Sparks Fly: A Novel of the Light Dragons (13 page)

“At least you didn’t change any of us,” Nico offered with a little grin before picking up a wooden chair. “Shall we try to break it?”

“You can try, but I doubt if even dragon strength will take down that door. It looks like awfully solid glass.”

And so it was. It might have the appearance of glass, but it evidently retained the properties of the oak door, because we didn’t even scratch the glass.

Nico, Holland, and I were taking turns whaling on the door with bits of the bed and chairs when two shimmery figures suddenly appeared on the other side of the door.

“Baltic?” I asked, and dropped my bit of broken chair to squint at the figures before I realized that neither of them was even remotely as big as he was.

“What the hell have you done?” a man’s voice asked as the door was opened.

I snarled something extremely rude, and lunged for
the two figures. Gareth screamed, then stumbled backward at the same time his wife, Ruth—who I had spent the last ten years thinking was my sister-in-law—leaped at me with her fingers curled into claws, forcing me back into the room.

“Where’s Brom?” I bellowed, belching fire at Ruth, who shrieked and started slapping at her clothing to put out the fire. “You bastard, if you’ve hurt him—”

“You’re not supposed to be here, you stupid woman! Why the bloody hell can’t you just do what I ask?” Gareth yelled back at me as Nico and Holland leaped forward to keep me from strangling Gareth where he stood in the doorway. “You never listen to me, do you? I don’t know what’s wrong with you that you can’t even follow simple directions! I told you what to do; I gave you very specific instructions, but did you bother to listen? No, you did not. Instead, you had to drop in on us at the crack of dawn, interrupting my sleep. You know how I hate that!”

I stared him down, my fingers itching to draw the most vile spell I knew, but given that was one to cause the unplugging of bowels, I curled my fingers into fists and fought the desire to use the broken chair on Gareth, saying instead, with great deliberation, “Where. Is. Brom?”

Gareth scowled at Ruth as she continued to slap at herself. “What are you doing, woman?”

“She set me on fire!” Ruth snarled, stabbing a finger at me.

I smiled.

“For god’s sake, will you two stop fighting? It’s enough to drive a sane man crazy.” Gareth narrowed his already beady-eyed gaze on me, waving his hands toward us. “Well, you’re here. Nothing I can do about that, I suppose, although just once I’d like to see you do what I tell you to do. Still, it could be worse. That dragon of yours
had better bring the gold with him when he comes to get you, or he’ll find himself going home without his precious mate as well as the kid. If you’re done causing havoc, I’m going back to bed.”

“I don’t think so. I think you’re going to take me to Brom in the next ten seconds, or this very badass dragon here is going to beat the crap out of you, while this equally badass…er…mine ghost will help him.”

“Knocker,” Holland said helpfully, then cracked his knuckles while looking menacingly at Gareth.

“Sorry, badass knocker.” I slid a glance toward Ruth, who had moved closer to Gareth. “And while they’re doing that, I’ll call down fire unlike anything you’ve ever seen. I bet you that even an oracle and a necromancer can be roasted alive.”

Gareth sputtered in anger while Ruth made some pretty scatological threats that I ignored, but in the end, all it took was Nico’s shifting into dragon form, and my setting fire to both Gareth’s and Ruth’s shoes before they conceded.

“You can see the brat, but the others have to stay here,” Gareth spat out, jerking me by the arm, his fingers biting painfully into my flesh.

“We will not leave Ysolde,” Nico said, starting toward us.

“You stay or she doesn’t see the kid,” Gareth snarled.

“It’s all right,” I said, pulling my arm from Gareth’s hold, rubbing the resulting bruises. “You boys stay here. Gareth isn’t stupid enough to hurt me, not when he knows Baltic will skin him alive if he even thinks about it.”

Gareth made a rude noise, slammed the door closed on a still-protesting Nico and Holland, and shoved me toward the stairs. “Hurry up. I want to go back to sleep, and you’re wasting my time.”

I walked carefully in front of them, bracing myself for the feeling of Ruth’s hands on my back. I wouldn’t put it
past her to try to shove me down the stairs. Luck, however, was with me, and I arrived at the landing one floor down without injury.

“Maybe you can get the kid to stop his whining all the time,” Gareth said, unlocking the door. “Nice job you did raising him. All he does is complain.”

I shoved past him and ran into the room, stumbling over a chair when I lunged toward the small bed that sat under one of the arched windows. “Brom!”

“Hnn?” came a familiar groggy sound, one I heard every morning when I tried to rouse my child from sleep. “Sullivan?”

He was warm, and sleepy, and utterly wonderful as I clutched him to me, ignoring the terms of our previous agreement about how many times I was allowed to kiss and hug him on a daily basis. I wrapped my arms around him and held him tight, tears burning my eyes for a few seconds as I thanked every deity I could think of for preserving my son.

“Sullivan, I can’t breathe,” he wheezed after a minute or so.

“Sorry,” I said, reluctantly loosening my hold on him. “Are you all right? Gareth hasn’t hurt you, has he?”

“I’m OK. Geez, Sullivan, you’ve kissed me five times, way over the limit, and Gareth’s watching. He’s going to think I’m a baby or something.”

I laughed, a shaky laugh to be sure, but laughter filled with relief as I let go of him and sank to my knees next to his bed. “If Gareth knows what’s good for him, he isn’t going to think anything of the sort.”

“So very touching,” Ruth said with a sneer, looking disdainfully around the room. “My god, you’ve already turned this place into a pigsty! I can’t believe we put up with you two for as long as we did.”

“It was no bowl of cherries living with you for the past ten years, either,” I said, still holding Brom’s hand.

“Ten years? Try three hundred,” she scoffed, scowling furiously.

“Three hundred
years
?” I shook my head. “That can’t be right. I know you have some pictures of you and Gareth and me in old-fashioned clothes, but I haven’t been stuck with you for three hundred years.”

Ruth opened her mouth to answer, but Gareth interrupted with a curt order. “Go get the guards to move the dragon and the knocker to another room. I don’t trust Sullivan’s magic to not screw up the door so they could get out. I’ll watch her until you get the others locked up properly.”

“She could try something on you,” Ruth said suspiciously.

Gareth’s lip curled. “If she does, the kid will suffer.”

I gave Brom’s hand a little squeeze before getting to my feet and moving to stand between him and the man who was biologically responsible for fathering him. I’d never been one to feel hatred for people; that seemed like such an extreme emotion, and one that made no allowances for shades of grey, but the primary emotion I was feeling now was pure, unadulterated hate.

“Why are you doing this?” I asked, feeling that I should at least make an attempt to understand the despicable depths of his mind.

“I had to do something to keep you two from bickering. I had centuries of that, and I don’t need any more.”

“No, not why did you send Ruth on an errand—why did you kidnap Brom?”

“I told you—we want gold. The gold you owe us.”

I shook my head. “You’re an Oracle, Gareth. Surely you could make money by practicing your trade. You don’t have to resort to kidnapping to get it. Is it Thala? Did she tell you to do this?”

He sucked one of his teeth and looked somewhat bored, leaning back against the door with his arms
crossed over his chest. “She contacted Ruth, yes. But we would have done this without her. You owe us, Sullivan. For all those centuries of care, you owe us plenty. We just want what’s due us.”

“I can’t believe…” I shook my head again. “Three centuries? That would mean I’d been with you since…since I was killed.”

“We found you wandering around in the snow, too stupid to figure out who you were or what happened to you,” he said, picking his ear and studying his finger. “Ruth wanted to let you freeze to death, or be caught by the dragons who were attacking the castle, but I realized right from the start that you were worth a fat reward. You wouldn’t have been brought back by that dragon god otherwise.”

“You saw the First Dragon resurrect me?” I was stunned by that thought, although it made sense. If Gareth and Ruth were outside of Dauva when it fell, then they would have had the opportunity to see me wandering around in a postresurrection daze.

“I convinced her it was to our benefit to keep you alive, so we took you with us back to Paris.”

“What were you doing in Latvia to begin with?” my curiosity prompted me to ask.

“Did a scrying the month before and saw that there was something valuable to be had there. Since we weren’t exactly welcome in St. Petersburg at the time, we headed out that way to see what was what. We had no idea the valuable object was you. What the hell?”

The last of his words rose almost an octave as the world spun around us, a blinding whiteness swirling around and in and through us until I realized that we were in yet another vision.

“Cool,” I heard Brom say behind me. “Is this one of those dreams you have where you get to see stuff in the past?”

“Yes. Stay next to me, lovey.” I reached back and
grabbed him, holding him to my side as I looked around the small, dark room of the vision. It was cold, very cold, and wherever we were wasn’t particularly nice.

“Can they see us?” he asked.

At the same time Gareth demanded, “What is going on? What the hell have you done to me, Sullivan?”

I turned to look where Brom was pointing. We appeared to be in some sort of a small shack, badly made, with drifts of snow coming through the gaps in the boards that made up the walls. A derelict cot was pushed up against one side of the shack, a figure huddled on it covered by what looked like a thick fur cloak.

“I don’t understand,” the figure said, lifting her head, a confused and dazed expression on her face. It was my past self.

“No, they can’t see or hear us.” I glanced from the present-day Gareth to the memory of his past self where he stood with Ruth in close consultation.

“It’s simple,” the past Gareth said, going over to where Ysolde sat. “You’re with us. We saved you from bad dragons who want to kill you. We’re all going to Paris to keep them from finding you, and let your friends, the ones with lots of gold, know that you’re alive. You remember that, don’t you?”

“Dragons?” Ysolde said, rubbing her forehead. “There’s something…something horrible—”

“That’s right, the dragons are horrible, and we’re trying to help you because we’re your friends. Remember?”

Gareth put both hands on her head and muttered what sounded like an invocation.

“What’s he doing to you?” Brom asked, pressing closer to me. “Is he hurting you?”

“No, lovey. He was just trying to make me believe something that wasn’t true.” I looked over Brom’s head to where the present Gareth was now watching impatiently. “You really were a bastard, you know that?”

“And you were a stupid cow who believed anything we told you,” he answered with one of his unpleasant smiles.

“I believed because you brainwashed me,” I said with a disgusted snort, reining in my temper. Brom had seen enough dissent between Gareth and me; I didn’t want him to witness any more unpleasantness.

“We had better be rewarded for our trouble,” the past Ruth said, coming over to jerk Gareth’s hands off Ysolde’s head.

“We will,” he answered, giving her a sly look. “The dragons will pay well for her once they know she’s alive again.”

“Thala won’t be pleased,” Ruth said as darkness began to fill my vision.

“Then we simply won’t tell her. She cannot rail against us if she doesn’t know the wyvern’s mate is still alive….”

The darkness washed over us in a wave of insensibility, wiping away everything that was.

The sensation of being consumed by nothingness ebbed away to leave us standing in the exact same positions, but instead of a dim, cold shack, we were once again in a room lit now by the rosy golden glow of a sunny Spanish morning.

“Thala won’t be pleased?” I asked Gareth as awareness returned to me. “What does she have to do with the price of tea in China?”

“The price of what?” he asked, looking more irritated than usual.

“It’s an expression. Why would Thala care if you and Ruth took me in after I was—” I sucked in a huge amount of oxygen as realization struck me. “She’s the one who killed me, isn’t she?”

For a moment, I could swear I saw fear flicker in his eyes, but that emotion was soon replaced with familiar belligerence. “I don’t know anything about who killed you, and I don’t give a damn who did the job. All I care about is getting what’s owed to me, and your high-and-mighty
dragon had better get his dread wyvern ass in gear and come up with the gold, or he’s going to be missing his bit of tail. And I don’t mean the one in his dragon form.”

I glared at him, wanting to say so many things, but determined to keep as much of it from Brom as was possible. “So what happened after you brainwashed me outside of Dauva? You took me to Paris?”

“How long does it take to get a few guards?” Gareth grumbled to himself as he peered out through the open door toward the stairs. “I could have gone to Seville and back by the time she stirs her stumps. What? Yes, we took you to Paris, fat lot of good that it did us. It turned out that anyone we could have ransomed you to was dead, so we were stuck with you. Ruth was ready to drop you in the Seine, but then you went into one of your funks and started manifesting gold, and we knew we were set for the rest of our lives.”

“The fugues,” I said, rubbing my forehead before glancing back at Brom. He had gotten dressed, and was sitting on the edge of his bed, watching with silent interest. “They started all the way back then?”