“I thought you two were friends,” I said to him, nodding at Drake. “Don’t you go back centuries?”

“Yes,” Gabriel said, and applied himself to a thick slab of ham.

Drake said nothing, but sipped an espresso. “Despite what you’re seeing here, they actually are friends,” Aisling told me. “It’s just that things were a little dicey for a while when Gabriel . . . err . . .”

“When he tried to poison you?” I asked, having heard something of Gabriel’s recent experiences with the Guardian.

“I didn’t poison her. I saved her life,” Gabriel said without meeting my eye. I had a horrible feeling he could sense the unreasonable swell of jealousy that seemed to burst into being whenever I thought about Aisling and him having some sort of relationship that went beyond what was appropriate.

Gabriel’s eyes flashed silver at me for a moment before he returned his gaze to his plate, but I could see him fighting to keep his dimples from showing.

The rat.

“You saved her after you betrayed us,” Drake said in a deceptively mild voice.

“What matters is that it’s all over and done with, and everything is forgiven and forgotten,” Aisling said in a loud voice, shooting a meaningful glance at her wyvern. “We’re all friends here, no matter how prickly the boys may get now and again.”

“Prickly!” Gabriel objected.

“Boys!” Drake added, an outraged look on his face.

Aisling giggled.

“Why did you betray them?” I asked Gabriel.

Silence, heavy and pregnant, fell upon the room. Gabriel studied me for a moment before answering. “Fiat Blu, the wyvern of the blue dragons, used Aisling to strike at Drake. I tried to reason with him, but Fiat has always been . . .”

“Insane,” Aisling offered.

“Unreasonable,” Drake said.

“. . . difficult,” Gabriel finished. “He would not listen to my attempts to defuse the situation, leaving me in an awkward position. I did the best I could to rein him back from the destruction I knew he would inflict, but he was more unbalanced than I thought, and he succeeded in poisoning Aisling before I could stop him.”

I sipped my coffee as I mulled over what he was saying. “What happened to the unbalanced Fiat? Didn’t you tell me there were two blue wyverns?”

“There can only be one true wyvern at any time,” he answered.

“You’ve been taking answer-avoidance lessons from Drake,” Aisling told Gabriel. “I’ll tell you what I know, May, although I have to pry every little bit of information from these guys.”

“I’ve noticed that particular trait myself,” I murmured.

Aisling gave her husband a long look that he ignored. “I gather that Fiat’s uncle Bastian—who, I have to admit, kind of wigs me out because even though he’s Fiat’s uncle and a hundred years older, he looks the same age as Fiat. Anyway, Bastian was born to be wyvern, but Fiat somehow convinced everyone in his sept that Bastian was insane, and he took over as wyvern instead.”