Dragon Fires Everywhere, page 30
I hope I’ll be back in time to see it.
But right now I have to focus on more than this wedding.
Real snow begins to fall along with the lovely snow Emerson whipped up for the ceremony, but the magical warmers and actual heater towers keep us all cozy. Even out here in the middle of Main Street, St. Cyprian. It’s perfect, just as Emerson wanted, and I wish I could enjoy it. I wish we could all enjoy it.
But as Jacob said, what kind of wedding would Emerson have except one that might free people from terrible curses and bring the Joywood and Carol down for good?
Nothing could be more her.
Now seated, I create the projection inside me, and then Ellowyn and Zander give it life. While they make the projection spell a reality, I let it go and then simultaneously magic myself out of the seat and off to the front of Carol’s house.
I tried to land inside, but she’s got enough wards and locks to keep even the strongest witches out. Plus I’ve never actually been inside, so there’s no picturing it to project myself there.
I told my coven I’d bring my father, so I reach out to him.
Dad, I need you.
It’s real winter on this side of town, and freezing, so I magic myself a coat plus one for Dad. When he appears, looking more than a little concerned, I hold it out to him, and he slides his arms inside.
“Georgie . . .”
“I need you to be brave,” I tell him, staring at Carol’s house. Not at him. “I need to get in her library.”
The truth is there. I know it.
As ever, my father focuses on the puzzle, not the problem. “How are you going to get in?”
It appears to me like a flash. I am not just a historian. I am the Historian. And a key once unlocked many secrets to me. Why wouldn’t it unlock this?
I call out for the key. When it arrives in my outstretched palm, it is warm and glowing, just like when I go into the archives.
Please work.
I move forward, past Carol’s gate. I start walking toward the looming door. But I can tell Dad hasn’t followed, so I look back.
“I can’t pass the gate, princess,” he says.
He stands there, pushing against something invisible that won’t let him pass. But I’m so close. And the wedding is only so long. I can’t wait. I can’t worry about why I can get through and he can’t.
“Stay right here,” I tell him. “If you see anything fishy, reach out to me. Reach out to my coven.”
“This isn’t safe,” he admonishes me. “You know it isn’t.”
“Maybe not. But I have to do it.” I feel it like a pull. And it’s a bit like the pull of the river, so maybe that should stop me, but the key is glowing . . .
And the key is not black magic. It is not bad.
When I reach Carol’s door, I see gold shining from the keyhole. This is right. This is right.
I put the key in the door, and the lock gives.
My heart is beating like a hammer against my chest. The key feels like holding a hot coal, almost, and something in the shape of a circle burns around my finger where Azrael’s ring once was.
Azrael. That grief swells up in me, but now is not the time for it. Except maybe one little thing.
You should be here, I reach out and tell him. Maybe he’s blocked me. I don’t know. But I feel better having sent that message to him anyway.
Carol’s house smells like sulfur and rot, but it’s beautiful. Gleaming wood and elaborate carvings. Every window is stained glass. Every light fixture is a glorious gold.
I peek in each room I see, looking for books. When I finally make it to the library, it’s the biggest and most beautiful one I’ve ever seen. It puts full museums in Europe to shame, both in volume and the artifacts she’s no doubt stolen. I should be disgusted.
But the Historian in me, raised in libraries, can’t help a dreamy sigh all the same.
I scan the titles, keeping the archive key in my hand.
What am I looking for? What do I need to know? I ask the library, the same way I ask the archives.
I feel something move around me, but it’s almost like it starts and then stops. As if it’s hindered by something.
An outside, evil force.
No doubt more wards and locks. I look at the key, wondering if there’s some clue here. But it’s just a key. The room is just a library.
Still, something is here. I feel it. A dark, lurking presence.
But books are ideas. And ideas aren’t dangerous in and of themselves. It’s what people do with them that causes trouble. That’s never seemed like a good enough reason to restrict any and all ideas to me. I’d rather let the ideas go free and maybe work on restricting the people who try to use them to hurt others.
“Reveal to me, what I should see,” I say.
The world around me ripples, but doesn’t quite change. So I do it again, and again, and again. Still there’s no give.
I know something exists behind the facade, but my magic can’t reach it. I keep trying, though. I have to do this. I have to succeed. Everything is up to me.
I’m pretty quickly spent. Sweaty and shaking. I’ve no doubt done irreparable damage to my hair, and if I have the energy to get back to the wedding, it will be on nothing more than my own two feet, not a flight or a pop of magic.
But I haven’t succeeded yet, and I have to succeed. I squeeze the key in my palm. It got me in here. It must have the answer. I look around, searching for something. Not the books I’m after, but maybe some kind of sign—
Then, there it is.
A little metal . . . weasel? A lot like the one Carol wore to the house tour what feels like a lifetime ago.
It’s screwed to one of the bookshelf joints, but if I touch it, the metal swings. And when I swing it out of the way, there’s a keyhole.
With shaky hands—both nerves and exhaustion—I shove my key into the hole. Nothing happens. But then I turn the key, and . . .
The world beneath my feet rumbles. The shelves shake, move, twist, and then turn. They open up the wall into a dark sort of cave.
And in that cave are even more books.
A stack of books, bound in black leather. There are no titles embossed on them, no authors mentioned. But I feel the evil pumping off them.
I smell it. I taste it.
And still I move forward. I need to protect myself before I open them, I know I do, but—
“You didn’t think it’d be that easy, did you?” a voice asks me.
It’s a vaguely familiar voice. But only vaguely—
Until I turn and come face to face with my father.
Not Stanford Pendell, but my biological father.
Desmond Wilde.
31
For a moment, I can’t seem to form a thought, much less say something.
It’s not the shock at being interrupted here. Why would anything be easy in this long, painful year? It’s not even that much of a surprise that—of course—someone turned up to make this hard.
What stuns me is that this is Desmond.
Not Carol or one of her cronies. Not even some evil black ooze.
My actual biological father.
He stands there, dressed in his crisp suit. He looks exactly the way a father of the bride should, but . . .
There is something wrong here.
Something more wrong than this man having an affair with my mother and keeping the fact that he’s my blood relative secret for almost thirty years, that is.
“Are you . . .” I hardly know what to ask. “Are you really working with Carol?”
I can’t fathom that this self-important man, someone who’s always been so . . . pompous yet ineffectual could be . . . actively engaging in black magic.
But he’s not the Desmond I’m used to seeing and dealing with, however distantly.
Today his eyes are a deep, terrifying black, and that’s new. Is it black magic or . . . is this just a Carol-controlled husk in the shape of Desmond? I certainly don’t remember his eyes being that black, or his smirk being quite that oily.
I definitely don’t remember him giving much of a shit about anything but himself and how he might become more important in the highest levels of witch society. I never would have picked him to be a lackey.
Then again, he made sure to get that black magic necklace to me back at my pubertatum, didn’t he? So working with Carol can’t be new for him. Unless . . .
Desmond Wilde was a friend of my dad’s. And my dad doesn’t always live in the here and now, but he’s never been a fool. If he thought they were friends, they were. They researched the secrets of the fabulae and the crows together when doing so was traitorous—and the Joywood have always been fans of swift and brutal “justice.”
Why would anyone risk it if they didn’t believe in what they were doing?
But then Desmond had a sudden change of heart. And followed that up with an affair with my mother and a lifetime of cravenly jockeying for status, which isn’t the same thing as power. It’s nothing but the appearance of power.
It makes me wonder if the thing that changed Desmond was Carol all along.
“You were a mistake, you know,” he says to me, examining his hands, clearly expecting that almost casual comment to rip me to shreds.
But I laugh. “Shocking! A child from an affair was a mistake? Imagine that.”
He gazes at me with those empty black eyes. Like a living corpse. Like a Joywood zombie. In spite of myself, I have to fight to restrain a shudder.
“I should never have let your mother keep you.”
“So why did you?”
He frowns a little, as if he’s not sure why. As if he doesn’t quite remember.
Definitely a Joywood zombie, I think.
He indicates the cave with a tilt of his head. “Go on then. Have a look. Learn all the secrets of the Joywood.”
I laugh again in spite of the fear moving through me. “Yeah, I’ll go ahead and skip right into the cave of evil while you watch.”
I call out to my real dad and my coven, but there’s only an echoing silence.
And Desmond’s smirk.
He moves closer to me. That’s when I realize I have nowhere to go except into the cave.
I try to reach out to Azrael too. Maybe we’re at odds. Maybe we don’t—can’t—agree. Maybe the real future for us is finally not indulging in the love our souls were meant to feel.
But I am not going to die here at the hands of Desmond Wilde without trying to get help.
“You can’t reach them,” he tells me, with fake pity. “Not your sad, illegitimate father outside. Not your friends performing their little farce. They think all is well, and they’ll keep thinking that until it’s too late.”
He smiles wide, and if I’m not mistaken, lets out the faintest little . . . titter.
And that’s how I know.
This is not Desmond. This is Carol. I know it.
So with no warning, I lash out. I shoot a blast of magic power that should knock Desmond over—
But he’s not Desmond. Not totally.
His power is greater—stronger—and he doesn’t even budge from the blow. Instead, he throws out a blast of his own.
And it has me skidding back, perilously close to the cave. I fight it with everything I’ve got, but it’s all-encompassing. It’s all over me.
Thick and black and oily.
It’s like that river sucking me under, but this time it’s pushing me into a cave, into black, into evil. And I’ve already spent so much energy just trying to get here.
We battle on in the same way. I manage some decent blows, but I never knock him back. And while I block some of what he throws my way, I am inching closer and closer to being thrown in that cave that throbs with evil.
I have one foot in, one foot out. I’m holding on to the side of the opening to keep the blast from taking me all the way in. Everything in me is flagging—every ounce of strength, power, magic.
It’s a renewable resource, and mine has been depleted.
I guess this is me dying horribly again, I say in my head, going for a little rueful gallows humor here at the end.
Because hey, at least I know I’ll come back.
And I’m going to fight until I can’t.
I throw another blast at Desmond and grip the doorway with everything I’ve got. And as I do, I feel one of my fingers start to . . . heat. Like a strange, hot brand around my ring finger.
There’s a deep, distant rumble through the house, kind of like when I turned the key to open the archives.
But this is angrier.
It isn’t Carol-as-Desmond, because he looks up, shocked.
Then furious, and not in my direction.
With his attention diverted, I throw out what little magic I have left. It knocks into him, but at the same time, the roof seems to crash in on itself.
No. Not on itself.
Because a huge, pissed-off dragon crashes in and lands with a thud that rattles the entire foundation I’m standing on. I almost topple back into the cave, but I just barely manage to grab onto the wall and hold myself up.
Azrael.
Here.
In dragon form and breathing fire.
I’ve never loved him more.
Carol-controlled Desmond manages to hold off the fire blazing at him, barely. Azrael reaches forward with one fearsome claw and closes it around Desmond’s body with no trouble at all.
And he roars, loud enough and scary enough to make me believe very deeply in genetic memories, because I am certain no breakable creature on this earth can possibly be chill in the face of a dragon roar.
But that doesn’t mean I can let him do this.
I scramble forward. “You can’t kill him!”
Azrael sighs, a plume of smoke erupting from his mouth. He slides me a wild gold look as he gives Desmond a little shake. “You are forever saying that to me.”
Since I’ve said it all of twice now, I assume he means across our many lives. But I don’t have time to mine that notion. “Carol will only use it as proof that magical creatures are dangerous.”
The way he looks at me is downright ferocious. “We fucking are.”
“But you’re not evil, Azrael. You’re not black magic. And I . . .” I look at Desmond hanging limply in Azrael’s giant claw. “I’m not altogether certain he’s actually in there. I think Carol has some kind of mind control over him.”
Another round of smoke. “If she does, he let her.”
A terrible truth I can’t deny. But still . . . “We can’t give Carol more ammunition. Not until you’re all free.”
He sighs. Then, with a flick of his tail—which crashes through lamps and walls like they’re made of papier-mâché—magic erupts in the corner of the half-destroyed house. A statue appears, kind of like the dragon one in the cemetery. But instead of big and fearsome, this is a small and inconsequential little stone thing that looks like a naked rat.
He tosses Desmond’s limp body at it, and with another burst of magic, Desmond is gone. I realize that Desmond is now imprisoned like Azrael was.
Azrael takes his time turning that huge dragon’s head of his back to me.
And for a moment, we stare at each other across the wreckage of Carol’s once-pristine house.
My throat is so dry it hurts. “You came.”
He studies me with that golden dragon gleam. “Did you know they are broadcasting that tiresome fairy tale all the way across the river? Directly into the graves. And there’s no way to block it out.”
“I did . . . not.”
“Well, they are. And I heard you. Loud and clear. Then.” He looks at the looming cave full of books that must be full of Joywood secrets. “Now.”
That makes my throat feel tight.
He keeps going. “Then the rest of them. The Guardian. The Immortal. The Revelare and the Chaos Diviner. On and on about this love thing I apparently know nothing about. And maybe you are right, I don’t.”
That hits me even harder than any of Desmond’s blows, but there couldn’t possibly be a worse time.
“Azrael, I don’t have time to fight with you. I can’t do whatever this is.” I’d magic myself right out of here, but I don’t have the magical battery for it, and I need to deal with some evil books.
Not a moody dragon I needed days ago.
He scowls at me. “Your words freed me once, Georgina, but I suppose that was different. That was a very physical imprisonment. A curse. This time, it was my own choice.” He shimmers bright and hot, and then he is a man, and that makes everything in me ache. “Perhaps you were right, and I was selfish. I did not want to feel that pain again. It is unbearable.”
“Yes,” I say. “I know. I don’t have to remember. I feel it all the same.”
His face darkens, but it’s an intensity of emotion, not temper. I feel it inside me like a new storm. “I do not want to lose you. I cannot stand the thought, but you were right to call me out on how . . . I love you for the woman you are and always have been, always willing to be brave, to fight. You are special, but not just to me. In every time, you have been special to all who need you, and in this lifetime, like that damn crow lifetime, there are so many who need you.”
My heart catches in my throat.
“I know how to love, Georgina. It is all I know how to do when it comes to you. But I have never been given the chance to live and love. We have been torn from each other in every time, and always too fast. Too soon. More than once by crows. Yet if you are the teacher, Georgina, I have no doubt I can learn to be better. To love you for who you are without fear. And maybe I can even learn to forgive. If it will save the world. If it will give me you, who must save the world.”
My breath comes out a little shaky. I’m beyond tired. My magic is down to zero. I need so many things, but mostly I just need him.
I always need him.
Just for a moment.
I move forward and rest against his huge, hot body. I lean my forehead against the broad wall of his chest. “Azrael, we have to do the saving of the world part first.”
“I have called in reinforcements.” He nudges me toward the cave. “What do your books tell you?”
