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“Mom says you like dragons.”
My aunt had no idea how much I liked dragons.
“Helena?” My mom stuck her head around the corner. “Oh, there you four are. Helena, sweetie—”
“I’m fine. I needed some air.”
“I thought you’d be front and center for a dragon,” she said.
“It’s kind of lumpy and chewed up. We sure it’s a dragon?”
“Helena. You’ve never been a skeptic. Or a spook.”
What lie did I make up? Had too much cake? That I knew that dragon personally?
Keon put his phone to his ear as it rang. He spoke in Lemurian, but I picked outHekon.
Every bit of blood I had pooled in my feet. My mother shoved past Auryn to get to my side as I turned a distinct shade of clammy gray. She just about tossed Akoni out of his spot.
It took everything I had not to collapse into her arms and tell her everything. I shook with the full body clench to keep control of myself.
“What’s going on?” Mom asked me, giving me a hug around the shoulders. “Baby. You can tell me. Whatever it is.”
No. I couldn’t. Icouldn’t.“I needed some air. I’m jetlagged to hell.”
Keon said something in Lemurian after hanging up with Hekon, and Auryn and Akoni nodded, relief flickering over their faces.
“Let me have another minute, Mom,” I told her. “I’ll be in. All the cake and sun and stress hit me wrong.”
Mom took the hint and herded the stray cousins back to the living room.
“What’s going to happen?” I asked Keon.
“Maren’s being transferred to an enclosed truck and transported to a secured facility,” Keon said. “But according to communications Hekon has intercepted, as far as they believe, theydohave a dragon, but she’s an animal. There is some deep concern and bafflement, but no one seriously considers her a security or intelligence threat at this time. So they want her in a more secure facility to be able to control curious mobs than because they think they have something valuable. They acknowledge that there’s no way to cover this up. The Americans have already reached out to request tissue samples.”
“That’s what I’m afraid of,” I said.
“The Wyrms have decided to take no action and to permit this to play out for now. They believe if they take action to obstruct humanity, humanity will respond with aggression. They do not want humanity braced for impact, if you will.”
Auryn knelt down in front of me. He put both hands on mine and whispered, “Perhaps this isn’t a bad thing. Perhaps this will make humanity reconsider what it thinks it knows. Perhaps it will open the door for us to introduce ourselves.”
The warmth of what he said, thewishfor it, settled over me in a magical mist.
And I wanted to believe him. And I wanted to believe he’d put it out there in the cosmos, and the cosmos would bend to his desire.
Twenty
Lemuria was so collectively shaken nobody had used a Helena hashtag in a week, and nobody paid attention to Akoni and me coming through the pipe while Auryn, Keon, and the pilots came through the portal.
Dekka was waiting for me at the machine.
“Your family took it well enough?” she asked as we walked back to the roost. Akoni stayed behind to check to make sure his assistants had been minding the machine correctly in his absence.
“My father doesn’t seem agitated beyond it’s a dragon.”
“You told them nothing?”
I gulped the cotton wad in my throat. “I told them nothing.”
