“There now, just ten minutes and you’re all done.”
He sniffed and nodded, keeping his eyes firmly closed. There was a clatter from behind, and the nurse looked up, holding her hand towards me to indicate she would be back in a few minutes. I gave her a nod of acknowledgement then, once she’d gone, turned back to Alex.
“You were asking about the money?”
He didn’t respond.
“Alex! Hey! You were asking me about the money.”
“Mmm.”
I guessed that was the most I was going to get out of him for now. I continued. “Well, the thing is, I was round at Balud’s this morning.” I quickly outlined what the troll had told me, and that the expected cost of making a bunch of palladium based weapons was going to be high. “So my plan is to go home after this and send out an email to all the council members and get them to talk to their organisations for some cash.”
Alex’s eyes flew open. “What? No! You can’t do that!”
Okaydokey. That wasn’t quite the reaction I’d been hoping for. Apparently it was possible to bring him out of his needle-induced nausea, after all. I eyed him warily.
“Why not? We need the money to get the metal. We need the metal to make the weapons. We need the weapons to defeat fucking Endor.”
“The Ministry doesn’t have any money.”
“I know they don’t have much, but…”
“No, Mack Attack, they really don’t have any money. Every missive I’ve been sent recently has been about how we can start to raise some funds. You have no idea how hard the recession has hit us.”
“If there’s no money, then the Arch-Mage can just decline. The Brethren and the Fae will step up. I wasn’t expecting much from your lot’s side anyway.”
“You’re forgetting the politics. The Arch-Mage can’t be seen to be the only person not stepping up to the plate. If the faeries and the furries give money, then we have to as well. Otherwise the loss of face will be catastrophic. We’ll have no choice but to match whatever the others put in, and that will completely bankrupt us.”
“That’s so fucking stupid!”
He shrugged expressively, a troubled look crossing his sun-kissed face. “You can’t just avoid asking the Ministry to contribute either. If it got out that you, as the all-powerful dragon council leader, went to everyone else except us for money, then the result would be even worse. No-one likes being made to feel like an object of pity.”
Outfuckingstanding. “I need to get hold of palladium, Alex.”
He sighed. “Let me see what I can do first. There must be some other way to source it without having to pay for it.”
That sounded a hell of a lot like stealing to me. I gave in for the time being, however, murmuring a reluctant assent. “Just don’t take too fucking long. Goodness knows when Endor will decide to show up again.”
The nurse bustled back in, removed the needles and swabbed over the small wounds on our arms, before covering them with a blob of cotton wool and some surgical tape.
“There now, that wasn’t so bad, was it?”
Alex grunted weakly in return. At the very least, the colour was starting to return to his cheeks. She handed us both over a biscuit and cup of something luridly orange.
“Just lie back, and relax, and finish those off, then you’ll be good to go.”
“Thanks,” I said, looking doubtfully down at the drink.
“Would you like me to take a look at your face while you’re here?”
“No, it’s alright. It looks worse than it is, honest. I just walked into a door this morning, that’s all.”
Both the nurse and Alex gazed at me with unmistakable skepticism. I gave a short laugh, more out of continued exasperation than humour. “No, really I did. But thanks again, anyway.”
“Yeah, thanks,” agreed Alex. He arched an eyebrow at me. “While we’re waiting, Mackenzie, you can tell me all about that book you’ve been reading.” He sent me a pointed look.
I took a sip, wincing at the rush of sugar that the juice provided, “Sure,” I said, unenthusiastically. “I can’t wait.”
Chapter Six
Once the nurse had disappeared to deal with her next donors, Alex propped himself up on one elbow and fixed me with a serious look. He’d recovered so miraculously from his terror of giving blood that I was having doubts it had been anything other than a vaguely psychosomatic induced hysteria.
“So? Spill all the gory details, Mack Attack.”
I sighed. “I have a book. Or rather the book has me; I’m not entirely sure which.”
At Alex’s quizzical look, I explained further. “I found it in Clava Books. The original Clava Books in Inverness. Then the shop burnt down and I thought it was lost forever. Until, that is, I was wandering along the shelves of the mages’ library at the academy and it showed up again.”
“Another edition?”
“No, I’m actually pretty sure it was the same book.” I tucked a curl of hair behind my ear uncomfortably. “I know it sounds daft, but…”
“No, dude, not at all. There are more sentient books around than you’d think. It stands to reason, if there was one about the Draco Wyr, then it’d be one of those.”
I was reminded for a moment that, despite Alex’s apparent fear of confrontation and his surfer dude persona, he was still a remarkably competent mage and I didn’t often give him the credit he was due. Shooting him a grateful look for not being more cynical about the book’s origins, I continued on.
“Anyway, it was written in Fae runes so it was a fucking pain trying to work out what it all meant. I had a dictionary, and I know some of the more basic runes, but…”
Alex nodded vigorously. “Yeah, I never got much further than the faerie equivalent of Where The Wild Things Are.”
Slightly distracted at the idea the Fae’s version of that famous kids’ book probably had the humans as the ‘wild things’, I shook my head to clear away the peculiar vision and stuck to the subject.
“Well, to cut a long story short, I gave it to Solus and he got it translated for me. I’ve had it for a while, except every time I was going to read it, something came up.”
“But you’ve read it now?” he prompted.
“Yes, Alex, I’ve read it now. I finished it yesterday.”
“And?”
“And what?” I knew I was being deliberately obtuse, but for some reason I didn’t really feel that comfortable talking about my heritage, even to Alex. There was a lot about it that was just too weird.
Alex pulled himself up to a sitting position then blinked several times. “Whoa, head rush.” He looked directly into my eyes. “It’s okay, Mack. You don’t have to talk about it if you don’t want to.”
I felt a rush of warmth towards my magic mate, then stared down at my feet and came to a decision. “None of it is that surprising. There’s stuff about where the Draco Wyr originally came from. We really are descended from honest to goodness dragons. Well,” I paused, “one dragon, anyway. We pretty much always have red hair. We always have bad tempers. A lot of my ancestors apparently died young as a result of picking just one too many fights. There were vast amounts who where just hunted down though. You know,” I said shifting, uncomfortably, “because of the crazy addictive blood with unbelievable healing properties.”
Alex raised his eyebrows. “Yeah, I can see why it would be a good idea to keep it as secret as possible and not go giving away any of that blood. Especially not to knowledgeable medical personnel who are going to test it.”
I waved him away. “They’re testing it for human stuff, not Otherworld stuff. Nothing’s going to show up.”
“You hope,” he returned grimly.
“It’s a calculated risk. It’s not like I’m handing it over to vampires or demi-goddesses or anyone like that.”
“Hmmm,” he murmured, in a non-committal manner.
“Besides, by the sounds of things, my bigger worry as a Draco Wyr should be ancestors of this warrior guy called Bolux. He killed the original Draco Wyr, but died of his injuries as a result. All his descendants have sworn through the centuries to make the Draco Wyr extinct, once and for all.”
Alex whistled. “Sheeeeit. That’s not great.”
“No,” I agreed. “In fact, it seems as if they were pretty much successful. By the time of the Great Fire of London back in 1666 –which was the result of a Draco Wyr inspired fight - they banded together to make a concerted effort to rid the Earth of my race. By all accounts, they succeeded. In theory, the knowledge and desire to slaughter as many Draco Wyr as possible died out because there were no more Draco Wyr to go after.”
“But you’re here,” he pointed out.
“That I am. There were hints in the book that at least one family had managed to escape the Bolux-inspired scourge, but there was nothing concrete.”
“Of course, if they survived and, as a result, you are here now, it stands to reason that the same might be true of these warrior dudes.”
“Yeah.” I fell into silence for a moment, brooding over the other revelations the book had offered.
“Maybe that’s the reason why your mother left you with the pack in Cornwall when you were just a kid. They were after her and you, and it was a good place to hide. She pretty much said so in the letter we found, which she had given to your old alpha, didn’t she? That ‘they’ were getting closer and something terrible would happen if they caught you?”
I nodded. “She wasn’t a Draco Wyr though.”
“How do you know?”
“She was scared of me, Alex. In that same letter, she said how terrified she was of my power. If she was a Draco Wyr too, then she wouldn’t have felt that way. She’d have known how to deal with it. She must have been human.” A bitter note entered my voice. “She was fucking afraid of me, Alex. I was just a kid and she was scared of me. That’s what kind of monster I am.”