Light Dragons 03 - Sparks Fly

continued to mutter some very rude things under his breath, helped me to my feet.
    “It’s all right; we have been a bit distracted, what with one thing and the other.” I folded the blanket and picked up a few things that had slipped out of the gardening bag, repacking it with a significant glance at Baltic.
    “I will be inside,” he said, shaking his head. “You have ten minutes before I come to find you. Do not make me hunt you.”
    I just smiled as he stalked off.
    “Hunt?” Maura said, turning around to look at me. “He doesn’t want to hunt you? But that’s a dragon game. All males like it.”
    “I think he’s warning me that he’s at the end of his very limited patience. What’s worrying you about Violet?”
    She slumped down onto a mildewed stone bench bedecked with somewhat obscene cherubs. “Everything.”
    “Is something going on between her and your grandfather? I don’t have a lot of memories of my time with your mother, but I do remember that she was always able to get him to do things that no one else could. Have they had an argument or something?”
    “I wish it was that. No, it’s something much more horrible.” She looked up as I sat next to her, ignoring a stone cherub that seemed to be about to do a most inappropriate act to another cherub. “You remember the talk we had a few days ago, about why I couldn’t leave the castillo in Spain?”
    “You said Thala was blackmailing you.”
    She nodded.
    “Is she trying to convince your mother that you’re in trouble?”
    “My mother doesn’t have to be convinced of that-she knows it very well by now.” Maura stopped pleating the material of her pants and took a deep breath. “Thala is holding my mother prisoner until I give her the location of the sepulcher. Yes,” she said when I gasped in surprise. “The very same sepulcher that you’ve been looking for.”
    I eyed her. “How did you know I am searching for it, too?”
    “Savian told me a few minutes ago. He said he didn’t think you’d mind, given the dire nature of the situation. Please don’t be angry with him for betraying your confidence. I begged him for help, and once he heard what I was trying to do ... well, it just kind of came out. I’m the one who deserves your wrath, not him.”
    “Don’t be silly. I’m not mad at him. Or you. But kidnapping your mother ... that’s very extreme of Thala.”
    Maura sighed. “She wants that sword that she says belongs to her mother, and since I left the tribe and she couldn’t make it a condition of my membership that I find out the location, she took my mother, and she’s holding her hostage for the information.”
    “So when you were in Spain and said you couldn’t leave ... ”
    “Thala told me I couldn’t go anywhere without her permission. I don’t know what she thought I’d do-perhaps present my situation to the L’au-dela Committee and bring them down on her head-but she warned me against doing anything but convincing Emile to give me the location of the sepulcher.”
    “And we took you away with us. Oh, Maura, why didn’t you tell us this at the time?”
    “What good would it have done?” She ran a hand through her hair. “There was no way to get those stupid handcuffs off, and besides ... ”
    “You didn’t trust us,” I finished for her.
    She nodded, sadness quite evident on her face. “I realize now that I was wrong about your conveniently losing the key just so you could keep tabs on me. But at the time, I wasn’t sure, and I just didn’t know what to do. So I kept quiet about it, and, in hopes that she wouldn’t hurt Mum, I explained to Thala that I’d been kidnapped by you.”
    Fear gripped my gut. “Oh no! Tell me she didn’t hurt Violet.”
    “She didn’t, or at least she says she didn’t, and I think that about this, she’s telling the truth. Evidently enough people in the town were witness to my struggles to convince her that I was taken against my will.”
    “So when you left us here, that was to talk to Dr. Kostich?”
    She shook her head. “I thought I’d try to find the sepulcher myself.”
    “But why?” I cried. “Surely Dr. Kostich would move heaven and earth to save Violet.”
    “No, he wouldn’t.” I stared at her in abject horror. She made a frustrated gesture in response. “I’m saying it all wrong. He would if he could, but the Committee has a strict no-negotiations policy with people who are, to draw a modern-day analogy, terrorists. He told me