Chapter Fourteen
It was the day before Christmas – and the morning of the negotiations.
Liza had been missing all night. Jaspar had sent a message to his home planet – prepare for war. The message would take several days to arrive, because of the great distance it had to travel.
Jaspar had also sent a message to Fabian, spelling out exactly what he would do to Fabian if Liza and the rest of the clan were not returned to him. Fabian had not yet bothered to reply.
They were all due at the conference center in two hours.
And to make things worse, the Weather Control Station was malfunctioning again. An enormous snowstorm had descended on the entire continent. The snowstorm made it impossible for Jaspar and his clan to shift and fly. They would be entirely reliant on their hovercraft.
Jaspar could barely keep his Drakken inside his skin. He was burning with rage, skin covered with scales, and the air around him shimmered with the heat that boiled inside his body.
“We will destroy them,” Sterran snarled, stamping on the floor. He was so hot with rage that he left a burning footprint.
Jaspar had scorched track marks into the wooden floor.
“My son is not dead,” Karmelite said, arms crossed across her chest. Her brow furrowed in concentration. “I would feel it if he were dead, the way I felt your father and Adriel’s loss.” Adriel, Jaspar’s brother from another clutch, had died in the same battle, ten years earlier. Their mother had gone on a terrifying rampage against the Raar, the horned race of beasts who had tried to claim their planet. Jaspar and his other clutch mates had joined her in glorious battle. The Raar were now extinct, and their horns decorated the Balthazar Clan’s feasting hall.
Karmelite looked up at Jaspar. “Do you feel that your heart-mate, Liza, is still alive?”
Jaspar was not sure, but he had not felt the devastating explosion of pain and fury that others who had lost their heart-mates had described. “I believe she is.” Then he glanced at his mother skeptically. “You acknowledge that she is my heart-mate?”
She inclined her head in a slight nod. “Perhaps.”
“And you vow that you did not sabotage the weather machine this time?”
His mother stared at him in genuine shock. “Of course not. I am solely focused on the safe return of our people. And your…Liza,” she added.
“Why do we not simply enter the caves without the property owner’s permission?” Sterran demanded angrily.
Jaspar let out a growl of frustration. “We do not have any reason to believe that she is there. Our tracking devices have scanned the caves multiple times and found nothing.”
The door opened, and Mawmaw and Pawpaw hurried in. They slammed the door shut and stamped snow from their boots.
“Anything?” Mawmaw asked, her tone despairing.
Jaspar shook his head. “Not yet. I will find her. This I vow.”
“I am sure you will never give up.” Pawpaw had tears in his eyes, and he blinked hard. “Anything I can do to help? We’ve filed a complaint with the North Pole police force, demanding to be allowed to search the cave, but it might not be approved until the end of the day.”
There was a rapping on the door, from low down, about three feet high. Jaspar yanked the door open, and La La stood there, looking frazzled and, oddly, waving a pink flower at him. She wasn’t wearing her elf costume, and her right arm had a burn on it.
“Sriii, sriii, sriii!” she shrieked, and pulled on Jaspar’s hand.
“She knows where they are,” Jaspar said, and quickly followed her out, with his brothers and clan mates at his heels.
He looked down at La La, who was still waving the flower at him. He’d never seen a flower like that before. It was fresh, and it certainly wasn’t from Far North. “Have they taken them off-planet in one of their ships?”
La La kicked him in the shin, hard.
“Are they imprisoned in the Harbingers’ hotel?” Sterran asked.
La La ran over and bit his hand. “Ow! Wretched little beast!” Sterran yelled, pulling his hand away and glaring at her.
“Is she in the cave?” Jaspar suggested.
La La nodded so hard it looked as if her head would fall off.
