"Crap!"
"Merde," Jim said.
"Whatever. I'm going through the bloody thing." I shoved my way into the hedge, instantly getting snagged on a gazillion little branches. My tunic tore, the chain holding my talisman got stuck on a branch, my hair got caught, horribly sharp branches scraped my bare arms and face, but I continued through it, losing only a sandal in the process. I was breathless and covered in leaves and dirt when I lunged through to the other side, taking only a second to note the police cars lining the house's drive.
I turned my back to them and started limping in the opposite direction, wiping the smoke and dirt from my eyes, plucking branches and leaves from my hair, braced and ready to take off if anyone so much as breathed in my direction. Jim mumbled something about ruining a beautiful coat as it followed me. I held my breath as we walked to the corner and took a sharp left, but there were no whistles, no sirens, no yelling, no police pounding down the pavement after me.
I looked at Jim. It was covered in branches and leaves, too, dirt smudging its muzzle. I plucked the bits of debris off it, trying to keep the shaking that suddenly swept through me to a minimum.
"Heel?" Jim asked in a caustic voice. "Heel?"
"Sorry, it was all I could think of." I took a shaky breath. "I think we're safe."
As the words trembled on my lips, a glossy black limousine sped around the corner, slamming on its brakes to come to squealing halt two feet away from me. I stared in dumbfounded surprise as a red-haired man leaped out of the car, jerked open the back door, then without so much as a "Hi, how are you, mind if I kidnap you?" grabbed me by my now-grubby waist and tossed me inside. I crashed onto the lushly carpeted floor, my nose banging into a pair of expensive, highly polished Italian shoes. Jim squawked as it was tossed in behind me.
"Good afternoon, Aisling."
I followed the feet up to legs, then higher to well muscled thighs. I knew that voice. I knew those thighs— sort of.
I pushed myself off the feet and faced Drake, Jim leaning up against my back. "Drake Vireo, fancy meeting you here."
Drake cocked a glossy black eyebrow. "That's just what I said to myself when I saw you standing at the scene of yet another murder."
I put my hands on his knees and used them to hoist myself up to sit on the comfy leather seat next to him. Just as I was going to ask him how the devil he knew where I had been, he said something in a language I didn't even come close to understanding. One of the red-haired men nodded. The car swooped into driveway, backed up, and headed in the direction we had just come from.
"What language was that?"
"Hungarian," Drake answered, leaning forward to look beyond me out the window at my side.
"Hungarian? Is that where you're originally from, Hungary?"
"Yes." A siren grew louder, and I realized that we were driving down the Venediger's street straight toward the mass of police cars with their blue flashing lights. The police more or less blocked the street, one uniformed cop directing traffic around the obstructions.
Drake gave another command, and the car came to a halt. Over the hedge I could see the gazebo as smoke billowed out its top. Several people stood around the burning building, one man hauling a garden hose over to it, others just standing helplessly. Pink Lips was there, clinging to the arm of one of the plainclothesmen.
"Did you do that?" Drake asked quietly, watching as the flames licked up the side of the building.
"No! It was Jim!"
"Me?" Jim gasped. "I did nothing of the sort."
Drake looked at me, his eyes almost black. "You ordered your demon to set fire to the Venediger's body?"
"It wasn't like that—it was an accident. I was thinking about your fire, and ... and ... I guess it got out of control."
Drake snapped an order, and the car backed into another driveway, turning around to leave the way we came. His lips pursed, Drake looked at me as if he was trying to figure me out. I lifted my chin, painfully aware that my arm was bleeding, my eyes were burning, and there were bits of broken branches in my hair. "If I get your passport back, will you leave?"
"What?" I stopped wiping at a trickle of blood running down my upper arm to stare at him.
"If I get you your passport, will you leave the country?" Drake pulled a handkerchief from his pocket and gently wiped my arm where blood was beading up in a couple of spots.
"How can you get my passport back?"
He shot me a quelling look. "I am the wyvern of the green dragons. It wouldn't be that hard."
"Oh. Yeah. I forgot about that whole thief thing for a moment."
"I believe it would be best for all if you were out of the country," he said, turning his attention to the scratches on my other arm. His touch was tentative and careful, as if he were handling an object of great value. "If you promise to leave Paris, I will bring your passport to you."
I had to think about his offer for a minute. If all I truly wanted was to go back home, it might tempt me, but now there were other things to think about, things like honor and my pride and ... Oh, who am I trying to fool? Drake was one of the things, too, although I still didn't know exactly what I wanted to do about him. "No. I wouldn't go home if you gave me my passport, not so long as Mme. Deauxville's murder is unsolved, and now the Venediger... Hey! How did you know he was dead? How did you know I found him? How did you know I was even there? OHMIGOD, you killed him, didn't you?"
"Kill him?" Drake snorted, tucking the bloody handkerchief back into his pocket. "Why would I kill him? I was working for him. With him dead, 1 won't get paid."
I don't know why, but Drake's admission was the very last thing I was expecting to hear. "You worked for him? You, a wyvern? What had he hired you to do?"
"I don't believe that's pertinent." Suddenly his eyes narrowed as he turned fully to face me. "Why do you smell of gold?"
My mouth hung open a moment as I stared at him. "You can smell gold, really smell it?"
"Yes." He leaned toward me, sniffing the air around me, his face coming to a halt in front of my bosom. "You have gold. Let me see it."
I clasped both hands to my breasts. I had tucked the jade dragon inside my blouse so it nestled between my breasts, a warm glow that radiated pleasure. There was also the gold-limned stone, the one I thought might be brother to the other two pieces Drake held, but it had slipped down underneath one of my breasts. "If I show you, you'll just steal it from me."
"Possibly. But I'll steal it for certain if you don't show me."
I gave him my very best fulminating glare. "Well at least you're honest about your dishonesty." With an annoyed grimace I tugged on the chain until the jade dragon popped up. I held it up so he could see the gold bits on it. "It's a talisman, and you can't have it. It was given to me."
Drake's nose twitched as he carefully eyed the dragon. "Jade?"
"Yes. It's mine."
"Hmm." He peered closely at it. "Eighteen-carat gold, approximately two hundred years old. Chinese in origin, judging by the style of the head—the Chinese always insisted on giving us those silly fringy bits on top. Not terribly valuable. Very well, you may keep it," he said, sitting back against the seat.
"How very generous that is of you," I said acidly, tucking it away under my tunic, secretly pleased that he hadn't sussed the fact that I had another bit of gold tucked in my bosomage.
"I thought it was," he said placidly. "What were you doing at the Venediger's?"
"Ironically enough, I was just going to ask you that very same thing, along with half a dozen other questions, beginning with why you have snatched me off the street when I was making a perfectly acceptable getaway, and ending with why you were lurking outside around the Venediger's gazebo if you didn't kill him."
Drake waved the questions away. "The answers to your questions aren't important. Why did you go to see the Venediger? Did you not know he had placed a bounty on your head?"
I reached over and pinched the skin on the back of his
hand. Hard. "I see you are confused about how this game is played. Conversation consists of give and take—"
He twisted in the seat and grabbed me around my waist, hauling me up to his chest.
"Oh, goody," Jim said from where it was lying on the floor. "I get to see another show. I just love it when he gets all manly with you. You think maybe he's going to rip your bodice or something?"
"Jim, I order you to be quiet," I said.
"Shut up," Drake told Jim at the same time, his eyes burning into mine. "Now, would you like to discuss the rules of the game?"
"Stop doing that," I protested, my bones melting under the look of wanton desire he was sending me.
His fingers trailed across the back of my neck, causing wave after wave of pleasure to ripple down my spine. His head tipped toward mine, his lips just a hairbreadth away. My back arched, forcing my breasts to rub against his chest, his breath hot on my mouth. I parted my lips, unable to resist the lure of his mouth for another second—
"Damn," he swore, pushing me back onto the seat.
"What?" My body, so close to going up in his flames, protested the rejection.
Drake rubbed his nose. "It's that gold you're wearing. It's distracting me. Take it off."
And alert him to the fact there was more gold on my person? Huh-uh. "Thank you, I believe I'll keep it on. Amelie said it was a talisman against dragons. I'm beginning to see why she thought it was important I have it. Now, let's get back to this conversation thing—where are we going? I hope it's somewhere we can talk, because I'm quite serious when I say that I have a lot of questions for you."
His eyes glittered darkly. "What makes you think I will answer them? I have the aquamanile back that you attempted to steal from me—"
"The one you stole from me."
"—and although your jade talisman is distracting, it's not valuable enough to tempt me. What do you offer me in return for answers to your questions?"
Why was it that having just a simple conversation with Drake made me feel as if I was juggling fire torches? I gnawed my lip for a moment, then decided that offering him the stone I had taken from the Venediger was the only thing I had to barter with. "What about the third piece that matches my aquamanile and that chalice you have?"
His beautiful green eyes widened. I grinned at the look of surprise on his face, one that was quickly wiped away and replaced with his usual savoir-faire. "You have the Occhio di Lucifer?"
"The what?"
"The Eye of Lucifer. That is the name of the third Tool of Bael. It is a lodestone bound in gold. You have it?"
I spread my hands wide, fervently hoping he'd buy my innocent act and not rip off my tunic to nose around my boobs. "Do I look like I've got it? You'd know if I had, wouldn't you?"
"Yes," he said, rubbing his nose again. The avid light in his eyes died down a fraction, but not much. "Then you know where the Eye is?"
"Maybe," I said coyly. "But I don't understand the name. Why is it called the Eye of Lucifer? And isn't that name you gave it Italian?"
Drake leaned back against the seat, his eyes watchful. "Yes, it is Italian. The Tools of Bael consist of the Anima di Lucifer—Blood of Lucifer—that is the aquamanile, and the Voce di Lucifer—the Voice of Lucifer—which is a gold chalice."
"You have that, as well," I said, thinking of the dragon-stemmed chalice that had sat next to my aquamanile in the display cabinet at his house.
"Yes. The third is the Occhio di Lucifer. The Venediger had that." He looked at me with speculation rife in his eyes. "If you have it, you must have taken it from him."
"Who's to say I did? And if I did, who's to say what I did with it?" I answered as mysteriously as I could. I needed to get him off the subject of what I could have done with a small stone in the short amount of time that passed while I was running from the gazebo until he nabbed me. "What were these Tools of Bael used for?"
Drake frowned for a second; then his brows relaxed into their normal smooth lines. "I keep forgetting that you have not yet discovered your full powers as a Guardian. The Tools of Bael were forged by a powerful mage during one of the Crusades. His intention was to use the power the Tools would give him to aid England's King Richard, but as soon as he had created them, a rival mage stole them and turned the Tools against him."
"But what did the Tools do? And who is Bael?"
Jim did an antsy sort of up-and-down jump. I narrowed my lips at it. "You may speak if you have something worthwhile to contribute."
"Everything I say are pearls of wisdom," Jim answered, then hurried on when it saw the warning in my eye. "Bael is the first principal spirit in Abaddon, the leader of all the princes. He rules sixty-six legions and often takes the form of a man with a hoarse voice."
"Oh, you mean Beelzebub. Right. Gotcha. So these Tools of Bael tap into his power?" I asked Drake. He nodded. "Wow. I imagine having access to the head of all the demon lords is pretty powerful stuff. What were the Tools used for, exactly? I mean, an aquamanile, a chalice, and a lodestone don't seem to have too much in common."
"Ritual," Drake said, looking away.
'Think sacrifices," Jim said with much pleasure.
My stomach turned. "Ah. OK."
"Blood sacrifices," the demon added, as if I didn't get that part.
"Yes, thank you. I gathered that."
"Of innocents."
"Innocents?" I asked it, afraid of what its answer would be.
Jim's lips twisted. "Children."
"Pull over!" I yelled at Drake, my stomach roiling. He took one look at my face and snapped a command to the two guys up front.
I made it to a space between two parked cars, but just barely, aware of Drake's presence behind me as I vomited my lunch into the sewer. Life, I was pretty sure, could not get any stickier.
I am so often wrong about these things.
11
"Say what you will about you—and I can say a lot, despite having known you for only a couple of days—you really have a fabulous house. Is this all stuff you've stolen over the years?"
Drake shrugged as I set a lovely Grecian bowl back onto its pedestal. I took the shrug to mean yes. The room he called his library could have doubled for a museum, so full of antiquities was it. It gave me an odd feeling to know that he was old enough to have seen most of the objects when they were new. I moved over to stand in front of a triptych depicting Saint George about to stab his lance into a writhing dragon. "One of your ancestors?" I couldn't keep from joking.
"No, that was one of the red dragon sept," he answered in all seriousness.
I gaped, looking from the triptych to him. "You mean Saint George really did slay a dragon?"
"Of course." Drake walked over to an ebony sideboard holding a variety of cut-glass decanters.
"Wow." I looked back at the picture. "So what was it like back then? The Middle Ages, I mean?"
Drake gave me a disgusted look as he brought me a glass filled with a deep red wine. "I wouldn't know—I wasn't alive then."
"Oh, really?" I took a tentative sip of the Dragon's Blood, its now-familiar burn a comforting heat, one that effectively singed out the last remnants of my nausea.
Drake's digusted look got a whole lot more disgusted. He did the nostril-flare thing as he asked, "Just how old do you think I am?"
"Well, let's see...." I strolled around him, enjoying the opportunity to look him over without appearing to ogle him (which, of course, was what I was doing). He was dressed in a navy suit this time, although as soon as we arrived at his house, he shucked the suit jacket and tie, and rolled up the sleeves of his cream-colored shirt. As I circled him, I had to clutch my hands together to keep from allowing my fingers to go exploring. "I'd say.. . hmmm ... five hundred years?"
"Five hundred!" Drake snorted.
I raised my eyebrows in mock surprise. "Four hundred?"
"I am exactly three hundred and eighty-nine years old, although I have been told that I don't look a day over two hundred."
I smiled at the outraged expression on his face. "Sorry, I didn't mean to offend. You're right—you don't look that old. I'm surprised that you're so young, though. You're just a widdle bitty baby dwagon, aren't you?"
"Hardly that," he said with another disparaging look.
I strolled over to admire a fabulously detailed ivory-and-ebony-framed dartboard. The darts in it were hand-painted with ornate dragons, trimmed in gold, each one fletched with peacock feather flights. "Pretty. Do you play?"
"Extremely well."
I put the dart I was examining back in its ivory socket. "Darts seem a little tame for a dragon almost four hundred years old."
"Any game can be made exciting if the stakes are right," he answered, waving me toward a chocolate-colored leather sofa.
"I suppose so. Are you sure Jim is going to be OK with your minions?"
"They're not minions—they are members of my sept. And your demon will be fine with them," he answered as he sat next to me, one arm snaking out to haul me up to his side. I thought of protesting the possessive move, but the truth was, I enjoyed being snuggled up next to him. And as long as I had to interrogate him, I might as well be comfy, right? Right.
I hadn't noticed much during the trip to Drake's house after having ralphed up my guts in the street, but once I arrived, I couldn't help but be impressed once more with just how fabulous his house was. Drake sent Jim off to the kitchen with Pdl and Istvdn, his two red-headed buddies who I gathered also served as some sort of bodyguards, both of whom Jim immediately began ingratiating itself with.
"So, let's get right down to the negotiating."
Drake looked like he was going to say something, but inclined his head toward me instead.
"First, the ground rules: You answer my questions, however many I want to put to you, honestly and completely. You agree to help me discover who the murderers are of both Mme. Deauxville and the Venediger. Once we find that out, I tell you where you can find the Eye of Satan."
"Lucifer."