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She still wouldn’t look at him. Instead, she kept her attention on Jori and the vault.
He moved closer to where she stood, leaning against the wall, arms crossed.
“Marli—”
“Later.”
He rubbed his temple with his thumb and turned away. “Right.”
What was there to say? About Zayli?
Yeah, we fucked a few times when we ran into each other over the years…
“Okay, here goes…” Jori murmured, inserting his extended claws into the golden finger holes. “Ouch, son of a bitch, that’s more than a pinch, Ma.” He yanked his hand free of the lock, blood beaded on his fingertips, dripping into the sink.
Sten shoved thoughts of Zayli to the back of his mind. Marli was right.
Now isn’t the time.
“Put your hand back and turn the mechanism. Hurry. Before it resets and you have to do it again.”
He grumbled, but did as his mother told him to, with some hesitation, lest he be jabbed again.
The entire plate with the etched spiral and dragon head turned with soft clicks as Jori twisted his wrist. Finally, the mechanism popped. The entire piece came free, revealing a vault just large enough for several stacks of file folders and a few small boxes. Elora reached for the entire contents of the vault, cleaning it out completely. She handed everything to Kymri as she reached back inside, feeling the walls of the safe itself.
“It has to be here, I know it… Ha!” she said when there was an audible click. Extracting her hand, she revealed a gold key cradled in her palm.
Jori set the vault mechanism on the countertop as his mother took the lead back to the closet. “I have to do that again, don’t I?”
Facing the mirrored wall, Elora slid the key into the lock. It clicked, allowing the entire panel to slide aside.
Jori sighed, seeing the second lock. “Guide me through this again.”
“Partial shifts are tricky when you’re first doing them. It doesn’t take much to go too far,” Sten said before he explained how to do it this time. “Focus on just the tips of your fingers.”
“Not hard to do, since they’re still throbbing. And bleeding.”
Once Jori had control of his semi-shifted appendage, he lined it up to the lock, repeating the same process.
“So this means that any spells Kargassa had linked to himself can be accessed by Jori?” Marli asked, biting her lip.
Elora looked at her, considering her question, searching behind the concern she saw there. “I believe so. If you’re worried about the collar and manacles Kargassa used to subdue us, Jori destroyed those.”
“If there are more, I’ll get rid of those too, Marli. They’re barbaric.” Jori grunted as the larger vault’s lock bit into his fingers again, then opened.
“Holy shit,” Sten murmured when the door slid aside to reveal the contents.
“It looks like Fort Knox in there,” Jori breathed.
Kymri approached with the files cradled in her arms, the top one open. She glanced inside the vault and referring to the files, she said, “According to this, there are sixteen of those vaults hidden around the mountain. And two more larger ones off-site.”
“What is it all for?” Jori stepped inside to examine the rows and rows of gold bars, stamped with Kargassa’s symbol.
“A dragon’s power is in their hoard.” Elora said.
“So every dragon in this mountain has one of these?”
Sten snorted, “Hell no.”
