"I think you have an unfair advantage."
"I can't sense the road up ahead. I can't sense much of anything right now."
"Left it is, then."
David fell asleep again before they could settle who'd won the bet. Tess eased the car over ruts deep enough that she'd heard their underside scrape bottom, trying not to wake him.
The road wound through conifers and scrubby birch and willow, crossed a rushing stream on a rickety-looking wooden bridge, and finally passed through an arch made of polished wood, gleaming in the late sun. She still couldn't get used to the way the sun stayed up so late here; her watch said it was after 8 p.m., her body thoroughly confused by the many time zones they'd crossed recently. She was worried the hot springs would be closed. But there was an OPEN sign in the window of the long wooden lodge building, and from beyond it, a cloud of steam rose toward the cloud-flecked sk
y.
Tess parked in the gravel lot. She got out quietly, closing the driver's door with care. David could rest while she looked around and checked them into the hotel.
There was the usual deep quiet and sense of cessation of movement that follows a long car trip, in this case made more noticeable because the place itself was so rural and quiet. The lodge and its outbuildings formed a rough "U" shape around the parking lot. Beyond the main buildings, she glimpsed cabins at the edge of the trees. Behind them, the land rose quickly into a hillside and then a cliff, leaning over the resort as if to embrace it ... or crush it.
She needed to check in, she needed to get David into a proper bed, but she understood how these things were done, and she knew there was a more important introduction to be made first, if they were going to stay here at all. Therefore, rather than going into the lodge, she followed a path around back of it. The sound of rushing water drew her onward.
In back of the lodge, the ground dropped away sharply. A steep path with stairs and handrails led down the rocks to a series of steaming pools, each a jewel of brilliant, startling green-tinged blue. The nearer pool had some families splashing in it, and was so shallow that it barely came up to the adults' waists. The water dropped in a short waterfall—five feet or so, barricaded with a locked metal gate—into the next pool, where a large sign read 18+ - NO MINORS BEYOND THIS POINT.
Tess followed a well-worn path around the top of the rock amphitheater above the pools, past a sign warning CAREFUL - BEWARE OF SUDDEN EDGE. A metal railing affixed to posts hammered into the rock at regular intervals provided a measure of security, or at least it should have. Under normal circumstances, the rock underfoot would've kept her feeling steady and secure. But instead there was a sense of instability, as if the rocks might shrug her off at any moment, just for the fun of it.
From up here she could see the entire hot springs, a string of five pools in all. The top one was the wide, shallow family pool. Below it, the other pools nestled among the rocks. They were nearly deserted, with just a handful of visitors sunning themselves on rocks or soaking in the curiously green water.
Tess paused at an interpretive sign beside a bench, explaining about hot springs with diagrams that she only glanced at. She rested a hand on the guardrail as the smell of the hot springs, a mix of wet rocks and sulfur, tickled the nostalgia centers of her brain with a mix of pleasure and longing.
"You are not welcome here."
The low voice sent a shudder through her as she turned.
She wasn't sure what she'd expected a dragon to look like, but she was pretty sure that it hadn't been this: a tall, muscular man wearing a T-shirt and jeans and clay-caked boots, looking like any rural logger or farmer, someone who clearly worked with his hands. His skin was dark bronze, his black hair swept back from a high forehead, and black eyes were fixed on her with an intensity that felt like a palpable heat. She didn't need to ask if he was the one she sought, any more than he needed to ask who she was.
He carried an axe loosely in one work-gloved hand, and there were bits of bark and grass stains on his T-shirt. He'd been clearing brush, Tess told herself, and forced herself to stand her ground, all too aware that there was nothing at her back except the long plunge to the hot springs.
Ancestral enemies they might be, but she couldn't help thinking: If I weren't a married woman, I'd bang that like a screen door.
Instead she said, through lips that were dry for more than one reason, "I come because I need your help, Verdegris, lord of fire."
Anger blazed in his fierce black eyes. "What is the matter with you? Do not speak that name here."
"No, of course not, I ..." She wanted to apologize; she knew what it was to hide from the human world. But faced with his disdain and his heat, the aura of power that surrounded him, his sheer masculine intensity, she found that she simply couldn't think. Her carefully marshaled arguments fell apart, and all she could do was struggle to keep herself together.
"And what makes you think I would help one of your kind?" Verdegris, or whatever he was calling himself in this place, asked her coldly.
"Because I'm here," she said, the words tumbling out carelessly in a way her mother would have slapped her for, "I'm here with David—with David Monaghan. Your David Monaghan."
This woman smelled like cold rock, old rock. Verdigris had felt her presence as soon as she entered his lands, the way he would have sensed one of his own kind—but different, a dissonance among the harmonies of basalt and quartz and ancient lava flows that sang to him from deep in the earth.
He had expected her fierceness, the sharp glitter in her stone-gray eyes. She looked small, but she would be strong. Oreiads—rock nymphs—always were. And he had expected her beauty, because all nymphs were beautiful; he was steeled to resist it.
But he had not expected her solidity and strength. Though she was small, there was nothing delicate about her. She was as earthy and solid as the rocks that had given birth to her. And he had certainly never expected that name dropping from her lips.
"How do you know—"
"How do you think?" she asked simply. "He's in the car. He needs you. Come on."
And with that, she set out with a rapid, ground-eating stride despite her short legs, back the way she'd come. Verdegris was in the uncomfortable and altogether unwanted position of having to break into a trot to catch up, on his very own lands. Trust David to find himself a troublesome woman like this one.
David ...