Dragon Witch ✔️

52 - Half Brother

I burst into the study room, panting. Nissa was on her feet in an instant, obviously smelling my fear. Kyton and Piper just glanced up at me.

Kyton smiled weakly. "Scones got the best of you?"

I shook my head. "Dorian, he-" I took a breath.

"Dorian, the housekeeper? What about him?"

"He's a changeling. I saw him downstairs."

He and Piper jumped to their feet. They ran toward the door, but I blocked the way.

"He's not there now. I'm not sure he ever was." Taking a deep breath, I explained what I'd seen and heard. When I was done, everyone slumped back into their seats. I joined them.

"Do you think he was telling the truth?" Nissa asked.

I shrugged. "No way to tell. He's a monster pretending to be a housekeeper. He obviously doesn't have a problem with lying. If I go to meet him, I might be walking into a trap. Then again, he might really think I'm on his side or something."

"When we go after the dragon," Kyton said, clapping a hand on my shoulder, "we will scout the area to make sure it's not a trap. Dorian said he knew a way to get dragon's blood. We can't afford not to go."

I rolled my eyes. "And what are you going to do if the dragon shows up, turns his magic on you, and paralyzes you? You got lucky on Friday. The dragon was too distracted by me and Eva to focus on you."

"I'll be fine. We found something this weekend when we were researching." He tugged a leather thong out of the neck of his shirt. A silver charm shaped like a thick quarter with a hole through it hung from the thong. "It's a fear pendant, blocks magical fear. It took a while to find a spell that would do that without interfering with the spell that's keeping the silver from burning me. I got Silvestre to cast it."

"Have you tested it?"

He dropped the pendant back in his shirt. "Yeah, Silvestre cast fear spells on me, but it didn't do anything to me when I was wearing the pendant."

I crossed my arms, hoping he would think about that for a minute and say what I was already thinking. He didn't.

"There's a big difference between a fear spell cast by a witch and one cast by a dragon."

"We'll see soon enough, won't we. Let's go." He grabbed his backpack and headed for the door.

I caught his arm. "There's no reason to leave a mess. Dorian will still be there after we spend five minutes to clean up." Besides, I needed some time to think about what we would do when we found Dorian.

He glared at the massive pile of books on the table. "You'd better be right."

***

"It's just over here," Kyton said under his breath. He was supposedly under an invisible glamour, but I could see him just fine. He walked at my side as we crept through the trees toward the stream. Or rather, I walked at his side. He couldn't see me. Apparently, neither could Eva. She kept moaning into my ear about how weird it was to ride on something invisible, even though she was made invisible by my glamour as well.

Piper and Nissa were coming around the waterfall from the other direction, Nissa hiding Piper under her invisibility glamour. I couldn't see either of them unless I concentrated really hard on a faint shimmering just past the far bank. Nissa was a lot better at turning invisible than Kyton was. Apparently she'd always been that way, even before she was a shade. At least that was one less thing I had to lie about. We'd already had a huge argument about whether she should wear a fear pendant like Kyton, which Kyton won, even though shades didn't really need to wear one.