Up in Smoke - Katie MacAlister [46]
“That still leaves you two shards short of a complete dragon heart.”
“One. The blue wyvern has a shard, as well.”
“Oh. So who has the fifth one? Gabriel?”
“No.” I was silent for a moment. “We think the dragon I saw in the shadow world has the fifth shard.”
Her eyes widened. “Baltic, you mean?”
“Yes.”
She whistled. “That’s going to be a hard one to get.”
“It will indeed. The hope is that the other four shards together will give us the ability to get the fifth.”
“Hmm.” Cyrene thought for a few minutes. “I bet that Bao is going to have a thing or two to say about all of this.”
“I’m sure she will, but that’s no affair of ours. Jian insists that Bao is not what she seems, and she has no right to bear the title of wyvern. We really have no reason not to believe him.”
“You don’t really have a reason to believe him, either, but I guess that point is moot. Oh! That’s it, over there,” Cyrene said, pointing to a stretch of beach and sapphire water that was glimpsed between starkly white stone buildings.
It took a few minutes to find a spot to park, so popular was the surfing event, but at last we tucked the car away in the shade of a church and walked the length of the town to the beach, where a large crowd was gathered around a couple of rickety tables. Surfboards lay glistening in the sun up and down the beach, their owners standing negligently beside them, or bent over them waxing the colorful boards with gentle caresses.
“Which one is Neptune?” I asked, allowing myself a moment to admire all the eye candy. Most of the surfers were shirtless, wearing standard knee-length cargo shorts, or brightly colored wet suits, all of them showing off physiques honed by years of swimming and surfing. There were surprisingly few women included, although the ones who were there were as buff as the men.
“I think that’s him, down there,” Cyrene answered after scanning the people. She pointed to the far end of the beach, where two men were emerging from the foaming surf, water glistening on their wet suits, their boards slung to their sides. A third man stood with his board balanced on his head, clearly about to go into the water.
“Which one?” I asked as we set off toward them.
“The one who looks like Neptune, of course,” she said with an exasperated roll of her eyes.
The two men stopped in front of the third, shaking water from their hair as they set their boards down.
“Brah!” the dry man said to one of the two guys. “That was sick air! Epic, totally epic! It’s just too bad that frickin’ Grom snaked you and knocked your stick. You’d have that tail slide otherwise.”
“Snakes suck,” the taller and blonder of the two surfers agreed. “It was a perfect barrel, too. The big mama is fully macking some sick grinders. For a couple of groats I’d shove a tin of surf wax up that snake’s . . . whoa, femmes.”
“Er . . . hello,” I said as the taller man noticed us. The other two men turned to look at us. “I’m sorry, this is completely random, but snakes? In the ocean?”
All three men looked at me as if I was the crazy one.
“You didn’t actually mean snake snakes, did you?” I asked the largest of the men. He had an air of relaxed command that I took to mean he was the head of all the water elementals.
“Dude, a snake is someone who drops in out of turn.”
“Not epic,” the dry man said, shaking his head. “Totally.”
“No, of course not,” I agreed, not having the slightest clue what they were talking about, but deciding to leave the surfer lingo alone. I turned back to the large man. “Are you by any chance Neptune?”
“Name’s Ned when I’m on the circuit, but you two femmes aren’t heavies, are you?” the man said, flashing me a very white-toothed smile before his gaze slid over to Cyrene. His eyebrows rose a smidgen. “Dude! You must be the naiad with the dirty doppel! Tasty! But weren’t you like totally owned last week?”
“I don’t suppose any of you speaks actual English?