Page 26 of Raul
Erica stepped aside, watching as Raul limped along beside his bodyguard and trying to get her equilibrium back while she hugged his words in her memory.
Pascal was holding the cable with one hand and two harnesses with the other. As soon as the harnesses were on and clipped to the cable, Raul and Dario began to lift off the ground.
Pascal watched them for a few moments before he jogged over to take the backpacks from Erica.
She raised a hand to wave as Raul and Dario were pulled inside the helicopter. They disappeared without acknowledging her gesture. The cable was lowered again, Pascal attached the backpacks, and the packs sailed up to the helicopter too. As a crew member grabbed them, Dario leaned out and waved, and disappointment that he wasn’t Raul made her sag.
The sound of the engine changed, and the helicopter veered away from the mountain. Raul was gone.
Somehow the sunlight seemed dimmer, and she felt hollow with loss.
“You ever flown one of those?” Pascal asked, yanking her attention away from the disappearing aircraft.
“In fact, I qualified for my rotorcraft license right before we left,” she said. “However, my heart belongs to fixed-wing flying.”
He glanced at his watch. “Too bad we don’t have time for a quick climb before we head down,” he said with a grin.
“No climbing, but I want to take a better look at the hole Prince Raul fell into.” Now that the thought-scrambling presence of Raul was gone, her brain began to function normally again, and she remembered her curiosity about the presence of a deep hole in the middle of a forest meadow. “Would you help me find it again?”
Pascal’s eyebrows lifted, but he nodded and pointed. “It’s on this side.”
They searched in silence for a couple of minutes before Pascal said, “Got it.”
When she joined him, she found a hole about two feet wide and two feet deep, the dirt still raw as though it had been recently dug up. “That’s weird. There’s this big hole, but no dirt piled up next to it. Where did the dirt go?”
She scanned the trees ringing them. “The prince saw upupa birds here. They like to eat baby dragons, who live in the trees while they’re young and small.” Using her phone flashlight, she examined the edges of the hole and sucked in a breath. “I think this was a Calevan dragon nest. See the claw marks here where she excavated the dirt to bury them?”
“So someone dug up the eggs?” Pascal asked, squatting beside Erica. “To sell?”
The grapefruit-sized dragon eggs were quite beautiful, their thick shells a deep blue-green. Before they became protected by law, collectors had paid substantial sums for them.
“You could only sell them on the black market now since it’s illegal to disturb the dragons and their nests,” Erica said. “If the thief got caught, they would be subject to jail time and a massive fine.”
“There are a lot of crazy rich people who can pay for rarity and don’t care about the law,” Pascal said with a shrug.
“But they didn’t take only the eggs. It looks like they took the dirt around them,” she said. “That’s a lot of extra weight to haul off the mountain.”
“Maybe they got picked up by helicopter, like Prince Raul,” Pascal suggested.
Erica looked at the empty nest, and anger surged like hot lava. “I hope they didn’t hurt the mother. She would have been guarding the nest.”
“Well, there’s no dead dragon body, but let me see if I can find any kind of a trail away from here,” Pascal said.
Erica stood as Pascal walked away, his eyes on the ground. The grass around the hole was too trampled down now to tell what might have happened to the mother dragon. She stayed put so she didn’t inadvertently mess up other signs of activity.
Pascal circled the meadow a couple of times before saying, “I don’t see anything, but a lot of people have stomped around here, not to mention the effects of the rotor downwash.”
“They could have captured the mother when they took her eggs,” Erica said, her blood boiling at the thought of the poor terrified creature being hauled away from her nest and her home. “And maybe they wanted the dirt to try to hatch the eggs.”
Calevan dragons were notoriously difficult to breed anywhere but in Caleva, so keeping the native dirt might give poachers more hope of success.
“We know it wasn’t anyone on official business from the Dragon Center, since Yvette checked into that,” Pascal said.
“I have to notify the Dragon Center,” Erica said. “They need to know about this.”
“You should tell Prince Raul,” Pascal said, looking up from the looted nest. “He can exert more pressure to make sure these thieves don’t get away with their crime.”
A sparkle of exhilaration rippled through her at the thought of seeing Raul again so soon. “You think he’ll want to know?”
