“No secrets here,” Sarah countered, slapping his hand away playfully. She glanced at the sky, where Alexander was currently winging in to say his own goodbye, then continued. “At some point, Nickie, you need to start looking deeper than secrets.”
Nicholas felt his ears turning red, his gaze darting toward the Intrepid’s windows. He hoped Sabrina was sound asleep and hadn’t heard him being called by that childish nickname...although from Alexander’s laughter as the latter transformed a few feet away, his brother had definitely caught the embarrassing moniker.
“Yeah, Nickie,” his twin teased, pulling Nicholas into a hug that morphed into a tussle, two grown men rolling over and over across the hard ground like boys. Even in human form, dragon farewells were as rough and tumble as they were sweet.
Nicholas was grinding his brother’s skull into the gravel, in fact—playfully, of course—when he noted the final crew member ambling up the ramp that Aerie provisioners had recently vacated. All present and accounted for, the shifter thought with pleasure, ticking the final box on his mental checklist. But something about the set of Zach’s shoulders turned contentment into concern as the tall, silent youth paused to linger just outside the open hatch.
The boy seemed so lost and alone. As if he didn’t want to walk onto the ship but had nowhere else to go. Or perhaps, Nicholas admitted, noting the avaricious gleam in Zach’s eyes as he took in the shifter’s family grouping, he has no one else to do things with.
Without another thought, Nicholas cut his own farewells short. A clap on his brother’s back, a peck on his mother’s cheek, and the newly minted first mate was double timing it up the ramp to catch the teenager before the latter disappeared into the bowels of Captain Fairweather’s ship.
***
“Will you help me with the door?” Nicholas asked, laying his hand on the teenager’s shoulder as the two came abreast. Zach’s quiver of twitching skin wasn’t as overt as Steph’s reaction to a similar gesture. But the flinch was evident enough to cause Nicholas’s brow to furrow in concern.
Still, Zach complied with the unnecessary request. And as Nicholas held back his own shifter strength to facilitate the partnership, the teenager helped heave the huge metal hatch shut and cut off access to the outside world. Finally, the pair walked wordlessly toward the hold to check over the accumulated stores.
Nicholas had more reason than efficiency to pay attention to his task, but he still found himself eying his companion inquisitively. Because Zach had tagged along without being asked this time around, and now the youngster appeared to know what he was doing as he tugged on ropes and thumped shoulder and fist against filled barrels.
The shifter, for his part, had a different agenda than securing their stores. Leaving Zach behind, he peered into corners, gazed at the ceiling, and generally sought signs of anything out of the ordinary, any suggestion that the hold had been vandalized in his short absence.
Because Sabrina’s gut reaction had been right. There was someone in the Plaza reporting to the enemy...or at least so Nicholas suspected after spotting a mechanical pigeon flutter away from a midstory balcony while the ship was being loaded an hour before.
The flash of sunlight on metallic wing struts had almost sent Nicholas tearing down the stairs in search of the traitor. His left foot wanted to catch the sender in the act and determine his identity...but his right foot begged to break into flight and rip the robotic messenger out of the air before it could reach its intended goal.
Instead of doing either, Nicholas had tuned back into his rational mind. It was a good thing, he reminded himself, for Gunnar to assume the Intrepid was on track to leave at midnight as previously requested. If the enemy dragons thought their initial attack had done the trick, then the Aerie would be saved from further bombardment. And if the ship’s departure time was slated for midnight...well then, an afternoon lift-off might just catch the enemy off guard.
Still...if someone at the Aerie was reporting to Gunnar, then that same someone might have become part of Intrepid’s new crew. None of the suspects—save Sabrina herself—had yet come aboard by the time the pigeon flew off. Which meant that whoever it was could have released the messenger robot, then ambled up the ramp at his leisure to plant a bomb or a bug in the dusty recessives of the massive hold.
With that possibility in mind, Nicholas dropped onto his belly to stare under pallets, squeezed his body behind dusty barrels, and generally made a fool of himself searching for items that didn’t appear to exist. Appearances be darned, he wasn’t about to let a traitor damage Sabrina’s well-cherished ship.
***
“What are you doing?”
Nicholas glanced up from the barrel he was examining, smiling as he noted that Zach was willing to communicate after all. The words were scrawled across one page of a pocket-sized notebook, but it was the concerned eyes with their marked similarity to the captain’s that stopped Nicholas in his tracks and made him rock back on his heels. “So you can write even if you can’t speak,” the shifter found himself musing aloud.
“Don’t be an asshole. I’m a human being. And I’m right here!”
Zach’s second missive made Nicholas laugh, and he clapped the boy on the shoulder just like he might have done to Sam when the two of them were young and still feeling their way through the world. This time, to his delight, Zach failed to flinch. “I apologize,” Nicholas said formally. “I am being an asshole. So, what you’re saying is...you don’t want to talk about it?”
To his delight, the boy hesitated for a long moment, then broke out into a roll of deep, audible laughter that proved there was nothing wrong with physical organs like vocal cords and voice box. On impulse, Nicholas whipped a tablet out of his back pocket, offering the pre-Change electronic device to someone who obviously needed the crutch more than himself. “Maybe this would speed up the writing?”
For a moment, Nicholas thought he’d made an improper choice. Not in giving up an expensive piece of equipment—after all, he’d stowed a backup tablet in his luggage just in case this one broke down. But would the boy retreat after being guided in a direction he wasn’t willing to traverse? Would he flee in alarm once he realized that Nicholas was offering friendship along with the physical gift?
Sure enough, the teenager jerked away from the proffered tablet the same way he’d previously cringed back from Nicholas’s touch. And the latter winced in reaction, surprised at how badly the rejection hurt.
“No biggie. You don’t have to take it,” Nicholas backpedaled, tucking the tablet into his jacket pocket while kicking himself for pushing too far, too fast. He knew better than to hunt down budding secrets. Next time, he’d simply open himself up to the experience and allow Zach’s mystery to unfold in its own sweet time.
“Strings?”
For a moment, Nicholas thought he’d misread the boy’s handwriting, which, let’s face it, could have used some work. Then he realized what Zach was asking.
“No, there are no strings attached. Unless you care to put in a good word about me to your sister.” Nicholas waggled his eyebrows playfully, and a smile—albeit more tentative than before—returned to the teenager’s pinched face.
The two stood eying each other cautiously for a long moment. Then, when Nicholas thought even his attempt at humor had failed, Zach nodded decisively and held out one hand in cautious inquiry.
Thank you, the boy’s eyes seemed to say. And despite the secrets still hidden deep within Zach’s silence, something powerful rushed through Nicholas’s body as he handed the tablet over. Something tender and unfamiliar, like the satisfaction of bringing a smile to his mother’s lips mixed with the heady joy of spiraling through the air in his draconic form.
Hiding from his own disconcerting feelings, Nicholas changed the subject. “Why do you think there are so many toilets in this hold? I mean, it’s odd to have even one in a cargo space, but I’ve counted six....”
Then the Intrepid shifted beneath his feet. Barrels rumbled and
ropes creaked as cargo tested its restraints. And Nicholas grabbed for a handhold as the airship rose straight up like a rocket, nearly leaving his stomach behind.
Chapter 16
Overreact much? Sabrina berated herself.
All it had taken was one mention of toilets that shouldn’t belong and she’d lost the warm fuzzies that filled her chest as Nicholas and Zach bonded in what they thought was supreme solitude. Panic had prompted her to blow one shrill shriek through the mouthpiece of her recorder, and now the Intrepid was soaring directly upward far faster than she’d intended...or had even thought possible.
Racing toward the open deck, Sabrina burst through the final hatch, then barred the door carefully behind her. Because if the Intrepid kept rising at this rate, it would need the pressure-equalization system operational to keep passengers and crew alive.
Not a good idea. The words bounced crazily through the captain’s brain, images of her inherited vessel imploding within the high-elevation environment making her cringe. Because the system Zach had recently installed was meant to be a lark, a way to keep the teenager occupied during those seemingly endless months when he’d not only refused to speak but also couldn’t bear to so much as look in another human being’s direction. She’d never meant to actually put his experiment to the test.
But the Intrepid was still surging higher, air rushing past her face as it spiraled around to join its sisters pressing upward against the dirigible’s hull. In the past, Sabrina would have dabbled with the breezes, flirting and dancing before asking them to settle down and come to heel. Now, though, the currents daunted her with their wild intensity.
After all, these weren’t mere breezes...these were winds. Currents so fierce that the captain doubted her ability to call a halt to the forces that had thoroughly slipped their leash.
So she wouldn’t ask them to stop completely, just to slow down. It shouldn’t be that hard to make the request stick.
Unfortunately, the recorder she clutched in one white-knuckled hand was worse than useless. Maybe when she’d been a child, the breezes had given her the benefit of the doubt, had treated her with kid gloves. Now, every time the captain tried to gentle aerial advances with soft, deep notes pulled from the throat of the plastic cylinder, the wind merely blew faster, whipping braids around her face until the beads slapped painfully against exposed skin.
The Intrepid was already higher than Sabrina had ever flown and she found herself stretching her jaw to relieve the tension in her ears. Was it her imagination, or did her chest seem tight from the lower oxygen levels this high above the ground? Was she dizzy from the ascent or just from the joy produced by invisible gas particles streaming across her entire body as if she had truly become a creature of wind and air?
Cupping hands around her nose and mouth, Sabrina tamped down her exhilaration and hummed up a bubble of richer air to breathe. She needed to hold it together. Needed to warn the crew so they could close any open windows and open the outflow valve before the people inside choked on their own carbon dioxide.
And then she needed to bring the ship way the heck down before the Intrepid achieved an elevation where even dragons feared to fly.
Wait a minute. Where even dragons fear to fly?
Walking carefully so as not to slide off the open deck, Sabrina made her way over to the nearest railing. Wow, the Aerie had receded fast. The towers were tiny protrusions poking up above the Green, the aerial defenders mere specks flying east to fend off feral dragons. As she watched, in fact, two colorful fliers met a brown and a gray, the battle appearing balletic and graceful with only the sound of wind rushing past Sabrina’s ears to mark their clash.
The skirmish below her wasn’t a dance, though. It was in deadly earnest...and was exactly how Nicholas’s brothers had planned to give Intrepid the breathing room necessary to escape Gunnar’s approach.
Sabrina had agreed to the strategy at the time. Now, though, as she watched a golden dragon become embroiled in the claws of a gunmetal gray, she cringed away from the reality of the fight. Would Amber’s mate return to the Aerie battered and full of holes? Would the brothers even manage to limp back home at all?
Suddenly, the Intrepid’s upward momentum seemed like the cleverest solution Sabrina had come up with all day. Because wouldn’t Gunnar bow out of battle as soon as he realized the airship—and the female dragon hidden inside—was out of any dragon’s reach? If the captain managed to tap into that mythical jet stream she’d grown up hearing about, would the enemy leave Aerie dragons alone and struggle to follow in their wake? Would Gunnar fly for hours before falling behind and giving up the pursuit?
Already, the gunmetal gray dragon appeared to be harboring second thoughts about his bold attack. Craning his neck upwards, Gunnar twisted away from his opponents, beating his wings as hard as he could in an attempt to draw nearer to the Intrepid’s receding hull. But neither Aerie inhabitants nor invaders could survive the airship’s current altitude, not without specialized equipment no dragon had ever bothered to create.
“A little too late to catch the ship now, aren’t you Gunnar?” Sabrina chided, words coming out in a garbled mess of tongue-twisting confusion. Her ears popped again, and for a moment something itched at the back of the captain’s skull.
Was there something she was supposed to be doing? Somewhere she was supposed to be going?
“The wind!” she remembered. Steph needed to travel east to the ocean, and Sabrina was glad to oblige her special guest.
The recorder twisted out of her fingers, though, when Sabrina attempted to bring it to her lips. The instrument flew halfway down the deck before touching down, then rolled to lodge against the attachment point of one of the many lines connecting gondola to balloon above.
Head cocked in dismay, Sabrina lost track of the recorder when she noticed that her fingernails were turning approximately the same shade of blue as the river that had receded into a thin line crossing the face of the earth below. Strange.
There was something she was supposed to be doing, wasn’t there? Something to do with air and magic and song....
Then, with a strange jolt, wind not of her making grabbed the ship and nearly tore the balloon from its moorings as first the top then the bottom of the Intrepid was captured by a band of eastward-moving air. Well, look at that. The dirigible had entered the jet stream for the first time in its long life, so Steph’s wish was soon to become a reality.
Whooping, the captain spread her arms and spun wildly in the raging current of air. The jet stream was really too high up to be safely traversed in the post-Change era...but boy was it fast. No way could a dragon catch up with her airship while it was being carried along by this pummeling mass of speeding air.
“I’m brilliant!” the captain crowed.
The slurring of her own words struck Sabrina as abruptly hilarious and she fell down onto the deck in a heap of merriment. Wind curled around her head, whipped braids into a clanking mass of ropes that streamed away from her skull.
“Ropes. The balloon.” Maybe she was meant to climb up into the rigging? Sabrina stumbled as she attempted to rise, nearly slipped beneath the edge of the railing as she caught herself against the ship’s side.
Teasing zephyrs nudged her, called her. Come play with us!
Willingly, Sabrina obeyed.
***
“Should we be up so high?” a computerized voice asked from the far side of the observation bubble where Zach and Nicholas had retreated to enjoy the ship’s ascent.
“You sure picked up that tablet’s text-to-speech feature fast,” the shifter replied absently, his mind still on the second pigeon he’d watched soar out a porthole window seconds after the Intrepid took flight. Someone had wanted to make sure enemy dragons didn’t allow Steph to slip out of their clutches...but who?
Unfortunately, Zach was the only one Nicholas could definitively let off the hook. By the time the shifter had jogged across each deck of the airship, peering through doorways and an
noying sleeping crew members, everyone else had been bedded down in the bunk to which he or she had been assigned.
Of course, it wasn’t that hard to lie still and pretend to be sleeping when footsteps barreled toward your room on the double. And if your roommate was lost in snoozeland, then who would remain to tattle on a traitor?
The problem appeared insolvable using the data currently available, but Nicholas still spent half an hour nibbling away at what he did and didn’t know. Only when a new voice dragged him out of deep contemplation did he notice that the landscape below had dwindled to nearly nothing in the distance. “No, we shouldn’t be nearly this high up,” the ship’s chief engineer said from the passageway above both of their heads.
And while Nicholas had allowed Zach’s question to flow over him and disappear into the void, this time he pushed thoughts of traitors and dragons aside and paid closer attention to his current surroundings. “Is there a problem?” he asked as the portly, middle-aged man climbed down a spindly ladder far faster than should have been possible given the sailor’s advanced age. Then, pausing as he attempted to remember the man’s name, Nicholas was gratified when the engineer filled in the blanks for him.
“Gerry Harrison, sir. And, yes, there is a problem.”
By the time the engineer had explained that the Intrepid never flew this high, that the captain always oversaw liftoff from the open deck, that Sabrina was up there now with no pressurization equipment to protect her.... Well, by then Nicholas had already sprinted up several ladders and was preparing to scale the final flight of stairs in order to achieve the open deck himself.
“Wait.”
Nicholas nearly shook off the older man’s restraining hand, but Zach’s troubled eyes forced him to pause. “Yes?” he said as levelly as he could.
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