“Oh, there was pain,” Angel said, a grim look on her face. “But not the way you might be thinking. Aja said her connection to Lecada was abruptly severed. It wasn’t the same as if her sister had been killed or even hurt, but she described it as if she and Lecada had never been connected. It traumatized Aja, because it was like cutting off something in one of her senses.”
Talia paled. “That’s odd. Perhaps the girl was taken through a portal?”
“That’s possible, but Rhiannon didn’t say anything about that.” Angel consulted her notes. “The other girl vanished a month or so ago—her name was Twinkle. She vanished without a trace.”
“We need to talk to the twin, obviously, but I don’t want to scare her. What do the parents have to say? Were the girls prone to running away?” Herne asked.
Angel shrugged. “You’ll have to ask her when she gets here.”
“So, she’s not coming because of Straff?” Talia asked.
“I don’t think so, but again, we’ll have to ask her when she gets here.” Angel glanced at her notes. “She’ll be here in an hour or so.”
“One thing I don’t understand is why Straff returned to Whidbey Island. Surely he has to know that we’ll be hunting him down again?” Yutani was the son of the Great Coyote, and he was a brilliant man, if a tad volatile. He was also our IT guy, and had managed to find a way onto the Dark Web without being traced, which opened up a well of knowledge for us.
“You say that as though we’re dealing with someone sane,” Viktor said. The half-ogre shook his head. “Straff is about as far from sane as I am from being a pygmy.”
I repressed a snicker. “True that,” I said. “But Yutani raises a good point. If Straff’s on the island again, he has to know that we’ll be seeking him out. He can’t think that Cernunnos hasn’t found out that he escaped, can he?”
It seemed ludicrous to think that Straff would be that oblivious, unless he was listening to the guard who had sprung him out of the dungeon. If she was still alive. There was a distinct possibility he had killed her. A sudden thought hit me, one that made my stomach lurch.
“Do we have to contact Blackthorn again?”
“Oh, yes. We’ll need to consult the King of Thorns again,” Herne said. “I don’t relish the thought, either.”
The last time we had met, Blackthorn had shown too much of an interest in me, and I hadn’t forgotten the sleazy, creepy way he had tried to insinuate himself between Herne and me. Blackthorn, the King of Thorns, was Straff’s father, and to me, he had been more frightening than Straff himself.
Angel’s cell phone rang and she glanced at it. “I set the reception phone to forward to my phone.” She moved away from the table to answer, while the rest of us continued to discuss Straff. But less than a minute later, Angel hurried over and turned on the TV.
“Guys, that was Maria Serenades, the deputy mayor. She has what she calls some disturbing news and she wants to talk to us today. She’ll be here around three o’clock. She told me to turn on the television and watch the breaking news.”
We quieted down as the newscaster came on. Marcy Winters—a ditzy bleached blonde for whom the song “Dirty Laundry” might have been written—faced the camera with a blisteringly cheerful smile.
“Today, history was made when Frassáire—the spokesman for the Dakkar Mountain Dragon Clan—bought the entire town of Remington, a small mining town last occupied in the early 1920s by prospectors. Located near Monroe, the town has sat empty since 1941, when the last residents moved away, and has been up for sale the past ten years. Frassáire told our reporters that the Dakkar Mountain Dragon Clan plans to renovate it into a tourist village, with rides and vendors, where families can come to meet and interact with the Dragonkin. They plan to open by early April.”
I stared at the screen. “What the everloving fuck?”
Herne swore, hitting the table with his fist. “I talked to the governor a few weeks ago. I warned him this was going to happen.”
At first, we had been worried that the dragons were going to take over by force, but as the weeks wore on and the dragons made themselves known but backed down in actual attacks, we began to suspect a more devious plot. Though the dead were walking—and they would as