Rigel looked shocked, and Lola looked terrified. Max, Collin, and Niko were also surprised at the question. Amy knew it was a horrible thought.
With a sniff, Rigel stepped away from Lola for a moment. “It’s not anything we’ve ever had to consider. Even with the shifting of the ley lines and Omphalos losing its tethers, the magic has been there for us. I don’t think I can honestly tell you what the interval would be to kill us. We typically start to feel the blood madness around ten days. It’s not good for us to go that long without. But that’s the blood in our system and the interaction with the magic. If you take away the magic…” He shook his head. “I don’t know. I would guess a lot less time. A day or two. Hours?”
Max gasped. “To experience an outage that lasted hours instead of minutes would devastate a lot of people in this community.”
“Longest one was…” Collin started.
“Just under twelve and a half minutes,” Amy answered.
Lola started working on dinner again as the silence hung in the air. Amy realized she and Rigel had been arguing about this very thing, and the tension in the air wasn’t fun. She cleared her throat. “Well. If we’re experiencing it this often, and we’re only at twelve and half minutes, then I don’t think we have to worry too much about it yet. There’s also no pattern to the outages. They don’t happen at the same time in the same place.”
“Wouldn’t an option be to move the vampires out of the circle of influence?” Max asked. “We don’t know how far this effect travels. If we could locate the edge of this, and temporarily relocate the clan outside the reach, couldn’t that be a solution?”
Rigel and Lola looked at each other, and Rigel tipped his head. “It’s something to think about. As much as we could experiment, I’d prefer to wake each evening.”
“I’d prefer that as well,” Lola said.
“Then our next task is to find out how far this extends,” Amy said and pulled her purse off the floor, pulling out a folder. “Do you have a map of the local area?”
“I can get one,” Rigel said.
“Let’s start there. I have all the locations on a chart here. We can plot it out.”
Max looked at the map. “We are way north of Oak Hill at this point. Still feel it?”
Brindy, in her harpy version, nodded. “Yup. Been trying to call up the glamour for about five minutes. Nothing.”
“How far does this go?” Amy lamented. “We can’t have a paranormal town if we don’t have the paranormal.”
“Rigel is still down,” Lola said over the Bluetooth in the car. “It’s been nearly half an hour.”
They could hear the worry in her voice, and frankly, Max didn’t blame her. This was the longest outage yet, and there was no sign of it letting up.
“We’re going to have to cut over to County Road 403 pretty soon, or we’re going to end up in Lake Bellamee.” Max pointed to the navigator. “At this point I’m almost willing to bet this goes all the way to the Canadian border.”
Lola’s relived voice came through the speaker. “Oh! He took a breath!”
“Brindy?”
“Nothing yet.”
“Stop, Max. Stop here. Pull over and let’s wait.”
“Ladies and gentlemen, I’m awake,” Rigel said.
Max nodded in agreement and pulled the car over. They sat on the side of the road, nearly ten miles north of Oak Hill, having started the drive up through the town as soon as Rigel sat down in the living room and declared there was a power outage coming. Brindy, who had almost let out the secret in town three days earlier when her glamour dropped in the middle of the grocery store, was all on board for finding out more about the outage.
Max glanced back at her. He’d always been taught that the harpies were horrible, cruel creatures, with no regard for life. But Brindy had proved him completely wrong. She was a young harpy, and without her human glamour, she was actually quite beautiful. She had massive talons for her feet that turned to human legs above the odd knee joint. She was covered in soft downy feathers that extended to her neck and shoulders. Her human arms were long and slender with wicked looking claws she could retract, and her wings were huge, but folded neatly back. The feathers that covered her were white and brown, and her tail feathers were pure white on the bottom and brown on the top.
This was her natural, normal form. The magic gave her the ability to retain a human form. They were reliant on it to hide among the humans. Shifters were different. They had two forms, or three in the case of some of the strong wolves, and they relied on the magic to guide them through the changes. Dragons relied on the magic to keep them aloft and in dragon form.
It was amazing how much they were learning about magic by losing it.
Sitting on the side of the road, it was another five minutes before Brindy started to feel the magic coming back, and another two after that before she could use it to be human again.
“Holy hell.” Brindy sat back in the seat, fully human again. “That was horrible.”
“Thirty-two minutes,” Lola said.
“For you!” Brindy called.
“So, now we know it’s a pulse, a wave that goes out. How about the Southern people?” Amy cued Niko to report with that.
“Same findings,” Niko said. “Keni just got her power back fully. Thirty-two minutes. I felt it too.”
“So we can assume that it goes in all directions,” Brindy said. “But at what point does it start to weaken?”
“I have an idea,” Keni said. “Give me a minute.”
They waited and the phone indicated that she was dialing someone on her end. And a moment later, it rang twice and someone answered.
“Hello?” It was Raissa.
“Hey, lady, so sorry to bug you while you’re out there, but we just had another outage. We’ve figured out that it moves out in waves, and this one took about half an hour to move out. Can you keep psychic finger on that pulse and let us know if you feel anything?”
“Yes, of course. Do you really think it can reach Chicago? Did you call Yuli in Minneapolis?”
“No, brilliant idea,” Keni said. “Just text me if you get anything in a few hours?”
“Got it.”
“I have Yuli,” Brindy said, dialing the phone.
Yuli answered quickly, “Hey! You harpy bitch! How the hell are you?”
“Hello, Yuli, you giant horse’s ass. You’re on speaker phone. Congrats for making that impression.” Brindy laughed. “So did your mother call you and tell you about these power outages we’ve been having in the Valley?”
“She did,” he answered. “She told me that everyone is just losing their power?”
“We’re trying to figure this out. You’re outside the Valley, far enough I think we might be able to use you. Have you felt any of these outages? We just had one go through and it was pretty strong and lasted about half an hour.”
“I’ve felt some…weirdness. A wiggle. Like the magic was trying to get away.”
“All right, can you call me back if you feel that again?”
“You got it, kiddo. And come visit sometime, beastie.”
“I’ll give it a try, once this is over. I don’t want to go anywhere outside the Valley while there’s a chance that I could morph in the middle of a grocery story.”
“Is that what happened?”
“I was with Venus when it happened. She managed to grab some grocery store bedsheets and get me into the bathroom.”
“Okay, whew. You said you have people checking this out?”
“Yes,” Max said. “Hey, Yuli. We’re working on this with the Sectorum Esse.”
“Dude, what?”
“Hi, Yuli,” Amy interjected. “I’m the Gray Eminance’s emissary. We want to get to the bottom of this.”
“If you hurt my friends—”
“She’s not hurting anyone, Yul,” Brindy said. “She’s Max’s mate.”
There was silence and he laughed. Max snickered at the horse’s bray he called a
laugh. “Well, I’ve been away too long. I’ll stay away until you all figure this out, but once you do come down and I’ll be back to visit.”
“Will do, horseface.”
“Check you later, talon tits.”
Amy turned and looked at the harpy. “Your bestie?”
“Yes, he moved out of Pine Valley because someone had an issue with him being gay.”
Max tossed a look over his shoulder. “Who?”
“His father.”
“Oh, that stings.” Max shook his head. “Well, now we have everything we need, let’s head back. I think our next task is going to be trying to figure out where this is coming from. It’s obvious it’s located in Pine Valley, but where?”
“How about the what or the how?” Rigel asked.
“Those might be able to be answered if we can locate it.”
“Good call. Head back here,” Rigel said. “It’ll be dark soon and we can all go out and canvas for some answers.”
Amy grabbed his hand across the dinner tabletop. “Are you frightened about this?”
“I think frightened is probably an understatement,” he admitted. “I think that fucking terrified comes closer to the way I feel.”
Amy sighed. “Carl will be here on Sunday.”
“He’s not going to have magic answers, Amy. He’s a smart man and we all appreciate that he’s going to help us. But we can’t assume he’s going to do anything different from what we’re doing. We’ll just have more manpower and more ideas as to what this might be and how we might solve it. Everyone magical in this town is at a loss.”
“I know, Max. I know. I’m stumped and frustrated. I don’t know how this could be happening. Every story comes in and I feel more helpless. I can’t see the pattern, or the reason or the cause. But I need Carl here. He’s older, more experienced. He’ll have other ideas that I don’t have.”
Max nodded and threaded his fingers into hers. “We’re all doing everything we can.”
There was a pervasive sense of terror in the town. Everyone was scared and people were starting to hide in their houses. Even the grocery store had started home delivery because people didn’t want to get caught in one of the power outages and be the cause of discovery. Pine Valley’s secret had been a secret for four hundred years, and they all wanted to keep it that way.
The vampires couldn’t leave the compound for fear of dropping in the woods and being the victim of small critters eating them. Maybe even a bear or lynx wandering by and taking a bite. Poor Brindy was hiding in her house, too. Max wanted to fly, but he didn’t trust the shift. Niko hadn’t been in the water since the near-drowning.
The town of Pine Valley was paralyzed in fear.
Max wanted things back to normal. He wanted to show his future mate how much fun they were going to have with their lives. He wanted time to speed up so she was ready to fully be his mate. People had already started calling her his, but it wasn’t completely official.
He perked up and smiled at her. He had an idea of something to take their minds off all of this, for just a little while. “Come on. It’s time.”
He slipped out of the booth, waiting for the now very confused Amy to slide out with him and take his hand. Keni waved at them—she knew to charge his account. He headed down the street to the now re-built and re-opened Tavoularis Jewelers and pushed inside.
“Good morning, Max.” Aaron waved from behind the counter where he was reorganizing some of the simple gold necklaces. “Are you here for the basement?”
“I am.” He gave Max a nod and held up his keys.
“Niko is in the design studio. Just let him know you’re going down there. He’s not paying attention very well, the way he does when he’s involved in something.”
Nodding, Max passed the back door to the new storeroom and studio that Niko had incorporated after Wayne, Wyatt, and Betsy had smashed the place to bits just under a year ago. He sat in the studio, peering through a loupe, checking out a stone in a wax mount.
“Hey, Niko. Going down.”
Looking up, Niko smiled. “About time. I was wondering when you were going to be here. I’ll be here until about ten working on this.”
“I don’t think we’ll be much past eight-thirty.”
“Good deal. Wanna come over for dinner? Tomorrow? Grandma is.”
“We’ll be there,” Amy answered for him. “Rigel?”
“I gotta get used to him being around, so yes.”
Max tugged on Amy’s hand and headed for a door at the back of the store, beyond the studio. Using the keys he had in hand, he let them in the first door and down the stairs. They wound around the basement to another door, which had another set of locks on it. Beyond this was a set of stone steps that descended into what appeared to be pitch-black, but a switch on the wall dispelled the darkness.
They walked down and into a cool passageway that led back into the rock there to another giant door—this one a relic of another time updated for modern security. Max placed his hand on the scanner and after it was done reading his palm, he spun the old-fashioned safe lock to open it and pulled. The massive steel door swung out and they walked into a massive cavern.
“Holy shit, Max. What is this place?”
“The Safe. It’s one of the best kept secrets of the dragons and the leprechauns.” He walked down the stairs to the center of the cavern. “This is where we keep our hoard, and the leprechauns keep their pots of gold. They aren’t literal pots anymore, but a series of super secure safety deposit boxes. That safe”—he pointed to the left—“leads to their gold. It’s a massive cavern they can access to check on the treasure. Every one of them can access this room and that vault. They cannot and dare not access four of the others in here.”
He tugged her along. “These are the hoards. Each one of these holds a dragon’s treasure.” He pointed to each. “Niko’s, mine, Henry’s, and Raissa’s. There are two other empty way on the right, and three more dug caverns just in case. And beyond that is another passage that will take you to several other hoards for dragons that don’t live here. The cavern is so safe, several have chosen to take the chance on keeping their gold here and live away from it. They do come to visit about three times a year to check everything.”
“Damn.” Amy walked forward, straight for Niko’s door.
“Oh, no!” Max leapt forward and pulled her back. “No. Don’t ever approach another dragon’s hoard! Niko is right upstairs, and he’d be down in a heartbeat, ready to eat you in a swallow.”
“Eat me?” Amy gasped. “I thought he liked me! Why would he make a snack of me?”
“We have a lot of trouble controlling the dragon when someone approaches our hoard. There are stories about people being eaten for just touching a single piece. I…I had someone once come near my meager hoard when I lived in England. It wasn’t pretty, mój cenny. Not at all. I had to fight my very nature to not eat them for brunch. You just don’t do it.”
“I’m assuming you want to show me your hoard. Are you going to eat me?” she asked in a little voice.
“Only if you ask nicely.” His grin was blinding.
“Max!”
“It’s true. Only if you ask. Because my dragon knows you’re my mate, he’ll act very differently. Very. He will preen at your admiration of his gold and jewels and treasure. He’s very eager for you to see what he has.”
Max lowered his eyes. “But, Amy, you have to understand. Even after all the time I spent in my early life, trying to build my hoard, I had none to inherit. My father left when I was young. He couldn’t deal with his wife being a dragon. He took everything she had and left. I spent all my childhood working to give my mother a good life. But she was always heartsick because he took her hoard. He took her treasure. A ten year old boy could only do so much as a child, and I wound up in the salt mines. I worked brutal days. I didn’t have the means to start creating my own hoard until I was nearly twenty. My mother died broke. I left to go to London just days after she died.”
>
“I thought dragons were immortal.”
He shuffled his feet a bit. “We are. But we can die. And she was doubly broken by his betrayal. He left her, and he took what her dragon had needed.”
“You never found him?”
“No. He disappeared. He left when I was three and disappeared.”
“I’m sorry, Max. That’s awful of him to leave you and your mother.”
“My hoard is so small, because of him.”
She put a hand on his arm. “Maximillian. I’m not judging the size of your hoard. I swear it. I don’t care if Niko’s is bigger, or if Raissa has half the gold in the world. I love you, not the gold.”
He stopped and looked at her. “What?”
“I love you.”
“You do?”
“Yes, you big, stupid lizard. Money is not a consideration for me. I want you, not jewels.”
He pulled her into his arms and held her tight. “God, Amy. I love you too. You’re so much better than I imagined.”
She put her head on his shoulder and he could feel her smiling. “Okay, Max. Show me the hoard. Please.”
Max nodded, feeling like he was on cloud nine, and his dragon wanting to fly happily around the skies above Pine Valley, walked to the door of the vault and scanned it open. He pulled the door wide and grabbed Amy’s hand to walk in with her.
The lights tripped on in the front of the vault, and the gorgeous couch he had bought in London in late 1899 sat in front, along with gorgeous black mpingo desk he’d had made to his specifications in Senegal about the same time. He’d paid handsomely for that desk and it was one of his most prized possessions.
He opened the laptop that sat on the desk and it started immediately. With a few taps he started a program and the different zones of his vault came to life.
Amy, however, was mesmerized by the desk. “Holy crap, Max. This is unbelievable. This is African blackwood. I’ve never seen a desk made solely of it.”
Skydance Page 15
