He truly enjoyed running the resort. He could take advantage of the casual companionship of his human staff when he wanted it, and solitude when he didn't. But he had missed this with a pain that he now understood had been his heart breaking: true companionship, being around someone he cared for, someone who made him smile.
Except it was no longer as simple as just himself and David. He looked across David's supine form in the water to meet Tess's intense gray gaze.
Nothing simple. Not at all. But how much fascination could anything simple hold, for a creature like him?
"Do you feel the corruption in him?" he asked Tess. He was more acutely aware of it the longer they remained in the water.
"Feel it? I don't understand."
"Your kind can sense things in the rocks, can't they? Use that."
Tess's face contorted in a fierce frown. "Can't ... can't feel anything."
"Try." He was going to have to help her, he could see. "This might be easier underwater, closer to the rocks. David, hold your breath, all right? And let us know if you need to come up."
David gave a small nod.
They dived together, pulling him down. As they sank toward the bottom, Verd opened his eyes. It was dim down here, but not dark. Tess's curls floated in a cloud around her head; her eyes were screwed shut, concentration visible on her face. David looked almost asleep, his hair belling out from his scalp and his eyes loosely closed.
Verd's pulse thrummed in his ears. Normally, when people swam in his pools, he was dimly aware of their energy and delight. It invigorated him, and was one of the reasons why he'd opted to keep the hot springs open to visitors when he had discovered and purchased this place some years back, claiming it as his lair.
But he had never been this aware. He could feel every ripple of the water across Tess's bare skin, across David's face.
And suddenly that awareness extended to the rocks, in a way it never had before. He was always aware of the landscape around his springs in a dim kind of way. He had assumed it worked similarly for the oreiads. But now, as his world expanded with Tess's enhanced senses, he recognized that he'd only ever beheld a faint shadow of what she could see.
He could sense the hard basalt core of these mountains, the granitic intrusions; he could feel the soft tickle of streams wearing the mountains away, of roots curling through soil that had once been river silt and glacial loess, eroded away from the mountains farther up the valley.
Tess's eyes opened suddenly, staring at him through the water in surprise. She must be feeling what he felt now, he realized. She could feel the taint in David the same way he could.
The question was, between the two of them, could they do anything about it?
In her childhood, on the mountain where her clan had always lived, Tess had grown up with the serene conviction that not a rock could fall or a grain of sand tumble down a mountain stream without her knowing. She had taken that intense awareness of the rocks for granted until leaving her mountain for the first time, when she'd discovered that other rocks were far more opaque to her. She could get them to yield up their secrets if she worked on it, but it was hard, like struggling to learn a foreign language when her mother tongue was barred to her forever.
Now, suddenly, the rocks around her opened up to her, welcomed her, in the same way the rocks of her mountain had once embraced her.
It was like coming home.
She might have been weeping. With the water all around her, she didn't know. All she knew was that she was once again a part of the world in a way she hadn't been for a decade.
And it wasn't just the rocks. She could feel the water too, and she now knew what Verd was talking about when he'd spoken of being able to feel the corruption that was killing David. She felt it the same way she would have been able to feel pollution or the scar of a strip mine o
n her ancestral mountain. It was an ache, a fundamental wrongness.
But what to do about it?
David jerked between them, gesturing feebly toward the surface, and she became aware of a different kind of ache as her lungs begged for air. She and Verd kicked off from the bottom together, breaking the water's surface an instant later. She and David both sucked in deep breaths. Verd's breathing was no rougher than if he'd been above water all this time, and she wondered how long dragons could hold their breath, or if it was simply another facet of his affinity for the pool.
She no longer felt the connection to the land quite so strongly like this, with her head in the air and her feet drifting rather than touching the bottom of the pool, but it was still there. Her head swam with it; her heart sang. She'd forgotten what it was like to feel the rocks, the entire land itself, welcome her as a returning daughter.
"This is incredible," Verd breathed, and she wondered how much of what she felt he could also feel.
"But now what?" she asked, looking at David's pale face as they drifted together in the water.
"Now you help me," Verd said simply.
"I don't know what to do."
His smile flickered briefly, making his face beautiful in the rippling, water-reflected light. "I don't either," he said, with a hint of wonder in his voice. She guessed that with thousands of years of ancestral dragon memories in his head, discovering something he truly didn't know was a novel experience. "We'll figure it out as we go along. Let's see if you can guide me—you using your abilities as a nymph, me using my affinity with the water—and we can draw the poison out of him."