Riding Rifts (Vampire's Elixir Series Book 2) Read online

  About who? Me? Had he lain in his bed all night, wondering how I was and what I was doing?

  “. . . about Nindock and what he was getting up to.”

  Deflection to deflation in one sentence. He must have seen the look on my face because he smiled and leaned in to kiss me on the forehead. “And about you, of course. Did you manage to persuade Derek? I noticed the others looked better.”

  “You saw them?”

  “A glimpse when I opened the rift. They were on two feet and moving, so I guess you did persuade Derek.”

  “I did. I had to promise him a juicy burger to get him on board, though.”

  Jevyn hesitated a moment. “A burger, huh? Isn’t everything still on lockdown? Where are you going to get one of those?”

  “No idea, but I had to do something. So, what are you going to do now that you’re here?”

  “I wanted to scout the camp. See what gives.”

  I whistled lightly. “After what happened last time?”

  “Yeah.”

  “He threw you out. Said not to come back or—”

  “I know, but I have a secret weapon.” He grinned broadly.

  I liked it. He looked happy, and I hadn’t seen him looking happy too much so far. It did something indescribable to my insides.

  “Really. What is it? A special gun or something.” I liked the idea of a secret weapon. Come to think of it, I liked the idea of any kind of weapon.

  “No. What good would that do me? Tell me what the best way would be to get around in the camp without being noticed.”

  I had to think about this riddle for a moment. I was pretty sure the first thing that came to my mind was wrong, but I said it anyway. “Go disguised as somebody like me.” I pulled the hood of my jacket over my head and tried not to look suspicious.

  He laughed aloud. “No, I’d look like a common criminal. Try again.”

  I thought some more, but nothing would come to mind, so in the end, I shrugged.

  “Okay. Do me a favor. Turn away.”

  “You’re not gonna run and hide, are you?” I asked.

  “I’m not that childish. Turn away.”

  Reluctantly, I turned my back on him. A matter of a couple of seconds later, he said, “Okay, turn back.”

  I didn’t know what I was expecting, but what stood in front of me wasn’t it. A dragon. Sharp teeth, golden-brown eyes, scales that seemed to shimmer in the sunlight, diffracting rainbows of color where the sun caught its skin. It was so beautiful.

  I opened my mouth, but nothing came out for a minute.

  “You’re incredible.” I couldn’t quite put into words how seeing Jevyn that way made me feel. Humbled. In awe. A little . . . turned on? Shit, where did that come from? It made me feel things I hadn’t felt for a while and things I promised myself to avoid until our quest, to find a cure for the virus, was complete.

  That resolve just got blown out of the water.

  “Turn around again.”

  “I want to watch you change.” I really did. I was fascinated by Jevyn’s new form.

  “Not yet. Another time. I have something else to show you.”

  “It will take a lot to beat what you just did,” I said as I turned. Again, only a second or two passed before he called me to turn back.

  I hesitated slightly. “You don’t look any different to me. Still a big scary dragon.”

  “You can see me?”

  “Of course, why wouldn’t I?”

  “Because I’m invisible to everyone else.”

  “What? That’s fairytale stuff. How can you make yourself invisible?”

  “It’s a spell. One of the very few I can perform, I’m sad to say, and only in dragon form. I can’t stay more than a couple of hours like it though. It tires me out too much.”

  “How do I know that’s true, that you are invisible?”

  He pointed at the corner of the building, and I turned to see what he was pointing at. Or who, as it was in this case.

  “Who are you talking to, Katie? We’re waiting for you to come with us.” Penny was leaning on the corner of the building, checking her lipstick in her front camera on her phone.

  I smiled, which appeared to confuse her a little. “You guys go ahead and explore. I’ll be along in a while.”

  “Okay, as long as you’re sure. Later.”

  “Yeah, bye.”

  I turned back to Jevyn, laughing at the top of my voice. “Invisible, huh? Clever.”

  “Not really. An accident of birth more than anything else. Most dragons have some magic, but many don’t use it now. It’s frowned upon by a society that believes technology can solve any problem. I’m not so sure. Sometimes, the old ways are the best ways.”

  “Reactionary,” I said, poking Jevyn in the snout playfully.

  “I prefer traditionalist, and if you do that again, you might get your finger singed.” He blew small flames from each nostril, like he was blowing his nose.

  “You’re just showing off now. So, what’s the plan?”

  “Well, I’m planning on having a fly around for a while to see what’s going on.”

  “Can I come with you? You know, ride on your back.”

  “No. Nobody rides on my back.”

  “Why?”

  “Because.”

  “That’s no reason. Because why?”

  “Well, for today, because I’m invisible and you’re not. It would look very odd if you were floating around in the air with no visible support.”

  I thought about that for a moment, and it was true, but I could tell from his voice that there was more to it than that. It didn’t look like I would get to the bottom of it, though. I watched as Jevyn backed up and then took two running steps and flapped his wings. The sound of the air being displaced was incredible, like a louder and much more powerful version of the sound a rip made when it opened.

  I swiveled around, watching as he gained some height, and then with a powerful blast of wings, he rose high into the sky, effortlessly it seemed, wheeling around until he was out of sight behind the buildings.

  I raced around the building and just managed to catch a glimpse of him before he vanished again. I so wanted to be up there with him, soaring with everyone on the ground looking like ants in a colony.

  But I couldn’t, and I wanted to find out why.

  ***

  IT TOOK ME an hour to walk around the camp. Most of the time I strode the streets with my hood up, attracting no great attention from the people there who seemed to have no time to worry about anything other than working. Having only seen a very small part of the camp the day before, I was incredulous at what appeared before my eyes.

  One part of the camp had been set aside for what seemed to be a medical center, and there were many people lining up outside. Many seemed to have some terrible injuries. Some had fingers or toes missing, others an ear or the tip of a nose, looking like it had been swiped off with a sharp knife. Still others had worse injuries, missing limbs being the most common. I remembered Jevyn telling me that it was a result of Nindock’s sometimes faulty rips in the veil through which so many people had made it to Earth. I found it difficult to remember that these were all, or at least mostly, dragon shifters like Jevyn who had left Dracos to try and make a better life for themselves on another planet.

  I hoped they didn’t have the magic to see invisible dragons whenever Jevyn would swoop around flying low enough that he could check on me. The only one who did was an old man sitting on a street corner in a large marketplace, drinking something that looked alcoholic out of a grubby bottle. His features were saggy and wrinkled, but he had the demeanor of a younger man.

  “Look,” he yelled, slurring the word, his pointer finger shaking as it followed Jevyn’s track through the sky. “Dragon,” he mumbled and then shook his head and took another slug of his booze.

  “What’s old Larvyn on about now?” one of the stallholders shouted to his neighbor.

  “He says there’s a dragon up there,”
the other stallholder replied.

  “Oh, you ignore him. He sees dragons everywhere he looks, even in the bottom of that bottle of his.”

  The two men laughed, while Larvyn wrapped his arms around himself, pulling his coat tighter to keep out the cold. He took another slug and slumped against the wall he was leaning on.

  The smell of cooking food attracted my attention. It was lunchtime by then so only understandable.

  I caught a glimpse of three familiar faces sharing some food to one side of one of the stalls.

  “Hey, guys. How did you get that? What did you buy it with?”

  “We didn’t. We bartered it,” Penny said quietly, putting her fingers to her lips while she chewed on the meat sandwich in her hand.

  “With what?” I asked quietly.

  “Information.”

  “Huh? How so?”

  “I made him an offer he couldn’t refuse,” Frankie said. It was a line from his favorite old movie, but I’d never seen it, so it was lost on me.

  I shook my head, still not following.

  “I was here talking to a man to see if he was interested in doing some business, you know?” Penny said. I wondered about the turn of phrase but decided to let it ride. “Frankie here was watching one of the stalls. Over there.” She inclined her head in a direction where there were at least a half-dozen stalls, so I let that ride too. Details. “By the time I’d finished making a deal with the guy, Frankie had spotted the stallholder’s assistant making a deal with a buyer but skimming some off the top and pocketing it himself. Frankie offered the stallholder the information for a beef sandwich each, and I’m just finishing mine up now. The guy who got fired didn’t look too pleased though and headed off quickly, so maybe it would be a good time to get out of here.”

  “What business did you do, though, Penny?”

  Penny leaned forward. She had a top on under her coat that dropped down at the front, giving whoever was looking, me in this case, a view down her front that if you were interested would definitely stoke the coals. She opened up her purse, and I could see something wrapped in tin foil and two full vials of blood, bright red and looking utterly delicious.

  “You got blood?” I asked as quietly as I could.

  “Yep, two vials and as much more as we want for the right price.”

  I didn’t want to know what the right price was. I was just glad we got what we needed.

  “What’s in the foil?”

  “There are sandwiches for you and Sparks in there.” My eyes lit up. I was starving.

  Marty stepped forward from behind Penny and dropped another foil-wrapped item into her purse. “And that is the biggest, juiciest burger on the stand,” he said with a smile.

  I was delighted with the outcome of the day so far. I did have one concern that I needed to pass on as we left.

  “Listen guys,” I said as we walked back out of the marketplace, heading back to the car, “if this is going to become a regular thing, you know, with your contact, Penny, you just need to make sure we don’t take too much and that this dragon doesn’t get hurt. Jevyn doesn’t need to know either. Keep this just between us, okay?”

  “Sure,” Penny said, while Marty and Frankie nodded nonchalantly.

  By the time we got back to the car, Jevyn was there, too, and back in his human form. I ran over to hug him, forgetting that the last time we spoke he was invisible to everyone but me.

  “Hey, Jevyn,” Marty said as he walked by. I remembered then he could only be invisible as a dragon.

  Frankie flicked him a mock salute, while Penny walked by laughing, doing that thing where you wrap your arms around yourself to make it look as if you are kissing someone. She did a fine job of adding smooching sound effects too.

  All three of them piled into the back of the car, chattering happily between themselves.

  I looked into Jevyn’s gorgeous eyes.

  “You going or staying?”

  “I’m staying for a while. I’ll come back with you to Lynnette’s place. I want to keep an eye on her.”

  “There’s room in the front if you need a ride. Or do you want to fly?”

  “A ride would be good. Help me get my strength back.”

  I stood up on my toes, kissed him on the lips, and then dipped away before he could respond.

  “Maybe that will help,” I said, blushing. Oh, man, look at me blushing over a boy, I thought.

  “For a start, it will,” Jevyn said. His eyes seemed to be burning with some kind of flame inside.

  My insides scrunched up into a little ball of fire as I watched him.

  Chapter Two

  Jevyn

  Lynnette’s shop

  Boise, Idaho

  I COULDN’T BE sure about the trip to Nindock’s town, but the impression I got was that Katie and her friends had managed to achieve whatever it was they went there to do. I knew I had, and the unexpected pleasure of seeing Katie there, and of being able to keep an eye on her to make sure she didn’t have any problems, was the most perfect bonus for me.

  I’d told Katie that I’d had a good night’s sleep back in Dracos. Well, that much was true. The part about thinking about Nindock was less true. In fact, it could be deemed to be ninety-percent untrue. I thought about him for about a minute. Then, the rest of the time I was awake I spent thinking about Katie.

  She seemed to have worked her way into my head in a way I would never have thought possible.

  The atmosphere in the car on the way back, particularly from the back seat, was most definitely celebratory. Katie, while driving, constantly seemed to want to turn around and tell her friends to be quiet.

  It was only when she managed to catch the eye of one of them in the rearview mirror that whatever message she was trying to get over finally had its effect, and the three in the back fell silent for the rest of the trip. It really didn’t take much thinking to figure out why they had gone to Nindock’s.

  Although I’d asked Katie not to use dragon blood anymore, and Derek had stepped manfully up to help them out, I thought I would have been angrier than I was. Yes, Katie had done something I’d asked her not to, but she had her own people to look after, and as most of the dragons in Nindock’s town seemed to be there because of a desire to escape my family’s rule, I felt little in the way of a need to protect them.

  Nindock, despite all his faults and overwhelming need to showboat all the time, had his town running well.

  From the air, the garbage and dirt were less noticeable. What was plain to see was the thought that had evidently gone into the design and layout of the town. From above it was orderly and logical, even if it was chaotic on the ground.

  I had, despite my misgivings, been impressed and much less concerned about the welfare of the dragons Nindock had brought over.

  I felt sorry for the ones who lost parts of themselves on the way over, but at least Nindock had provided medical care for them, which was more than a lot of them would have had back at home on Dracos.

  When we got back to the shop and down into Derek’s basement, I made an excuse while the vampires did what they needed to do. Then, I took a walk to the top floor of the store and then out and onto the roof.

  The entirety of the roof had been given over to a garden for some of the more exotic and rarer herbs and spices Lynnette used in her spells. Maybe she sold them in the store too. I wasn’t sure, although I thought I’d seen some paper bags labeled as dried herbs.

  Although the view from the roof wasn’t the best, too low to be able to see much more than the tops of other buildings and the distant lines of mountains that provided the backdrop to the city, the space above was clear, and with no power—so no lights at night—the view of the moon and stars would be excellent.

  With a plan in mind for later, I retraced my steps back down to Derek’s basement.

  “You guys all good?” I asked, noting the empty shot glasses draining by the sink.

  There were various replies in the positive. One or two sounded
utterly spaced out, but the rest, including Katie, seemed to still be in their right minds.

  “Anyone know where Lynnette went?”

  Four shrugs, a shake of the head, and a nope from Derek.

  “So, she could be doing anything even as we speak.”

  Three shrugs, two nods, and a yep from Derek.

  “Okay, thanks guys, very useful. I thought you were keeping an eye on her, Derek.”

  Derek turned his head away from his screen for a moment to look at me. “She’s not my mother.”

  “I know that, but I was hoping you might persuade her to not go off opening rifts everywhere. You know, maybe tie her to a chair or lock her in a closet.”

  “Who told you about that?” Derek swung his chair round so his entire body was facing me. He must have been hugely annoyed to let go of his keyboard.

  “Nobody told me anything. I was trying to make a joke.”

  Derek turned back and started operating his keyboard with lightning-fast strokes. “It’s not a laughing matter!” he said with such finality that I thought it would be best not to push it anymore.

  I checked out Katie who was relaxing on the sofa. Like the rest of them, she had fallen silent when Derek had his outburst. She could only shrug in as much confusion as I was feeling.

  Maybe I’d see if I could get Sparks to speak to him and find out what the outburst was all about.

  I took a seat on one of Derek’s dining chairs. It was no good asking Katie to go up onto the roof until it was dark outside—that was at least a couple of hours away—and I really didn’t want to spend it in silence, looking at five people who were acting like they had just eaten two Thanksgiving dinners with extra pumpkin pie.

  After a while, I decided I might as well go upstairs to the shop and have a look around. I’d pegged the shop as a front for Lynnette doing something illegal, and while she wasn’t there, it was time to find out.

  I told the room I was heading upstairs for a look around. Other than a half-hearted okay from Katie, there was no reply. The only person who seemed to be operating at full speed was Derek, and he ignored me completely.

  Upstairs, the shop was quiet, maybe just the scurry of some creature scuttling around on the floor. Outside, the street was quiet. There was one old man with a bottle wrapped up in a paper bag who was shuffling and stumbling around. It made me think of some of the people I’d seen in the marketplace in Dracos. In all my time there and in the cloistered surrounding of the Pathya palace, I’d never seen the kind of deprivation I’d seen in the market. People scrabbling around for morsels of food that I would have thrown away as inedible. Traders trying to make a thin living, selling goods to people who had an even thinner living.