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Joelle took in the man’s serious expression, his sincerity, his sadness in reliving such a terrible tragedy. She let the words process, sinking in with a solemn gravity, hooking her attention on the parts where Diego had specified that he was Josh’s uncle, that his sister had been Josh’s mother—never mentioning Joelle. The truth crept through her, insidious as a poison that seeped into her pores rather than the slicing cuts Noxx had preferred. “Josh and I don’t share the same mother, do we?” Her quiet voice seemed to boom through the helicopter’s audio system, blasting through the speakers built into her helmet.
His silence was answer enough. The knowledge should’ve troubled her, should’ve dragged her down instead of creating the light floating sensation she felt that matched the lift of the chopper. “Do we share the same father?”
Diego shook his head.
“Josh isn’t really my brother.” Oddly, saying the words out loud made the notion feel real. She and Josh didn’t look alike, didn’t act alike, and she’d known for years that he shouldn’t have any magic if he’d been full witch. Their men didn’t have active powers. Yet one glance at Josh in a rage, and anyone would know he hid strong sorcery. A beast lurked behind his eyes now and then. Not a shifter, and yet he might be related to them. “Josh’s father. He’s not a witch?”
“He’s…” Diego seemed uncomfortable.
“Just tell me. I love him the same whether he’s blood kin or not.”
“His dad’s a dragon. So is Josh. I mean we haven’t seen him flying around, breathing flame, or anything, but yeah, his father’s whole family line has a curse that makes one son in each generation a dragon locked in human form. The tattoos that your kidnapper put on him? They locked down his powers.”
A dragon. A mighty beast with wondrous magical abilities and perhaps wings more powerful than Alexei’s. Envy burned as bright within her as any dragon’s flame she imagined. Not to take away what her brother had been given, but to be that fierce? She would give almost anything to have the same.
Diego glanced at her arms covered by Alexei’s jacket. “Any tattoos under there that could be wards blocking your magic?”
“No, Noxx didn’t leave my skin unbroken long enough to ink it.” She couldn’t worry about powers now, not when she faced losing her only family. “So if Josh isn’t my brother, then I have no one.”
“Hey, don’t say that.” Diego didn’t sound as if he would tolerate an argument. “Josh considers you his sister, blood or not. If you don’t mind having more family, the connection between you two makes you my niece. My mom will adore you. Plus, with Josh dating the youngest Donovan sister and me dating the oldest? That makes you an honorary part of their family.”
“Why would royal witches accept me?” She didn’t believe it.
“They adopted an immortal assassin so whynotyou?” He opened a backpack strapped between their seats.
She expected guns or ammunition, not a cosmetics bag with a sparkly hairbrush sticking out. “Pink unicorns?”
He grinned. “My mate has a baby girl, and I couldn’t find a brush in the house other than the munchkin’s spare one. The sisters sent some clothes that should fit you. At the next stop, we’ll find you a place to clean up, change, and work the tangles out of your hair. Sorry we won’t have but an hour or so before the flight to Los Angeles. I promised my witch that I’d be back in time for her Senate presentation as her grandmother’s heir.”
“The heir to the most powerful witch Senate seat in the world?”
“That’s the one.” He didn’t look happy about it.
“All right, let’s go home.”Home. Something she’d never thought she would have. “By the way, you know about the prophecy, right? The one that says the demon that Josh wants to vanquish will take down the entire Senate in a fiery battle?”
“The city to burn?”
“That’s the one.”
“Yeah, we know about the prophecy. We just don’t know how to stop it.”
“I do.” She patted the stolen pages under the bulletproof vest. “Let’s save the witch world, uncle.”
ChapterFour
Three months later, Joelle stared out the floor-to-ceiling windows of her brother’s penthouse apartment in downtown Los Angeles. Long orange and gold streaks of the setting sun glowed across the maze of freeways crisscrossing the city and settled on the mountains in the distance.
The view looked so different from what she’d seen the last time she’d been here with Diego right after her rescue. She’d arrived in the midst of the massacre of the witch Senate. Sure, some Senators had escaped, but the ruling body had lost one too many from the fallout. Now, Josh’s girlfriend and her sisters had taken charge of a world of high-strung witches who hadn’t known a change of leadership in two thousand years.
Which explained Josh’s crankiness. That and the fact that Joelle had dared to return here after the Order had torched most of the city. He’d considered her safe in New Orleans under lock and voodoo priestess protection with two immortal bodyguards. But she’d missed him, missed this new sense of family, which might as well have done her as much good as longing for Alexei Maronov. The demon prince had been too busy saving the city with her new family to bother calling her.
“You’re not to talk to him,” Josh had said when she’d arrived a few days ago. “He’s a dangerous man, a criminal.”
Yeah, yeah, everyone kept telling her that. Yet here she stood in the penthouse her brother had shared with Alexei’s cousin before the goblin left for her home realm.
His roommate being goblin royalty explained the staggering amount of gold décor. Furniture, mirror frames, and artwork gleamed gilded reflections in the window, offsetting the charred remains of so many neighborhoods in the city. When the Order had attacked, they hadn’t cared who had suffered, and apparently Noxx hadn’t anticipated the supernatural species in LA working together instead of fighting against each other.
Her brother argued that their horrible guardian hadn’t been here during the attacks, but Joelle could feel the woman’s presence in the pit of her stomach. She’d returned here to find Noxx, to join the fight against the Order, and to learn answers about her family.
