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28 February 1967
“Are you sure this is going to work? It seems somewhat—I don’t want to say naive, but perhaps reckless?—to base your plan to storm Western Europe’s most secure storage on a movie premise.” The Guardian named Patrice stood with Drake outside Suffrage House, eyeing its imposing white stone facade. Drake was under no illusion that the plan that had finally formed was not incredibly bizarre, but given the extensive precautions the Committee had taken over the last eight months after each of his attempts, he had little choice. It was this or go completely back to the drawing board.
“It will work so long as you can break all the wards and prohibitions,” he answered, checking his watch. They had two minutes before a handful of green dragons would start a distraction at the back entrance. “Do you have the demons you will need?”
“Not on me, but yes, they are ready for summoning.” The Guardian gave him an odd look. “I don’t know how you’re going to get through the lock; the peek I had at it last week was beyond daunting.”
“That reminds me, I must also reclaim the grimoire you used to get access to the vault,” Drake murmured to himself before addressing her statement. “Do not worry about the lock. It will yield to Mattio. He has trained for the last three hundred years, and there is no lock he cannot best.”
“Mm-hmm,” Patrice answered, but didn’t look convinced.
The slight explosion that Drake was expecting sounded then, causing him to settle into the glamour that changed his (very well-known) appearance. Taking Patrice’s arm, he escorted her into Suffrage House.
It took little time to find the cleaners’ closet on the basement floor that his sept members had found on one of many previous sweeps of the building—sweeps that were usually cut short as soon as the Watch realized who they were. With only a fast glance at the stairs that led down to the subbasement where the vault was located, he joined Patrice in the small, musty closet, carefully shutting the door in a way that left him able to open it from the inside.
“What now?” she asked him when he made himself comfortable on the floor while she perched on a upturned bucket.
“We wait for the offices to shut, and the building to go into its night routine,” he answered.
“You know, I saw that Audrey Hepburn movie, too,” Patrice said after a few minutes of silence, which Drake spent listening intently. “It was fun, but not very likely. Although I have to admit, the security people don’t seem to have noticed us entering. How many others have you stashed away throughout the building?”
“Several. They will have no direct impact on opening the vault, however.”
“Protection?” she asked.
He nodded, and resumed his stance of intense listening; his nerves jangled, and his dragon fire was unusually high.
Four hours and twenty minutes later, just when Drake had stood to relieve his cramped muscles, his watch made a tinny pinging sound.
“Hrm?” Beside him, Patrice jerked from where she’d slumped while dozing. “Is it time?”
“Yes,” Drake said, and, emerging from the closet, glanced down the empty hallway, dimly lit by a screened light.
They hurried toward the door that led downward, their footsteps hushed, but echoing nonetheless. Drake was aware of his kin around him, hidden in various spots throughout the interior of Suffrage House; even with that reassurance, his breath was quick, and his heart beat loudly in his ears.
“I guess it’s showtime,” Patrice said once they arrived in front of the heavy steel vault door.
Pal, István, and Mattio emerged from the far hallway at a run, but after a moment’s alarm, Drake relaxed. Their expressions were content, not worried.
Patrice summoned a demon, one in the form of a bored female in a large blond hairstyle that Drake recalled was referred to as a beehive. The demon chewed gum loudly as it argued with Patrice, but in the end, broke the prohibitions on the door while Patrice tackled the wards.
“The security system?” Drake asked Pal.
“Down,” he answered with a grin.
Patrice glanced over, having finished with the wards. “You disabled it? I thought the wires were protected by a housing that couldn’t be cut.”
“Cut? No. Melted, yes,” István said with grim satisfaction.
“Did you use some sort of a torch? I didn’t think such things got hot enough to affect the alarm housing,” she said, her gaze on the demon as it broke the last prohibition.
“Dragon fire can do much that mortal torches can’t,” István said with dignity. Drake, who was waiting, moved forward the instant the last prohibition melted into nothing, beckoning at Mattio.
“Ah. Yes. I see.” The dragon, who wore the same mildly befuddled expression as had his grand-mère’s mate, studied the lock. He was an elder, a good seven hundred years older than Drake, one who lived the life of a solitary scholar.
The fact that he was the best safe cracker in all the L’au-dela was not known to anyone outside the sept, and both Mattio and Drake were quite happy keeping it that way.
It took the dragon fifteen minutes before he managed to work his way through the many layers of mechanism, but at last the door was open.
“I’ll check it out first,” Drake said as he gestured at his men to remain behind. If there was a trap inside the vault, or something that posed a threat, he preferred to keep his kin safe.
Insert the vault, the air was slightly warm and resonant with the scent of old books, incense, and ... he tipped his head back and breathed deeply.
Gold. There was gold here.
His blood lit with dragon fire as he moved silently into the antechamber, aware of air circulating around him, a faint hum from overhead fluorescent lights, and the soft tapping of something wooden.
He strode past rows of metal cases, each labeled with the contents, everything from grimoires to diaries, a variety of objects that had been deemed by the Committee as too dangerous to be available to the mortal and immortal worlds, and even a few silver-chased cases bearing cursed items. Drake quickly scanned the labels of all the cases, but none were what he was looking for.
Carefully, he proceeded through the door to the next room, and came to a halt at the sight of a man—no, not a man, a spirit—who was surrounded by imps in tiny elaborate Edwardian dresses, complete with large hats and parasols.
“—if I’ve told you once, I’ve told you a hundred times that this scene is all about elegance. You need to get in that headspace! Let’s go over it again—you are at Ascot with all the other nobility. You are rich and above such things as being excited at horse races. You stroll—STROLL—around with slow, languid movements. Only Eliza leaps around when the horses pass by. Do you hear? Only Eliza! Now, let us try it again. Places! Wait—where is Eliza?”
Drake blinked once to make sure he hadn’t suddenly started hallucinating. The spirit jumped to his feet and stormed around calling for Eliza before he noticed Drake in the door.
“We’re closed,” the spirit told him.
“Indeed. And you are ... ?”
“Misha.” The spirit considered him sourly. “You’re a dragon.”
“I am Drake Vireo, wyvern of the green dragons,” he said with a bow.
Misha made a tsking sound in the back of his throat. “Here to be a bother, no doubt. Well, you can go away until the vault is open tomorrow morning. As you see, I have much to do, far too much for the sanity of one man. We have only three weeks before we’re due to be televised on Cavalcade of the Otherworld TV show, and the imps simply refuse to understand how this scene works. It’s as much as a spirit can stand, let me tell you. No, no, do not run to the railing to see the horses ... stroll. You know how to stroll, don’t you?”
Drake considered his options, decided that he didn’t have the time or inclination to find out why a vault keeper was evidently putting on a production of My Fair Lady with Australian House Imps, and instead simply gathered his dragon fire into his hands before directing it at the spirit’s head.
He caught a second of Misha’s surprised expression before the latter succumbed to the immediate drastic drop in the energy needed to keep himself in corporeal mode, and disappeared into nothing.
The imps cheered, and scattered to a series of what looked like elaborate dollhouses lined up against the far wall.
It took less than a minute to locate the lockbox containing the chalice. A few minutes of bathing the box in his fire had it crumbling into nothing, leaving inside a blackened, smoking silver box.
Drake extracted from it a golden goblet encrusted in emeralds. The scent of the gold damned near drove him to madness, but he tucked it away in the charred box and left the vault.
“The Voce di Lucifer,” he said two hours later when he, with Pal and István at his side, gently placed the chalice onto a shelf in his personal vault beneath his Paris house. It wasn’t as secure as his lair, but that was back in Hungary, and he very much wanted to enjoy his new acquisition for a while before it had to be hidden away. “The Venediger has excellent taste in chalices.”
“Very nice,” István said, rubbing his nose. Drake knew just how he felt. The scent of the gold went straight to his head and left him struggling to control base emotions.
“Pretty. It has dragons on it, did you see?” Pal asked, leaning forward to study it. He, too, rubbed his nose. “Bah. I can’t get that close to it without ... well ...”
“I’m going to find Suzanne,” István announced, and, turning on his heel, marched out of the room in order to find his mate, who acted as cook for Drake’s household.
Pal laughed, then grimaced when he tried to walk. “I don’t often wish to be tied down to a woman, since I must go wherever you travel, but this is one of the times when I dearly wish I had someone upon whom I could slake this lust.”
Drake ignored the erection that resulted from the nearness of the chalice. “Have you heard of the Tools of Bael?” he asked Pal, adjusting a subdued spotlight so that it just glanced off the artifact.
“No. Should I have?” Pal asked, moving toward the door.
Drake was silent for a minute before he turned and followed Pal out, making sure to set all the alarms and locks on the door. “It seems to be a well-kept secret, if the trouble I had digging out information was anything to judge by. There are three objects, one the chalice I acquired, one a lodestone chased in gold, and the third an aquamanile.”
Pal slid him a look as they climbed the stairs to the main floor. “If it’s such a big secret, then no one will notice if the other two pieces of the set disappear.”
Drake allowed himself a small, satisfied smile. The need to possess the three pieces had moved to the top of his interest list. “That is exactly how I feel. The trouble is finding them. My preliminary research indicates that the Anima di Lucifer is held privately in the States, while the Occhio was last seen in Italy about thirty years ago.”
“It’s too bad the Interpol people didn’t accept you,” Pal said, his gaze amused as Drake strode to his library without comment. The subject of his repeated attempts to get into the organization that held on to so many tantalizing bits of information still rankled.
He made a mental oath he would get into the organization, or die trying.
14 July 2004
Once again, I have stumbled across this journal. It has a curious way of disappearing and reappearing at odd moments, but perhaps that is due to my lack of interest in recording the goings-on of the green dragons. I would throw it out altogether, but it was Grand-mère’s wish that I keep a journal, and so I shall.
The phone rang just as he was mulling over what news to record in the journal.
“Drakeling! You are avoiding your dearest mama! I will not have this! I did not go through the many hours, the many, many days, of the most horrendous torture while the midwives ripped you from my womb only for you to turn your back upon me! You hate me! You have turned down the path of your so-deranged father, and you hate me! Admit it to me, the one who almost died giving you life.”
Upon hearing the sultry, Spanish-accented voice of his mother, doña Catalina de Elférez, Drake heaved a mental sigh, and damned the fact that he’d recently given her the number of his mobile phone.
Life was so much easier in the days when she had to be on the same continent to speak to him.
“I will not honor the statement regarding hating you, because we both know it is rubbish. As for your other claim, the last thing I could do is avoid you, Mother,” he answered in what he’d come to think of as his Catalina tone. Only she could both drive him to distraction and amuse him. He suspected that it was her Latin blood in him that led to his secret enjoyment of her dramatic scenes. “For one, you pop up too regularly for me to even begin avoiding you, and for another, there is no other woman alive who can enrage me one moment and make me laugh the next.”
“You should be glad there is no one such like me,” Catalina answered without a care toward proper grammar. “For if there were, you would be in love with her instantly.”
“I don’t know about that,” he said slowly, his mind filling with horror at the idea of falling for a woman who both annoyed and intrigued him. “It’s a moot point, since I will never take a mate. What is it you want? I don’t wish to be brusque, but I have an appointment I cannot miss.”
“Is it not said that all men desire their mothers for mates?” Catalina continued, ignoring his question just as he knew she would. “I, myself, longed for a man as good as my so beloved papa. He was the handsomest, the most courtly of men. All the women loved him.Even some of the men, but that was not spoken of at that time. But my papa, how full of joy he was. Before Toldi killed him, naturally. Afterward, he held a grudge toward us, and insisted on retreating into the spirit world with Mama. I will never forgive Toldi for not only killing my entire family but driving them all into the spirit realm simply so they could avoid him. It was all so unfortunate. You bear some of my sainted father’s appearance, thank the Virgin, and not that of your demented father, although poor Kostya sadly favors him. It is his nose, I think. It is so very thin and straight, like the edge of the razor. Have you heard from him?”
“Father?” Drake asked, both startled by the idea and confused by his mother’s unorthodox use of pronouns. “Did you have him resurrected again? I thought the last time—”
Catalina gave a ladylike snort of disgust. “No, no, why would I do such a thing? The only reason I had him brought back before was to see if death had improved him at all. It did not.”
“No, it didn’t,” Drake agreed, thinking of the report of Toldi’s resurrection he’d heard from Kostya a few hundred years earlier. “Despite that, I still feel it was inappropriate to have his scrotum made into jewelry after you killed him a second time.”
“Madre de Dios, did you think I was not due ugly earrings after what I put up from that maniac?”
Drake interrupted what he was sure was going to be a lengthy—and familiar—tirade about what his mother had (admittedly) suffered when his father had claimed her as his mate. “I must leave, Mother. What is it you need?”
“You speak to me in such a manner? Me, who lay on the altar of childbirth for days on end—”
“The car is waiting for me. You have one minute, and then I must hang up,” he said, ignoring the fact that he was on a mobile phone, and not the landline.
“I will not have this—”
“Forty-five seconds,” he said, fighting his dragon fire, which was fairly burning along his blood, making him feel itchy with anticipation.
The Anima di Lucifer had been found. It had arrived in Paris that very day, and he knew to whom it had been delivered.
“I did not raise you to speak in such a manner!” Catalina snapped. Drake bit back the urge to laughingly remind her she hadn’t raised him at all, since he’d been sent to live with his grand-mère when he was barely walking. “But since you are the son of my heart, the blood of my blood, I shall give way to you as I always do.”
He did laugh at that, but managed to cover up the mouthpiece before she could hear. “I appreciate that.”
“It is your brother. Have you heard from him? He has not contacted me for ... oh, it must be sixty years? Seventy? When was it that all the Nazis ran to South America?”
“Mid-1940s,” he answered, nodding when István opened the door and tipped his head toward the front door. “And no, I have not heard from him, but it was his decision to go underground to find any remaining black dragons before he returned to the weyr.”
“That is odd, though, is it not?” Catalina said with a click of her tongue. “This silence?”
“Not given the current makeup of the weyr. You know full well how Kostya is about the silver dragons—he will cause endless trouble about them when he does surface, and Gabriel will respond with little patience. Thus, I am content for Kostya to remain out of sight of other dragons. And now I must go, Mother.”
“I do not like this silence. It is not like him—”
Drake clicked off the call, and spent the ride to the aquamanile’s owner in contemplation of how he would present the Anima once he had it.
“What will you tell the Venediger when you refuse to give him the aquamanile?” Pal asked when they were paused at a light. “He’s not going to be happy with us. He’s still bitter about the loss of the chalice.”
“The green dragons have survived worse than an unhappy Venediger,” he said, glancing up at the large building that obviously housed several high-end apartments. He waved back both guards. “And since he believed me when I said I was unable to break into the L’au-dela vault forty years ago, all is well. No, I will do this on my own, in case Albert was suspicious and has set some sort of a trap for us. Return for me no later than thirty minutes.”
He felt the prickle of awareness as soon as he entered the building. It was oddly silent, and he thought once or twice that he caught a faint scent of a dark being, most likely a demon.
But it was when he entered a sunny sitting room filled with embroidered antique furniture that he stopped, as the sense of foreboding, scent of demon, and general aura of something being not right coalesced.
A body of a middle-aged woman hung by hands tied behind her back. That she was dead was clear, which meant that someone had taken issue to her owning the aquamanile.
“Peste,” he swore, and wondered who would kill a mortal with such obvious pointers to the Otherworld. Albert wouldn’t be so stupid, especially since he thought Drake was acquiring the artifact for him.
With an annoyed tsk, he quickly searched the rooms of the apartment but found no sign of life. He called the mortal police, figuring he had about ten minutes before they’d arrive. It wasn’t until three minutes later when he returned from checking a service balcony that he heard noises indicating someone else was in the apartment.
“The Anima,” he murmured, and hurried to the sitting room, there to see a woman with wildly curly hair lean in as if she was going to touch the dead woman. “No!” he told her, leaping forward when she made an odd squawk and fell toward the body.
He managed to get her before she breached the circle of salt on the carpet, jerking her back, the scent of her suddenly filling his nose.
His body reacted in a way that made him think of a time a few centuries before when he’d touched the coil of a primitive battery, the hairs on his arms standing on end with the woman’s nearness.
She spoke in an atrocious version of French, her accent belying her origins.
“American?” he asked, trying to catch her scent. It was a heady mixture of light floral notes tinged with an earthier base of sun-warmed fields, and to his immense confusion, it fired both his libido and his interest in the woman. He studied her, more than a little surprised to find she was a Guardian. He’d assumed by the clumsy way she’d almost thrown herself on the dead woman that she was mortal.
“Yes.” She glanced around, obviously overwhelmed. He wondered if she had something to do with the death, not being particularly concerned if she was. It was nothing to do with him ... although he wouldn’t have been averse to inviting her to his bed. There was something about her, something in her hazel eyes, that stirred his interest.
“I did not kill her,” he reassured the woman when she suddenly realized the circumstance in which she found herself. Fear coursed through her, driving his dragon fire through his veins.
What was this madness? No mortal woman had ever stirred his fire, and precious few dragon females. For him to be reacting this way now ...
She made a face, and he worried she was going to be sick at the sight of the dead woman.
On the whole, he thought as he kept her talking just to see what she would say, it was doubtful that she’d killed the mortal.
That said, it was probably wiser for him to take the aquamanile and leave the strangely intriguing Guardian. He distracted her with a few questions about the circle of ash, trying to come to a decision.
His mind told him to get the Anima di Lucifer and wash his hands of the woman, but the dragon part of him demanded that he investigate the strange reaction she stirred within him.
“What does fear smell like, exactly?” the woman asked in answer to one of his statements.
An image flashed in his mind, that of her racing through a forest, her hair streaming behind her as she dodged around trees and leaped over small shrubs, all the while he followed, tracking her by the scent of fear left on the air. “Sexy,” he said, willing his body to cease its attempt to woo her.
There would be time enough for that later. He was mildly startled by that thought, but couldn’t pay attention to it while he had to deal with the situation before him.
“What?” the woman asked, and he answered something—just what escaped him, for the moment he leaned forward to make a point by staring straight into her eyes, he felt himself on the edge of a precipice, about to fall into the haze of arousal and intrigue that seemed to surround her.
It took an effort, but at last he managed to distract her by asking her questions about who had drawn the circle, and why, and when it became clear she was too suspicious, he pulled out the identity card he’d kept after he’d been removed from Interpol.
He smiled to himself. He’d lasted six months before they finally discovered that he was accessing databases far above his clearance level.
“Wait a minute! I didn’t just fall off the stupid wagon. I want to see that up close,” the woman demanded when he tucked away his wallet.
“If the circle is closed, how did the demon escape?” he asked her in a blatant attempt to distract.
It worked. He spent the next few minutes indulging in a mental argument about whether he should just leave, or if further investigation into the woman was warranted.
She continued to argue with him, and it wasn’t until she told him her name—Aisling Grey—and that she was a courier, that he realized it was she and not the dead woman who had the Anima.
He breathed in deeply again, this time catching the faintest hint of something other than her fascinating scent. “Gold,” he told her when she insisted her statue was just ordinary metal. “The statue is of gold.”
The combination of the Guardian and the scent of the gold left him on the edge of arousal. Aisling made a fuss about him not acting like a policeman, but he couldn’t remain focused on his cover story. Not when he found himself caught in twin demands of possessing the aquamanile ... and the woman. He wasn’t the least bit startled by the realization that he wanted her in a sexual way—it seemed perfectly natural given the fact that her presence seemed to bind him to her with a thousand silken ropes made up of the most exquisite anticipation.
What was out of the ordinary was the way something inside him seemed to thrum when she drew near.
Wyverns didn’t thrum, especially at mortals.
Except Aisling proved that one wyvern, at least, was vulnerable to the effect of her presence.
“Let me go!” Aisling demanded when he drew her to him, unable to keep from running his hands along her hips and back, and breathing in deeply of her scent so as to commit it to memory. His body was hot and hard with need, but he kept himself in check as he brushed a strand of her wild, curly hair back from her cheek, and then, unable to resist, leaned in to taste her lips.
She was as sweet as honey, and as heady as dragon’s blood.
He stole the aquamanile while she stood with her mouth slightly parted, and her eyes soft with passion.
“What? Hey! You can’t kiss me!” Her voice followed as he bolted out of the apartment, the mortal police sirens warning they had arrived. He left by a door leading out to a back alley, the echo of her words trailing after him.
“Stop! That’s mine!”
“Not any longer,” Drake said, mingled satisfaction and sexual frustration leaving him feeling strangely empty.
Ten minutes later, he rode in the back seat of the car, the case bearing the Anima on his knees, his gaze sightlessly watching as the streets of Paris passed by.
Just who was the Guardian who denied her birthright? Why did she appear so clueless about her profession and the Otherworld, and yet at the same time oddly knowledgeable about other things? Was she deceiving him for some purpose, or was she simply as naive as she appeared?
He had a feeling he’d be seeing her soon, if for no other reason than he suspected she’d go after him for the loss of the aquamanile.
“Good,” he said, smiling at nothing. He very much looked forward to their next meeting, ignoring the fact that he hadn’t been so captivated by a female in a long time. “We shall see how hard you try to recover what you lost, Guardian.”
“Eh?” Pal asked from the front seat, glancing over his shoulder to Drake.
“Nothing. Let us go straight home. I wish to put the Anima with the Voce di Lucifer.”
“The Venediger isn’t going to be happy,” Pal pointed out again.
“It is of no matter,” Drake answered, his mind on the Guardian named Aisling. He wished he could pinpoint what it was about her that had such a profound effect on him, but he’d never been one for too much introspection. It was one reason why he continually forgot about the journal he’d been determined to keep.
Aisling Grey. It was an unusual name for an unusual woman. He wondered how she’d react when she found out he was a dragon, and smiled again.
He couldn’t help but look forward to that discovery.
