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Our voices had never risen to full volume, and we’d withdrawn enough to talk to each other’s faces, rather than in each other’s ears. But I cuddled forward again, loving that intimacy.
‘Well then,’ I whispered before giving Anyan’s earlobe a little nibble. ‘We need to distract ourselves until we have an audience. Whatever can we do to pass the time?’
With a growl, Anyan manhandled me onto my back, his lovely heavy body draping mine. We’d managed to entertain ourselves for a quite a while when Anyan stiffened. Stiffened more, I should say, and with his whole body. Not just his special parts.
‘He’s here,’ he murmured in my ear.
Show time, I thought, and then I started talking. Plan B was in effect.
‘Are you certain he heard?’ Ryu asked as my dad passed me a second bagel smothered in cream cheese. I was still making up for those three days without food.
‘No,’ I told the baobhan sith, giving him an evil look as I started in on my second breakfast. I’d woken up on the wrong side of the bed after my dream-night with Anyan.
‘Jane,’ Ryu admonished, casting me an equally ill-tempered glare. I sighed.
‘Sorry, I’m just nervous as hell. But I’m serious, I don’t know if the White heard. I said everything I was supposed to say, and Anyan was sure the White was lurking around, but I can’t guarantee he heard, or listened, or cared. ’
My dad leaned over my shoulder, patting my hand that rested on the handle of my coffee mug.
‘You did all you could, Jane,’ he said, turning back to Anyan’s big farmhouse sink to wash dishes.
Caleb, sitting next to me with the remains of his own breakfast, nodded. ‘And I doubt the White would waste such information, or be oblivious to it. ’
‘But what if he knows it’s a trap?’ I asked, my voice small.
Iris piped up from where she sat across from Caleb, her voice like honeyed ice cream.
‘I don’t think they can risk assuming it’s a trap, any more than we could if we thought they were moving on a new weapon. ’
Plan B hinged on the fact that the White was weaker than the Red. We needed to separate the two dragons, and we needed them as far away from each other as we could get them. The good thing about them being dragons, meanwhile, was they couldn’t communicate. Dragons had no pockets to hold a cell phone, and massive fuck-off claws made dialing difficult. So if we could get the Red and the White really far apart, we could work on the White, using the stone.
We could get Anyan back, and have a fighting chance at taking the Red.
The hard part, however, was not necessarily separating the two. The hard part was making sure they both went where we wanted them to.
In other words, we had to create two sets of ‘dangers’ that they’d have to split up to follow, only one had to be significantly less dangerous than the other. Presumably, they’d send the less powerful dragon, the White, after that group, and the Red would go after the more dangerous group.
As I qualified as ‘most dangerous’, being the champion, I needed to be Red bait. But we had to invent another story, equally compelling, after which the dragons would send the White. For if they both chased after me, we were fucked.
Not least because the creature had admitted it wasn’t sure it could apparate something as big as a dragon again, without serious consequences to itself. And we needed the creature for so many reasons.
‘I agree with Iris,’ Ryu said, interrupting my reverie. ‘They’ve got to check this threat out. And if I were them, I’d send someone after both of our groups to be safe. ’
What I’d told Anyan, so that the White could overhear, was a mixture of facts and lies. The facts were that we’d learned of a stone that was an important ingredient in a process that could separate the White from Anyan. I lied, however, about the fact we already had it. Instead, I said that we’d only heard of it, and that it was located very far away, in China. We’d concocted a whole story about it being in the collection of the Communist regime, blah blah blah. We were sending a team to investigate.
The kicker was that the ritual involved a bunch of other stuff, which we had to prepare in Rockabill. That was the other lure – the one that would hopefully bring in the White, and that was baited with the power of the creature.
‘The second we get our hands on that stone,’ I’d told Anyan, my voice radiating excitement, ‘the creature will apparate me right back to Rockabill. And then we can start the ritual. We can take you back in seconds, just like they did. ’
And that was my little personal pot sweetener. I’d gone over those last minutes in Whitby, when the Red had stolen Anyan from me, a thousand times. And they weren’t even minutes. It had taken only seconds for the Red to lash out that damnable tail of hers and send Anyan flying onto those bones. Another few seconds for her little chant to power up their mojo … and Anyan had been lost.
And it had been all an accident of fate. Everything had been going according to plan, or so it seemed, when Jarl had showed up, and everything was suddenly back in the Red’s hands. Er, claws. But then Jarl was dead and we were going to win…
Only we lost. Big time.
So that was why I said what I had to Anyan. I knew, after seeing what had happened in Whitby, that huge things could happen in seconds. And because of our connection with the creature and its power, it appeared like we had time on our side. The Red and the White didn’t know the creature actually had limits on its strength – all the dragons knew was that the creature could apparate either one of them at will.
And the Red and the White obviously knew the power of time, since they’d used it against us so well in Whitby.
If the White had heard me, which I had to have faith it did, it would know that all I had to do was lay a hand on that stone, and it and I could be back in Rockabill in seconds, starting this mysterious ritual I’d told Anyan about.
Which meant they had to send someone here, to make sure that ritual never got off the ground, at the same time they tried to keep me from reaching the stone.
Only, in reality, we already had the stone, and I wasn’t leaving Rockabill.
At that moment, we were distracted by the lady of the day coming down the stairs.
Magog walked down slowly, looking distinctly uncomfortable. She’d washed all the gel out of her jet-black hair, and combed it flat and straight. Iris had taken some scissors to round it off at the ends, and to give her some bangs. Her massive amounts of eye makeup were toned down, and she’d taken out her facial piercings. To cap off the ‘Jane’ look, she’d borrowed a pair of my jeans and my Converse.
If it weren’t for the wings, we could have been sisters.
Are you sure it’ll hide the wings? I asked the creature, who sent a warm wave of assent through me.
[So completely no one will be able to sense the glamour. You just have to explain to it what you need it to do. ]
I stood up from the trestle table, and walked toward Magog.
‘You look great,’ I told the raven before realizing how arrogant that sounded. ‘I mean, you look just like me. That’s good. We’ll only need to cover those wings and we’ll fool ’em. ’
Magog nodded nervously. I wondered why she was so antsy till she asked her next question.
‘And you’re sure I can give it back?’ she said, her singsong Welsh accent prominent.
‘Of course. I’m just asking it to let you carry it, and to lend you some power. That’s all. It knows to come back to me when I call. Are you ready?’
The raven nodded, and I pulled the labrys.
It answered my summons, blazing forth in my hands as if it knew it was about to go on a mission. It probably did, actually, as it had become such a part of me.
Do I just talk to it? I asked the creature. Again, it seemed to nod in my mind. So I stared at the labrys, and I mentally explained what we wanted it to do, feeling like a bit of
a tit.
I felt less like a tit, though, when it shimmered in my hands, reappearing in one of Magog’s to our mutual surprise. It was eager to get this show on the road. A second later, while Magog was still looking down in shock at her new burden, the air shimmered around her.
When it cleared, I was standing there. A perfect simulacrum of me, down to the unique power signature I recognized as mine, now that it stood in front of me.
‘Wow,’ I said as I blinked at myself for a few seconds.
‘Weird,’ Gog said, walking up to his bedmate and love and peering down at her with an expression of curiosity mixed with a mild distaste I tried not to take personally.
‘All right,’ Daniel said. ‘Let’s move out. We’ve got a chopper ready to take us to the airbase. From there we go to a British carrier, where we will meet with an Alfar contingent from the Great Island to fill out our numbers. When we’re close, we’ll switch again to choppers. They’ll take us to our goal. The Chinese government is expecting us, and is allied with us in this mission. ’
I grimaced, despite the fact that this should be good news. The truth was that the Chinese were with us only because they were so against supernaturals. Their government was very aware of the existence of the supes, and was determined to wipe them out. So they were more than happy to join with us in the destruction of the Red and the White, but for reasons I found more than distasteful.
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