“I’ve heard of you from Gabriel,” the woman, May, said, eyeing Rowan thoughtfully. “You killed some dragons a while ago.”
He was silent for a moment, his shoulder hurting, his brain still a bit muzzy from less than an hour’s sleep, and his soul crying for solace. “If I told you that I didn’t kill them, that their deaths were due to their own actions, would you believe me?”
“Possibly,” she said without hesitation. “But that’s not what the dragonkin say about you.”
“No, it is not,” Gabriel said, a chilly look in his eyes. “All dragons know of the Dragon Breaker and how the First Dragon punished you. We know he charged you to aid us whenever we needed, but you seemed to disappear immediately after that pronouncement. How is it you avoided detection?”
Rowan gave a jaded smile. “Perseverance and dedication to being lost to the world.”
“And yet you are here now.”
It was a statement not a question, but Rowan was an intelligent man. “My sister asked for help. As soon as I knew it was to aid dragons, I felt obligated to do what I could.”
“A noble intention, given your past with us,” May said with a little nod. “And now I suggest that since we have to work together, we let the events of the past go.”
Gabriel stayed silent for a moment, his eyes seeming to sear through to Rowan’s soul.
“Let it go,” May said, nudging her mate. “He says the story that we know isn’t the truth, and it may well be that’s so. Regardless of what happened twenty years ago, we need his help now. He’s the only mortal-born alchemist around.”
Gabriel sighed and nodded, his gaze warming up slightly. “You are right, as usual, little bird. Very well, Dragon Breaker—”
“My name is Rowan.”
Gabriel made a little face, then his lips twitched in a smile. “I will trust my mate’s judgment on this, Rowan. We will work together in amity.”
Well, that was something, Rowan supposed. It might not be an outright declaration of his innocence, but at least one dragon had been persuaded to give up that horrible name for him.
“Did you know that they would be here?” Rowan asked, tilting his head toward the tea shop, where the three now-unconscious beings were stacked tidily in a corner. He paused, waiting for a break in traffic before jaywalking across the street to the entrance of the hotel.
“Not them specifically, no,” Gabriel said.
“We knew it was likely that Bael would send someone, though,” May said. “And Bee—she’s your sister, yes?—said that you would be here and that you’d seen a whole gaggle of red dragon–demon hybrids, so we thought we’d keep an eye on the hotel.”
“I don’t suppose it was luck that brought the thief to the tea shop while they were there waiting,” Gabriel said, rubbing his chin.
Rowan would have liked to do the same thing, since his face was itchy with the drying blood of Kim, but that would mean lifting a hand, and at the moment, his left shoulder refused to consider that movement, while his right hand was throbbing and swollen from the fight. He’d get a bucket of ice, check to make sure that Sophea and the old lady were safely locked into their rooms, and then try to recapture the sleep that he’d been rudely woken from when his sister called to say the silver wyvern had arrived and was waiting for him across the street from the hotel. “Hmm? Oh, probably not. It’s not like fate to make anything easy for me, and that includes dealing with the old woman.”
They stopped outside the door to the hotel. The street was busy with evening traffic, whose noise helped keep their conversation relatively private. “You don’t mean to say that the thief is working with the demons, do you?” May asked, looking confused.
“No, I didn’t mean that. Sorry, I’m a bit rummy from lack of sleep. Bee called me about half an hour after I’d gone to sleep, so my brain is a bit less than it should be. I simply meant that from what I know of the old woman, it’s just like her to end up being right where trouble is.”
“And what of the mate guarding her?” Gabriel asked.
“Mate? You mean Sophea? She’s a dragon, isn’t she?”
“No. She is a wyvern’s mate. Jian, the wyvern of the now-extinct red sept, must have claimed her before he was killed.”
“I could have sworn she was a dragon…”
“To outsiders, a claimed mate is all but indistinguishable from other dragons. That is why you were confused.”
“Regardless of that fact, I don’t think that Sophea is guarding Mrs. P.” Rowan frowned a little, but that made his eye hurt, so he contented himself with lowering one eyebrow instead. “At least, not in the sense that I think you mean it. She is a captor, perhaps, but the only reason she’s keeping Mrs. P alive is so she can take the ring herself.”
Gabriel’s eyes narrowed on him. “Are you sure about that?”