“There’s much to be said for wyverns, including their knowledge of people who are willing to portal them at a moment’s notice, but one of the best things is their ability to cushion falling objects,” I said into Drake’s stomach.

He pushed my knee off his face. “You made me bite my tongue.”

“Want me to kiss it and make it all better?” I asked, leering at him as I rolled off his body.

“Sheesh, weren’t you guys going at it when you so cruelly abandoned me to the torments of the Akasha? And you give me a hard time for wanting to call Cecile every day!” Jim grumbled, picking itself up from where it had landed.

“Not that it’s in any way your business, but we didn’t get to ‘go at it,’ as you so crudely put it. We didn’t have time. Paula felt it vitally necessary to unburden herself of yet another lecture about my apparent lack of interest in the wedding planning.”

“Oh. I take back what I said about the Akasha. I’d rather suffer there than have to sit through another one of your stepmom’s tirades.” Jim indulged in a full body shake, then looked up. “Incoming.”

Drake was a blur as he shoved me out of the way just in time. István’s body hit the floor with a heavy whump, Pál following almost immediately, cracking his head on István’s with an audible thunk.

“Ouchie. You guys OK?” I asked as Drake helped me to my feet.

Pál swore in Hungarian. István rubbed his head and staggered to his feet. “Yes. Maybe not. What was question?”

The two men sidestepped handily when a sixth and final form dropped to the floor.

I was less than happy about having Mr. Bossy Pants along, but Drake insisted that to exclude Kostya would create worse feelings than already existed.

Kostya rose to his feet, muttering.

“Are all portals like that?” I asked Drake as I brushed off a bit of dust from his shirt. Drake preferred raw silk shirts, usually dark green, but tonight he was dressed completely in black. “Hey, how did we get turned around? You were holding me when we went through it.”

He shrugged. “Portals are never easy. It is one reason why I wished you would stay home. You could have been harmed.”

“Oh, we’re not going to go into that again.” I straightened my shirt and dusted off the knees to my just-barely-fitting jeans. “You told me yourself that it’s a lot harder for me to be hurt, so a little portalling isn’t going to do either me or the baby any harm.”

“Just remember your promise,” he said, leveling a meaningful look at me before opening the door to peer out.

“Like I could forget it? So where first?” I asked, starting to follow him.

István stopped me, pushing me gently back so he could proceed. “Remember your promise,” he said in his gravelly voice.

I rolled my eyes and made to follow him.

“You stay behind us,” Kostya ordered imperiously, pushing past me.

I stuck out my tongue at his back and turned to consider Pál. “You’re a modern man despite your years. You aren’t going to pull any of that macho protective crap on me, are you?”

He smiled and slipped ahead of me. “You promised,” he reminded me.

My fingers jerked, itching to draw a couple of confinement wards. “Honest to god! As if it’s not bad enough having one mother hen…now I have three!”

“You love it and you know it. So, this is Fiat’s place, huh? Pretty swanky. Drake, I’m thinkin’ you’re going to have to up the stakes a little if you want to beat the competition,” Jim said, snuffling a heavy brocade tablecloth on a glass-topped table.

“Don’t be telling him that,” I said, swatting Jim on the nose. “Our house is perfectly fine. Besides, this place is…too Fiat.”

We stood in a room that was bright and sunny, but cold, as if the air-conditioning had been left on high. I shivered a little as I rubbed my arms, examining the room with curiosity. I’d seen Fiat’s apartment in Paris, but this was his home in Lake Como, and although it was gorgeous, it was lacking in…well, warmth.

Jim wandered over to look out of the window. The room had a high ceiling edged with elaborate moldings. Two crystal chandeliers sparkled in the wintry sunlight shining through tall windows flanked on either side by long, gold drapes. The view revealed a steel gray lake lapping almost to the base of the house. The elegant room was filled with gold and blue furniture.

“You break it, you buy it,” I warned Jim as I stood on tiptoe to see what the guys were doing all clustered together.

Pál held a small black electronic box. He directed it around the room, silently pointing in various directions. The others nodded, taking care to touch nothing.

“Looking for bugs?” I asked Pál in my best espionage voice.

He shook his head. “Alarms. We don’t want to trigger anything.”

Evidently the room was clear of alarms with the exception of the windows. I whispered a command to Jim to not touch anything and silently followed the four men as they opened the door and swept the hallway for signs of a security system. Pál pointed to a small white box perched high on the wall. He pulled out a cell phone–sized gadget, fiddling with it for a minute before setting it on a half-moon table in the hall, nodding to Drake that all was clear.

“What’s that?” I asked Pál as we trailed out of the room.

“It interrupts the camera image.”

“I see you guys went shopping at the James Bond Emporium o’ Spy Stuff,” Jim commented. “I can’t wait to see the exploding breath mints.”

I shushed the demon and gave in to my curiosity by having a good look around. We were upstairs in a pentagon-shaped main hallway, five corridors converging on a sunny spot that had a skylight above. The center was open to the ground floor, flooding the area above and below with light. I had to admit it was very pretty, very elegant…and very lifeless.

We made a cursory examination of the upper-floor rooms. There were security cameras at each of the corridors.

“What are we going to do about them?” I whispered to Drake. “Are you going to scramble them, too?”

He shook his head. “We could disable the cameras, but that is not a viable solution.”

“Why not?” I asked.

“One might go off-line temporarily without causing concern,” he answered. “But more than that would provide a clear signal to anyone watching that someone was in the house. We have another option, although I don’t like it.”

“Why not?”

He nodded to a couple of discreet small, round disks high on each wall. “Smoke detectors. The smoke bombs I’d planned to use will likely set them off before we wish to alert anyone to our presence.”

“Whoever is watching is going to see the smoke anyway—what’s the big deal if the alarms go off?”

“The alarms will do more than bring local firemen. They will likely also summon more dragons. I’d rather we just have to deal with the ones here than cope with additional forces as well.”

“Yeah, but the dragons here will call for help eventually, won’t they?”

He shook his head. “Not if we take care of them quickly enough.”

“Ah. Gotcha.”

The four men gathered to have a confab while I eyed the smoke detectors.

“You’re not thinking what I think you’re thinking, are you?” Jim asked, making squinty eyes at me.

“Will it work?” I asked it.

The demon shook its head. “Yeah.”

“Then why the Negative Nelly business?”

“I hate it when you call me Nelly! And I’m shaking my head because I know you, and something is bound to go wrong.”

“Meh. Don’t be such a pessimist. Sweetie? I’ve got an idea…”

Twelve minutes later, the upper hallway was full of dense, black smoke—demon smoke, the stuff generated by the summoning circle. It was nasty and oily and left a pesky residue on walls and furniture, but it had one beneficial quality—it didn’t set off smoke detectors.

“I told you that you’d need me,” I said smugly as I dusted off my hands and admired my handiwork. I’d drawn five summoning circles, each completed just enough to generate the vile black smoke that billowed out of the floor and filled the corridors.

Kostya snorted, but looked rather surprised at how well the smoke covered our presence. We waited until it obscured us enough to slip past the video cameras, and hurried downstairs before someone could hit the panic button.

Drake caught the two blue dragons who were patrolling their way up the stairs by surprise, handily disabling them. Although he didn’t flinch at inflicting violence when he had to, he preferred a bloodless lifestyle. I smiled with approval when Pál whipped out a syringe gun and knocked out the two struggling dragons the other men were holding. Two more men stationed in the lower hall were likewise dealt with, Pál wielding his anesthetic with great aplomb.

“How long will they be out?” I asked Pál as Drake pulled a sleeping dragon to the room where we were storing them.

“Two hours minimum. They’ll wake up with a hell of a headache, too,” he answered, grinning.

It took a while for us to work through the more populated ground floors, but with István manning the electronics, Drake and Kostya taking down the guards as we found them, and Pál knocking them out, we cleared all the rooms but the most promising one.

The door to the basement was warded and bore an electronic lock.

“Is that going to be a problem?” I asked.

Drake rubbed his chin while examining the lock. “Possibly. It’s the same sort of lock I have. They are supposed to be the ultimate in security, although in this case, I have to hope the claim is overly confident.”

Jim and I sat down and waited while the boys discussed the situation, pulling out a number of gadgets to try on the lock.

Nothing seemed to work. I was just indulging in a big yawn when Drake growled an oath as he slammed the last electronic gizmo down.

“What about Aisling?” Kostya asked, nodding at me.

I stopped yawning and tried to look perky and attentive. “Hello!”

“She’s a Guardian—maybe she can break the lock.”

“Hmm.” Drake gave me a speculative look and held out his hand for me.

I toddled over and prodded the keypad of the lock a couple of times. “I’m afraid I don’t know a ward for unlocking things, not that I’m sure such a thing exists.”

“Perhaps there is something else you can do to it,” Drake said, frustration evident in his voice.

I knew how important this was to him, so I didn’t answer that Guardians were never meant to be housebreakers, and instead, gave the lock a quick once-over. It was housed in stainless steel, but the main components of it were plastic.

“Is it fireproof?” I asked, thinking maybe the combined dragon fire from four dragons might melt the sucker.

“Not the insides, but the outer casing is. We couldn’t do enough damage to it to get to the sensitive parts.”

“Hmm.” I reached out to poke at it again, but the dry, cold environment caused me to get a static shock when I touched the metal housing. I jumped back, laughing.

“You’ve thought of something?” Drake asked.

“Oh, yeah. It’s a computer at the heart of the lock, right?”

He nodded.

“And what do computers hate?”

The four men just looked at me.

I smiled. “Watch this.”

The little door in my mind swung open as I closed my eyes for a moment and used my enhanced vision to see all the possibilities. Static electricity was thick in the room—I simply gathered it together between my hands, shaping it as I would dragon fire.

“Uh…Ash?”

“Shh. I’m concentrating.”

“Yeah, I can tell. Someone want to put that out before the alarm goes off?”

“Huh?” I opened my eyes and swung around, a glowing blue ball of electricity hovering between my hands. Behind me, the kitchen table that sat in the middle of the room was on fire. “I didn’t do that! I can’t use Drake’s fire anymore, remember? It must be Kostya. He has horrible control over his fire.”

“I do not! I am very controlled!” Kostya fumed as Pál and István used dish towels to slap out the fire.

“Uh-huh. Then why were you setting Drake’s secret room alight earlier today?”

“That wasn’t me! Someone else must have done it.”

I shook my head. “Everyone here can control their fire. Well, except me, but like I said, ever since I became Fiat’s mate, I haven’t been able to use Drake’s fire at all.” I didn’t tell them how profoundly sad I was over that, missing the way we’d share his fire in moments of great intimacy.

Drake looked thoughtful for a moment before walking over to stand in front of me. “Kiss me.”

“What?” I glanced at the others. “I thought you didn’t like me doing that in front of sept members.”

“It’s not a matter of like or dislike, it’s a matter of respect, but that point is moot at this moment. Kiss me.”

He put his hands on my arms and would have pulled me to his body, but I still held the ball of electricity. I dispersed it, shaking my hands to lose the tingling feeling that came from holding energy. “OK, but you asked for it.”

Drake stood passive while I nibbled on his lips, my tongue teasing his mouth until it parted for me. I tasted and nipped and squirmed against him in a silent attempt to make him give me what I wanted, but he wouldn’t.

“Fire!” I finally said, pulling back just long enough to speak. “Give me your fire.”

His lips were as hot as ever as I kissed him again, his fire building within him until it spilled over into me, roaring through me with the velocity of a bullet. It fired my blood, scorched every cell in my body, setting alight not just my physical being, but my soul as well. I flung open the mental doorway and sent the fire back to him.

“Anyone got some hot dogs or marshmallows?”

I ripped my mouth from Drake’s, joy welling inside me as I realized that Drake and I stood together, flames licking up our legs. “It’s back!” I said, unable to contain myself as I did a little fire dance. “I have your fire again! But…how?”

His eyes glittered like backlit emeralds on black velvet. “I do not know, but I can guess. You are my mate again, kincsem. That is all that matters.”

“Woohoo!” I screamed, and leaped on him. He let me kiss his adorable face for a few seconds before patting my butt and reminding me of the job at hand.

“Later, we will investigate this miracle in fuller detail,” he said, his eyes promising all sorts of wicked acts.

“Boinksville, here we come,” Jim said as I stamped out the flames around us.

It took three balls of electricity slammed into it point-blank before the lock gave up the ghost. After that, the subsequent locks on the three inner doors were a piece of cake, and in no time at all, we were deep underground, in a labyrinth of dirt-floored tunnels that stretched out into darkness.

Drake, with the unerring instinct of dragons, led us down one of the tunnels until we arrived at an ancient stone door. We were in a section that was lit by yellow lamps clamped to either side of the passage. I trailed along after the dragons, trying to count the number of doors as we passed them, but lost track by the time we entered a natural cavern with a ceiling a couple of stories high that framed a gigantic stone door.

Just as Drake announced, “This is the entrance to Fiat’s lair. It will be heavily protected. Aisling?” I noticed something peculiar.

“Yeah, it looks nasty. Hey, come have a look at this.”

He frowned as I indicated a door set into the side wall of the cavern. “We do not have time to explore. I wish for you to look at this door now.”

“I’ll make a deal with you—I’ll look at your door if you look at mine.”

His lips thinned. “We do not have much time remaining to us.”

“Fine. But you have to look at mine next.” I stood in front of the giant stone door and took a good long look at it. Surprisingly, there were no locks on it. There were a whole lot of other things, however. “There are three…no, four wards on it. One curse, one prohibition, and something I’ve never seen before. It’s like words scratched into the surface of the stone.”

“That would be Fiat’s bane.”

“Bane?”

“A dragon’s bane is like a curse. It is unique to each dragon and used to protect their treasure from thieves. It can cause grievous injury and most likely death if disturbed. It will be the most difficult element for us to overcome.”

“Lovely. Now come look at my door.” I took his hand and started to pull him toward the door on the side wall.

“Mate, we do not have time—”

“I think you need to make time for this,” I answered with a meaningful look.

Kostya gave an exasperated sigh. “Drake! It will take at least an hour to break this door, possibly two. We must start on it now, not give in to your woman’s curiosity.”

“I’m so glad I met you first,” I told Drake. “If I’d known only Kostya, I probably wouldn’t have wanted to meet his brother.”

His expression was grave as I stopped in front of the door. “I trust you have a very good reason for this.”

“Yup. Take a look at that.” I gestured toward the small wooden door. It was made up of planks, bound together with bands of iron, and looked like something out of a medieval castle.

He looked. Behind us, Pál and István approached. Jim squinted at the door, saw what I saw, and raised both brows.

“It is a wall,” Drake said. “What’s special about it?”

I traced the outline of a simple ward. “It’s not just a wall, it’s a door, and it’s warded. You can’t see it because you didn’t draw it, but it is warded—with a perdu ward.”

That got everyone’s attention. I smiled to myself as the men crowded around the door. Perdu wards, as I have mentioned, are only used when someone wishes to obscure the entrance to somewhere. The fact that no one had noticed the door but me was of minor interest. That it was warded to be hidden indicated that something of importance was behind it.

“Can you open it?” Drake asked, fumbling around blindly until his hands closed on the curved door handle. He tried turning it but it was locked.

“No, but there are no other wards on the door. It’s wooden, so I think you should be able to break it down.”

All four dragons focused on the door. It didn’t so much burn as explode, bits of hot, twisted metal flying every where, a hail of scorched wood drifting down after it.

I had been ordered to the other side of the cavern, something I was grateful for as I picked my way through the debris. Drake held out a hand for me, following as Kostya led the way into the now-opened room.

“Now this is creepy,” I said, looking around the brightly lit room with a sense of something seriously awry. The walls were stuccoed a pale beige. Lights built into the ceiling beamed cheerfully down on a tasteful living room suite of blue tweed. A flat screen TV was attached to one wall, while bookcases lined two other walls. Behind us, a small dining room table sat with four chairs. An entrance led to what I assumed was a small kitchen.

“This is…someone’s apartment?” I asked, noting the signs of occupancy. A large ashtray on a coffee table bore several cigar stubs. A glass of whisky sat next to an oversized chair, a book resting on the arm of the chair, as if its owner had set it down for a moment.

“That’s what it looks like,” Drake said, opening a door and flipping on a light. A large bed dominated the inner room. “The question is, who lives here?”

Kostya picked up the book, flipping through it. “Whoever it is, he reads Latin. Not a very pleasant reading choice, either.”

I peered over his shoulder to read the title. He handed me the book as he went to scan the bookcase. “Huh. He’s reading a grimoire. I haven’t seen this one before. It looks like it was just printed. I wonder who the publisher is.”

Drake and his men opened the two other doors of the apartment, not finding anything of interest. I flipped the book open to the title page. “Ah. Bookplate. Uh…Drake? I think you need to see this.”

“Let me have it,” Kostya said, taking the book without so much as a “please” slipping past his lips.

He stared at the embossed plate on the inner front of the book, a pallor washing over his face.

Jim put its front legs on the chair and peered over Kostya’s arm. “Oh, man.”

“Who does it belong to?” Drake asked, shuffling through a stack of papers on a small mahogany desk.

“There’s just one name,” I said, pulling the book from Kostya’s bloodless fingers. His eyes were wide and staring, looking inward at something only he could see.

Jim backed away, its expression wary.

“Yes? What name?”

I held the book out to Drake. “Baltic.”