Draiks and Angels: Rescued

16 - Nap

They arrived at Cona's house without incident at around two-thirty in the afternoon. Cona let them in the Kitchen door with a finger on the pad and made sure to lock the door behind them. She noticed the bowl in the sink and suddenly felt embarrassed.

"You remember how to get to the library? Just head up, I'll be there in a sec."

Michael nodded and went ahead. Cona noticed that he was limping slightly. Did his leg still hurt from this morning? Wouldn't the magic have taken care of that? She went to the sink and washed the bowl and spoon, leaving them in the drainer in the other half of the sink to dry.

She joined Michael in the library to find him sitting on a stool just looking at the shelves of books. She found her set of maps tucked on one of the shelves and pulled out the one for the county. She laid it out on the table in front of Michael and took the seat opposite. They bent over it to get a better look. They were used to seeing things from above, so it was easy to extrapolate what they saw to where they had been.

"The ruins were about here," Cona pointed, "and the temple was about here."

Michael looked at the coast, "I'd say the cliffs end around here."

"Here is the river," Cona traced with her finger, "and it looks like this would be the bend where the piece was."

They each placed a finger on one of the locations and found they lined up in straight lines. They were not equidistant, but the temple and the canyon were in the same line with the ruin, and the line from the ruin to the cliff looked to be perpendicular to that line. Cona looked around, then grabbed a notebook off a shelf and used it like a ruler to extend the line from the cliff to the ruin and out east. It led into the mountains just south of the city of Culmen. Past the mountains was a large empty plain.

"If we only have to check on this line, we probably don't need to know anything more," Michael suggested.

"We would probably have to go to the ruins and fly directly east from there just to be sure we were on the right course."

"Sounds good."

"But more importantly, you're limping. Does your leg still hurt?"

Michael winced. He had hoped she wouldn't see that, "I used a lot of magic hiding from Andrew, and I didn't want to run out, so I had to stop the healing early. I can still stand and walk. It should be fine."

Cona narrowed her eyes at him, "Can you run?"

"Uh, I haven't... tried?"

Cona could tell he was hedging, "If we end up in a situation like in the temple where we have to run again, and you can't because of your leg, that would be bad. You should finish healing it."

"I don't want to use all my magic doing that, so we would have to wait a while for me to recover some, I guess... Are you willing to delay the search just for that?" Michael tried to discourage her.

Cona frowned, but said, "Better delayed than captured by those... Shadows."

Foiled. "Fine. It normally takes a full day to recover all my magic, but we don't have to wait that long. Maybe... a few hours?"

Cona agreed. Since they had time to kill, she found an old hammock and they strung it up between the stairs like Michael had been imagining. It required flying to get into, and Cona had Michael try it first. He almost fell out, but finally managed to get situated, laying on his back on his wings. The soft fabric made it so it wasn't uncomfortable, though. He put his hands behind his head and closed his eyes.

Cona sat on the railing of the landing above and asked, "Tell me about yourself? I mean, apparently Angels live in an Aerie with other Angels and I don't know what that's like. I've always just been alone with my father and the staff."