Page 42 of Riding My Dragons

”Contact them immediately, please.Make sure they understand we need it now.Time’s running out.”

Fergus and Jade left the room through a rear exit, leaving my friends and me alone with Neal Callaway.His eyes moved either knowingly or at least suspiciously from one of us to the other.

“As Jenna’s uncle,” he said, “there are things I can infer from this situation.But…,” and he paused meaningfully,“what’s most important to me right now is that she’s returned to us safely.”

”Yes, Sir,” I said for all of us.

CHAPTER 20

Cade

My instructions for the handoff of the box were to go to a certain rooftop in Reptos and wait there.I had to get up there on foot, of course, because I couldn’t be spotted flying.It was the roof of an inn, tucked into a picturesque looking neighborhood, where the clients—I might as well call them the Gorgonites now—had arranged for me to get access.The Gorgonites’ representatives would join me, and we’d finish the deal.

Naturally, after learning exactly who it was that I was looking for, the place I was supposed to go was right across the tree-lined street from the roof of a church.

A church, for stars’ sake.A church, when what we were up against, after all, was a bunch of religious mad-dragons.Talk about your dangerous irony.

Now I’d never been the religious type.I never saw much use for believing in things I couldn’t see and couldn’t touch, that I was supposed to believe in without questioning because somebody else told me to.Listening to somebody else tell me what to believe and what to think and having them use that to tell me how to live didn’t strike me as being really the thing to do with my life.And it sure didn’t sound like the way to enjoy just living.

Right now, though, I had to wonder if it was really any worse than the way I had been living up until now.Being in the church and doing what the guy in the pulpit told me, I wouldn’t have had my wings twisted into becoming a thief, and it wouldn’t have gotten me wanted by the law.It might have cramped my wings in the here and now, but it wouldn’t have putme at risk of screwing up my entire future.And what was more, it wouldn’t have made me potentially responsible for helping to start up the Old Wars again in a way that could turn the whole damn world into smoking ruins.

I had lived the life of a member of the Taisce family, and now I and millions of people might have to pay for it—unless a plan that we’d put into action after meeting Jenna’s uncle paid off.

Jenna’s Uncle Neal seemed like a decent enough human.My buddies and I definitely had the feeling there were things he wasn’t saying to us when we met, and he first sized us up.He was a mature guy and there didn’t seem to be anything about him that you’d call naive.He had to know, or have some idea, of how it was between his niece and the three of us.But it probably didn’t seem like the time and place for Neal Callaway to ask, so which one of you three is screwing Jenna?Or, which one of you took Jenna’s cherry?Or even, so you mean to tell me the three of you have been humping my niece?With the fate of the world on the line, questions like that didn’t seem to be on point.But from just the looks of us, Neal had to guess that something was going on.

It wasn’t as if humans didn’t have a healthy interest in sex themselves.The only difference between your basic healthy, good-looking young human guy and a guy like Elliot, Byron, and me, aside from our being both men and dragons, was that we could do it twice as much as the human.And I knew human guys sometimes bedded women in twos and threes.Working with them and serving them in the family’s gambling places, I’d heard them talking about it.But still, what we’d started doing with Jenna had nothing to do with getting her out of the trouble that she was now in because of the Gorgonites.Needing to help her swept away everything else.

And we needed to help her.She’d come to us as an innocent.Being with us had brought her to things in herself that were waiting to be woken up.She’d trusted us with that.And she had become important, not just for what happened in bed with her, but because she was Jenna.And Jenna had come to matter to all of us more than anything else.

No sooner had I thought about how important she really was than the sound of wingbeats coming in from the distance caught my attention.I looked to the west, and over the sights and sounds of people celebrating “Reaffirmation” came two male Scalers, wearing black suits with sleeveless tops that fastened around the neck and at the lower back.One of them had a leather pouch strapped to his waist.I backed up a few steps on the roof of the inn and let them come in for a landing near me.“Cade Taisce,” said one of them as they morphed to human.

”That’s me,” I said.

”You’ve got the thing?” said the other Scaler.

”Yeah, I’ve got it,” I said.

”Let’s see it,” the first one said.

I reached around behind me to a pocket on one side of the slit where my tail would come out when I morphed.I took out the old, faded box with the Scaler Legion engraving on it.“Here it is.”

”Hand it over,” said the first guy.

”Catch,” I said, and tossed it.The box spun through the air between the two Gorgonites and me, and the first one caught it.They both gave me a look as if I were a bird that they wanted to snatch out of the air.Then the one who had caught the box handed it to his friend, the one with the pouch on the strap.I expected him to slip the box into the pouch, and that would be the end of this little exchange.

Instead, the guy took something out of the pouch.The new object was a shallow, rectangular-shaped thing with what looked like old-style buttons and lights on it, and a nook on the front of it that was just large enough for a data box to slip into.

Suddenly anxious, I asked, “What’s that?”

The guy with the new gadget said, “A data box reader.We had to go to a lot of trouble, look in a lot of places, to find one of these and get it working.This will let us read what’s on this box, check the inventory of data.We won’t be able to decrypt it here; we’ll have other people waiting to do that so we can read it.We’re just verifying the item.”

I felt as if I wouldn’t just morph into a dragon, but a thousand little dragons would come crawling out of my skin.I hadn’t expected them to do this here, now.My breathing turned shallow from not wanting to breathe too heavily and give away how my nerves were tangling up inside.Calm, I told myself.Just keep it calm.Let this play out the way we planned it, and maybe I might live through the next few minutes…

Holding up the data box reader, my new friend fitted it into the nook and hit one of the series of buttons at the top.The lights over the buttons lit up.The gadget made some electronic noises that I’d never heard before.From out of the lights came a flickering holographic-type screen.The reader made some whirring sounds as unfamiliar as the last ones.And then, inside the hologram, some words flashed.They were in reverse from where I was standing, but I could make them out.

NO CONTENT.ZERO SCANNABLE DATA.

My two friends looked closely at the hologram readout, then at me.I just cocked my eyebrows in a shrugging expression at them.

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