Dreamwalker (Stormwalker #5)(51)

The mirror. “Mick, we have to—”

I was interrupted by a downdraft from dragon wings, hot wind rushing over us. I looked up in alarm, but it was Drake, settling in to the clearing. He transformed behind a cloud of darkness and made for us.

Drake’s skin was cut and dark with abrasions and bruises, but he seemed otherwise whole. He stared in shock at Mick, whose skin held no tattoos, his aura free of all things dragon.

“Is he well?” Drake asked abruptly.

“No,” I said.

“I can speak for myself.” Mick got to his feet as robustly as ever, fists balling as he towered over me. “What were you about to say, Janet? We have to what?”

“Find the mirror. It’s key to this …” I trailed off, realizing. “Oh gods, Emmett knows where it is.”

At this time in my life, the mirror was lying forgotten in the attic of my old hotel, waiting for me to come buy the place and then Mick and I to wake it up. If the Emmett in my dream went to the hotel, found the mirror, and woke it himself, would that change future reality? It shouldn’t, if my previous dream was anything to go by, but magic mirrors were powerful and unpredictable, and Emmett was one hell of a mage.

I tried to calm down. Emmett didn’t necessarily know where the mirror had been before I’d found it—he only knew I’d hung it in my saloon.

Then again, Emmett was thorough. He’d probably created a dossier on the mirror, knowing who’d made it and who’d owned it through the centuries.

“What mirror?” The hands Mick put on my shoulders were no less strong, and I felt a bite of magic in them.

I stared at his fingers then back up at him. I shouldn’t be feeling magic if Emmett split him in two, but then again, maybe dragon magic wasn’t the only kind of power Mick had. Some of the spells he’d shown me had been very close to witch magics and other powers of the earth.

“We’ll fix this,” I promised him.

“Janet is right,” Drake said. “We must go to the Crossroads and retrieve the mirror before Emmett does. The mirror has much power and responds well to you.”

Mick didn’t release me. “What mirror? What crossroads?”

“A magic mirror,” I said. “As powerful as it is obnoxious.”

“All magic mirrors are obnoxious,” Mick said. “And a shitload of trouble. What are you doing with one?”

“It belongs to you too. At the Crossroads—a hotel I bought in Magellan.”

Mick raised his head, finally letting go of me. “Magellan. Where the vortexes are.” It was a statement, not a question. When I nodded, he said, “The very place I’m trying to keep you from.”

“That’s the one.” The vortex that held my mother, at this time, had not been sealed and buried. It was lying there, like the mirror, waiting for me to come and open it.

Mick gazed at me a long time, his eyes shrewd and assessing. “Going there is the only way to make me whole again?”

“I think so,” I said. “I have no idea, to tell you the truth.”

Mick kept on studying me. He stepped to me and cupped my face in his hands, the tingle from his fingertips spreading through my blood.

We looked at each other. I realized that while I loved the blue of his eyes, I loved the black that sparkled through them as well. The dragon had always been part of him, whether I’d known it or not.

After a long moment, Mick lifted his hands from me and stepped back. “All right,” he said. “We’ll go.” He made a curt gesture. “Drake.”

Drake looked morose, but he loped away into the dark, his strong legs eating up ground. Not long later, a black dragon soared down to us, swept us both up in one talon, and flew us away.

***

I convinced Drake to let us ride back to the motel near Coeur d’Alene so we could fetch Mick some clothes. While the townspeople of Magellan embraced the weird, they drew the line at public nudity. Drake reluctantly agreed and flew after us, keeping himself out of sight, and waited for us just inside the woods beyond the motel.

In our room, Mick dressed without speaking, pulling on jeans, sliding a T-shirt over his torso and skimming it down his abdomen. He grabbed more clothes and tossed them into a duffel bag while I numbly watched.

“Mick,” I said while he laced his boots, “Are you all right?”

“No,” he said curtly. Mick slid on his leather jacket, slung his small duffel over his shoulder, and took up the motel room’s key. “Let’s go do whatever you think will stop this.”

I stepped in front of the door. “Do you believe me? About Emmett and the dreaming?”

Mick wasn’t going to look at me, then at the last minute, he sighed and flicked his gaze to mine.