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 whoever was and whoever will be, tells me to salvage your honor, then 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 cannot believe that you would call my visions a waste of time!”
“You are being emotional, Ysolde,” he started to say, but I slapped both hands on his chest with a glare that by rights should have stripped his 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? You were not earlier. Did it arrive since then? 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 about 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, although you didn’t remember what you did in the vision we just saw,” 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 and setting me down 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 it was better to indulge the latter rather than the 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 their mate dies.”
Baltic, who had been frowning at my slang, instantly switched into seductive 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, chérie,” 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 heard, but even he says there’s just no one of the caliber we need to tackle Thala other than an archimage.”
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 a 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 the expression.
“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, it’s Dr. Kostich or nothing.”
His jaw worked, since he was 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 last 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 fifty-some 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 make. Although I had my doubts that Thala’s intentions with regard to Baltic were of the murderous nature, I knew from the 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 killings. 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 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 your 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 you going into London.”
“It’s Aisling’s turn to host the Mates’ 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, then 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.”
“There is nothing to say she hasn’t escaped.”
“You left a whole bunch of Drake’s guys to watch the borders, didn’t you? Stop worrying. They’ll tell you if she leaves the aerie.”
“Assuming they see her,” he muttered darkly.
“I’m the first one to admit she’s powerful, but I don’t see her getting out of the country without someone noticing. I’ll be back before dinner. If Brom and Nico come home early, remind them that Brom’s vacation was officially over yesterday, and it wouldn’t hurt them to start on his lessons this afternoon. Oh, and Baltic?”
“Yes?” He leaned into the car.
I grabbed his head and pulled hard on the little core of dragon fire that slumbered inside me, letting it flow out to him as I kissed him again. “Perhaps later we can explore some more of your secret fantasies,” I whispered, smiling to myself at the look of mingled surprise and passion that flitted through his eyes.
Chapter Two
“To the Wyvern’s Nest?” asked Ludovic, the dragon whose services the blue wyvern Bastian had offered as a gesture of peace (and more likely, of apology for believing Baltic had killed so many of his sept members), as he pulled out into the sparse traffic of the tiny little suburb of London and headed in the direction of the main roads.
“Not yet. I’d like to do some shopping first. Er…some special shopping.” I cleared my throat. “After that, I’ll be going to Aisling’s house, not the blue dragon pub. The meeting has been moved since Baltic had a hissy fit at the thought of it being held out in public where anyone might happen to sing a dirge and thereby blow up the building with us in it. Do you know where Aisling lives?”
“Of course,” he answered, his light brown eyebrows rising. “We blue dragons make sure we know where all the wyverns live.”
“That sounds like something Chuan Ren or another red dragon would have said, not the peaceful blues.”
Ludovic shrugged. “It is the truth nonetheless. I’m sure you will realize this is not meant to shame or embarrass you, but we trust no one outside the sept.”
“And yet you’re working for us,” I pointed out gently, not wanting to offend him. Ludovic was a nice young man, probably only a few hundred years old, with a personable smile, and a penchant for the latest in high-fashion clothing. He always looked as if he had just stepped off the runway, something I’d noticed had applied to most blue dragons—male and female—that I’d seen since my latest resurrection. “Surely Bastian wouldn’t have volunteered you to drive us around if he didn’t trust us.”
He shrugged again. “It is not for me to question the wyvern; he gives the orders, and I follow them.”
I kept silent but thought to myself that the easygoing Bastian ruled his sept with more of an iron hand than I had imagined. That or he inspired some pretty intense devotion from sept members.
“Where is it you wish to shop?”
I bit my lip, a little heat warming my cheeks. “It’s…uh…I’d like to go to a toy store. An adult toy store.”
“Adult toys?” he asked, frowning in the mirror at me. “Electronics, you mean?”
“No.” I took a deep breath. “Sexual toys.”
His eyes widened, a speculative look in them.
“Not for Baltic and me,” I told the look quickly. “Well, perhaps one or two things. But I have to replace Pavel’s toys.”
His speculative look went into overdrive.
“Not that I ever use them with Pavel. He and I don’t do that. Or anything, really. Nothing sexual, that is. We like to cook together….” I closed my eyes for a few moments, knowing I was just making things worse. “I need to find a store. You wouldn’t happen to know of one, would you? If not, I can call around to find one that doesn’t look like you’ll get a social disease by shopping there.”
Ludovic spun the wheel and sent us out into the traffic heading for the main road into London. “As it happens, I know of a necromancer who runs a shop of the sort you seek. She has many specialty items.”
“Specialty? Fetish, you mean? I don’t think Pavel’s into anything too extraordinary. Although there was that swing contraption, but I assume that was for…never mind. I’ll try your friend’s shop. Is it in London?”
“Yes.” He glanced at his watch. “When is your meeting?”
I told him the time and sat back, making a mental shopping list of things I wanted to purchase. By the time that was done, I had to face the sad truth that the inevitable could be avoided no longer….I called Dr. Kostich.
“Good morning, this is Ysolde de Bouchier,” I said politely in answer to his terse greeting. “I hope I’m not disturbing you, but I have a matter of some importance I’d like to discuss.”
“What do you want, Tully Sullivan?”
I flinched at the zing of pain that followed the use of my human name. Members of the Otherworld frequently avoided the use of full names simply because names have power, and in the hands of people like an archimage, that power could be quite tangible
. Not to mention painful.
“I’d like to request your help with a necromancer named Thala. She—”
“No,” he said abruptly.
“Thala is Baltic’s former lieutenant, the one who sang a dirge directly on top of us, and brought our house down around our ears. Literally.”
He breathed heavily into the phone for a few seconds. “I do not have time for the troubles of your husky dragon, Tully.”
I dug my fingernails into my hands in reaction to his wholly unsubstantiated jibe that Baltic’s dragon form was fat. “This concerns Maura, too, you know,” I said quickly, hoping the mention of his beloved granddaughter would sweeten his temper. “Thala is a necromancer, and the leader of the tribe of dragons that—”
“I have just told you that I have no time for your troubles, and I object to being made to repeat it, but I will do so this once: I have far more important things to do than worry about dragons, necromancers, and whatever other trouble you’ve found yourself in, so I will thank you not to disturb me again.”
Before I could explain, he hung up the phone, and I had a very strong presentment that if I tried to call back, he’d simply hang up again. Or worse.
“Oh, what the hell. You live only three times,” I said, throwing caution to the wind as I dialed Dr. Kostich’s number again.
“Yes?”
“I realize you don’t want to talk to me—”
“Then you should know better than to call me. Do so again at your own risk.”
The phone went dead in my ear.
“Arrogant, annoying mage,” I grumbled as I dialed a third time. “Can’t be bothered…Look, this is important, Dr. Kostich, so please hear me out.”
“As important as being transformed into a tree sloth? That is what I am about to do.”
“Threaten me all you like, but I will not be bullied into keeping quiet—”
The murmur of his voice speaking in Latin caught my attention. I listened for a few seconds, recognized the words, and with a snarled, “You are the meanest person I know!” I hurriedly hung up the phone before he could complete the spell.