He didn’t answer immediately, just reached into the back pocket of his jeans and pulled out a wallet. “Look inside,” he said, tossing it onto the bed in front of me.
Opening it, I saw that he was indeed Trae Wilson, and that he was thirty-five. The same age as Egan, and six years older than me. Then my gaze was drawn to the picture sitting inside the small photograph window. It was of two almost identical boys. Same age, same cheeky smile, same golden skin and sun-shot hair. The only thing that was different were the eye colors—one pair golden, one sky blue. Egan and Trae as boys.
Behind that were a couple of other photos—Trae with two women, one older, one younger, but all three sharing the same blue eyes, and another shot of him and Egan, this time as teenagers. Both of them were goofing around with surfboards, and the laughter and friendship—love even—between the two seemed to have been caught in that single photo.
There could be no doubt that they were, indeed, brothers. God, how was I going to tell him that Egan was dead?
I tossed the wallet back on the bed, then said, “Have you been searching for him the whole time he was gone?”
“No, because he told me he was disappearing for a while. I just didn’t expect it to be for ten years.” He raised the gun again, and anger sparked in the depths of his blue gaze. “Now stop avoiding the question. Where is he?”
I blew out a breath. There was no easy way to do this. No gentle words that could make the hearing of it any easier. “He was shot in the chest last night. We escaped, but I couldn’t get him to a hospital and he died.”
Pain, deep and haunting, flashed briefly through his eyes. He’d known, I thought. Had felt something was wrong, which is why he’d been so angry with my refusal to talk about Egan’s whereabouts.
“Where is his body, then?”
I hesitated, closing my eyes briefly against the sudden sting of tears. “I waited with his body until dawn’s final death, and prayed to the Gods of sun and sky and air to guide his soul onto his next journey.”
He didn’t get angry. Didn’t react in any of th
e ways I’d half expected—which only confirmed the thought that, deep down, he’d known his brother was dead. He stared at me for a moment, his gaze moving up to the scar on my head then back again to my lips, and then he lowered the gun. “Thank you for doing that much.”
I nodded, a little thankful that he hadn’t asked why Egan had been shot. But then, maybe he already knew—after all, he’d been in contact with his brother before his death.
“Egan was a good man. I couldn’t just leave him there alone. It wouldn’t have been right.”
“No, it wouldn’t have.” He stood up abruptly. “Would you like a cup of black coffee? We haven’t got any milk.”
“I can live without milk. I can’t live without three sugars.”
“Three sugars? It’s a wonder your teeth aren’t rotten.”
I stretched out a foot and toed open the wallet. “Who said they aren’t?”
“Sweetheart, those teeth of yours look in fine biting order.”
“Well, they aren’t going to be biting you any time soon.”
He flung me a grin that briefly lit the room with its bright cheekiness. “What a shame. I might have enjoyed it.”
I snorted softly. “Your license says you live in San Francisco, but that’s not where Egan came from.”
“No, we were both born and raised in Stewarts Point, and our clique still lives there. I was there visiting my mother when he contacted me.”
A clique, I remembered from the few talks I’d had with my dad about my air cousins, was generations of air dragon families living together in a community. Unlike sea dragons, who tended to live in single-family units.
I had no idea how many cliques of air dragons there were, but I knew there were more of them than there were of us sea dragons. The sea might be a vast and mighty mistress, but she was also full of predators, and the ancient safe havens where we could birth and raise our young were few and far between. And getting more crowded with humans every day.
“What did he want?” I asked. “Why did he contact you?”
“He wanted help.” He hesitated. “And he wanted protection.”
He had to have meant from Marsten. And I guess the help of a thief would be valuable, given our plans to break into Marsten’s mother’s place and steal the backup security codes apparently kept there. But protection? “What can you do that Egan couldn’t?”
“Nothing.” He hesitated, then added, “He didn’t really explain what was going on, he just said he needed an extra pair of hands to protect you.”
That was Egan all over, I thought, blinking back tears. He was always more worried about everyone else than himself. Which was probably why the younger kids at the research center had taken to him so quickly—he was their protector. Or as much as anyone could protect them in that place.