The maiden smiled. “You make no sense, Goddess.”
“Argh!” Lina threw up her hands in aggravation. “Explain exactly why I haven’t blasted you to kingdom come yet?”
“Because you like me. You also need me. Not to mention you couldn’t even if you tried.” Baba Yaga waved her hand. Lina found herself back at Lacey’s side.
“How long was I gone?” she asked the Seer.
Lacey smiled. “Merely a blink. Literally. How is Baba Yaga? I haven’t dealt with her in eons.”
“Aggravating.”
“Ah. Nice to see she hasn’t changed. You will grudgingly come to like her. She has her way of doing things, but she is ancient and has earned the right to be grouchy.” Lacey patted Lina on the thigh. “I know she can grate on you sometimes. Believe me, I’ve had my share of run-ins with her in the past. Just understand she, like you, has a job to do. She is bound by her own set of laws, just as you are. Her way of helping sometimes seems less than helpful. Just keep in mind she is on the side of humanity. Sometimes, even to her own detriment.”
“She and I will be butting heads a lot, I guess.”
“Probably.”
Lina shivered. “I don’t like this job,” she quietly said. “I didn’t ask for it.”
“None of us did, or would. That’s what makes us best suited for it. Anyone who would want this job, willingly, is someone who should not be in it.”
“I saw those assholes kill a family. Kael’s family.”
Lacey stared out over the water. “I’m sorry.”
“Me, too.” Lina briefly told her about it. “Even worse, I couldn’t do anything about it. Well, I tried. The only thing I managed to do was knock a goblet out of the third guy’s hand.”
Lacey looked shocked. “Really?”
“Yeah. Was that something to do with my goddess powers?”
“It must be, because I’ve known a lot of Seers, and none of them could ever do anything like that.”
“Great.” Lina thought for a moment. “So, have you seen anything that might be of use to me with this situation? Like did you see who killed Bertholde? Or any chance you know who the third guy might be?”
“No,” Lacey said sadly. “I’m sorry. I’m not going to be of any use to you there. I wish I could.”
“Do you know anything about the tablet?”
“Oh, yes. I helped hide it a few centuries ago.”
Lina hoped her jaw hadn’t gaped. “So you know where it is?”
Lacey laughed. “Heavens, no. It’s been moved several times since then. My guess is that Bertholde left you several clues as to its whereabouts, and that you’ll find it near her home. As she grew older, she kept it closer to her for safekeeping. Several of the keepers had been killed over the years.”
“Who are the other keepers?”
“That I don’t know. Once I left Europe for Scotland, I took myself out of the running. I do know as of last year, at least, that it was safe. Bertholde physically laid eyes on it at least once a year.”
“Is it possible one of the other keepers killed her?” Maybe it was a clue.
Lacey shrugged. “Anything’s possible in this day and age. I highly doubt it, though. From what she told me the last time we talked, about a week before she went to Yellowstone, all of the other keepers were much older than herself and not in very good shape. She talked about passing the torch, but I didn’t know for sure what she meant. I assumed she was talking about a new keeper for the tablet. So very few of our kind even know about its existence anymore.” She looked sad. “Now, I know what she meant. At least I got to have a good talk with her.”
Lina stretched and felt her back pop. “What did you really bring me out here to discuss?”
A coy smiled curled Lacey’s lips. “I don’t know what information Bertholde left for you to give you a history of our kind. Seers, I mean. There aren’t a lot of us. You’re basically born to the job.”
She pointed at Lina. “You were born to the job. You don’t find it coincidental that your father’s family hailed from Eastern Europe?”
“I—” Well, Lina had never given it much thought before. She considered it. “What does that have to do with anything?”
“Seers are sometimes born into knowing families. Families with active shifter lines. It’s not exactly a secret you can keep hidden, especially once a child grows into adolescence and feels the urge to shift. Seers were originally their own lines. Back in the days before history, our kind realized that by pairing up with shifters, our own kind could be protected. As Seers began to mingle and mate with shifter breeds, eventually the Seers became one with the shifter races they joined.
“But sometimes, someone from a shifter line who doesn’t come from a knowing family, call it a recessive shifter gene, if you will, will pop up.”
“You’re saying I’m a shifter? I thought I wasn’t?”
Lacey smiled. “One of my skills that I use for my pack is when a baby is born to shifters, they bring it to me for me to see if it’s Alpha or not, or if it’s even a shifter or not. You, my dear, come from a shifter line. Dragon line, not wolves. I don’t even have to know your history to know this. Bertholde told me she extensively researched your family line. You are from dragons several generations back, on your father’s side.”
Lina didn’t know what to say to that. She had to let it sink in for a few minutes. Eventually, she settled on, “So I’m, what, the baby shifter whisperer?”
Lacey laughed long and hard. “I’m not saying you’ll have that same skill, dear,” she finally managed to get out. “But there’s also something else you should know. It’s not uncommon for shifter lines, by that I mean the shifter races, to intermingle from time to time. For a wolf and feline, for example, to mate. The dragons and wolves have always been close. I don’t know exactly what your origins are, genetically speaking, but it wouldn’t surprise me, based on what Bertholde told me, to find out you have a wolf or two in the woodshed, so to speak.”
Lina blinked in shock, unsure what to say. Finally, she settled for falling back on the rock, staring up at the sky, and screaming until her voice cracked and her throat felt raw and hoarse.
Lacey simply sat there, looking out over the water.
After Lina got it out of her system, she looked at Lacey.
“Feeling better, dear?” Lacey asked.
Lina snorted, then laughed, rolling onto her belly and laughing until tears rolled down her face and her humor had transformed into gut-wrenching sobs.
Lacey gathered her up and let her cry against her. “It’s all right, child,” she soothed. “Let it out before it eats you alive. It is a lot to take in. It must feel like the world has been dropped onto your shoulders.”
“No, it feels like the world just dropped me with a flying kick and then ripped my head off and shit down my neck.”
Lacey laughed. “You are going to give Andel fits. Bertholde would be extremely amused and proud of that.”
“What is the deal between them, anyway?” She told Lacey about the postscript in Bertholde’s note to her.
Lacey laughed. “Andel is her nephew. She loved him, but he surely tried her patience over the years. He once set fire to her house when he was a teenager.”
“Oh. Wow. I guess that would piss a person off. How’d he do it? Matches? Candle?”
Lacey snorted with amusement. “He’s a fire dragon.”
“Ah. Oh.” Lina got the giggles again. “Did she give him the scar on his face? Smack him upside the head for breathing too hard?”
Lacey shook her head. “No. A cockatrice did that.”
That pulled Lina up short. “Oh. Whoops. Glad you told me.”
Lacey looked out over the water again. “They killed many in his family. Not the same way they killed poor Kael’s family. It was in a territory dispute. The cockatrice wanted dragon land and decided to come in one night in a sneak attack and try to take it the good old-fashioned way, by slaughtering the residents of a small village.”