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Or at least, none of the strange man.
When Luka lowered his hands, he found a large mug of steaming coffee had appeared on the desk in front of him. “Oh, thank you, coffee fairy! How did you know I needed this more than oxygen and sex combined?”
Vasily snorted from where he stood on the other side of the desk. “Because no one knows you like I do.”
That was the truth. Centuries together had peeled away all the facades and secrets. And that was even before Luka had realized Vasily was the reason his heart beat and his lips rose into a smile each day. He had initially been drawn to Vasily due to raw attraction. With his very tall, muscular build, angular features, and dark chocolate brown eyes, Vasily had been eye-catching in all the best ways. Luka was ever so glad now that the animalistic attraction had brought them together because he couldn’t imagine not having Vasily in his life.
Holding the mug between both hands, he lifted it to his face and breathed in the rich aroma. Sometimes just the smell of hot coffee with a hint of sugar and a splash of hazelnut creamer was enough to get the wheels in his brain turning.
Not today.
This was a drink-the-entire-cup-and-possibly-get-a-second kind of morning.
“Were you able to locate Dimitri and Sam?” Luka asked after taking a sip of the hot liquid of life.
“Dimitri was inhaling his breakfast. I told him to come to the mission room when he finished chewing. I just missed Sam. Apparently the little mage snagged a muffin and ran off for some more testing and consults with the Abe Clan.” He perched his hip on the corner of the desk and placed his enormous travel mug next to Luka’s blue one. “Dimitri promised to shoot Sam a message to come here when he’s done.”
Luka grunted and turned his attention back to the computer screen in front of him. They’d taken over the tracker meeting room to begin their digging, though it wasn’t as if they’d needed to kick anyone out. Right now, the comfortable room was one of the few places in the clan compound that wasn’t completely overrun with dragons and mages.
Since the discovery of the Sousa Clan’s home nine months ago, the Valerii had opened their territory to not only the Burkhard fire dragons but also the Abe Mage Clan from the lost clans of the Sodalicium. More were still poking and prodding at King Rodrigo to let them visit. Everyone wanted to see the ruins or study the translated works of the Sousa that had been recovered so far. But it wasn’t Rodrigo they had to get past.
No, the main roadblock was Dr. Samuel Hunter, lead archaeologist on the Sousa discovery. He was guarding the site like a mother dragon protecting a clutch of eggs.
Not that Luka blamed him in the least. The mage with the broken core was on the verge of being made whole at last, if only they could unlock the key hidden within the Sousa’s copious notes. It also didn’t hurt that fixing Sam’s core meant fixing the broken magical cores of all the remaining Jaeggi mages.
“Go get comfy,” Luka said as he pulled up a detailed map of northern South America. He grabbed an electronic pen from the cluttered desktop while Vasily strolled over to the three enormous leather couches arranged in a U shape in front of a wall of flat-screen monitors. On the largest of the TVs, Luka brought up a map and drew a red circle around the location of the Sousa Clan.
“So, you said the man had us start right here,” Luka said. “And we flew north.”
“Northwest,” Vasily corrected. “Now that I think of it, we definitely went over the Amazon.”
“Okay, northwest.” As he spoke, Luka drew one line on the computer screen that started from the Sousa site and went more west than north. Then he drew a second line that had the same starting point but was more north, creating a cone that encompassed chunks of Peru, Ecuador, Colombia, Venezuela, Guyana, Suriname, and French Guiana.
“Oh fuck no.” Dimitri groaned as he walked in the door and took one look at the giant map on the wall. There was resignation in his pale blue eyes and something that may have been a quiver in his square jaw that spoke of despair. “Please, do not tell me this is your search area. Vasily mentioned you two were having some crazy dream and that you need to find a lake. There’s got to be thousands of lakes in that area, and that’s just the known ones. You’ve got millions of acres of rainforest in there, and probably countless undiscovered lakes hidden under the canopy.”
Luka poked his head out from behind the computer monitors set up on the desk and glared at the head of the trackers.
