"Huh?"

"Lusus naturae. It is Latin for 'whim of nature.'" His fingers caressed my jaw as he pushed a curl off my face. "It simply means that a wyvern may challenge another for the right to a mate."

"You have got to be kidding!" I gasped, my brain grinding to a halt at the idea of what it was he was saying,

Jim heaved an exaggerated sigh. "Oh, great, now you're going to be into threesomes. I can't wait to tell Drake about that."

"The amulet!" I shouted, glaring at Jim before I pushed my way out of Gabriel's near embrace.

"You have lost an amulet?" he asked, looking around at the flower beds and the lawn.

"No, the man who stabbed me stole it."

"Ah, I see. It is valuable?"

I opened my mouth to say it was priceless but remembered in time how dragons reacted to any form of treasure. They were hoarders, acquiring treasure to be hidden away in their lairs, and even if the amulet had no gold— which acted more or less like the dragon version of catnip—it was still a very valuable piece.

"It's valuable to me," I said, choosing my words carefully. "I'm a courier, and I'm supposed to deliver it to someone here in Budapest. I have to get it back."

"Sit," he ordered, pushing me back to the ground from which I had struggled to get to my feet. "I will find this amulet for you."

"But how—?" I knew from the experience of the previous month that each of the four dragon septs had special skills for which it was known. Drake and the members of his sept were master thieves, while the blue dragons, headed by a veritable god of a man named Fiat Blu, were trackers extraordinaire. But Gabriel had said he was a healer—

"The one who attacked you has your blood on him- I will find him. But first I will attend to your wound." Gabriel lifted my arm and bent his head over it. For a second I felt an abnormal fear that he was going to bite me, but it wasn't his teeth that touched my skin.

His mouth, lips, and tongue caressed the bleeding gash. I sucked in my breath at the intimate feel of his mouth on my flesh, part of me disgusted by the thought of what he was doing, another part, a dark, secret part, strangely intrigued. His breath was hot on my arm, and for an instant I thought it was dragon fire I felt licking along my skin—but that couldn't be right. Drake was the only dragon whose fire I could feel.

Gabriel looked up from my arm, a tiny bead of my blood in the corner of his mouth. His tongue flicked out to suck it into his mouth, his eyes smiling at me as he leaped to his feet and quickly scented the air. Then he was off with the grace of a very male, very sexy gazelle.

"Holy cow," I said, my breath made uneven by the experience of his type of healing.

"I'm going to tell Drake that you have a new boyfriend." Jim said, watching me with unreadable dark eyes. "One who likes to suck owies. I'm a demon and even I think that's just gross."

I looked down at my arm. The long cut was still red, but it had closed and stopped bleeding, as if there was something in Gabriel's saliva that promoted healing. "You say anything to Drake at all, and I swear we'll go to the neutering clinic, Have you ever heard of a dragon who can heal?"

"Sure, dragon spit is well known for its healing properties." I glanced up at Jim, puzzled by the sarcastic tone in its voice. "Not! Dragons aren't healers, Aisling. They take, they don't give. You know that."

"Well, this dragon has something going for him, because not only is the pain gone but the cut is closed. Come on. Maybe you can track the guy who cut me. Or Gabriel. I need that amulet back, and as much as I appreciate Gabriel's first-aid skills, I don't trust him where treasure is concerned."

We ran through the copse of trees, emerging on the other side to find ourselves in a rock garden filled with exotic plants and a little waterfall that splashed prettily down a mossy cliff.

"Oh, man, now I gotta pee," Jim complained as we ran by the waterfall to the stretch of lawn beyond it.

"You do not. It's just a psychological thing. Do you smell either Gabriel or the guy who did the slash and dash?"

"What do I look like, a bloodhound? I'm a Newfoundland! We're water dogs. We don't do the tracking thing!"

We ran up to the outer edges of a church ruin. Beyond it was an open-air theater. I stopped next to a marble plaque marking the site of an ancient convent, clutching it for a moment as I caught my breath. Jim panted beside me, its tongue hanging a good six inches out of its mouth.

"This is ridiculous. This island is something like a mile and a half long and who knows how wide. We'll never be able to find them if you can't track them."

"I'm not the only one around here who can do something. You're the one who wants to be a Guardian. So do your thing. Look around you."

I opened my mouth to snap out a nasty comment but closed it without saying anything. Jim was right (dammit!). One of the abilities I had discovered the month before was that I could see things not apparent to the visible eye by opening myself up to my environment, allowing what a very wise woman in Paris had called "the possibilities" to become clear to me. "Why does everyone in the Otherworld seem to have a quantum physics degree?" I grumbled as I straightened up, closing my eyes and trying to calm my distraught mind so I could really see the world around me.

"What do you see?" Jim asked as I opened the door in my mind that allowed my mental sight to see reality.

Jim backed away from me as I stood next to the wall bearing the plaque. Beyond Jim the ruins of the convent shimmered in the night, the walls stretching and yawning as if they were alive. Before my bewildered sight, the convent came to life, the broken walls slowly rebuilding themselves, dark figures moving gracefully down paved pathways, a bell tolling somberly in the distance.

"Aisling? Do you see Gabriel or that mugger?"

"Uh ..." Two of the dark figures glided toward me, their heads covered by white coifs. "No. Not Gabriel. I think I'm seeing a memory or something of the convent."

"Ghosts? Cool. Where? Oh, yeah, the two over by the well, do you mean?"

I turned my mental vision on Jim. "What do you mean, 'the two over by the weir'? You can see ghosts? Why didn't you tell me that?"

Jim shrugged. "You never asked."

I sighed and turned to look beyond the convent ruins, my mind's eye scanning the gardens and tiny forest that curved around the south end of the convent.