Soul of Smoke (9 page)

Chapter Eight

Getting Twitchy

While Ashem was putting the others through their paces again the next morning, Kai once again snuck through the curtain in the kitchen and headed down the tunnel with her lantern. She had a paranoid urge to check and make sure the bag she’d packed was still there.

It was. Sighing, Kai headed back up the dark, twisting tunnel. She thought about poking around in the hoard for something to help her with her distraction idea, but it was too hard in the dark. She’d have to get Cadoc to come down again.

About two thirds of the way up, her light fell on the shadowed off-shoot that she’d noticed the day before. Curious, Kai left the main tunnel.

The new passage wasn’t long; it only ran for a dozen feet before opening up into a small, round room.

Kai lifted her lantern. It was the library. The room was filled with books. Three entire walls were curved, floor-to-ceiling shelves filled with row upon row of books. In the dim light, their spines were mostly black and brown and ancient-looking, though here and there Kai saw a smattering of newer, brighter covers.

The only empty wall was honeycombed with row upon row of small holes bored into the stone. A long wooden table littered with papers and surrounded by chairs sat in the center of the room. In the middle of the table, a glass sphere with an open top sat on a black cushion, reminding Kai of the candle holders her mom liked to stuff with fake flowers and colored stones.

She walked to the honeycomb wall and lifted her lantern again, peering into one of the shallow holes. Light glinted off something small and angular within. She pulled out a round-cut diamond the size of her thumbnail. Blinking in surprise, she looked in the next cubby. A fat, rectangular ruby sat inside. The next one contained a huge emerald, and the one after that another diamond. Each of the hundreds of tiny cavities housed a single gemstone, markings scratched below each cubby. It looked like an alphabet, but not one she’d ever seen.

Kai replaced the diamond and lifted out a darkly glittering sapphire, rolling it between her fingers so it sparkled in the light of her lantern.
Holy hell
,
there must be millions of dollars stuffed in this wall.
So much for history being treasure.

She replaced the sapphire and pulled out a pink diamond, then an emerald the size of a robin’s egg. She put them both back, though her fingers lingered. She didn’t need the money—though it would be nice to be completely out from under her parents’ thumbs—but Juli could have used it.

Sighing, Kai turned to go. Then her eye caught on the clear glass sphere.

A diamond hovered in its exact center, unsupported by anything except, possibly, magic. Intrigued, she walked around the table, setting her lantern beside the black cushion. She’d seen the dragons do magic, of course, but here was magic just sitting on a table. Did it only work for the dragons or might it work for anyone?

What would happen if...

She raised one finger and touched the cool, smooth glass of the sphere. It released one clear, shivering note. The diamond pulsed, a wave of light and tingling energy rippling outward. As it passed, a solid, three-dimensional image unrolled in the air above the table, glowing with its own light.

A cloudy, gray sky capped a strip of desolate beach. A dark ocean laced with whitecaps foamed on the right, a hazy mountain range disappeared into the distance on the left. All around the sky, dragons as varied in color and shape as tropical birds tangled in vicious mini battles.

At the center of the scene, a red dragon battled a white one. The white dragon was slightly larger, its snowy scales streaked reddish black with blood. It lunged and slashed its claws down across the red dragon’s collarbone. The red dragon’s mouth opened in a soundless roar. It darted forward, claws flashing, but the white dragon feinted out of the way.

The sound of slow, uneven footfalls echoed from the stone walls. Startled, Kai sprang forward, hoping another touch would turn the image off. Her fingers brushed the smooth glass.

The dark cave disappeared, and Kai found herself blinking in cloud-filtered sunlight. Waves crashed in an inexorable rhythm against the stone beach. The ground vibrated. There was a deafening roar. Disoriented, Kai spun.

Life-sized dragons, one crimson, one white, were trying to kill each other on the beach less than a dozen feet away.

Kai’s insides shriveled.
Not again!

Dozens—maybe hundreds—of dragons shrieked and roared overhead in a scene that made the battle in the meadow look like a play date.

She yelped and ducked as the white dragon’s tail whistled inches above her head. Scrambling away on hands and knees, she found her escape blocked by a silver dragon charging up the beach. Its roar thrummed through Kai’s body, buzzing in her teeth.
Oh
,
hell
,
oh
,
hell
,
oh hell!
How did I get here?

Kai threw herself to the side, the silver dragon’s charge missing her by inches. Her head slammed into something hard. She fell back, groaning, and tried to see what she’d hit. There was nothing in front of her but a few more feet of desolate beach and the ocean beyond.

Her breath hitched, her heart pounding in her ears. She put her shoulder against the invisible barrier and shoved. The surface gave a bit, but it didn’t move. It felt odd, as if it were made up of dozens of short, vertical ridges. She spun, pressing her back against it.

The silver dragon had joined the fight on the crimson dragon’s side. Unnoticed above them, a black dragon swooped out of the sky, jaws open. Bile rose in Kai’s throat. It had silver eyes. Without meaning to, she shouted, “Watch out for Kavar!”

At the last second, the silver dragon noticed Kavar and tackled his crimson ally out of the way. Kavar slammed down onto the silver dragon instead, sinking his teeth into its neck.

In the air, a slender red-black dragon faltered in its flight. A wailing keen rose from her throat, the most pitiful, horrifying sound Kai had ever heard.

The silver dragon collapsed. A shimmering haze rose around him, and then only a slender young man with a long nose and disheveled brown hair lay on the beach between Kavar’s claws, his eyes empty and staring.

The red-black dragon fell drunkenly from the sky.

“Stop.” A voice cut through the chaos, male and commanding. Silence rang in Kai’s ears. “Minimize.”

The ocean disappeared. The light dimmed. Kai was still in the library, but now there were fires burning in the walls above the shelves. Shaking, she reached up to touch the formerly invisible barrier, half-turning her head. Books. She’d been trying to crawl through a wall of books.

Her breathing ragged, body shaking, she pushed herself up. The image of the dragon-filled beach hovered over the table, rotating slowly.

Across the room, Rhys leaned against one side of the archway that led into the tunnel, his good hand holding his injured shoulder. He was breathing hard, his jaw set, broad shoulders taking up much of the opening. The sleeves of his simple, dark blue shirt were pushed up, revealing his indicium, which licked like motionless flame over the muscles of his forearm.

For the first time, Kai noticed that the only jewelry Rhys wore was a gold chain around his neck with flat, rhombus-shaped pendant. The pendant held a round, yellow stone in its center. Lines radiated from the stone, making Kai think of the sun.

“Are you all right?” he asked.

Kai lifted shaking hands. Adrenaline coursed through her. She could feel every throb of her heart. She took an unsteady breath. Safe. She was safe. Not being attacked by dragons.

“Kai?”

She balled her out-of-control hands into fists.
Safe.
Not being attacked.
Safe.

“Kai.” Rhys stepped forward, leaning heavily on the wall. He didn’t look like he should be out of bed, let alone all the way down here by himself.

She forced herself to nod. “Sorry. I’m fine.” She tilted her head at the hologram-like image rotating above the sphere of glass because her hands were still unsteady. “What is that?”

“The record, or what it showed?” Rhys’s voice was even, but strained.

Kai rubbed her head where she’d run into the books on their stone shelf. It hurt. Her head seemed to hurt a lot since she’d taken up with dragons.

“Both.” She studied him. “Are you all right?”

He dropped his hand from his shoulder and nodded, meeting her gaze. The impending storm pulsed in the air between them. Standing, he took up more space than she remembered. Tall and broad, his cheeks and jaw more defined for the stubble that grew there. She rubbed her fingers absently across the skin of her throat, forcing herself not to stare at his eyes, so intensely blue. “So, the record?”

He gestured at the floating hologram with his good arm. “We keep information in mineral crystals and gemstones like humans do in books and computers.” He pushed off the wall and walked to the table. He moved slowly, but was definitely better than he had been the day before. “Someone left this one in the glass. Probably Ashem or Ffion.”

Kai crossed to the table, standing directly opposite Rhys. “It’s like a video? It happened?”

He nodded. “It was supposed to be the battle that ended the war.”

“Supposed to be?”

He looked at his hands. “It didn’t.”

“Okay...” She walked around the table and turned off her lantern, useless in the now brightly-lit room. She made sure to keep a few feet between them. That glance at her fingers before he’d let the bowl drop and shatter was, humiliatingly, burned into her memory.

He touched the sphere. The scene expanded again, the stone walls disappearing, the bloodstained dragons suddenly life-sized. Kai took an involuntary step toward Rhys and braced herself for the noise and terror of being dropped into the middle of the battle, but the scene didn’t move. They stood on the pebbled beach, lush green mountains to one side, gray ocean on the other.

“What’s—” She turned, and then cut off. She’d misjudged that last step, and he’d half-turned toward her.

He was so close, she could feel the heat that radiated from his body. She lifted her eyes a solid foot to meet his electric blue gaze. He looked just as surprised as she was, but he didn’t back away.

His scent was clean and wild, like wind through the mountains and something else masculine and melting that sank into her bones. He lifted his hand as Ashem had, as if he would brush his fingers across her cheek. Then his expression changed, his jaw tightening. He closed his fist, dropped his hand and moved away.

First the bowl, now this. Annoyed and embarrassed, Kai turned and bumped her hip on the now-invisible table. “Ow!”

Rhys moved his fingers, and suddenly the overcast sky surrounded them. They were above the place the slender dragon with red-black scales had crashed. A green dragon with a snake-like head and feathered wings in every color of the rainbow dove toward her, one foreclaw raised. A projectile that looked as if it were made of bone hovered between.

Kai yelped. She’d always thought it would be thrilling to stand unsupported in the sky, but even though she knew it was an illusion, fifty feet of nothing between her and the beach made her head spin.

Rhys, who had turned away from the two dragons to gaze at the scene as a whole, glanced at her. “Minimize.”

The illusion shrank so it hung over the table once more. Kai’s legs had turned to jelly. Her body was tough, but she didn’t know if it could take much more adrenaline. “Did you know that silver dragon?”

“Iain.” Rhys lifted his hand, as if he would touch the image of the body on the beach. “He died saving my life.”

“You were the red dragon?”

Rhys nodded.

Kai toyed with her carabiners. Other peoples’ tragedies made her feel awkward. She just never knew what to say. Words were so hollow when it came to things like this. They could never touch the sadness, never truly make it better. Still, to say nothing was probably worse. “I’m so sorry.”

Rhys’s voice had a hard edge. “War has a high cost. I’ve paid less than many.”

Unsure how to respond, and thinking about the naïve comments about cost she’d made the day before, Kai pointed to the hologram. “Who’s the white dragon?”

Rhys reached into the glass sphere and pulled out the diamond. The image disappeared, leaving the room drab and unadorned.

“Owain.”

Kai hesitated, then asked, “Is he the one who wants power?”

Rhys’s fist closed around the diamond, knuckles white. He met her eyes briefly, and then dropped the gem onto a cushion of black velvet. “Yes.” He walked to a bookshelf and ran his fingers absently along spines, and Kai saw that he still favored his injured shoulder.

Rhys pulled out a book. “Do you read?”

“Depends on the book.”

He nodded. “Some of these are in English. You can borrow them if you like. Just be sure to put them away. Ffion is meticulous and Ashem is anal.”

The subject change was obvious, but seeing someone die, even in a hologram, had dried up her curiosity. “Thanks.”

“It might be best if you stay away from the records.”

The idea of experiencing another dragon battle, even a virtual one, made her feel faintly ill. “Don’t worry, as of right now I have no desire to go near that thing.”

He glanced over his shoulder, a wry half-smile on his face. “That’s not the same as promising you won’t, George.”

To her annoyance, Kai’s heart thumped at the sight of his smile. “I know.”

Pulling out another book, one of the less age-darkened volumes, he came back toward her.

Again, she noticed his pallor, and the dark circles under his eyes. “You should go get some rest. You look like you could use it.”

Rhys’s smile twisted into an expression of disgust. “I probably could.”

Kai laughed. “Getting twitchy?”

He ran a hand over his jaw, the skin of his palm rasping quietly against the stubble. “Is it obvious?”

Kai shrugged. “I know the look. I saw it in the mirror every day after I had a bad fall from a crag and got laid up for six weeks with a broken leg. I even missed gymnastics by the time I got my cast off.” Scanning the shelves herself, she was surprised to see some familiar titles. She picked up
The Hobbit
and stuck it under her arm, then retrieved her lantern. “I guess we’re leaving?”