‘I had no idea you could play like that,’ Suzanne added.
At least somebody remembered something.
Although I could have done without the Mages remembering Meagan’s gift. I hovered close to her, not knowing what to expect from him. He looked as if he was really enjoying himself. His eyes were all sparkly. Jubilant. As if victory was within his grasp.
There was nothing to like about that.
‘Um, th-th-thanks.’ Meagan pushed her glasses up her nose and clutched her books to her chest.
Trevor came to lean against Trish’s locker. His smile was so friendly that I completely distrusted it. ‘You want to join our jazz improv group? We meet after class on Mondays and Thursdays, and we could use a piano player.’
As if that was going to happen. I started to turn away, positive that Meagan would decline.
‘Sure,’ she said and I spun back to stare at her in shock. She nodded firmly, her stutter completely banished. ‘That would be great.’
Trevor’s smile looked hungry to me. ‘See you there, then.’
‘Absolutely.’
The first bell rang. Trevor and Suzanne turned away, talking quietly together as they headed to class. Meagan and I walked in the opposite direction. I had a major case of the creeps. ‘Are you nuts?’ I whispered.
‘Someone has to find out more,’ Meagan murmured. ‘I’m the most obvious choice, so I volunteered.’
‘No way. It’s stupid.’
She stopped and glared at me. ‘It’s not stupid. It’s brilliant. I’m going undercover.’
‘Don’t you see? Their spell is getting to you, too, making you think things you wouldn’t think otherwise.’
‘Bullshit. I know what I’m doing.’
‘But …’
‘You’re the one who said we should play along. How else are we going to find out where the others are? How else are we going to figure out how to save them?’
I shook my head. ‘It’s too risky.’
Meagan waved that aside. ‘If you want me to calculate the probability of success, I’ll work it out for you.’
‘That’s encouraging.’
‘But you have to know that if we do nothing, our chances of success are much lower.’
‘And you can tell me how much.’
Meagan smiled.
I made one last appeal. ‘I’m good with risk. I just don’t like you taking the risk.’ I sighed, because she wasn’t persuaded. ‘I don’t think this is a good idea at all. Let’s think of something else.’
‘I don’t think there’s a better one.’ Meagan got that stubborn look, the one that told me she’d never change her mind. ‘I’m going in.’
* * *
I’d always thought that if I could just break the Covenant and tell Meagan the truth about my abilities, we’d be best friends again like we used to be. I’d always thought there’d be nothing left to argue about and we could be a team.
But it wasn’t working out that way. Instead, we were fighting all over again.
We argued more about her decision to join the improv jazz group over tofu burgers at my fave restaurant. It was a relief to escape the pervasive power of the golden Mage spell that was filling the corridors at school. I’d thought it might help us think more clearly.
It hadn’t done one thing to change Meagan’s mind.
‘The problem really is that you don’t trust me,’ she said.
‘No, the problem really is that you don’t know what you’re up against.’
‘What are you afraid of?’ she demanded.
‘Other than everybody dying or disappearing?’ I eyed her and she nodded. ‘Okay. Mage spells can change your thinking. They can make you believe things that you know aren’t true. Only a more advanced spellsinger can defeat them.’
‘And I’m not trained yet.’ She nodded thoughtfully, surveying the restaurant. ‘Okay, that’s fair. Give me Jared’s number.’
I sat back in shock. ‘I don’t think he’ll help.’
Meagan smiled. ‘Want to make a bet on that?’
‘He bailed on me. He left …’
‘Sure, but I’d be the one contacting him.’ Meagan made a flourish in the air with her fry. ‘And I’d be doing it to save you. Trust me – he’ll help.’ She ate that fry with great satisfaction.
Was she right?
Couldn’t hurt to try.
Would it be good enough?
Just pulling up his address made my pathetic heart go flippity-flop. I was even blushing when I forwarded it to Meagan. Derek was nice. Kinda cute. Maybe he was even safe – well, given that he was a wolf shifter – but Jared …
I had a feeling that no one was ever going to turn me inside out the way Jared did.
I just wasn’t sure that was a good thing.
Meagan typed away, composing an entreaty to Jared. I desperately wanted to see it, but tried to be nonchalant. ‘You haven’t eaten anything,’ she said without looking up.
‘I’m not hungry.’
‘You’ll need your strength to shift, if you have to.’ She pushed my tofu burger, still in its wrapping, toward me and sounded stern. ‘Eat.’
‘Promise me that you’ll be careful.’
She smiled. ‘This is going to be awesome. You’ll see.’ She leaned closer. ‘All you have to do is trust me.’
I couldn’t say anything to that.
‘Promise,’ Meagan insisted.
‘Okay. I promise. But you have to ask me if you have any doubts. You can’t take any more risks and …’
‘Pinkie swear,’ she said, interrupting me. She held up her pinkie finger the way we used to promise things to each other in elementary school.
The sight made me smile. A little.
I pinkie swore. There was nothing more I could do.
I didn’t know what to do with myself after school. As hard as I tried to persuade her, Meagan had insisted it would compromise her cover if I came to the jazz session. That drove me a bit nuts, as I was worried about what might happen to her. She was sure that nothing would happen in front of everyone. I reminded her that a lot had happened Saturday night in front of everyone, and she reminded me that almost everyone had been enchanted. I didn’t see why that same spell couldn’t be cast again.
We went round and round, each certain that she was right. She was determined to do this and since I couldn’t stop her, I played by her rules.
For now.
I did seriously consider the merit of spying on her in my salamander form, but I had promised to trust her. It was a bit early to bail on a pinkie swear.
I tried to be responsible and do my homework.
In the end, I was too restless to make much progress and it felt strange to go to her house without her.
So, I went to my house.
My rationale was that it was time to check on the place, pick up the mail, water the plants, etc., etc. The truth was that I wanted to be alone, and I wanted to be alone someplace familiar. Someplace safe. It’s never a bad thing to slide inside the protective barrier of your dad’s dragonsmoke.
I closed my eyes when I unlocked the door to our loft and felt the glittery caress of his dragonsmoke. It was piled high and thick around the perimeter of the apartment, woven all around it like a protective cocoon. Stepping through the chill of my dad’s dragonsmoke – breathed slowly and deliberately to defend his territory from invaders – made me shiver.
Then it made me want to cry.
Because I could already feel that the barrier was degenerating. Dragonsmoke erodes over time, gradually dispersing. My father’s barrier had been a fortress wall, but in his absence, it was thinning. Not enough for anything to be at risk, but I could feel the difference and that made me keenly aware of his absence.
And the reason for his absence.
Would my parents come back?
Together?
The loft felt lonely and empty. Cold. The decor has always been a bit austere, but on this day, it felt impersonal. Vacant.
&
nbsp; I locked the door behind myself and went through all the rooms, checking the locks on the windows. There was a smell in the kitchen and I realized that no one had remembered to take the trash out on that last day. Clearly, icky trash hadn’t been at the forefront of my mom’s thoughts when she’d walked out. It was out of character, though, because she always had a departure checklist. This time, she’d been too upset to follow it.
Or too determined to leave to care.
I did the dutiful thing. I took out the trash and emptied the dishwasher, cleaning up the kitchen in the hope that she would come back and wouldn’t be disgusted when she did so. I got proactive with the contents of the fridge, too. I sorted the mail, leaving it on appropriate desks, as if everything would return to routine just because I wanted it to. And then I ran out of jobs to do.
That was when it occurred to me to visit my dad’s hoard.
A dragon’s hoard is a personal treasury of items of both monetary and emotional value – deeply personal and vigorously defended. I think sometimes that the secrets are more valuable than the gold.
My dad’s hoard was housed in a windowless room with only one entry. It was located roughly in the middle of the loft – by design, not accident – nestled between the kitchen and the walk-in closet adjacent to the master bathroom. The master bath wrapped around the other side of the room that held the hoard, and if you hadn’t been thinking about space, you might not have realized that an entire room was secreted there. You had to slide the clothes down one bar in the closet to even see the door, which was painted the same color as the closet walls. The hoard door was locked, too.
That was enough to keep human intruders away. My dad also had defenses against dragons. His dragonsmoke was almost impenetrable around the door of the hoard— when I pushed his shirts aside, I could see its frosty glitter. Unlike the dragonsmoke that surrounded the loft itself, this barrier permitted no one to cross other than my dad.
I had never been invited into his hoard. I had seen specific items that had been removed for me to view them elsewhere in the loft. I’d always wanted to know what else was in there. I’d never had the opportunity to find out— though it hadn’t been for lack of trying. The dragonsmoke barrier had kept me out, even in my dad’s absence.
But now I could spontaneously manifest elsewhere.
I should be able to bypass the barrier.
My dad would never know that I had crossed his dragonsmoke barrier. He’d never feel it burn me for daring to go where I shouldn’t. He’d never feel it break. I would simply go around it.
I would prove that he couldn’t exile me in the traditional way.
And I would finally know what else was in his hoard.
If that wasn’t incentive, I didn’t know what was.
Chapter Fourteen
It was ridiculously easy. One minute I was standing in the closet, gathering my nerve. The next, the whole world was sparkling with blue light.
I opened my eyes to find myself in a darkened room. I could smell that it was sealed against the world, and against the light that outlined a door I saw the glitter of dragonsmoke.
‘Well done,’ someone said.
My heart leapt and I spun in terror. There was a radiance on the far side of the hoard, one that illuminated very little. I took a cautious step closer, mustering the cusp of change.
‘You’re learning fast, Sis,’ Sigmund said, a smile in his voice. ‘I love that you don’t mind breaking the rules.’
My dad had said that he saw Sigmund sometimes in his visions, so I had to check. ‘You aren’t going to tell on me, are you?’ I moved closer to the ghost of my big brother. He was leaning over something, cradling it in his hands. I couldn’t tell whether the faint light was coming from it or him.
‘Erik probably knows.’ Sigmund shrugged. ‘All that foresight. Maybe he guessed that you would come in here. I did.’ He smiled at me. ‘Or at least I hoped you’d have the nerve to do it.’
I looked around, my eyes having adjusted to the darkness. There were the expected piles of coins and jewelry and shiny trinkets. The gold gleamed warmly, even with such faint light, but I saw that there was a lot of silver, too. Buckets of gems. I bent and grabbed a fistful, letting them run between my fingers like dried beans.
‘It’s incredible,’ I said.
‘Just like the stories say.’ Sigmund sounded bored. ‘Over centuries, you can collect a lot of stuff. Erik was always big on financial security.’
I glanced up. ‘What was in your hoard?’
He smiled. ‘Books.’ His tone turned rapturous. ‘Books with leather bindings and embossed covers. Books filled with secrets, inscribed by hand or letterpress on vellum or parchment. Engravings and drawings and symbols and knowledge. Books. I loved them as I never loved anything else.’
‘What happened to your hoard?’
His lips thinned and he turned away. ‘I destroyed it.’ I saw him swallow. ‘I burned it all, so no one else could ever have it.’
I wondered how many things had been written in those books that might have been helpful to me. ‘Anything about Wyverns in those books?’
His eyes gleamed in the darkness. ‘You’ll never know now, will you?’
That made me mad. ‘You could have left it as a legacy. You could have helped me out a bit here.’
Sigmund frowned and tapped his fingers for a minute. He wouldn’t look at me. ‘What you want is over here, you know.’
I wasn’t sure whether he had told me that because he felt guilty, or whether it had been his plan in the first place. I went to his side. ‘How’d you get in here, anyway?’
He gave me a look filled with pity. ‘I’m dead. I can go wherever I want. Usually no one sees me, though.’
‘You always turn up when I’m in the dark, and nearly give me a heart attack.’
‘Always been fond of dark corners,’ he said. When he smiled, he looked so mischievous that it was hard to be grumpy at him. ‘And deep shadows.’ He wiggled his eyebrows, then pointed down to the shelf in front of him.
I couldn’t figure out what it was at first. ‘It’s broken,’ I guessed finally.
Sigmund picked up the bigger piece of stone and turned it for me. It was dark stone, really dark, and when he held the pieces, I could see that it had once been a polished sphere. But it was broken now, and the fact that the pieces were carefully preserved in my dad’s hoard told me that it had been important.
Whatever it had been.
‘The Dragon’s Egg,’ Sigmund supplied. ‘It used to show the location of a firestorm.’ He spun one piece, but it was lopsided. ‘The story of how it was found is lost.’
I would have bet that my brother knew how it was found, but he averted his gaze, a sure sign that he wasn’t telling.
‘What about the story of how it got broken? Is it in your book?’ I asked.
He shook his head. ‘Happened after publication.’
‘But you know.’
‘Once upon a time, a Slayer captured both the Wyvern and the Dragon’s Egg. The Pyr Nikolas was given the choice of saving just one.’
I looked at the broken stone. ‘He chose the Wyvern.’
Sigmund sobered. ‘He loved the Wyvern. He would have done anything for her. But it is forbidden for any of our kind to be intimate with the Wyvern.’ He grimaced. ‘It’s similar to the human edict against sleeping with one’s sister.’ He arched a brow.
I ignored his expectant expression. ‘Why?’
‘Maybe if you go back far enough, we dragons are truly all brethren.’
‘Is that why she died?’
Sigmund shook his head. ‘It’s why she lost her powers.’ He snapped his fingers. ‘Presto! All gone.’
‘What?’ She lost her powers because she had sex? Once? I was going to live for hundreds of years, but to keep my powers I’d have to be a virgin forever? ‘But I’m just getting my powers!’
‘Then you’d better follow the rules, Sis.’
‘What rules? There’s no
rule book or guide.’
Sigmund scoffed. ‘Don’t play games. You know instinctively what most of them are.’ Then he looked pointedly around the room to the door.
That was a telling reminder. ‘Right. You couldn’t have mentioned this need for me to follow the rules before I entered the forbidden territory of Dad’s hoard.’
He grinned and I figured he was teasing me. ‘So, did you break an important one? Guess you’ll find out when you try to leave. Think your powers have gone away already?’
I folded my arms across my chest. ‘You are not helping.’
‘We could both be dead in here. How fun would that be?’
‘Not helping.’
‘Of course, you might not waste away to nothing and die before Erik gets back. You might be alive.’ Sigmund winked. ‘Until he killed you.’
‘Hello, could we stay on topic, please?’ I indicated the Dragon’s Egg. He didn’t have to know that he had me seriously worried.
He patted it. ‘Erik could also use this like a scrying glass, see the future before it happened.’
Sigmund was too smug and I guessed he was hiding something from me. ‘Don’t tell me you can see the future, too?’
‘All the dead can.’ He smiled. ‘We just don’t care anymore.’
‘Do you care about anything?’
Sigmund straightened and looked straight at me. ‘I wouldn’t be here otherwise, kiddo. Think about it.’
I did.
Then he beckoned to me, inviting questions.
I had lots. ‘What happened to Sophie?’
‘You have the answer on your finger.’
I looked down. I’d seen a white dragon and a black one come out of the ring the previous spring. I knew they were Sophie and Nikolas. Being trapped in a ring with your beloved didn’t sound to me like an ideal fate.
I would have asked another question, but when I looked up again, Sigmund was gone, one piece of the Dragon’s Egg rocking slightly from his touch.
Scrying, huh.
Maybe it was time to give that a try.
I stepped closer to the chunks of the Dragon’s Egg. It would have been bigger than a basketball when all one piece – now five pieces lay on velvet in my dad’s hoard.
Winging It Page 25
