Page 93 of Dragon’s Rogue

“Out! Now!” The words snapped out of Thorne’s mouth like a whip crack.

They ran for the portal, Zane still supporting Blaze. Thorne slapped his palm on a flat stone plate above an identical lever to the one they’d used to get in here, shoved the lever across, and the portal appeared. They dashed through it. Tyr closed it behind them, and they crowded around the viewer.

They could still see the cavern shaking. Small chunks of rock dropped from the ceiling and skittered across the surface of the tomb. Another, smaller crack appeared near the first.

After a moment the shaking subsided. They waited, holding their breath, watching Vyrkos.

Nothing happened.

After a few minutes they all let out their breath in a collective sigh of relief. Thorne and Tyr took off for the Batcave to check the readings, while Zane and Blaze followed more slowly. The spells had worn her out more than she wanted to admit; she still wasn’t a hundred percent.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I tried everything I could think of. Why the hell were the Seals even given to us, if there’s no way to put them back in the tomb?”

“It’s not your fault.” Zane dropped a kiss on top of her head. “We’ll think of something else.”

Four days later, they still hadn’t.

The tomb’s magical field had been further weakened by the reaction to Blaze trying to reinstate the Seal, and after stabilizing for a short time, was starting to inch downward once more. They still had a bit more time—but not much.

Blaze longed to spend time with Zane, just getting to know each other, but nearly every waking moment was devoted to hunting for a solution to at least one of their problems. Blaze spent hours poring through her spell books, looking for anything that might help, while the others hunted through the Draken archives.

Blaze wished that she had the other two Keepers to help her, although she wasn’t sure what they could do. They didn’t know where their Seals were, and they weren’t witches, so they couldn’t help her look for spells.

At least, they weren’t trained witches. Blaze suspected they had some latent power; after all, the Seals had originally been entrusted to sorceresses, to be passed down their lineage. And Blaze hadn’t forgotten the rush of power Tempest had displayed when she’d unexpectedly made the dragons obey her.

Rebel she wasn’t sure of, but she’d always wondered how Rebel had gotten through her magical wards the first night she broke into the vault. If she had some kind of ability to avoid or transmute energy fields—like magical wards or electronic alarm systems, rendering herself invisible to them—it would explain why she was such a successful thief.

Unfortunately, the two women were avoiding Blaze and the dragons. It seemed that Blaze’s attempt to get Rebel on their side had failed miserably. Thorne had also tried talking to Rebel, asking—or rather, demanding—that she and Tempest come and stay at the lair. That had gone about as well as you’d expect. And Tempest, despite her fascination for dragons, had sided with her sister.

Tyr had resorted to taking his books to the coffee shop next to Tempest’s store and lurking there for most of the day; Blaze wasn’t sure if he was guarding her or stalking her. Probably both.

Silas had dropped out of sight. He hadn’t contacted Rebel about the idol, or tried to come after Blaze at her house. That should have been good news, but the longer Rebel went without hearing from Silas, the more she seemed to convince herself that she and Tempest were out of danger and didn’t need the dragons’ protection.

Blaze knew in her bones they hadn’t seen the last of Silas. He’d worked and schemed for ten years to get the idol back. Now that he knew where it was—and where Blaze was—she knew he would keep coming for it until he got his hands on it, or died trying.

He was biding his time. Building his strength.

Which was what they were discussing that evening in the Batcave. Tempest had closed her shop and gone home for the night, and Tyr had been persuaded to come back to the lair rather than lurking outside her house.

Thorne was at one of his computers, running down leads on the other two Seals. Now that he knew who the Keepers were, he was sifting through Rebel’s and Tempest’s backgrounds, trying to get some idea what form the Seals had taken and where they might be.

Zane, Tyr and Blaze were talking about Silas.

“It seems to me that the extra stress on the tomb might be increasing due to his proximity to the idol, and his focus of attention on it,” Tyr was saying. “I believe Corwyn and Vyrkos are pulling power from him and the coven, through the idol. It’s allowing them to break down the tomb’s protections bit by bit.”

Zane was eating his second helping of chocolate raspberry torte, which he claimed helped him think better. Blaze was doing nothing more than toying with hers, scraping the icing away from the cake and licking it off her fork.

“I still think you’re wrong,” Zane said to Tyr. “There’s been incremental weakening, yes. But the biggest hits we’ve taken to the tomb’s protections were at specific points when the idol was responding directly to Silas, or the first time, when it was activated by Blaze’s spell. I don’t think he can have a continuous effect on it.”

“I disagree. I believe that now that it’s reconnected with Silas, it’s leaching power from the tomb itself,” Tyr said.

Zane sighed. “The idol’s in the spell cage,” he said. “How can any of them still be pulling power through it?”

Zane had taken to going in and checking the spell cage every day. It made Blaze antsy; even inside the cage, the artifact gave her the chills.

“I don’t know,” Tyr said. “Both the idol and the spell cage were created with Draken magic, after all. Some sources say that Draken Lords can manipulate and nullify Draken magic, since they’re the original source of it. Maybe because the idol is linked to Vyrkos, the cage doesn’t completely block his magic.”

“God, I hope it’s not that,” Blaze muttered. She licked more frosting off her fork.