Red got a key from the front desk, walked through half of the building, then went upstairs. Frustrated, I went to the bar, ordered a beer, and called Valinir to tell him where I was. From where I sat, I could see the front desk. Assuming customers always dropped off their keys when they left, I would see Red or anyone else of interest if they came by. One thing I noticed was that all of the hotel’s staff I had seen were either Vampires or Werewolves. I didn’t think I’d be booking a room.
I ate lunch while I waited and was really starting to get bored when Valinir called. “Mondranar just showed up at the tavern,” he said without preamble. “I’ll follow him when he leaves.”
I was trying to figure out where we should go next to look for the egg when Valinir sat down next to me at the bar.
“I’ve called Iceland,” Valinir said, shaking me out of my musings.
“What? Why?”
He pursed his lips. “I didn’t think you were listening. I’ve called Iceland. Mages from there and Ireland will be here in a day or two.”
“Why?”
Valinir told me he followed Mondranar around and around Prague, on the metro, buses, then back on the metro again. Mondranar was obviously trying to shake a tail. Valinir, however, kept changing his glamour, and finally followed the Dark Elf to the old farm-turned-hotel where I had been waiting. That was too much of a coincidence. Unfortunately, it still didn’t help us find the Dragon’s egg.
“Mondranar is too dangerous to let wander around. At the very least, he’s a spy and provocateur for Prietnar. A full circle of realm-walking battle mages is coming to capture or kill him. All we have to do is keep an eye on him until they get here.”
“So, that’s what we’re doing now? Following the Dralf around, and the Dragon’s egg isn’t important anymore?” I asked.
“That’s not what I’m saying at all,” he responded. “As soon as we deal with Mondranar, then we’ll get back to searching for the egg.”
I stood up and said, “No, I don’t think so. I’ve done some crazy things, but I’m not hunting Dralf battle mages. You do whatever you think is best, but I’ll just run along.”
He just blinked at me. “Where are you going?” he asked.
“I’m going to check out of the hotel, then I’m going to sit down with Josef and try to work out a more organized way of trying to find the Dragon’s egg.”
As I was leaving, I saw the redhead get into a car with a golden-haired man in a business suit, who I estimated was as tall as me. He was another halfling, possibly part Elf. So, they were staying at the same place as Mondranar, but it didn’t appear they were with him. What was she doing at that tavern? I glanced back at Valinir. All I’d accomplished in Prague was increase my confusion.
Chapter 10
Josef owned the whole building, and his shop occupied the first floor. He lived on the two middle floors, and his laboratory and a storage room filled the top story. I had always stayed in one of his spare rooms when I was in Prague and often used Josef’s house as a base for exploring Europe. It almost felt like a second home.
The year we spent covering each other’s backs while we negotiated Europe during the end of World War II had cemented a close bond. We had always maintained close contact. He had visited me twice in the States, but usually it was me coming to Europe.
To pay for my room, I cooked for him and tidied the place up. Since such things were as natural as breathing to a house witch, I always felt I got the best end of the bargain. After dropping off my bags and giving Josef a brief explanation as to why Valinir and I were no longer together, I went to the food market. Upon returning, I entered through the back door and started up the stairs with the groceries. I heard Josef in the shop with a customer and glanced in that direction. A flash of red hair caught my attention.
Peering between the balusters, I saw the redheaded mage I had spent half the day following. The golden-haired man was with her. I set my packages down and snuck around to a place where I could overhear the conversation.
I heard Josef ask in German, “But why would anyone want it?”
“What would anyone want with a Dragon’s egg?” the man asked in the same language. His voice, almost musical, sent shivers through me. “Hell, Josef, I have no idea. You’d be lucky to survive hatching the damned thing.”
“Some damned fool probably thought it would bring him a fortune,” the woman said. “So far, all it’s brought is death. And now there’s a Dralf blood mage looking for it. Nothing good will come of this.”
“I heard a rumor of a Dragon in Russia on Samhain,” Josef said.
Silence except for a scuffling of feet. “Ah,” Josef said, “I guess my informant was incorrect. It really was an airplane burning villages for no good reason. So, what do you plan to do with this egg if you find it?”
“Destroy it,” the woman said.
“And you think that will be an easy task?” Josef asked.
“I don’t,” the man said, “but she seems to think we can just drop a large rock on it, or something. That’s why we came to see you. I was hoping you might have a book on Dragons.”
“I have a book, but I loaned it to a friend.”
Silence met Josef’s statement. A silence that stretched.
“Recently?” the man finally asked.
“Would you care for some more tea?” Josef answered. He was as good as an Elf at dodging questions he didn’t want to answer.
I stifled a laugh.
“You said the Dralf sold some dragonet eggs,” Josef said.
“Yes, and an Elf bought them the following day,” the woman said.
“Why would they want them?” Josef asked. “What value are they?”
The man answered. “You can use a dragonet to track the egg. Of course, you have to hatch them first.”
“Someone told me they couldn’t be trained.”
“They can’t, in the conventional sense,” the man said, “but they aren’t magical creatures, so you can use magic to control them. You wouldn’t need a full clutch, though. I assume the Dralf kept a few eggs, then sold the rest. I have no clue why the Elf bought all of them.”
The mystery man and woman took their leave shortly thereafter. As soon as they were out of the door, Josef turned the “CLOSED” sign on the door, and called out, “You can come out now.” Of course, he knew when I crossed his wards, but I didn’t think his visitors were aware of me.
I stuck my head into the room and said, “Let me put the food upstairs and then I’ll come down.”
Upstairs, I put the duck to marinade, sliced some fruit, and put potatoes on to boil, then took the fruit and some cookies downstairs. I put the plate on the table and sat down while Josef poured me a cup of tea.
“Who was that?” I asked, taking a bite of an apple slice.
Josef reached for a cookie and dunked it in his tea. “The girl is Göndul Hagansdottir. She calls herself a Valkyrie—her mother’s Aesir and her father is Human. I’ve known her a long time. The man is Cassiel Thenatir. I’ve never figured out what he is. I thought maybe some kind of Elf. They’ve been together the last few years when she’s visited.”
I shook my head. “Possibly part Elf. I didn’t see his eyes, but his hair certainly looks Elven. He’s too short for a High Elf, wrong coloration for either a Wood Elf or Dralf.” I sighed. “So, they’re looking for the Dragon’s egg, too. And they’re following the same Dralf that Valinir is concerned about.”
“He has normal pale blue eyes, not cat-pupiled like yours. They do seem to know more about Dragons and dragonets than you do,” Josef pointed out.
I shrugged, took a sip of tea, and another slice of apple. “They’re both realm walkers. I’ve never been to Draegar.”
“You heard what Cassiel said. What did you do with the dragonet eggs?”
“Destroyed them. They were fairly close to hatching. I don’t know how close, a day or two, a week, two weeks?” I shrugged again.
“You destroyed all of them?”
I nodded. “If they really are friends of yours, you might let them know that hotel they’re staying at isn’t safe.” I thought about it. No one knew when the Elven mages would find Mondranar. He and Valinir could run into each other and cross magics that very night. “Hell, Josef, Prague might not be safe. Two battle mages going at each other could make that part of Prague look like Dresden, and Valinir called in a complete circle.”
The golden-haired man, Cassiel, showed up at Josef’s the following day around noon. I was curled up in an overstuffed chair by the window reading the Dragon book in the sunlight. Unfortunately, the author had neglected to write the chapter on destroying a Dragon’s egg. I glanced up as the shop door opened, and clearly saw Cassiel’s face for the first time.
He was possibly the most beautiful man I had ever seen, and we both sort of froze, staring at each other. Golden hair to his shoulders, pale blue eyes—the irises almost white with deep blue darts and a dark blue ring around the outside—slanted, like someone from China, or an Elf. High cheekbones. A full-lipped sensual mouth that… Danu, have mercy… begged to be kissed. Wide, solid shoulders and chest. Shorter and stockier than a full-blooded Elf, but I knew he would need those muscles to support his wings.
I was lost, and I knew it.
I saw his nostrils flare and his eyes dilate. His Elven half—hell, maybe his Angelic half as well—picked up on my interest. I had never met an Angel in person, so no wonder I hadn’t recognized a Nephilim from the feel of his magic the day before.
“Ah, Cassiel,” Josef called from the back part of the store, breaking the spell that held us. “I was going to call you.”
Josef hurried toward us. “Come in, come in. Kellana, could you please heat the kettle?”
I unwound from the chair and stood. Cassiel watched me until I reached my full height, our eyes level.
“This is my friend Kellana,” Josef said, taking the Nephilim’s arm and pulling him into the shop so he could shut the door. “And this is Cassiel, the man I was telling you about.”
Josef turned to me. “The kettle, Kellana?”
I shook myself out of my trance and hurried to the back room where Josef kept an electric kettle and the ingredients for extending hospitality. I threw some cookies—biscuits as they called them in Europe—on the tray. Not wanting to wait for the water to heat, I spoke a Word and poured the boiling water into the pot. Then I took the tray up front to the small table where Josef entertained his special customers.
As I sat down, avoiding Cassiel’s eyes, I realized how silly I was acting. I wasn’t an adolescent, and it wasn’t as though I’d never known a man before.
“Kellana tells me that you’re staying out at Hotel Čertousy,” Josef said.
Cassiel looked startled and his head snapped around to look at me. “How would you know that?”
“A Dralf is staying there, too,” Josef continued. “Kellana thinks that’s a dangerous place to be at the moment.”
The Nephilim continued to stare at me.
“A contingent of Elven battle mages is heading toward the hotel,” I said, “intending to capture or kill that Dralf, who is also a battle mage.”
I waited for him to say something or ask a question. Instead, he looked to Josef, who nodded. Cassiel pulled his mobile phone out of his pocket, punched in a number, then said, “Get out of there. Now. Far and fast.”
He had to be speaking to the redheaded Valkyrie. For the first time, I wondered about their relationship. I was impressed by the speed with which he took action. After a couple of minutes, he spoke again.
“I’ve been informed that the hotel may become a battleground. Yes. The Dralf. I’m at the bookstore. Yes, see you here.” He hung up.
“You were following Mondranar?” Cassiel asked me.
“Yes, but I found him by following your friend, Göndul.”
“You were the one who left the message at the tavern?”
“My friend was. I followed Göndul from the tavern out to your hotel.” I poured tea into the three cups. “Is she coming here?”
Cassiel nodded. “Do you know when the Elves are going to assault the hotel?” he asked. “You do know that the hotel is owned by a Vampire lord, don’t you? Mondranar and the Vampires work very closely.”
A light went on. The Vampire attack in London. “Excuse me a moment.” I got up and went upstairs to call Valinir. No answer.
“Why are there so many Vampires in this realm?” Cassiel asked when I came back.
“From what I’ve heard, their home realm isn’t a very nice place. Heavy volcanism, lousy climate, and they have a population problem. They breed at an incredible rate, and they’ve had massive population crashes throughout their history. Since their realm is next door to Earth, they’ve been slipping across for millennia. But there’s a rumor that a Dralf opened a breach for them two years ago on Beltane, when the veils fractured. They’ve poured across ever since.”
Two hours later, Cassiel got a phone call. His side of the conversation was terse and brief.
“I have to go,” he said. “Göndul has been attacked.”
“Button up your wards,” I said to Josef as I grabbed my bag and followed Cassiel out the door.
“You watch your ass,” he yelled after me.
I caught up to the Nephilim as he turned into an ally. “Where is she?” I asked.
He shed his jacket and shirt, and I watched as his golden wings grew out of his back. He had to turn sideways, as his wings stretched longer than the width of the alley. There were three types of Nephilim, depending on the non-Angel parent. The hair and wings were gold with an Elven parent, white-blond with a Human parent, and red with an Aesir or Vanir parent. All of them were very rare. Angels didn’t mess around much with other races.
“I don’t have time to wait for you,” he said.
“I didn’t ask you to. Where is she?”
He told me a couple of street names, then launched straight up into the air.
I took off running. The intersection he named was less than half a mile away, and I made it in two minutes. That wasn’t very discreet, but if Göndul was being attacked in the middle of the city in the middle of the day, discretion had already gone by the wayside.
Cassiel landed just before I got there, a short sword in his left hand. A small bolt of lightning from his other hand hit a Vampire and sent him flying.
Göndul stood with her back to the wall, wielding a fairly impressive long sword with both hands. Not including the body without a head lying at her feet, and the man Cassiel had electrocuted, I counted more than a dozen Vampires armed with klestrithi—the long, serrated knives Vampires favored.
I pulled out a paintball gun and fired at the three closest Vampires. They weren’t as susceptible to the sleepy gas as Humans, but they still had to breathe, and I had it on good authority that they hated the pink stains the potion left on their clothes.
Two of the vamps rushed at me. I shot one in the face, then had to parry a cut from the other one. He tried to leg-sweep me, but his legs weren’t nearly as long as mine. I kicked him in the face, and he went down, rolling away from me.
I heard another crackle of thunder from one of Cassiel’s lightning strikes, and saw a head bounce away from Göndul’s position. I had reach on her, but that sword of hers was almost long enough to equalize that. She definitely had the advantage over the Vampires.
As I parried a cut from another Vampire, I saw Göndul grab a Vampire by the throat and slam him into the brick building hard enough to flatten his face and damage the bricks. I made a mental note not to get into a fight with her.
I took out the vamp I was sparring with and spun around to cut down a vamp who looked ready to bury his knife in Cassiel’s back. Those lightning spells were potent, but slow in close quarters, and he didn’t seem to have confidence in his blade. Another vamp came at him from his non-blade side, and he didn’t react in time. My knife buried in the vamp’s eye probably saved Cassiel from a nasty cut.
&nbs
p; Another lightning bolt, and suddenly the street was quiet. A couple of vamps disappeared around a corner, and I saw another one climb over the edge of a roof. Four bodies stained with pink lay on the ground, four had nasty burn marks, and five more lay in pools of their own blood.
“The pink ones are only asleep,” I said.
Cassiel rushed to Göndul’s side, and I saw blood running down one of her arms and dripping onto the sidewalk. He took her arm in his hands, she shuddered, and then collapsed. I walked over and picked up her sword. Although her clothes were stained with blood, and her left sleeve was shredded, it appeared that she was no longer bleeding.
“Can you carry her?” I asked.
“Yes.”
“Then I will meet you at the bookshop.” I waited for him to spread his wings and take flight, then headed away from the scene myself. Sirens sounded in the distance, and I wanted to be out of the area before the authorities arrived. Humans always got so excited when bodies were involved, and they usually acted incredibly dense when I tried to explain that they were only Vampires. They never seemed to have that problem when demons were involved.
Although I knew about Angels’ physiology, it was such an incredible thing to watch Cassiel spread his wings and fly. When he was fighting standing on the ground, he looked like a normal man with golden wings tattooed on his back. But when it came time to fly, the tattoos came to life, became three dimensional, and spread the way you would expect wings to spread. All the way back to Josef’s shop, all I could think about was how cool it would be to have wings and be able to fly.
Chapter 11
By the time I got back to Josef’s shop, Cassiel was putting Göndul to bed in one of Josef’s spare bedrooms. The amount of blood on the shirt he stripped off her told me how bad her wound was before he healed her. I took a look at her arm, then went upstairs to Josef’s lab and whipped up a poultice, spelled it, and took it back downstairs.
“What is this?” Cassiel asked.
“A healing poultice. My mother is an apothecary. It will help the healing process.”
Dragon's Egg (Dark Streets Book 2) Page 8
