His flirtatious invitations would be the death of me. Maybe I should tell him he couldn’t do that, either.
I opened Io’s door and the smell of the dead terawolf had me covering my nose and mouth with my hand.
“Terrible, isn’t it?” Ahyana said.
“Yes. Did it work?” I asked.
Io sat at the table in front of the scroll, looking dejected. “No.”
My stomach sank like an anchor. I had been so hopeful.
“We’ve tried everything. We used blood. Some of its fur. Its toenails. I even scraped its horns, but nothing.” Io held up her hand toshow me the silver sparkles from the horn still attached to her palm. “The scroll hasn’t changed.”
“Maybe it has to be alive,” I said.
“I can’t imagine that would make a difference,” Io said sadly.
“The scroll did reject the Locrian dirt and would only work with Ilionian soil,” Ahyana pointed out.
“Yes, but I don’t think terawolves have enough aether for it to work. Aether was created by the tears of the goddess’s daughter when she was parted from her mother. How could there be enough of that in a creature special to her brother? The only aether part of the terawolves seems to be their ability to turn invisible,” Io said.
That made me think about Luna, and how I’d briefly thought she had turned invisible. “Did I tell you all that Luna disappeared?”
They all turned slowly to stare at me. As if I had taken leave of my senses.
“She reappeared a few moments later,” I added. “What?”
“That’s not normal,” Zalira told me.
“I just assumed that animals here did that.” I had no frame of reference to know differently.
Io stood up and headed out the door. She nearly slammed into her brother, who was leaving. He had gotten ready quickly. She put her hands out to stop from running into him and he quickly grabbed her to keep her from falling forward. He glanced down.
“Have you been holding my wife’s lizard?” he asked his sister.
“No. This happened from the terawolf.”
“So now we have two things in the palace making this mess?” He raised one eyebrow at me, sharing a heated moment from our inside joke, and then he left.
“What did he mean?” Io asked.
“There have been a couple of times when Luna has sneezed and she gets silvery sparkles everywhere. It annoys him.”
Then it was as if we all shared a single brain and came to the same conclusion at the same time. I raced into my room, over to Luna’s enclosure.
And saw that there were two long, furled wings protruding from the bumps in her back.
Chapter Thirty
“Luna has wings?” I delicately lifted one and opened it a bit at the end. Definitely wings.
“She has gotten so big so quickly,” Io said, sounding awed.
Another thing that apparently wasn’t typical and I didn’t know.
I picked Luna up and her body stayed limp. She looked as if she were dead, but I knew she wasn’t. “She does this when she’s sleeping heavily,” I told them as I put her back down. “What kind of lizard has wings?”
“No kind,” Zalira said, her eyes wide.
