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Also, he didn’t understand what he was looking at. A mage needed to look this over. Time to surface.
Vasily kept a prayer in his head as he swam back up. He truly, dearly hoped the mage he’d come to rescue was in there somewhere. He hadn’t spotted anything else. That had to be it, right?
Getting his head above water again was a relief. This time, he found the entire rescue party waiting on the banks, including Luka. Someone must have alerted him that Vasily had found something.
Still, he double-checked first. “Luka, anything?”
“Nothing on my end.” Luka’s head dipped down to more his eye level, wings rustling with impatience and excitement. “What did you see down there?”
“The weirdest fucking thing in this decade. I’ll swear on that. There’s this cave entrance with a metal arch around it, symbols carved in the arch, and it’s under some kind of containment spell? I could feel it, see the glimmer.”
“Huh. See what’s beyond it?”
“Not even a little. The cave walls twisted around pretty sharply. All I saw was dry dirt.”
Evora came in closer, waving him out of the water. “Come with me. I’ve booked us a hotel nearby for the night. You can describe exactly what you saw, and I’ll draw it.”
That made absolutely no sense to him. “Uh, why can’t I just take you back down with me? You’ve got breathing spells you can use.”
For some reason, she gave him a look like he was being difficult on purpose. “I do not want you barbecued. For one thing, we didn’t bring any sauce.”
Uh. What?
As if to accent her point, the sky overhead gave a warning rumble.
Ah, shit, right. Any storm in this area was 99.9 percent likely to deliver lightning too. Flying through a storm was risky enough, but with lightning in the mix, they really were in danger of being barbecued.
Good sense suggested he follow Evora out of the water, but…
Luka voiced the aggravated whine he could feel building up in his own throat. “We’re so close, though!”
“We’re actually not,” Sam said. He pushed his glasses up, laying things out in a factual manner. “If they’re underwater, we have no easy way to get them out. We need earth dragons and a hell of a lot more magical firepower to manage this rescue. We’ll need to stop here for the day anyway until we can get the right people over here.”
“Dammit.” Vasily hated it, but Sam was right. He knew better than to argue. Besides, Sam was just as eager as they were to get down there, so if even he said to wait, then how could Vasily argue?
He wanted to, though. Oh, how he wanted to.
Evora led them back into the air and into town. It was nothing more than a short hop from here, and they landed again easily on the outskirts of town before walking in. Evora had picked a nice hotel with a lake view, so it wasn’t much of a walk. Ooh, had a nice roofline, too—something flat. They could potentially fly in and out from there.
Like Evora had prophetic powers, or perhaps seer powers, they’d barely reached the lobby of the hotel when the skies opened up. He could hear the lightning strike the water, see the charge of it leap across the water’s surface. Yeah, that explained the no fish thing all right.
Evora patted him on the shoulder with a knowing smile.
He just sighed in response, head dropping for a moment. “Yes, yes, you were right.”
“I just needed to hear it.” Evora winked at him before making her way to the desk.
He followed Evora to the front desk, took the room key, and went upstairs.
The hotel was a nice one, with terracotta floors and white walls, built to keep the heat out. Bathrooms were a tad on the small side, so he and Luka took turns in the shower. Vasily wanted the smell of lake water out of his hair. Once he was out of the shower and into dry clothes, he didn’t know what to do with himself. It was barely three in the afternoon, too early for dinner, and he was too keyed up to want food just then.
He moseyed out to the veranda. It was covered, so he could stand at the railing and look out over the lake, watch the storm. When people said this area got the most lightning strikes per acre in all of South America, they weren’t kidding. That was the second lighting strike he’d seen in the past half hour, and he hadn’t been paying the lake strict attention during that time.
The smell of lightning—a tangy ozone that reminded him so much of magic—filled the air. He breathed it in deeply and his dragon once again longed for what they’d never had—a mage mate. It would have felt like a betrayal if he hadn’t known Luka felt the same yearning.
