For the barest moment Pia resisted her impulse. She should not stoop to Evil Eva’s level. But then there it was. Her hand came up without her permission, and she flipped the other woman her middle finger.
Eva and the others laughed. As Pia went to bed, she consoled herself with the thought that at least the psychos’ laughter was friendlier than when they had first started out on the trip. Anyway, that was her story and she was sticking to it.
When she went to bed, she expected to toss and turn, and to chew on all her worries, but instead she fell asleep almost immediately.
Someone stood over her, swathed in shadows, looking at her with green eyes. He bent over to touch her.
No. That wasn’t right.
There wasn’t a man in her room. Someone was growling.
The peanut lay stretched out on her torso, long wings sleek against his supple back, his head on her shoulder. He was such a beautiful white dragon baby, every delicate feature etched in perfect miniature. She stroked a hand down his body and whispered, “Ssh, sweetheart, it’s all right.”
He lifted his head to look at her, and his dark violet eyes glowed with ferocity. Wow, he really was unsettled. He was going to be quite a force to be reckoned with when he grew up. She looked out the window where he had been staring. While the night sky was clear, there were no stars.
The sky looked so wrong that dread jolted through her. She gathered the peanut up in her arms and rolled to her feet to go to the window. Oh, thank God, there were some stars sprinkled across at least part of the sky.
As she watched, a few of the bright lights went dark. A man stood at her shoulder and whispered, “Nothing shines forever. Their deaths will pave a way to a new age.”
She glanced back at him. Green eyes smiled at her.
“No,” she said. Was she agreeing with him, or refuting him?
The peanut’s growling grew louder. She hugged him tightly. Either the stars were dying, or they were being smothered or eaten. Despite what the man said, it was horribly wrong, the most horrible thing she’d ever seen. A harsh, discordant clash sounded like a dirge, or perhaps it was an inhuman scream, and dread soaked the landscape like blood.
The dread was everywhere. It beat a dark, oily sludge in her veins and tried to black her out, swallow her whole. The man reached out to put his hand on her shoulder, and suddenly the peanut’s little head whipped around and he actually bit her—
She plunged awake, her skin damp with sweat. Dammit all to hell, that wasn’t the kind of dream she had been hoping she would have. A vague nausea roiled and she curled on her side, breathing deeply.
The baby was roused again, his presence draped over her, an invisible protective cloak spiked with aggression. She put a hand on her rounded stomach. What the hell?
The dark sense of dread had intensified. It saturated the air so thickly, she felt as though she were actually breathing it in like wood smoke.
Smoke.
She came fully awake, stabbed to alertness by a knife of adrenaline.
The acrid scent of smoke hung in the air. A sharp clash of metal sounded in the distance, along with shouting, and a red-tinged fog drifted across the window outside.
Or maybe that wasn’t fog. Her head ached fiercely and her ears rang as if she heard a high, thin scream.
There was no sound of movement in the apartment. Lunging to her feet, she ran out of her bedroom.
The embers of a fire pulsed brightly in the fireplace in the common room. James sat on the floor, slumped against the hallway door. Andrea sat in an awkward heap in front of the window.
They couldn’t be dead. They couldn’t be. Pia leaped to James and slapped him. He came upright with a growl and pressed the tip of his sword against her throat before she could jerk back.
The sharp tip nicked her skin. They stared at each other, wild-eyed. Then James jerked his sword away and said, “FUCK, don’t ever do that again. I could have sliced your throat wide open.”
She hissed, “You were asleep.”
Affront flashed across his handsome features. “I never fall asleep on watch.”
“Keep telling that to yourself as you go wake Andrea up!”
The sharp clashes of metal in the distance—those were swords. James leaped toward Andrea’s slumped figure as Pia raced for the nearest bedroom. Eva would never sleep through this kind of commotion, not unless she’d been drugged.
Eva and Miguel lay in a large bed. Miguel had the bedcovers pulled up to his chin while on the other side of the bed Eva lay stretched on top, wrapped in a blanket.
Having learned her lesson the hard way with James, Pia slapped Eva’s ankle hard and jumped back out of the way as the other woman lunged to her feet with a growl.