Sparks Fly: A Novel of the Light Dragons (35 page)

“Dauva,” I said, staring at it before spinning around, trying to look in all directions at once. “It’s Dauva.”

“Fascinating, absolutely fascinating. I believe this translocation requires a few notes,” Dr. Kostich said, pulling out a small notebook and a gold pen.

Jim snuffled the First Dragon’s shoes. “Wow. Those are some pretty awesome teleporting skills you got there, Your First Dragonness. Don’t suppose you’re looking for a devastatingly handsome demon sidekick, are you?”

“Jim!” Aisling smacked it on its butt.

“So the fighting has stopped for good?” Magoth put his hands on his naked hips and looked around in dismay. Suddenly, he brightened up. “I recognize this place. It’s where my sweet May enjoyed playing with me. May, my darling—”

“No!” May said in a disgusted voice, but her eyes were large as she moved to press herself next to Gabriel, whose arm immediately went around her.

“Fine, be that way. I’ll find someone else to tail-slap me.” He eyed Pavel, who looked more than a little startled.

“So this is what the famed Dauva looked like all those centuries ago,” Holland said, strolling toward the wall. “I’ve always wonder—oof!”

He bounced off the wall, taking himself—and the rest of us—by surprise. He rubbed his nose and reached out to pat the wall, turning to face us with disbelief in his eyes. “It’s real.”

“It can’t be real,” I said, shaking my head. “Baltic
hasn’t rebuilt it yet, and besides, I told him no moat. That clearly is a moat.” Everyone looked at where I pointed. “This has to be a vision of past Dauva.”

“This is no vision,” Baltic said slowly, crossing the drawbridge upon which we all stood. He touched the stone gateway.

“If it’s not a vision, then…what? It’s real?” Aisling asked, looking curiously at the First Dragon. “Can he make something as big as a castle appear out of thin air?”

The First Dragon smiled.

“He created the race of dragons,
kincsem
,” Drake told her. “A castle would be as child’s play to him.”

“Well,” I said after giving Baltic a chance to thank his father for magicking up his heart’s desire, “that’s awfully nice of you to save us the trouble of rebuilding. Thank you.”

The First Dragon ceased smiling. I felt as if the sun had gone behind a cloud. “The choice of whether this place is a reward or punishment is yours, daughter.”

“You will not punish my mate,” Baltic said, and would have continued if I hadn’t stopped him.

“Fine,” I told the First Dragon. “You’ve made your point. I’ve failed you again. If you’d just tell me exactly what you want Baltic to do, I’ll convince him that it’s within his best interests to do it. But please, no more mysterious comments and hints at unknown things and references to events I have no memory of ever happening because, to be honest, I’m really getting sick and tired of it all.”

The First Dragon’s eyelids dropped over his eyes, making me feel even more as if I were on trial—and my defense was made up of the Marx Brothers. “The end is within your grasp, daughter. The choice of which end it will be is yours.”

“Oh, for the love of…See? That’s exactly the sort
of mysterious crap—” His eyes widened. I cleared my throat. “Mysterious comments that drive me bonkers.”

“That’s not an awfully long tri—ow!” Jim yelped as Aisling leaned down and whispered furiously in its ear.

“You refuse, then?” The First Dragon began to turn away. “So be it.”

“No, I don’t refuse!” I started toward him, but Baltic held me back, saying, “Mate, do not distress yourself. It is a game he plays. He enjoys trying to destroy my happiness.”

“Well, I’m not going to let him. Now, you just listen here,” I threw caution to the wind and marched over to where the First Dragon was strolling out of the circle of people. I caught at his sleeve, my temper getting the better of me even though I knew it was the sheerest folly. “I’ve done everything you asked, not that you ever really came right out and said what I had to do, but I’ve tried. I’ve wheeled and dealed…dealt…whatever, and I’ve made sacrifices, and I’ve tried to keep the peace to the very best of my ability, but that’s evidently not good enough for you!”

“Man alive, is she yelling at the First Dragon?” Aisling asked Drake, her eyes huge as I shook the First Dragon’s sleeve.

“I believe she is,” Drake answered. “It is not something I ever wish to see you doing, in case you were thinking along those lines.”

“I’d be afraid to,” Aisling admitted.

“Ysolde, maybe you should take a few minutes to calm down,” May said, taking a few hesitant steps toward me. Her gaze kept skittering to the First Dragon as she added, “I think your emotions are running a bit high right now.”

“Of course they’re running high!” I let go of the First Dragon’s sleeve to run my hand through my hair. “He’s trying to drive me insane.”

“Baltic?” May asked, nodding toward me, obviously hinting that he should do something to stop me.

Baltic crossed his arms and leaned against the wall of Dauva, but he said nothing.

“Look, I don’t mean to be rude—”

“Too late,” came a soft voice behind me.

“But if you’re frustrated with me, I’m doubly so with you. So if you’d just once and for all tell me—”

“This is beyond tolerable,” Thala said suddenly. “I have better things to do with my life than witness your pathetic little dealings. You’ll be mud beneath my heel soon enough.”

She shot a look of pure loathing at pretty much everyone, and leaped on me, sending me flying backward with a wicked blow to my face. Pain stretched across my back for a second before there was a snapping noise, and then Thala was off, racing away with the black sword box in her hands, the broken leather strap trailing behind her.

Baltic, who had caught me before I could hit the ground, gave a shout and tossed me forward to Drake before he ran after Thala. Pavel sprinted after him with only one backward look.

“Really, Thala,” I yelled, my hands on my hips. “You have to pick now to do this? You don’t see that I’m busy with the First Dragon?”

“Should we go after them?” May asked Gabriel.

“She has the sword. I suppose we should.” Gabriel glanced toward the First Dragon before making a bow.

“You stay here—I’ll go. He’ll never let you get the sword, but he’d let me have it,” I told Gabriel before racing past the First Dragon.

“Running is so tiresome unless one is being chased by a being with a barbed cat,” Magoth said in a bored voice.

I heard the others calling after me as I ran, but I ignored them, focusing on trying to remember the lay of the land. Dauva sat on the rim of a solid granite ledge
that dropped several hundred feet down to a marshy wooded area, leaving only one side and the front vulnerable to attack. That was one reason why it was so successful at resisting attacks, but that didn’t matter to me at the moment; what did matter was where the game trail I raced along was taking me. I had a vague sense that the ledge was fairly close by on the left side, but the terrain had changed in the last few hundred years, and I could no longer rely on landmarks to guide me.

The sound of crashing bodies through the underbrush warned me the others were following. It just drove me faster. I had to get that sword before Baltic, assuming he could get it away from Thala. I hoped Constantine had the presence of mind to come after me, so he could restrain Thala, but I had a feeling he wasn’t going to be as trustworthy as I’d hoped, not after the most recent experience with him.

“I really hate it when I’m right about things like this,” I panted a few minutes later when I emerged from the heavily wooded area to a narrow stone ledge. I stopped a good dozen feet from the edge, but I had to take a minute to catch my breath before I could address the two people who stood there.

“—betray me now as you have done in the past?” Baltic was in the middle of saying. He stood facing Thala, who held the black sword box in both hands. “What have you done with my talisman?”

“What do you think I did with it?” she answered in a snotty voice, a cruel smile on her face. She pulled a narrow gold chain out from under her shirt, allowing a flat disk of gold hanging from it to dangle before him. “If it means so much to you, you should take better care of it.”

“I did. You betrayed my trust there, as well.”

“I did tell you it was folly to trust anyone,” she answered with a little shrug, then yanked the chain off her neck and threw it at his feet. “Let it not be said that I am
not generous. I am through with it, so you can have it back. You may thank me for giving your mate one less thing to fuss over.”

Baltic didn’t even look at the talisman lying in the dirt. “Do you think I care what you do, so long as it does not involve the light dragons? If it is your desire to avenge yourself against the archimage, then do so, but do not involve me or those I am responsible for.”

“You really believe that’s what this is about?
Revenge?
” Thala laughed softly, gesturing toward him with the sword. I eyed it, wondering if I could snatch it and shove her over the edge of the cliff. It was high enough that the fall would likely kill even an immortal…. Mentally, I shook my head as the idea occurred to me. I couldn’t do that to her, not even when she had tried to destroy us. “Perhaps it
is
about revenge…of a sort. But not the type you or your precious Ysolde would understand.”

She didn’t even look toward me as I edged a hair closer to her. I wanted the talisman, but more important, I wanted that damned sword.

Behind me, voices called as the others tried to find our path. I assumed they were having a bit of difficulty finding us since they didn’t have Savian to find our tracks.

“The sword is mine,” Baltic said, holding out a hand. “It was given to me, not you.”

“That was a mistake,” Thala said, smiling. “Not one that will be repeated. Now if you don’t mind, I’m going to kill you once and for all, and then I think I’ll kill your mate, and after that—”

I never did find out what horrible plan she had in mind, because Baltic sprang at her before she could finish her threat, sending her flying backward a good eighteen feet, right up against a sharp obelisk of stone that seemed to have erupted out of the earth. The force of the blow knocked the sword box from her hand, causing me
to scramble forward and snatch it up before she could grab it again.

I tied the broken leather strap around my waist even as Thala screamed an oath at Baltic. “You will not triumph again! Not after all this time!”

“Mate, stay back,” Baltic ordered as Thala lunged at him, her hands dancing in the air as he sidestepped her.

I gaped at the gestures she was making, recognizing them. “Baltic, she’s—”

He, too, must have recognized them, for with a roar of fury, he sprang on her again…but she had finished casting her spell, and this time, it was Baltic who went flying.

Right over the edge of the cliff.

T
ime as I knew it stopped. No, the world stopped. The
universe
stopped. I stared in dumbfounded horror at the empty space at the edge of the granite cliff where a nanosecond earlier, Baltic had stood.

“My sword, if you don’t mind.”

I continued to stare at the spot, my brain unable to process what it had just witnessed. With another oath, Thala ripped the box from the leather strap. I took six steps forward until I stood at the edge of the cliff.

“Baltic?”

The word came out as light as the wind.

“Baltic?”

“There she is. Ysolde, you’re a hard woman to track…. Erm…where are Baltic and Thala?”

“Look, there’s Thala, running that way. Drake—”

“You stay here, Gabriel,” Drake said. “István and Pavel and I will go after her.”

“Are we chasing someone? I love a good chase. I love
it even more when I catch the prisoner and can take her back to my palace, to my toy room, where I—”

“That’s enough, Magoth,” May said. “You can go with Drake if you behave yourself.”

“I will stay and guard my beloved one,” Constantine announced. “Unlike some, I do not need to take prisoners to enjoy myself.”

I peered down into the dark depths of the ravine. There was nothing—no flicker of color or movement, just…blackness. “Baltic!”

The scream was horrifying to hear, filled with agony of such depth, it brought me to my knees.

“Holy shit! Ysolde? Are you OK? That was the single most horrifying noise I’ve ever heard. Oh my god, May, she’s going to throw herself over.”

Hands jerked me back from the edge as I was about to leap down and find Baltic.

“What happened? Ysolde, what happened?” May’s voice was filled with concern.

He couldn’t be…I shook my head. I couldn’t even put into words my worst fear.

A black shape stood next to me. “Oh man, did what I think happen just happen?”

I looked down at Jim as it peered over the edge of the cliff, then backed up hastily. “Man, it did. I never thought the dread wyvern could be killed twice, but I guess I was wrong.”

“No,” I said as Aisling gasped in horror.

“Who’s wrong? What’s happening?”

I ignored the voices behind me, shaking my head as I focused on Jim. “No, you’re wrong. He’s not…He can’t…He didn’t…”

It was the sympathy in the demon’s eyes that made me realize the horrible truth.

Baltic was dead. He was gone, just like that, one minute
standing before me, demanding that Thala give him the sword….“No, that’s wrong. Not Thala.”

“Who’s not Thala? What is going on?”

It was Constantine’s voice that spoke.

I continued to stare at the demon as my brain tried desperately to pull together the pieces of a puzzle I didn’t know existed until that day.

Hushed voices murmured in the background.

“Baltic’s dead? Are you sure? Ysolde, my darling, my love, allow me to comfort you.”

I shoved Constantine away without even thinking about it, aware of something behind me, a presence that seemed to compel me to turn.

“He’s dead,” I said, ignoring everyone and everything that wasn’t at that moment important.

The First Dragon just looked at me.

“He’s dead,” I repeated, a bit more forcefully, striding toward him until I was a foot away.