Light Dragons 03 - Sparks Fly

books.
    Katie MacAlister

Chapter One
    “T he lady is here to see you.”
    Baltic turned at the voice, obviously startled to hear it since he had been alone in the upstairs corridor. “What foolishness is this?”
    The heavily varnished wooden paneling that ran the length of the upper floor of the three-hundred-year-old pub melted into a dirt yard dotted with odd wooden figures.
    Baltic glared first at the wooden figures, then at the man who approached him. “Ysolde! Why have you drawn me into one of your visions of the past? And why must you include that murderous bastard in it?”
    “Don’t blame me; blame my inner dragon.” I sighed to myself and folded my arms over the couple of shirts I had been about to hang up in the wardrobe, which, like the corridor outside our bedroom, had faded into the scene before us. “Although I have to say, if it’s going to make me watch episodes from your past, you might as well be here, too. Who is that? Oh, Constantine. And look, it’s Baltic version 1.0, all sexy and shirtless and hacking away at something with a sword.”
    “I have better things to do than relive unimportant events,” my Baltic, the Baltic of the present day, growled, transferring his glare from Constantine, the former silver wyvern and once his friend, later his most hated enemy, to me. “Make the vision stop.”
    “I would if I could, but they never do until they’re good and ready ... . Hey, where are you going?”
    Baltic, with a rude word, turned on his heel and marched away. “I have spent the last twelve days chasing Thala across all of Europe and half of Asia. I have work to do, mate. You may indulge yourself with this vanity, but I will not.”
    “Vanity! I like that! It’s not vanity. And you can’t just leave my vision like that!” I yelled after him, watching with a growing sense of injustice as he disappeared around the side of a small hut. “They’re valuable sources of information! Kaawa says we’re supposed to learn from them, to glean facts about what is important to us now. Baltic? Well, dammit! He left! That rotter.”
    I slapped my hands on my legs and spun around as the vision of Constantine approached the other man who stood in a cluster of quintains and man-sized targets.
    “Well, I’m not going to be so obstinate that I don’t learn whatever it is my inner dragon is trying to tell me. Let’s see, what do we have here ... obviously, we’re in some sort of a training yard, and since Baltic isn’t frothing at the mouth at the sight of Constantine, evidently this vision is from a time when they were still friends. Hello, my love. I don’t suppose you can hear me, let alone see me?”
    The vision Baltic didn’t react, not that I expected him to. The people in the visions my inner dragon self, long dormant and only recently starting to wake up, had provided me were just that-visions of events in the past. I could watch and listen, but could not interact with them.
    Constantine, clad in wool leggings and a tunic bearing a gold-embroidered dragon on a field of black, strode past the empty sword-fighting targets to the occupied one, his attitude cocky, while his face was arranged in an expression implying sympathy. “Did you hear me?” he asked as he stopped at the side of the man who was diligently hacking away at the straw and wood target with an extremely big sword.
    “I heard. It is of no matter to me.”
    I spent a few moments in admiration of the interplay of his muscles as Baltic continued to swing and thrust his sword into the target, his bare back shining with sweat.
    “It always did make my knees weak to see you wield a sword,” I told the vision Baltic, moving around to see the front of him. His face was different yet familiar to me, his hair dark ebony then, his chin more blunted. “I like your hair the dark chocolate color it is now. And your chin, as well, although you certainly were incredibly sexy before Thala resurrected you. And your chest ... oh my.” I fanned myself with a bit of one of the shirts I was holding.
    “Alexei says you have no choice. He says it is the command of your father.” Constantine cocked one eyebrow at Baltic, moving swiftly to the side when Baltic swung wide.
    “You look the same,” I informed Constantine. “Evidently being brought back as a shade didn’t affect your appearance, whereas resurrection does. Interesting. I’ll have to talk to Kaawa about that the next time I see her. Still, you were handsome then,