“The shrew can take us there?” Lucas sounded skeptical.
“That, my boy, is no ordinary rodent.” Jacques picked up the coins and pocketed them before bowing again to Aria. “Although this encounter did not go as I’d hoped, your beauty has brightened my morning,ma chérie. I hope you feel the same?”
“I’m afraid to answer that,” admitted Aria.
That response seemed to please Jacques. His smile slipped, though, at Lucas’s glower.
“Thank you for the stuff,” the Morph said, plastering a clearly fake smile on his face.
“Anytime, my intense young friend.” The Satyr gestured to Sparkle, who flew to his shoulder. “Home, my girl. I will join you there.”
With a poof of ash, Sparkle vanished. By the time Aria finished sneezing, Jacques had disappeared through the door.
Lucas rubbed a hand over his face. “He can’t help it, I don’t think.” He sounded like he’d swallowed some of Sparkle’s ash.
“He was rather charming. Hey, do you have a weapon I can borrow?”
He shot her a startled look. “Don’t you have your sword?”
Aria held it aloft and tapped it on the table. The entire thing dissolved into dust. “It’s toast. I need to shift to Dragon to get a new one, and I don’t dare until I’ve had a chance to absorb the crystal.”
“Yeah, I’ve got something for you.”
She glanced up at him, one brow tweaking. His words were edgy, his eyes sparking green. Her entire body tingled. Unbidden, the tip of her tongue emerged to moisten her lips.
His eyes flared. Aria’s heart hammered so hard she swore he’d be able to hear it. She swallowed past the lump in her throat. “That would be great, thanks.”
Lucas grimaced and headed for the stairs.
Aria pointed to his bagel, sitting abandoned on the table. “Where are you going? You didn’t finish breakfast.”
“Bathroom.” His voice sounded curiously strangled.
“Are we going to find Cara?”
He took the stairs two at a time. “When I get back, we’ll go find ourselves a Watcher.”
Aria’s sense of loss and disappointment as he vanished up the stairs confused her. Was it the Satyr’s pheromones? She sighed, and dumped a healthy serving of crystal dust onto the peanut butter gracing her bagel. After a moment’s thought, she picked up the bag of herbs.
The bag said half a teaspoon a day. She dusted that on top. And then added a second dose.
If she was going to be spending the day with Lucas, she figured she’d need all the help she could get.
31
Life was good.
Or okay, at least. Nikolai drifted through his days, grazing on Elandriel’s sweet grasses, galloping with the Bellatis across the savannas, and trotting through the dense forests with their cold-running rivers and still, deep lakes.
Nikolai was accustomed to the raw, and sometimes cruel, beauty of the Kalahari in the human realm, but he’d never experienced anything like this. Elandriel was pure magic; its incredible richness and diversity gleamed with health, a prime example of the balance as it was meant to be.
The great cycle of life took on an entirely new meaning for Nikolai as it flowed through him and folded him into the whole. But beyond it, he sensed how it tied deep into the core power, the churning source that seemed endless.
He asked one of his guards about it. “Thee life energy feeds us all?”
The Bellati stared at him. “Yes.”
“But whaat of thee energy that runs deeper?”
