“You’re killing my dad!”
Magnus flamed as he dove from the sky, striking the ocean’s surface only a few feet away. Arnaud gasped for breath, floundering, his wings useless, his fires dampened, as I chewed further and further into his vulnerable neck. His jaws gaped wide as he fought for breath, to survive.
Magnus splashed high, his lips skinned back from his teeth, his wings propelling him closer, ever closer. “Iget to kill my dad,” he screamed. “Leave go.”
I didn’t.
Instead, I ground my teeth deeper, seeking his life-giving arteries, tasting his blood, relishing it. Magnus flamed into Arnaud’s opened mouth, forcing his father to breathe in fire hot enough to melt steel.
Arnaud’s lungs were certainlynotmade of steel.
He couldn’t scream. Magnus’s flames melted his throat, his larynx, his trachea. At the same moment my jaws connectedwith his jugular, Arnaud’s lungs flash-fused into a mash of blackened tissue. His eyes bulged in their sockets as he fought to drag in breath, any breath at all. The water around him reddened with his life’s blood.
Leaving him to thrash in the water, I half-swam, half-foundered away from his dying body to Magnus.
Magnus watched, with cold indifference, as Arnaud’s body finally died. The black dragon floated atop the mild wavelets, dead and gone, the last of his blood seeping into the sea. While not exactly a sailor, I knew the scent of blood would soon attract sharks and orcas.
“Magnus?”
He finally looked at me, his eyes nearly black with hate, with rage. I recoiled, backpedaled, my wings pushing me away from him.Has he gone crazy? He looks as though he wants me dead.Not far away, a dorsal fin cut through the water. Then another.
“Sorry.”
Magnus blinked, shook his head. “I’m sorry, Jade. I lost it for a second. Are you okay?”
“Yeah. But we need to skin out or we’re shark bait.”
Only then did Magnus observe the circling sharks. “Shit. Let’s get out of here.”
Seagulls, pelicans and albatrosses might take flight from the water with ease, but dragons didn’t. We floundered, beating our wings to give ourselves enough lift to take off, trying to escape before the sea predators decided they liked live meat more than dead. At last, shedding sea water, we gained altitude.
Circling over Arnaud’s corpse, we watched the sharks’ feast. Their long, sleek bodies thrashed on the surface, taking bites of the corpse before swimming away to dine. More and more sharks joined in, taking off chunks of Arnaud’s body,gulping the food down, then swimming back for more. Magnus grimaced.
“At least his body won’t be found,” he said, flying near me. “I think that’s best. The feds’ll wonder what happened.”
“We’ll say we ran, then lost him,” I replied, watching the feeding frenzy with morbid interest. “Let them chase his ghost. Not that they’ll find it.”
“They’ll have his thugs to prosecute,” he added. “The blackmail and bribery schemes to unravel. They’ll end his human trafficking, free his victims. They have their names. I think Anderson will have his hands full even if he never gets his hands on Arnaud.”
Rising on a warm ocean thermal, I flew beside my love. “He’ll know we killed him. Anderson.”
“Let him.” Magnus grinned. “Knowing and proving are two different things.”
“It’s nice we had allies eat the evidence?” I asked, coy.
“In an hour, it’ll be as though Arnaud never existed.”
Chapter Twenty-Five
Magnus
“You killed him, didn’t you?”
Anderson glowered from the other side of his desk, his hands folded atop it. “What happened last night?”
I blinked, glancing at Jade’s wide eyes. “Uh, no, we ran. We knew he’d kill the agents. Carlson and, er, Morgan. Right, Jade? If we hadn’t, he’d have killed them for sure.”
“So what happened to him?”
