Chapter Ten #4
“I think there’s a little wine left back in the library,” Allie said, gesturing toward the castle. “Looks like you guys could use it. Our people can finish up here, if that works for you.”
I suspect in normal circumstances the dragons would object to being treated as if they were so frail, but obviously, Yrian’s blast did more than scorch off a few layers of epidermis. They were a bit shaken, but whether it was due to Yrian or Xavier, I didn’t know.
“You coming?” I asked him as the others headed off.
“I just purchased this phone device,” he said, still searching.
Exhaustion hit me then, leaving me feeling as if I were underwater, struggling to move my limbs. All I wanted to do at that moment was crawl into bed and sleep for a few days. “I’d offer you mine, but it’s filled with pug memes. You do that side, and I’ll look over here.”
It took us another seven minutes, but at last Yrian found it halfway under one of the big trailers. Another ten minutes, and we arrived at the library, which was full of dragons and vamps, the former guzzling the last of the wine.
“We saved Yrian a glass,” Thaisa said, offering it when we arrived. “Not that he was burned, but still. I figured he might like it.”
Yrian took the glass and offered it to me. I smiled, took one sip, gasped at the fire that burned down my throat to my belly, and handed it back. “That really is potent stuff.”
“Given that the place is evidently crawling with demons and bad quasi-dragons, we are happy to have you all stay here,” Allie said. “We have plenty of room, so please don’t feel like you’ll be putting us to any trouble.”
The others who weren’t a part of the original visit murmured their appreciation, and Allie left to arrange for the rooms to be made ready.
“We will leave you in peace, since I suspect you have much to discuss,” Christian said as he and his team left the library.
Yrian surprised me by standing and making him an elegant bow. “I extend my thanks for your security team guarding Becket. My youngest brother has made money available to me. I will be happy to give some of it to you for her care.”
I caught a glimpse of surprise in Christian’s eyes before he made an almost equally nice bow to Yrian.
“Your gesture is not necessary. As my Beloved is wont to say, it is not a bad thing for Dark Ones to extend our concerns to other beings in the Otherworld, and we are happy to aid the dragonkin as best we can.”
“Now, that’s what I call polite,” Aisling said softly when the door closed behind Christian. “He seemed so rigid at first, but I think Allie’s right and he’s just a big ole teddy bear underneath. Not unlike some wyverns I could mention.”
Naturally, all the men bristled at the implication that they were softies, but just as naturally, the women ignored their fussing.
“What we need to do before we retire for the night is discuss what our next step will be,” Drake said, frowning at nothing in particular. “I can’t help but feel the fact Xavier ran away rather than remaining with his attack force is regrettable.”
A silence fell over the room, one that I suddenly realized was pointed in our direction. “If you are hinting that Yrian should have taken Xavier down, I would like to remind you that a whole herd of evil dragons were attacking you guys, and Yrian was a little busy keeping you all alive!”
“Because what are a few layers of skin between friends?” Hunter said sotto voce to Jim.
“Dude doesn’t seem to have the best grasp on his fire,” Jim agreed. “You’re lucky you didn’t go up in smoke.”
I tweaked the glamour I was creating, hidden by the table I sat at, and, instead of throwing it on Hunter, tossed it onto Jim. It squawked, its appearance now that of a chicken.
“What—” Aisling stared at Jim the chicken as it blinked its beady little eyes at me; then she shot a furious glance my way. “OK, I admit Jim’s comment wasn’t necessary, but a chicken, Becket? Really?”
I shrugged. “Blaming Yrian for your troubles isn’t fair, and I hate unfairness, bullies, and Nazis. Not necessarily in that order.”
“Please change it back,” Aisling said, breathing a bit heavily.
“It’ll wear off in a few minutes,” I said, ignoring her thinned lips and glare.
“The fact remains that Yrian agreed to help us with Xavier, but when he showed up, nothing was done to stop him,” Hunter objected in a flurry of confusing pronouns, watching as Jim began to peck around on the carpet, obviously scooping up crumbs from the snacks Allie had set out for the postfire recovery.
“The First Dragon made it clear that we can’t stop him on our own, but when we have Yrian with us, Xavier still escaped. ”
“Are you going to take that?” I asked Yrian in a near whisper. Oddly enough, he didn’t look as outraged as I felt; instead, he watched the others with the same sort of inscrutable expression his brother wore. “It’s not your fault that Xavier got away.”
“No, it is not,” he agreed, but said nothing more.
I expected him to lecture his family for assuming he would be the great hero to swoop in and save their respective asses, but he didn’t.
He just sat there, relaxed, but somewhat distant.
I had the feeling he was thinking hard, but whether it was about the scene we’d just experienced or something else was beyond me.
“You assured us you would help take down Xavier,” Archer said slowly, his expression troubled.
“Not that we expect you to do it on your own—Hunter and I are the best ones to strike a harsh blow against him, but we can’t do it alone.
We need you for that, and yet, as Hunter pointed out, when we were all there, he escaped. ”
“You did not tell me Xavier possessed a shard of the dragon heart,” Yrian said, leaning back in his chair.
A second silence fell while the dragons all looked at one another.
“Does that matter?” Drake asked after almost a minute of no one speaking.
“It does when he has it on his person,” Yrian said, his gaze shifting to his brother. “Did you know he had a shard?”
“Yes.” Baltic frowned. “But like Drake, I don’t see why that matters. It’s not as if it could be damaged even if you were to outright kill Xavier.”
“You might not be able to destroy a shard, but I can,” Yrian said, then rose, holding a hand out for me. “Becket is tired and needs to sleep. I will guard her so that the Dark Ones may rest.”
“Wait, what?” Aisling said at the same minute Ysolde asked, “You can break the shards?”
“Yes.”
I got to my feet, but slowly, wondering at this man who had appeared abruptly in my life earlier this morning and now felt like I’d known him a lifetime. “Am I the only one who doesn’t understand the significance of a shard?”
“The dragon heart was created by the First Dragon. It is made up of four shards, one granted to each of the original four septs,” Gabriel said with obvious hesitance.
His eyes were shadowed as they watched Yrian.
“It is the most valuable relic of dragonkin. I had never heard that it could be destroyed, however. Re-formed and then sharded again, yes. But destroyed?” He shook his head, clearly confused.
“Is it possible for you to ... I don’t know, banish or remove Xavier from the mortal plane without hurting the heart shard?” I asked Yrian.
“Not if he has it on his body, which he does. I felt its presence as soon as he attacked. If I had destroyed him as I did his followers, it would have meant the end of the dragonkin.”
“Are you saying that if a shard is destroyed, we all die?” Aisling asked, leaning into Drake just as Jim’s glamour dissolved into nothing. I’d set it to last only five minutes, feeling that was just punishment for speaking unfairly of Yrian.
“Die? No.” Yrian took my hand again, and I was distracted by the sensation of his fingers around mine.
My libido kicked into high gear despite the situation.
I told it to chill until such time as I decided whether I wanted to get involved with Yrian on a romantic level.
“But it is the heart of the kin, and without it, we will decline. No new dragons will be born.”
“Holy shit,” Thaisa said, looking at her dragon. “We haven’t even talked about kids yet. What if we can’t ever have them? Who will take over the tribe when you want to retire?”
“I know Drake has our shards tucked away safely in his lair, but I sure as shooting hope Gabriel and May are doing the same, because man alive! I didn’t know we had that hanging over our heads!” Aisling said, her expression stark.
“The shards have survived since the creation of the dragon race,” Drake reassured her at the same time Gabriel murmured that their shard was safe.
I couldn’t help but notice the similarly stricken expressions on all the other women’s faces.
“There have been wars and attacks, and they have not been destroyed. Until now, I wasn’t aware that was a possibility. ”
Everyone looked at Yrian.
“Hey!” I said, taking offense on his behalf, since he didn’t seem to want to do the job.
“You can just stop looking at Yrian like he’s a villain.
He’s here to help you guys ... and me ..
. and is not Mr. Destruction. I’d think you’d be a bit more grateful that he realized what was going on and didn’t damn you all to declining. ”
Yrian gave me an odd look. “What are you doing?” he asked.
“Defending you to your family,” I told him, my ire spiking despite my exhaustion.
“Why?” he asked, tipping his head a little to the side, an act that made my stomach go wobbly with want and need and a plethora of other emotions I decided I didn’t want to deal with at that moment.
“I told you—I don’t like bullies.”
“We’re not bullies,” Ysolde said, but her expression was troubled. “We just want Xavier dealt with, especially if he’s now targeting the green dragons.”
“You’d think with a roomful of wyverns, they’d suss out what’s going on, huh?” Jim asked Yrian, giving me a side-eye as it approached him.
“What do you mean?” Gabriel asked, now frowning at Jim.
“Jim!” Aisling said almost at the same time, clearly outraged. “May I remind you that you are on Team Green Dragons, and that insulting everyone here is not likely to get you vacation time with Amelie and Cecile next month?”
“I second Gabriel’s question,” Ysolde said, her fingers twitching. “Would you mind explaining your accusation, Jim?”
“That depends,” Jim answered, watching her closely. “Are you going to bananate me if I don’t? Because those crumbs I found when Becklestein chickened me—which I gotta admit was more fun than I thought it would be—ain’t gonna hold me over until breffy.”
Aisling took a deep, deep breath, and said through gritted teeth, “Answer the question, Jim. Yes, that is an order, and furthermore, you will continue to answer any questions that anyone else puts to you in the next ten minutes.”
“Why only ten minutes?” Jim asked, also doing a head tip. It wasn’t nearly as effective as the one Yrian did.
“That’s the length of time you have to convince me not to banish you to the Akasha for the next month,” she said in a tone that would have had me toeing the line immediately.
Evidently Jim thought better of continuing down its path of mischief, because it plopped down next to Yrian and said, “You want to tell them, big guy, or should I?”
“Jim!” Aisling said with an edge to her voice that could have cut cement.
“Demon lords,” Jim said with a roll of its eyes at Yrian. “Can’t live with ’em, can’t live with ’em. I’m talking about just why Xavier is after Drake’s shards. None of you seem to be asking why he wants them.”
The dragons all exchanged glances, then turned en masse to Yrian. Just as they did so, I could see enlightenment striking Baltic.
“Ah,” he said, his gaze on Yrian. “You think he wishes to re-form the dragon heart?”
“Why would he do that?” Gabriel asked, his brows pulled together as he obviously tried to follow that line of reasoning. “How could he benefit from re-forming and resharding the heart?”
“He couldn’t,” Yrian said, starting for the door, but I didn’t move, wanting to hear what the dragons said about their big, bad enemy.
“Then who—” Drake started to ask, but stopped, a horrified expression crawling over his face.
“Bael,” Baltic said, his eyes still on Yrian. “You think Bael wants it to get out of the Duat?”
The other dragons didn’t exactly gasp in horror, but I got the feeling they were doing so mentally.
Yrian’s expression turned sour. “I think he’s using Xavier to gather up the things he needs to escape, yes. But that would do him little good if he arrived in the mortal world without any power.”
“Which he’d have if Xavier attacked the septs in order to steal or force the delivery of the dragon shard like he did Bastian. With that in his hands, he could effectively destroy us all with it,” Drake said, putting his arm around Aisling when she pressed tighter against him.
“Oh my god, he could be targeting the children,” Aisling said, worry and distress evident in her eyes. “Maybe we should fly home tonight rather than tomorrow.”
“The children are safe,” Drake said in a smooth tone, but it was a bit crackly on the edges. “There are twelve guards on top of the electronic security. No one can as much as step on the grounds without us knowing.”
Despite his words, I noticed his gaze met Baltic’s for a few seconds, and I realized that Ysolde and Baltic had sent their young son to stay with Aisling and Drake’s kids.
“While I agree it’s entirely possible he would target weaker members of your septs in order to force you into compliance, the rest of what you describe doesn’t sound like Xavier,” Archer protested. “He’s no one’s lackey. Taking the shards fits in with his motive of destroying us.”
“This has the stink of Kashi all over it,” Yrian insisted.
“It’s likely that Xavier has no idea he is playing into Kashi’s hands, but that doesn’t negate the point.
This is why I have wanted to attend to Kashi before your sire.
Xavier may be a threat, but it is not as dangerous as that hatched by Kashi.
Stop resisting me, Becket. You are tired, and need sleep. ”
I slid a glance up at him. “You really are an annoying man sometimes.”
“Yes, but that doesn’t change the fact that you need sleep. Come.” He tugged at my hand again, and I decided the dragons would probably prefer to discuss things without me, so I let him lead me out of the library.
“You know, I am a big girl, and I can put myself to bed just fine all on my lonesome, in case you wanted to stay with your family and work out the next move.”
“I don’t need to discuss it with them. I know what we need to do next.”
“We?” I asked as we mounted the stairs. In the distance, I could hear the sound of a TV and children singing along to it.
Yrian opened the door to my room. “Yes. I will need your assistance in the Duat.”