Page 20 of Dark Dragon’s Mate

But she had some of her own ideas about the Draken toxin that was their primary research area right now. It had been a priority for the Shifter Council ever since one of Ragnor’s formulas had turned up on Earth, in an attack on a group of Wild Dragons.

It had been stolen from a company called Gen-X, who were famous for their illegal shifter experiments. Somehow they’d formed an alliance with Ragnor, and had been funding his ‘research,’ lending him computers and drugs he otherwise wouldn’t have had access to.

Trish didn’t want to talk to the rest of the team about her theories until she’d had a chance to run some more experiments. They’d probably just laugh at her.

She examined her petri dishes under the microscope one by one, each one with a drop of the toxin combined with another substance, to see how it reacted.

She really wished she could get a look at Emon’s wound, maybe take some tissue samples to see how her ideas worked on a dragon already affected by the toxin. But the last time someone on the team had suggested the idea to Emon, he’d breathed lightning on the guy’s laptop and turned it into a twisted blob of burned plastic.

They’d all taken that as a hard ‘no.’

Emon had also apparently decided that Trish wasn’t worth his time after all. She’d barely caught a glimpse of him since dinner the first night.

Trish, on the other hand, still couldn’t think about the gentle way he’d taken care of his sister without tears stinging the back of her eyes.

Also, she couldn’t think about that kiss without her ovaries threatening to burst into flames.

All in all, a lethal combination.

But she couldn’t keep letting him avoid her. Pretty soon her injection would wear off, and She-Wolf would be threatening to bust out again.

She only had one more dose; after that Tristan would have to risk himself again to get her more. She owed it to him to try to talk to Emon before that happened, see if he could try to help her control her wolf without drugs.

Tristan had already tried, and gotten nothing but blood and bite scars for his trouble. They couldn’t involve Brock; that would mean admitting to the Silverlake leaders that she was rogue.

Emon was her only chance.

After the visual inspection of her samples, she checked her notes on the infrared spectroscopy she’d done, and then went back to the mass spectrometer analysis of the toxin done by the rest of the team.

And then to the list of ingredients in Ragnor’s notes.

Something wasn’t right. There was an anomaly somewhere—the numbers didn’t add up. It was like there was some other invisible substance modifying the mixture.

Like dark matter, in space. You couldn’t see it or measure it, and the only way to know it was there was by its effect on everything around it.

But how could there be something in the toxin that hadn’t been found in the mass spectrometry? Even if it was a substance of unknown origin, it should show in the results.

The lab was deathly silent. She really was going to have to bring in some music when she worked at night, or the quiet would drive her crazy…

And then she heard the sound. The hollow, ghostly sound she’d heard the first night she got here.

And again, the whispering.

Moving as quietly as a wolf in the forest, she tiptoed to the door and peered cautiously into the hallway. No one was in sight. But the whispering sound was still there, faint and getting fainter, as if it were moving further away.

Trish followed it down the corridor. If there was a damn ghost in this castle—or a ghost convention—she was going to see it.

She heard it as she approached the stairway at the end of the hall, sounding like it was moving upward. Just when she got to the bottom of the stairs, it stopped.

Trish started up the staircase. She didn’t know what was up here—probably nothing. The castle was full of empty rooms. But just before she got to the top she thought she heard, somewhere in the corridor above, a door quietly closing.

She stole down the corridor, trying to figure out which door it was. The first door she tried was locked, but the one across the hall opened. And on the far side of the room was a dark gap in the stone wall, where no gap was supposed to be.

A secret door. And it was open.

The secret door led to another stairway going up. Trish heard noises coming from above, as if someone were rummaging around in a room looking frantically for something.

That didn’t sound like a ghost.