Hour of the Dragon - Heather Killough-Walden Page 0,102
his brow furrow and touched his forehead to find it slightly warm. Shit, he thought. Am I coming down with something?
Then he looked up and realized that as Cain had been talking to him, he’d been moving around the room, handing something to each of his clansmen. Whatever it was, they seemed to know immediately what to do with it, as they all began popping it into their mouths and swallowing.
Cain stopped his rounds in front of Conall. “Take this,” Cain told him, holding out what appeared to be a small matte-black sphere.
“Oh crap, is this the mind-control blocking thing?” he asked, only now remembering that Katrielle and the others had been working on one to counteract the effects of Victor Maze’s chaos thoughts. And only now realizing that until Cain had arrived, the entire lot of people inside that garage had gone off on a tangent! Shit, he thought. They’d been talking about children’s cartoons and John de Lancie and laughing about what Conall did and did not know, when something devastatingly important was happening right that very minute.
“Crap,” he whispered again as he took the pill from Cain’s hand and swallowed it down immediately.
Cain turned away from him then and addressed his men. “I can’t be with you nonstop, but that should help prevent repeats of what I walked in on a few minutes ago.”
The ashamed expressions deepened, and there was some uncomfortable shifting on the leather sofas and the leather seats of the bikes.
“In the meantime, we have two humans to rescue. So –” he said with a glance over his shoulder at Conall. “A brief recap.”
Conall almost sighed in relief knowing that Cain was recapping solely for his benefit.
“These women, along with Annaleia Faith from the Draco clan, are of no value to Maze. His interest in them resides solely in their interest to Randall Price. Maze promised Faith to Price in return for his cooperation.”
“And his bad vibes,” added Crow under his breath.
“Yes,” Cain agreed. “Maze also used Price to get closer to Katrielle.”
“How so?” asked one of the men Conall didn’t yet know.
“Maze allowed Price to believe he was unaware of Faith’s location and one way or another, Randall Price sent out a call for a bounty hunter of sorts. Detective James of course responded, which we now know Maze was expecting – as James is Katrielle’s personal employee. We’re assuming Maze took the opportunity of the meeting to comb the detective’s mind and garner as much as possible about Katrielle.”
“Damn,” someone said.
There was a thick silence while everyone seemed to be considering the implications of this. All Conall knew was that Maze had some sort of personal plans for the Nomad and that they were no doubt unpleasant. It was after all her first love Bantariax who had trapped the chaos god in the first place.
“So!” Cain said as he drew the meet to a close, “This demanded trade is for Price’s benefit, but if Maze is the opportunist we know he is, we can expect him to take the opening to deal us some kind of blow at the same time.”
“You know, I don’t understand why he doesn’t just kill Price and maybe try to off the others and be done with it,” said Crow.
Cain glanced at him, and Conall heard him softly say, “Don’t let Mace hear you say that, Crow.”
Jacob Crow straightened. “Right. But you feel me?”
Conall had been wondering the same thing.
“Honestly no clue,” said Cain simply. “My guess is he isn’t finished with the man just yet. It’s possible he’s tied to him in some way and isn’t yet strong enough to sever the tie. Therefore he has to appease Price for the time being.”
“So he’s going to do everything he can to make sure Faith winds up in the psycho’s hands,” said Conall. He could feel his blood pressure rising.
“Not if we can help it,” said Crow. “You know the plan. Just stick to it.”
All around the garage, the Monsters clan rose from their seats and slid on jackets or gathered holsters or ammo from the wall.
“Trust us,” said the Aurum member – Nathan, Conall remembered – as he passed by him on the way to gather his own things. “We’ll have her back.”
“We won’t let her come to harm,” assured the man with hair the color of night.
“She’s one of our own now too,” said Cain. And to everyone else he said, “Head out.”
Chapter Thirty-three – Undisclosed location, then Austin Texas, early morning