Joey had been looking at the slip of paper in Cleo’s hand. “It’s only a couple of blocks from here,” he said helpfully.
Mikhail added, “We have plenty of extra room should you like to stay. If my wife didn’t already offer. She’s one of the women inside there.”
Petra turned to him and began carefully enunciating in English, “If she is the one with a face like a sweet apple, yes she did, so kind! She said her name is Bird. In your language, is that not the little feather-beak?”
Nikos knew a conspiracy when he saw one forming—but at least it was a benign one, unlike the one that Cang Long, former Guardian, seemed to be a part of.
The problem was, he had not expected to find anything even remotely dangerous in California. Joey had been a valuable ally in dangerous situations, but Nikos mostly knew him in reference to missions involving missing mates and suchlike. Mikhail’s preferred area of study, when he wasn’t fighting as an imperial knight, was ancient texts. Nikos had assumed the problem would be something academic, something easy, but not dangerous. Nikos had accepted out of old loyalty, and had grabbed the chance to give an outing to his newest two recruits.
He glanced at the girls’ hopeful faces. They were his newest adoptees as well as the youngest of the recruits. They had grown up on rough streets in Morocco and Istanbul respectively before they had been rescued and brought to him. They were proud of what they’d learned so far—justifiably so—but like teenagers the world over, their exuberance tended to overreach their skills. And yet their self-confidence, so new, was still so fragile.
He could stash them someplace safe and forbid them to move until he made certain there was no danger, and risk watching that self-confidence shatter, or . . . he could take the opportunity presented to him.
“Very well,” he said. “You two join this martial arts class while I scout the territory with my old friends here, so we can find out more about their ancient artifact. It’ll be good practice for your skills and your English. We’ll meet later and exchange reports.”
Two pairs of brown eyes, Cleo’s honey-colored, Petra’s dark, considered him, and Nikos could see the girls deciding that whatever the old guys were up to wouldn’t be as interesting as this prospective class. Two grins preceded shouts in English, “Yes, sir!”
They scampered back to the bakery, and Nikos turned to Mikhail. “Lead the way.”
At that moment, the street was empty, so Mikhail took that invitation literally. With a whoosh of air he stepped upward and in a flash of light became a silver dragon, eeling with slow grace through the salty ocean breeze.
Nikos took a step and shifted, rejoicing as he always did when giving himself over to his unicorn. He flung up his head, testing the thousand scents and sounds and vibrations on the wind currents, his eyes and ears sifting those in the real world and his powerful horn those in the mythic realm. He sensed no shifters in animal form needing help or healing in the immediate vicinity. Good. He stretched up his wings and took to the air.
Mikhail sailed upward, and Nikos followed. The town shrank in size, becoming a patchwork of roofs in lines hugging the coast. Nikos’s powerful wings beat the air, catapulting him skyward, where he began to coast. He glanced down, noticing Joey’s sporty red car racing along the streets, but his unicorn, now ascendant, turned his head
to search the streets—and found her.
By now Jen was a tiny figure, but Nikos could see every detail, from her sun-kissed blond hair to her sober profile as she parked her bicycle at the side of a building. Then she just stood there, leaning one hand on the wall.
The urge to close the distance between them was so strong that Nikos wrenched his attention back to Mikhail, who had already begun his downward descent toward the pale sand of the shoreline between the golden palisades and the sparkling sea.
I can’t let this happen.
Blue-black locks of silky unicorn mane spilled across Nikos’s eyes as he landed lightly in the sand. He folded his wings, then between one heartbeat and he next shifted back to his human self. Mikhail shifted as well.
Joey appeared at a run, covering the ground. Mikhail and Joey Hu were regarded as venerable elders in the imperial court—but that didn’t stop them from being active in the field.
“When Long Cang tried to take the stone,” Mikhail said, “I was able to ward it before he dropped the palisade on the cavern.”
“And on Mikhail,” Joey put in. “Or tried to.”
In his characteristic way, Mikhail shifted the subject from his personal danger to the problem at hand. “Though we cannot get inside, we have guarded this area in hopes of catching some of Cang’s followers.”
Nikos, having lived on an island in a landscape and climate much like this, cast his eye over the huge slabs of disturbed sandstone tumbled down, a rockslide almost reaching the sea. “What do the local humans say?” he asked.
“They think a recent quake was the cause,” Joey said, rocking back and forth from toe to heel, the very picture of a fox trying to outfox someone.
Nikos side-eyed him as he nodded. They had earthquakes in the Aegean, too. He turned to Mikhail. “Is there no path within?” The easiest way would be for him to walk or fly inside as his unicorn. The closer he got to the artifact, the easier for him to use his horn to nullify any toxic magic in or around it.
“When I say collapsed, I mean collapsed.” Joey smacked his palms together. “We can’t get in. You’re one of the only people we know and trust who might be able to reach it, or at least get a reading from out here.”
Mikhail said, “Cang is risking far too much for a simple record of ancient wanderers. Even more disturbing, at the end of our last encounter with him, we both sensed that not only is there someone with him, or behind him, but that this someone is far more powerful.”
More powerful than a red dragon? Nikos cast a querying look Joey’s way, to see a sober nod. The oh-so-innocent expression was gone.
Good.
“All right.” Nikos stepped up to the weathered sandstone of the palisade. He stretched out the hand on which he wore a square-cut red diamond set in gold. As he bent his head, concentrating, the ring’s brilliant crimson refractions glowed brighter, as if a little bit of the earth’s molten core had been captured within the stone.