“Why do you need that?” she asked, still wearing a puzzled expression.

I explained briefly about the dragon heart.

“So, the red dragons will hand over their piece, and that will give you two of the five?”

“Temporarily hand over, yes. It’ll be returned to them.”

“Two isn’t going to do you much good,” she pointed out. “Not if you need all five shards.”

“Gabriel has that worked out. Drake will loan us his piece in exchange for helping Jian.”

“Why would he want to help Jian . . . ? Oh. To end the war?”

“Yes. That’ll be part of the deal Chuan Ren is going to have to agree to in order to be freed. Assuming I can free her, that is.”

“You’re going to need Magoth for that, I bet,” Cyrene said with surprising prescience. “Do you know where he is now?”

“Oddly enough, he’s been keeping a low profile. Gabriel has had people watching for him, but as far as we know, Magoth and Sally are holed up in his house in Paris.”

“Hmm. I’d have thought Magoth would have been raising hell by now. Ha. Hell.”

I couldn’t help but smile. “I’m sure he would if he could, but I think he’s finding out just how limited he is without any powers.”

“Is he going to be able to help you with Jian, then?” Cy asked.

“He should be able to, but whether or not he will remains to be seen.” I skimmed over the horror that thought brought me. I truly did not want to think of what I’d have to do in order to get Chuan Ren released.

“That still leaves you two shards short of a complete dragon heart.”

“One. The blue wyvern has a shard, as well.”

“Oh. So who has the fifth one? Gabriel?”

“No.” I was silent for a moment. “We think the dragon I saw in the shadow world has the fifth shard.”

Her eyes widened. “Baltic, you mean?”

“Yes.”

She whistled. “That’s going to be a hard one to get.”

“It will indeed. The hope is that the other four shards together will give us the ability to get the fifth.”

“Hmm.” Cyrene thought for a few minutes. “I bet that Bao is going to have a thing or two to say about all of this.”

“I’m sure she will, but that’s no affair of ours. Jian insists that Bao is not what she seems, and she has no right to bear the title of wyvern. We really have no reason not to believe him.”

“You don’t really have a reason to believe him, either, but I guess that point is moot. Oh! That’s it, over there,” Cyrene said, pointing to a stretch of beach and sapphire water that was glimpsed between starkly white stone buildings.

It took a few minutes to find a spot to park, so popular was the surfing event, but at last we tucked the car away in the shade of a church and walked the length of the town to the beach, where a large crowd was gathered around a couple of rickety tables. Surfboards lay glistening in the sun up and down the beach, their owners standing negligently beside them, or bent over them waxing the colorful boards with gentle caresses.