“Just let me talk to you for a minute!” he yelled. “I know you can hear me in there.”
In response, she merely started honking her horn like crazy. When he still didn’t move, she fired up the engine. She looked at him with fury in her eyes and honked one more time, then started driving. Myles held on tightly. If she thought he was going to be scared off by being on the hood of a moving car, she was wrong. He’d been in situations more dangerous than this hundreds of times during his missions to recover dragon artifacts. He could handle much worse. Besides, she wasn’t going to be able to drive very fast with him sitting right in front of her and blocking her view out the front window. She tried to move forward, revving the engine a bit in an attempt to scare him, but he didn’t flinch.
“Just let me talk to you,” Myles yelled again.
“Just leave me alone!” she said. She looked like an angry hornet, but still, Myles stupidly persisted.
“I’ll leave you alone if you talk to me for a minute,” he said.
In response, she laid on her horn, long and loud. The two of them must have made quite a scene, and were drawing even more stares now than they had been when running through the Great Hall. Myles did his best to ignore the growing crowd, but he was starting to worry that this little display he was putting on might not be the best idea. He was pretty sure he wasn’t winning any new dragon shifter fans right now. And yet, it was so hard to tear himself away from Harlow. If she would just hear him out, perhaps she would come to understand that he was only insisting on coming on the mission because he cared about her.
“You’re not gonna win this battle,” a laughing voice to his left said.
Somewhat startled, Myles looked over and saw an old wizard standing on the nearby sidewalk. The wizard was wearing traditional wizard robes in a deep purple color. He also wore a traditional wizard hat in the same shade of purple, its long pointy top reaching high above his head. The man’s eyes twinkled with unbridled amusement and he let out a soft chuckle as he looked over at Myles’ predicament.
Myles was tempted to tell the man to mind his own business, but he couldn’t bring himself to yell at an older man. It had been drilled into him too deeply to respect his elders. So, instead, he settled for asking, “What do you mean?” through clenched teeth. The man’s smile widened.
“I mean, son, that you need to be able to recognize when a woman needs space. I’d say this young lady is giving you clear indications that she doesn’t want to talk to you right now. You need to honor that. Pushing a woman to talk to you when she really doesn’t want to is only going to make you both frustrated. Trust me on that. I’ve had a few years’ experience. The way to her heart isn’t to push her so hard that you push her away.”
The man winked at Myles, and Myles found himself growing even more frustrated.
“I appreciate the advice, sir,” Myles said, doing his noble best to keep his voice from filling with rage. “But this is about a matter of state business. It’s not about trying to win her heart.”
“Oh?” the old man said, the amused expression never leaving his eyes. “You could have fooled me.”
Myles felt a strange sensation in his stomach when the old man said those words. It was almost as if the words had been a punch in the gut, and Myles knew why: it was because they were true. With a frustrated growl, Myles hopped off of Harlow’s hood. They would have to have a conversation at some point, but now was not the time. Not with a crowd of people gathering to watch, and an old man giving Myles advice on how to win a girl’s heart.
After Myles hopped off the hood, Harlow gave a short, triumphant honk of the car’s horn. As she started to pull away, she rolled down her window slightly and shouted at him.
“You had no right!” she said. “This is my mission.”
Myles sighed as he watched her drive away.
“It wasn’t about whether I had the right or not,” he whispered after her. “Can’t you see that? It was about the fact that my heart gave me no choice but to throw myself into the ring to protect you.”
There was, of course, no answer from her rapidly disappearing tail lights.
* * *
Four days later, as their small commuter plane touched down on the runway of Devil’s Melt Municipal Airport, there had still been no answer from Harlow. Not really, anyway. She had taken on an air of absolute professionalism, and would speak to him whenever it was necessary for them to communicate regarding their plans for the mission to get the amethyst records. But if there was not a professional reason for her to be speaking to him, she would not talk to him. A thinly veiled anger hung behind her eyes, and Myles’ patience itself was beginning to grow thin. He even thought a few times that perhaps he’d been wrong about her, and she was more of a spoiled brat than an intelligent, strong woman.
It was, however, difficult to actually ignore her intelligence or strength. She had plenty of both. Yesterday, on the eve of their journey, Peter had taken time to practice a few defensive spells with Harlow. An invitation like that from the leading High Council wizard himself was considered quite an honor, and it showed how seriously Peter took this mission. Myles had been invited to watch, so that he would better understand how the spells worked if Harlow needed to use them out on the field. As Peter put Harlow through her paces, Myles had been impressed all over again with her abilities. Peter did not go easy on her—after all, Saul’s army would not go easy on her. She needed to be prepared. But Harlow had risen to the occasion. She had moved with lightning speed, rapidly deploying shield spells and deflecting spells to counter every attack Peter threw at her. Her magic ring had seemed to glow as she practically danced across the room, her face scrunched up in perfect concentration. Myles could not have torn his eyes off of her if he’d wanted to.
But he didn’t want to. He wanted to watch her forever. She was beautiful beyond anything he’d ever seen. And somehow, he’d managed to piss her off. He was the guy that everyone got along with. Everyone. So it frustrated him to no end that the one person he most wanted to be on good terms with seemed to hate him.
Myles forced his mind into the present moment as the small plane’s brakes brought it to a grinding halt on the short runway. It turned to taxi toward the hangar, where a car would be waiting to take Myles and Harlow to their hotel. At six seats, the plane wasn’t the smallest one Myles had ever been in, but it was close. It was used primarily to shuffle tourists from the nearest major city into Devil’s Melt. The pilot had told Myles that the plane made the trip several times a day during the summer. In the winter, it was not uncommon for a whole month to go by with no trips to Devil’s Melt. Not many tourists made their way to this sleepy northern Montana town in the middle of the desolate cold.
The pilot let Myles sit in the copilot seat, and tried to pry him with questions about what his business was in Devil’s Melt. Myles kept things as vague as he could, passing it off as research for a report on the seasons of Montana. Myles had thought this was somewhat of a lame excuse, but the pilot had seemed to buy it, and had started prattling on about what his favorite seasons were and why. Now, as Myles and Harlow deplaned from the small aircraft, the pilot shook their hands and wished them luck, letting them be on their way with little fanfare.
Myles drove the rental car to the hotel, and Harlow rode the whole fifteen minutes in silence with him. Myles had to stifle back a sigh as they made their way into the snowy parking lot. He was doing his best to ignore Harlow’s icy attitude, but it was getting harder and harder the more they were alone together.
Huge snowflakes began pelting the windshield as Myles pulled the car to a stop, and he raised his eyes to look at the cold, gray sky. It had been snowing off and on ever since Myles and Harlow had landed in Montana, and Myles had seen a blizzard forecasted for that evening. He’d hoped that they’d be able to get started on their mission early tomorrow morning, but it didn’t look like that was likely to happen. Not with such a huge storm rolling in.
Myles checked them into the
hotel, which was quite a sleepy place at the moment. In the summer, it would fill up with tourists and the bright neon “No Vacancy” sign out front would be illuminated almost nonstop from June to August. Now, however, Myles and Harlow appeared to be the only people here. Their car was the only one gracing the parking lot, and the man at the check in had seemed very excited to hear that they would be renting out two rooms instead of just one. Myles had almost laughed at the thought of asking Harlow to share a room with him. If he’d tried that, she might have actually broken her icy silence—in order to say a few choice words to him.
Their rooms were next to each other on the first floor, conveniently right in front of where Myles had parked the car. Without bothering to ask if she needed help, Myles grabbed Harlow’s duffel bag from the trunk and carried it into her room for her. She followed him, said a curt thank you, and then waited expectantly for him to leave the room. He hesitated, glancing at his watch to see what time it was. He was starving, but right now it was only three in the afternoon. Too early for dinner.
“Did you need something?” Harlow asked. Her voice was not exactly cold, but it didn’t have much warmth in it either. Her eyes looked tired, and Myles realized that she was probably exhausted from the preparation for this trip, as well as from traveling.
“I know you probably want to rest a bit, but I thought perhaps we could meet in an hour or so to discuss our plans. And then maybe we could grab dinner? I know I’m not your favorite person right now, but you do have to eat. And we have to work together so we might as well make the most of it.”
“We have to work together because you insisted on coming on this trip,” Harlow said, crossing her arms. “I’ll be civil, but I’m not interested in fraternizing with you. I don’t want to be all chummy and go to dinner together and such.”
Myles sighed. “Fine,” he said in a weary tone. “No dinner, then. But I do think we should get together to discuss our plans now that we’re here. How does an hour from now sound?”
“It sounds fine,” Harlow said. “I’ll see you then. Now, if you don’t mind, I’d like to rest for a bit.”
Myles nodded and moved to leave the room. His heart felt heavier than it had in a long time. He realized that he’d hoped that being out here by himself with Harlow would somehow improve things between them, but so far it seemed to be having the opposite effect. He walked into his own room and closed the door behind him, looking forlornly out at the snow swirling around the window. He had to remind himself that his motivation to come on this trip was not so that he could become best friends with Harlow. It was to protect her from the harm that was coming their way as soon as Saul’s people had the slightest inclination that they were here.
Myles got up and went to open the backpack he had brought along with him, pulling the laptop out of the bag and setting it on the small hotel room desk to power it up. He was tired, but he already knew he wouldn’t be able to take a nap with so many troubled thoughts swirling through his brain. He might as well get some work done.
He immediately immersed himself in reviewing all of Harlow’s notes on the locations where Saul’s men had already been in their search for the dragon stone. Myles had marked these locations on a map of the area as best he could, hoping to be able to make some sort of guess as to where the group would be going next. The first thing Harlow and Myles needed to do was to track down the group. Then they could work on sneaking into the group’s camp to find the amethyst records. Figuring all of this out was no easy task, since the group seemed to be moving fairly quickly across the region. There was the possibility that Saul’s men had some sort of stationary base camp where they received and kept supplies. Many of the conversations Harlow had managed to record and eavesdrop on had implied that this was the case, but Harlow had never been able to find out exactly where such a base camp might be located.
Myles suspected that it was somewhere near here, the city of Devil’s Melt Proper. It would make sense, because this would be the easiest area to fly in supplies. It bothered him a bit, though, that the pilot who had flown in Harlow and him hadn’t mentioned any other flights. Surely, even if the pilot had not been the one actually flying supplies in, he would have noticed the extra winter activity at the airport. It was possible that Saul’s men were subsisting on hardly any supplies, but Myles wondered if perhaps the pilot knew more about what was going on around here than he let on.
Harlow and Myles could not be too careful.
Myles continued working, becoming so engrossed in his work that he barely noticed that almost a full hour had ticked by. He checked and rechecked the map, and studied Harlow’s notes, hoping to glean some new information that he had not seen before. But nothing he read shed any new light on their situation, until he looked at the map one last time before going to meet with Harlow. As he looked back and forth between Harlow’s notes and the map that she had marked up, he noticed a discrepancy between the marks on the map and the location descriptions from the conversation transcripts. Frowning, he corrected the marks on the map, and suddenly everything made sense.
With the incorrect markings, the map had seemed to show an erratic pattern of searching by Saul’s men. But with the corrected marks, it was easy to see that Saul’s men were moving in a definite pattern—a pattern that made it potentially possible to predict where they would be heading next. Excitedly, Myles double checked his work just to be sure. It was easy to see how Harlow had made the mistake. Some of the locations were very similar, and she was under a lot of stress and hadn’t slept well for days. But Myles was sure now that he was right, and the new pattern made it look like Saul’s men should be coming right back by Devil’s Melt Proper very soon.
Myles jumped up to go take the paper over to Harlow and show her, his heart beating with excitement. Perhaps finding Saul’s men wouldn’t be as difficult as he’d originally thought it would be.
Before Myles could even get his shoes on, though, there was a knock at the door. Myles opened it to find Harlow standing there, looking annoyed.
“I thought you were coming to my room,” she said, stepping into Myles’ room. “Did I misunderstand?”
“Uh…I don’t think we ever said, actually,” Myles said, glancing again at his watch and seeing that it was now several minutes past the time when Harlow and he were supposed to meet. She hmphed and sat down on the edge of the hotel bed, seeming to be in an even worse mood than she had been earlier. Myles smiled, though, thinking that the news he was about to share with her might cheer her up.
“Anyway, the meeting place is not that important,” Myles said. “I made a big discovery, Harlow. You’re not going to believe it but it turns out the map we’ve been using to study the location of Saul’s army contains flaws.”
“Flaws?” Harlow asked.
Myles nodded his head vigorously. “You accidentally misplaced a mark on one of the locations, which had thrown the whole map off. I caught it and corrected the error, and now you can see a definite pattern in the way Saul’s men are moving. Here, look.”
Myles thrust the map at Harlow, and she took it, staring down at it with a doubtful look.
“Look,” Myles said, pointing to a spot on the map. “The black line is the path we originally thought Saul’s men were taking. This red line is the corrected path. See how it’s more of a predictable pattern? And look, if they continue following the pattern, they should be coming by here very soon. We might be able to catch up with them sooner than we thought.”
Myles looked up at Harlow as she took in the lines on the map. He’d expected her to be excited once she realized what the map showed, but her frown only deepened as she looked down at the map.
“This can’t be right,” she said. “I checked over this several times.”
“I know you did,” Myles said. “And most of the map was correct. It was just this one little error you made that threw the whole thing off. It was an easy error to make—especially with all the work you’ve been putting in lately. See how the locatio
n descriptions are really similar? But this one is actually the correct one.”
Myles pointed to the red, corrected line that he had drawn on the map and waited patiently for Harlow to see what he was talking about. But after looking at it for several long moments, she shook her head and handed it back to him.
“I don’t see what you’re saying,” she said, crossing her arms. “The original line still looks correct to me.”
Confused, and feeling slightly embarrassed, Myles looked down at the map again, trying to see whether he had indeed been wrong to think that the original markings on the map were wrong. But no, as he looked over the map and notes again, he was sure that he was right. He looked up at Harlow, whose arms were still crossed, and eyed her somewhat incredulously. Was she legitimately refusing to see the truth? Myles knew she was not a dumb person. There’s no way she was actually just not understanding what he was saying to her. Maybe she felt bad that she had made a mistake?
“Harlow, no one is going to fault you for making an error like this,” Myles said. “I didn’t bring it up to rub it in your face. I brought it up because now that I see it, I think finding our enemies here will be much easier than we originally thought it would be. This is good news. I thought you’d be happy about it.”
But Harlow’s eyes flashed with anger as she looked up at Myles. “I don’t need you to give me good news,” she said. “I don’t need you to do anything for me. I just want you to leave me alone. You didn’t want me to come out here in the first place. Are you just looking for proof of my failures now?”
Myles was taken aback. And then, he started to feel angry himself. He’d tried to be nice, but this had gone too far, and he had reached his breaking point.
Determination and the Dragon (Redwood Dragons Book 4) Page 7