She snorted. “First lesson. It’s a vehicle, not a carriage, and this particular vehicle is called an SUV.”
“SUV.” It sounded like one word when he said it.
She pointed at the glove box after she made the turn onto the main road. “There’s a manual in there. Tells you all about it.” She grimaced. “I’m sorry. I know you said the curse gave you an understanding of every language, but did it include reading?”
“More or less,” he said absently, already paging through the manual. “It helps that I was able to read before the curse, although obviously I haven’t done a great deal of reading since then. I guess I’ll discover what skill I still possess.”
“There are diagrams, too. They’re usually good.” He didn’t respond, and she wondered if she’d lost him. “Mind if I play some music?” she asked.
His only response was a distracted hum of agreement.
Yep. She’d lost him. She switched to satellite radio and settled in for a long ride.
SOTIRIS’S CELL RANG as he sped up the drive to his lakefront mansion, gravel spinning away from his tires, pinging on the undercarriage with an infuriating racket. He hated the damn rocks, but it was the only practical material for an approach that was so long as to be a private road, rather than a simple driveway. Dust filled the air when he finally stopped and climbed out, coating his shoes despite the hard stone surface at the foot of the stairs. He coughed and waved a useless hand in front of his face, as he checked his phone. He frowned. The security company?
Already there, and not afraid of anything he might meet, he strode up the stairs and twisted the front door knob, cursing when it proved to be locked. That damned girl locked the house up tight, even when she was awake. Frightened little mouse. But then, that was part of the reason he’d hired her. He hadn’t wanted some chatty little thing. He’d wanted her to do the job and remain invisible. He jammed his key into the lock and yanked open the door, startled into stillness for a moment when the alarm went off. What the fuck?
Hurrying for the panel, he quickly cleared the alarm, wondering why the hell the company had called if the alarm hadn’t gone off. His cell immediately rang. The security company again.
“What?” he demanded impatiently. “I’m here. The alarm wasn’t disturbed and the house was locked.”
“Sir, I’ll need your password?”
Jaw tight, he spoke the pass phrase, knowing he’d get nothing else from them until he did. “What the fuck is going on?” he snarled. “I told you—”
“Sir, this is”—Sotiris didn’t listen to what came next. All he heard was, —“and it’s not the house alarm we’re calling about. It’s the cabinet alarm upstairs.”
He almost dropped the phone. Taking the steps two at a time, he raced upstairs and into the room containing the only thing he truly cared about. Not the blades, though they were delicious mementos of his various victories. No, there was only one . . .
He stared at the ruin of the room, blades missing, glass everywhere . . . and the hexagon . . . gone. Impossible. How could they have known? No one knew what it was, what it meant. Only he and Katsaros. And its creator, he reminded himself. But she was far from here, and no longer a force in this world or any other. He’d made sure of it.
He called the security company back.
“Mr. Sotiris,” the same security supervisor said. “How may we help?”
“The video,” he said hoarsely. “Who took it?” He didn’t have to explain what “it” was. They knew. Because they’d urged him to store the hexagon in a bank vault instead. But he’d thought to outwit everyone. Who would have expected his most valuable relic to be stored in a house by the lake? In a room decorated with old blades? It had no jewels to tempt the ignorant, no magical signature to attract the knowledgeable.
“The woman you employ, sir. Maeve Collins. She took it, though from the background movement, she wasn’t alone. And she didn’t linger. Fourteen and half minutes after she took the item, the alarm was set at the back door, and two people left the house. Ms. Collins and a large, unknown man. We have no record of him entering, but she must have admitted him. There was no prior alarm.”
“Thank you.”
“Would you like us to send a team, sir? We can help—”
“Not with this you can’t.” Sotiris hung up.
Knowing what he’d find, but needing to see it anyway, he strode for the statuary, pulling so hard on the heavy door that it flew open. Light filled the room, activated by motion sensors embedded in the walls.
“Fuck!” He followed the curse with a wordless roar of fury, storming over to the pile of rubble and staring, as if he could undo the disaster by focusing hard enough. “Fuck!”
He spun away. There was no point in lingering over the bits and pieces of ancient stone that had been Dragan’s prison. With the warrior gone, it was nothing but trash. Damn it. His mind was spinning, thoughts jumping uselessly from one thing to the next. There was little doubt that the girl had been the one to free Dragan. The nature of the curse . . . it demanded a woman’s vulnerability to work. He’d designed it that way.
And once the bastard was out. . . . Dragan had been a king’s son. A beautifully-made man, for all that he’d had the misfortune to have been “blessed” by the goddess and chosen to fight all her battles. Those battles had hardened him, but they’d also produced a confident strength that the girl, meek and inexperienced as she was, wouldn’t have stood a chance against. Not that Sotiris gave a damn about her. It didn’t matter anymore whether or not she’d helped Dragan. She’d stolen from him. Stolen the one thing he could not lose. She would die for this.
Sotiris forced himself to focus, to consider his options. He wouldn’t be able to find Dragan until the warrior used his magic, which in turn wouldn’t be possible until he’d topped off his energy levels. A thousand years ago, he would have been bursting with magic in the short distance between house and garage. But now? Hell, with magic so thin in this world, it could take days. But Sotiris wouldn’t wait that long to find him. To find the hexagon. He had to catch them before the warrior managed to reconnect with Katsaros, something that would happen soon, if the last few months were any indication. The bastard was more than strong enough to be aware that his man was free, though he shouldn’t be able to know exactly where. Not with the goddess’s magic mucking things up. Katsaros would be reduced to sending out a homing beacon of sorts, hoping to bring the warrior to him, which might well take a while, given the distances involved.