meeting was about, to try to ensure the Belishaws’support.”
“Sounds like a piss-poor way to drum up campaigndonations.”
“True. It doesn’t track. Which means it’s something else. Something far moreserious.”
