Pia Does Hollywood (Elder Races, #8.6)(26)

“Understood.” Dragos turned to Pia. “Go.”

Did he feel the contagion growing stronger? Dread made her stomach bottom out. Fighting back panic, she said in quiet, anguished protest, “No.”

He raised one hand toward her then let it fall back to his side. His darkened gaze was intent, and his hard expression had gentled. “Listen to me,” he said quietly. “They’re right. If I turn, then I might kill you all before they stop me. Those things I came across—they were incredibly fast. You need to get some distance from me while you can.”

“Is it worse?” she whispered, searching his gaze. “Can you tell?”

His expression turned inward. “Not yet. And I am fighting it as hard as I can. But if we separate, you can keep searching for a cure even after I’ve turned. If you stay by my side, it might doom us both.”

“That’s right.” She whirled back to face Tatiana and Shane. “He might turn, but that doesn’t necessarily mean he’ll be lost to us if he does. We need more than a line made of masking tape. We need chains, and something to anchor them to.”

Shane’s eyebrows rose. He asked Dragos, “You will allow us to chain you?”

“I’ll put the chain on myself,” Dragos said.

Tatiana and Shane looked at each other. Shane said, “So far, I’ve had to destroy every infected one that I’ve found—they’ve been too dangerous and frenzied to capture. Dragos might be our best opportunity to find a cure for everybody.”

“Get an SUV back here, and the heaviest chains you can find,” Tatiana rapped out. With an assessing glance at Dragos, she added, “You’d better make it two SUVs.”

“Ma’am,” said one of the guards. “The gate to the back isn’t wide enough for vehicles that big to fit through.”

“I don’t give a shit,” she snapped. “Knock down a wall, if you have to. Move fast!”

They leaped to obey. Within short order, Pia heard an engine gunned, and a Hummer slammed through the gate opening, tearing down a good chunk of the wall with it. Roaring around the corner, it stopped between the house and the swimming pool. It was joined immediately by another Hummer.

A few minutes later, a couple of guards brought thick ropes of chains. Pia didn’t want to think about where they might have had the chains stored, or for what purpose. Working quickly, and with Dragos’s active cooperation, they soon had him chained to both vehicles, a Hummer on either side of him.

Watching him test the give on one of the chains, Pia rubbed her arms and shivered. Even though it was for everybody’s protection, and it might possibly save his life, the sight of him trapped between the two vehicles was terrible.

Tatiana walked up beside her, watching Dragos with a calculating expression. The Queen asked, “Do you think it will hold him if he turns?”

If Dragos had been able to shapeshift, she would have snorted a derisive laugh. As it was, she shook her head and answered honestly, “I don’t know.”

Tatiana sighed. “Well, we had to try. At the very least, it might slow him down.”

Shane had helped with chaining Dragos, and now he moved up beside the two women. “We need to move on to business.”

Dragos shook his arms to settle the chains into place. “Tell us everything you know.”

Shane crossed his arms, watching him. “When we got word of the first sightings, two nights ago, we moved in fast and hard, and I thought we had eradicated the problem, but then more infected people popped up just north of here. Until you, we thought this was a purely Light Fae affliction—virtually every infected person we found was Light Fae.”

“No humans?” Pia asked.

He shook his head. “Not at first. Not until today. A few hours ago, we discovered a couple of magic users who lived at the edge of a Light Fae community had turned. Most humans appear to be unaffected.”

“The contagion might be sorcerous in nature,” Dragos said. “I can feel it attacking my Power.”

Shane paused, studying him. “That would make sense. And if it’s true, most humans won’t be affected at all, but all of the Elder Races, along with any humans that have sensitivity to magic, will be susceptible to it.”

The other Wyr stood nearby, listening intently. Quentin interrupted. “What do you mean, that makes sense? What makes sense about it?”

Shane sighed. He looked at Tatiana. “I haven’t had the chance to tell you this bit yet. When you called me in, we had just finished engaging in a skirmish with several of Isabeau’s Hounds.”

Who was Isabeau, and why had they killed her dogs?

As Pia looked questioningly at Tatiana, the Queen said in brief aside to her, “My twin sister. The Hounds are her attack force.”

Ah. The twin sister who was also a demesne ruler, the Light Fae Queen with the Seelie Court in Great Britain, from whom Tatiana and her followers had fled in the fifteenth century. What kind of history lay between the two sisters that was so bad that, centuries later, Isabeau would send an attack force to Tatiana’s demesne? Or perhaps the attack force was in response to some new antagonism?

Glancing at Dragos, she gave Tatiana a silent nod of acknowledgment as she chewed on a thumbnail.

Shane continued, “We killed several of them, but a few escaped.” He paused and took a deep breath. “Tatiana, I think one of them was Morgan. I didn’t get a good look at him, so I can’t say for sure. If it was Morgan, he was one of the ones who got away.”