Rory had a hand clamped around her forearm and, normally, that wouldn’t have held Saff back, but she was still reeling from the fire and her ability to keep her human form took immense concentration. She couldn’t do that and struggle against Rory, fight her friend off to rush further into the fray.
Gods, how she wished she could.
Saff chewed back the bile threatening to work its way up her throat. It was a human emotion from a human body. The dragon in her raged, craved a fight. Whoever or whatever had attacked her friend on the beach would pay, would have ice and mist rained down on them with a precision and wrath no one had ever seen before.
“Saff, calm down.”
“I have to find her,” she hissed, yanking as hard as she could against Rory’s grip.
“You have to also stay within the boundaries of dragon and humankind. The human authorities aren’t going to give you free rein around a crime scene,” Rory hissed under her breath.
The humans crowded around them stared only an instant at them before turning their focus back to the authorities combing through the debris. The noxious stench of burned wood and plastic assaulted Saff’s nostrils, and she felt the scales rippled down her back, underneath her clothes.
Her struggles did not escape Rory’s notice. “Don’t change here. Get ahold of yourself.”
She took deep breaths, understanding the logic of her friend’s words. Nothing would be worse for all of them than if she lost her form in front of so many witnesses and the police. Not to mention the reporters gathered on the beach as well with their massive cameras.
“I have to get to that mess. If she’s even there… Minerva has no family to claim her. She can’t just be left like that.”
“We’ll come back under the cover of darkness then, but you have to understand. I could not find your pet human when I came for you, and there was no time to search. I couldn’t let my friend perish.”
Saff succeeded in pulling her arm away finally. Glaring back at her friend, she worked as hard as she could to keep her shape.
“She wasn’t my pet.” Saff spat the word from her mouth like a foul thing.
Rory shook her head. “She was somewhat of a distraction, you have to admit that. She could never have been an equal partner and now she is gone. Saffyranae, we have to find the other eggs. The children cannot die. The plague cannot spread.”
“She helped me.”
“And her sacrifice for the cause will be noted,” Rory assured her gently.
“How generous of you. How grand and magnanimous our people are.” Saff frowned and opened up her nostrils, taking in deep breaths. Her sense of smell was not as acute as in her true form, but sifting through the scents once more, she almost choked on the oil and burnt wood stench, but there was something missing. Something she’d been too upset to notice or rather not notice earlier. “There’s no human flesh.”
“What?” Rory asked.
“If she’d died under the pier or on the beach, there’d be the reeking scent of burnt flesh. Rory, take a breath.”
Her friend frowned but took in a deep breath as well. “The area… is clean. I was so busy trying to sniff your human, I assumed I’d missed her, not that she was already gone.”
Saff nodded and beamed at Rory. “She’s alive. I don’t know where she is, but she did not perish here.”
She turned eagerly back to the cars, marching in double time over the shifting sands beneath her. Her hand was on the handle of the car door before Rory had her own clamped over it yet again. “What now?”
“Stay on mission,” Rory urged. “You can search for your human on the way.”
“How?”
Rory sighed and pulled several large vials from the satchel she’d been carrying. “Additional cure for you to distribute. The Council sent me with it as they feared even more humans than we initially estimated could be afflicted. You know the best places to find those struggling with the plague. Go back to the jewelry store and get a list of names from your contact. We have a duty to keep this contained as best we can. Minerva—you said it yourself—she is resourceful and crafty, even for a human.”
“True.” Saff balked at the phrase, though: “Even for a human.” Minerva would’ve been hurt to hear it. What would she say? Maybe, “I’m crafty and resourceful for anyone.”
“We will find her,” Rory promised. “I will look for her, too. I have the scent, and I will be traveling to distribute the cure among the other Searchers. We cannot let this plague spread, Saff. Imagine another human melting away in your grasp.”
Saff shuddered, thinking over the pain etched in the warped features of the man she’d had to kill. He’d turned unseeing eyes on her and hoped for salvation, a way to end his unspeakable pain. He’d been too far gone to save, but she’d ached at the choice she’d had to make. She gave life as a shaman. She restored the Earth and worked to heal where she could. It was anathema to her to take life, but when his had been doomed to such pain and inevitable extinction, there had been no choice.
Gods, there couldn’t be more of this, couldn’t be other humans about to suffer the same fate. As much as she needed to get to Minerva, Saff couldn’t turn her back on those humans or force them to suffer if she could stop it.
She took her hand off the car door and pushed her ponytail back off her shoulder. “I’ll do what I can. I still have the information from the shop girl Mary. Hopefully, it will prove less… explosive.”
“We can split the list. I’ll take half, you take half,” Rory said, goal-oriented as always. “This is how it should be, Saffyranae. We all have our orders to follow, and together we will act inspired by the common good for all, not just on our selfish wishes. The abstract can never be heavier than the eyes in front of you...” Rory paused, a wrinkle in her brow. “You used to believe that, too. That we had to put ourselves aside to help others.”
“I still believe that, Roryneela,” Saff objected.
And she still did… But Minerva wasn’t abstract to her. Not at all.
26
Minerva
Her head throbbed as she opened her eyes.
No, that was wrong. Throbbed was too small a word. Throbbed came with a night partying a bit too much with the rich kids up at USC who sometimes found her tough talk and resourcefulness fun. It meant she’d drunk too much vodka and Red Bull, maybe even exorbitant amounts of Yager. This felt like someone pounding a railroad spike between her eyes. Sitting up, she pushed back the waves of nausea working through her and tried to ignore the ringing in her ears.
Blinking groggily, she glanced around herself. An old room with peeling wall paper, the stench of mold in the air, and the tiniest hint of rats scurrying in the walls. Before she’d had her good fortune in L.A. with Allen as her landlord, she’d squatted in places where the rodents were hiding out. You never forgot that sound.
Minerva rubbed at her head as she took in her surroundings. No one was in the room with her. Her first plan was to make for the windows. No dice. The damn things had metal bars at least an inch-thick lining them, and she had to be at roughly ten feet off the ground. She could maybe make the leap, but it wasn’t like she had anything on her to even think of filing the bars down.
A huge oak door loomed at the far end of the room. Minerva tried that next.
Her hands, slicked with sweat, had a hard time finding purchase on the door, slid there badly, but she eventually rubbed them off on the fabric of her sweatshirt. Grabbing the bronze tightly, she twisted it as hard as she could, but nothing gave.
Pissed off beyond belief, she pounded on the wood. “Let me out, assholes!”
The door opened soon after, much to her surprise. Three large men scurried in, all looking like the ‘roid-rage cousins of those on the beach. She stood as tall as she could, which, granted, barely came up to some of their chests.
Hard to remain confident when staring a dude in the nipples, but Minerva would never say she didn’t try.
“Who the hell are you people?”
The one closest to her, wearing torn jeans and a hoodie, eyed her before opening his mouth. Minerva swallowed hard but refused to look away. She’d been attacked a few times now by these criminals, these monsters stealing and killing the eggs. The ones spreading the virus.
She wouldn’t back down now. She had to at least try to get some kind of answer. The best thing she had going for her was at least none of them had the black eyes or the tell-tale signs of magical infection.
“We’re more interested in you. Minerva, right?” Hoodie asked. Odd how even if he was broad, he didn’t look that much different from the privileged college kids she sometimes hung with. Maybe like he’d escaped from the campus gym but not the type to be in on a secret magic cabal. But who knew anymore. Hoodie continued: “How did you even get an egg in the first place?”
She narrowed her eyes at him. Hoodie was the first henchmen she’d met who hadn’t seem clueless, who hadn’t kept to the cover story that it was just a gem.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Really?” he asked, sarcasm dripping from his voice, as he eyed her. “You try selling this shit on the beach, and a dragon shows up to recover you. You and that thing scare the ever-loving shit out of a potential customer. Not a great one, but still. Now we have you and her grabbing merchandise by the half dozen from Annette. So, where the hell did you come from?”
“Texas and other places,” she said. “What’s your point?”
“You, bitch, have been fucking up our operation. We’d rather get your dragon friend off our trail too, but we’ll take what we can get.”
Minerva snorted and tried to play dumb. It worked more often than one would think, especially since as someone young enough looking to still sometimes pass as a high schooler, she was often dismissed as an airhead anyway. “I hang out with dragons, right? Is this some Lord of the Rings LARPing crap? You take Dungeons and Dragons too literally? I stole a ton of stuff from this douche, half of if I couldn’t even identify, and then, like a good little thief, I tried to make a profit.
She shrugged her shoulders. “That’s really it. Sorry to burst your bubble. Or mess up your RP fantasy or whatever.”
Hoodie shook his head and circled her. Instinctively her hand went to her thigh but her holster had been taken off her, and her knives stripped from her body. Instead, she balled her hands into fists at her sides, in case Hoodie punched at her.
Not that she’d last long against three men in a tight space.
She had nowhere to maneuver, nowhere to run and use her natural quickness. Plus, no knives. Fuck, and those were her favorites too.
“You know where the dragon is, that tall blonde who spits ice. She ended up killing two of our men at the dock before the whole thing collapsed on her. We will find out who she is. We will find out how to get to her, too.” He grinned and, reaching down, stroked Minerva’s chin. She fought the urge to spit in his face. She wasn’t going down without a fight, but she wasn’t going to be dumb and bait these creeps either. “You can help us, and you get to live. You don’t start talking, and we use you as bait before we kill you both.”
“I don’t hang out with dragons. I don’t have some wardrobe to Narnia or nice ruby slippers, either, asshole.”
He chuckled, as if what she said amused him. Then, he pulled his arm back and slapped her hard across the cheek. Her vision spun, and she spit blood.
“Got ruby lips though. You’ll talk. Boss wants that.”
Despite everything, despite the pain lancing through her, Minerva’s ears perked up. They’d been dealing with mostly low level players so far. Middlemen and hapless minions. If there were any way to make real progress, this might be it.
Assuming she survived.
Big assumption.
“I can’t talk about what I don’t know,” she said, her voice distorted around her swelling upper lip.
“You will because we’ll be sending in the Specialist shortly.”
He turned to the other men behind them, still so young-looking for guys in on an elite magic-peddling ring. Then again, she didn’t look old enough to be running around with a dragon either.
Wait, was there an age limit for that?
“Specialist?” she echoed.
He grinned. “You’ll see. Chuck, keep an eye on her.” With that, he and one of the others strode back out the door. It clicked behind them with a resounding thunk, leaving her and Chuck alone.
27
Saffyranae
The vials might as well have been massive rocks crammed into her rucksack. The weight of them pressed down on Saff’s back, and, although she’d carried incredibly heavy loads, even as a human, she’d rarely felt something as crushing. It was possible that the weight was more burdensome because, while distributing the cure was important, it wasn’t working to find the partner and friend Saff was growing to care deeply about.
“And then a giant purple velociraptor flew out of the sky and set my hair on fire,” Mary said. She tossed a few of her bouncy red curls behind her ears. “Saffyranae, you’re not listening to me.”
She shook her head and glanced at the (former) shop girl at Annette’s. After Mary had been caught giving out info from Annette’s book, she’d been fired. She’d also apologized profusely to Saff, saying that she had no idea Annette had figured out what she’d done or set Saff and Minerva up. A quick read of Mary’s emotions had told Saff enough to know the human was telling the truth.
Now that the shop girl had been saved from a gruesome, magic-caused death, Mary was loyal to Saff’s cause, to helping the dragon eggs be recovered, and to saving any other unfortunate customers who might have been contaminated. For the three days Saff had been back in L.A., the two had been working to administer the cure to others. And, at night, trying to figure out where the egg-thieves would have absconded with Minerva.
It was going better on the cure front than with locating Nerv.
Much to Saff’s growing worries.
“Ahem,” Mary said. She coughed theatrically and leaned against the door frame of the next house on the list. “You miss her.”
Saff steadied her shoulders and tried to focus her attention on the task at hand. “I’ve been struggling to find her. She was brought into this world and into this fight because of me. It is only fair I help recover her.”
Her heart ached. While he’d spoken more extensively, Nehemaiah’s words had never been able to bother her. He had always been full of gas and hot air, more prone to empty words than to action. No. It was Rory. They’d always been so close. To have her dearest friend express doubt in this arrangement she’d forged with Minerva was as painful as when she’d first tried to learn to fly and crashed with startling regularity until she mastered it. Rory had helped there too. That’s what made her oldest friend’s doubt that much harder. It seeped into Saff, too.
* * *
Even now, Saff could trust Minerva; that much she knew.
She just wasn’t sure Minerva was safe in this fight.
Saff had been combing through a beach in blind panic, terrified that her friend had been burned to death under a pier. Saff knew that there was no place for a human deep within the secrets of her world. There was a reason they’d stayed hidden as a society, more or less. It wasn’t as though the dragons couldn’t take over the planet, if they so chose. Thousands of years before Saff and Rory had been born, the dragons had chosen not to, and that it would be best for them to go about their business of preserving the Earth and developing their culture without humans. Their business was simply far too complex, and far too dangerous, for humans to be involved in.
Even now, she was failing her. All of her attempts to search for Minerva had turned up exactly nothing. Saff wanted her friend. She just wasn’t sure she was good for her. Gods, even good enough for Nerv.
Friends didn’t leave friends captured; friends could rescue each other. She’d been able to do it before. Damn it, she should be able to do it again.
“A
nd you’re still on another planet or through the veil,” Mary said. “We will find Minerva. I’ll hit every lead, and contact I have from my time at Annette’s. We’re working through it.”
Saff clenched her jaw. “Around what’s been ordered.”
Mary put a hand on Saff’s shoulder. Normally, Saff wouldn’t tolerate that, and she had still found it confounding the few times Nerv had done it. However, everything was off-kilter these days, and the contact kept her calm.
“If you weren’t giving out the vials…if you weren’t working to help save people like me, then so many people would be dead by now.”
She shuddered, still tormented by the man she couldn’t save. “I wish for everyone to live through this. I want to save them all.”
“You will. I’ve noticed you kicking a lot of ass lately. Now, let’s see what we can do here.” Mary rang the doorbell and donned a wide smile.
That confused Saff too. She understood that humans lied, and it was one of her gifts to ferret out the truth from those surrounding her. It was the one thing that both annoyed and sometimes amused her about Minerva: the thief could hide so well. What she did not understand were the false facial expressions, the gestures humans relied on to assure each other everything was fine when it was the furthest thing from the truth.
The door finally opened and an older woman with a cloth over her hair looked frantically between both of them. She started into a rapid-fire litany that Mary furrowed her brow at but Saff recognized as Greek. She’d been trained in many world languages, and it sometimes helped in her work on Earth since shamans could be needed anywhere.
Brushing off the lessons from her fathers, Saff bowed her head and spoke. “Yiya, what’s going on? Why are you so upset?”
Sirens and Scales Page 129
