Whisper Kiss: A Dragonfire Novel - Softcover

Cooke, Deborah

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0451230922 ISBN 13: 9780451230928

Publisher: Berkley, 2010

Synopsis

The national bestselling Dragonfire series continues to heat up...

For millennia, the shape-shifting dragon warriors known as the Pyr have commanded the four elements and guarded the earth's treasures. But now the final reckoning between the Pyr and the dreaded Slayers is about to begin...

Niall Talbot has volunteered to hunt down and destroy all the remaining shadow dragons before they can wreak more havoc. But fate has placed him in the hands of Rox, an unconventional tattoo artist who doesn't even flinch when a shape-shifting dragon warrior suddenly appears on her doorstep. And as a woman who follows her heart in matters of passion, she makes the perfect mate for a firestorm with Niall...

About this title

About the Author:

Deborah Cooke has always been fascinated with dragons, although she has never understood why they have to be the bad guys. She has an honors degree in history, with a focus on medieval studies.She is an avid reader of medieval vernacular literature, fairy tales and fantasy novels, and has written over forty romance novels under the names Claire Cross and Claire Delacroix.

Deborah makes her home in Canada with her husband. When she isn't writing, she can be found knitting, sewing or hunting for vintage patterns.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:

Chapter One

New York City
June 26, 2010

Rox came home, triumphant. She’d finally found the perfect job for her roommate and current “project.”

This would work.

Thorolf, who called himself T, was a big bike courier with no direction or ambition. Rox had known from the outset that T could make more of himself, but she’d had a hard time persuading him to try. Every option had been impossible in his view, but Rox hadn’t given up. And now her efforts would pay off. True to form, Rox had pulled in a favor and found exactly the right job for T.

Reduce, reuse, and recycle didn’t apply to just goods in Rox’s world. People could be reinvented, too.

And if there was ever a man who needed reinvention, it was T. She’d never met anyone with such a lack of focus, yet so much potential. Once she’d seen what he could do, Rox had been determined to help him make the most of his innate gift.

T, unfortunately, wasn’t inclined to change.

Delivering groceries for the neighborhood organic store would be a perfect step for him. The job would give him a paycheck, enable him to help with the rent, allow him to be outside—which he preferred—and keep him from partying late so that he could get to work early each day. Rox thought it was the perfect combination of responsibility and freedom.

But it would work only if Rox could persuade T to accept the job. He was the obstacle to his own success.

She unlocked her apartment door and heard T rummaging in the bedroom. It was a good sign that he was home. She dropped the bag of groceries on the counter—scored while she finalized the job offer—and strode into his bedroom, only to find T packing his few possessions.

He was still in his black Lycra tights with the khaki shorts over top of them, the mud up his back fresh from a day of being a bicycle courier. He was home early, though—and the fact that he hadn’t just grabbed himself a beer from the fridge and crashed on the couch, or gone drinking with his buddies, meant something was up.

Something, Rox would bet, that she wasn’t going to like.

The furtive glance T shot over his shoulder in her direction, as if he had been caught, only fed her suspicions.

“What’s going on?” she asked.

T dropped his gaze and returned to his packing. If anything, he was moving faster. “I’m, uh, leaving.”

Rox folded her arms across her chest. “Leaving as in taking a vacation or leaving as in moving out?”

“Door number two,” he mumbled, not looking at her.

Rox feared he was going to move in with one of his friends, whom she considered to be bad influences. “You find a job or just a better offer?”

“Both.”

Rox waited, but T said nothing more. He picked up greasy bike parts from the floor in the corner of the room and packed them with a reverence most people would have saved for precious gems. She waited, but he kept packing, gaining speed. She tapped her toe and he ignored her.

Rox’s anger flared at his evasiveness. “You’ve finally found a job, after three years of my bugging you about it, and you can’t even look me in the eye to tell me?”

T shuffled his feet. “I know you’ll be pissed.” In another time and place, Rox might have been amused that this man—who was almost two feet taller than she and weighed easily twice as much, who could use his fists like no one she’d ever known, and who could change into a dragon at will—was afraid of her.

As it was, her mouth went dry. What had T gotten himself into?

“It’s not a real job, is it?” she guessed. “Are you involved in something illegal? Because you know that has to be the stupidest choice—”

“It’s not illegal, Rox. Just weird.” He faced her,but still didn’t meet her eyes.

This was bad news.

“Tell me the truth,” Rox demanded. “No matter what you’ve done, I’ll be more mad if you lie to me.” She poked him in the shoulder when he didn’t immediately reply. “What’s going on, T?”

“Not T,” he insisted, as had become his habit recently. It was exactly the opposite argument he’d made when she’d first met him—then he’d insisted that he had to be T.

And they said women changed their minds too much.

“Thorolf,” she said deliberately, wondering what the hell had gotten into him. If he needed direction, she had one for him. “I found you a job today. That organic grocery store by the tattoo shop needs a delivery guy. You’d be outside pretty much all day, but you’d get a regular check. . . .”

His lips set stubbornly. “No. I gotta go, Rox. That’s all there is to it.”

“Where are you going to live?”

“That’s taken care of, too.”

It wasn’t much of an answer, not enough of one to suit Rox, but T turned back to his packing. He began to jam T-shirts and bicycle parts into his backpack in no particular order, obviously in a rush to get away from her. It was incomprehensible that this man who had never shown a spark of initiative or determination, despite her many efforts, had finally developed some resolve.

And it meant he was saying no to her.

After three years of encouraging him, after three years of trying to make something of the mess of a man she’d met in a bar and taken into her protection, Rox was not amused.

She was worried.

“Why?” she demanded.

“There’s something I gotta do. Something I gotta learn.” He ran a hand over his hair. “A whole lotta stuff I gotta learn and it’s not easy.”

“You?” Rox was incredulous. “You’ve never had any ambition to learn anything, no matter how many ideas I shove under your nose. You don’t even have the initiative to stock beer in the fridge.”

“Well, that’s gonna change.” His tone was resolute. “I know this guy and he’s teaching me things. . . .”

Rox felt her eyes narrow as everything began to make sense. “Guy?”

“Yeah.” For perhaps the first time ever, T—Thorolf—showed real enthusiasm. “His name’s Niall Talbot and he’s a bit of a pain—snotty; you know—but he’s teaching me this great stuff that I want to know. And now it’s time to take the next step.”

“What kind of great stuff?”

“I, uh, can’t tell you.” His nervousness gave Rox a pretty good idea of what was really going on. T was a lousy liar. “I need to go and live there with him, like an apprentice, and learn as much as I can.”

“There?”

“He runs an eco-tourism travel place, with an office down in Chinatown. I’m gonna stay with him. Erik said so.”

Rox’s suspicion rose with the introduction of another unfamiliar name. “Who’s Erik?”

“He’s, um, this other guy.” Thorolf rummaged in the pockets of his shorts and came up with a business card that looked the worse for wear. “There! That’s Niall.” He smiled triumphantly as he handed it to Rox, then began to whistle as he plucked his spare brake parts off the radiator.

He was leaving and he was happy.

Rox found her hand shaking as she stared at the card. Either T had finally gotten a decent job, just the way she’d been bugging him to do for years, or he was lying to her and had found some big trouble.

Rox would have bet her favorite tattoo gun on option number two. She was pretty sure “Niall” was a cover story for a woman. T only showed this much energy when he thought he was going to get lucky.

What was she going to tell Gary about the delivery guy who was no longer around to take the job?

And what would happen to T?

“You found this card,” she accused, “or you delivered a parcel there. You don’t know this guy.”

“Sure I do.” He gestured vaguely with one hand. “He’s, um, like me.” Thorolf slanted Rox a glance that made her heart stop cold.

That admission changed everything. She had seen T shift shape in that bar fight when they had first met; she had seen him become a dragon right before her eyes. If she hadn’t been stone-cold sober, she wouldn’t have believed it. If she hadn’t already been crazy in love with dragons, she would have been afraid.

As it was, Rox had taken T’s nature in stride.

In fact, she’d thought—very, very briefly—that he might have been her dream come to life. One morning had been all it had taken to relieve Rox of that romantic notion.

T was a mess.

He was a project, not a dream date.

Part of the reason she had taken T into her care was to give him an alibi and an endorsement. She didn’t doubt there were many people who would take advantage of his odd talent, and T was ridiculously trusting.

But two dragon shape shifters in New York? With a bit more thought, Rox had more doubts. She flicked the corner of the card, not troubling to hide her skepticism. “Have you seen him do it?”

“Well, sure.” T shuffled his feet. “He knows stuff, a lot of stuff.”

“Like what?”

“I can’t tell you.”

“No.” Rox didn’t believe him. “This is a bad idea.”

He appeared to be insulted. “Why shouldn’t I learn to use my abilities?”

“It would be one thing if you did, but I know you, T.” At the flash in his eyes, she corrected herself. “Thorolf. You’re driven by three things—sex, sex, and beer, in that order. You have no aspirations, no dreams, no desire to learn anything. If you weren’t such a big sweetie, I’d have given up on you ages ago.”

“That’s not why you stick up for me,” he said, gesturing toward the living room walls.

Rox wasn’t interested in talking about her motivations. She wagged the card at him. “This isn’t true. You found this card. You’re really moving into some woman’s place, aren’t you?”

T pushed a hand through his hair and looked discomfited. “Awww, don’t make this harder than it is, Rox.”

“Why not? I’m worried about you!” It was typical of T to think he could just saunter out of her life without giving a decent explanation, without even realizing that someone gave a crap about him and his survival.

Rox knew that the world could be a tough place, and that an ability to fight wasn’t always enough.

“Okay, so maybe it’s because of you.” T held up a hand when she might have argued. “Maybe because you’ve been on my ass all these years, I recognized opportunity when I saw it.” He appealed to her, apparently sincere. “I’m doing what you’ve always wanted me to do, Rox. I’m learning about my powers. Be happy for me.”

“But . . .”

“But nothing. I gotta go, Rox. Ciao.”

As Rox watched, stunned, the hulk of a man who had been the greatest make-work project of her life strode out of her apartment.

Just when she’d been within an inch of making something of him.

The door clicked behind him and she heard T leap down the stairs, as if he’d broken free of a prison.

Whistling, dammit.

Trusting in someone.

Someone other than her. She was perfectly prepared to help her projects find their wings, so to speak, and loved watching them take flight into their own futures.

But this was different.

Something was wrong.

Rox stared at the business card and felt sick with concern. She wondered whether Niall Talbot had ever even heard of Thorolf.

Rox was going to find out.

There was trouble on the wind.

It was late on a Saturday evening and Niall was walking home from the gym. He’d left Thorolf at a café; already he needed a break from spending every moment of the day with the Pyr’s newest recruit. The fact that Thorolf was driving Niall nuts within mere hours of Thorolf’s having moved in with him wasn’t a very good portent for this mentorship.

There had been a partial eclipse in the morning, one that had been mostly visible over the Pacific. Niall hadn’t needed to see it to feel his body respond. If nothing else, it reminded him of his self-imposed deadline. In December 2010, the first of three total eclipses would occur. The three firestorms linked to those eclipses had to be key to the Pyr, and Niall was determined to ensure that the world was devoid of shadow dragons by then.

He had roughly six more months to destroy all of the shadow dragons. The Dragon’s Blood Elixir that had been used to create the shadow dragons was destroyed, and Magnus, the leader of the Slayers who had raised dead Pyr and Slayers with the Elixir, was dead. Niall had volunteered to clean up the details.

He had expected the cleanup to be quick, but it had been an ordeal. The shadow dragons had been unpredictable.

Niall hadn’t thought they had it in them. In the past, they had been robotic, mindlessly following the commands of Magnus until they were incapable of doing so. With Magnus gone, they should have attacked in unison, keeping at it until they were dismembered and their ashes scattered.

But they hadn’t. Niall couldn’t figure out what had changed.

Worse, Erik, the leader of the Pyr, had insisted that Niall and Thorolf work together. Niall had eliminated twenty shadow dragons, sometimes with Thorolf’s help, including another the night before. But Thorolf was less than reliable, and Niall was sick of having to track down the other Pyr. He was fed up with Thorolf’s being out partying when he needed him. The shadow dragons tended to appear suddenly, as if conjured from nowhere, always having the element of surprise on their side.

Niall had lost it the night before. Thorolf had arrived so late for the surprise attack that Niall had given up on him. They’d argued after the shadow dragons were destroyed, Niall insisting that Thorolf move in with him or quit. He’d known it wouldn’t be easy to live with Thorolf, but he needed eyes at his back.

He needed a fighting partner he could rely on.

He needed some sleep.

And that meant he had to keep a closer eye on Thorolf, whether he liked the prospect or not.

Niall walked quickly, fighting that sense of being watched. He still couldn’t get the smell of incinerated shadow dragon out of his nostrils. Maybe it was the scent and the reminder of that near loss that made him feel vulnerable. Maybe it was a lack of sleep that left him feeling stalked.

Maybe he shouldn’t have left Thorolf behind.

The streets were oddly quiet, the wind making little gusts that sent the dust scuttling in the gutters. The vegetable stalls and tables of fresh fish that crowded the streets of Chinatown in the daytime had been packed up and towed away, and the evening crowds were surprisingly thin. There was a bit of litter blowing across the pavement and the neon lights seemed to be advertising to no one at all. The wind was a cold one, unseasonable, more like a September wind than one he’d expect in June.

But it was more than the cold. The wind smelled to Niall of decay and death and destruction. The wind was wrong and unsettled, unnatural. The scent of rot riding the wind made him think of Slayers, although he couldn’t sense any in the vicinity.

Niall caught glimpses of the sky between the buildings and didn’t like the way the clouds were dark on their bellies, roiling. The sky was simmering.

He supposed that even humans with their less-sharp sense of smell might find the weather unsettling. Niall found it downright disturbing. He asked the wind for tidings—politely, because its mood was unpredictable—but received no response.

At least, there was no direct response. A swirl of wind ripped down the street immediately after his question. The awning over a Thai restauran...

About this edition

• Publisher: Berkley
• Publication date: 2010
• ISBN 10: 0451230922
• ISBN 13: 9780451230928
• Binding: Mass Market Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 416