Oh. Her sister hadn’t told him. “He was Gia’s mate. He died protecting a village in South America.”
The human mercenaries who had been trying to liberate the population had mistaken Marco for a guerrilla fighter. Gia had been devastated, and Logan thought it was worse because she’d been unable to avenge him. But there had been no enemy. It had been a tragic case of mistaken identity in the heat of battle.
“Gia never mentioned his name.”
She pursed her lips and traced a pattern on the railing. “So…are you seeing anyone right now?” He raised an eyebrow. “Gia isn’t,” she elaborated.
His expression shifted to one of wry amusement. “You’re a troublemaker, aren’t you? I begin to see why my son is so taken with you. And, no. I don’t…date. And I’m not going to start at this stage of life. I would never dishonor my mate’s memory that way.”
Logan was disappointed. Gia was the most self-contained person she knew, but she wanted her sister to be happy above all things. The Earth Elemental spent too much time alone with her memories.
“That’s too bad,” she said, flicking a piece of imaginary lint away.
“It’s a stupid idea anyway,” Douglas said.
Logan scowled at him. “No, it’s not.”
His mouth quirked up, the first friendly look he’d ever given her. “Gia hasn’t aged. I have.”
“Not that much,” she said dismissively.
“It’s enough. That opportunity, if it ever was one, has passed. It’s Connell’s time now,” he said, giving her the side-eye again.
“Meaning?”
He shrugged. “Regardless of what happens, Connell’s place is here. He has obligations.”
“And if that opportunity had worked out for you back in the day? Would you have followed Gia?”
Douglas rolled his eyes. “You know you’re a pain in the ass, right? It’s not news to you,” he drawled.
Logan sniffed. She was still trying to think of a smart-ass reply when a muddy-green jeep pulled onto the road leading to the house. Straightening, she half-expected a Were to pop out of it to report another stripping. But it was Yogi, and he looked furious.
“Sammy’s in a coma?” he roared.
“Son, calm down,” Douglas said, passing a weary hand over his face.
Yogi pointed an accusing finger. “She put him in a coma! Riley just told me everything.”
Of course she did. That one was a bitch coming and going. Making a production of examining her nails, she stayed quiet, waiting for the chief to control his man.
“It was for his own good, so he can mend,” Douglas said.
The words were good, but the tone was a trifle flat. Hmm. He could try a little harder to defend me.
“And when exactly is he going to wake up?” Yogi yelled.
Logan stopped messing with her nails. “He should be up now,” she said ever so casually. “Provided that he meant it when he said five more minutes.”
Both wolves turned to her in surprise. Yogi’s expression wiped clean before sagging. His eyes started shining, and his face contorted as if he were fighting tears. His annoying, testosterone-fueled behavior dropped, and he was simply a relieved big brother.
“Is he going to be okay?” he asked, voice cracking slightly.
Uncomfortable, she squirmed on the railing. “He’s going to live,” she hedged.
He would be as well as a Were could be without his wolf.
Douglas seemed to understand what she wasn’t saying. “Come on, son. Let’s go see him,” he said, guiding the younger man with surprising gentleness.
Logan hung back long enough for the family reunion to take place, but she headed upstairs after deciding she couldn’t avoid it any longer. Douglas was questioning Sammy about how he felt, feeling him over in a cursory medical exam.
“Do you still not remember anything from when you were attacked?” Douglas asked, his hand stopping to rest on the little boy’s back.
Sammy looked small and scared. It probably wasn’t helping that it was the chief himself questioning him. “No. I don’t remember anything,” he whispered.
“Not even a green light?” Connell asked, his face dark.
Sammy shot him a wide-eyed look and shook his head.
By the Mother, couldn’t the big bad Weres back off a little? The kid obviously thought he did something wrong to get this kind of attention from his leader and the pack’s top enforcer.
The child looked past the men at her with a pleading look. She clapped her hands loudly, making everyone turn to her. “You must be starving, kiddo! I am too. Let’s go find some grub.”
Sammy beamed at her and hopped out of bed, too young to realize he should excuse himself when in the presence of his pack’s alphas. Racing over to her, he took her hand. Surprised, she looked down at him before shrugging and turning to walk out the door, leaving the men behind. She was hungry.
“Should we follow them?” Yogi asked, his naturally loud voice following them.
“I could eat,” Connell said, exiting the room and trailing them down the stairs.
Twenty minutes later, Logan was wolfing down eggs, sausage, and a stack of pancakes she couldn’t see over. Halfway down the stack, she bothered to glance up, only to find the table full of male Weres staring at her.
She paused, fork hovering. “What?”
Connell and Douglas exchanged amused glances.
“We’ve never seen anyone eat more than us,” Sammy whispered.
“Is that right?” she asked, surprised.
After a beat, Logan shrugged. It was good for them to lose to a girl every once in a while.
23
Gia sneezed violently, the dust from so many old books getting the better of her. She may have been Earth, but she wasn’t immune to the little human irritations.
Rubbing her nose absently she added a book to the heap next to her. Piles of leather bound volumes surrounded her at the large stone table reserved for visitors. Noomi and the other archivists all had their own private nooks hidden away in the stacks, but each of the major chambers had a communal table for tasks like hers.
She had been researching for hours. At first, she had been worried she’d be searching for a needle in a haystack, and she wasn’t wrong. However, she soon realized that the haystack was made of needles, pins, maces, and the occasional sword.
Despite Noomi’s suggestion to start with the indexes of artifact catalogs, there was still hundreds of books and scrolls to scan…and so far, there had been no hint from the Mother on where to look.
Ignoring the gnawing disquiet in the pit of her stomach over the Mother’s continued silence, Gia doggedly pulled record after record. She had vastly underestimated the number of weapons associated with Air Elementals, those that they fought with or had taken possession of in the course of their duties. The latter was a complication that had the potential to skyrocket the number of potential candidates.
Though Connell and Logan’s reaction suggested it was a weapon that belonged to someone of Logan’s family line, Gia couldn’t eliminate the other possibilities. She could be looking for a sword or spear that had switched allegiances after an Elemental had killed its original owner. Instances like those were uncommon, but not so rare that she could afford to ignore them.
Her list of possibilities was currently at a dozen weapons. Some were less likely based on the fragment Logan had found, but there were many entries in the archives that were only written descriptions with no accompanying sketch. Too many of the archivists in years past had no artistic skills. Gia was going to have to send all the descriptions to Logan and hope that one resonated with her. She was nowhere near finishing her list.
After a few minutes, she got up to replace one heavy leather volume on the shelf behind her. Standing on her tiptoes, she slipped it back in place before grabbing another. Removing it caused the precarious stack to shift and bump into the little pile next to it, dislodging a rolled-up cylinder—dropping it on her head.
“Ow,” she muttered, picking up the offending item and rubbing at the sore spot on the back of her skull.
The culprit was one of the many scrolls stuck into random crevices all over the archive. Unfortunately for her head, this one was wound around a brass bar, with heavy, ornamental knobs at each end.
Sighing, she was about to stick it back up on the shelf before thinking better of it. She had been waiting for a sign. Maybe this was it. Unrolling the scroll with care, she frowned before smiling. The text was in Latin, but the actual record was a translation of the original Mandarin.
All Elementals were gifted with languages. It was part of their inheritance, but the archivists only knew the languages they studied, so most had chosen to keep their records in Latin since the early Renaissance. This particular scroll was a listing of the great battles fought by Feng Po Po, one of Logan’s most famous ancestors.
A small doodle on the margin caught her attention. It was a hastily drawn picture of a spear or staff with an elaborate dragon headpiece. The fierce-looking creature was wound around the top of the staff, a line of raised scales running down its back.
Gia held the scroll at arm’s length and squinted. If this doodle was accurate, there was a small chance one of those scales could be the spike Logan had found. Maybe the Mother had been trying to tell her something by nearly concussing her. Of course, she could be reading too much into a random coincidence. There were at least seven other weapons that were equally valid possibilities.
Walking over to the table, she added the scroll to the pile. Feng Po Po was an Elemental of great renown, even among others of their kind. If the doodle were a weapon associated with her, there would be mention of it elsewhere, and perhaps a more detailed drawing. In the meantime, she would send descriptions of what she had to her sister. They might get lucky…or she might be here searching for weeks.
24
Logan had been hoping to get back out to the woods after breakfast, but her plans were disrupted by the fact she sprouted a four-foot shadow.
Sammy followed her wherever she went, trailing her like a puppy. Even Connell and Yogi were ignored in favor of her, a situation neither man had experienced before, judging from their nonplussed reaction.
She could have taken to the currents to escape, but Logan found it hard to leave Sammy. Though he was up and smiling now, he had been close to death the day before. Her lingering sense of obligation to him was heightened by the sparkling bits of her aura intermingled with his own. She could feel the tug on her heartstrings as they walked all over the chief’s house and outside around the nearby buildings.
Logan was hoping to tire Sammy out, but it didn’t seem to matter that he had just risen from his sickbed. The little boy was bouncing off the walls and climbing all over her, his energy boundless.
Yogi and Connell were no help either. They sat back and watched her and the kid from the couch, sipping at home-brew beers while Sammy did a credible imitation of a whirling dervish.
Would it be kosher to dose him with something so he’d go down? Nah. The chief would have a problem if she drugged a still-recovering cub.
Maybe I can feed him a lot of turkey. All that tryptophan might knock him out. She was wondering where she might get a fully cooked thirty-pound bird when she felt the tug along the aether, signaling a message from Gia.
Peeling Sammy off her back, she handed him to an amused Connell.
“Take this. Give him a gallon of warm milk or something and put him to bed,” she ordered. “He shouldn’t be taxing himself this hard yet. I have to take a message.”
Connell passed Sammy to his brother like he was a hot potato in order to follow her. “What message?”
Logan walked through the mudroom doors and out to the porch before answering. “That one,” she said, pointing to the symbols forming in the dirt.
A long line was assembling themselves before their very eyes. They stretched out along one side of the house, the shallow grooves deepening in the hard-packed earth until they were clear and defined.
Connell came up behind her and whistled before remembering he was an alpha Were. “That’s kind of cool, I guess,” he mumbled, trying to downplay how awesome Gia’s skills were.
Logan grinned. “It’s totally badass, and you know it,” she said, kneeling in front of one of the pictures before dismissing it.
“What are these?” he asked, leaning over a badly formed representation of a mace.
She didn’t blame him for being unsure. Some of the pictures were pretty rough, but that wasn’t Gia’s fault. Her sister could transmit what was in her mind’s eye faithfully. If the pictures were bad, it was because they were done poorly to begin with.
“This is our list of suspected weapons. Or a part of it,” she amended, examining the mace carefully before moving on down the line.
She took the spike out of her pocket and held it in front of the next drawing.
“I don’t think that’s it,” Connell said, his nose wrinkled.
“No shit, Sherlock,” she grumbled while revolving the spike above the likely protruding bits of each drawing, trying to fit the fragment into place without success.
“What about this one?” he asked, standing at the far end of the line.
“Stop backseat driving,” she ordered with a scowl before moving to the next one.
“But it’s this one,” he insisted, pointing down.
Digging in her heels, she ignored him while she steadily worked her way down the line. By the time she got to the last drawing, he was openly glowering at her. She nudged him away from the drawing with her hip. Connell folded his arms and backed away with an eye roll while she looked down and made the connection.
The depiction of the dragon headpiece was rough, but it still seemed as if the little creature was looking right at her.
“I told you so.”
“Shut up, you gorgeous bastard,” she muttered above his deep-throated chuckle. “This is off,” she said, turning to him.
His smug expression fell. “So it’s not it?”
“Oh, it’s the right one,” she said, her stomach knotting. “But this sketch is shitty. The tail is wound the wrong way.”
“Ah,” he said, a wealth of meaning behind that one syllable. “So you recognize this dragon-spear thing?”
Sucking in a deep breath, she nodded. “I have to make a call.”
“Are you going to do your schizo talking at nothing thing again?”
She took exception to that. It wasn’t schizo. “I’m not calling one of the girls. I need my phone,” she said, feeling her pockets before remembering it was in her pack.
Logan wanted privacy for her call so she flashed up to the roof of the chief’s house after grabbing her things from the sickroom. It was a pointless gesture, however, as Connell effortlessly climbed up there after her like the agile jerk he was.
“I like to watch the stars from up here,” he informed her, stretching out like a lazy Roman emperor waiting for a servant to feed him grapes. He leaned closer. “By the way, the next time you decide to visit my bedroom for any reason, you better plan on staying a bit longer…”
His voice dripped with sexual innuendo, but with the exception of a sudden heightening of her color, she ignored him. She mumbled something noncommittal and fished her phone from the side pocket of her bag.
“Who are you calling? A weapons specialist? Some professor?”
Logan ignored him and hit the top listing on her favorites list. It rang a few times while Connell reached for her pack and started poking through it.
Smacking his hand only resulted in another one of those sexy grins. Meanwhile, the person with all the answers finally picked up on the other end.
“Mom, I need your help.”
25
Connell’s head whipped around when Logan said Mom. He sat up straight, unapologetically eavesdropping.
“I need you to do me a favor,” she continued. “Can you go to the hallway, to the silk scroll of Feng
Po Po? No, the other one—the one with the staff. Can you take a picture of it and send it to me?”
Fascinated and surprised that Logan’s mother was still alive, he focused on her end of the conversation, despite her obvious annoyance at having him there.
“No, don’t use the big camera,” Logan said in a tone of barely controlled patience. “Take a picture with your phone.”
She tapped her fingernails on her thigh. “Because that way you don’t have to download the picture from the SD card. You can send it as a text. No. No. Just hold your phone up to the painting and tap on the camera app…It’s the picture of the camera in the corner. Now tap on it once. Did it open? Good. Now tap on it again and send it to me. There’s that little box with an arrow on it. Use that. My phone number’s already in there. Yes. Perfect.”
His grin was so wide it was threatening to split his lip wide open. Logan sounded like every child with a technophobic parent, the ones over a certain age who could never remember how to check their email.
He could picture Logan’s mother now, a sweet, grey-haired lady who drank lots of tea out of those tiny cups they used at Chinese restaurants. He couldn’t wait to meet her. If she wasn’t too frail, they could invite her out to the compound for a relaxing weekend in the mountains.
“Mom, this is really blurry. I need to see the details of her staff better. Can you try again? And this time, can you tap on the screen so the camera focuses better? Zoom out with your fingers to get a close up. Okay, good…”
An alert sounded. Logan removed the phone from her ear and looked at her screen. “This is good enough, Mom. Yes, I’ll come home as soon as I wrap up this case. I have to go now. Give my love to Aunt Mai.” Logan rolled her eyes. “Of course, I love you too.”
She finished by making a loud kissing noise he found charming—and would be imitating to taunt her at every opportunity.
“I hope you kiss me goodbye like that when I call you,” he said, leaning up on his elbows. “So when do I get to meet your mom?”
Air: The Elementals Book Two Page 16
