Chapter Eleven

EOGHAN

After their haircuts and massages at Ijumaa’s place, Eoghan realized they’d spent a totally relaxing day in each other’s company. He’d marveled at how well suited they were with each other, not only at work but also at home. They’d passed the day doing small domestic things together…things they put off because they were away a lot of the time like laundry, house cleaning, and grocery shopping. They’d joked and laughed the whole day away.

That evening, they’d grilled steaks and invited Al, Ted, and Bear to join in, eating outside in the garden since it was a beautiful summer evening. They’d gone to bed and made slow, breathless love until they were both gasping and exhausted, then rolled over and fallen asleep in each other’s arms.

The next day they’d lazed around and just enjoyed each other. Going for lunch on the ocean, slow, languid afternoon sex, and an early night. It had been a thoroughly relaxing two days off and by the time they pulled into the parking lot at Griffith Park they were ready for whatever Arizona Priest had to throw at them.

The moment they stepped off the elevator, Eoghan sensed an almost electric charge in the air. He glanced over at Ari. “Feel that?”

He nodded, and Eoghan realized he’d pushed back his jacket and had covered the hilt of his Glock too. “There’s something supernatural in here,” Ari said.

Eoghan agreed. He glanced over at his partner as they walked toward the bullpen. “It’s not our policy to invite them in so whoever they are, the chief must trust them.” The minute they rounded the corner, he stopped as he spotted the chief, beckoning them over. She stood just outside her office flanked by none other than Severin and Invictus. They weaved their way in between several personnel who’d stopped working and were openly gaping. Several marshals were watching the conversation between the chief and the tall men, probably realizing they were paranormals of some kind, but not dragons. Eoghan hadn’t known of them until Two Trees had mentioned them. And until meeting them and watching them shift into fearsome dragons, he hadn’t believed it.

“Why are they here?” Ari asked quietly as they walked through the office.

Kellen McGillis turned a corner just then, not looking up from his phone as he texted, and nearly ran right into Ari. They both pulled up short just before a collision. Eoghan watched Ari open his mouth, probably ready to apologize before he recognized him, shutting it just as quickly as McGillis sneered at them both and sidestepped Ari.

Eoghan decided he’d have to have a very unpleasant conversation with Kellen and hoped that he’d have the opportunity soon. For the thousandth time, he wished he’d never become entangled with the man. He couldn’t stand him and now there was tension between him and Ari, things were even worse. When they got to the chief and the shifters, they greeted each other, shaking hands.

“It’s really nice to see you two again so soon,” Eoghan said. “But I have to say, I’m surprised we’re meeting in the office.”

“Severin and Invictus got back in touch with the Agency just recently as you know,” the deputy chief said. “I asked them to come into the office the next time they were in town and reregister with the Agency. It’s been a long time since we’ve had any contact with them.”

Eoghan was certain he detected the double meaning in the boss’ words but for now, he just went along with normal greetings. If anyone in the office or at the Agency was spying on them, all they’d see would be them greeting these men whom they’d met a few months ago when they’d supposedly been up north at Mount Shasta to check on these ancient beings. They probably wouldn’t put two and two together that these were the dragons.

“We wanted to talk to you about the Tahoe shifter clan and the jade we require,” Invictus was saying. “We might have to ask for Agency help in negotiations. Would it be okay if we spoke in private somewhere?”

“We can meet in the SCIF,” the chief helpfully offered. “It’s got a comfortable conference room table, and we’ll have the ultimate privacy there.” She turned toward Eoghan and Ari. “Why don’t you two come down there as well? You know the Tahoe shifter clan and all the moving parts on that reservation. Maybe you can lend our friends here some of your sage advice.”

“Sure, Chief,” Eoghan said.

“Anything you need,” Ari reiterated. He exchanged a glance with Eoghan, knowing like he did that shit was getting real. It felt like the time had come when decisions and plans were about to be made. It was exactly the way he expected them to be after the chief had told them to take a day to drive back and a couple of days to rest up. He just didn’t expect to come to work and find Invictus and Severin in the office.

They headed down to the SCIF, their secure compartmented information facility, a room all Federal offices had; no cell phones nor computers were allowed in the room to maintain completely secure information. Whatever was shared down in this room, on the lowest level of the building, couldn’t leave the room, unless it was in the heads of those who heard it there first.

They checked their phones and were wanded by armed security personnel before being let into the room. The single phone inside was scanned every day for bugs and hardwired so no information could escape. As soon as the door was locked, Eoghan breathed a sigh of relief that they could now talk freely.

“Nice to see you here,” Ari said to the dragons, before Eoghan got a chance to voice the same thing. “I am surprised, though.”

Severin and Invictus smiled as they pulled up chairs and sat down at the table across from them while the chief sat at the head. “Your chief sent a message that she wanted us to come in the next time we were in town,” Invictus said. He glanced over at her and smiled. “She completely charmed us, and we both got the impression she wanted this meeting urgently. We figured this would be a planning meeting for an upcoming operation to stop Tillis Bradshaw and help King John Townsend, so here we are…to plan.”

Eoghan frowned, turning toward the chief, then back to the dragons. “I didn’t realize you had any contact with the chief.” He glanced back at the boss. “How did you send a message to them? The last time you wanted to talk to the dragons, Ari and I had to be picked up—literally picked up—and flown to a cave, for Christ’s sake.”

“Yeah,” Ari protested. “Do you know how scary it is to hang from someone’s claws?”

Eoghan snorted, watching the chief crack a smile.

“Actually no, I don’t, and I went low tech this time.”

“Low tech?” Ari asked. “How do you get any less low tech than a message delivered face to face?”

She shrugged. “Carrier pigeon.”

“Carrier pigeon,” Ari repeated flatly. “How the hell does a carrier pigeon fly that high up without being killed by…I don’t know, whatever natural predators pigeons have, hawks and eagles and shit.”

It was Invictus and Severin’s turn to laugh. “We established carrier pigeon communication with the I.S.R. years ago,” Severin said. “They don’t fly all the way up to our caves. They never go anywhere near our mountain. There’s a coop at the base of the mountain in Redding. Historically, we always used this method to communicate with the Agency. As we said, we used to be on closer terms with the I.S.R., many years ago. It’s been a while, though.”

“But how did you know there’d be a message waiting?” Ari asked.

“We figured your chief would be in touch when we were needed, so a month or so ago, we started checking the coop every few days. Two days ago, a message turned up and we left our mountain and started driving.”

“You didn’t fly or something?” Eoghan asked.

“Oh, definitely not. That would have been too dangerous. We do have an enemy as you witnessed for yourselves.”

Eoghan watched Ari reach up and touch the side of his face and hair where the enemy dragon had burned him. He remembered with dread how scary it had been to see the fire-breathing dragon attempt to roast Ari alive. It had been downright terrifying to see one dragon drop him only to be caught by another. Those minutes as he’d imagined Ari falling to earth, burning alive, had been one of his worst memories since he’d embarked upon this path with the I.S.R.

“I remember feeling like I was gonna die,” Ari said.

“And I remember feeling grateful that you didn’t,” Eoghan said. He looked deeply into his lover’s eyes for a few seconds before clearing his throat and forcibly dragging his gaze away from his, afraid that he was wearing his emotions on his sleeve. He probably was.

“I would have found that terrifying, Sapphire,” the chief said. “But we’re on to bigger and better things.”

“Yes, ma’am,” Eoghan said, grateful he could look at the table and hopefully he hadn’t given anything away in his glances or voice. Keeping Ari Brown as a secret lover as well as a partner was becoming harder and harder the longer he had to do it.

“Yes, well, as I told you during our last phone exchange, I have been assembling people I can trust here on my end to help with our cause,” the chief said. “Thanks to King John…who finally contacted me through a very strange Hispanic woman who showed up at my home one night several weeks ago, he suggested three other shifter reservations who might cooperate with us. He says they’re now on board to help in his cause. I’ll need to have you vet these, Sapphire…Brown.”

“What do you mean, vet them, ma’am?” Eoghan asked.

“He says they’ve done business together in the past and they’re friends but we have to be sure. Two are based in Colorado, one in Wyoming,” she replied. “We don’t think Tillis Bradshaw’s tendrils or that of his organization have reached that far, but we don’t want to be surprised when we are suddenly faced with wolves in the chicken coop.”

“Yes, ma’am,” Eoghan said. “You want us to go there and meet with these shifters?”

She nodded. “I’m going to task you to visit the ones in Colorado and ask our friends Severin and Invictus to go to Wyoming.” She glanced at the dragons. “Go ahead, tell them and then we have to wrap this up.”

Severin nodded. “I found a keystroke logger in your chief’s computer here at the office this morning. She already believed that every communication and email was being monitored and she was right.”

“Someone put a—” Ari started. “How’d that happen? Here in the office?”

“I don’t know but it had to have happened in the last couple of days. When Night was on my computer performing routine maintenance two days ago, it wasn’t there. This really is a good thing,” Priest said, trying to sound reassuring to Eoghan’s ears, but she was clearly affected judging by how haunted she looked. “We’ve all known someone has been monitoring me here in the office,” she said. “They’ve just become much more aggressive about it.”

“How could someone get into your office without your knowledge? There’re cameras in every corridor including the bullpen right outside your office,” Ari said. “Aren’t there?”

Oddly enough, she smiled slightly. “Yes, and according to Night, footage of my office from the cameras in the last two days has been erased which means someone either here in the office or at the Agency headquarters in Washington is responsible for erasing it. She’s tracking that also.” She paused and looked at everyone. “Come on. Don’t look so glum. Surprisingly, I wouldn’t call this a bad thing at all. It just means whoever they have spying on me—” She waved a finger around the table in a circle, encompassing all of them. “And us…is fucked once we figure it all out and call in the full force of the I.S.R.” She paused, sucking in a deep breath. “We will be successful, gentlemen.”

Or die trying , Eoghan thought.

Nevertheless, he couldn’t believe the chief’s courage. At what felt like incredibly risky circumstances, she’d gone on, finding one ally after another without them knowing a thing about it until now. “Okay, Chief,” Eoghan said. “We get it. When do you want us to leave and who are we meeting?”

“You fly out tonight,” Priest said. “You’ll be meeting Rana Fields from the Falcon, Colorado reservation, located right outside of Colorado Springs. She’s your contact at the tribal police out there. When you meet with her, she’ll introduce you to the other tribe in Denver. That tribe isn’t so easy to deal with and even though Andy Red Crow says he’s willing to help, he’s young and impulsive. Rana says it’s best to have an ally and since Red Crow knows her, she thinks an introduction is the best way in.”

“Is he the tribal council leader or what?” Ari asked.

“He’s the new chief. His father recently passed away. He just turned nineteen so he’s heavily dependent on guidance from his elders and he doesn’t necessarily like to follow every suggestion they make even though obviously, they’re older and wiser than him, Rana says. She thinks it’s his youth and inexperience making a lot of decisions for him. She fears that possibly the real reason he agreed to help the I.S.R. is just to show his elders he’s in charge, capable of filling his father’s shoes. Still, Denver is a huge reservation and very wealthy due to Indian gaming.”

“This guy sounds shaky, boss,” Eoghan said.

“Yes, but we need the numbers he’ll bring to the table if he’s actually being genuine. Andy Red Crow has a lot to lose if Tillis Bradshaw gets his way. Denver isn’t that far away from other affected cities where we know Bradshaw is taking power and they have a synthetic blood plant as well,” Priest said.

“Are we sure we know everywhere Bradshaw has laid down tracks?” Severin asked.

They all turned to the big dragon. The orange fire around his irises was disconcerting to Eoghan, and if he and Ari hadn’t met him before and broken bread with him, he would have been completely freaked out by it.

“One of our IT personnel has been on this project ever since we started,” the chief said.

“Night?” Ari asked, sounding a little surprised.

The chief nodded. “She’s been my right hand in all of this here in the office. Ever since she found all that information on King John in the very beginning, I’ve had her watching my computer as I’ve already said. She’s been tracking Tillis Bradshaw’s goons and watched him take over one route after another, just as we predicted he’d do. We’re pretty sure we know how far his influence and his vampires have spread.”

“I like the girl a lot but you’re sure we can trust her?” Ari asked.

“Who is this Night person?” Invictus asked.

“She’s a snow leopard. She can’t shift because she’s only half cat. The other half is human,” the chief said. “And in answer to your question, Brown, yes, she’s as loyal as they come.”

“Okay, good,” Ari said. “I like her.”

“All right.” She reached into her jacket and pulled out an envelope, handing it to Eoghan. “There are your travel documents. You’re traveling under clean identities. I don’t want anyone in the office to know you’re flying out or where you’re going. Meanwhile, check out one of the Chargers. I’ve created a scenario where you and your partner are flying up to supposedly chasing down a report of an alien ship landing from M-3918 way up north near the Oregon border.”

“Sorry, but what’s M-3918?” Severin asked.

The chief turned toward him. “It’s a planet in a distant star system. We have one of their aliens down in the tombs—our version of a holding cell here in the I.S.R.’s basement.” She smiled. “Charlie Turner, one of our jailers, has named him Carmine.”

Severin and Invictus exchanged a glance and Eoghan spotted the excitement in their eyes when the orange glow intensified. Severin looked back at the chief and grinned, suddenly looking like a kid. “Can we see him? Neither of us has ever seen an alien before.”

Eoghan laughed. “That you know of.”

“Huh?” Invictus asked. “Oh, yeah, you’re probably right.” He grinned too. “Can we see Carmine?”

“Sure. I’ll take you down there when we’re done.” She looked at Eoghan and Ari. “I want the five of us to meet again in five days. I’ll have to find a place safe from prying eyes. By that time, I’ll have a final battle plan of attack.”

“And the other shifters and werewolves that are a part of this?” Eoghan asked.

“They’ll all be informed as well as King John,” she said. “I’ll contact you on your burners.”

“Okay, boss. You got it,” Ari said, glancing at Eoghan. “What time do we leave?”

Eoghan leafed through the paperwork in his hands. “Just after three, at Burbank.” Eoghan looked over at the two dragons before standing up and holding out his hand to them. They all shook. “I’m so glad we’re finally going to get to conclude this. I don’t like not knowing who the traitors are in our midst.”

“Nor do I, Sapphire,” she said. “Nor do I.”