“You go,” the dragon said, shoving me again.
“Not one more step! And if you touch me again, I’m going to scream my bloody head off!”
“Ysolde,” Nico said with a warning, his green eyes glittering in the dim light. “I think perhaps we should go wherever it is they want to take us. You wouldn’t want to attract the wrong attention.”
I bit back the urge to yell for Brom, and nodded, allowing myself to be pushed up more of the stairs. Baltic, I knew, must be in the compound, using Savian’s sterling skills to locate Brom. I didn’t want to do anything to pull them away from that. This was why, three minutes later, as a very solid wood and iron door was slammed shut on us, I turned to face the two other men who were locked with me in the airless, stifling room. “Great. Now Baltic is going to have to rescue us, too.”
Nico and Holland moved quickly over to the shuttered window, pulling open the wooden slats to peer down the wall of the tower. “We can’t jump.”
I came over to look. “Really? It’s only three stories. We could do that easily. I’ve jumped out of a second-story window without breaking anything…. Oh. Damn.” The ground beneath the window dropped away dramatically, punctuated with jagged spires of rock that erupted almost painfully from the earth. “Yeah, that’s not going to happen.”
“Pavel says you are a mage?” Holland asked.
“Kind of,” I said, looking at the door. “My magic isn’t very reliable, not even after Dr. Kostich lifted the interdict that was meant to keep me from using it.”
Holland looked confused. “I thought dragons could not use arcane magic?”
Nico gave him a wry grin. “They’re not supposed to. But Baltic and Ysolde seem to be the exceptions to the rule.”
“Baltic doesn’t use magic very often,” I explained. “I was trained by the head of the Otherworld himself, Dr. Kostich, but my magic is…well, as I said, it’s not very reliable. Still, it’s worth a shot. If nothing else, it’ll be another distraction, and that can only be good for Baltic.”
“I think we’d better get out of the way.” Nico hurried over to a large wooden chest that lurked in the corner, big enough to hide a body in, turning it on one end, and moving so that the chest blocked sight of him.
Holland watched closely as I placed both hands on the door, trying to get a feel for its composition, and for any magic that might have been placed on it to keep us on one side of it.
“No wards or anything,” I said, shaking out my hands and taking a deep breath. “All right, I’m going to give an unlocking spell a try. Holland, given what happened to Aisling’s demon Jim when he stood next to me the last time I cast a spell, you may want to go hide behind the chest with Nico.”
“What happened to the demon?” Holland asked.
“It lost its preferred form. Took Dr. Kostich to fix the problem, and I died during the process. Baltic was furious.”
Saying nothing, Holland just ran for the chest as I drew a circle on the floor and called the quarters, beginning with the east. “Heart of storms, I call upon you to aid me now. Heart of fire,” I said, turning to the south, “I call upon you to give me strength. Heart of tears, I call upon you to give me wisdom.” Finally, I turned to the north. “Heart of iron, I call upon you to bend all to my will.”
“You might want to duck down,” Nico said as Holland peeked over the top of the chest. “You wouldn’t want anything to happen to your head.”
“Erp.” Holland disappeared.
“I wish May were here,” I said, taking another deep breath, trying to put all thoughts of worry and fear and anger from my mind. “She does this so much better. Here goes.”
My dragon fire, normally banked, grew in intensity as I pulled on it, but that alone didn’t give me the force I needed to form my will into action. I knew the quiet place in my mind where I used to access arcane magic was gone, driven out, I suspected, by the dragon that was waking within me. Rather than fight that loss, I simply pulled hard on Baltic’s fire, reveling in the power it brought with it as it roared through me and joined with my own lesser fire, merging into a force that lit up my mind. I cast wide my arms and spoke the words, channeling our merged fire as I did so:
Threefold and one,
Elements come unto me.
Iron-bound, and oak-hewn,
Portal of strength and denial.
Turn to my hand and let me see,
All that lies beyond.
The air within the room gathered itself, silence lying heavily over us for the count of four, then with a soft whump, the air exploded outward in a brilliant flash of white-blue light, knocking me backward a good two yards into the wall.
“I’m all right,” I said, shaking the stars from my head as Nico rushed toward me, helping me up. “I’m fine; just had the breath knocked out of—by the love of the saints!” I stared at the door, wanting to simultaneously scream and throw large, heavy objects around the room in a temper tantrum to end all temper tantrums. “Why can’t any of my spells go right?”
Holland had moved to the door and was considering it with his head tipped to one side. He reached out to touch it. “It’s…it’s glass.”
Mentally, I ran over the spell. “Turn to my hand and let me see, all that goes beyond. Oh, very funny, magic! Ha-ha-ha. Let me see, indeed.” I marched over to the door, which was indeed now made of glass, thick, wavery glass approximately three inches thick, and bound with the same iron bands as the wooden version.
“At least you didn’t change any of us,” Nico offered with a little grin before picking up a wooden chair. “Shall we try to break it?”
“You can try, but I doubt if even dragon strength will take down that door. It looks like awfully solid glass.”
And so it was. It might have the appearance of glass, but it evidently retained the properties of the oak door, because we didn’t even scratch the glass.
Nico, Holland, and I were taking turns whaling on the door with bits of the bed and chairs when two shimmery figures suddenly appeared on the other side of the door.
“Baltic?” I asked, and dropped my bit of broken chair to squint at the figures before I realized that neither of them was even remotely as big as he was.
“What the hell have you done?” a man’s voice asked as the door was opened.
I snarled something extremely rude, and lunged for the two figures. Gareth screamed, then stumbled backward at the same time his wife, Ruth—who I had spent the last ten years thinking was my sister-in-law—leaped at me with her fingers curled into claws, forcing me back into the room.
“Where’s Brom?” I bellowed, belching fire at Ruth, who shrieked and started slapping at her clothing to put out the fire. “You bastard, if you’ve hurt him—”
“You’re not supposed to be here, you stupid woman! Why the bloody hell can’t you just do what I ask?” Gareth yelled back at me as Nico and Holland leaped forward to keep me from strangling Gareth where he stood in the doorway. “You never listen to me, do you? I don’t know what’s wrong with you that you can’t even follow simple directions! I told you what to do; I gave you very specific instructions, but did you bother to listen? No, you did not. Instead, you had to drop in on us at the crack of dawn, interrupting my sleep. You know how I hate that!”
I stared him down, my fingers itching to draw the most vile spell I knew, but given that was one to cause the unplugging of bowels, I curled my fingers into fists and fought the desire to use the broken chair on Gareth, saying instead, with great deliberation, “Where. Is. Brom?”
Gareth scowled at Ruth as she continued to slap at herself. “What are you doing, woman?”
“She set me on fire!” Ruth snarled, stabbing a finger at me.
I smiled.
“For god’s sake, will you two stop fighting? It’s enough to drive a sane man crazy.” Gareth narrowed his already beady-eyed gaze on me, waving his hands toward us. “Well, you’re here. Nothing I can do about that, I suppose, although just once I’d like to see you do
what I tell you to do. Still, it could be worse. That dragon of yours had better bring the gold with him when he comes to get you, or he’ll find himself going home without his precious mate as well as the kid. If you’re done causing havoc, I’m going back to bed.”
“I don’t think so. I think you’re going to take me to Brom in the next ten seconds, or this very badass dragon here is going to beat the crap out of you, while this equally badass…er…mine ghost will help him.”
“Knocker,” Holland said helpfully, then cracked his knuckles while looking menacingly at Gareth.
“Sorry, badass knocker.” I slid a glance toward Ruth, who had moved closer to Gareth. “And while they’re doing that, I’ll call down fire unlike anything you’ve ever seen. I bet you that even an oracle and a necromancer can be roasted alive.”
Gareth sputtered in anger while Ruth made some pretty scatological threats that I ignored, but in the end, all it took was Nico’s shifting into dragon form, and my setting fire to both Gareth’s and Ruth’s shoes before they conceded.
“You can see the brat, but the others have to stay here,” Gareth spat out, jerking me by the arm, his fingers biting painfully into my flesh.
“We will not leave Ysolde,” Nico said, starting toward us.
“You stay or she doesn’t see the kid,” Gareth snarled.
“It’s all right,” I said, pulling my arm from Gareth’s hold, rubbing the resulting bruises. “You boys stay here. Gareth isn’t stupid enough to hurt me, not when he knows Baltic will skin him alive if he even thinks about it.”
Gareth made a rude noise, slammed the door closed on a still-protesting Nico and Holland, and shoved me toward the stairs. “Hurry up. I want to go back to sleep, and you’re wasting my time.”
I walked carefully in front of them, bracing myself for the feeling of Ruth’s hands on my back. I wouldn’t put it past her to try to shove me down the stairs. Luck, however, was with me, and I arrived at the landing one floor down without injury.
“Maybe you can get the kid to stop his whining all the time,” Gareth said, unlocking the door. “Nice job you did raising him. All he does is complain.”
I shoved past him and ran into the room, stumbling over a chair when I lunged toward the small bed that sat under one of the arched windows. “Brom!”
“Hnn?” came a familiar groggy sound, one I heard every morning when I tried to rouse my child from sleep. “Sullivan?”
He was warm, and sleepy, and utterly wonderful as I clutched him to me, ignoring the terms of our previous agreement about how many times I was allowed to kiss and hug him on a daily basis. I wrapped my arms around him and held him tight, tears burning my eyes for a few seconds as I thanked every deity I could think of for preserving my son.
“Sullivan, I can’t breathe,” he wheezed after a minute or so.
“Sorry,” I said, reluctantly loosening my hold on him. “Are you all right? Gareth hasn’t hurt you, has he?”
“I’m OK. Geez, Sullivan, you’ve kissed me five times, way over the limit, and Gareth’s watching. He’s going to think I’m a baby or something.”
I laughed, a shaky laugh to be sure, but laughter filled with relief as I let go of him and sank to my knees next to his bed. “If Gareth knows what’s good for him, he isn’t going to think anything of the sort.”
“So very touching,” Ruth said with a sneer, looking disdainfully around the room. “My god, you’ve already turned this place into a pigsty! I can’t believe we put up with you two for as long as we did.”
“It was no bowl of cherries living with you for the past ten years, either,” I said, still holding Brom’s hand.
“Ten years? Try three hundred,” she scoffed, scowling furiously.
“Three hundred years?” I shook my head. “That can’t be right. I know you have some pictures of you and Gareth and me in old-fashioned clothes, but I haven’t been stuck with you for three hundred years.”
Ruth opened her mouth to answer, but Gareth interrupted with a curt order. “Go get the guards to move the dragon and the knocker to another room. I don’t trust Sullivan’s magic to not screw up the door so they could get out. I’ll watch her until you get the others locked up properly.”
“She could try something on you,” Ruth said suspiciously.
Gareth’s lip curled. “If she does, the kid will suffer.”
I gave Brom’s hand a little squeeze before getting to my feet and moving to stand between him and the man who was biologically responsible for fathering him. I’d never been one to feel hatred for people; that seemed like such an extreme emotion, and one that made no allowances for shades of grey, but the primary emotion I was feeling now was pure, unadulterated hate.
“Why are you doing this?” I asked, feeling that I should at least make an attempt to understand the despicable depths of his mind.
“I had to do something to keep you two from bickering. I had centuries of that, and I don’t need any more.”
“No, not why did you send Ruth on an errand—why did you kidnap Brom?”
“I told you—we want gold. The gold you owe us.”
I shook my head. “You’re an Oracle, Gareth. Surely you could make money by practicing your trade. You don’t have to resort to kidnapping to get it. Is it Thala? Did she tell you to do this?”
He sucked one of his teeth and looked somewhat bored, leaning back against the door with his arms crossed over his chest. “She contacted Ruth, yes. But we would have done this without her. You owe us, Sullivan. For all those centuries of care, you owe us plenty. We just want what’s due us.”
“I can’t believe…” I shook my head again. “Three centuries? That would mean I’d been with you since…since I was killed.”
“We found you wandering around in the snow, too stupid to figure out who you were or what happened to you,” he said, picking his ear and studying his finger. “Ruth wanted to let you freeze to death, or be caught by the dragons who were attacking the castle, but I realized right from the start that you were worth a fat reward. You wouldn’t have been brought back by that dragon god otherwise.”
“You saw the First Dragon resurrect me?” I was stunned by that thought, although it made sense. If Gareth and Ruth were outside of Dauva when it fell, then they would have had the opportunity to see me wandering around in a postresurrection daze.
“I convinced her it was to our benefit to keep you alive, so we took you with us back to Paris.”
“What were you doing in Latvia to begin with?” my curiosity prompted me to ask.
“Did a scrying the month before and saw that there was something valuable to be had there. Since we weren’t exactly welcome in St. Petersburg at the time, we headed out that way to see what was what. We had no idea the valuable object was you. What the hell?”
The last of his words rose almost an octave as the world spun around us, a blinding whiteness swirling around and in and through us until I realized that we were in yet another vision.
“Cool,” I heard Brom say behind me. “Is this one of those dreams you have where you get to see stuff in the past?”
“Yes. Stay next to me, lovey.” I reached back and grabbed him, holding him to my side as I looked around the small, dark room of the vision. It was cold, very cold, and wherever we were wasn’t particularly nice.
“Can they see us?” he asked.
At the same time Gareth demanded, “What is going on? What the hell have you done to me, Sullivan?”
I turned to look where Brom was pointing. We appeared to be in some sort of a small shack, badly made, with drifts of snow coming through the gaps in the boards that made up the walls. A derelict cot was pushed up against one side of the shack, a figure huddled on it covered by what looked like a thick fur cloak.
“I don’t understand,” the figure said, lifting her head, a confused and dazed expression on her face. It was my past self.
“No, they can’t see or hear us.” I glanced from the present-day Gareth to the memory of hi
s past self where he stood with Ruth in close consultation.
“It’s simple,” the past Gareth said, going over to where Ysolde sat. “You’re with us. We saved you from bad dragons who want to kill you. We’re all going to Paris to keep them from finding you, and let your friends, the ones with lots of gold, know that you’re alive. You remember that, don’t you?”
“Dragons?” Ysolde said, rubbing her forehead. “There’s something…something horrible—”
“That’s right, the dragons are horrible, and we’re trying to help you because we’re your friends. Remember?”
Gareth put both hands on her head and muttered what sounded like an invocation.
“What’s he doing to you?” Brom asked, pressing closer to me. “Is he hurting you?”
“No, lovey. He was just trying to make me believe something that wasn’t true.” I looked over Brom’s head to where the present Gareth was now watching impatiently. “You really were a bastard, you know that?”
“And you were a stupid cow who believed anything we told you,” he answered with one of his unpleasant smiles.
“I believed because you brainwashed me,” I said with a disgusted snort, reining in my temper. Brom had seen enough dissent between Gareth and me; I didn’t want him to witness any more unpleasantness.
“We had better be rewarded for our trouble,” the past Ruth said, coming over to jerk Gareth’s hands off Ysolde’s head.
“We will,” he answered, giving her a sly look. “The dragons will pay well for her once they know she’s alive again.”
“Thala won’t be pleased,” Ruth said as darkness began to fill my vision.
“Then we simply won’t tell her. She cannot rail against us if she doesn’t know the wyvern’s mate is still alive….”
The darkness washed over us in a wave of insensibility, wiping away everything that was.
Chapter Seven
The sensation of being consumed by nothingness ebbed away to leave us standing in the exact same positions, but instead of a dim, cold shack, we were once again in a room lit now by the rosy golden glow of a sunny Spanish morning.