Flames, page 17
“No!” I dragged Naelen closer to Olsen’s throne. By now, sweat was pouring down my face. “If there’s a way to save him, tell me what it is. Besides, I have a monocle that can undo magic. I never tried it on any of the objects, but maybe it would work on them. Maybe I could destroy the objects completely once Jacques was tied to them again.”
“Stop saying his name,” hissed Olsen. “You make him stronger when you do.”
“Tell me how to save Naelen,” I said. “Please, I’ll do anything you want.”
“Mostly I want you to go away,” said Olsen. He held out his hand. “Let me see this monocle you speak of.”
I took it out of my shirt and held it up. “See?”
“I want to hold it, slayer. Give it to me.”
“No,” I said. “How do I know you’ll give it back?”
“I’ll take it from you if you don’t hand it over,” he said, standing up.
So, I gave it to him, but I didn’t like it. I only knew that I needed this man’s help and that I couldn’t afford to make him so angry that he didn’t do anything for me. I had to agree to his requests because he had all the power.
Olsen put it up to his eye. “Hmm,” he said. “Where did you get this?”
“Do you see anything when you look through it?” I asked. “Because it usually only works for me.”
“I see,” he said. “I see the threads of magic. Where did you get it?”
“From a reindeer,” I said. “I mean, sort of. It’s a long story.”
Olsen handed it back to me. “It might work. If you can get the fiend into the objects, I think you’ll be able to dismantle them entirely. But I don’t think the monocle will have any power left in it after you do something so arduous.”
“I won’t need it if the objects are gone,” I said. “So, does that mean you’ll help me?”
“You’ll need to make a potion,” said Olsen. “You’ll need the flesh of a dragon, a bloom from the rose of the grave of Eire Prescott, ice from Canthe, Alaska, and rock from the active volcano of Scray in Ecuador.”
“Who’s Eire Prescott?” I said. “And where are those places?
“Eire is the mage who first locked the fiend in the objects. The places are the sites of portals to the world that he comes from.”
“Okay,” I said. “I guess that makes sense. How do I find this stuff? Where’s Eire’s grave?”
“I don’t know exactly,” said Olsen. “I just know that those are the ingredients you’ll need.”
“And what do I do with them?”
“You make them into a potion,” said Olsen. “You mix them together and you whisper an incantation over them. And then you make Naelen drink the potion. If he won’t drink, you can also pour the potion into his eyes, nose, and ears.”
I licked my lips. “And then he’ll be okay?”
“Well, then the fiend will be gone from his body,” said Olsen.
* * *
“So, um, how long are you going to keep him locked up?” said Gordon in a quiet voice.
Naelen and I were back on the plane. He was going crazy saying he needed to get flesh, needed to make an offering, so I’d locked Naelen in the bedroom. Now he was banging on the door and screaming to be let out.
I eyed the pilot. “Shouldn’t you be, you know, flying the plane?”
“We’re in the air now, we’re fine. Taking off and landing are the tough parts,” he said. “It’s only that I’m a bit concerned, Ms. Gannon. I know that you and Mr. Spencer are close, and that he’s been flying you all over the world for nearly a year, but the truth is that he’s really my employer, not you. I’m supposed to do what he says. And he’s saying he wants to be let out of that room, so…”
“He’s not himself,” I said. I peered around Gordon at the door to the cockpit. “Can we go talk while you’re sitting in the pilot’s seat or something? I mean, what if we run into a flock of birds?”
“We’re not going to run into anything,” said Gordon. “I think I need to let him out.”
“No,” I said. “No. You can’t do that. Naelen is locked up for everyone’s safety. Right now, he’s dangerous.”
“He doesn’t sound dangerous. He sounds desperate.” Gordon put his hands in his pockets. “Maybe you two had a fight or something, but that doesn’t give you the right to keep him there. And what are you going to do with him? You’re a slayer, and he’s a dragon—”
“I’m trying to help him,” I said. “He’s been possessed with the spirit of an evil mage. He’s not himself.”
“Possessed?” said Gordon.
“Trust me,” I said. “I would never hurt Naelen. I’m working on a way to cure him.”
Gordon did not look convinced.
“Trust me,” I insisted.
“I want to trust you, Ms. Gannon,” he said. “I really, really do.” And then he went back to the cockpit.
* * *
Thank goodness for Naelen’s laptop, which he had on the plane, and thank goodness for the Internet, because otherwise I wouldn’t have had any idea how to find Eire’s grave. But I found a website that gave me information about which cemetery he was buried in and how to find the grave.
We touched down in Charleston, South Carolina. I left Naelen back on the plane with Gordon. Naelen had fallen into a sullen silence after I’d ignored his pleas to be let out. I could only hope he was resting and not morphing into Jacques. As difficult as he was to work with now, I was sure he’d be even worse when there wasn’t a shred of Naelen in the driver’s seat at all. I needed to work as fast as I could.
I rented a car and drove to a Briarwater Cemetery, where I found the grave tucked in a corner without a headstone. All that was there was a little stone square that had been buried in the ground. It was engraved with an E for Eire. Right next to the stone square was a rose bush in full bloom. I cut two of the blossoms from the bush. I figured that way I’d have one and a spare. Then I drove back to the plane.
When I arrived, Gordon was pacing nervously in front of the bar.
“Gordon,” I said, “what’s going on? Usually, you keep to yourself. We never even see you back here.”
“Well, I can’t handle listening to him,” said Gordon. “He’s been begging me to take those cuffs off him, and I don’t understand why you’ve got him in them in first place.”
“I told you, he’s possessed.”
“What did you do to him that he can’t get himself out of a simple pair of handcuffs?” said Gordon. “He’s a dragon, for God’s sake. Honestly, the one thing that’s been stopping me from helping him is knowing that you subdued him somehow, and that if I go against you, you’ll come after me.”
“Oh, geez, Gordon, you’re not scared of me, are you?” I said.
He studied his knuckles. “Well, I didn’t used to be. But what did you do to him?”
“It’s the cuffs. They block magic. If you take them off, he’ll be insanely powerful, and neither of us will be able to stop him. Promise me you won’t take them off.”
“What will you do to me if I do?”
“I won’t need to do anything,” I said. “The thing in Naelen will hurt you.”
He didn’t look convinced.
“Promise me,” I said.
He didn’t say anything.
I sighed. “Gordon, what can I do to convince you?”
He looked down at his toes. “Don’t worry about it. I believe you.”
“You do?”
He nodded. “Yeah, I do. I can’t think why you’d hurt him. I know you two care about each other.”
Oh, good, he was being reasonable. “Thank you.”
He nodded again. “Not a problem.”
“All right, listen, next we need to go all the way to Ecuador. I need to get as close to this active volcano called Scray as I can.”
Gordon rubbed his face. “Okay, I guess I can do that.”
“You can do it,” I said.
He went back to the cockpit and we took off.
I pressed the two blossoms into a notebook and hid them in the back of a little closet near the cockpit.
I sat down in one of the swivel chairs and peered out the window. I felt exhausted. The only thing keeping me going right now was the hope that I could fix Naelen. If I could get him back, then everything could be okay. Maybe this nightmare would be over. Finally.
Now I knew that I didn’t care about the stupid mating bond. If he had it, fine. We could deal with that. What I couldn’t deal with was losing him for real. I needed to save him. My life without Naelen would be bleak and sad.
It was a struggled to keep my eyes open, and as the plane soared through the air, I began to nod off. I kept trying to force myself to keep my eyes open, but it was no use. Soon, I was tugged off to dreamland.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
I awoke to the sound of throaty male screams. “Naelen?” I was on my feet in seconds, brandishing the knife I’d gotten from Logan’s place.
But the door to the bedroom was open.
“Naelen,” I said again.
No response.
Carefully, I tiptoed across the plane to peer into the room. No one was in there.
Screams again. They were coming from the front of the plane, from the cockpit. Shit. Gordon.
I ran up to the cockpit and tore open the door.
The first thing I saw was blood. I smelled it too, the coppery tang against my nostrils. It smelled like sweat and fear. The person who was screaming was Gordon. He was in his pilot’s chair and his hands were high above his head, pinned to the wall. He was missing both ring fingers from each hand. They’d been bisected at the knuckle.
Naelen was standing over him with a knife.
“Naelen!” I said. “You can’t mutilate the pilot!”
“I had to, Clarke,” said Naelen. “It’s what Jacques needs. I can’t stop myself.”
Gordon looked up at me. “I’m sorry,” he said, his face full of agonized pain. “I should have listened to you.”
I turned to Naelen. “How’d you get out of the cuffs?”
“Gordon let me out,” said Naelen. “Once I knew you were asleep, I called for him softly.”
I rounded on Gordon, angry. “But you promised not to do what he said.”
Gordon gritted his teeth. “Yeah, well, he’s my employer.”
“I did threaten his job,” Naelen said.
I dragged my hands over my face. “Oh my God.” I took a deep breath. “Gordon, where are the cuffs?”
“Yeah,” said Naelen, “those are gone. I threw those out of the plane. You’re not going to see those again.”
I pointed at him. “Out of the cockpit. You got what you wanted. You got your fingers. Now get out.”
Naelen opened his mouth to say something, but then he closed it. Hanging his head, he left the cockpit.
Gordon’s hands were freed from above his head as Naelen left. He collapsed against the pilot’s chair, moaning.
I knelt down next to him. “Your fingers. Are they here?” I knew sometimes, if you made it to the hospital fast enough, they could reattach things.
“He b-burned them,” said Gordon. “Said they were a sacrifice.”
Well, there would be no reattaching of Gordon’s fingers. I shook my head. “I’m so sorry. I’m really sorry.” I snatched his chin and gazed into his eyes, pouring magic into him. “You don’t remember any of that. You don’t remember what Naelen did to you. You had a terrible accident, and you lost your fingers, but you’re calm now, and you don’t feel any pain, and you’re going to tell me where the first aid kit is.”
Gordon let out a gasp. He shut his eyes. “Oh, the pain’s fading.”
“I expect you’re in shock,” I said.
“The first aid kit is…” He opened his eyes. “Above our heads.”
I tried to smile at him, but I couldn’t quite manage it. Instead I patted him reassuringly on the shoulder. “We’re going to get you patched up.” I took a deep breath as I took down the first aid kit. “You’re going to be okay.”
Luckily, I’d been hurt a lot as a dragon slayer, and I’d patched myself up more times than I could count. My sister had come home pretty messed up from vampires too, and I’d put bandages on her. Of course, she was a drake, and she healed pretty quickly, but she still relied on me to make sure that she didn’t scar, so that was experience I could call on. I wrapped each of his wounded fingers and got him cleaned up.
There was blood in the cockpit. I cleaned that up too.
During all this, Gordon was cheery. He even kept apologizing for being so clumsy.
I hated compulsion sometimes. But it was necessary. I couldn’t have Gordon freaking out about Naelen, not when we still needed him to land the plane.
I told Gordon to do that as soon as he could. He needed medical attention. “Tell me we’re not over the ocean or something.”
“Oh,” said Gordon. “Yeah, about that. Naelen made me switch course.”
“What?” I said.
“Sorry,” said Gordon. “I mean, the good news is, we were heading north, so I’m still over the United States right now. I can land anywhere.”
I clenched my hands into fists. “Land the damned plane.” I stalked out of the cockpit to find Naelen. “You told him to change course?”
Naelen was sitting in one of the swivel chairs. “I had to appease Jacques, Clarke. He doesn’t want you to try to put him back in the objects. He won’t let you do that.”
I sunk my hands into my hair.
Naelen furrowed his brow. “Why are we losing altitude?”
“I told Gordon to land the plane so that he could go to a hospital,” I said. “I bandaged him up, but it’s not good enough.”
“Well, damn,” said Naelen. “Where are we?”
“I don’t know,” I said.
“Find out,” he said. “I can find us another pilot if I know where we are.”
“And leave Gordon stranded here?”
“Gordon’s a big boy,” said Naelen. “Besides, I’m sure he’d rather not spend too much more time with me now.”
“Well, I compelled him to forget it all.” It wouldn’t last forever, of course. As soon as we parted ways with Gordon, he’d remember. That was the way normal compulsion worked.
Naelen smiled at me. “Good girl. See? This could work. We could do this.”
“What are you talking about?”
“It’d be like it was before. You and me on the road, flitting from place to place.”
“Except instead of helping people, we’d be cutting off their fingers? No thank you.”
* * *
Naelen was true to his word. Before I was finished packing Gordon off on the ambulance, he had another pilot waiting for us at the plane.
I argued with him in the darkness on the tarmac. In the distance, there was a big passenger plane rolling down a runway to take off, its lights blinking against the night sky. Well, technically, it was early morning now.
“Look, I don’t want another pilot,” I said, “not unless the pilot is going to allow me to fly to the places that I need to go to in order to gather things for the potion I need to make.”
Naelen rubbed my shoulder. “I want us to go somewhere and relax. We need to reconnect.”
“No,” I said. “We don’t.”
We went back and forth for a bit, but in the end, I gave in to him, because it was better to have access to a private plane than not, and because I couldn’t very well leave Naelen alone. God knew what he would do if he didn’t have me to rein him in. I wasn’t sure exactly how I was going to do it, but I was going to convince this new pilot to take me where I wanted to go, and I was going to make this potion and get my Naelen back.
But once inside, the pilot took off, taking Naelen’s instructions for our destination, whatever those had been. I flopped down on one of the swivel chairs and contemplated my next move. I had lost the cuffs. Naelen had thrown them out of the plane. I could contain him by ripping out his magic, but that didn’t last forever, and I was exhausted. I needed to rest if I was going to have any hope of taking him on.
Naelen strode across the room in his bathrobe. “I’m going to take a shower,” he said.
“Of course you are,” I said darkly. There was a shower on the plane, but we only used it when we didn’t have access to a shower at a hotel or something, which wasn’t often. Naelen was under the influence of Jacques’s cleanliness obsession, and he couldn’t stop taking showers.
He smiled at me, and his voice dropped in pitch. “You should join me.”
I gaped at him. “You can’t be serious. You think I’m the least bit attracted to you right now?”
He considered. “Yes?”
I slumped further into the chair. The last thing I needed right now was Naelen’s typical cockiness. Because I happened to be rather susceptible to it, and I didn’t want to be attracted to him right now. He wasn’t himself.
He came over and braced his hands on either arm of the swivel chair. “Clarke,” he said in a husky voice, “I feel better now. The sacrifice drove Jacques back. It’s me.”
I put my hands on his chest and shoved him. “Get away from me.” Because this close, I could smell him, and he was masculine and appealing, and the robe bared a tantalizing sliver of his skin that pointed toward tempting parts of his body.
He absorbed the impact of the shove and grabbed my hands with his. He kissed me.
I pulled away. “Naelen, I’m serious. Don’t.” I was begging him. If there was any part of him that was still my Naelen, he needed to hear the desperation in my voice and honor it.
He tugged me up out of my chair and pulled me after him into the bedroom. “Come on, Clarke. Tell me a shower doesn’t sound good.”
I struggled out of his grasp. “I’m not taking a shower with you.”
He shrugged. “Suit yourself.” He crossed the room to the bathroom and went inside, leaving the door open. He turned on the shower tap and reached out to test the temperature. He looked over his shoulder at me, grinning. “It’s been too long, beautiful. I miss touching you. You miss touching me too.”
