“I’ve never seen you like this. You’re confident and almost bossy. Did sexing up a dragon do this for you?”
She scoffed, “Hardly. If anything did, it was you going missing. It took me longer than I want to admit for me to come after you, but after enough time passed and it was clear something had gone wrong, I had to come for you.”
“You could’ve gotten yourself killed.”
“Yeah, well, maybe I still will. Don’t worry about it so much. You’re done with the business of going undercover. You’ve done your part.”
James shook his head. “No. Not after everything I’ve heard. All of this is so much bigger than I thought it could possibly be. He’s united three very large vampire covens. They are all onboard with him. That doesn’t even include what he’s doing here in Chicago.”
“He told you all that?”
James shook his head. “I listened. I had nothing else to do but listen. The things he said. The things he’s doing. Stefano has been putting on a show. They’ve been separating out the jobs so no one can put all the pieces together for what’s really going on.”
“And what’s that?”
“Trying to take over the world, Q. What else? And he wants to destroy the dragons in the process. Somehow, he’s going to enlist the humans to help him.”
A ball of dread settled in the bottom of her gut. The words all made sense, but they didn’t compute.
Syrena entered the room smiling. “I have good news for the two of you. It doesn’t look like either of you have Dragon Fire in your system.”
“You didn’t have to like draw blood or anything?” Quinn asked.
“Nope. Just a spell. You’re clean. But you should both get some rest.”
James and Quinn sat together for a long time before she drifted off to sleep.
* * *
She didn’t wakeup on the floor by the couch. She didn’t even wake up in the house. Something weighed her hand down in her lap. The Fire Stone bared the weight of a good paperweight in her hand. It was warm to the touch. She jerked her head up when she realized she was moving.
She glanced over at the driver.
“Drake?”
“Hi, Quinn.”
“What’s going on?” she asked. She tried to keep her voice even, like she was just talking to her brother as they took a road trip or something. Not a vampire-ghoul creature in her brother’s skin.
“You did what Grey wanted you to do. You stole the stone. Now I’m taking you back to Grey so he can finish off the spell he’s been working on.”
Quinn rolled down the window and raised her hand with the stone to the open area in the car frame. She wanted to throw it. She wanted to get rid of it. Her body remained frozen in place. She couldn’t act. She couldn’t do what she needed to do to protect everyone.
“Oh, yeah, Grey made sure that you would hold onto that stone for dear life. You may as well accept your fate.”
“Drake, you realize if you take me to Grey, I’m dead. He’s going to kill me.”
Drake chuckled. “He has far bigger plans than death for you.”
Quinn shifted in her seat, rolling the window back up when the cold started to get to her.
“Why exactly do you think you know anything about Grey to begin with? He’s not a good guy.”
“He’s not a bad guy. He’s trying to help the vampires, that’s all.”
“By eradicating another species? Then conquering the human world too? You really think Grey gives a shit about you?”
“He turned me into a vampire. Do you think he would do that just for fun?”