“Me?” I squeezed my arm. It felt solid enough.
“Yup. You dropped like a sack of anvils. Then the First Dragon made his grand entrance, waved his hands around, and blammo! You were alive again.”
“The First Dragon . . .” There was something about that name, some memory that tugged on the edge of my awareness.
The woman and man had been arguing while the dog talked to me. I wondered for a moment if I had gone moon-mad, but decided that if I had, it didn’t matter if I talked to dogs, so I asked it, “Who are you?”
“Boy, you really are out of it, aren’t you. You don’t remember anything? Baltic’s going to go bonkers if you’ve lost your memory again.”
I frowned, searching my mind. There were many fleeting shadows of memories that moved so quickly I was unable to pin them down. “No, I . . . there’s something . . . a man, I think. He’s . . .”
“Fine!” the woman yelled, taking me by the arms and steering me toward a door. “But if Baltic wants to know why Ysolde is all wonky from being resurrected a second time, I’m going to be sure to tell him it’s your fault.”
The man snarled a curse as I was hustled out of the room, down a short hallway, and out another door into a corridor filled with doors.
Something about the surroundings struck a familiar note as well. “I think I’ve seen this before,” I said, pointing at the wall as the woman and the dog herded me into a small metal room. I touched the wall of it, lurching when the floor moved beneath me. “This is a . . . a . . .”
“Oh, man, I hope you get your memory back soon, or Baltic really
I looked at her as she pulled me backward out of the small room and into a big, bright hall.
“Not hall,” I corrected myself as I looked around. “Lobby. Hotel lobby.” The world seemed to resolve itself before my eyes, as if it was slowly being brought into focus.
“Thank god,” Aisling said as she and Jim pushed me into a large off-white chair.
“Aisling!” I said with delight. “I know who you are! And Jim!”
She gave me a crooked smile, then gestured to a waiter and demanded coffee. “Whew. You gave us quite a fright there. I was trying to figure out how to tell Baltic that we killed you changing Jim back, and then the First Dragon was suddenly there, and . . . well, I’m just glad your brain is back, too.”
I frowned as she began her sentence, but by the time she was done, I had pulled together enough of my wits to respond. “The spell killed me?”
“I don’t think so. Kostich said it was the backlash of arcane magic that was suddenly released when Jim was changed back into Newfie form. You lit up like a Christmas tree for a minute, then collapsed. We’d just figured out you were dead when pop! The First Dragon was there, calling your name, and bringing you back.” Aisling gazed at me with a kind of amazement. “I don’t think I’ve ever heard of anyone being resurrected twice, especially not by the First Dragon. Drake says he hasn’t made an appearance for centuries, not until May saw him when she re-formed the dragon heart. It’s obvious you have some sort of a tie with him.”
I took a deep breath, grateful to feel air filling my lungs. “Well, I’m not going to complain, since I’m alive. I can only imagine what Baltic—” Horror made the skin on my neck crawl as realization struck me. “Oh, dear god! Baltic! He must have felt me die!”
Frantically, I searched my pockets for my cell phone, but found nothing.
“Oh, geez. I didn’t think of that. Your phone got blasted with the explosion of light. Here, take mine,” Aisling said, shoving her phone at me.
My fingers shook as I punched in the phone number, remembering well the promise in Baltic’s voice when he swore he would not live without me.
“Were you dead long enough to kill him?” Aisling asked, adding a hellish nightmare tinge to an already overwhelming sense of panic.
“Please answer, please answer,” I chanted as the phone rang. Tears filled my eyes as I blocked the need to examine the worst-case scenario. “Please, Baltic, please—”
A wordless snarl of anguish answered the phone.
“Baltic!” I yelled into it.
“Ysolde?” Heavy breathing was all that met my ears for a few seconds. “Christos! What are you doing to me? Where are you? Why did it feel as if my heart was ripped out anew? What have you done?”
“Oh, thank god.” I covered the mouthpiece for a moment. “He’s all right, Aisling.”
“Thank god,” she said as well, then grabbed Jim and pulled it after her to another grouping of chairs in order to give me a little privacy.
“Where are you?” Baltic demanded again. A horrible noise followed, a combination of breaking glass and screaming metal, followed by a muffled explosion. “Bloody hell!”
“What’s going on? What was that?” Fear gripped my heart despite the sound of his voice.
“Pavel?” Another crash of glass sounded sharp in my ear, followed by Baltic grunting as more metal screamed. “The door is off. Are you hurt?”
Distantly, I could hear Pavel answer, “Just my arm. Air bags saved us.”
“Oh, my god, you were in a car? You crashed? Are you all right?” I stood up, spinning one way and then another, needing to go to him but having no idea where he was.
“Yes. This car is defective. We will get another. Now you will tell me why I felt as I did the time Constantine killed you.”
I took a couple more deep breaths, pointing out to myself that if he could talk, he was fine. “Something happened when Dr. Kostich helped me lift my borked spell off of Jim.”
“Your
“Borked. You know, wonky.”
He sighed, and in the distance I heard a
“Actually, I’m more like six minutes old, but that’s neither here nor there. What was that whooshing noise I just heard?”
“The defective car has burst into flames. What happened with Kostich? Why did it feel as if you died?”
“I did die.”
Stentorian breathing was all I could hear for half a minute. “Why,” he finally asked in a voice that sounded strangled, “did you die?”
“I just told you. Kostich and I were lifting the spell off of Jim, and it went bad. The backlash of the release of arcane power killed me. The First Dragon resurrected me. Again.”
Baltic swore profoundly. “I’ll never hear the end of that,” he muttered before raising his voice as sirens sounded near him. “Stay where you are. I will acquire a new vehicle and fetch you.”
“Oh, no you don’t. You stay where you are and I’ll get a car and pick you and Pavel up. Is his arm hurt badly? Are you hurt in any way?”
“Mate, do not give me orders when you have just come close to destroying me. Stay there. We will find you.”
We compromised after five minutes of argument to meet at Aisling and Drake’s house.
“Are you sure Drake won’t mind my showing up?” I asked Aisling as our taxi pulled to a stop at a graceful house in a exclusive neighborhood.
“Not at all,” she answered, then added with a little grimace, “And if he does, tough noogies. I want you to see the babies. They’re beyond adorable, even though I’m hardly impartial. Jim, stop that. Your package is exactly the way it used to be. Ysolde, I hope you don’t mind being frisked. Drake’s security since the twins were born has almost gone past what’s tolerable, but he means well.”
It took a good three minutes for me to be scanned, searched, and have an oral swab taken to determine whether I had any communicable diseases, but at last I made it into the foyer of the house, and Aisling bustled me upstairs to the nursery to see her babies.
The twins were sleeping in identical intricately carved wooden cradles, swathed with lace and filled with a number of stuffed toy dragons. I duly admired them, chatted with their nanny, a young green dragon named Grace, and reassured Aisling that I would return at a later date when the twins were awake so I could admire them as
