Dragon Knight (The Collegium Book 3) (7 page)

“What do they gain? Is there a money trail you can follow?”

“That’s what I hope to do while people believe I’m visiting you. When the ice storm in the North West Passage burned out my magic, it was staged. I’d been lured up there. I thought I detected a pattern, everything falling into place to indicate that a geomage had been hired to sabotage test drilling for oil and natural gas beneath the ice. The result would be an eco-disaster to be supplemented with an oil tanker sabotaged by mundane methods to create a gigantic spill, one that would trigger political clashes among the nations trying to claim the Arctic as their own.”

“It didn’t happen.”

He saluted her statement of the obvious with a lift of his coffee mug. “No. Instead, while I was endangering everyone’s lives by chasing the false trail up to the Arctic, the Group of 5 initiated turf warfare in the narco-gangs of Mexico. And I know they did because there were tales of mythological creatures from Aztec carvings coming alive and killing key personnel. An illusion a mage could achieve. I think I even know which mage. He was my first target. He’d know something of who hired him. Seven months ago, he died.”

“How?”

“A Mexican drug lord shot him.”

Her eyes opened wide. “Wow.”

“Yeah. Apparently, some of the narco-gangs have magic. This drug lord, either by natural aptitude or an amulet, saw through the mage’s illusions.”

“Or he could have just gotten lucky, firing at random,” she said.

“Lucky, or the Group of 5 sold him the amulet.”

“Wait. What? They turned on the mage they’d hired?” Her disbelief was cute.

He shrugged. “They have no loyalty, and this disposed of the mage just before I could question him. Plus, now the drug lord owes them a favor.”

She pulled a face. “Depending how you look at it. They’re also the ones who sent the rogue mage in to attack the drug lord in the first place. Although, I guess they wouldn’t tell him that bit.” She frowned at Lewis. “You’ve tried following the magic. That didn’t work. Now you want to follow the money. Have you told anyone in the Collegium about this quest?”

“No.” Without hard evidence it was impossible. It would be no more than a conspiracy theory such as had gotten Valenty Smith ridiculed, and with his magic burned out, Lewis couldn’t afford to give anyone further reason to question his fitness to serve the Collegium. But it had meant he was on his own—till now.

“Oh boy.” Gina rubbed her arms. “Goose pimples.”

“You don’t have to do this for me,” he said. “I can look for the money trail myself.”

“How good are your hacking skills?”

He refused to answer.

“Yeah. I thought so. You’ll alert them as soon as you go hunting online.”

“Which is why I tried tracking the mage first,” he admitted grudgingly. “Hell.” He stood. “Maybe I shouldn’t even be here. I don’t think the Group of 5 consider me much of a threat, not since I so stupidly followed their false trial and their weather mage burned me, but I shouldn’t risk bringing you into this.”

She stood, too. “You took a risk for me. You met a dragon. I can do a bit of hacking.”

Gina watched Lewis struggle with the idea of accepting help, of needing it.

“Thank you.” His large hands tightened on the back of his chair. “Don’t put yourself at risk.”

“I’m actually pretty good at hacking.” A wry comment in its understatement. She was an excellent hacker. Her brain worked that way. People thought house witchery was a warm, cozy magic, a lesser kind of talent, but in fact it had orderliness at its heart. She saw patterns, and especially anything out of place, because of her talent’s need for tidiness. “I’ll show you your room.”

He had to stay the night. What sort of pretend boyfriend left half-way through? The uncommitted kind, and that wasn’t Lewis.

She decided the blue and cream bedroom at the front of the house would suit him. It was spacious and serene and if he opened the windows, he’d hear the ocean. After how eerily detached he’d been during his experience of clarity of sight, she wanted him to have that reality.

The whisper of the waves or their crash in a storm always helped her. Gentle or fierce, the ocean had a relentless power. It endured.

She intended to sleep with the windows open in her own room that occupied the other front corner of the second floor. She would concentrate on the ocean’s sounds and not on the man who’d be sleeping nearby.

He walked beside her up the main staircase. No small talk. No comment on the age or beauty of her home. But his hand touched the bannister lightly in a tap of appreciation.

She left him at the door to his room and heard it shut as she walked along the passage, the lights extinguishing behind her. Her room was soft shades of green and sand, a room to ground and restore her. She walked to the windows, opened one, and sat on the window seat. The ocean glinted silver and darkness, reaching out to the horizon.

Clarity of sight. Lewis had called it silver light. What had he seen?

He hadn’t said. He’d been intent on his own quest, this mysterious Group of 5. Did they even exist?

When she’d entered his office with her story of a secret dragon-alien, he’d undoubtedly questioned her sanity. Everyone
knew
dragons were mythical, so she had to be delusional.

Now, he spoke of a mysterious group that he hadn’t told anyone in the Collegium about, and she questioned if it was post-traumatic obsession. She didn’t think it was. The group probably existed. She’d track their money trail, provide the evidence to Lewis, he’d pass it on within the Collegium, and the group would be dealt with. Undoubtedly, they’d be far less than Lewis’s experiences had exaggerated them in his mind. Then he’d be free to journey the Deeper Path.

The breeze was cool. A tug of her magic brought an afghan folded at the bottom of her bed to wrap around her shoulders. The stars were achingly bright. They spoke of her dreams. When she developed clarity of sight she could start on the Deeper Path. Like her aunt, she’d be able to journey through the galaxy.

Lewis had the opportunity, and he didn’t seem to care.

Obsession.

Her thoughts circled back to him.

He was committed to tracking a shadowy group whose existence he hadn’t revealed to his fellow Collegium.

She wrapped the blanket tighter around her.

Some of her family and friends had served in the military. Others had suffered unrelated traumas. The thing was, she’d seen post-traumatic stress disorder before. People with PTSD could fixate. Lewis was a high functioning individual by anyone’s measure, but burning out his magic had to have been traumatic, and the trauma had been exacerbated because every day he returned to work in an organization where the exercise of your magic defined you.

So his conspiracy group existed. Maybe they had even set up a distraction that had trapped him in the North West Passage while they pursued their plans somewhere else. But she was disinclined to believe that whoever the group was and whatever their agenda, they were worth the president of the Collegium’s time.

Lewis had to let it go.

She’d help. The Group of 5 were trouble, even if only because of Lewis’s obsession with them. She started turning over the problem and how she’d attack it. He’d need to give her a starting point. The deceased conspiracy theorist’s name, Valenty Smith, wouldn’t get her far. She needed the name of the rogue mage Lewis believed the Group of 5 had hired, then killed. She needed specifics. The fact that Lewis hadn’t given her those was worrying. Without specifics, this was just a nightmare fairytale that obsessed him.

She looked at the stars. As attaining clarity of sight obsessed her.

A sheet of paper lay on the kitchen table, in the place where Gina always sat. Crisp white paper without lines, although the writing on it was even and straight, its contents ordered.

Lewis had left a note.

Gina sent out her magic. She was alone in the house.

At some point between midnight and morning, while she slept, Lewis had left without waking her.

“Stupid wards.” They hadn’t nudged her with news of his departure because he was a guest, free to leave.

The note was detailed. She’d wanted specifics on the Group of 5, and he’d given them without her having to ask. Three tentative identifications of the group’s members, seven people he suspected had been hired by them—four were dead, the other three minor players in…

Gina blinked. The note crumpled in her hand. The other three were people with only a trace of magic, but they weren’t minor in the mundane world. Two were arms dealers and the third managed a media network.

Lewis had listed events: dates, catalysts, consequences and people involved; military coups, natural disasters and political upheaval. At the very end of the note he’d added a message for her. “You don’t have to do this. Walk away if you need to.”

The names listed made this more than a post-trauma fixation. The people on Lewis’s list had real power, even if it wasn’t magic.

Walk away?

She looked out the window, across the garden and out to the country he’d have walked across to reach Emmaline’s portal. He’d chosen to walk rather than ask her to drive him. He’d walked—or ran—three miles at the crack of dawn.

He had to learn he wasn’t alone.

No. I won’t be walking away
.

Four hours of sleep was sufficient. Lewis strode across Cape Cod. The clarity of the predawn light as it stole color from the world reminded him of the clarity of sight Morag had woken in him. He let it seep into his view of the world, catching the silver shimmer of it as it overlaid the contours of the island and centered in on the portal.

Despite himself, his pulse quickened. This was proof that the silver light might replace the magic he’d lost. He hadn’t let himself believe Gina’s talk of the Deeper Path. Yes, Morag was a dragon, and he’d believe, an alien. But he hadn’t let himself consider the implications of this new way of seeing. He’d locked up the wonder of it and left it, metaphorically, in that incredible, impossible dragon’s den.

But, alone now as he hiked across country, he contemplated what the truth of it meant for him. If the Deeper Path unlocked another layer of magic, he wouldn’t be vulnerable, dependent on the magic and commitment of others. He’d no longer have to trust his life to their sometimes shaky magic, and their sometimes shakier sense of honor.

He hadn’t doubted Gina’s magic or honor. He had tasted her passion.

The silver light dimmed and vanished as he brought the sight under control.

If he accessed a new level of power, would he tell the Collegium? Did Gina expect he would? Had she told Morag as much? He knew his reputation. He had cultivated it. He was a Collegium guardian to his soul, everything sacrificed to serve. And it was true. However, first as commander of the guardians and now as president, he’d learned that service didn’t mean sharing everything.

There were enemies, either purposely or by stupidity, within the Collegium. People he couldn’t trust. The idea of having power they didn’t suspect tempted him.

The measure of power was like the measure of money. It didn’t matter how much you had, as long as you had more than the person next to you. At the moment, the senior mages of the Collegium didn’t consider him competition, and so, they were less guarded with them. He could read them, their secrets and fears, their ambitions and motivations.

Or was it that with the absence of magic, he was leaning on his mundane skills, using the cold reading talent of his parents’ act to decipher people’s intent? People revealed more than they knew in body language, tone of voice and facial expression. Ask the right questions and they spilled even more. Then a smart man paid attention to where words and behavior contradicted themselves.

Gina was authentic. The truth of her was in her home.

He’d had to wrench himself out of there. His soul had craved its peace, and his body craved her.

Dew wet the legs of his jeans. When he arrived in New York, he’d have to stop at his apartment and exchange jeans for a business suit; personal preoccupations for pure Collegium affairs.

He recognized Emmaline’s cottage, a traditional Cape Cod structure with a steep roof and uncompromising geometry. He tapped at the back door and walked in.

Porters seldom locked their doors. Ownership of the portal gave them enough raw power to ensure their security by other methods. And people needed entrance to the portal.

Silently, he descended the stone stairs to the basement. He wouldn’t have been so free at a strange portal, but Gina had negotiated his welcome here. He reached the basement and it was empty. He set his bag down and sat beside it, back to the wall. He’d wait for Emmaline or her apprentice, Riaz, to awaken. Meantime…

The silver light flared as if it had been barely restrained.

He’d seen portals before in mage sight. Then, they had glowed golden and blazed in a wide solid circle, even as mundane sight had shown them as shifting pools of mercury.

Now, the circle of the portal vanished in an intricate lacing of silver. Patterns to make his brain ache wove a rectangular arch over the portal, and reflected beneath it, as if the floor of the basement vanished. Yet, even as the rectangular arches remained, they multiplied and interlocked, built up and around. Built into a spiral that—

“Sorry. Sorry, sorry, sorry. I stayed up late and the portal’s alarm had a hell of a time getting through to me.” A tall, lanky black man charged down the stairs, taking them three at a time. “Hope you weren’t waiting long. It would be just like Aunt Emmaline to make you suffer to punish me. That stone floor is cold.”

He paused for a breath, stuck out his hand. “I’m Riaz.”

Lewis shook hands. “Lewis Bennett.”

“President of the Collegium, which is cool.” Riaz grinned. “So you need to get back to New York?”

“Yes.”

“Will Paul what’s-his-name, O’Halloran? Will he be expecting you?”

“He’ll wake up.” The Collegium paid him enough. Porters tended to set up alarms that alerted them to incoming travelers, but there was no necessity for them to do so. They didn’t have to allow anyone through their portal.

“Yeah, but you’ve got the right to use his portal?” Riaz pushed.

“Yes.”

A beaming smile, interrupted by a yawn, answered him. Riaz flapped a hand in apology. “Why wake him up? I’ll walk the in-between with you. I need the practice.”

“You don’t need to hand me off, porter to porter?”

“Not if you have Paul’s permission to use his portal, and as the Collegium president, I bet your name’s on his register. I’ll make sure you don’t get lost on the way, and you just step out.”

No other porter had ever offered Lewis that way of travelling the in-between. But the kid was a trainee. Enthusiastic.

“Thanks.”

Riaz held out his hand.

Lewis took it.

Physical contact was the only way for non-porters to safely traverse the in-between. Usually that meant being handed from one porter to the next. So, Lewis had expected to grip Riaz’s hand while stepping through the portal, only to grasp Paul’s hand and be hauled out. Space behaved oddly in the in-between. It seemed to collapse.

Without Paul to haul them out, Lewis counted seventy one heartbeats before Riaz pushed him through the New York portal.

He emerged into the empty basement and swiftly took the stairs up and out, glad to avoid Paul.

New York had its own beauty at this early hour. The streets had traffic. Cabs, trucks and cars cruised them, getting ready for the day, but the sidewalks were clear of all but a few people intent on exercising. Walking to his apartment in the quiet, he called up the silver light and saw it as a spider web spinning through skyscrapers and swirling into pools. He’d have to ask Morag to interpret what he saw.

He’d be taking lessons from a dragon.

The thought brought a small smile as he swiped his security card to enter his apartment building.

“You’re looking happy.”

Lewis turned as a man stepped out of the shadows.

Shawn Johnson, one of the guardian babysitters that Kora, commander of the guardians, insisted Lewis needed.

“Waiting for me?” Lewis gestured for Shawn to enter with him.

“Kora was…perturbed.”

Kora didn’t get to run Lewis’s personal life, not even his fake one. However, that was a discussion to have with her, not Shawn. It brought back the information that Morag had given him, that he’d been three times bespelled. And that brought back his rage. He didn’t let it show as he hit the elevator’s call button. “I’ll be at the office in forty minutes. The board meeting is at eleven. I want an additional option added to the restructure recommendation report.”

Shawn was a highly trained guardian. He didn’t roll his eyes. But it was close. Of the three guardians protecting Lewis, he most resented the office work involved in the role.

But a moment later, he forgot his frustration in shock.

“Add in the option to disband the Collegium,” Lewis said.

“Pardon?”

Lewis stepped into the elevator. He mightn’t have magic, but he knew the timing of the elevators in his building, and how to play an audience. The elevator doors closed without him saying anything further.

An angry smile drew his lips back from his teeth.

As per Kora’s instructions to report anything significant involving Lewis directly to her, Shawn would be on the phone to Kora, waking her. That suited Lewis just fine. If Kora wanted to worry about anything, let her worry about the Collegium. Its president could look after himself.