“Yes! They were kind of flickering in my dream. No, more like wiggling,” Bird exclaimed softly, the sibilants in her voice echoing. “You know dreams, they don’t make a lot of sense in the light of day. But the wiggling . . . goes . . . like this. Not in a circle so much as a spiral.”
She wound her hand in a corkscrew motion, then. blinked at the mural. For a second the two patterns locked together visually for a moment, taking her breath away. She stepped closer, then it was busy again, patterns and circles striving against one another over the coarse stone.
But the afterimage remained. She had seen the center of the spiral. Keeping her gaze locked on that part of the rock, she stepped close, then blinked as the figures seemed to jerk and writhe and wiggle. She shook her head, planted her feet firmly, and closed both hands around the lamp.
“What is it you’re seeing?” Mikhail asked.
“Don’t you see it, too? The center of the spiral. But when I get too close, I lose it and it all goes jerky on me.”
Mikhail said slowly, “I wonder if . . . Bird, please take my hand, and look again, at what you call the center. Tell me what you see.”
Bird gladly clasped his warm, strong hand. She faced the mural, keeping the light steady on it with her free hand. Once again she saw the two spiraling patterns lock together and freeze. She squinted at the central images.
And gasped. “The silhouettes are grayed out by the chalk ones. What I see is a . . .” She blinked, fighting to hold the image. “It’s a claw, with five talons. Holding a moon?”
“It’s a pearl, an ancient symbol,” Mikhail murmured. “It’s significant, but how?”
“Those talons . . .”
“Five talons is the sign of a royal dragon,” Mikhail said.
“I didn’t know that. What I thought it represented was a target for a hand. Could you maybe touch it?”
Mikhail placed his hand in the center of the spiral. She flinched slightly, expecting an explosion or something spectacular and creepy.
Nothing happened.
He turned to her. “Would you mind trying? If anything happens, I’m here.” He slid his arm around her.
She nodded, swallowed as she fought to keep the image still . . . and laid her hand to the cold, moist stone where she knew that dragon talon lay.
Nothing.
They both stepped back, Bird looking away. Her head throbbed a little from the effort she had been making to keep the two images locked together.
Which had only happened when they held hands.
Wait.
“We saw it together,” she said. “Is that because we’re mates?”
“Or because we are human and shifter?” he murmured softly. “That would change a lot of things . . .”
“Oh!” She tugged him back. “How about if we try . . . this.” She took his hand, lacing her fingers over his. Then, moving together, they pressed all ten of their fingers over that image.
Abruptly that faint singing note expanded to a chord, as if silver hammers had come down on a thousand crystal chimes. Blue light blistered the dark paint, then sprang out and shot across the cavern to the shadows in the cavern wall behind them.
They both turned to see what that strange blue light revealed. Bird yanked up the forgotten flashlight in her left hand, hoping it would add its light to that eerie blue light. But the lamp’s beam was too weak. It vanished entirely into the deep shadows on the other side of the cavern.
“Turn it off,” Mikhail whispered. “I think it’s interfering.”
He had already turned his lamp off.
Bird clicked off her lamp. The blue light intensified to a bright glow that not only reached the stone across the cave, but seemed to sink into it like an X-ray. There was . . . something . . . inside the stone, glowing a ghostly blue-white.
Mikhail let out a soft sigh. “That’s it. But we daren’t—” He stopped, his head tipped as he listened.
Then she heard it, too. High shrieks, like tearing metal, pierced the air. She stiffened, staring in disbelief as cracks opened up in the walls, glowing a sullen red.