“A girl has to have some fun.”
“Did you get everything in order?” I asked Baltic as he tucked away his phone. “Did you arrange to have a healer standing by when we get back to England? I don’t like the looks of Holland’s injuries, even though he says he can heal that severed arm.”
“We’re not going to England,” Baltic said, taking my arm with one hand, and Brom with the other.
“We’re not?” I asked as he ushered us out of the room and into the portalling chamber. “Where are we going?”
“Home.”
“Home is England, isn’t it?”
“No.”
“Then where are we going?”
“Going? Right, this is where I make my last stand. I absolutely refuse to leave,” Maura said as Savian and she reentered the building. “I have told you people and told you people—I can’t leave. There are things I must do, and I cannot do them if Thala finds me missing. I’ll just have to do them with this giant pain in the ass attached to me.”
“Like hell you will,” Savian growled. “I’m not staying here to be chewed to shreds by that red-haired she-devil. You’re coming with us whether you want to or not.”
“Please, I can’t leave Spain,” she pleaded as Savian, with a grim expression and a loud groan of pain, bent down and hoisted her onto his shoulder. “Dear goddess! What do you think you’re doing? Put me down!”
“I know you’re anxious about everything, Maura, but you needn’t be. Once Savian gets the key to his handcuffs, I will talk to your grandfather for you if you like,” I offered as we stepped into the portalling room. “I know how intimidating he can be, and I’m sure with his help, he’ll keep Thala from threatening you, or whatever it is you’re afraid she’ll do to you because we took you away with us.”
“No, you don’t understand at all…. It’s not that simple.”
“Where are we going?” I asked Baltic again as the portal attendant gestured us toward the oval of grey light that twisted upon itself, a never-ending Möbius that sat in the middle of the room. Just looking at it raised the hairs on the back of my neck; it was wrong, somehow, that a tear in the fabric of space should just hang in the air like that. Baltic’s face was grim as he looked at it, and I knew that he and the other dragons were all dreading the experience to come.
“Latvia,” he answered as Pavel, with an identical expression of complete and utter loathing, stepped into the portal.
“To Ziema?” I asked, naming the town where the forest that hid Dauva was located. Dammit, I was sure we were going home. I’d have to make another phone call.
“Riga. Pavel located a house there for us yesterday, before Brom was taken. He was going to have you look at it, but there was no time. We will go there now, and set up defenses so that the usurping bastard will not threaten you or Brom again.”
I said nothing before I entered the portal other than to reassure the still-protesting Maura that I would help her deal with her grandfather and mother. Baltic waited until Brom and Savian and Maura had been sent through the portal after me before venturing into it himself, the now-comatose Holland in his arms.
He was just as rumpled and discombobulated coming out the other side as he had been going to Spain. I spent a few minutes fussing over Holland before attending to Baltic. He suffered me to smooth out his shirt, and tidy his hair (which always came undone from its leather tie when he went through a portal) before turning his attention to Pavel.
“There should be two cars waiting for us.”
“Where the hell are we?” Savian asked, rubbing his chest with a pained expression on his face. “Did the portal company screw up?”
“I’ll see that they’re ready,” Pavel said with a nod. He got to his feet and staggered out the door.
“There wasn’t a screwup, no,” I told Savian before turning a worried glance on Holland. “Baltic, we need a healer.”
“One will be at the house when we arrive.”
“Then what are we doing here?” Savian asked.
“Wait a minute—this isn’t England,” Maura said, somewhat belatedly, it was true, but she, being a dragon, was extremely discomposed by the portal. Nico was only now shaking his head and rubbing his face, clearly trying to recover from the effects of portalling.
“No, it’s Latvia.” I waited for the explosion and wasn’t disappointed.
“Latvia?” Maura exploded in a flurry of oaths that were luckily in Zilant, the archaic language once used by the dragons in the weyr. “Why are you doing this to me? Why do you want me to suffer like this?”
“We don’t want you to suffer. Admittedly I may have wanted that a while ago, but not since you’ve been so helpful in Spain. And considering that you went against Thala in order to aid us, I feel it’s only right we aid you in return. Baltic, can I use your phone for a second? My battery is dead.”
By the time I made a fast phone call, visited the ladies’ room to tidy myself up (I may have a dragon buried deep in my psyche, but luckily, portal travel didn’t discommode me much) and returned to the others, Pavel was feeling much more like himself and announced that the cars were waiting.
Baltic picked up Holland. “Brom, you may open the car door for me. Holland will travel with Pavel, while you will stay with your mother and me.”
The rest of us shuffled out of the portalling office after them, Maura still protesting that she couldn’t be in Latvia; it just wasn’t possible, and why couldn’t we understand that?
She complained the entire way through town, and into the outskirts.
“Seriously, there has to be a way to get these handcuffs off,” she said, still going at it when Baltic pointed to a dirt driveway. I turned up it, trying to think of some way to calm down Maura when Savian took care of the matter for me.
“You’re making my head hurt with your endless bitching,” Savian said, rubbing his face.
“I’m not bitching; I’m complaining about this unnecessary abduction. And tough toenails!” was her reply.
He cast her a glance that had her opening her eyes wide. “It hurts so bad, I may vomit. On you. Savvy?”
Silence reigned in the car for a whole thirty seconds before Brom, his nose pressed to the window, asked, “Is that my lab? It looks kind of crumbly.”
The drive was long and straight, the rich chocolate earth covered in golden leaves from the aspens that lined the drive, their branches arching over us in a lovely way that had me thinking warm thoughts about Pavel’s house-finding abilities.
To the right, a shimmer of water could be seen through the trees, as well as a ruined red stone wall with still-intact Gothic windows.
“Oh, I’m sure that’s not it. That’s not much more than a shell of a building. Surely Pavel would have found us something with a basement, or a completed outbuilding.” I glanced at Baltic, beside me. “Wouldn’t he?”
He shrugged. “He showed me the information about the house. It is an eighteenth-century mansion with five standing outbuildings, on twenty-seven acres. It has power and water. That is all I know about it. It was up to you to approve it or not, but he did not have time to show you the pictures.”
“An eighteenth-century mansion,” I said, a little thrill of excitement making me shiver. “It sounds wonderful.”
“It sounds full of mice,” Maura said in a subdued voice.
“Pessimist,” Savian told her.
“Realist, thank you. Emile has an eighteenth-century house in the north of France that is mouse central. I grew up there.” She shuddered.
“Another ruin,” Brom said, pointing to the other side of the drive.
“That looks like it could have been a barn or something,” I commented as the trees grew denser around us, the track making a sweeping curve to the northeast. “Oh, I think I see the house through the trees! It looks big. Yes, that must be it. How excit—” The words dried up on my lips as we rounded a dense clump of trees that lurked at the far end of a large pond, revealing the three-story mansion in all its
glory.
If you could use that word. Which I wasn’t about to.
“Sins of the saints,” I swore, letting the car roll to a stop a few yards away from the closest end of the house.
Baltic squinted at the house for a moment before opening the car door. “It needs some work.”
“Needs some work?” My mouth hung open as I stared at the looming monstrosity before me. Oh, it was a mansion all right, and it looked as though it had seen every single moment of time that had passed since it was built three hundred years before.
“Told you it has mice,” Maura said with grim satisfaction as Savian, wordless at the sight of the house, slid out of the backseat, pulling her after him. “Probably rats, too. And given the state of the house, I wouldn’t be surprised to see badgers, foxes, and bears inhabiting it, as well.”
“Cool,” Brom said as he stared wide-eyed at it. “It looks haunted. What’s behind it? That looks like a building back there. I’m going to go see.”
I closed my eyes and rested my forehead on the steering wheel for a moment, wondering if it was possible to gather everyone back up to whisk them away to England and civilization.
“Mate?” Baltic stood with my door open, his hand outstretched for mine.
I looked up at him, then over to the house. I have no idea what the original color of the paint was, but now it was basically the color of putty. Mildewed putty on which a dog had thrown up. The ground-floor paned windows had tall, elegant dimensions that you see in homes of its age; the second floor bore gabled windows of a lesser stature, but topped with ornate hemispheres. The upper floor had more gabled windows, but without the prettiness, obviously belonging to the servants’ quarters. The roof, dotted with chimneys of varying colors, was solid green with moss, as were the gables. Unkempt, scraggly grass the color of straw surrounded the house, along with some depressed-looking bare trees that drooped claustrophobically over the far end of the house, no doubt making the rooms at that end of the house extremely dark.
It looked like a deranged special effects master’s idea of a house sitting over a portal to hell.
“You don’t seriously expect us to live there,” I told Baltic as I slowly emerged from the safety of the car. “If it’s not infested with mice and bears, or haunted—both of which are frankly quite likely—then it’s got to be nothing but a giant mold and mildew pit, and completely uninhabitable.”
“You like fixing things up,” he said, his fingers twining through mine in a gesture that I suspected owed more to a desire to keep me from running away than one of affection. “This house will satisfy your need to be domestic.”
I tore my horrified gaze from the house and let it rest on him. “You’re joking, right?”
“Consider it a challenge. Or if you like, practice for how you will furnish Dauva once it is completed. Ah. There are Pavel and the others.”
“I found a building I can use,” Brom said, running around the house toward us, as happy and excited as a boy could be. “It’s got a big door and windows, and everything. There’s no glass in the windows, but that’s OK. It even has a sink, although there’s something brown that growled at me living in it.”
“This is a nightmare, isn’t it?” Maura said, staring at the house with the expression I had a feeling was also on my face. “I’m having a nightmare to end all nightmares, and this is just the capper on that, isn’t it?”
“I don’t think I’ve ever seen a house I’d use the word ‘rancid’ about, but this one fulfills just about every meaning of the word,” Savian said, likewise staring at it.
I was about to tell Baltic that there was no way I would ever consent to live in such a horrible parody of a house, when one of the two double front doors opened up, and a man emerged onto a short, split verandah.
“There you are,” Constantine said, gesturing grandly toward the house. “Welcome to Valmieras!”
Chapter Ten
“You did this on purpose!”
Faded and tattered wallpaper rustled forlornly in the wake of an agitated dragon.
“Not in the sense you mean. Baltic—”
“You went behind my back to call that bastard traitor!”
A little breeze came in through the window I’d thrown open, but even the fresh air wasn’t strong enough to battle the horrible combined scent of mildew, abandoned house, and things I’d really rather not identify.
“Ysolde, my beloved one, would you like me to strike him down?” a disembodied voice asked. “He looks as if he is about to do you bodily harm, and I cannot allow that.”
I stopped trying to grab Baltic as he paced back and forth in front of me, down the length of the largest bedroom that he had claimed for ours, his hands gesturing in short, jabbing movements, his eyes all but spitting fury, and instead focused my best frown on Constantine. “Of course I don’t want you to strike him down, and Baltic has never lifted a hand to me. Ever! Such an idea is utterly ridiculous.”
“It also has great appeal at this moment,” Baltic growled as he stomped past me, smoke trailing him.
“Oh!” I stepped immediately into his path, transferring my frown to him. “You wouldn’t!”
He looked downright deadly at that moment, every inch the famed dread wyvern, his black eyes lit with fury when they narrowed on me, his muscles bunched, his dragon fire about ready to burst from him. “Wouldn’t I?”
I wrapped my arms around his waist, ignoring the fact that his arms were crossed over his chest. “Not unless you mean on a certain posterior portion of my person, and even then, that would be totally uncalled for. Unless, of course, you let me reciprocate.”
He looked even more outraged than he had when Constantine sauntered down the front steps of our new home. “I am a wyvern! Wyverns are not spanked. You, however, are not a wyvern.”
“Really? You’re into that, too?” Constantine said, going from transparent to corporeal form in the blink of an eye. “Did Ysolde tell you about my spectral whip? I’m told it’s not nearly as effective on non-spirit beings, but still packs a titillating sting if used properly.”
“We are not into that, no,” I said quickly when Baltic’s fire rose even higher. “I was just making a little joke to lighten the mood, which Baltic well knows. He just likes to pretend he’s more indignant than he is.”
“You called him,” Baltic accused me.
“Are we back to that again?” I tightened my arms around him, crossed arms and all. “Yes, I did call Constantine. No, I didn’t inform you that I was telling him we were going to Latvia instead of back to England. And no, I do not desire him. I love you. I always have, I always will, and someday, you’re going to realize that and be on your knees in gratitude that I love you so much, I’m willing to put up with your insecurity where Constantine is concerned.”
Baltic growled, although he loosened his arms enough to let me hug him properly. “Why did you feel it necessary to inform him of your location?”
“She wants me to do a little job for her,” Constantine said, fading back to nothingness. “Two jobs, actually. Neither of which you can do.”
“Oh, for the love of the saints, Constantine! I said no baiting Baltic! And I mean it. If you can’t behave, you can take a time-out in one of the outbuildings and think about what it means to have some manners. Baltic, my love, my only love, stop smoking.”
He looked at me as if I were deranged.
I smiled and touched one nostril. “Your dragon fire is riding so high that little wisps of smoke keep sneaking out. It’s true that I asked Constantine to do a job for me, but I didn’t expect he would come here immediately.” I paused for a moment, thinking about that. I looked over to where I’d last seen the shade. “How did you get here before us? I called you from the portal office when we first arrived.”
“I was already in Riga. I knew that Baltic would try to rebuild Dauva, and I decided when you disappeared from England that he had brought you here. It’s amazing what a little snooping in real estate offices will uncov
er.”
“What jobs?” Baltic asked, unbending even further to wrap his arms around me, his hands on my behind. “What is it you believe he can do that I cannot?”
Constantine snickered.
“I’m serious about the time-out,” I told him before turning back to Baltic, picking my words carefully. “I want my dragon shard from Kostya.”
“The Avignon Phylactery?” He looked puzzled for a moment, then shrugged. “Thala has much to answer for in giving it to him solely in order to distract me. It is right you should want it back, mate, but you do not need to employ traitorous murderers in order to get it.”
“You murdered more dragons than me,” came the reply from across the room. “Thousands more! It’s a wonder the weyr didn’t charge you for them centuries ago, like they have now.”
“Baltic has been cleared of those ridiculous charges that he killed the blue dragons,” I started to say, but I was interrupted before I could hone my outrage to a needle-sharp point.
“I will have Pavel get the phylactery for you.”
“Pavel who you said yourself was not a very good thief?” I kissed Baltic’s chin, ignoring the gagging noises from Constantine’s side of the room. “There are few beings more suited to the liberating of stolen items than a shade, my darling. And look at it this way—it will give Constantine something to do, and it will vex Kostya in the bargain.”
Baltic’s expression went from outraged to thoughtful. “That does have a certain attraction. Very well, I give my approval to him reclaiming our shard. What is the second job?”
I took a deep breath. This was going to require a more delicate touch. “Dr. Kostich refused to help us with Thala.”
“Then we will use the other archimage of whom you spoke.”
I shook my head, grateful Constantine was keeping quiet for a change. “I don’t know her well enough to really gauge whether or not I can convince her to assist us. We’re not in the weyr, Baltic, and thus not officially recognized by the Otherworld. She has no reason to help us.”
“The same applies to the deranged archimage; yet you thought he would do so.”
Sparks Fly: A Novel of the Light Dragons Page 15
