Page 41 of Dark Fire

They’d left him alone long enough that the prisoner was beginning to crack by the time they got to him. They chained the prisoner to a chair in the middle of the cell; Sobek and Warrick began to circle him as Tevryn leaned against the wall just enough out of the meager light to not be seen clearly but to still be an ominous presence in the room.

“Where did you come from?” growled Sobek.

The prisoner shook his head.

“Why did you target Delaney Pierce?” asked Warrick in a harsh voice.

“Who did this to you? You weren’t born like this,” snarled Sobek.

Around and around the two of them circled, bellowing questions and unnerving the man. His head whipped back and forth between his two interrogators, but he maintained his silence.

Finally, Tevryn approached him. “Let me make this easy for you. I’ll talk, and if I’m wrong, you just shake your head. Nothing difficult about that. It’s clear that you’re some mutant science experiment. I suspect the lab up in Reykjavik created you. You aren’t shifter born. Someone did this to you. I doubt you volunteered. One of my friends thinks it’s a man named Elron Whistler. Frankly, I don’t buy it. I don’t think he’s that smart or that evil. Sobek there thinks it’s an ancient dragon called Abraham working with the Shadow League.”

“Do you think he even knows who the League is?” asked Warrick.

“Probably not, but this thing is starting to sweat, and I suspect convulsions are on the way.”

“What makes you think that?” asked Sobek.

“He was human once, and that only changed a short while ago. I’ll bet there’s some pill or drug he has to have every so often or he loses control of the shapeshifting.”

“That never happens to dragons,” said Warrick.

“No,” said Tevryn, “but it happens to shapeshifters. Some of them go mad, and they begin to lose control. He’s not a dragon-shifter; he’s a shapeshifter, and it won’t be long before he loses his ability to control a shift. The problem is, he isn’t a distinct shifter species, he’s a genetic freak, and if he loses control, it’ll kill him.”

All three members of the Phantom Fire stared at him with hard eyes.

“If I talk, he’ll kill me,” murmured the man.

The prisoner was sweating blood, the first symptom of the terminal stage. There would be no saving the man. If they were going to get anything—now was the time. Hardening himself against their captive’s suffering, Tevryn leaned down to whisper in the man’s ear, “Who?”

“Apophis.”

Tevryn nodded. “Abraham.” He turned back to the prisoner. “They lied to you. Your condition is worsening, and they have left you to die a horrific death. They didn’t send you after my mate, did they? They sent you to kill the person working for Elron Whistler. Abraham is afraid of Norle, isn’t he?”

“They say it’s more toxic than iron or obsidian, especially to dragons. Please, I don’t know anything else,” the prisoner whimpered. “You have to help me. My skin is crawling, and I feel my bones shifting, only they aren’t realigning.”

They could hear bones within the prisoner’s body cracking and grinding as he screamed in agony. News out of Alaska had talked about unstable mutant-shifters that weren’t viable for long and needed to have a specific drug in order to maintain cohesion for any length of time.

“It’ll be all right, lad,” said Sobek comfortingly as he put his hands on the trembling man’s shoulders, and before the prisoner knew what he was about, Sobek mercifully snapped his neck and ended his torture—not anything the Phantom Fire had done, but what Abraham and the Shadow League had done.

“That’s a bit of good news,” said Tevryn. Both Sobek and Warrick looked at him. “It would seem Abraham and Whistler are at cross purposes. We can use that to our advantage.”

Chapter 17

Delaney

Delaney opened one eye, sensing that she was not alone but that it wasn’t Tevryn who was with her.

“Good morning,” said Dani. “I knew Tevryn was with Sobek and Warrick…”

“Are they in danger?” asked Delaney, coming awake and wondering how, with everything that had happened yesterday, she had been able to sleep so soundly. She supposed that wasn’t so difficult, though, as she and Tevryn had spent a memorable night.

“Um, dragons? Dragon stronghold? Short of a bomb, Dragonwyk is probably the safest place on earth to be. So, no, they aren’t in danger. They did need to question the guy that tried to kill you, though. I was a bit freaked out to hear there were three of them, and two of them didn’t survive. Dragon battles can be brutal and a bit terrifying. I’m a cop, and I know the first one I saw freaked me out. All I could think was regardless of my feelings for Warrick, I had to get away.”

Delaney rose up and leaned against the headboard, drawing her knees up to her chest. “What did you do?”

Dani laughed. “I tried to get away. Didn’t work. Dragons can be particularly single minded when it comes to their eternal flames. I often wonder if those amongst the Phantom Fire feel the call even more keenly. After all, until recently, if they chose their mate, they gave up so much.”

---