He glanced back out the window as if considering this. “How much did she tell you?”
“Everything, I think.”
“Oh, she couldn’t have told you everything, Mister Blanchard. Everything she knows? Perhaps. Or, thinks she knows. Rhianon refused to accept certain fundamental truths when I tried to tell them to her before.”
“Is that why you killed Tragen and the rest? They refused to accept it, too?” Austin regretted it instantly, sure Maeron would retaliate for the accusation. Instead, he only frowned.
“Tragen was Rhianon’s mentor. Did she deign to speak of my own? No? Perhaps they never told her. Kelvan. The man was a visionary. He had the strength to see what the rest refused to admit: the act of trapping the dragons was so traumatic as to weaken the ethereal barriers that hold together the fabric of existence. They don’t belong there, locked in that folded reality. The cosmos doesn’t want them there! Their binding was like a nest of fibermites, eating, eating, eating at the foundations of our world. Keep them there, and everything falls apart! Everything! The savagery of the Dragon War would be nothing compared to the utter destruction of Rhyll itself!”
Maeron turned Austin’s head to face him, his eyes fierce. “The Sentinels painted Kelvan a fool. They said his ideas ‘failed to hold up under scrutiny,’ rejected it outright before he had even finished his work.” Austin tried to turn from the tirade, but Maeron held him tighter. “They called it an accident when he died. A fire. Perhaps, Mister Blanchard, but perhaps not. I wasn’t there. I didn’t know what to believe at first. I thought the Sentinels might be right. But I was younger, then, and foolish, and the more I looked — ”
Maeron glanced up as they approached the next station. He renewed his grip on the daypack. “It would seem our time is up, Mister Blanchard. Kelvan was right, mark my words. You tell your ghost of Rhianon that!”
TWENTY-FOUR
“He’s about this tall, short brown hair, probably wearing muddy trousers? And a green pack?”
“I dunno, cutie. Maybe?” The street fiddler shrugged with a grin and touched his bow to the strings. Another group of Londoners passed down the stairs into the Tube station beside them.
“Maybe?” Corinna snapped with enough force to give him pause. “You don’t ‘maybe’ remember something! Did you see the stupid bloke or did you not?”
The fiddler scowled, rubbing his chin stubble with a meaningful glance at the smattering of coins in an open violin case beside him.
“Are you seriously trying to — ?”
The bow drew across the strings, drowning out the rest of her protest in the beginning of a jig. Corinna cursed under her breath, reduced to pitching a handful of change and a spare paperclip into the case.
“How’s your memory now?”
Still playing, he glanced down and slowed to a more delicate tune, which highlighted the violin’s poorly tuned G and D strings. “Pretty sure I spotted a guy like that. Half hour ago? Went that way.” He angled his head down the stairs. “Doubt he’s worth all the fuss you’re making ‘bout him. I’ll let you buy me a pint; we can chat all about it.” He winked.
“Buy your own bloody pint.” She dashed for the stairs, calling over her shoulder, “And that kindling’s out of tune!”
Since leaving their room like it was on fire — Tragen’s book wrapped in a bag under one arm — Corinna had rushed to track Austin as best she could. The hotel desk had seen him leave. A souvenir vendor down the street claimed Austin had passed his stand. Tracking him after that had grown increasingly difficult. Anyone she thought might be in a position to have seen him got a hurried interrogation. Most hadn’t.
Corinna had backtracked twice before dropping a quid in a homeless man’s cup and asking him. She gave five more upon confirming he had seen Austin cross the street and head into the Tube entrance. She was making better progress than she would have expected, but was apt to run out of cash before she caught up to him — if she caught up to him at all.
The station’s dingy entry foyer was blessedly cramped. Past the ticket machines and turnstiles, a single set of escalators led down to the platforms. A small station meant only one platform to search. Yet if she was too late to find him there, how the bloody hell could she track where he went? Only one line serviced the station, but he could have gone in either direction, gotten off at any stop, taken another in any other direction. Finding someone who had seen him would be next to impossible!
Corinna cleared the turnstiles, took the escalator down, and dug her nails into the rubber of the handrail before starting to trot down. She would think of something. There was no other choice.
Bloody hell, Austin! Was he just being stupid, or had the dragon done something to him?
“Corinna!”
“Austin?” she shouted back, shocked. He stood on the opposite escalator looking like she had already punched him in the gut. “Don’t you fecking move!”
She dashed down the remaining few steps, dodged a bloke handing out flyers, then shot up Austin’s escalator to where he waited.
“I should bloody well kick your arse, running off like that! ‘Can’t risk losing me again?’“ she quoted from his note. “Do you have a clue what you’re doing? I’d smack you silly but that might knock whatever sense you’ve got left straight out your head!”
He had been trying to say something. She finally let him get it out.
“It’s gone!”
Agape, she tugged him off the escalator by the arm.
“Maeron,” Austin burst. “He found me on the Tube. I couldn’t stop him, I couldn’t even move!”
She stared, her fists clenched to strike someone as she fought the urge to break down. She threw her hands into her hair instead. “You — ! If you hadn’t — !”
“I know!” he hissed with an anguish that broke her heart. “I was coming back! I know it was stupid, I shouldn’t have listened but Boden . . .” He clenched his jaw and shook his head. “I’m sorry.”
“Sorry? You’re — !” She swallowed, fighting against panic and the urge to leave him right there. Instead, she grabbed Austin’s wrist and tugged him back to the down escalator. “We’ll find him.”
“He got off at Leicester Square, he said he was going back to Rhyll, but I don’t know where he went!”
“We’ll find him! You don’t get to give up.”
“I’m not giving up! I’ll fix it. But — how in the world are we going to do this?”
They were flying down the escalator, almost to the bottom. She pulled up full stop and turned to glare at him again, unable to give an answer.
“We’ll think of something.”
They ran to the platform where Corinna was thankful to find a train arriving, saving her the agony of having to stand and wait. She tugged him onboard.
“We’ll get to Leicester Square, then do what I did to find you: ask anyone and everyone if they saw him. Track him down. Catch up to him. We can do this.” Both stood holding the same pole. She faced Austin. “We’ll need to split up. Leicester Square Station is big, and we need to cover ground fast.”
“So how do we find each other again?”
Surprising herself, she slid an arm around his waist and hugged tightly. “I think I can do something about that, once we’re at the station. Is Boden still in contact?”
Austin hesitated. “Not since — no. Boden turned on me. He wanted me to release him, so he could help, he said. We were going to Dinas Emrys where there might be a skeleton for him. I nearly got to the train and — I just couldn’t.
“He went berserk when I went to turn back; he tried to take control and force me there. I had to fight him to get back on the Tube, and then he went quiet. I don’t know if the struggle cost him that much, or he just didn’t see the point while it was moving. Then Maeron showed up, and . . .”
“You should have trusted me, Austin.”
“It wasn’t that simple.”
She let it go without response. The dragon could have influenced him. Per
haps his link to the crystal could still help them find it before . . .
She couldn’t bring herself to finish the thought. The doors slid open moments later.
They disembarked, and Corinna yanked Austin to a halt. “I’m glad you’re alright. Don’t think I mentioned that part.” She punched him thrice in the shoulder before she could stop herself. “But you acted a bloody twit!”
She punched a fourth time, then grabbed his hand and hauled him off while he stammered another apology. A pack of worries were snapping at her heels. Chief of which currently was how much strain the growing distance put on the “anchor” between Austin and the crystal. How much longer before one side or the other broke from that strain? Had it broken already?
“Let me know the minute Boden says anything.”
“I will. You mentioned a way to find each other again?”
She stopped in the middle of the tunnel from the platform, having forgotten. “Right! Good, yes. Meet me by the escalators — I’ll be along in a tick.”
Austin did as she told him despite his obvious confusion. After a moment’s wait, she pulled out her mobile phone with one eye on the travelers headed toward her. She had less time than she would have liked to find someone suitable. The brunette carrying a white purse and chatting with her friend would have to do. Corinna shifted her mobile to her right hand, feigned a laugh at something on the screen, and shouldered right into her target.
“Oh! Sorry, I — ”
“Bint! Mind where you’re going!”
“So sorry!”
Corinna retreated from the brunette’s ire as quickly as she dared and found Austin waiting for her. She pushed the mobile she nicked from the brunette’s purse into his hand. “There. Now you have a phone.”
“You stole it?”
“Aye, so don’t get attached.”
He hesitated.
“Emergency circumstances, Austin!” she argued, not without a twinge of guilt. “She was rather rude, if it makes you feel any better. I’m sorry it’s pink. Kind of.”
To her relief, he simply nodded. “So what do we do if we find him?”
“I’ve got some ideas on that, actually. For now, one of us spots him, we call the other and trail him. First thing to do is see if he went up to the street or got on another line. Ask anyone who looks to have been there a bit. No being shy.”
“I won’t be.” The determined nod he gave was small comfort, but she took what she could get. “I don’t suppose you’ve had a chance to look at the book?”
“Did you really just ask me that?” She turned to go and then stopped, grabbing his hand. “Be careful.”
And then they were off.
Austin found someone who had seen Maeron board the northbound Piccadilly Line. It was their first lead. It proved to be their last. Corinna got off at the first stop down the line. Austin took the one after. Neither turned up evidence of him disembarking. With no way to be certain of their choices, each abandoned searching their respective stations and moved on to the next. And then the next.
And then the next.
TWENTY-FIVE
“I’m sorry,” Austin stammered, breaking the silence. His right knee bounced, restless, beneath the coffee shop table.
Corinna didn’t look up from Tragen’s book. One fingertip bookmarked an earlier section. Her other hand grasped a coffee cup. “I know,” she answered, then set the cup down and turned a page.
He nodded. Useless apologies aside, he was trying his best to focus. They had lost Maeron’s trail. Their search took them long past the point where anyone who might have seen him could conceivably remain in the Tube. Street searches had swiftly grown pointless.
Austin had kept at it a while regardless. He searched alone while Corinna retreated to an all-night coffee shop. There, she scoured the book for a way to track the crystal through whatever shroud Maeron had surely placed over it.
And without the crystal nearby, they possessed no magic to aid them.
Now, Austin sat with her and racked his brain for other ideas to keep from being completely useless. He refused to think an answer didn’t lurk somewhere. This was his fault. There must be a solution, yet he couldn’t find it.
It would be dawn soon. Loaded with caffeine and guilt, he felt like he could go another full day without sleep if he needed to. So far, all he had to show for it was a pile of discarded ideas and worries about Corinna and Rhi that meant nothing if they didn’t find Maeron.
Corinna turned another page. Focused on the book, or freezing him out? It felt like both. Teeth clenching, Austin tried to concentrate on the problem at hand. He grabbed his knee to stop it from bouncing.
Should they report Maeron to the police? It might slow him down, but that assumed the police would do much on the word of two people who reported him as, what, a thief? They couldn’t accuse him of anything sufficient for a manhunt without telling either an unbelievable truth or a lie large enough to get them held in custody themselves. Even so, the police would hardly tell them if they found him, and, as Corinna pointed out, probably couldn’t handle Maeron anyway. He would elude them with magic, or he would get cornered and fight them with it. Neither option helped. Corinna had refused to put the police at risk for almost certainly no gain, to say nothing of possibly spurring Maeron to use further magic around the already fragile crystal. They had discarded the idea. Yet, lacking for anything else, Austin kept coming back to it.
It was the second of three things he kept coming back to.
“Maeron told me something when he took the crystal,” he muttered, finding himself returning to the third. Corinna’s gaze clicked up at him. “I wasn’t going to mention it. I don’t know if I believe him — I mean, I don’t, really, and it probably doesn’t have any bearing on tracking him anyway, but if you need all the data you can get, I guess it’s — ”
“Come on with it!”
“Sorry. He said he wanted to take the crystal back because keeping all the dragons sealed up would, ah, rupture the universe.”
Corinna didn’t respond, her green eyes watching.
“Well, I’m paraphrasing. But he seemed to think — ”
“I know what he thinks. You don’t believe it, do you?”
“Of course not,” he answered. Aware his tone lacked complete conviction he added, “Sure as hell doesn’t excuse anything he’s done, even if I did believe it.”
Corinna resumed reading.
“You don’t either,” Austin finally needed to say. “Right? Is there any more to that?”
“Oh, I’m sure there’s gobs of proof. Really persuasive proof! That’s why he had to kill everyone, aye?”
“I’m just saying, if there is a chance, then maybe — ”
“Maybe what?”
“Maybe if we don’t find him, it’s at least some consolation that it might be true and . . .” He sighed. “Forget it. Ignore me.”
Corinna’s glare softened in the moment before she returned it to the book. “He tried telling me the same thing.” She did not look up. “I was running for the train, in Bath, so I could use the pendant and get away clean. He was close, tracking me, talking in my mind because of it. He must have been desperate to trip me up. After all he’d done, that he’d try to say the rest died to protect a lie?” She lifted her gaze again, tired and hard. “It made me so furious! Telling those lies right into my head and I couldn’t stop him — ”
In a moment, she turned aside and cut short Austin’s next apology with a gesture. He waited, confused. She didn’t make him wait long.
“He was speaking in my head,” she said, clearly in the midst of analysis. “I didn’t want to listen, I didn’t want him in there. Austin, I think I forced him out. I mean, she did — Rhianon — forced him out!”
“I don’t — ”
“Maeron stopped talking at a certain point. I’d thought he’d been getting ready to attack or had to focus on something else, but I think it happened right when I wanted him out the most!”
�
��You can remember what you were thinking?”
“Everything right before the pendant is only a few days ago for me, don’t forget.” Her eyes darted about as if trying to spot something that still eluded her.
“Okay, so if you’re right, what’s that mean?”
“I shouldn’t have been able to do it. Not here, anyway. Telepathy via magic? Rhianon never learned much about it, but I don’t think I can stopper that up without magic of my own, and I’d left the crystal behind at that point.”
Austin had begun to pick it up. “You had something to enable the magic somehow. Assuming you’re right.”
“But I didn’t! The only thing I had was the pendant, and that only worked because it was made in the crystal’s aura, and even then I needed — ”
“But if it could fuel itself, maybe — ”
“No, Austin, trust me, it couldn’t work that way!” She grabbed his wrist, still thinking. “He was inside my mind. Fefferman, the spriggan, they’re innately magical creatures, like I said, able to do limited magic here so long as it’s close to them.”
“They make their own aura, I remember. But you said you couldn’t; you need a source to tap.” Among the things she had been scouring the book for was a way to draw Boden’s aura into Austin so she could try a spell to find Maeron.
“Yes!” she said. “But what if I don’t need a source? If you follow.”
“I don’t. Follow.”
Corinna pointed to herself. “Trapped dragon: powerful magical creature.” She spread her arms wide. “Huge aura! Fefferman, spriggan: much weaker magical creature.” Now, she brought her hands in a few inches from her face. “Smaller aura, barely larger than their bodies. We thought, as humans, that we didn’t have an aura at all in this world, but what if it’s still there, just so small our bodies cover it entirely! Not even an aura; call it a ‘potential,’ but it still works inside us! Maeron was in my mind, and I forced him out.”
Memory of Dragons Page 23