“There is one thing that might be able to save them.”
“What?”
He hesitated. Not because he didn’t want to help them, but because he didn’t know what Stryker might do with the cure. In his hands, it could prove most lethal.
No good deed goes unpunished.
Somehow this was going to come back on him. He knew it. Such things always did, and they left him bleeding and cursing. Yet even so, he couldn’t allow Medea to be hurt any worse than she already had. She was right. She’d been through enough, and at the end of the day, they were family. Maybe not in the conventional sense, but he felt a kinship with her. And he had grown up thinking himself one of Stryker’s sons. Thinking of Stryker’s daughter as his own sister.
Every time he looked at Medea, he saw Dyana’s beloved face. Remembered their time as children and the day they’d renamed her Tannis because they could no longer bear to call their only sister the name of their aunt who’d allowed her own brother—the god Apollo—to curse them to die over something none of them had participated in.
They’d all been innocent victims of a fetid power game between the ancient gods. All of them had paid a high cost to continue living, just to spite those who would see them fall for no reason whatsoever.
For better or worse, Medea was every bit as much his sister as Tannis had been. And because he loved her, he refused to add to her pain.
“I don’t know if it’ll work or not.”
Medea chafed at his hedging. “Oh for goodness’ sake, just say it, already!”
“A dragonstone.”
Pulling back, she scowled at him. “A what?”
Urian hedged as he sought a way to explain it. But it wasn’t as easy as it should be. “For lack of a better term, it’s an enchanted rock the dragons have. Supposedly, it can cure anything. Even death. It even brought Max back after he was killed saving his wife and children. So I would assume it could cure this, too.”
“Where do you get one?”
That was the easy part.
And the hardest thing imaginable. “As luck would have it, there’s one here.”
Joy returned to her dark eyes. “Where?”
He visibly cringed at the last place either of them wanted to venture. Because asking for help there was all kinds of rampant stupid. “That would be the stickler, as it belongs to Falcyn.”
“That surly beast I met earlier?”
He nodded. “To my knowledge, that’s the last one in existence. The rest were all destroyed or have gone missing.”
Medea groaned out loud as her stomach shrank at the very thought of having to negotiate with Falcyn over something so rare. It flipping figured. She might as well stick her head in the mouth of a hungry lion and ask him not to bite.
Or her mother to shed blood when she was in one of her moods.
“Great. So how do I go about getting this thing?”
“Word of advice? Ask nicely.”
***
Falcyn stared at Narishka. “You want my dragonstone?” He laughed in her face. “Fuck off and die in agony, you worthless bitch.”
“Does your son mean so little to you, then?”
“About as much as you value your life.” He smirked pointedly.
Blaise stepped between them, aggravating Falcyn, as it prevented him from killing her. “Why do you need his stone?”
Narishka raked a cold glare over him. “This doesn’t concern you, maggot. Stay out of it.”
