Dragon Blood

Chapter 50

Nolan sat at the dining room table in Atticus's small house in the foothills. He hadn't wanted to go back home. It smelled too much of Rhia. This place smelled of her too, but not quite as concentrated. Other females, Atticus Dáithí... they were mixed into the building. Cameron was upstairs, sleeping away the daylight, and his own potent brand of shade magic was helping in covering her scent.

He worked the fabric of her baby blanket through his fingers, relishing in how soft it was and how much power was woven into it.

He was frozen to his seat. His mind unwilling to process everything and his heart fracturing to pieces.

An overwhelming amount of work was building up waiting for his attention.

He still had a thousand things to do at the hospital. His personal assistant was doing her best with the resources she had, but there was a lot she couldn't do without his direct approval or signature or something else that only he could provide. There were over a dozen voicemails from the dean of the hospital alone because he'd completely forgotten about the three residents he was supposed to be supervising. He didn't want to think about the number of consults he'd put off even before he was recalled to the Counsel.

He'd let Rhia take up so much of his attention right from the beginning. He'd done what every teenager did when they let their hormones get in the way of rationality. He did what every love-struck idiot in every romance novel did. He neglected his very real responsibilities, and now his world was beginning to fracture apart. Any hope of maintaining relationships with L.A.C., or any hospital in this country for that matter, was gone.

And that was just his career.

The Counsel and Constantine had their own demands.

Technically he still had all the paperwork and ceremony to take his seat back on the Counsel. He still needed a full debriefing from the three vampires that took over his duties when he left almost forty years ago. He still needed to connect with his old allies within the Counsel and make appointments to meet with the few new members.

He also needed to find time to apologize to Arkil. As irritating as the elf was, and as justified he'd been in aggressively acquainting his face with the desk... it was impossible to work with any of the elven clans if you didn't have, at a bare minimum, a working relationship with him.

On the purely vampire side of things... well... shit didn't just hit the fan. It hit a fan aiming directly into a thousand other fans until there were fine particles of feces hovering in the air and became completely impossible to avoid breathing it in.

Raphaël had made his biggest move yet. As the sun rose over California and set away from France, they raided the distribution warehouse in Paris. The warehouse that supplied blood to every vampire blood bank in mainland Europe. A year's worth of food... gone. Every vampire who had been working that evening was dead, their bodies less than charred heaps of ash by the time it was reported. Raphaël couldn't have picked a better, or worse, time. It had effectively taken Constantine out of the search for Rhia along with most of the vampires he'd brought with him.

All that work... and Nolan couldn't bring himself to focus on a single thing. Because doing any one thing that took his full attention away from finding Rhia... it felt like he was abandoning her.

She had fought so damn hard against the dark elf. He had watched her rake her claws across his face, and he had smelled the blood from him and the soldier she'd bitten. He heard her war cry, calling forth the dragonkin in the area. Drawing out his own dragonkin magic. Magic he never thought he'd have after he turned.

He had the chance to shoot the elf. He could have killed him. He had the gun aimed directly at Zenith. But... he couldn't take the risk that he would have hit her. Hurt her. He let them get away. It was his fault that Rhia was missing. Not just Rhia. Madeline and Maddox were gone too, along with Juniper, Dáithí, and the other seven from the compound attack. Sophie had been among them. Sophie and Dáithí were gone. His two best and oldest friends were gone. He didn't know what to do anymore.