The Emerald Dragon (The Lost Ancients Book 3) by Marie Andreas Read Free Book Online

finally reached the ground. Climbing down was a lot harder than going up. No wonder so many cats got stuck in trees.
    “Boom?” I didn’t like the sound of that.
    Crusty made a tiny fist, held it high, then dropped it. “Boom.” The maniacal grin on her face was disturbing.
    “Uh, yes.” I turned away from her and faced Garbage. “How long have you been able to hear me in your heads?” I waved my hands as I noticed all three about to give me a useless answer. “Without actually hearing the words come out of my mouth with your ears.” I tried thinking back to any time they’d done something like this, but while sometimes they did show up about when they might be handy, plenty of times they didn’t.
    “Always hear.” Leaf drifted down to try to communicate, since obviously I was dafter than the rock Crusty stared at. “Then we didn’t.” She frowned and shook her head. “Then we did.” Big grin on this one.
    Great. Most likely this was another one of their mysterious powers they had a long time ago, like hiding people, that was now coming back. I wasn’t sure how I felt about these powers popping up. Not to mention I was still weirded out about them being in my head. I focused hard on thinking of a huge pile of sweets next to a giant bottle of ale.
    None of the faeries even responded.
    I added them to the thought by name.
    “You give us now!” Garbage was an inch in front of my face in an instant. The other two were not far behind her.
    That was reassuring. So they could hear me in their heads, but only if I thought of them. I’d have to watch my thoughts.
    “Can you hear everybody?”
    Garbage, realizing that I wouldn’t magically supply them with sweets and booze in the midst of a bunch of trees, pulled back. “No. Was we could. Now. Boom. No.”
    “We hear you .” Leaf added.
    Clearly, that was the extent of their answers. We were back to boom. For a second I thought about running and telling Covey, but then I remembered her taking off was part of why I’d been in that tree in the first place.
    “You give us now!” Garbage wasn’t letting go of the sweets and alcohol idea. I should have made my test thought a little less appealing.
    “I can’t. The Shimmering Dewdrop is closed right now, and I don’t know if they’re done with the house yet.” The final repairs should have been finished today, but knowing the crew I had working on it, they probably took a two-hour break after the earthquakes. A repair job that should have taken about two weeks ended with almost a full, two-month-long rebuild of my entire house.
    The reasons I’d been in the tree all slammed back into place. Damn. I’d managed to push the fact that Glorinal was possibly alive and running around with a bunch of murderous rakasa out of my head.
    “Girls.” I waved all three faeries closer and lowered my voice. “Have you ever heard of the emerald dragon cult? Or of the rakasa?”
    Crusty looked studiously blank. I’d say it was an act but I wasn’t even sure she heard me. Leaf and Garbage looked worried for the merest of seconds, and then both shook their heads.
    That was something new. They were deliberately lying to me. Most times they were too vague for others to understand, but they didn’t outright lie.
    “Not cult, no.” Crusty paid attention after all. And judging from the tiny glare Garbage shot her, she told me the truth.
    “So you have heard of the emerald dragon then?”
    Crusty, suddenly realizing that she said something she shouldn’t, took a deep breath, as if she was holding it under water, and then did a backwards summersault away from me. The other two quickly followed, then flew off over the trees.
    Life was so much easier when all I had to do each day was dig through elven ruins.
    I drifted back toward the ruins. Not where the standard dig sites were, but the side near the Forgotten Plains. The plains were unnaturally created eons ago when a bunch of bad magic went horribly wrong. Or so some of