Marnie yanked her camera out of her pocket and clicked it on. She pressed the shutter button and prayed. Pressed it again. Again.
"They're doing sex!" Julie whispered, shocked.
Marnie pinched her to make her be quiet, but it was too late. One of them—a female with yellow wings with big brown spots— stopped what she was doing to the male with reddish wings. Her little head swiveled as she looked around. She twittered something.
Marnie gaped. The little fairy had teeth. Pointy teeth, like a cat.
Several of them laughed. One chirped more words, and they looked all around as if they were spooked. A bitty little man with blue wings cried out and pointed right at the tree where Marnie and Julie were hiding.
The biggest female, a slender redhead with wings the color of dusk, raised her hands over her head. She cried out some words real sharp, like she was bossing someone around. She was loud, too, louder than someone that little ought to be. Her teeny hands closed into fists.
They all vanished, and it was very dark beneath the trees.
The girls did get in trouble for sneaking out, but it was worth it. Marnie sold her pictures to the local newspaper and then to a wire service. Eventually she even forgave her sister for opening her big mouth and scaring the fairies off.
8:52 p.m. December 19 (local);
2:52 a.m. December 20 (Greenwich)
LOS Lobos perched precariously on the mountainous coast of Michoacan, Mexico, where the peaks of the Sierra Madre del Sur crowded the coast so tightly they all but fell off into the Pacific. The tiny pueblo straddled one of the few roads into the mountains, a bumpy cement snake that shed its paving seven kilometers up to wriggle off in happy obscurity, becoming a dirt trail usable only by donkeys or those with no regard for their vehicle's undercarriage.
There was no inn or hotel in the village, but Senora de Pedrosa, old Enrique's widow, had an extra bedroom once she booted out her third-oldest grandson—who, after all, was well able to stay with his brother and sister-in-law for a few days. She'd rented that room to the stranger who slept there now, dreaming of darkness.
Cullen awoke with a start. For a second he didn't know where or when he was, but there was light. He could see.
Not that there was much to see. He'd fallen asleep at the little table his hostess had provided, dozing off with his head on his arms.
Gah. Tedious dream… though not as tedious as the other one. He'd hoped that one would quit squirming up from his unconscious now that he was Nokolai, but no such luck,
Cullen straightened, scrubbed his face with both hands, and twisted to stretch the kinks out of his spine. Apparently his recent late nights, added to tramping through the jungle, had caught up to him. What time was it, anyway?
He picked up the phone that served better as a clock than a communication device this far from any cell towers. The glowing display informed him it was a ridiculous hour to be asleep. Well, he was awake now.
What had woken him?
He frowned. The dream? But it had never woken him up before. He listened, sniffed, but didn't hear or smell anything unusual…
Then he felt it again. Soft as the brush of a feather, something tickled his shields.
Instinctively he snapped them tighter. What the hell—?
Then he smiled. Of course. Someone had noticed him, was trying to turn him aside. Who else but the one he sought?
His hand went to his chest, where the longer of his two necklaces dangled. He opened the pouch—leather, covered with silk— and removed the contents. For a moment he simply savored it, turning it over between his fingers.
It was hard and smooth as glass and shaped like a large flower petal. The edges were sharp enough to make him careful how he handled it. In daylight, he knew, it would be dark gray with an opalescent sheen, as if coated by oily water. At the moment his eyes could barely make it out.
But Cullen didn't rely only on his eyes to see. And his recent blinding, now healed, had only made his other vision sharper. With that vision he saw color: alive, glittering color. Blue for water, silver for air, brown for earth—red sparks, yellow, green—all the colors of magic danced across it. But underneath… ah, underneath them all, it was the deepest purple, a purple darkened nearly to black.
Purple, the color of those of the Blood. What he held had come from the oldest of the magical species, the one made more purely from magic than any other. Chances were, Cullen thought as he smoothed his thumb along the glassy surface, that no one on Earth had held one of these in four or five hundred years.
A dragon's scale, so recently shed that the magic of its former owner still lived in it.
A dragon who might be looking for Cullen, as Cullen was looking for him—though for different reasons. He grinned into the darkness, his hand closing around the sharp edges of his prize.
10:52 a.m. December 20 (local);
2:52 a.m. December 20 (Greenwich)
EIGHTY kilometers outside Chengdu in Sichuan Province, China, an old woman was climbing a mountain—quite a short mountain, actually, though the trail was steep. Few took that trail in winter, but today both land and sky were clear of snow. The sun was a shiny pebble overhead.
She wasn't alone. Five others lagged behind, perhaps not as keen as she on reaching the Taoist temple at the trail's end. The cold annoyed Madam Li Lei Yu, bringing as it did intimations of age and mortality. But then, her pilgrimage was itself a reminder of those states: both the immediate pilgrimage up this blasted mountain and the larger one that had brought her back to her homeland.
After arriving in Chengdu she'd learned that the man she'd come here to see—a monk—had died last year. She was annoyed with An Du. Couldn't he have waited a little longer? She would make the trip to his grave, but there was a strong flavor of "get it over with" to her climb.
She was twenty feet from the top and out of sight of the others when it hit. Not dizziness, though she lost track of up and down. Not blindness nor deafness, though her vision went gray and her hearing faded. Something strong and other blew through her, snuffing out her senses like candles, sending her sliding across reality as if it were ice.
She came to lying on her back with the sun still shining, the rest of the climbers still on the other side of the bend, and a name on her lips that hadn't been spoken aloud in four hundred years.
Li Lei didn't speak that name now, either. But it sang inside her, opening vistas of terror and joy, memory and change. For several breaths she didn't move, letting her heart settle back into its usual steady beat. Letting her thoughts settle, too, around the new shape of reality.
"So," she whispered in the language of her birth, "he has come back."
And just how long had he been back before the wind blew through and whispered his name? She scowled.
The sound of voices all too near made her push to her feet, wincing—since there was no one to see—at the pain in her hip. There was a time when a little fall like that… well, no matter. She was old, and the Maker had for some unfathomable reason chosen to include decrepitude as part of the package. Railing against it did no good.
Nonetheless, she was muttering under her breath to whomever might be listening as she walked back along the trail.
The others came around the bend, following their guide. He was a small, agile man of about forty who had not liked it when she went on ahead. He had actually thought he could prevent her. The married couple just behind him were from Beijing, the two young men from somewhere in Guizhou.
Li Lei Yu neither knew nor cared why the others had decided to climb a mountain today. She was interested in only one person of the party: the middle-aged woman at the rear. She ignored the guide's questions and expostulations as she made her way to her companion.