Light Dragons 03 - Sparks Fly

that you not see the archimage again.”
    “We may not have a choice in the matter,” I said slowly, brushing off an infinitesimal bit of lint from his shoulder. “I didn’t get a chance to tell you earlier, but I reached Jack this morning. Do you remember him?”
    “No.”
    “He was apprenticed to Dr. Kostich at the same time I was-only Jack is a very gifted mage, and I’m ... well, you know how my magic goes all wonky because I’m a dragon. Jack is now a full-fledged mage, and very talented, from what I heard, but even he says there’s just no one of the caliber we need to tackle Thala other than an archimage.”
    Baltic watched me closely. I kissed his chin, knowing he wasn’t going to like what I had to say.
    “There are other archimages,” he said.
    “Two others, and one is out of reach while he’s on some sort of a magi retreat. The other is a woman I have had no experience with, and I suspect wouldn’t be overly easy to persuade to help catch a highly dangerous, partially psychotic half-dragon necromancer.”
    “Thala is not that dangerous,” he said dismissively.
    I pulled down the back of his shirt collar. “Have you looked at your back, lately? That dirge she sang brought down an entire three-story house on top of us, Baltic. You can’t do that if you’re not able to tap into some pretty impressive power.”
    He made a disgusted noise.
    “I’m just saying that I think Dr. Kostich is going to be our only choice.”
    “I do not like it.” Baltic’s frown was, as ever, a stormy thing to behold, but I had long learned to ignore the expression.
    “Neither do I, but so long as mages wield arcane power, they are going to be the best bet for combating the dark power that necromancers use. I’m afraid, my delectable dragon, it’s Dr. Kostich or nothing.”
    His jaw worked, since he was no doubt sorely tempted to tell me we’d do without my former employer and head of the Otherworld, but we had few choices open to us.
    “You and Pavel chased Thala for twelve straight days and nights,” I told him, my hands caressing his chest. “You know her better than anyone. You know what she’s capable of; you know how many outlaw dragons follow her. Can we bring her to justice without the aid of people outside our sept?”
    “No.” I knew just how much it cost him to admit that. He took a deep breath, his eyes sparkling with the light of vengeance. “She has grown more powerful in the last month. I do not know where she is getting the members for her tribe of ouroboros dragons, but we encountered more than thirty of them in Belgium, and another two dozen in Turkey. That she can lose that many members and still have the number of dragons we saw when we finally chased her to Nepal ... ” He shook his head and didn’t finish the sentence, clearly frustrated that he hadn’t caught her to deal with her himself.
    For a moment, I was stunned by what he said. “You ran into fifty-some of Thala’s ouroboros dragons before you lost them in the wilds of Nepal?”
    “Fifty-eight.”
    “What happened to them?” I knew from the manner in which Baltic had greeted me upon his return that morning that he had no injuries, so it wasn’t likely he’d fought the dragons.
    His eyes grew hard and even shinier. “What do you think happened to them?”
    “You didn’t kill them?”
    “Not alone. Pavel was with me.”
    I gawked at him. “Baltic!”
    “They were trying to kill us,” he pointed out, instantly quelling the lecture I was about to make. Although I had my doubts that Thala’s intentions with regard to Baltic were of the murderous nature, I knew from the past experience that her gang of outlaw ouroboros dragons were much more cutthroat.
    “I still don’t like it.”
    “Your heart is too soft,” he said, giving my behind another squeeze.
    “That is not my heart, and you know full well I don’t like killings. Which is why I wholly approve of the plan to bring Thala to the Otherworld Committee for justice. They can banish her to the Akasha, or something appropriate like that.”
    Baltic made a noncommittal noise that had me glancing sharply at him, but before I could do more than wonder, he said, “You will ask the archimage if there is another who could deal with Thala now that we know where she is.”
    “I thought you said she disappeared in Nepal.”
    His lips thinned a little. “She did. But I suspect she has taken control of an aerie high in the Himalayas.”
    “The one I saw in