Light Dragons 03 - Sparks Fly

all, so that we might be together as one?”
    “That is going to get old so quickly ... . No, I lie; it already is old.” I scanned up and down the street, spotting Ludovic’s car a block away. “Just be quiet for a few minutes and let me talk. I don’t have much time, because Ludovic is convinced that every second on the street is a second where Thala is lying in wait to smash me to a pulp, so we’re going to have to make this quick.”
    “I am intrigued, naturally, but I have already agreed to help you, and thus you must now release my arm. I am almost at the end of my power.”
    “Sorry.” I let go of his arm. He faded into nothing. “You still there?”
    “Always at your side, my love.”
    I sighed to myself, wanting to snap at him, but knowing it would do little good, not to mention leaving him testy and less likely to aid me. “You said you got through Aisling’s wards because you’re not a normal shade. Does that mean you can do other things that non-wyvern shades can’t do?”
    “What sort of things?”
    “Like, say, break into someone’s lair?”
    “You desire that I steal from Baltic?” Satisfaction was rich in his voice. “I will move the stars themselves to do that, beloved one.”
    “Don’t be ridiculous, Constantine. Why would I need to break into Baltic’s lair? No, what I need from you is much, much more difficult ... and much more dangerous.”
    He said nothing as I spoke quickly while walking slowly toward Ludovic’s car, obviously playing up to his ego by explaining that I desperately needed Kostya’s shard-the one that had been stolen from Baltic-and that he was the only one who could get it for me. By the time Ludovic stood waiting for me next to the open door of the car, Constantine was making pleased noises.
    “You wish for me to steal from my godson for you?” his disembodied voice asked.
    A woman strolling past us with two basset hounds looked startled before hurrying on. A few yards away from us, Ludovic frowned when I stopped. He glanced around the street before cocking an eyebrow at me.
    “Yes, that’s exactly what I want you to do.”
    “That I will gladly do without requiring a further commitment of help from you, but only after I reclaim my sept.”
    “No!” My fingers itched with the need to throttle him. “Constantine, I don’t know what any of us has to do to make you understand this, but I’m going to give it one more shot because you were a good friend to me before you lied to me and dishonorably bound me to you in order to keep me away from Baltic-Gabriel is a good wyvern. The members of his sept-and it is his sept, not yours any longer-love him. They will stand behind him no matter what. You can challenge him from here to kingdom come, and they’ll still stand behind him. If you persist on this idiotic course of trying to oust him, all you’ll do is destroy the sept, because I can guarantee you that if Gabriel were to leave, all the rest of the silver dragons would go with him.”
    Constantine appeared before me, a pugnacious look on his face. I glanced around quickly, but no one was close enough to have seen his materialization ... no one but Ludovic, who started in surprise. I gestured to him that it was OK, but still he headed toward me.
    “The very same dragons who followed me when I left the black sept!” Constantine snapped, anger and pain and frustration in his voice and expression.
    “Yes, those very same people,” I said, putting my hand on his arm. “But you’ve been gone for four hundred years, Constantine. They aren’t your followers anymore. They have a wyvern, a good man, one who will fight you to his death to keep them. Do you really care so little about the silver dragons that you would destroy them simply to satisfy your own ego?”
    He digested this for a moment. “They are not my sept any longer? I am not a silver dragon?”
    Pain lashed him, pain that I knew well. I hugged him, wishing things had turned out differently, wishing I’d listened to Baltic and never had Constantine’s shade raised. “I think you’re like me-once a silver dragon, and now something else.”
    “You are a light dragon,” Constantine said, looking curiously at me.
    For one horrible moment, I thought he was going to demand that I persuade Baltic into accepting him into the sept, but he simply looked beyond me. “But before that, you were a black dragon.”
    “Yes. I was born silver, but I became a black dragon when I accepted Baltic