Dragon Knight (The Collegium Book 3) (11 page)

Lewis reappeared in Morag’s chamber. In clarity of sight, his body appeared as silver crystal. The energy that ran through his blood sparked and lit. Beyond his body, the chamber opened like fractal flowers, layering one upon the other. Each was infinite, each contained. The Deeper Path balanced paradox as a doorway.

He had travelled to a beach in Australia. It had been winter there; the empty stretch of sand home to a small flock of seagulls that combed the beach or flew low over the cobalt-blue water. But he’d seen deeper than that. He’d seen the silver pull of gravity on the waves and on the birds’ flight. He’d seen the silver spirals that led out and in and away. Possibilities. Gateways to other galaxies.

They were everywhere. He could see them in Morag’s home. Everywhere was just next door.

He stepped into the silver light and into the presidential office in the Collegium: his office, although he felt no ownership of it.

Practice with Morag had strengthened his clarity of sight, and he saw the intricate pattern of the magic laid into and over his office. They were protections, but also the oath ties each mage swore to the Collegium when they joined it. So much magic centered on his office.

Lewis’s heartbeat remained steady. As much power as the office held, it was irrelevant on the Deeper Path. That required only to see truly. Not to lose focus, but to hold to the intellectual, dimensional insight. He had so much to learn.

He returned to Morag’s chamber and released his clarity of sight. Color returned faintly to the world. The white opal colors of the walls, ceiling and floor confirmed that he was back in his three dimensional, old world.

“Thank you,” he said to Morag.

The dragon lay near Gina’s armchair. “You are a most satisfactory student.” One of the dragon’s black tentacles stretched and touched Gina’s knee. “Go home, now. It is enough for today. Time is a dimension even the Deeper Path must respect, and we have used hours of it. Rest.”

Gina smiled at Morag. “It’s not me who tested its power.” She looked at Lewis, and away. “But I am tired.”

She stood, and just that simply, Morag translocated them to the closet under the main staircase in Gina’s house.

He opened the door of it and walked out. The space was too small to complicate with polite gestures such as inviting Gina to exit first.

She closed the door behind her, glancing across to where a grandfather clock stood in the hallway. “Nearly one o’clock. Would you like a hot drink or anything?” The offer sounded reluctant.

“No. Thank you.” He needed sleep. His physical body was exhausted and his brain had to switch off consciousness so it could do whatever mysterious thing brains did to process the day. Acting in five dimensions rather than three was not natural to him. Do-able, but alien. He concentrated on one foot in front of the other. Wry humor darted the thought that it would be easier to translocate than to climb the stairs. He put his hand to the bannister. “Goodnight.”

“Goodnight, Lewis.” Gina’s voice trailed him up the stairs before her footsteps faded in the direction of the kitchen, evidence that she’d stayed to watch him.

He reached the guest room, set the alarm on his phone, undressed and slept.

Hot milk with cinnamon, vanilla and honey warmed Gina up physically, but emotionally she felt cold. She rinsed the empty mug and walked upstairs, avoiding the creaking eleventh step out of habit.

One of the benefits of her home’s powerful wards was that she never had to physically secure the house. That meant she could leave the windows open to allow in the sea air and the scents of her garden. However, when she sniffed now, the scent that came to her was that of a summer fog rolling in. She sent out her house witchery in a gentle push of magic that silently closed all windows.

Her muscles were stiff from sitting for hours watching Lewis learn from Morag. She pulled on a lilac satin chemise and crawled into bed. Twenty minutes of concentrated relaxation exercises had her muscles relaxing but her emotions remained disturbed.

She couldn’t let go of what Morag had said: humans were instinctively inclined to give and receive comfort. How human were you, then, when you relinquished those emotional and sensory ties to walk the Deeper Path?

All she had ever wanted was to follow her aunt Deborah and discover worlds beyond Earth. To walk among alien people and on alien planets had been her dream. Her repeated failure to attain clarity of sight had crushed her…but now, for the first time she
felt
the price clarity of sight and the Deeper Path demanded. It meant renouncing her place on Earth and among humanity. She would lose the bonds of family and friendship.

Aunt Deborah was part of the family, but she wasn’t emotionally close to any of them. Had she known and chosen that distance?

Would Lewis think the sacrifice of the core of passion in him worth the Deeper Path?

Gina lay in bed and remembered his kiss. She remembered the taste of him, the feel of his body and how he’d looked that evening, walking up to her with his skin shiny with water and salt, the muscles clearly defined, the banked desire in his eyes.

She flipped over to lie on her stomach and bury her face in a pillow. It was worse than pointless to think of him. She could guarantee he wasn’t lying there thinking of her.

The pillow smelled of lemon and sunshine from the soft bleaching she’d given the old linen. Breathing in the familiar scent, her heart beat steadied, her flushed skin cooled and she sighed for how messy life could be.

The clash of her house ward being tested woke Gina jarringly. She sat up, momentarily disoriented. Her bedside clock said not quite four in the morning. The sky outside was dark. The particular smothering quality of the darkness suggested the fog had not only rolled in, but stayed.

From the heart of the fog came a roar, not animalistic or even demonic. It was the roar of fire.

Gina leapt out of bed.

Gina ran out of her room and straight into Lewis who stood, bare-chested but with his jeans on, just outside her door.

“Fire mage,” he said briefly.

She pushed back from him, fingers splayed against his chest. She let her fingertips rest there a moment, keeping her balance, as she closed her eyes and used mage sight to check her wards.

The mage had crossed her home’s outer perimeter with its look-away spell and maze ward set about fifty meters from her actual land. The wards were intended to distract people who weren’t actively looking for her. That meant, she was his intended target.

Or Lewis was.

She opened her eyes, staring into Lewis’s dark ones.

Flames outside sent an orange light dancing in the windows, magnified by its reflection off the fog. The mage had ringed her house in fire.

“The mage hasn’t made it across the house’s boundaries,” she said. “The wards against evil and evil intent are unbroken.” And her house witchery instincts told her she was stronger than the fire mage. “But I don’t want someone seeing through the look-away spell and detecting the fire. My family could.” And some of her family, like her cousin Angela, might be out and about. Hospitality businesses, like the bakery, meant strange and inconvenient hours of work. If her family saw her in trouble, they’d rush to the rescue.

“Where is the mage?” Lewis asked.

“To the side of the house, back behind the dogwood, trying to take the side path in. I have to stop the fire before someone notices it.” She called on her house witchery and the magic came eagerly, almost as if it, too, was affronted and outraged at this attack on her home. She channeled it as she would have if dousing any other fire, whether hot oil catching fire in the kitchen or a bonfire escaping control out in the yard.

Her magic descended in a smothering torrent on the ring of fire around the house. The glare of orange firelight vanished.

The fire mage definitely wasn’t as strong as Gina. She felt him attempt to reignite the flames, and her house witchery walloped him, beating him hard, once, as if he was a carpet that needed freeing from decades of dust. He staggered, attempted to relight the fire, failed, and began to run towards the beach.

“He’s in retreat,” she told Lewis. “Heading for the beach.”

Lewis ran.

“Damn. Hell. Damn.” She’d forgotten Lewis’s training and instincts. Of course he’d run towards the threat, even without magic. Unless more had happened in the training session with Morag than Gina had observed, Lewis couldn’t use the Deeper Path yet to replace his magical skills. He’d be facing a fire mage—and who knew what back-up—as a mundane. “To hell with it.”

Gina’s house witchery unlaced the hammock from its comfortable span between two trees, whistled it through the air and bound the fire mage thoroughly, toppling him to the ground. Then she leaned against the wall and concentrated on perceiving any other intruders. She wasn’t used to expending her magic in such violent and high adrenaline ways. She could hear her pulse thudding in her ears.

It seemed the mage had arrived alone. There was no one on the beach or in a near radius of her home. Her scan blipped. No one conscious. Just beyond her outer perimeter, in the treehouse inside her neighbor’s yard, there was a huddled heap of humanity.

Gina raced downstairs.

The fog was damp and cold and rolling in the open front door. She snatched a coat from the rack and shrugged it on. She met Lewis on the bottom step.

He had a hammock-bound fire mage slung over one shoulder.

“Should you be carrying him?” Her worried question slipped out before she could reflect that Lewis might resent the slur on his ability to protect himself.

“I knocked him unconscious first,” Lewis said laconically. He dumped the man none too gently on the porch and straightened.

Gina stared at the mage’s unconscious sprawl. It reminded her…“Would your Collegium send someone down here to watch over you?” She couldn’t read Lewis’s expression in the dark, so she flicked on the porch light.

Ah.

She flicked off the light. Apparently the Collegium could and would send someone to watch over, a euphemism for “to spy on”, its president, and Lewis was not happy about it. “There’s an unconscious body behind in my neighbor’s treehouse. The treehouse is elaborate and unused now that the kids are at college, and I’m guessing your…watcher chose it as their base to try and observe things here, and the fire mage got the jump on them.”

“Got the jump on a guardian, but not on you.” Lewis’s tone was neutral.

She shoved her hands into the pockets of her coat. Her toes were freezing on the cold boards of the porch. “Everyone underestimates house witches.”

“You like it that way.” Just a hint of amusement in his voice, warming it.

Something in her relaxed. “Do you want to retrieve your guardian?”

“Not particularly. But I’ll check that whoever it is lives.” He ghosted off the porch.

Gina looked at the shadowy lump that was the unconscious fire mage. She’d never had a prisoner before. What was the protocol? She didn’t want the intruder inside her house.

She went inside and upstairs to dress quickly. It was bliss to her poor toes to slip on warm socks. She laced up her sneakers and ran back downstairs.

“You must be freezing,” she said to Lewis.

He’d returned and stood on the porch. He’d found the porch light and switched it on. “It is cold,” he said absently, attention on the fire mage.

Gina rolled her eyes.

“This one’s awake,” he added.

“Are you sure?” She stared at the mage.

Lewis didn’t bother to answer her. He crouched beside the man playing possum. “The guardian you coshed has some questions and he’s unlikely to be overly particular about how he gets those answers. He has a worse headache than you.”

The mage’s eyes opened. “I doubt that.”

“Who hired you and for what purpose?”

Gina had met fire mages before. They tended to be flamboyant.

But whatever bravado this one usually exhibited, it shriveled in the face of Lewis’s glare. Or perhaps the man’s headache really was that bad. He confessed instantly. “Don’t know names. A guy came up to me in a bar. He didn’t feel like he had magic, but he knew I did. He knew my name, my game.”

“And what is your game?”

The man wriggled.

“You call flame,” Lewis said. “And I’m dumping you in the ocean.”

The fire mage froze. “He said you were tough.”

Gina couldn’t believe it. “You’re an idiot. You took a job against the president of the Collegium.”

“No!” their prisoner yelped. “No. You can’t be.”

Lewis relaxed back on his heels, straightened and stood.

The fire mage’s words tumbled out in a jumble of self-exculpation. “The guy at the bar said you were just some dude. He said that she was his wife and he wanted you taught a lesson. That’s what I do.”

“You terrorize women,” Lewis clarified. The flatness of his voice was scary.

“Nah. I go after the ones that stray.”

Gina tightened the hammock around the man, eliciting a protesting squawk.

“Before you dispose of him…” Lewis put a detaining hand on her arm. He studied the fire mage. “Why didn’t you take the presence of a guardian watching the house as a hint that you were in over your head?”

Good question.
Gina released the ropes enough for the man to answer.

“Because I was paid a crap load of money.”

Lewis took his hand off her arm. “Go ahead.”

Her anger gave her magic a boost. The fire mage shot up in the air and sailed out over the ocean. There was a loud splash. The hammock returned, dry, to the house and folded itself neatly by the top step.

Lewis got out his phone and snapped an order into it. “Collect the fire mage from the sea. He can be your gift to Kora when you tell her I won’t be in today.” He clicked off the phone.

“I don’t have an ex-boyfriend who would do this,” she said, ignoring the command to the injured guardian, and, for now, the interesting information that Lewis’s plans had changed.

He ignored her comment on the quality of her ex-boyfriends. “This was the Group of 5. They joined the dots. Obvious when you think about it.”

“Pardon? No, wait. You have to be freezing.” His naked chest kept distracting her. “I’ll make coffee while you grab a shirt.” Neither of them would get any more sleep that night.

“Breakfast,” Lewis said.

She blinked at him. “Now?”

“I’ll make toast.” He moved towards the kitchen. “What are Morag’s sleeping patterns? How soon can I visit her? I’d like to return to the dragon’s den as soon as possible to practice the Deeper Path. The sooner my translocation is confident, the sooner I can progress to more useful things.”

“Translocation is useful.” It was too early for the noise of grinding fresh coffee beans. Gina took ground beans from the freezer and measured them into the coffee maker.

“Translocation is nothing compared to the magic I used to have. Last year, I could have handled the fire mage.”

“I didn’t see your lack of magic slow you down.”

“But you had to defend us. You did a good job.”

She felt a small glow of pride. A compliment like that from the former commander of the guardians was like winning gold.

“So, when can I visit Morag again?” he pushed.

“Any time, as long as you’re prepared to wait for her attention.”

He nodded, apparently satisfied, and investigated the bread box. “It’s empty!”

She looked away from her intense study of the coffee maker. Coffee, the necessity of life. “It happens. I’m a house witch, not a miracle worker.”

“Sorry. It wasn’t a complaint. You’re so Zen in the kitchen, I just expected…when does your cousin’s bakery open? I’ll get us both breakfast.”

She had to smile. His was a good apology. “I intended to visit the bakery this morning, myself. Hence the lack of bread. How about an English breakfast? Porridge and a fry-up?”

“That’s too much trouble.”

“Not once I’ve had coffee.”

He took her at her word. “I have a couple of phone calls to make.”

She’d bet he did, cancelling engagements for the day. His schedule would be a nightmare. “Thirty minutes.”

He retreated, and she sipped coffee and puttered around the kitchen. The radio played old show tunes and it was a gentle, almost pleasant start to the day, if she ignored the situation with the fire mage that had woken them.

The fresh raspberries were tart and sweet with the creamy oatmeal. Gina ate her bowl standing by the stove and watching sausages spit, the bacon sizzle and halved tomatoes caramelize.

Lewis entered and ate a bowl of oatmeal, sans raspberries or sugar.

He ate it fast, which gave Gina a suspicious thought. “You don’t like oatmeal, do you?”

“It’s filling.” He scraped the bowl clean.

She cracked two eggs and fried them sunny-side-up before sliding most of the fry-up onto Lewis’s plate, and a smaller serving of bacon and tomato onto her own. “So…”

He picked up his knife and fork.

“Can you explain how you think the Group of 5 tracked me back to my home?” She intended to start her own search of the internet for answers, but if Lewis had a starting point for the search, she’d take it.

“Yeah.” He ate some bacon. “I think they ignored your cyber identity and put together the real world facts—or the facts as they know them. Our cover story is that you’re my girlfriend. They added up that, plus your software consultancy and concluded you were a likely person to be pursuing them.”

She considered that. It made obvious sense, except for one point. “I’m not a guardian.” She couldn’t find a more tactful way to register the underlying issue: would Lewis put a genuine girlfriend at risk of the Group of 5’s attention?

No, that was unfair. He had tried to get her to retire from chasing them once she’d reported how swiftly the unknown fifth member of the group had come after her false identity online. He’d only requested her assistance in navigating the dark web because he thought it safe.

And how had she responded when he’d suggested she drop the case? With an emphatic “no”. Which, when she thought about it, was probably the likely response of any woman who got involved with Lewis. He wouldn’t hook up with a wimp.

“You handled the fire mage just fine,” he said. “Better than the guardian who was meant to be guarding me—and that’s something I’m taking up with Kora. A secret bodyguard who isn’t up to the job is worse than not having one.”

“Kora looked stressed,” Gina commented.

“She’s more stressed, now.”

“You woke her up?” She stared at him as tomato juice dripped from her suspended fork.

“Woke her up, informed her of her chosen guardian’s failure, and told her I won’t be in the office today and if she sends anyone else to spy on me, she’ll find they disappear.”

“You’d translocate them?” The tomato fell off her fork.