The Perilous Sea (The Elemental Trilogy #2)

She leaned her head on his shoulder. “You saw a meteor?”


“I am beginning to think that perhaps your admirer was not being hyperbolic, but literal, in what he wrote: you could have been born during a meteor shower and you could have made lightning strike on the day you and he met.”

“So he is pardoned for his heinous literary offenses because he was being truthful?”

“The parts having to do with elemental magic, maybe. But it is still the height of unmanliness to mewl ‘you are my hope, my prayer, my destiny.’ ”

“May I remind you that is the only way to properly address a girl who wields lightning? Anything less reverent and, poof, one’s hair is on fire and one’s brain scrambled.”

“All right, my hope—but I am not saying the rest of it—I have something you need to feel.”

She feigned the sound of outrage. “But we barely know each other, sir!”

He laughed softly. “But you must hold it in your hand and feel it change,” he urged, in her ear. “I insist. I can wait no longer.”

She knew they were on a serious subject, but the flutter of his breath on her skin, the low drawl of his words—heat raced along all her nerve endings. “Will I like it?”

“Well, I do have to apologize for its size. It is rather small.” And with that, he pressed something rather small into her hand.

It was a pendant on a chain, and while the chain was cool, the pendant was warm.

“Remember the first day, you asked me what was so cold under my clothes? It was this.”

Then it had been icy; now it was not cold anymore. It must be half of a pair of heat tracers: a heat tracer’s temperature increased as distance to its mate decreased. The mate of this particular tracer had been quite far away earlier. But now whoever carried the other half of the pair was much, much closer.

“Before too long, we should land and put the pendant some distance away,” Titus continued, “so we can conceal ourselves and see who is coming before they see us.”

“How much time before this mage catches up with us?” That idea would work better during daylight hours.

“Depends on our relative speed. Just keep an eye on it.”

She nodded and put it back into the bag.

“There is something else you should probably know,” he said.

She couldn’t quite decide from his tone whether he was making a silly subject sound serious or making light of a grave one. “Will we be talking about dimensions again?”

“Yes, the eye-poppingly enormous size of my—well, if I must be specific, our—trouble: the Bane is here in the Sahara.”

She shivered. “For us?”

“For now I would assume so, until I learn otherwise.”

“And how did you learn about it to start with?”

He gave a brief account of the additional tracers he had found on the wyvern, which had led Atlantean forces to close in on them, before those battalions were themselves attacked.

“Bewitched spears?” Her jaw dropped. “Which century are we living in?”

“It was like watching a reenactment of a historic battle, no doubt about that.”

“What kind of mages carry hundreds of bewitched spears with them?”

“The kind who does not want Atlantis to find out who they are.”

“And they are helping us?”

“Accidentally, I would imagine. They are probably causing Atlantis trouble because that is what they live for.”

She nodded slowly, digesting everything he had told her. “And this is the same sand wyvern as earlier?”

“Yes.”

“You are sure you have rid it of all Atlantean tracers?”

“Hard to tell. But we have not had trouble in the past hour and—”

He looked at his watch and swore.

“What’s the matter?”

“According to the compass built into my watch, we are flying in the wrong direction. I had set a course with a racing funnel for southeast, but now we are headed almost due north.”

A racing funnel was a spell used to keep a wyvern on the straightest possible path during a speed trial. A wyvern in a racing funnel had no reason to deviate from its set course.

He murmured, resetting the racing tunnel. But instead the wyvern turned due north, then gradually, north-northwest.

“Is it taking us to the coast of the Mediterranean?”

His arm tightened around her middle. “No, I think it is taking us in the direction of the Atlantean base.”

“What?”

“Homing elixir.”

For cavalry, and even for large private stables, the practice was fairly common. Beasts raised in those establishments were fed small amounts of elixir that kept them docile and happy. Those elixirs, when formulated specifically for the establishment, also served to prevent lost or stolen beasts from straying too far, because going more than twenty-four hours without will make them automatically turn toward home.