And alert him to the fact there was more gold on my person? Huh-uh. "Thank you, I believe I'll keep it on. Amelie said it was a talisman against dragons. I'm be-ginning to see why she thought it was important I have it. Now, let's get back to this conversation thing—where are we going? I hope it's somewhere we can talk, because I'm quite serious when I say that I have a lot of questions for you."

His eyes glittered darkly. "What makes you think I will answer them? I have the aquamanile back that you attempted to steal from me—"

"The one you stole fromme."

"—and although your jade talisman is distracting, it's not valuable enough to tempt me. What do you offer me in return for answers to your questions?"

Why was it that having just a simple conversation with Drake made me feel as if I was juggling fire torches? I gnawed my lip for a moment, then decided that offering him the stone I had taken from the Venediger was the only thing I had to barter with. "What about the third piece that matches my aquamanile and that chalice you have?"

His beautiful green eyes widened. I grinned at the look of surprise on his face, one that was quickly wiped away and replaced with his usual savoir-faire. "You have the Occhio di Lucifer?"

"The what?"

"The Eye of Lucifer. That is the name of the third Tool of Bael. It is a lodestone bound in gold. You have it?"

I spread my hands wide, fervently hoping he'd buy my innocent act and not rip off my tunic to nose around my boobs. "Do I look like I've got it? You'd know if I had, wouldn't you?"

"Yes," he said, rubbing his nose again. The avid light in his eyes died down a fraction, but not much. "Then you know where the Eye is?"

"Maybe," I said coyly. "But I don't understand the name. Why is it called the Eye of Lucifer? And isn't that name you gave it Italian?"

Drake leaned back against the seat, his eyes watchful. "Yes, it is Italian. The Tools of Bael consist of the Anima di Lucifer—Blood of Lucifer—that is the aquamanile, and the Voce di Lucifer—the Voice of Lucifer—which is a gold chalice."

"You have that, as well," I said, thinking of the dragon-stemmed chalice that had sat next to my aqua-manile in the display cabinet at his house.

"Yes. The third is the Occhio di Lucifer. The Venediger had that." He looked at me with speculation rife in his eyes. "If you have it, you must have taken it from him."

"Who's to say I did? And if I did, who's to say what I did with it?" I answered as mysteriously as I could. I needed to get him off the subject of what I could have done with a small stone in the short amount of time that passed while I was running from the gazebo until he nabbed me. "What were these Tools of Bael used for?"

Drake frowned for a second; then his brows relaxed into their normal smooth lines. "I keep forgetting that you have not yet discovered your full powers as a Guardian. The Tools of Bael were forged by a powerful mage dur-ing one of the Crusades. His intention was to use the power the Tools would give him to aid England's King Richard, but as soon as he had created them, a rival mage stole them and turned the Tools against him."

"But what did the Tools do? And who is Bael?"

Jim did an antsy sort of up-and-down jump. I narrowed my lips at it. "You may speak if you have something worthwhile to contribute."

"Everything I say are pearls of wisdom," Jim an-swered, then hurried on when it saw the warning in my eye. "Bael is the first principal spirit in Abaddon, the leader of all the princes. He rules sixty-six legions and often takes the form of a man with a hoarse voice."

"Oh, you mean Beelzebub. Right. Gotcha. So these Tools of Bael tap into his power?" I asked Drake. He nod-ded. "Wow. I imagine having access to the head of all the demon lords is pretty powerful stuff. What were the Tools used for, exactly? I mean, an aquamanile, a chalice, and a lodestone don't seem to have too much in common."

"Ritual," Drake said, looking away.

'Think sacrifices," Jim said with much pleasure.

My stomach turned. "Ah. OK."

"Blood sacrifices," the demon added, as if I didn't get that part.

"Yes, thank you. I gathered that."

"Of innocents."

"Innocents?" I asked it, afraid of what its answer would be.

Jim's lips twisted. "Children."

"Pull over!" I yelled at Drake, my stomach roiling. He took one look at my face and snapped a command to the two guys up front.

I made it to a space between two parked cars, but just barely, aware of Drake's presence behind me as I vomited my lunch into the sewer. Life, I was pretty sure, could not get any stickier.

I am so often wrong about these things.

11

"Say what you will about you—and I can say a lot, de-spite having known you for only a couple of days—you really have a fabulous house. Is this all stuff you've stolen over the years?"

Drake shrugged as I set a lovely Grecian bowl back onto its pedestal. I took the shrug to mean yes. The room he called his library could have doubled for a museum, so full of antiquities was it. It gave me an odd feeling to know that he was old enough to have seen most of the ob-jects when they were new. I moved over to stand in front of a triptych depicting Saint George about to stab his lance into a writhing dragon. "One of your ancestors?" I couldn't keep from joking.

"No, that was one of the red dragon sept," he answered in all seriousness.

I gaped, looking from the triptych to him. "You mean Saint George really did slay a dragon?"

"Of course." Drake walked over to an ebony sideboard holding a variety of cut-glass decanters.

"Wow." I looked back at the picture. "So what was it like back then? The Middle Ages, I mean?"

Drake gave me a disgusted look as he brought me a glass filled with a deep red wine. "I wouldn't know—I wasn't alive then."

"Oh, really?" I took a tentative sip of the Dragon's Blood, its now-familiar burn a comforting heat, one that effectively singed out the last remnants of my nausea.

Drake's digusted look got a whole lot more disgusted. He did the nostril-flare thing as he asked, "Just how old do you think I am?"

"Well, let's see…." I strolled around him, enjoying the opportunity to look him over without appearing to ogle him (which, of course, was what I was doing). He was dressed in a navy suit this time, although as soon as we arrived at his house, he shucked the suit jacket and tie, and rolled up the sleeves of his cream-colored shirt. As I circled him, I had to clutch my hands together to keep from allowing my fingers to go exploring. "I'd say.. . hmmm … five hundred years?"