Page 68 of Magic Claimed
“Before you start worrying”—he shot me a knowing look—“Ethan is with Kes. They’re getting moved into the apartment next door.” He jerked his head in Callum’s direction. “You caught him up yet?”
I shook my head. On top of all the other bad news, how could I tell him about the attack on The Portal?
“Well, the good news is, the police don’t think I’m involved. The bad news…” He glanced at Kira and for the first time I noticed her shell-shocked expression.
“The bad news is that they don’t blame me because Tairen claimed it was all her doing.”
I gaped at him. “Wait, she…”
He turned towards Callum. “Short story is, a black dragon rampaged around Bricktown and destroyed The Portal.”
Callum went utterly still.
“The dragon disappeared, and no one was hurt, but it’ll be a while before we get everything put back together. And someone in the street was shouting your name the whole time. Guess they were hoping to pin the responsibility on you.”
No one said anything for a few moments while Callum digested that.
“So Mom was arrested because she was trying to save me from the consequences of a crime I couldn’t possibly have committed?” I’d never heard him sound so flat and cold.
“Not entirely.” Morghaine spoke so quietly, we almost couldn’t hear her words.
“Then why?”
“Because the dragon that destroyed The Portal… was me.”
I watched as Callum and Ryker went through the same thought process I had and came to the same conclusions.
“How long do we have?” Callum wanted to know. “Before they find out it couldn’t have been Mom?”
“They might never find out,” Faris returned heavily. “Not unless someone tells them the truth. And chances are, unless she shifts, they won’t even care enough to dig into it. The Bureau of Idrian Affairs in Washington is sending an agent, but with all the video recordings and your mom’s confession, why would they bother digging?”
“But no one got hurt. What will they do to her?”
“Lock her up as a threat to humanity?” Faris suggested bluntly. “You know there’ve been more ugly rumors and hostile encounters with humans lately, and this is only going to make it worse. And just like the Symposium, we can’t expose Blake’s play without letting the humans know what’s possible. Our hands are tied.”
I wasn’t going to accept that, and I could tell by looking around the room that no one else was either.
“So we have to figure out what Blake is actually planning. Why this attack? Why now? And how does it tie into the missing kids?”
“Plural?”
I laid out for them what Kira and I had discovered, both about Jeremiah and about Tabitha. “If I’m right, and Blake had a hand in Jeremiah’s kidnapping, I don’t think he’s going to stop there. So I have to convince Tabitha’s mom to talk to me. See if we can find out whether there’s any link between this online game and their disappearance.”
I had a feeling there was a connection, and it meant that Blake had something big in mind. He had to have been planning this since even before the Symposium. But what I couldn’t figure out was…
“How did Blake get his people here, then getthem out again so quickly? At Monique’s place, the scent trails ended in the middle of the backyard.”
“I tracked the dragon to the alley behind The Portal,” Kira put in thoughtfully, staring at her hands. “The trail disappeared after that.” As if he or she had shifted back into a human and simply walked away. But to where?
“So he has to be close, right? Blake’s base has to be somewhere nearby.”
He was the key to all of this, just as he had been since the beginning, and it felt like we were no closer to catching him. No closer to understanding. We stood in the center of the board, but we were blindfolded, with all the pieces shifting around us.
All we could do was pick a direction and keep moving.
“We’ll find him,” I said grimly. “He can’t get away every time. And now that Callum is awake, we can focus on the next most urgent tasks.”
“The poison,” Ryker said.
