Phoenix (17 page)

It has to come from somewhere.

“What did the book say?” I whisper, fearing that to speak at full volume would be to close the tiny window that has allowed this conversation to take place at all.

Nia rolls onto her back.

Have I killed the conversation, then? Or perhaps I should be surprised to have learned as much as I did.

I puzzle it over, my thoughts dissecting every word Nia has spoken, as well as the gaps she left between, the telling omissions, clues hidden in what she didn’t say.

“What did the recipe call for, or the theory?” I speak hesitant words into the night, but they seem to dissolve in the open air, unheard, unanswered.

Then Nia rolls onto her side again. “Tears. Dragon tears. I know that doesn’t make any sense, but the word came up several times and I looked up the Russian later to be sure I hadn’t misunderstood.”

“Dragon tears have magical properties,” I remind Nia.

She blows out a huff of air that says she doesn’t agree with me.

“No, seriously. My father swears that’s how he survived when he was gored by the evil dragon Ion. My mom cried on him. He says her tears saved his life.”

“I have cried many tears.” Nia’s words are filled with the pain of them. “None of them ever brought anyone back from the brink of death. None of my tears ever turned to gold.”

My breath catches in my throat. This would be a great time for me to make a connection with Nia, some romantic thing that says I understand her like no one else can, and we should be together. What do I say? What can I say? Something profound. And moving. And loving. “I’m sorry.”

It feels so feeble.

Nia sniffs. “It was a long time ago.” She rolls onto her back again.

Now I’m sure I’ve blown it. She doesn’t want to talk about her old pain again, or gold, or any of it. But the conversation churns through my head, so many bits that don’t sit level with the others. “Why does the white witch have a Russian language learning program in her library, anyway?”

“Hmm?” Nia sounds distracted. My words must have tugged her back from the brink of sleep.

“The white witch—she lives in Russia. To my knowledge, she’s always lived there. Doesn’t she already know Russian? Why would she need to learn it?”

Nia sighs. “I don’t know.”

I try to answer my own question. “If she’s half as old as we think she is, I suppose the Russian she grew up with is as old as Beowulf is to us. Maybe she wanted to learn modern Russian.”

“Nah.” Nia dismisses my theory. “I think it was for her daughter.”

“Her daughter?” I sit bolt upright.

On the other side of Nia, Ram sits upright, too. “Eudora has a daughter?”

I don’t know how long he’s been awake, listening. Probably eavesdropping on my conversation with Nia to be sure I don’t woo her out from under him—the only reason he hasn’t cut in already was that I was doing such a poor job of wooing her, he didn’t need to interrupt. Even if he was only half-awake before, he’s certainly awake now.

“Eudora. She’s the white witch, right?” Nia clarifies. “The one who made the mamluki, or yagi, or whatever you want to call them? The one who made the water yagi and forced me to deliver them to lakes and the ocean?”

Ram and I are both nodding like crazy, assuring her we’re talking about the same person.

Nia confirms, “Yes, she has a daughter.”

I listen in shocked silence. Eudora has a daughter? She can’t possibly. She’s something like eight hundred years old, far past egg-laying age. Or so I’ve always been told. None of the dragons I know are nearly old enough to confirm any of that.

“How old is her daughter?” Ram asks.

“Last time I saw her, maybe ten or twelve.” Nia shrugs. “That was over a year ago. She’s been away at boarding school ever since. All the language programs in the library were for her, I think. She was the only one I ever saw using them.”

“Eudora has a daughter?” I repeat, still grappling with the idea, which doesn’t fit anything I ever imagined. “How? Ten years old—does she have a mate?”

“Her daughter? Or the white witch? Neither of them had any mate I ever saw.”

“The daughter must be adopted,” Ram concludes. “It’s the only thing that makes sense.”

“But she looks like her mother,” Nia informs him.

“What’s her name?” I ask.

Nia raises her empty hands toward me. “I never learned the white witch’s name, and I wasn’t allowed to interact with her daughter. I can tell you very little about either of them. I was a prisoner. They let me use the library, at least, let me have a bit of freedom inside the castle, but I didn’t dare overstep those bounds, or I lost even those freedoms again.”

“Eudora’s over eight hundred years old,” Ram reminds us.

Nia raises an eyebrow. “She looks thirty, maybe forty. It’s difficult to say, because in some ways, she doesn’t look right at all. Sometimes I could have sworn I could see her skeleton right through her. She’s a ghost of a person, a corpse inside a body. Haunted.”

“And her daughter?”

“A little strange, too. But not as bad as the witch. She had an innocence about her, but she still seemed haunted. Or maybe it was the castle. Everything about that place was cold and creepy.” Nia shivers.

Ram has scooted over closer to us and is sitting cross-legged in between me and Nia, but a little off to one side. We make a triangle, almost, together. He gives me a look. “Our mother turned Eudora to only human before any of us were born. Twenty-two years ago, give or take.”

“The daughter would be, what, thirteen years old now, at the most?” I clarify.

Nia nods.

Ram continues. “Dragons don’t age past maturity. Physically, we stay twenty-something forever.”

“I’m almost two-hundred, but physically, we’re peers.” Nia gives Ram a tiny smile that makes my heart plummet inside me.

She and Ram are peers.

What am I? Not their peer, apparently. So, what, I’m just a kid? A peer with Eudora’s daughter? I caught all the food on this trip. Ram and Nia would never have never met if not for me.

Ram returns Nia a tiny smile of his own, and continues talking. “But once my mother turned Eudora to only human, she was no longer a dragon.”

“She started aging again?” Nia fills in when Ram pauses.

He nods, his eyes alight with theory. “And any child she would have had would have been only human, especially if the father was only human.”

I’m listening, but I can’t talk. I can hardly process what I’m hearing. Ram and Nia are on some kind of wavelength together, and I’m not there. It’s like I’m not even here.

But while they’re having their little moment together, the sun is rising. In the distance, I can hear the waves beating the shores of the atoll. I smell the iodine tang of the sea rising up with the tropical breeze. But the scent is more than that of the sea. There’s something else along with it.

Something familiar.

And evil.

It’s my turn to keep watch, isn’t it? But I haven’t been alert, looking out to sea. I haven’t been asleep, either, and Nia never formally told me it was my turn to take over from her, but I should have been watching. I was the one who insisted we keep watch in the first place.

I leap to my feet and run toward the beach, peering into the pre-morning dawn, past the sand, into the water. The waves reflect the ambient light, and dark forms mar the white sand. Inhuman creatures stagger up from the waves.

The yagi have arrived.

I sprint back to our camp. “Yagi!”

For an instant, Ram and Nia look startled, as though they were so lost in each other they’d forgotten all about the part where we’re being hunted to extinction by mutant mercenaries. But then they blink and seem to come to their senses, and together we rise as dragons into the morning sky just as the yagi swarm the island, their armored feet scuffling the sand where only minutes before, we slept.

*

We fly hard through the day, across the equator and on toward Fiji. I’m kicking myself for all my mistakes. I let the yagi sneak up on us much too close. I was the one who insisted we keep a watch, and then I got caught with my guard down. It’s inexcusable.

But more than that, I may have pushed Nia irrevocably away with my pressing questions.

A knot forms in my stomach. I don’t regret asking the questions I asked, or pressing her for answers. I’m glad to know the things I learned, even if I don’t understand their significance yet.

Still, much as I hate to admit it, I don’t know that it would have made any difference if I hadn’t asked. Nia seems to prefer Ram. In some ways, they’re a better fit for one another. Neither of them seems to appreciate my humor. They’re both serious, and even kind of bossy—Ram, of course, in his overt way. And Nia in a more manipulative, subtle sort of way.

She’s beautiful, of course. And a great person—fascinating, smart, insightful. And if she picks me, I’ll be thrilled. If she rejects me, I’ll be heartbroken.

But maybe more heartbroken at being rejected…than at losing the person who broke my heart.

If that makes any sense.

The islands become more numerous as we near our destination. In millennia past, volcanic activity was rampant in this corner of the ocean, though everything looks peaceful right now. Finally we land on an isolated islet, little more than a rock jutting up from the sea.

Ram, our unappointed leader who dipped toward land first, is likewise the first to change into human form. “So, you think we need to sleep here and go on to look for the dragon’s island tomorrow, even though we have daylight left?” The look he gives me is almost accusational, and he gestures toward the sun as though it’s on his side.

Nia speaks before I’m even fully human. “I won’t risk leading the yagi to this dragon, if there is another dragon.”

Anger snaps my direction from my brother’s eyes, but he clearly isn’t going to argue with Nia.

I’m not about to pick a fight, either. But I am curious about what we’ll be looking for in the morning. I’m also hungry. This islet we’ve landed on is mostly volcanic rock, jagged bits of worn lava rock roughly a hundred feet in diameter. There’s a sandy stretch in the middle where I suppose we’ll sleep, but the rest of the islet is eroded stone, full of crannies, shallow waters, and tiny tide pools, which are dotted with mussels, oysters, and clams. I stretch out an arm in dragon form and use my talons to pry a few of the largest of these from the rocks.

Ram and Nia do the same.

I slurp down a few oysters before asking, “What do we know about the island we’re looking for? And the dragon? What has Eudora told you?”

Nia scrapes a mussel from its shell into her upturned mouth. She tosses the shell behind her, plucks up another, and makes a sound that’s part sigh, part snort. “What Eudora has told me, and what is real, may be two very different things. She is not a trustworthy person, as you know.”

I’ve found a large clam—maybe not a giant clam, technically, but at least as big as my head—and I’m using both hands to wrest it from the rock. I grunt. “What do you think we’ll find?”

Nia repeats the information she shared at the start of our journey. “There’s supposed to be a heart-shaped island somewhere about midway between Fiji and Tonga, with an active volcano.”

“Active volcano,” Ram repeats as he snaps the legs from a crab and sucks their meat out one-by-one. “How active?”

Nia beats a large clam against a rock. “According to the books in Eudora’s library, active can mean just about anything. Even volcanoes that were supposed to be dormant can still erupt at any time. The earth is unpredictable, and volcanoes are her most volatile spots. Scientists study them carefully and try to predict when they’ll erupt, but there are too many variables. It’s not an exact science at all. I don’t know what we’ll find. It may look dormant. It may be smoking or steaming or spewing fire, for all I know.”

Her words send a shiver like déjà vu down my spine. Fire. Surrounded by fire—like in my dream. Except it wasn’t really a dream. More like a nightmare.

Ram scrapes meat from the crab shell he’s holding. “Active, for our purposes, means potentially dangerous. If this volcano is active, we need to be careful, and get away quickly if there’s any sign it might erupt.”

“Yes,” Nia agrees. “There are signs we can watch for—increased heat, increased seismic activity. We need to pay attention, because the warning might be brief. We don’t want to be anywhere near the volcano if it decides to erupt.”

“And the dragon lives in this volcano?” Ram clarifies as Nia scrapes the last of the meat from the clam she beat open.

Nia scans the rocks for more shellfish. “In the volcano,” she says with emphasis. “That’s the one part that was clear. Not near the volcano or in a cave in the side of the volcano. The dragon lives inside the cone itself. The legend is that this monster demanded live human sacrifices.”

“Doesn’t sound like any dragon I ever knew,” Ram notes, one crab leg protruding from his lips like a cigar while he takes a deep drag and sucks out its meat.

“Nor any dragon I want to get to know,” I mutter as I pluck a handful of oysters. I don’t go as far as saying it out loud, but I’m not optimistic about what we’re going to find, and I have personal reasons for feeling that way. We’re hoping to find a mate in this volcano, aren’t we? Isn’t that the whole point of our journey—to find another dragon so one of us, or perhaps one of my sisters, can have a mate and bear another generation of dragons?

But who wants to marry the demon dragon from the volcano? Not me. And yet, if Ram and Nia are pairing off, as I’m quite suspicious they are, that leaves me with whatever’s down in that fiery hole.

No wonder I’ve been having nightmares.

“The part that always confused me,” Nia continues, hammering another clam until it opens, “is how a dragon could live inside a live volcano, anyway. Yes, granted, we’re more or less fireproof. But fire is hardly the deadliest threat of the volcano.”

I stop mid-oyster-slurp and spin to look at her. She had my attention when she mentioned fire, and now I’m racking my brain trying to think what could be worse than fire. “What is?”

CHAPTER FIFTEEN