Patterns in the Dark (Dragon Blood Book 4) (29 page)

Cas glanced back in time to see Tolemek’s scowl.

“Yes, because curing diseases is so often the work of a half hour.”

All Cas could do was wave and hope he could do it, hope that whatever the Cofah had been researching would help him along.

“Wait,” he called as Duck and Sardelle headed after her. “I don’t mean to sound needy, but if there truly is an assassin skulking about, it would be nice if someone watched my back while I worked. It’s hard to concentrate when you’re expecting a bullet between your shoulder blades at any moment.”

Cas paused. He was right. For all she knew,
he
was her father’s target. Zirkander and the others might need her marksmanship on the front line, but… She looked back at Tolemek. He needed her. Sardelle had the power to keep the Cofah at bay. She could—

“I’ll watch him,” Zirkander said, surprising her by coming up beside her. “You’re more fit than I am right now. I can manage to sit on a desk and point my pistol at any shadows that move, but you’ll be more capable of keeping them from advancing. Duck will help you, and Sardelle will be there too.” He nodded at Tolemek. “Jaxi said she would help you, Tee.”

“Did she? Joy.”

Cas shook her head. “Sir, I should stay. It’s my fault that my father’s here, and I should be the one to protect Tolemek.”

“I don’t see how it could possibly be your fault that you’re related to him and he’s here. But I wasn’t opening this up for debate.” Zirkander jerked a thumb over his shoulder. Another spray of bullets fired, but this time, they bounced away before striking the glass. Sardelle must have raised one of her shields. Did she truly need the help of a couple of riflemen? Maybe she could hold off the Cofah on her own.

“She’s not as effective with the dragon’s presence muting her awareness,” Zirkander said, as if he had guessed her thoughts. “And she said she would be busy watching over Tolemek’s shoulder.” He touched his temple. “She’s the only other person here likely to know how to help with this cure. I need you to protect her. You and Duck.”

Cas knew she shouldn’t hesitate, but she couldn’t help but feel she was the best person to protect Tolemek and Tylie if her father showed up. She knew him; she’d been
trained
by him. She met Tolemek’s eyes, silently asking what
he
wanted. But he was no help. He gazed back at her for a moment, then walked over to a desk full of books and handwritten journals. He put his back to her and dug into the notes.

“Lieutenant,” Zirkander said. “I’m not making a request.”

“Yes, sir.” Cas glanced once more at Tolemek’s turned back, then headed for the door.

* * *

While Tylie watched from the corner, Tolemek flipped through the logs, scanning the entries as quickly as he could, hoping he would find what he needed in the mess. And hoping that what he needed was actually there. The Cofah might not have spent any time looking for a cure, instead accepting the losses of their troops as a necessity in order to obtain the blood.

That observation made him pause and look up, his thoughts focused inward. The blood. If the dragon was contagious with this virus, didn’t that imply that handling his blood wouldn’t be safe, either? The Cofah scientists wouldn’t have dared ship it out to different parts of the empire if it was possible they would start an epidemic. Even if they hadn’t been working on a cure, they would have had to find some way to filter the blood, extricate the virus from amid the cells. That alone should give him a starting place.
If
he could find the information.

“That where you’re going to work?” Zirkander pointed to the desk, then climbed onto a table between two cabinets, putting his back to the wall. It was a spot where he could see over the furnishings in the lab, but where he was protected from most sides.

“Yeah. You actually going to watch my back?” Tolemek would rather have had Cas, but he hadn’t wanted to put her in the position of having to choose between him and her commander. Mostly because he was afraid the equation wouldn’t come out in his favor. Zirkander should want to make sure Tolemek survived, so that he could find a cure, but the way he had ordered Cas away had struck him as odd. “I wasn’t sure I believed your reasoning with Cas.”

Zirkander frowned down at him. “I didn’t want her to be in a situation where she would have to shoot her own
father.
That was my reasoning.”

“Oh.” Tolemek’s cheeks heated. Chagrined that he hadn’t thought of that himself, he struggled to focus on the words in the logbooks. He kept wanting to think of Zirkander as a villain, because he had always been one of the Cofah military’s arch enemies when Tolemek had been a soldier. It was disappointing that the man refused to live up to expectations of nefariousness.

Zirkander sat now, his pistol resting in his lap, watching all of the doors to the lab. Sweat beaded on his forehead, and dark semicircles had formed under his eyes, but he didn’t look like he would let the virus keep him from his duty. “I, on the other hand,” he said, “wouldn’t be all that upset over shooting the man.”

“Cas hasn’t talked much about him with me.” Tolemek couldn’t quite bring himself to ask if she had revealed more family details to Zirkander.

He wasn’t finding much in the logs, which seemed more dedicated to reporting the check-ins of people on duty than scientific findings. He drummed his fingers on the desk and looked around the lab.

“I assume he cares about her, but it’s not all that apparent. He doesn’t talk to her. I don’t know why parents are mystified when they raise a kid to be competent and independent, and then the kid ends up choosing her own career.” He was speaking loudly, perhaps to be heard over the gunshots down the corridor, or perhaps because he hoped Cas’s father would hear him.

“If he hears you, he might shoot you instead of me.”

“That would be better than turning into a crazy man who attacks his friends before dying,” Zirkander muttered so softly Tolemek almost didn’t hear it. “I haven’t had the opportunity to try parenting yet. I suppose it’s easier to judge from the outside. Those competent, independent women aren’t all that easy to handle.” He smiled faintly.

“You seem to be doing all right.” Tolemek tried not to sound bitter. He loved Cas and appreciated all of their similarities, right down to the distant father figure who couldn’t quite understand his children. But he kept struggling to accept that Cas didn’t seem to feel as strongly about their relationship, or at least wasn’t ready to admit to as strong of an emotion as love. And then there was Zirkander and Sardelle, always sharing smiles and leaning against each other, flirting with each other. They hadn’t known each other much longer than Tolemek had known Cas, but they seemed much more comfortable with each other. Much more… in love.

“Oh?” Zirkander used his sleeve to wipe sweat from his brow, then took a deep swig from his canteen. “Glad to know it comes across that way.”

“You don’t think it’s going well?” Tolemek poked into the drawers of other desks and picked up notes left on tables, searching for something more useful than the logbooks.

“It’s going well.” Zirkander put his canteen away, gave Tolemek a thoughtful look, then added, “But it’s a little hard to be with a woman who doesn’t need protecting, and is in fact far better at protecting people than you are. Far better at everything, really. I’m not complaining, mind you, and I wouldn’t change anything about her. I’m just admitting that my ego has been a little battered of late, and that I’m struggling to feel needed around her.”

“She is the one with the bigger sword.”

Zirkander snorted. “Yes. And that’s a good thing, that she’s here to protect us, and that, for some reason, she’s fond of me. The fact that sword size enters my mind and matters to me at all, it’s a failing, I suppose.”

“I like hearing about your failings.”

The faint smile returned. “I thought you might.”

Tolemek didn’t look back at Zirkander, but he wondered if the man knew of the argument he and Cas had engaged in. Or maybe he could simply tell that Tolemek had a problem with her divided loyalties, something he had already acknowledged as a failing in himself. Still, it did make him feel better to know that Zirkander and Sardelle might not have quite the perfect relationship that he had witnessed from the outside.

“He’s falling deeper into unconsciousness,” Tylie said softly from her corner, a mournful note in her voice. “I think when he roused himself earlier, it stole the last of his reserves.”

“Understood.” Tolemek forced himself back to the task. He could ponder his love life later. If he could only find something useful in this mess.

Remembering the vials of blood he had seen by the centrifuge earlier, Tolemek jogged to that corner, checking on Tylie on his way past. She was watching him, her eyes large and hopeful, and he tried not to feel her expectations weighing on him like the yoke of a cart too heavy to pull. Since the dragon had fallen unconscious again, she had been less coherent, less able to grasp the situation around her. What would happen to her if that dragon died?

Tolemek stopped in front of the centrifuge. There had been a binder over here, hadn’t there? Yes, there it was. He grabbed it and a vial, but paused, his hand hanging over the rack. There had been six or eight vials there before. There were only two now.

“I think I know part of our sniper’s mission.” Tolemek waved at the rack.

“He took some?”

“Yes, but not all of them. Four or six vials maybe. I only saw this rack from the other side of the room before.”

“Hm. We already sent back samples for the king,” Zirkander said. “But it’s possible—no, probable—that he was sent out before Kaika and Apex returned. So he could conceivably be working for the crown. But he could be working for someone else, too, some high bidder who heard about the dragon blood somehow. It was top secret, but that doesn’t mean information doesn’t slip out.”

The binder absorbed Tolemek’s attention, and he forgot to respond. It held the information he had been hoping to find, a long list of tests, along with notes about filtering the blood. And how they had failed to filter the blood. He snorted. He could have guessed that. If the virus was too small to see under a microscope, it was much smaller than a cell. Unless something larger could attract and bind the smaller proteins somehow.

He rubbed his face. As much as he appreciated his sister’s faith in him, this wasn’t his specialty. It sounded like the scientists had already tried means of filtering and had abandoned the strategy. Tolemek flipped the pages, hoping to get past the failed tests and to a spot where the researchers had found success.

Halfway in, the tactics switched to attempts to kill the virus without killing the blood cells. “Ah, now we’ve got something,” he muttered, pacing back toward the desk.

“A cure that doesn’t involve cutting into people’s skulls?” Zirkander asked.

“Uh, a cure that’s not going to help you at all.”

“That’s not heartening.”

“Can it help the dragon?” Tylie asked, leaving her corner to stand beside Tolemek.

“Maybe. If I can find a way to deliver a sun’s worth of radiation to the dragon without frying everyone else in the ziggurat.” Tolemek peered around the laboratory, searching for inspiration. What had worked in vitro wouldn’t necessarily work in a dragon.

“Care to explain?” Zirkander asked.

“It’s fairly simple. After trying countless ways to filter the blood or kill the virus without killing the cells, someone sterilized a vial on a whim. Maybe the scientist had noted the resilience, or pure magical power, you might call it, of the dragon’s blood. Sterilization would kill human blood cells, the same as it killed the virus, but the dragon cells survived. All they’ve been doing is irradiating the blood, then crating it up and shipping it out.”

“So you can help the dragon, but you can’t help any of the people that have been afflicted with this already?” Zirkander didn’t tear up and mention the state this left him in, but it had to be on his mind.

“You can help the dragon?” Tylie repeated, clasping her hands in front of her. She either did not realize that Zirkander was sick or could not grasp the ramifications of it in her current state.

Tolemek wanted to heal the dragon if only so he could release Tylie from whatever bond he had formed with her, and so those glimpses of sanity he had received down in that tomb would return permanently.

“I have to figure out—” he scratched his stubbled jaw and stared through the cracked glass at the dragon, “—how in all the cursed realms am I going to irradiate an entire dragon?”

“How does one irradiate something small?” Zirkander asked. “As you’ll recall, I was folding paper fliers in my science classes, so you’ll have to explain it in little words.”

Tolemek snorted. “Exposing something to energy that’s capable of stripping electrons from atoms. This destroys or slows down bacteria, microorganisms, and viruses, or at least renders them incapable of reproduction. You can deliver the radiation with a radioactive substance or generate it electrically.”

“I’m not sure those words were little enough.” Zirkander raised his eyebrows at Tylie, as if to ask if she understood.

She leaned against Tolemek’s arm. “My brother is smart.”

“No, I just read books.” He hugged Tylie, but then returned to his walk around the lab, hunting for whatever equipment they had used. “They may have just done it with heat, honestly. Thermal radiation.”

“Heat?” Zirkander asked. “You know Jaxi melted a hole in that twenty-foot wall up there earlier, right?”

Tolemek paused. Was it possible the sword could emit enough heat to kill the virus in the blood? Or maybe all they would need was ultraviolet light? He thought he remembered reading about short wavelength light being used in Iskandia to sterilize drinking water down in some mines. He didn’t think it would be enough to simply strike the exterior of the dragon with intense ultraviolet though. They would have to find a way to remove the blood, irradiate it, and return it to the dragon. Probably. Maybe. He wished he knew more, that more science of this nature had successfully been done in the world. As resilient as a dragon might be, this one was nearly dead. He might kill it if he experimented. And where would that leave them then?