“Yes, my son, patience is a virtue.” Eleanor turned the corner and entered the hall behind Ransom, Aborella by her side. “I am surprised to see you here, Alexander. Aborella, please show my sons back to Gabriel’s room and Raven back to the dungeon.”
Aborella’s fingers crackled with dark lightning, and Gabriel nudged Raven behind him. “You’re not taking her anywhere!”
Eleanor opened her mouth to speak, then balked, her head whipping around to stare down the narrow hall to their left. She frowned. “Ransom, Aborella, take these fools back to Gabriel’s room and lock them inside until I return. It appears we have another visitor.”
“Shall I call more men in to help, Your Highness?”
“No,” Eleanor said. “I’ll take care of this one myself.”
Nathaniel strode into the palace library and inhaled deeply. There was no one here. He released Sylas’s hand.
“This wasn’t where she did it. It was here, but it wasn’t.” Sylas rubbed his forehead, his eyes wide.
“Of course not.” Nathaniel waved a hand around the room. “This is all for show.” He pointed at the large grimoire under glass. “Do you think my mother would keep her grimoire in an unwarded room, even if that room was inside a fortress? No. She’s not that stupid. This library is a distraction, and the memory you have in your head of where she hid your ring is a false one.”
He dug his nails into the side of his head. “The girl…”
“Even if she’d tried to find it, she would have failed. Mother keeps her magic the same as she keeps her treasure, well hidden and guarded by the only person she ever actually trusted—herself.” And me, Nathaniel finished in his head. He knew it was true, and it still hurt to admit it.
He weaved through the shelves and stopped before a tapestry on the southernmost wall. It was a needlepoint of Hera in her garden of golden apples. He remembered it from his youth, ran his fingers across its stitching. The wall behind it was hard, solid.
“How do we get inside?”
“I have a trick for that.” Nathaniel tamped out his pipe and dumped the tobacco, then repacked it with a different blend. “While I’m doing this, tell me about what brought you back to Paragon.”
Sylas leaned his back against the wall beside the tapestry and frowned. “You won’t believe it.”
“Try me.”
“All of you were going north once we reached Italy. I decided to go in the opposite direction, back the way we’d come.”
Nathaniel continued carefully layering magical tobacco but gave Sylas a sideways glance.
“I thought it would be safer. Mother had said to stay apart, but you, Xavier, and Colin headed in the same direction. It didn’t make sense to me. So I returned to Greece. Spoke more to the oreads. They told me about an island, one that humans couldn’t reach. It was called Aeaea.”
Nathaniel paused. “The home of the mythological goddess Circe?”
Sylas snorted. “She is no myth, Nathaniel, and her island exists south of Rome in the Tyrrhenian Sea. The goddess still resides there. I’ve met her myself.”
“Sounds like the perfect hiding place. How did you end up here?” Nathaniel asked as he lit the tobacco.
“I fell in love with a fairy named Dianthe. She invited me back to her homeland of Everfield.”
“Everfield? As in the kingdom of Everfield?”
He inclined his head. “Yes. Aeaea straddles worlds, Nathaniel. We took a ship to Everfield, where I met Dianthe’s family and learned what Mother and Brynhoff never wanted us to know. They’ve been tyrants for centuries, bleeding the other kingdoms dry, rewarding the corrupt leaders that keep the people in rags, and returning just enough to them to make it seem like the kingdom of Paragon is keeping them afloat when, in actuality, they are hoarding riches at the expense of the other four territories. They’ve been doing it since before we were born. Corruption among the Highborn keeps anything from changing. Eleanor has them in her gilded cage. They feast on the suffering of their people.”
Nathaniel didn’t have time to fully digest what Sylas was saying. He needed to focus on the task in front of him. He brought the pipe to his lips and blew a puff of smoke against the tapestry. The smoke formed a pentagram, similar to the one he’d used to break through the wards around the palace, but this magic was even stronger. The runes marking each of the sections were specifically designed to analyze the magic behind the tapestry and find its weaknesses. He had known the recipe for the wards around the palace. This magic he did not know, so he had to deconstruct the components himself.
He reached out and turned the symbol, reading the runes like they were numbers on a dial, instructions to unlock his mother’s ward. The smoke had read her magic beautifully, and when he mastered the break, the tapestry fluttered.
“After you,” he said, brushing the tapestry aside.
Sylas looked between him and the open mouth of the treasure room beyond and tentatively strode inside. With a snap of his fingers, Nathaniel lit the candelabra that circled the room. The pile of treasure at the far end rivaled any he’d ever seen, at least five times the size of his own. An entire family of dragons could sleep inside its riches.
“She certainly hasn’t denied herself any good thing, has she?” Sylas said gruffly.
“No.” Nathaniel moved his focus to the front of the room where shelves of magical texts, dried herbs, and crystals lined the walls. He remembered doing magic in this setup, although back then these things were in a parlor in a separate area of the house. As he’d suspected, Mother had become more protective of her magic over the centuries.
He glanced down to where an arcane circle marked the stone floor. “This was where she performed the spell to strip you of your magic,” Nathaniel said. “Do you remember where she put the box with your ring?”
Sylas closed his eyes. “I can see a black box closing, my ring inside, and then she’s putting it up on a shelf, behind a book called The Saddle of Arythmetes. I feel small, like I’m a child.”
“Hmmm.” Nathaniel cursed.
Clearly that was a planted memory, meant to humiliate him. It wasn’t enough to take his power, she had to make him feel helpless. Nathaniel pondered the best way to find his brother’s ring. If he swapped out his tobacco, he could produce another hummingbird, but this room was so steeped in his mother’s magic he was afraid the smoky beast would not be able to sense the ring.
Instead, he tried to think like his mother. She’d want it somewhere safe. This was her son’s immortality, and given that Sylas was leading a rebellion against her, she’d prefer to keep him alive with something to hold over him. He scanned the shelves.
His eyes caught on a dragon skull. A baby by the size and shape. The skull rested on the uppermost shelf, its dark, empty eyes glaring toward the circle with hollow antipathy. Whose skull had it been? Which dragon child had been murdered to bring her the power of its blood or bones? His stomach turned as he spotted a rolling ladder and pulled it over, then climbed to look into the eye socket of the murdered baby.
Just as he’d suspected. She was a sicker bitch than he’d thought, hiding her son’s heart and magic in the skeleton of her victim. He reached in and pulled out the black box.
“That’s it. That’s the one!” Sylas reached for it, but Nathaniel shook his head.
“See these symbols?” He pointed to the arcane marks all over the polished ebony. “This is magically bound shut. The spell must be broken, not forced. If you try to force it, it will destroy what’s inside.”
Sylas folded his arms and bent in two as if his stomach hurt. He moaned softly.
“Easy, brother. If I can break Mother’s treasure ward, I can break this one. Give me a moment.” He gave Warwick’s tobacco a couple of sure puffs, set the box down on the workbench beyond the arcane circle, and blew out the symbol again. For a moment the smoke rearranged itself, finding the right symbols, then it formed another dial. Nathaniel gripped it at its center and set to work on creating the key.
&nbs
p; A pulse of energy rolled through him, almost knocking him off his feet. He kept going. Almost there. Almost there.
“Did you feel that?” Sylas said nervously. “Nathaniel?”
The lock clicked. He opened the box, and inside was his brother’s garnet. He tore it from the satin mount and tossed it to his brother, who slid it on his finger and moaned as light shimmered across his skin.
“Hell yeah!” Sylas yelled. His wings snapped out, and Nathaniel watched him draw a deep breath, his pale skin taking on a slight golden glow.
“Prepare yourself. Mother knows we are here, and she’s on her way.”
“What?” Sylas looked wildly over both shoulders.
Nathaniel got to work changing out the tobacco in his pipe once more. He was about to need the heavy artillery. “That pulse you felt was the alarm she set on the box I just opened. It was undetectable. I tripped it.”
“So she’s coming here now? Shouldn’t we run?” Sylas asked frantically.
Nathaniel held the freshly lit pipe between his teeth. He withdrew the shadow mail candle from his pocket and lit it up, then removed what he’d found in the dungeon earlier and laid it on the table beside the candle. A lock of Raven’s hair. If Aborella had taken a lock of Clarissa’s hair before unbinding the sisters, then it was likely hair that could rebind them. Clarissa would have her own and Avery’s, but this, this could change everything. Quickly he licked his finger and scrolled a message to Clarissa, then watched as the shadows twisted around the hair and carried it and his message to the one he loved. He prayed to the Mountain that she could figure out how to use it.
“Sylas, the moment we walked into this treasure room, I knew we were not getting out of this palace without facing our mother. Even if she hadn’t had a tripwire somewhere, eventually the guards would wake up and find you missing and we’d be in deep water anyway.” Nathaniel watched his message fade and extinguished the candle, returning it to the inside of his pocket.
“What should we do?”
Nathaniel brushed the sleeves of his suit and straightened his vest. “We face her.” He watched all the color drain from Sylas’s face. “Or you could hide in the library and let me handle this.”
Sylas didn’t even hesitate. He blinked out of sight and was gone. Nathaniel couldn’t blame his brother. The dragon looked like he hadn’t had a square meal in weeks, and clearly he had experienced the dark side of his mother’s magic. It wasn’t surprising that he didn’t want to sign up for that again.
Nathaniel closed the empty black box; then he waited as the sound of footsteps in the library drew near.
Chapter Thirty-Four
Mistwood
Clarissa felt like a woman whose husband had gone off to war. She stared at the book that was in her hands, but it might as well have been upside down for how many words she’d read. Beside her, Avery chewed the side of her nail while she blinked absently at the egg toasting happily in the fire. On the other side of the room, Maiara was whittling a piece of wood that Tempest had procured for her. It was turning into a carving of a horse that she said was for Li’l Puff when he or she joined the world. Nick had gone for a run on the grounds to burn off some steam.
But it was the tall redhead who paced the room that made Clarissa truly nervous.
Sabrina had arrived just after Nathaniel and the others had left. She’d gone to the London flat and then used her resources to track them back to the crossroads outside Mistwood. Then she’d caused such a fuss that Tempest had noticed her, realized who she was, and let her in.
Sabrina was Tobias’s mate and she was a vampire. Clarissa had never met a more intimidating woman in all her years, and that included many pop stars and divas. The vampire’s green eyes seemed to burn into her whenever she looked in her direction, and she hadn’t sat down once since she’d arrived.
“How long have they been gone?” she asked, pausing her pacing by the fire and crossing her arms.
“About twenty-four hours,” Clarissa said. “But our time does not line up to their time in Paragon. For them, I have no idea how long it’s been.”
Sabrina started pacing again. “Tobias told me something of the sort. Perhaps we should try to help. I can bring a team of vampires.”
“There’s no way to open a portal without one of their rings,” Clarissa said.
Sabrina planted her hands on her hips. “One of them should have stayed behind in case there was trouble. Now we can’t help if something goes wrong.”
“Nathaniel is extremely powerful. I’m sure he’ll succeed.” Clarissa closed the book. It was futile to try to read with her stomach in knots like this.
“Tobias is extremely powerful,” Sabrina murmured to no one in particular.
Out of the corner of her eye, Clarissa saw the shadow mail candle blaze to life. She’d kept it beside her constantly since the moment Nathaniel had left, but it had never ignited.
She raised one hand in excitement. “It’s a message from Nathaniel.”
Clarissa grabbed a pen and flipped to the last page of the book she was holding. All the women gathered around. The flame flickered, the shadows dancing and coiling. She copied the letters one by one.
“Use Warwick’s blood,” she read aloud. The candle flickered out. There on the nightstand was a strand of black hair.
“Is that…?” Avery stared, looking slightly sick. “Why would Nathaniel send back a strand of Raven’s hair? You don’t think she’s dead, do you?”
“If she was, he wouldn’t be suggesting I have Warwick rebind us together.” She reached for her phone and dialed the old man’s number. It rang and rang again.
“Where do I find this Warwick?” Sabrina said. “I will bring you his blood.”
Clarissa looked up at her and whispered, “Chill. You are super scary right now.”
The vampire crossed her arms and backed toward the fire. “Sorry. I miss my mate.”
Warwick’s greeting finally came in her ear. “If you’re calling me yourself, it must be an emergency.”
“It is. Nathaniel sent me a message from Paragon. I need your help.”
Chapter Thirty-Five
Paragon
Nathaniel wasn’t sure what to expect. After all, he hadn’t seen his mother in three hundred years. Dragons didn’t age the way humans did. However, immortal as they might be, over the course of time, things changed. From popular fashion to hairstyles and culture, older dragons had trouble keeping up. Often one could tell the age of a dragon simply by their appearance. His three-piece suit was an example. It certainly wasn’t representative of modern London, but it was what he was comfortable in.
What would his mother be comfortable in? What illusion would she bring forth?
The tapestry shifted and he found out. Eleanor, Empress of Paragon, stood at the opening to the chamber, dressed in a strappy onyx dress with a satin sheen. She entered the room, her shoulders squared, her chin high, and peered down her nose at him. All the softness he’d remembered from his childhood had been stripped away and replaced with a gaunt and angular visage marked by thin lips and flat, soulless eyes.
He sighed, his heart turning to lead in his chest. “Hello, Mother.”
“Nathaniel? You’re the last person I expected to see. Why are you here?” Her voice was as flat as her eyes, betraying no emotion. Did she think there was a chance that his motives were benign?
He ran a hand down the front of his vest. “I could say the same. You see, when I helped you develop the spell to send the nine of us to Earth, I thought we were doing it to save us all from a planned attack by Brynhoff. But then Marius was killed anyway, and you didn’t make it through the portal with the rest of us. I’ve labored under the assumption all these years that you died in the coup.”
Her lips twitched, showing a little teeth. “Brynhoff is dead. I was able to subdue him, take control of the kingdom, and have him executed.”
“Hmmm.” Nathaniel took a step toward her. “And afterward? Why didn’t you come for us?”
She shrugged, her perfectly shaped eyebrows rising toward her expertly coiffed hair. “I couldn’t find you, spread out as you were. It seems you followed my advice too well. You were impossible to track down.”
Part of Nathaniel wanted to believe her, the boy within who’d spent years joyfully mastering magic by her side, but he knew it was a lie. Rowan and Alexander had told him she’d ruled with Brynhoff and her appearance here, now, proved as much. Alexander had spoken of one of Aborella’s trackers being worn by a monster in the late 1600s. And then there was Scoria who’d hunted Gabriel, Tobias, and Raven, ordered to return them to her dead or alive. They’d had to kill him to survive. His mother was not the woman of his memories. She was a monster.
“I’ve missed you, son,” she said, approaching cautiously. “You were the only one who ever truly understood me.”
“Likewise,” he said flatly. “You’ve changed your magic room. I remember more plants and less skulls.” He glanced at the skull of the dragon child on the top shelf.
“We underestimated the power of blood magic,” she said, running her finger along a shelf laden with sorted bones.
“Blood magic is very powerful indeed. Our blood powered many spells when we were together.”
She shot him a sideways glance. “Not just our blood. The blood of others. The blood of children is the strongest.” She sighed and shook her head. “I am so strong now, Nathaniel. Stronger than the Goddess of the Mountain.”
He gasped. “Blasphemy.”
“It’s true.” She turned to him, her dark eyes hollow and soulless. “There are greater gods and goddesses, and once I obtain their book of spells, I will be the most powerful of all.”
Nathaniel inched toward the door. “Is that your goal, to be more powerful than the gods?”
She whirled on him and laughed. Her eyes flashed. “Isn’t it yours? Who wouldn’t want the power of a god?”
The Dragon of Cecil Court (The Treasure of Paragon Book 5) Page 20