Tempest Reborn (15 page)

For the hut wasn’t as substantial as it had been. The first time I’d seen it, it had been so real. But now there was something gauzy about the earth piled up around the structure, and the wood looked less wood-like and more like a smooth plastic facsimile of wood. A bad facsimile.

Girding my loins, I strode forward. Something was weakening Anyan, I knew, and I knew what that something was … if only I could remember. I also knew I had to tell him something, that I was here to do something important. I tried to focus on my duties, but they swooped away like unladen swallows.

When I entered the hut, however, all thoughts besides relief were pushed out of my brain at the sight of the barghest, sitting quietly in front of the fire, watching it with sad eyes. Like the outside, the inside of the hut had lost some of its detail. The far side of the space loomed dark and empty, where once I knew there had been a back wall, full of shelves and sporting colorful paintings. The fire was still alive, though – bright and dancing, looking just like a real fire.

I came up behind the barghest and knelt, wrapping my arms around him.

‘Jane,’ he said, his voice thick with relief. I kissed the shell of his ear in response, and held him like that for a long while.

Eventually, he pulled me around and down into his lap. I cuddled up to him happily, but my nervousness increased when I saw his face. He looked tired, and wan, as if he were at the end of his rope. Trying to remember what it was that I had to ask him, I questioned him.

Stroking a hand down his face, I said, ‘You don’t look so good.’

Anyan shook his head, his dark curls flopping adorably. ‘Let’s not talk about it. Let me just look at you.’

And that’s what he did, the big softie. He studied me, as if memorizing every feature of my face. As he did so, I would have sworn the hut behind him grew a little more detailed, a little more solid.

But not as solid as it had been before.

‘What’s going on?’ I asked gently after quite a few minutes had passed.

‘Nothing,’ he said sadly. ‘But I’m glad you’re here.’

‘I’m glad, too,’ I said, squeezing around him like an overzealous chimp. We sat like that in silence for a few moments, but something kept niggling at me.

‘I’m supposed to tell you something,’ I said quietly into his ear. ‘But I can’t remember what it is.’

Anyan withdrew a bit, looking steadily into my eyes. When he spoke again, he did so carefully.

‘Is it about the White?’ he whispered. ‘I’m fighting him at every turn, but…’

Anyan was taking a risk saying his enemy’s name, but it did the trick. My memories, my charge, came back to me in sharp focus.

‘I’m dreaming,’ I whispered. ‘But you’re here. Why couldn’t I remember everything before?’

The barghest smiled, kissing my forehead gently. ‘It’s the nature of dreams, Jane. We leave ourselves behind, to recover from reality. I couldn’t remind you without risking him hearing, and I needed to see you, to be with you.’

‘You did the right thing, reminding me. Now this is important. Is he around yet?’ I whispered back, urgency lacing my voice.

Anyan closed his eyes, as if trying to sense something. ‘No,’ he said eventually. ‘But he will be here soon. I think he knows we meet now. I’ve not been able to keep your presence hidden.’

Leaning forward, I put my lips to Anyan’s sensitive ear, and spoke in the quietest voice I could.

‘Let him come,’ I said. ‘Let him come, and listen. Signal to me when he’s close. Do you understand?’

Anyan looked at me, his iron-gray eyes searching mine almost desperately.

‘You have a plan?’ he asked.

I nodded. Hope bloomed in those gray eyes then, and the hut around us throbbed with a burst of color. The fire blazed, warm and merry, and I knew what the trouble was.

Anyan had been losing faith in us. In me. He’d started to believe he’d never get out of this place.

‘Silly barghest,’ I said in his ear, pulling him toward me in a rough hug. ‘You’re mine now. I’m not letting you go.’

‘I know. I always knew. It’s just…’

‘It’s hard. Now I need to ask you a question before he comes. Is he here?’

Again Anyan sensed and then shook his head. ‘No.’

‘Why are they always dragons?’ I asked. We’d figured out battling the Red that when she was Morrigan-shaped, she was more Morrigan, and she was more Red when she was the dragon. Because both had their weaknesses, she’d fought us the last time as this scary dragon/Morrigan hybrid. Like a were-dragon. But ever since the White had been resurrected, they only ever showed up in dragon form.

And our plot hinged on the answer to that question.

‘It’s because of me,’ Anyan said, talking fast. ‘I weaken the White. Morrigan’s a willing host, so they can swap between her true form and the dragon’s. I’m a prisoner, trying to get free. It means the White can’t change. Presumably, if he went back into my shape, I might be able to turn the tables on him. As it is, I keep him distracted. Or at least I try. I’m not very effective,’ he admitted, and I thought of the times the White had tried to kill me and I nodded.

‘So your presence in the White’s mind handicaps him? Making Morrigan the more powerful one?’

Anyan nodded. ‘Yes.’

Plan B it was, then. That was the plan that depended on the White being the lame pony in this circus. We thought that was the case, but we had planned for every contingency.

Our voices had never risen to full volume, and we’d withdrawn enough to talk to each other’s faces, rather than in each other’s ears. But I cuddled forward again, loving that intimacy.

‘Well then,’ I whispered before giving Anyan’s earlobe a little nibble. ‘We need to distract ourselves until we have an audience. Whatever can we do to pass the time?’

With a growl, Anyan manhandled me onto my back, his lovely heavy body draping mine. We’d managed to entertain ourselves for a quite a while when Anyan stiffened. Stiffened more, I should say, and with his whole body. Not just his special parts.

‘He’s here,’ he murmured in my ear.

Show time
, I thought, and then I started talking. Plan B was in effect.

‘Are you certain he heard?’ Ryu asked as my dad passed me a second bagel smothered in cream cheese. I was still making up for those three days without food.

‘No,’ I told the baobhan sith, giving him an evil look as I started in on my second breakfast. I’d woken up on the wrong side of the bed after my dream-night with Anyan.

‘Jane,’ Ryu admonished, casting me an equally ill-tempered glare. I sighed.

‘Sorry, I’m just nervous as hell. But I’m serious, I don’t know if the White heard. I said everything I was supposed to say, and Anyan was sure the White was lurking around, but I can’t guarantee he heard, or listened, or cared.’

My dad leaned over my shoulder, patting my hand that rested on the handle of my coffee mug.

‘You did all you could, Jane,’ he said, turning back to Anyan’s big farmhouse sink to wash dishes.

Caleb, sitting next to me with the remains of his own breakfast, nodded. ‘And I doubt the White would waste such information, or be oblivious to it.’

‘But what if he knows it’s a trap?’ I asked, my voice small.

Iris piped up from where she sat across from Caleb, her voice like honeyed ice cream.

‘I don’t think they can risk assuming it’s a trap, any more than we could if we thought they were moving on a new weapon.’

Plan B hinged on the fact that the White was weaker than the Red. We needed to separate the two dragons, and we needed them as far away from each other as we could get them. The good thing about them being dragons, meanwhile, was they couldn’t communicate. Dragons had no pockets to hold a cell phone, and massive fuck-off claws made dialing difficult. So if we could get the Red and the White really far apart, we could work on the White, using the stone.

We could get Anyan back, and have a fighting chance at taking the Red.

The hard part, however, was not necessarily separating the two. The hard part was making sure they both went where we wanted them to.

In other words, we had to create two sets of ‘dangers’ that they’d have to split up to follow, only one had to be significantly less dangerous than the other. Presumably, they’d send the less powerful dragon, the White, after that group, and the Red would go after the more dangerous group.

As I qualified as ‘most dangerous’, being the champion, I needed to be Red bait. But we had to invent another story, equally compelling, after which the dragons would send the White. For if they both chased after me, we were fucked.

Not least because the creature had admitted it wasn’t sure it could apparate something as big as a dragon again, without serious consequences to itself. And we needed the creature for so many reasons.

‘I agree with Iris,’ Ryu said, interrupting my reverie. ‘They’ve got to check this threat out. And if I were them, I’d send someone after both of our groups to be safe.’

What I’d told Anyan, so that the White could overhear, was a mixture of facts and lies. The facts were that we’d learned of a stone that was an important ingredient in a process that could separate the White from Anyan. I lied, however, about the fact we already had it. Instead, I said that we’d only heard of it, and that it was located very far away, in China. We’d concocted a whole story about it being in the collection of the Communist regime, blah blah blah. We were sending a team to investigate.

The kicker was that the ritual involved a bunch of other stuff, which we had to prepare in Rockabill. That was the other lure – the one that would hopefully bring in the White, and that was baited with the power of the creature.

‘The second we get our hands on that stone,’ I’d told Anyan, my voice radiating excitement, ‘the creature will apparate me right back to Rockabill. And then we can start the ritual. We can take you back in seconds, just like they did.’

And that was my little personal pot sweetener. I’d gone over those last minutes in Whitby, when the Red had stolen Anyan from me, a thousand times. And they weren’t even
minutes
. It had taken only seconds for the Red to lash out that damnable tail of hers and send Anyan flying onto those bones. Another few seconds for her little chant to power up their mojo … and Anyan had been lost.

And it had been all an accident of fate. Everything had been going according to plan, or so it seemed, when Jarl had showed up, and everything was suddenly back in the Red’s hands. Er, claws. But then Jarl was dead and we were going to win…

Only we lost. Big time.

So that was why I said what I had to Anyan. I knew, after seeing what had happened in Whitby, that huge things could happen in seconds. And because of our connection with the creature and its power, it appeared like we had time on our side. The Red and the White didn’t know the creature actually had limits on its strength – all the dragons knew was that the creature could apparate either one of them at will.

And the Red and the White obviously knew the power of time, since they’d used it against us so well in Whitby.

If the White had heard me, which I had to have faith it did, it would know that all I had to do was lay a hand on that stone, and it and I could be back in Rockabill in seconds, starting this mysterious ritual I’d told Anyan about.

Which meant they had to send someone here, to make sure that ritual never got off the ground, at the same time they tried to keep me from reaching the stone.

Only, in reality, we already had the stone, and I wasn’t leaving Rockabill.

At that moment, we were distracted by the lady of the day coming down the stairs.

Magog walked down slowly, looking distinctly uncomfortable. She’d washed all the gel out of her jet-black hair, and combed it flat and straight. Iris had taken some scissors to round it off at the ends, and to give her some bangs. Her massive amounts of eye makeup were toned down, and she’d taken out her facial piercings. To cap off the ‘Jane’ look, she’d borrowed a pair of my jeans and my Converse.

If it weren’t for the wings, we could have been sisters.

Are you sure it’ll hide the wings?
I asked the creature, who sent a warm wave of assent through me.

[So completely no one will be able to sense the glamour. You just have to explain to it what you need it to do.]

I stood up from the trestle table, and walked toward Magog.

‘You look great,’ I told the raven before realizing how arrogant that sounded. ‘I mean, you look just like me. That’s good. We’ll only need to cover those wings and we’ll fool ’em.’

Magog nodded nervously. I wondered why she was so antsy till she asked her next question.

‘And you’re sure I can give it back?’ she said, her singsong Welsh accent prominent.

‘Of course. I’m just asking it to let you carry it, and to lend you some power. That’s all. It knows to come back to me when I call. Are you ready?’

The raven nodded, and I pulled the labrys.

It answered my summons, blazing forth in my hands as if it knew it was about to go on a mission. It probably did, actually, as it had become such a part of me.

Do I just talk to it?
I asked the creature. Again, it seemed to nod in my mind. So I stared at the labrys, and I mentally explained what we wanted it to do, feeling like a bit of a tit.

I felt less like a tit, though, when it shimmered in my hands, reappearing in one of Magog’s to our mutual surprise. It was eager to get this show on the road. A second later, while Magog was still looking down in shock at her new burden, the air shimmered around her.

When it cleared, I was standing there. A perfect simulacrum of me, down to the unique power signature I recognized as mine, now that it stood in front of me.

‘Wow,’ I said as I blinked at myself for a few seconds.

‘Weird,’ Gog said, walking up to his bedmate and love and peering down at her with an expression of curiosity mixed with a mild distaste I tried not to take personally.

‘All right,’ Daniel said. ‘Let’s move out. We’ve got a chopper ready to take us to the airbase. From there we go to a British carrier, where we will meet with an Alfar contingent from the Great Island to fill out our numbers. When we’re close, we’ll switch again to choppers. They’ll take us to our goal. The Chinese government is expecting us, and is allied with us in this mission.’