Page 50 of Red Dragon’s Flame

This time, the fire that surrounded them had a blue thread flickering through it, like the center of the hottest flames.

Chapter 23

They were interrupted by the chime of a communicator call, from somewhere outside the game hologram.

Mikah groaned in protest. “Fucking people never leave me alone.”

“It might be important,” Devon said.

It might be about her. Mikah pulled Devon to her feet, then pressed his control disk and deactivated the holo. They were back in the empty cavern, with their clothes scattered on the floor.

The ball was on his workbench, still chiming insistently. Mikah briefly considered exploding it into a million tiny pieces, but finally he conjured clothes for himself and stalked over to it.

“Mikah here. And this had better be incredibly fucking important.”

It was Thorne—with Tyr behind him. “We’ve got something,” Thorne said, in his abrupt way. Devon had no reason to be self-conscious about her lack of social finesse—she was no worse than anyone else around here. Thorne went on, “Not a lot, yet, but we’ve been searching the internet and Tyr’s archives for anything on your Allohim, and there’s a few things to report.”

Devon, who’d grabbed his t-shirt and was wearing it like a dress, whispered, “Don’t they ever sleep?”

The dragons heard her, of course, even through the communication ball. Tyr said, “He sometimes goes for days without sleep, Mystery Girl. And then he’s so grumpy no one wants to talk to him.”

Thorne added, “Days without sleep doing favors for people who have not yet sent me any akhasa mead. Just saying.”

“I’m on it,” Mikah said. “What have you got?”

“I’m sending a full written report to Emon, but here’s what we have so far.” They heard keys tapping, and then he said, “A general search on the word ‘Allohim’ barely turned up anything. The closest we found is Elohim, which is one name for God in the Judeo-Christian Bible.”

Mikah sat down on a padded bench, pulling Devon down beside him and giving her a secret smile. She kissed his shoulder. He said, “So either that’s a coincidence, or they think they’re gods?”

“They do look like angels,” Devon put in. “Scary ones.”

“Yes, so you said,” Thorne agreed. “We took that into consideration, and we did find a couple of instances in the archives where the name ‘Elohim’ was linked to the Banarak, a race of humanoid beings from one of the outer worlds that the dragons never had much traffic with.”

More key tapping. “They were reported to have unusually active electrical fields around their bodies, and to be able to manipulate electromagnetic fields. As they evolved, they were using that ability to create certain types of magical items—primarily weapons. However, several hundred years ago, they cut themselves off from the other worlds.”

“The electricity sounds like them,” Mikah conceded. “One of them smacked me with a lightning bolt that would have killed a non-magical creature.”

“Yes, Emon mentioned that.”

Mikah said, “And that’s it? It’s pretty thin.”

“It would be,” Tyr jumped in, “except I found two references linking the Banarak and phoenixes. One of them said that they had captured one or more phoenixes to use in a perverted ritual, to give themselves unnatural powers.”

“Oh,” Devon said softly. Mikah looked down at her, but she was looking off into the distance.

Tyr said, “Your girl has a phoenix tattoo, doesn’t she?”

That woke Devon up. “His girl is right here. And yes, I do. One that spits fire.”

“Exactly,” Tyr said. “Any chance you’re one of these Banarak?”

“The perverts?” Devon asked. “Not that I know of. My parents didn’t have wings.”

“Maybe they didn’t do the perverted ritual,” Tyr said. “Whatever it was.”

Mikah just shook his head. No tact anywhere.

Thorne said to Devon, “Any chance you’re a phoenix in disguise?”