CHAPTER 2
Garret
I couldn’t believe it happened. Right before my eyes, this blonde tavern owner decked Dean—laid him out flat, and not in the way that he liked.
We were both Drake males. In our human shapes, we were big, muscular, formidable, not easily intimidated. In our dragon bodies, we were bigger than men—proud, powerful reptiles, horned and spined and winged, with massive, powerful tails. The number of creatures that could stand up to us, on whatever world we found ourselves, was few. There were some, like the mighty lumberers of this planet Komodo II, that were bigger and more powerful and could take us down. But there was nothing more fierce or fearsome than a male Drake.
Nothing, perhaps, except an angry female. And judging by the swing that this Noelle put on Dean’s chin, and the way it absolutely flattened him almost faster than the eye could follow, this was a human female with a lot of anger saved up over a lot of years—anger enough to lay out a male drake.
As I stood there, flabbergasted at how she’d punched Dean out, I could only wonder what the hell happened between them to put all that anger behind that punch. And hope that I’d never be on the receiving end of it.
I snapped back to attention as Noelle, shaking the fist that she’d hit him with and smarting at it, took a step away from where Dean lay, and Steve Rendon, the blonde member of our two-man guard team, took her by the other wrist. Ben Bowden, his black-haired, bearded partner, took out a pair of wrist binders, and Steve snapped at Noelle, “You’re under arrest for assaulting the Prime Councilor!”
Noelle didn’t move. She stood in Steve’s grip, blinking her eyes, her angry expression now mixing with one of shock, as if she were thinking, Did I just do that? Was that me?
Gazing down at Dean, who was now dragging himself up onto his elbows and looking as if his brain were rattling around in his skull, all I could think was, Yes, Noelle, you did that.
I knelt down to offer Dean a hand and help him up. Taking my hand, Dean first got himself up squatting and rubbed his jaw. Then, with a soft grunt, he pulled himself all the way up with me. Rubbing his jaw some more, he eyed Noelle, more stunned than angry, as Steve recited to her the ancient words, “You have the right to remain silent. You have the right to legal counsel. If you have no such counsel, it will be provided for you. Anything you say may be used…”
Dean cut in on the guard. “Stop,”
he said, holding out a hand. “Reverse the arrest.”
Facing Ben, who was set to step forward and get those binders on Noelle’s wrists, Dean said, “There’ll be no arrest. No charges against her.”
Ben and Steve were quietly flabbergasted. “Mr. Prime Councilor, Sir, this woman assaulted you. We all saw it. Everyone in this place saw it.”
And it was true. Suddenly remembering we were in a tavern that served the public, I gazed around at the bar and the tables and saw the other patrons turned around in their seats and staring right at the little drama unfolding in this corner of the Wing and Claw. There was a whole room full of witnesses to Noelle Sayers punching out the leader of the entire colony and not looking terribly sorry about it. The blonde would now be facing the worst jam of her life—except that Dean was letting her go. And I could just guess why. There was a time, when these two knew each other, when she must have actually flattened him in exactly the way he liked.
“I know what everyone saw,”
Dean argued, “and I know what the lady did. I’m the one she did it to.”
He took one last rub at his jaw. “I’m within my rights not to press charges. And,”
Dean reminded the guards pointedly, “I’m also the leader of Komodo II. What I say in this situation goes.” He gestured at Ben’s binders, “Put those away and stand down. No arrest, no charges.”
Seeming disappointed, Ben backed off and reattached the binders to his belt, while Steve frowned crookedly and released Noelle’s wrist. Noelle exhaled and rubbed the wrist that Steve had grabbed. She flexed the hand with which she’d hit Dean and winced a little.
“Is there a place we can talk?”
Dean asked Noelle.
***************
There was a place to talk, and while Ben and Steve stood outside the door to Noelle’s office, Noelle sat on the edge of her desktop while Dean and I stood facing her. And in the words of a song from the 20th Century on Earth, And so the conversation turned.
”Listen, Noelle,”
said Dean in a tone that I recognized as his sincere voice, “I really am sorry for the way we left things back then. I wished you hadn’t just disappeared that way. I knew you were hurt, but I didn’t have a clue that you were this angry.”
And this time he only motioned at his jaw.
“Well, I guess you were just more aware of some things than others,”
said Noelle in an icy calm.
”Noelle, I wanted to get back in touch, but you made it impossible,”
Dean said, sounding more plaintive than I’d ever heard him. It was as if the sight of Noelle had made him eight years younger, sent him back to that earlier time in both their lives. This was strangely fascinating to me. I’d seen Dean enjoy women. I’d enjoyed a lot of women with him. But this Noelle actually seemed to have affected him in a deeper way than just pleasure. Dean was my best friend, but right now it was almost as if I were seeing him for the first time.
“I would have wanted to talk some more,”
Dean said.
“Yes,”
said Noelle, “there are a number of things I’m sure you would have liked to do more.”
That one made me wince a bit. What kind of relationship these two once had was more obvious by the minute.
Noelle quickly switched tracks in the conversation. “So tell me, Dean, exactly why are you here instead of back in Hydra supervising the recovery from the storm?”
Dean paused at the question, not sure of what to tell her. This was the really tricky part of what we were doing here. There was only so much we could tell people. If the general citizenry of Wyvern knew what we were looking for, some of them would want to help us, and they’d turn out for it. They’d turn the settlement upside down trying to be the ones to help us find or identify whatever this was, and Wyvern could turn to chaos in the time it took to tell it—homes and businesses disrupted, maybe people in danger. As the leader of the planet, Dean would be responsible for that. He needed to weigh his answer carefully.
And that was why I chimed in. “There’s something we’re looking for. Something we need to find—something that could be really important.”
Noelle was understandably perplexed. She wrinkled her brow at that. “And you think this important thing is here? Right here in Wyvern? What kind of important thing is it? What would make you think it’s here? What’s so special about this place?”
Hoping to put her at ease, I replied, “Important things have a way of turning up in unlikely places.”
”So how is this thing important?”
she asked. “Important to what?”
Now Dean and I were both quiet. We both realized I had talked the two of us into a corner with her, and neither of us knew how we’d get out of it.
”You’re not answering,”
she said. “But whatever it is, it’s important enough that you’d leave the relief effort after…”
She trailed off, her voice growing quiet with suspicion and insight. More softly, Noelle finished, “The energy storms. You think there’s something here that could help with the energy storms? Here in Wyvern? How?”
Finally, Dean must have decided it was time to start acting like a leader again, and spoke up. “Listen, Noelle, we don’t know what it is. Do you remember back in Hydra, there was a man, an older man named Maurice?”
”Right,”
she recalled. “Maurice. The man who was sensitive to energy being emitted and exchanged. The weather predictor who could also tell how well every electronic thing in the city was working, where everything was about to go down or malfunction…”
”Maurice, exactly,”
said Dean. “Well, Maurice is sensitive to energy flows in other ways, in other places. He has a limited sense of things going on in other nearby places. And one day, Maurice started to pick up something unusual happening here in Wyvern.”
”Well, did he give you any idea what it was?”
”He couldn’t tell, exactly. He only said if we could find this thing, or this phenomenon, whatever it is, it could be important.”
She looked off with an expression I couldn’t read. Talking to both of us, yet neither of us, Noelle said, “About the energy storms…”
”I don’t know what to tell you about this, Noelle,”
said Dean. “We know from other planets that the Union has been to, that some planets, or some places on some worlds, have unusual properties, unusual flows and concentrations of energy. Garret and I have been thinking, maybe there’s something like that somewhere here in Wyvern, or somewhere near here. And maybe, just maybe, if we could study it, learn what it is, it might help us figure out what to do about the energy storms.”
”But I don’t understand,”
Noelle said, snapping back to attention. “Everyone thinks the energy storms are caused by whatever is under that meteor crater up north, the thing that has the root system made of something no one’s ever seen before, with properties no one understands. Do you think the root system reaches all the way out here? Or maybe something like that has been forming here?”
Her eyes widened at the implications of it. “You don’t think more energy storms could start here?! Oh no! Do you mean we could be not just the target of a storm, but some kind of ground zero for one?”
She looked away from us again, brushing her fingers through her hair, and she said something else under her breath, something I couldn’t make out. Was it someone’s name?
Dean said grimly, pointedly, “That’s why you can’t say anything. That’s why you mustn’t say anything. Not a word to anyone. Can you see what might happen in town if people knew what we were talking about right now?”
”Yes,”
said Noelle, looking worriedly back at us. “I understand why you didn’t want to say too much and I won’t speak a word that was just said in this room. I don’t want to see what could happen any more than you do.”
”We appreciate that, Noelle,”
said Dean.
I could tell she had her wits about her again when Noelle said, “As you can see from the long silence between us, Dean, I know how to keep my mouth shut. If there’s a secret, I know how to keep it a secret.”
Dean nodded and sighed a bit. “Yes,”
he said. “I guess you really do, at that. If you can keep quiet with me for eight years, I think you can keep quiet about this. Thank you.”
Noelle’s office was silent for a moment after that. But in that long, silent pause, I could sense so many things not being said, and so many questions not being asked.
This Noelle Sayers could keep a secret, all right. I somehow had a strange hunch that perhaps she could keep more secrets than anyone might guess.