“Are you going into London today?”
“Nice change of subject, and, yes, I am.” I shook off the last few dregs of anger over the idea that the First Dragon had tried to force Baltic into taking a mate, and finished putting away the shirts I’d bought in a local shop. “Where is Nico taking you today?”
“He wants to go see a history museum.” Brom looked thoughtful. “It has ships and stuff, but no bodies, although Nico says there might be some surgeon’s tools. When are we going to get our own house so I can set up my lab again? You said you’d start looking right away, and it’s been forever.”
“Four weeks is hardly forever.” I smiled and gave him one of the three daily hugs he allowed. “But I’ll ask Baltic again about a house. Would you mind if we lived outside England? He’s likely to want to be near Dauva in order to oversee the rebuilding, and I hate to make him travel between here and Riga all the time.”
“Are there mummies in . . .” His face screwed up in thought.
“Latvia?” I finished. “I have no idea, although it is close enough to visit St. Petersburg, which I know has some fine museums. Whether or not they have mummies is beyond me. You can ask Nico, though. Perhaps he’ll know.”
“OK. Will he come with us? Because he’s a green dragon, and not in Baltic’s sept, I mean?”
“I’m sure Drake will give him permission, since he’s agreed to let Nico tutor you for a year. Oh, you probably want your allowance, don’t you? Let me get my purse.”
Brom’s expression turned painful for a few seconds before his shoulders sagged, and he said with obvious reluctance, “Baltic gave it to me this morning when he got home from Nepal. But if you wanted to give me more, that would be OK.”
I laughed and gave his shoulder a little pat. “I’m sorry to have burst your bubble, but you really don’t need more than one weekly allowance.”
“How am I going to buy supplies when we get a house?” he asked as I herded him before me back into the narrow hallway. The floor and walls were wooden and uneven, and made me feel like I was walking at an angle. I didn’t complain, though; I found the small pub run by some human friends of Pavel, Baltic’s second-in-command, charming and quaint in its Elizabethan Englishness. Baltic insisted we would be safe there should Thala, his former lieutenant, decide to try to kill us again. I had no doubt that he would keep us safe no matter where we were located, but, like Brom, I was growing tired of such a transient lifestyle, and yearned for my own home, where we could settle down once and for all.
“When we have room for you to set up another mummification lab, I’ll buy you some supplies. Although, really, Brom, couldn’t you find some hobby other than mummifying animals?”
“You said it was illegal to mummify a human,” he pointed out as I tapped on the door to his tutor’s room. “Besides, I don’t know where to find a dead person.”
Nico, an auburn-haired, studious green dragon who’d had charge of Brom’s education for the past few months, greeted me and grabbed a small backpack. “Did Brom tell you that we’re going to the naval museum today?”
“Yes, despite the fact that it won’t have bodies.” I shared a smile with Nico before reminding Brom to behave himself. “I won’t be back until just before dinner, but Pavel said he was going to cook up something special, so be home by six.”
“Absolutely,” Nico agreed, and with a glance at his watch hustled Brom down the stairs. I heard the rumble of male voices drift upward after them and waited, wondering how best to broach the subject of my vision.
Baltic appeared at the head of the stairs, his hand quickly whipping away from his pocket as he spotted me.
“You didn’t!” I said, frowning as he approached, with Pavel on his heels. “Baltic, really, it’s too bad of you!”
Guilt chased across his face, followed immediately by a look of pure seduction as he swept me up in his arms and bathed me in dragon fire. “Cherie, what is it you’re frowning over? Could it be that you have missed me in the past ten minutes as much as I’ve missed you?”
“Whenever you call me cherie, I know you’re feeling guilty about something,” I said, melting against him even as I giggled a little. “Of course I missed you, and not just for the past ten minutes. It’s been a hellish twelve days while you were trying to find Thala, not only because I was worried sick about you, but because you weren’t here to drive me wild with desire—but that’s not the point. Brom did not need more money. And don’t deny you gave him some, because I saw you putting your wallet away.”
“We’ve spoken of this subject already,” he murmured against my lips, pulling me brazenly against his hips. “Can you think of nothing more you’d rather discuss after my absence?”
“Why, yes, I can.” I almost purred as I let him kiss me, amused that he thought he could distract me in such a way, before I realized that he had a very good record of doing just that.
I gave myself up to the sensation of his fire sinking into me, of the hardness of his body against mine, of his scent, that masculine, spicy scent that seemed to kindle my own dragon fire. And when his mouth moved against mine, I knew I didn’t stand a chance. I kissed him with all the passion I possessed, making him growl into my mouth as I tugged on his hair, wordlessly demanding more of his dragon fire.
Pavel passed by us, murmuring something about waiting for Baltic in the sitting room, but even that didn’t stop me from welcoming Baltic’s fire with a little moan of my own. His tongue burned as it swept inside my mouth, his chest and legs hard when he pushed me up against the wall. I clung to his shoulders, rubbing myself against him, pulling hard first on my fire, and when that didn’t come, I pulled on his to bathe us both in heat.
“Ysolde, if you do not stop attempting to seduce me in the hallway, I will take you right here,” Baltic said in a low voice filled with passion. “And while I would be happy to fulfill this latest of your secret fantasies, we risk shocking anyone who comes upstairs.”
I slid one hand down to pinch his adorable behind. “For the last time, you incredibly sexy dragon, I do not have sexual fantasies that are anything but perfectly ordinary, and certainly do not involve voyeurism. Besides, parts of me are still humming after the way you greeted me this morning when you arrived home. That was quite the homecoming.”
“I merely gave you the attention you were due.” Baltic raised an eyebrow seconds before he dived for my chest, his mouth and hands hot on my breasts. I squirmed against him, shifting his hands so I could have better access to his chest, wondering if I had time to indulge us both, but at that moment my phone vibrated in my pocket and bellowed out a recording of one word: “Ysolde!”
Baltic raised his head from where he was licking the valley between my breasts, frowning something fierce. “Mate! I thought I told you to change your alarm sound.”
I giggled against his mouth and nipped his bottom lip. “But it’s so perfect! Nothing catches my attention more than you saying my name. And speaking of attention, you should have stuck around that vision. It was most interesting.”
He ignored the emphasis I put on the words, wrapping his arms around my waist and lifting me off the ground as he squeezed tightly. “You try my patience, woman. I have no time for reminders of what happened in the past. I have lost twelve days chasing Thala, and there is much work that I must accomplish in a short amount of time.”
I took a deep breath. “I wish I could ignore them, but I can’t. You’re not the only one who lost twelve days, my darling. When the First Dragon demanded I salvage your honor—”
“I’ve told you before that my honor is fine as it is.”
“When your father, the godlike ancestor of every dragon who ever was and who ever will be tells me to salvage your honor, I’m not about to ignore anything that might help me do just that. Especially since you aren’t making it the least bit easy for me.”
“If you choose to waste your time—”
“Waste my time? Waste my time!” I gasped, shoving at his shoulder. “I canno
t believe that you would call my visions a waste of time!”
“You are being emotional, Ysolde,” he said, stopping when I slapped both hands on his chest with a glare that by rights should have stripped the hair off his head.
“I am not being emotional!” I yelled. The echo of my voice along the wood-paneled hallway was quite audible. Baltic’s glossy dark chocolate eyebrows rose. “Fine! I’m emotional! I can’t help it. I’m hormonal right now.”
“Are you having your female time? I hope it will be over soon. I do not like having to wait for it to cease,” he said, passion firing in his eyes.
“People can hear us downstairs, you know, and you haven’t quite embarrassed me to death. Would you perhaps like to inquire as to the state of my bowels?” I took a deep breath when he looked like he was going to do just that. “What were we talking about that didn’t involve my bodily functions?”
“Your being emotional. It is a good thing that I am a wyvern, and thus am able to control my emotions where you cannot.”
“Oh, I like that—”
“It is just like that time at Dragonwood when you tried to geld me with your eating dagger. You were most emotional then, as well. You remember that, do you not?”
I frowned for a few seconds as I tried to dig through what remained of my memory. “No . . . At Dragonwood? I tried to geld you? Are you sure?”
“Do you distrust my memory?” he asked. There was something about the innocent look on his face that made me suspicious, but there was nothing I could say to challenge his statement.
“Your memory of the past has never been in question, no,” I said slowly. “If you say I tried to cut off your noogies, then I assume I did so, but I’m also sure I had a very good reason for doing it. What did you do that made me so annoyed?”
“You are going straight to the meeting and back again,” he said, totally ignoring my question, returning me to the ground to escort me down the narrow stairs to the main floor of the pub. “The driver will wait outside for you. I would accompany you myself, but the builders are ready to leave the country, and I must check with them before they do so.”
“You are getting more and more like Drake Vireo every day,” I told him, alternating between annoyance and pure, unadulterated love. I decided that it was better to indulge the latter rather than former, and accordingly gave the tip of his nose a little lick before waving at Pavel as he stood talking to three men whom Baltic had engaged to begin the process of restoring Dauva.
“I am infinitely superior to the green wyvern,” Baltic said loftily, nodding to one of the blue dragons he’d hired as drivers for us. “And you must remember that I will do anything to keep you and Brom safe.”
“I know that, and I appreciate what it cost you to borrow some of Drake’s men to watch over Brom and me while you and Pavel were tracking Thala, but as I told you before you left, we’ll be fine. There’s no reason for Thala to want to harm Brom, and really, that goes for me, as well. As for you . . . well, she went to the considerable trouble of resurrecting you, so despite that whole situation of her blowing up the house on top of us, I don’t think she wants to kill you. I think she was just frustrated and angry, and felt cornered, and let loose on us because of that, not because of any murderous intent.”
“She did an exceptionally fine job of making me believe otherwise.”
I touched his shoulder. Although Thala’s destruction of the house hadn’t killed us—dragons being notoriously difficult to kill—it had done so much damage to Baltic’s back that even today, he still bore scars. “Well, I should say she has no reason to want to kill you, so therefore she can’t gain anything by offing me. After all, you’re not like the other dragons who cork off if your mate dies.”
Baltic, who had been frowning at my slang, instantly switched into seduction mode, something he was wont to do whenever I mentioned the newly discovered fact that he was a reeve, one of the very rare dragons who could have more than one mate. “I would not survive your death again, cherie,” he murmured against my lips, bathing me in a light sheen of his dragon fire. “Not a third time. It is for that reason I insist that you not see the archimage again.”
“We may not have a choice in the matter,” I said slowly, brushing off an infinitesimal bit of lint from his shoulder. “I didn’t get a chance to tell you earlier, but I reached Jack this morning. Do you remember him?”
“No.”
“He was apprenticed to Dr. Kostich at the same time I was—only Jack is a very gifted mage, and I’m . . . Well, you know how my magic goes all wonky because I’m a dragon. Jack is now a full-fledged mage, and very talented, from what I hear, but even he says there’s just no one of the caliber we need other than an archimage to tackle Thala.”
Baltic watched me closely. I kissed his chin, knowing he wasn’t going to like what I had to say.
“There are other archimages,” he said.
“Two others, and one is out of reach while he’s on some sort of magi retreat. The other is a woman I have had no experience with, and I suspect wouldn’t be overly easy to persuade to help catch a highly dangerous, partially psychotic half-dragon necromancer.”
“Thala is not that dangerous,” he said dismissively.
I pulled down the back of his shirt collar. “Have you looked at your back lately? That dirge she sang brought down an entire three-story house on top of us, Baltic. You can’t do that if you’re not able to tap into some pretty impressive power.”
He made a disgusted noise.
“I’m just saying that I think Dr. Kostich is going to be our only choice.”
“I do not like it.” Baltic’s frown was, as ever, a stormy thing to behold, but I had long learned to ignore it.
“Neither do I, but so long as mages wield arcane power, they are going to be the best bet for combating the dark power that necromancers use. I’m afraid, my delectable dragon, that it’s Dr. Kostich or nothing.”
His jaw worked, no doubt sorely tempted to tell me we’d do without my former employer and head of the Otherworld, but we had few choices open to us.
“You and Pavel chased Thala for twelve straight days and nights,” I told him, my hands caressing his chest. “You know her better than anyone. You know what she’s capable of; you know how many outlaw dragons follow her. Can we bring her to justice without the aid of people outside our sept?”
“No.” I knew just how much it cost him to admit that. He took a deep breath, his eyes sparkling with the light of vengeance. “She has grown more powerful in the past month. I do not know where she is getting the members for her tribe of ouroboros dragons, but we encountered more than thirty of them in Belgium, and another two dozen in Turkey. That she can lose that many members and still have the number of dragons we saw when we finally chased her to Nepal . . .” He shook his head and didn’t finish the sentence, clearly frustrated that he hadn’t caught her to deal with her himself.
For a moment I was stunned by what he said. “You ran into more than fifty of Thala’s ouroboros dragons before you lost them in the wilds of Nepal?”
“Fifty-eight.”
“What happened to them?” I knew from the manner in which Baltic had greeted me upon his return that morning that he had no injuries, so it wasn’t likely he’d fought the dragons.
His eyes grew hard and even shinier. “What do you think happened to them?”
“You didn’t kill them?”
“Not alone. Pavel was with me.”
I gawked at him. “Baltic!”
“They were trying to kill us,” he pointed out, instantly quelling the lecture I was about to give. Although I had my doubts as to whether Thala’s intentions in regard to Baltic were of a murderous nature, I knew from past experience that her gang of outlaw ouroboros dragons were much more cutthroat.
“I still don’t like it.”
“Your heart is too soft,” he said, giving my behind another squeeze.
“That is not my heart, and you know full well I don’t like k
illing. Which is why I wholly approve of the plan to bring Thala to the Otherworld Committee for justice. They can banish her to the Akasha, or something appropriate like that.”
Baltic made a noncommittal noise that had me glancing sharply at him, but before I could do more than wonder, he said, “You will ask the archimage if there is another who could deal with Thala now that we know where she is.”
“I thought you said she disappeared in Nepal?”
His lips thinned a little. “She did. But I suspect she has taken control of an aerie high in the Himalayas.”
“The one I saw in my vision a few months ago?” I asked, remembering the cold, bleak stone building.
“That is the aerie, yes. It used to be held by Kostya, before Thala confined him there.”
I shivered at the thought of being held prisoner in such a stark location. “All of that notwithstanding, I will ask Dr. Kostich, but I can tell you now that there isn’t anyone else to help us. And stop looking at me like that—I don’t want to have to deal with him any more than you do, even though he’s really not the horrible person you think he is.”
“He is responsible for your death, mate.”
“You know as well as I do that he wasn’t responsible for my dying a second time. Well, not directly responsible. Besides, I apologized about that, so you can stop looking like you’re going to yell at me again. It’s not as if I die so often that I deserve a lecture. Honestly, Baltic, you really are becoming just as bossy as Drake, and you know that only irritates me.”
“I do not like you going where I cannot protect you,” he said in a low grumble that was softened by the look of love in his beautiful onyx eyes. I melted against him, unable to resist the emotions I knew bound us so tightly together. “The other mates should come here instead of your going into London.”
“It’s Aisling’s turn to host the Mate’s Union meeting, and even if it wasn’t, I’m not going to live my life hiding in the shadows because Thala is on the loose.” I kissed him quickly so as to avoid the temptation his mouth offered, and climbed into the back of the sleek dark blue car. “I’m going to do a little shopping before I meet with Aisling and May, and, yes, I’ll be careful, so you can stop fretting. Thala is in Nepal, not here in England.”