Dragon Fall: Masters of the Flame 3 (Mating Fever) (12 page)

Torch and Anjali met them at the airfield in a big, navy-blue sedan. Its sloping hood and the smile on Torch’s face said it had been almost as good as flying.

They’d convinced Rave to stay behind since someone had to mind the shop—and lead the Nox Incendi if Esme’s dream of the stronghold turned out to be some kind of latent trap set in her subconscious. When Bale had tried to command Torch to remain behind as well, he’d gotten only a blank stare from his thick-necked cousin.

“You made me enforcer for the clan,” he reminded Bale. “And Ashcraft is a security issue. So I’ll be with you.”

Bale growled under his breath. “Then why would you bring your mate?”

Torch grinned. “Because I can’t stop her.”

He and Anjali had arrived earlier to scout, and they both looked windblown from the blustery spring day.

“Ashcraft made me meet him on the northern part of the lake,” Anjali said. “And he came by boat. If Esme’s right and he somehow has a place
in
the lake—one of the islands, maybe?—it’d likely be somewhere there.”

“But there’s nothing on recon,” Torch said.

“You went out there?” Bale glared at his cousin in the rearview mirror. He’d elected to sit in the back with Esme—all the better to reach forward and strangle his cousin. “If Ashcraft was there, you might’ve been in danger.”

“Kinda the point of having an enforcer,” Torch said. “So our reyex isn’t in danger.”

Esme reached across the seat and touched Bale’s knee when he scowled. “How do we get out onto the lake?” she asked. “In my dream—in my memories—we floated over the water.”

“Luckily we have associates with a boat,” Torch said. “We’ll be there soon, and then we’ll see where your dreams take you.”

“Not far,” Esme whispered, barely more than moving her lips, but Bale heard and put his hand over hers on his knee.

Salty swells frothed on the lake when they parked at the marina, and the gusting wind brought Bale the scent of wolf-shifter. The wolves had provided backup to the Nox Incendi the last time Torch and Anjali had confronted Ashcraft on the lake, but calling on them still bothered Bale.

The dragonkin had to be even more secretive than most shifters. It was one thing for a human to glimpse a wolf in the distance and muse at the success of the Endangered Species Act. Something else entirely to see a dragon. But maybe that was a better argument for working with the wolves, and Torch trusted them.

Bale handed Esme into the rocking boat—which he decided he trusted even less than airplanes and wolf-shifters. Torch and Anjali moved to the back of the cruiser.

“Where to?” The older gray wolf, who Torch introduced as Joel, smiled toothily at them.

Bale glanced at Esme and put a hand at the small of her back. Through the light knit jacket she’d worn over her black revenge fashion, he felt the tension in her spine.

She bit her lip. “Into the middle,” she said after a moment. “I think.”

He guided her toward the front. “I prefer boats with dragons gracing the prow.”

She grinned distractedly. “I like the idea of storming his castle with a hundred warriors.”

“I’ve pictured you as a Viking war maid,” he admitted. He gestured ahead of them. “Lead us into battle.”

She looked either alarmed or intrigued, her pale brows knotted. “I don’t know…”

“None of us do,” he reassured her. “That’s why we’re hunting together, because Lars Ashcraft is a threat to all of us. What do you remember?”

“I was so hazy from the hallucinogens.” She leaned against his shoulder. “What if it was all in my head?”

“Then we had a nice sail around the lake on a pretty spring evening.” He cocked one eye toward the clouds thickening above them. “Unless it starts raining, and then you owe us all coffee and a donut.”

She coughed out a laugh, and the stiff line of her body curved more easily against his. “I’ll have to take another run at the slot machines for all I’ll owe you guys.”

Her hair whipped at him, the fine strands stinging against his cheeks, and he reached up to gather the silky skeins in his hands.

“Close your eyes,” he said softly as he stepped behind her. “Tell me what you remember.”

She sighed and relaxed her head forward when he finger-combed the hair back from her ears. “It was after one of our private dates, not an event date where the photographs would show up in the paper the next day. I thought I’d had too much to drink even though it was still early, but now I think he must’ve slipped something to me then. I kept falling asleep in his car, and every time I woke up I’d see a little glimpse of the city and then the lake and then, yes, at some point we were on a boat. And then…” She made a strangled sound of frustration.

“Maybe your eyes were closed,” Bale said softly, “but your other senses were aware. The boat was rocking like it is now. You smelled the salt…”

With deft fingers, he plaited her hair into a complex braid down her back, the last twist holding tight even against the tug of the wind. Although the dragon couldn’t resist giving a tug itself, just to see.

She lifted her head. “He said something…”

“Well, I know it wasn’t
open Esme
,” Bale muttered.

She whirled to face him, her eyes sparking with determination. “He didn’t care about that. Except that it made me good dragon bait. But he said something in Latin. I recognized it because we had to take Latin at boarding school and I kept up with it a little since there’s enough law in grant writing to make Latin useful.”

He smiled at her. “What is Latin for ‘you go, girl’?”

“He said something about blood and something else, and then he threw something over the side of the boat.” She fisted her hands against her temples. “Why can’t I remember? But I was terrified he was going to throw me over next.” She wrapped her arms around herself. “I wish he had…”

Bale gathered her under his arm, wishing for a moment that he still had the tough membrane of the wing to shield her. But she was tough enough on her own. “What did he throw?”

She frowned. “I can’t remember. It glittered.”

“Salt.” Anjali stepped up beside them, her phone to her ear. “Piper says it’s salt and blood. She thinks Ashcraft disguised his stronghold out here using an occult incantation locking salt crystals into a protective reflection. The transformational reaction is kind of like shapeshifting, actually, but it isn’t real. It’s all an illusion. The illusion would be enough, though, to hide his getaway.”

“Plenty of salt out here,” Joel said. He pointed back toward the engine. “It gets all crusted up. Just need the blood.”

While Torch poked around near the engine cover, Bale turned Esme to face him, his hands on her shoulders. “Where were you when he threw the salt and said the words?”

She closed her eyes and leaned her weight into his palms. “Water all around… That’s not useful, is it? It was night…”

“If it was night, there must have been lights,” he said. “What do you see?”

“The marina sign,” she murmured. “There.” She pointed, but the marina was in the other direction.

Bale rotated her, orienting her along the path she indicated. “What else?”

“A train went by…there.” She pointed at the railroad causeway.

But that was too long a line across the whole lake to use for triangulation.

“Look up,” he said softly. She tilted her head back, her eyes still closed. “What do you see now?”

“Stars.”

“Which ones?”

She grunted. “Little twinkling ones?”

He laughed softly. “If I took you night flying, I’d teach you all their names.” Before she could reply, he went on in a low voice, “But look along the horizon. This time of year, not too late in the evening, you might see Canis Major.”

Her mouth tightened. “There’s too many. I can’t see them all…”

“Not all.” He leaned closer to kiss her fluttering eyelids, first one, then the other. Softer still, he said, “The dragon would fly you anywhere you wanted to go. Tell it which way. What do you see?”

The troubled line of her lips softened—more trouble for him—but he kept his voice low and cajoling, a rumble like distant thunder from his inner beast. “Maybe not a faraway star, but something closer and brighter…”

“The moon,” suggested Joel in a whisper.

Esme pointed her other arm across the lake. “There. The moon was just coming up over there.”

“Actually,” the wolf-shifter grumbled, “that time of night it would’ve been just going down…” But he was already spinning the cruiser to align with his wolf’s intimate awareness of the moon.

With two points on the flat surface of the lake and Esme’s pointing arms, they triangulated on a third point.

In the empty middle of the lake.

Esme opened her eyes, and her arms fell limp to her sides. “Nothing,” she said dejectedly.

But Anjali stepped up beside her with her phone in one hand and a fistful of salt. “Do you have the right phrase?” she asked into the phone. She wrinkled her nose at the reply. “Well, yeah, I guess we have plenty of salt, but I’m not sure where else we’d look… Okay, okay.” She flicked the phone to speaker. “Hold on while I get some blood…” She shook her head at Torch when he thrust out his hand. “No, yours has ichor in it.” She waved Esme back too. “Let me do this. I need some closure too.” Using Joel’s utility knife, she cut a shallow wound in the meat of her palm. She winced when the salt and blood mingled but spoke into the phone in a strangled voice, “Go ahead.”

She tossed the handful of salt just as Piper’s clear voice called through the phone. “
Cum sanguis et sale
!”

The heavy crystals, rough from evaporation, glinted in the sun and carried farther than Bale would’ve thought likely, even with the blustering wind. They swirled in the air for a moment.

And didn’t fall.

“Is it working?” Piper asked anxiously. “The incantation is from a hermetic text on self-deception, but it should work like a supersaturated chemical solution. All the molecules are suspended in a liquid at the highest possible density except for one last…”

The wind, kicking up spray, seemed to hold its breath.

Then the small island bulwarked with high walls appeared through the salt.

Chapter 12

In a burst, Esme let out the breath she’d been holding. Then she just as quickly tried to suck it back in. The walls looked less substantial than spun sugar.

Or spun salt.

Joel grunted out a curse. “And I thought I’d seen it all. A castle in the middle of the Great Salt Lake. I’m maybe gonna have to believe the stories of the monster that lives in the lake too.”

“Lars Ashcraft
is
the monster in the lake,” Bale rumbled.

He’d changed, and not just because his left hand was no longer a sharpened talon at the end of a crippled wing. She’d noticed it when she insisted that she had to see where the nightmare led her.

He’d listened to her, thought about what it would mean for the Nox Incendi, and been willing to take the risk. He might’ve been locked in his cavern for years, and he might’ve even claimed the dragonkin had no more need of a king. But he still protected them, would still put himself between his clan and any threat.

Except now she was part of that circle too.

She didn’t want to be. Her guilt and shame were already bad enough. But he hadn’t given her a choice.

She should be more mad about that, since Lars hadn’t given her a choice either. She’d have that out with Bale at some point.

But at the moment, facing the ghostly castle with its sulfurous yellow tinge, she was glad to have her friends around her.

Joel angled the cruiser closer to the walls. The light had faded as the clouds clumped across the evening sky. In the gloom, the salt dulled to the color of old bone. “I don’t see a place to dock. Don’t even see a door.”

They all looked at her.

Esme frowned, scouring her memory. But she shook her head. “I don’t remember him carrying me in.”

“You stay with the boat,” Bale said. “We don’t need a door.”

He stepped to the edge of the boat and stripped naked.

Anjali spun on her heel to face away from him. She aimed wide eyes at Esme and mouthed
OMG
before whispering something into the phone to Piper. She started to angle the phone behind her until she caught Esme’s glower, but she only smirked unrepentantly.

Esme couldn’t blame her.

Her dragon lord was magnificent.

Though he was leaner than Torch or even the wolf-shifter, when he spread his arms, he seemed to fill her vision.

And then, as his finger bones lengthened, his wings were stretched beyond her view. She could see only the shimmer of scales blooming across his skin.

The boat tilted dangerously under his shifting shape, and he launched himself off the side of the boat.

She caught her breath. He wasn’t fully dragon yet…

But mid-leap, his wings swept down. Brine fountained up beneath the powerful lash, and when the water cleared, the dragon was everything she saw, droplets and salt gleaming on him like tiny stars.

Her heart leapt with him as he flew up, and she didn’t realize Torch had changed too until the second dragon rose, spiraling beside Bale.

Anjali was bent down, gathering the discarded clothes, but she glanced at Esme. “I got this. You go with him.” She nudged Esme toward the wider open space at the back of the boat.

Bale circled down, and when he was low enough, Esme reached up to him instinctively, her pulse thundering. He hovered only a heartbeat, and even then the massive beat of his wings almost buffeted her off her feet.

But his claws closed carefully around her, lifting her to the simmering heat of his body. He swept upward again, and her stomach heaved…

Then kept flying. Because she was in his arms—talons, whatever—and she knew he wouldn’t let her fall.

Craning her neck, she watched Torch snatch Anjali from the boat and follow them up.

Though it had seemed imposing from water level, from above the castle looked less like a lordly abode and more like a mini Alcatraz, stunted and mean, with the high walls circling a courtyard and several buildings.

Nothing moved. The place seemed empty.

Bale spiraled down, releasing Esme in the moment before his claws touched the ground. By the time she straightened her clothes, he was in his human shape again.