Up In Smoke (15 page)

“That's where the complicated part comes in. I guess he tried, and Drake wouldn't consider the request. It's understandable given how delicate Aisling is right now.”

“I suppose, although she doesn't strike me as particularly delicate.”

I grinned at her. “To be honest, I agree, but I do understand Drake not wanting her to get involved. Chuan Ren must be absolutely furious with her.”

“So that's where you come in? Gabriel is doing this as a favor to Drake?”

I hesitated for a moment, using a tricky turn as cover for my silence. “Jian asked me if I could use my connection to Abaddon to locate and free his mother. In exchange, he offered us the use of the dragon-heart shard that the red wyvern holds.”

“Why do you need that?” she asked, still wearing a puzzled expression.

I explained briefly about the dragon heart.

“So, the red dragons will hand over their piece, and that will give you two of the five?”

“Temporarily hand over, yes. It'll be returned to them.”

“Two isn't going to do you much good,” she pointed out. “Not if you need all five shards.”

“Gabriel has that worked out. Drake will loan us his piece in exchange for helping Jian.”

“Why would he want to help Jian . . . ? Oh. To end the war?”

“Yes. That'll be part of the deal Chuan Ren is going to have to agree to in order to be freed. Assuming I can free her, that is.”

“You're going to need Magoth for that, I bet,” Cyrene said with surprising prescience. “Do you know where he is now?”

“Oddly enough, he's been keeping a low profile. Gabriel has had people watching for him, but as far as we know, Magoth and Sally are holed up in his house in Paris.”

“Hmm. I'd have thought Magoth would have been raising hell by now. Ha. Hell.”

I couldn't help but smile. “I'm sure he would if he could, but I think he's finding out just how limited he is without any powers.”

“Is he going to be able to help you with Jian, then?” Cy asked.

“He should be able to, but whether or not he will remains to be seen.” I skimmed over the horror that thought brought me. I truly did not want to think of what I'd have to do in order to get Chuan Ren released.

“That still leaves you two shards short of a complete dragon heart.”

“One. The blue wyvern has a shard, as well.”

“Oh. So who has the fifth one? Gabriel?”

“No.” I was silent for a moment. “We think the dragon I saw in the shadow world has the fifth shard.”

Her eyes widened. “Baltic, you mean?”

“Yes.”

She whistled. “That's going to be a hard one to get.”

“It will indeed. The hope is that the other four shards together will give us the ability to get the fifth.”

“Hmm.” Cyrene thought for a few minutes. “I bet that Bao is going to have a thing or two to say about all of this.”

“I'm sure she will, but that's no affair of ours. Jian insists that Bao is not what she seems, and she has no right to bear the title of wyvern. We really have no reason not to believe him.”

“You don't really have a reason to believe him, either, but I guess that point is moot. Oh! That's it, over there,” Cyrene said, pointing to a stretch of beach and sapphire water that was glimpsed between starkly white stone buildings.

It took a few minutes to find a spot to park, so popular was the surfing event, but at last we tucked the car away in the shade of a church and walked the length of the town to the beach, where a large crowd was gathered around a couple of rickety tables. Surfboards lay glistening in the sun up and down the beach, their owners standing negligently beside them, or bent over them waxing the colorful boards with gentle caresses.

“Which one is Neptune?” I asked, allowing myself a moment to admire all the eye candy. Most of the surfers were shirtless, wearing standard knee-length cargo shorts, or brightly colored wet suits, all of them showing off physiques honed by years of swimming and surfing. There were surprisingly few women included, although the ones who were there were as buff as the men.

“I think that's him, down there,” Cyrene answered after scanning the people. She pointed to the far end of the beach, where two men were emerging from the foaming surf, water glistening on their wet suits, their boards slung to their sides. A third man stood with his board balanced on his head, clearly about to go into the water.

“Which one?” I asked as we set off toward them.

“The one who looks like Neptune, of course,” she said with an exasperated roll of her eyes.

The two men stopped in front of the third, shaking water from their hair as they set their boards down.

“Brah!” the dry man said to one of the two guys. “That was sick air! Epic, totally epic! It's just too bad that frickin' Grom snaked you and knocked your stick. You'd have that tail slide otherwise.”

“Snakes suck,” the taller and blonder of the two surfers agreed. “It was a perfect barrel, too. The big mama is fully macking some sick grinders. For a couple of groats I'd shove a tin of surf wax up that snake's . . . whoa, femmes.”

“Er . . . hello,” I said as the taller man noticed us. The other two men turned to look at us. “I'm sorry, this is completely random, but snakes? In the ocean?”

All three men looked at me as if I was the crazy one.

“You didn't actually mean
snake
snakes, did you?” I asked the largest of the men. He had an air of relaxed command that I took to mean he was the head of all the water elementals.

“Dude, a snake is someone who drops in out of turn.”

“Not epic,” the dry man said, shaking his head. “Totally.”

“No, of course not,” I agreed, not having the slightest clue what they were talking about, but deciding to leave the surfer lingo alone. I turned back to the large man. “Are you by any chance Neptune?”

“Name's Ned when I'm on the circuit, but you two femmes aren't heavies, are you?” the man said, flashing me a very white-toothed smile before his gaze slid over to Cyrene. His eyebrows rose a smidgen. “Dude! You must be the naiad with the dirty doppel! Tasty! But weren't you like totally owned last week?”

“I don't suppose any of you speaks actual English?” I asked.

Cyrene gripped my arm and made a half bow, half curtsy, hissing at me as she did, “May! You don't speak to Lord Neptune like that!”

“Groms,” the dry man said with a little shake of his head as he headed out into the surf.

“I meant no disrespect, I assure you,” I told Neptune as he hoisted up his board and started up the beach. “Maybe we'd better start all over. I'm May Northcott, and this is my twin, Cyrene. What exactly is a Grom?”

“Grommit,” Neptune said, setting his board down on a blanket. “Wallace and Grommit, you know? Groms are noobs, kinda clueless. What are you two beach bunnies doing here? Yo, dude, I'm starving. Go find us some grindage?”

“On it,” the other man said, and headed off to where some food vendors had set up.

Neptune cocked an eyebrow at us, clearly waiting.

“Lord Neptune,” Cyrene said, making another of her odd little curtsies. “My twin and I have come to explain about the recent unpleasantness with my spring. You see, May is a wvyern's mate, and also, through a very complicated series of circumstances, bound to Magoth, the demon lord.”

“Totally gnarl,” Neptune said, nodding. He leaned a hip up against a wooden table that held the surfboard. “But nothing to do with your puddle.”

“I can see why you would think that, but . . .” Cyrene shot me a pleading glance.

I took pity on her. “Cyrene helped me avoid banishment to the Akasha. In the process of doing that, she devoted a great deal of time to my welfare and couldn't attend to her spring as she wished.”

“That so?” Neptune looked thoughtful as he eyed first me, then Cyrene. “Brah, word on the street is that you're shackled to a dragon, and that's why your puddle got barreled.”

“Er . . .” Cyrene looked as confused as I felt.

I picked out the words that made sense and drew a few conclusions. “Because of my involvement with the dragons, Cyrene has been drawn into their society as well. But I can assure you that she takes her position very seriously and is totally devoted to the welfare of her spring. If you could see your way clear to reinstating her as a naiad, I'm sure you would have no reason to regret it.”

“No reason,” Cyrene said hastily. “No reason at all! I'm so into my spring!”

Neptune pursed his lips and unzipped his wet suit to scratch a spot on his chest while he thought it over. Cyrene clutched my hand in a grip that was almost painful.

“Sorry, brah, can't do it,” he said finally. “I hate to bowl you, but there's rules, you know?”

Cyrene's lower lip quivered as she turned large, liquid blue eyes on me. “May, please,” she whispered.

My heart broke for her. Oh, Cyrene was no end of trouble, but she was my twin, and I knew how much being a naiad meant to her. “What would it take for her to prove to you that she is worthy of the position?”

Neptune grabbed a couple of cloths and started wiping down his board. “Gonna take some work, dude. Lots of work.”

“Wait a minute. What sort of work?” Cyrene asked in a suspicious tone.

I pinched her and said, “She's not afraid of work and is fully ready to prove herself to you. What exactly does she need to do?”

Neptune grabbed a can of surfboard wax. “You took from the big mama. That's not cool, not cool at all. You gotta give the big mama back her own, and then we'll see.”

I toyed briefly with the idea of asking for a translation but figured we'd just end up with more snakes and Grommits, and decided the less time Cyrene had to put her foot in it, the better. “We'll do that. Thank you. And . . . er . . . break a leg, or whatever it is you do out there.”

The sound of his laughter trailed after us as I hauled Cyrene down the beach. She was prone to argue with me, but I had neither the patience nor the time to tolerate it. That didn't stop her, however, from unloading her opinion of both Neptune and my high-handed (as she called it) treatment on the way back to Faro.

“Go get us tickets to Rome,” I said after we turned in the car to the rental agency.

She glared at me. “That's all you're going to say? Just go get tickets? May, I shouldn't have to prove myself to Neptune—”

“You're the one who messed up,” I interrupted her, pulling out my cell phone. “Now you have to pay the price. So stop complaining and go get us tickets so we can see just how badly damaged the spring is, and then make some plans to clear things up so I can get back to figuring out how I'm going to spring a wyvern from Abaddon.”

“Bah,” she snorted, but went off to find out how quickly we could get to Rome.

“Do you need help?” Gabriel asked after I explained the situation to him. His voice was as delicious as ever, even after getting beamed all around the place by assorted satellites. Just the sound of it nestled so close to my ear sent little goose bumps of pleasure up and down my arms.

“No, I think we'll be OK. If we can't get a flight, we'll get to Lisbon and use the portal place there, although I heard it's a bit dicey. But I expect we'll find a flight. It means, however, that I won't be back in Paris until tomorrow.”

“One moment,” he said, and I heard muffled voices in the background. A minute later he was back. “Maata will meet you in Rome. She can take a portal from here.”

I know how little dragons liked to portal—it had something to do with the tenuous quality of portals, since objects were frequently lost during transit—but it wasn't for that reason alone that I objected. “You're not pulling a Drake on me, are you?” I asked.

“A Drake?”

“Aisling says she can't step foot out of the house without one of Drake's bodyguards accompanying her. You haven't suddenly gone into overprotective mode, have you?” I asked, smiling despite myself. “Because if you have, let me disabuse you right now of the notion that I need protection. I'm quite capable of taking care of myself.”

“I have no doubt of that whatsoever, little bird,” he answered, amusement rich in his voice. “Although I do have to admit that I understand more now what drives Drake into protecting his mate. But it is not a question of you being able to protect yourself. Maata is fluent in Italian, and since you said that neither you nor your twin speaks it well, I thought she might be able to help.”

I bit back the response that it wouldn't take much linguistic power to eyeball a spring, saying simply, “That seems like a lot of trouble to go to on Maata's part, but if she wants a little break from her regular bodyguard duties to hang out with us in Italy, we'd be delighted to have her. Oh, hang on, here's Cy with the tickets.”

“I just hope you know what you're doing,” she said, a little pout ruining her normally sunny expression. “This is the best I could get.”

I glanced at the flight information and passed it along to Gabriel.

“I would come to help you myself, but I have a meeting with Bastian scheduled. Drake believes he will be wholly agreeable to giving us access to the blue shard, but I don't wish to take anything for granted.”

“And you thought it was for your handsome looks and that satin voice I agreed to be your mate,” I said, “when all along it was your brains.”

“Indeed,” he said, and I frowned. It wasn't like him not to respond to a flirtatious comment.