Breathing Fire

Christian drank for a solid five minutes, drawing hard, as though he did this all the time. Which was a little disconcerting. I’d add it to the growing list of questions I had that were definitely not going to get answered today.

My wrist had already made good progress towards healing by the time he finished. He drew back, looking breathless and dazed. He shook his head a few times, as though to clear it. “That is some powerful shit! Whew! Let’s party!”

I rolled my eyes.

“So…” I began. “You, uh, know what to do, Christian? I know you’ve never, yanno, ‘slayed’ a dragon before. But you know how, right?”

He glared at me, pouting exactly as though he didn’t know what to do. “Of course I do. I went through all the training. So I have a very good idea about what to do.”

“A very good idea?” My brows rose. It didn’t sound like quite enough to me.

He just continued to glare. My blood ringing his mouth made him look slightly more ferocious than normal. Sloan handed us a box of tissues without a word. I thanked her, and we began to wipe up.

“My father never got a chance to slay a dragon either….but he taught me all of the theories.”

I looked at him incredulously for a few tense moments. “Theories…” I said softly.

He became even more defensive. “I know enough, trust me. Besides, it goes against the grain to discuss the family secrets with one of you. They’ve been well guarded from your kind…obviously.”

I just raised a brow at him. “As long as you know what you’re doing…”

He shrugged, the casual gesture not working for him as it usually did. “I guess we’ll see, huh?” His response was defensive and childish, and far from the reassurance I had hoped for.

I brooded for a few minutes until I realized where we were. “We need to make a stop. Make a right on Tropicana, left on Warm Springs,” I told Caleb suddenly.

Three pairs of incredulous eyes swung to me, Caleb’s glaring into the rearview mirror. “Why on earth?” he began.

“Torst,” I said very softly, looking out the window.

“Torst,” Caleb repeated in the same voice, a wicked grin spreading across his/my face at me. “God, I love hanging out with you guys.”

I rolled my eyes.

“Torst?” Sloan asked.

Christian just sighed. “I thought that thing was buried for good. But, yeah, guess that’s worth a stop, under the circumstances. Torst means thirst in god only knows what language. And Torst is an…object of power that Jillian acquired, oh, who knows when? She won’t share the story.” He glared at me.

I half-smiled. “I’ll tell you what. If we live through this, I’ll give you the full story, or as full as it can be, without the when part.” Age was a touchy subject, as always, and the when would reveal far too much about mine.

His bloody mouth turned up in a shit-eating grin. It just looked wrong on his face. I started attempting to clean his face again. The blood had dried too quickly, so the dry tissue could only do so much. “Hell, yeah,” he said.

“Who is holding Torst for you?” Caleb asked.

I flinched. I was embarrassed. I couldn’t help it. I’d done a bad, bad, thing. “No one is. I put it in storage.”

His eyes in the rearview mirror were cold with disapproval. “How? Why?”

I sighed. “It’s not good. I just couldn’t see another way. It won’t be happy.”

“What kind of blood did you use?” Professional curiosity colored his tone. I was surprised, though I shouldn’t have been, that he’d guessed my method so quickly.

“Necro. I was in a pinch at the time, and more than a little pissed at that stupid axe. I swear it was provoking me on purpose. Maybe it wanted to rot in storage.” I grimaced.

“So defensive,” Caleb said flatly. “It must be bad.”

Christian whistled. “It’s gonna be pissed.”

“So it’s an axe?” Sloan was asking the car at large.

I nodded. “I’m just hoping that the promise of dragonsblood will calm it down…”

“Your blood, perhaps,” Caleb suggested.

I grimaced again. “That’s hardly what I had in mind. It never drinks as much as you want it to.”

“So it’s an axe that drinks blood?” Sloan sounded dubious.

“Oh, yes,” Caleb said succinctly, and in such a way that I had the strong urge to deck him. He spoke about the axe far more passionately than I’d ever heard him refer to any woman. “So many would kill to have a relic like that, and she puts it in storage. You’re lucky I didn’t know where it was all this time.”

I rolled my eyes at him. “Why do you think I didn’t tell anyone?”

“It’s not going back in there at the end of this,” Caleb said, his tone very final.

I glared at him. “We can cross that bridge when we get to it. We certainly don’t have time to fight about it now.”

Caleb just nodded. “As long as you realize that it will be a fight, if you try stash that thing away again.”

It was a threat, and I wanted to take exception to it, but now was not the time. “Your opinion on the matter has been noted,” I said neutrally. I wasn’t neutral about it, though. Not by a long shot. Torst was a killing machine, only good for mass carnage. I sure as hell didn’t intend to keep it handy when there wasn’t any killing to be done. It’s thirst knew no bounds. I would fight Caleb over it if it came to that, but I would curse the gods all the while for giving me shit for options once again.