I stepped through my newly constructed wards, never breaking my gaze from Warner as he crossed around the still intact bakery display case. The blood magic clung to me like a comforting cobweb. Yeah, it was probably a bad sign that I found the byproduct of blood magic comforting.
Warner was dressed in dragon training leathers, and his dark blond, newly chopped short hair highlighted his wide brow. Actually, everything about the sentinel was wide — jaw, shoulders, hands — and too big, too manly to be considered beautiful, which was fine by me. Preferred, even. He wore the sacrificial knife I’d created in London openly displayed in a sheath built into his leather pants on the left thigh, though he drew with his right hand.
Normally I’d take a moment to ogle his leather-enhanced, hard-muscled physique, but I shivered instead. The chill that had grabbed me outside still had a hold on me.
Warner ran his dark-green gaze down and across every inch of me as I moved to stand before him, crushing the broken glass still covering the floor of the entrance underneath my boots as I went.
This look — so full of concern, then rage — was not the one I’d anticipated when I’d smoothed on black tights and a cashmere sweater dress this morning.
“You are unharmed,” he said.
“Yes.”
“Who has done this?” The heat of his question sent a shivered thrill through the cold settling into my bones.
He was angry. Absolutely livid. Smoldering with it. My dragon … ready to inflict his brutal justice on the culprit.
I smiled, an involuntary and inappropriate response. “The kid.”
“The child dragon?” The sentinel was the sharpest tool in the bakery, which was completely fine by me. Especially because he didn’t seem to find me slow at all.
“She calls herself Shailaja now,” I said.
Warner stilled. “Shailaja?” he echoed, though he pronounced it differently. Harsher. More German, his accent breaking through his adopted speech patterns for some reason.
“She’s a teenager now,” I said, filling the awkward space that had suddenly wedged between us. “She pulled all the magic from my necklace. She was holding the leeches over Scarlett and Gran, and she pretty much forced me to somehow help her absorb it. Or use it to counter whatever was containing her magic.”
“A teenager,” Warner muttered. I was getting the idea I wasn’t the only one in shock now. And something about Warner’s shock was putting me on edge … well, further out along the edge I was already perched on.
“She said something about needing more magic, but then Gran kicked her ass.”
Warner hadn’t taken his gaze from me, but he’d been looking more through me than at me since I’d mentioned the crazed koala’s name. Though he did look momentarily impressed by Gran’s magical prowess, so he was listening.
“Shailaja was the former treasure keeper’s daughter,” he finally said.
“I know.”
He nodded, not bothering to question where I’d come by this knowledge.
“You knew her, then?” I asked.
“I did,” Warner answered. “Guardians do not often have children after they have ascended. The former treasure keeper and my mother had been guardians for at least five or six hundred years before they chose to procreate. In contrast, you are the only child of a guardian in your generation. It was unusual that there were two of us when I was … younger.”
“So you ‘knew her’ knew her?”
Warner’s reaction was awkward and stilted enough that I had to get the big question out of the way, and out of my mind.
“I don’t understand the significance of the repetition. We met when I began training at fourteen. She was a few years older.”
“You were together?”
“We were no more than … children of guardians.”
“Sounds to me like something to bond over.” I narrowed my eyes to let him know I was serious.
“Indeed,” he answered. Then he curled his lip in a smirk. “I gather your jealousy indicates that things are not as dire here as they appear.”
“I’m not jealous of that crazy … b … witch.” Warner raised an eyebrow at me, then crossed his arms and settled his hip back against the counter as if he was waiting for some confession.
“You haven’t kissed me yet!” I cried. Hell, if I was going to be irrational, I was going to go all the way.
Warner had his arms around me before I’d even spoken the last word. The taste of his black-forest-cake magic — all creamy dark chocolate and sweet cherry — enveloped me as he ran his hands up my arms to grasp my shoulders, then captured my lips with his.
I sighed, opening my mouth to him and pressing my body fully against his. Everything about Warner was broad, and all that broadness made me feel deliciously petite. I loved feeling petite.
“Don’t be angry with me,” he murmured against my lips. “Shailaja broke with the guardians. That was … unprecedented. And when she disappeared altogether …”
I wrapped my arms around his neck and lightly rubbed my cheek against his rough jaw. “When she disappeared?” I prompted.
“I thought … that the warrior —”
“Yazi? My dad?”
“The former warrior,” Warner clarified. “It is the warrior’s task to execute any sentence.”
I pulled slightly away from Warner so I could see his face. He looked grim. The sentinel never withheld information from me, but some days I wouldn’t mind that information coming with a bit of candy coating.
“My father is the executioner of the dragons?”
“If necessary. The sword delivers a clean death. But any sentence that doesn’t fall to the warrior becomes the treasure keeper’s responsibility.”
“Because Pulou keeps more than just treasure.” Yep, that was a new tidbit. There was a dragon prison somewhere. I shuddered to think what it contained.
“Yes.”
“So the instruments of assassination aren’t the only weapons capable of killing a guardian.”
“The warrior’s sword has never been raised against another guardian. I doubt it’s been raised against any dragon more than once in a millennia.”
“But you’re saying my father is powerful enough to kill guardians.”
“No.”
“No?”
“I don’t know.”
“I don’t like it when you don’t know something.”
“I know.”
I sighed and pressed my face into the curve of Warner’s neck, welcoming his warmth and momentarily blocking my sight of the destruction of my bakery.
He ran his fingers through the curls at the top of my head. Then down my neck and between my shoulder blades to the small of my back. Then up again.
I wanted to stay crushed against him forever, but I couldn’t ignore the heavy pit of guilt in my stomach any longer.
“She has the map,” I said, hoping my words were completely incomprehensible when muttered against his neck.
Warner’s hand stilled. “She took it deliberately?”
“Kett asked the same thing.”
“The vampire was here?”
“After. Before you returned.”
Warner stayed silent, thinking, and I didn’t interrupt or break our embrace. In a minute, we’d have to be moving forward, and I wanted to delay that for every second possible.
“It was unfortunate that the vampire wasn’t here for the altercation, or Kandy,” Warner said. His tone was distant, as if he was thinking out loud. “I understand that vampires are almost as skilled at tracking as werewolves.”
“Not in this case,” I said. “She was swarmed by the shadow leeches, then disappeared like she did in the fortress in Hope Town.”
“She’s in league with the shadow demons, then. I thought … perhaps … that there was a chance that the shadows had simply kidnapped her from the fortress.” Warner — for all his assertion of not being romantically involved with Shailaja — sounded pained at this prospect.
I looked up at him. He offered me a fleeting smile. An affectation he’d picked up from me … and Scarlett, smiling through pain. Sometimes I wasn’t sure how well I knew Warner, or how much of his persona was constructed through the chameleon nature of his dragon abilities.
“I guess it was silly to think a six-hundred-year-old boyfriend wouldn’t come with a past, when every twenty-plus-year-old I know probably has a worse one.”
Warner’s grin widened. “I’m not six hundred years old,” he said, falling readily into the fight I always picked with him. “I’m at most fifty-five … and who are all these twenty-plus-year-olds that you know?” He capped his playful banter with a sexy growl and a possessive squeeze of my hips. “They sound far too young for the warrior’s daughter.”
I kissed him, again pressing myself against the long length of him, but now being on the edge of rough with the lip lock. God, I adored this man. I adored that he knew when to be serious and when to be playful. I adored that he was possessive, and yet believed that I was more than capable of taking care of myself.
I adored that he liked Kandy, and … well … tolerated Kett. Or at least the idea of Kett, because they hadn’t exactly spent much time together yet.
I flicked my tongue in and out of his mouth. He groaned so softly that I felt it more than heard it. The involuntary noise turned my limbs to mush. He always seemed so in control, and it was way sexy to hear him otherwise.
“We should probably go after the map,” I said, regretfully breaking contact with his lips just enough to speak … between kisses, of course. “But I can’t leave the bakery like this for Bryn to find. She’ll call the police.”
“Is it your brownie’s day off?” Warner asked, still paying more attention to kissing me than anything else.
“Jesus, sixteenth century, you can’t go around being rampantly racist anymore,” I chided, attempting to remain playful and remember that he grew up in a completely different world. “Bryn is First Nations.”
“Brownies are not connected to First Nations ancestry.” Warner nuzzled my neck.
We were like freaking chaste teenagers. “God,” I groaned. “I’m so tired of acting like I’m sixteen. We get the map back, then we’re going straight to bed.”
“I’m not sure what acting like you’re sixteen has to do with that —”
“Well, I don’t know what the hell a brownie is either,” I cried, aware that I was being utterly, frustratingly dramatic and over the top again. “Other than a girl who aspires to sell cookies or graduates to sell cookies. You know, Brownie. Like a baby Girl Scout.”
He had no idea what I was talking about. I clenched my fists, barely stopping myself from hauling off and punching him in the shoulder.
Warner eyed me. “Your mood is shifting rapidly tonight.”
“Don’t you dare.”
He tilted his head, and now eyed me like the minefield I was. When he spoke, he did so slowly and deliberately. “You’re angry, and you keep stuffing that anger away. I certainly don’t mind being a distraction, but perhaps you would feel better if we went after the map.”
“There goes any chance of being mysterious and compelling,” I grumbled. Then I covered my face with my hands, digging my fingertips into my sinus cavities around my eyes in an attempt to relieve my growing headache.
“I find you exceedingly compelling, warrior’s daughter.”
I peeked through my fingers to find Warner grinning at me. A look that demanded to be kissed off his face.
“Stop grinning at me like that,” I growled in mock frustration. “Or we’ll never get the map back.”
Warner dropped the grin. “We’ll get the map back, Jade.”
I bobbed my head in unconvinced agreement and stepped back from him to survey the ruin of the bakery. “It’s going to take hours to clean this, and I can’t even call Gran’s handyman until morning. Or at least that would be the polite thing to do.”
“Which is why I asked after the brownie I assumed you’d acquired to clean,” Warner said, still keeping his tone measured and even for my sake, rather than his own. I got the distinct impression he liked me a little crazy.
“I don’t know what a brownie is,” I said.
“I wondered why you were washing the bowl of the standing mixer the other day … Again, I assumed it was the brownie’s day off.”
“That was two weeks ago,” I grumbled. Annoyingly, dragons didn’t wear watches or follow any particular calendar. “So brownies clean?”
“Among other things, such as the repairs the door needs.”
“And I can just hire one?”
“Well, no. They choose,” Warner said. “They set their terms. And you don’t pay them, not with money.”
“And a brownie is an … elf?”
Warner looked aghast. “Absolutely not!”
Okay. I should have expected that a cleaning elf would be criminally insane. I hadn’t even known for sure that elves existed beyond fairy tales and whatnot until he reacted like that.
“What elf do you know?” Warner narrowed his eyes at me. “They’re worse than vampires. Have you befriended one? How does it enter this dimension? Does your father know?”
I crossed my arms and narrowed my eyes right back at him. I had no idea what the hell he was talking about, but I was learning to bluff. Dragons liked to appear all knowing — and, unlike certain vampires, they could usually deliver that — so it was better to appear all knowing right back at them.
“The brownie?” I prompted.
Warner huffed, then begrudgingly dropped the topic of elves. “We can make a request when we cross through the nexus. I assume you have a plan that involves telling the treasure keeper about she-who-claims-the-name-Shailaja?”
Right. I’d been hoping to avoid the chat with the treasure keeper, actually.
“So that’s how it’s going to be?” I asked. “She-who-claims?”
“That is for the best.”
“Whatever.” I was exhausted already, and was guessing there would be no nap time in my near future. “I need to change.”
“You look quite fetching.”
And just like that, I was grinning at my dragon like an idiot again. Even though I had only a loose understanding of what ‘fetching’ meant to Warner, I got the context through his tone.
“It’ll be warmer in San Francisco.”
“San Francisco?”
“Yeah, we’ve got a date with a vampire.”
“Great. Just … great.”
I laughed, and the last of the tension between us dissolved.
I tiptoed upstairs to my apartment in the dark to find my satchel, which Gran had left on the steamer trunk coffee table in the living room. The bag tasted of her lilac-and-grass magic until I looped it over my head so it slung across my body to rest on my left hip. Then it just felt like part of me, similar to my necklace and knife. I wondered if Gran had the time to complete the containment spell she’d promised me before she fell asleep, but I didn’t want to wake her to ask. She had taken Scarlett’s bed, and my mother was curled up in mine.
After checking the weather app on my phone, I decided that it wasn’t too warm in San Francisco for an outfit that Warner obviously liked. So I just added rosy lip gloss to my ensemble, then jogged downstairs to grab some American cash out of the newly repaired safe in the tiny office off the bakery kitchen. I’d learned to always have various currencies and my passport securely zipped in a side pocket of my satchel at all times these days.
Before I locked the safe, I also — rather mournfully — tucked Kett’s vampire wedding rings onto the top shelf. I wasn’t going to have the time to attach them properly to my necklace until I dealt with my rabid koala problem, and I didn’t want to risk losing that rare gift.
I remembered to leave a note for Gran and Scarlett about ‘brownies’ not just being the chocolate delicious ones you can eat, and to let them know I was heading into the nexus to confront … err, talk to Pulou.
Warner was waiting for me in the bakery basement. He hadn’t bothered flicking on the bare light bulb that hung in the middle of the room. He actually couldn’t stand perfectly straight down here. The ceiling was low, only six feet.
He turned to watch me walk down the wooden stairs from the pantry, but his expression was more serious than admiring.
“Your new blood wards are powerful, but they don’t block the portal,” he said. “It’s still open to anyone who knows of its existence.”
“Yeah, Gran mentioned that. But I don’t think I can ward against the treasure keeper’s magic.”
Warner touched the concrete and brick wall before him thoughtfully. I waited for him to question my use of blood magic, but he didn’t. Dragons might be a judgmental bunch, but magic didn’t scare them. Or maybe they just didn’t see it in terms of good and evil, as witches did.
“Nor can I,” he said, dropping his hand to his side. “But it’s a concern.”
“You think Shailaja could use it?”
Warner shrugged. “If she is the daughter of the former treasure keeper.”
His ‘if’ hung between us, but I didn’t bother to stoke the fight that could potentially lie behind it. If Warner wanted proof of Shailaja’s identity, that was his prerogative.
“Only Pulou, you, and I know of this doorway,” I said. “I understood it was constructed by the current treasure keeper, not the former.”
“Your father doesn’t know of it?”
“I don’t think so.”
“The warrior hasn’t visited the bakery?”
“Not while I’ve been awake. Possibly never.” I reached for the magic of the portal and bid it to open. Warner contemplated me, and perhaps the actions of my not-particularly-fatherly father. I didn’t expect — or pine for — much parenting from Yazi, who’d only known of my existence for less than two years now. I’d been peachy keen for twenty-three years without a male role model.
“Your hair glows with golden fire in the magic of the portal,” Warner murmured. So I wasn’t the only one capable of being serious and flirty at the same time.
“The magic of the portal is golden, sixteenth century,” I snarked as I stepped by him. “You might want to dig deeper with the wooing.”
“Is it?” he murmured behind me.
I walked into the welcoming magic of the portal, reaching my hand back for Warner without turning. He linked his fingers loosely through mine. We didn’t need to touch to cross together into the nexus — I barely needed to think about my destination anymore — but I liked reaching out to him. I liked that he always responded in kind.