Hidden Dragons (2 page)

As a wise fae once said, a little power is a dangerous thing.

The dragon master removed the crystal from its nest of velvet.

The dragon nosed it, smart enough to be curious. Joscela wondered how the keeper felt to stand so close to the ancient beast. She’d never had a dragon. Once every queen possessed one, but their number had dwindled by the era in which she’d assumed the throne. Some compared the creatures to dolphins in intelligence, others to small children. Though they couldn’t speak, they understood commands. Crucial to tonight’s proceedings was the magic that packed each cell of their huge bodies. Pure magic. Old magic. The very magic the one-time gods used to form fae reality. Never mind combatting poison or piercing good armor, the spell power within one dragon could create or destroy worlds.

Compared to that, burning enemy villages couldn’t measure up. Every hatchling was a weapon someone, someday wouldn’t be able to resist deploying.

Though the dragon’s playful nudge nearly pushed him over, the dragon master didn’t scold or shove her off. Perhaps he couldn’t bear to with so little time remaining. He braced his back leg instead, closed his eyes, and composed himself.

As if sensing the seriousness of the situation, T’Fain settled back onto her forelimbs. Her keeper held the sphere between them. As he connected his mind to it, the crystal began to glow. The detail Manfred and his cohorts had encoded into the quartz soon poured into him. The keeper’s eyes moved behind their lids. Unlike inferior races, pureblood fae could grasp immense amounts of knowledge, each bit as clear and accurate as the rest. This dragon master’s lineage endowed him with yet another skill: the ability to communicate with his charge telepathically.

The dragon’s wings twitched as the river of information hit her awareness. Fortunately, like her keeper, she could hold it. Comprehension wasn’t needed, only accepting what was sent. The beast seemed to be doing exactly that. Her upper and lower lids closed over her ruby eyes.

At last the transfer was complete. The keeper set the empty crystal on the cracked sand, then gently clasped the dragon’s cart-size muzzle. The creature blinked as if emerging from a dream.

“Be,” the keeper said softly in High Fae. “Be what I have shown you.”

He let go and stepped back. T’Fain shook her body and raised her wings, not for flight but in display. The keeper retreated faster. Despite her misgivings, Joscela couldn’t deny a thrill. It wasn’t every day one witnessed new realities being born. The dragon tilted her great bronze head as if listening to faint music. Joscela’s heart thumped behind her ribs. If she’d been in the beast’s position, she’d have been screaming or belching flame. The dragon didn’t seem upset, merely attentive. The keeper turned and ran.

Joscela wasn’t prepared. Possibly no one was.

Like a star exploding, a blinding brilliance replaced the bronze dragon. The power blasted Joscela’s hair back, and her ship jerked to the end of its anchor line. She couldn’t tell if the tether snapped, because her senses were overwhelmed. Lightning swallowed the world around her, rainbow sparks dancing in the white. Her ears rang with alien chords. The air was so thick with power it felt like feathers against her skin.

He’s killed us
, she thought.
The dragon keeper wanted us all to die
.

Even as this possibility arose, the sight-stealing radiance ebbed. Her vessel was still aloft, still anchored, though she’d been knocked onto her ass on the wooden deck. Everyone around her had, from what she could see through her watering eyes.

Ignoring the disarray of her long silk gown, she stumbled to the railing to see what had transpired below. The scene she discovered made her smile unexpectedly. Manfred’s fancy throne had toppled over with him in it. He didn’t appear hurt, but half a dozen shaky soldiers vied comically with each other to help him up. Everywhere she looked, fae pushed dazedly to their feet. The dragon was gone. Her death had produced that great white light.

Joscela focused on the spot where T’Fain had been standing. Beside her, Ceallach pulled himself up as well.

“Look,” he said, a note of grudging awe in his voice. “The new portal is forming.”

She’d already seen what caught his attention. The opening was round or would be when it finished coalescing. Years might pass before the doorway was mature enough to use. For now, streaks of green and brown and blue swirled like clouds within the aperture. Though she’d had no part in its design, she understood what was happening. The essence of the realm of Faerie was outfolding into the human world, blending with it to form a combined reality bubble. Silver glimmered and then disappeared at the top of the portal’s ring—a pair of dragon wings taking shape, she thought.

“The sacrifice succeeded,” she observed, though this was obvious.

“The dragon master should find that some comfort.”

“That presumes comfort matters. The last living reason for his bloodline’s existence was just wiped out. The protectors among the Guild can hire out as mercenaries. Gods know what purpose he and his kin will find.”

Ceallach put his hand on her arm, and they gazed at the man together. The dragon’s trainer had run as far as he could from the explosion. Now he stood on the sand, a solitary figure looking grimly back toward the forming door. Char marks streaked his face and leathers, as if he alone had passed through real fire. The soot obscured his expression, but still . . .

“Shouldn’t he be more devastated?” she asked Ceallach quietly.

When she glanced at her companion, one corner of his mouth tugged up. His intensely blue eyes met hers, and the grin deepened. “I believe he should, my queen.”

Joscela’s heart skipped a beat. “Perhaps the rumors are true.”

“Perhaps they are.”

Though willing to believe almost anything of her kind, Joscela had discounted the whispers as wishful conspiracy theories. If they were true, however . . . If more dragon eggs existed, hidden away by the fae whose calling it had always been to train them . . .

If that were true, all might not be lost. Joscela could transform her present disgrace into victory. She could undo everything Manfred had accomplished. As to that, she could undo him.

The increasing warmth at her side told her Ceallach had shifted closer.

Unwilling to risk any associate but him hearing, she spoke in a spell-hushed voice. “We must discover everything we can about this dragon master.”

“Yes, my queen,” Ceallach agreed in the same fashion.

He laid his hand over hers on the silver rail. They were royals—cool thinking and strategic. It wasn’t their way to let their emotions run rampant. Nonetheless, both their palms were damp with excitement.

“We’ll have our work cut out for us,” she said, meaning the caution for herself as much as her confidante. “The Dragon Guild is as good at keeping secrets as the nobility.”

“Better.” Ceallach flashed a wolfish grin. “Nobles come and go. Dragon masters have survived whoever sat on the high throne. If someone held back a clutch, it won’t be discovered easily.”

Joscela longed to grin in return. She could always count on Ceallach relishing a challenge. Instead, she returned her gaze to the chaotic scene below, her expression carefully composed to queenly placidity.

“Good thing we have forever to rewrite destiny,” she observed.

CASSIA Maycee was home again.

She came to this realization on the roof of her deceased grandmother’s downtown penthouse. Her three best friends sprawled in their swimsuits on the fancy lounge chairs to either side of her, as if a time machine had transported them from high school. Because Cass’s gran had been more lenient than their parents, they’d often hung out here. She’d splurged on a climate spell, so though it was late October, the terrace was summery. Above the ephemeral shield, stars twinkled like diamonds on black velvet. Ripples glowed invitingly from the lap pool, though no one was swimming. To the east, a flock of young gargoyles played airborne tag around the Pocket State Building’s spire. Their joyous swoops were medicine to Cass, allowing her grief to lie on her as softly as the blood-warm air. Her grandmother was at peace, her life having been full and rewarding.

Cass was tempted to stay up here forever.

For twenty-two strange years she’d lived as a human among humans, cut off from the magic of the Pocket. She’d done it because she loved her fully human mother and because her father, who wasn’t human at all, impressed upon her the fact that human lives were short. Cass was half faerie and could expect to live centuries. She’d probably still be out there if her mother hadn’t remarried and her maternal grandmother hadn’t left Cass her estate. Even in death, Patricia Maycee could move mountains. One of the few arguments she’d ever lost was when her daughter divorced Cass’s father and moved Outside.

I don’t belong here
, Cass’s mother had pleaded.
I’m not like the rest of you
.

Patricia Maycee had been aghast. The Pocket had grown up around her ancestors. Their original family farm was smack dab in its center. Since that time, Maycee descendants had flourished in this city.

Not Cass’s mother, however. She’d hated magic the way some women hate spiders.

“Oh my God, this is delicious,” Cass’s friend Jin Levine broke into her thoughts to declare. “I’m an excellent bartender.”

Cass turned her head on the lounge chair cushion to smile at her. Rarely lacking in confidence, Jin was half gold elf and half human. Her skin was a creamy tan, her short-cropped hair twenty-four karat. Dressed in a tiny blue and green bikini—which she looked awesome in—Jin was sipping the rainbow-colored cosmo she herself had whipped up.

“We need a toast,” her cousin Bridie suggested. Her golden hair was long. Aside from that, she was enough like Jin to be her sister and probably closer than the real thing.

Jin sat up and raised her glass. “Here’s to the half-and-halfers. Now that we’re back together, may we never lose touch again.”

“May we never take each other for granted,” Bridie added.

“May we never run out of hot men to ogle—”

“or chocolate—”

“or comfort-spelled Jimmy Choos.”

“Crap,” Rhona interjected into the elf cousins’ riff. Her newly adopted werefox son was trying to squirm off her lap. “No, Pip, cosmos aren’t for one-year-olds!”

Cass had to grin. Leave it to Rhona to bring them back to reality. Straddling the fence between cute and pretty, she was half human and half werefox. Jin might have made up the name for their clique—which they’d thought extremely clever as tweenagers—but Rhona was its glue. She made peace and planned birthday parties, not to mention telling
the
best lies to parents. She was the good girl none of their folks thought would deceive them.

Jin and Bridie were the wild girls, of course. Cass hadn’t really had a role. “Snow White” was what classmates called her, for her raven hair and her soft blue eyes. She hadn’t been especially bad or good. Boys liked the way she looked, but Jin and Bridie were the ones they chased, the ones they knew would be fun. Cass’s faerie blood intimidated people, though as far as power went, she couldn’t call on much. Boys hadn’t been in danger of ending up as toads.

Maybe “the quiet one” was the closest she’d come to a label.

To go by his excited babbling, Pip wasn’t likely to have that problem. Cute as a button and very wiggly, he stretched even farther across his mother’s front. Activated by his attention, the rainbows in Rhona’s cosmo danced.

Cass hopped up before he could knock the glass over, plucking it from the table beside his mom. “That’s just too pretty, isn’t it?” she said. “Next time we’ll buy Cointreau without enchantments.”

Pip let out a wail as his object of desire escaped.

“I should have gotten a babysitter,” Rhona said, bouncing him worriedly.

“No,” the others denied in unison.

“Cass
had
to meet him,” Bridie assured her. “We shouldn’t have brought alcohol.”

“Well,
I
need alcohol,” Jin said with her wonderful throaty laugh. She flicked her short golden hair with matching manicured fingernails. “You wouldn’t believe what I put up with at work today! Boy bands behaving badly are no picnic.”

Bridie smacked her cousin’s thigh with her hand. “Like I wasn’t right there with you.”

The cousins hosted a popular TV show called
As Luck Would Have It
. Each episode related an amazing escape from danger or stroke of good fortune.

“Between the two of us, you got the patience,” Jin informed her cousin. “Therefore, you don’t need to complain.”

Rhona laughed, which thankfully distracted her son from his distress.

“Ma, ma, ma,” he burbled, patting her cheeks with chubby palms.

“Oh my God,” Rhona choked. “Every time he calls me that, I tear up.”

“Aww,” Jin and Bridie chorused in unison.

“To Rhona’s wonderful new addition,” Cass said. Still standing, she toasted her with the rescued drink. “No little boy could have a better mom.”

Rhona blushed. “I hope so. Since I adopted him, I swear I feel like an idiot at least twenty times a day.”

“There’s a lot to learn,” Bridie said, patting her knee reassuringly.

“Anyone can see you’re good for him,” Jin put in. “He’s totally normal and healthy.”

Pip had been one of the city’s infamous “little miracles.” Prevented from shifting to his fox form by a genetic flaw, his parents had abandoned him to a bogus adoption agency. The criminals who ran it sold him and other children like him for use in dark rituals. Pip had been lucky to be rescued—and to end up with Rhona. Interestingly, a couple boys they’d known in high school, now detectives with the RPD, had been instrumental in saving them.

“We should toast Cass,” Rhona said with her trademark thoughtfulness. “Maycee’s brave new leader.”

“Oh I’m not that,” she denied, startled to hear it put that way. “The department stores run themselves. I’ll just sign a check or cut a ribbon occasionally.”

“Don’t be modest,” Jin scolded. “Everybody knows your gran kept the board in line. If it weren’t for Patricia Maycee, who knows what shape the chain would be in?”