Free Rising Dragons Omnibus by Ophelia Bell Page A

again in his mother’s journal added another piece to the puzzle.
    The rest of their time before moving to London had been spent traveling back to the Temple, collecting more data and a few artifacts. When she and her team were busy preparing their paper, she had corresponded with her team remotely from a collection of hotels around the world, in cities where other experts existed who could validate the authenticity of their artifacts. It had been the Queen, Racha, who had dictated the terms of their use of the data they had collected from the Temple and she had reviewed and signed off on the final submission of the paper to the most elite journals in Erika’s field.
    The only time she and Geva had been out of sight of each other since they’d left the Temple had been during the secret meeting he and the other Court dragons had attended, high atop the mountain on that tiny island. The Council had important things to say that the human mates couldn’t be privy to, but it just made Erika wonder who this elusive Council was.
    Geva hadn’t been inclined to share the details of that meeting at first, only saying that they had accomplished more than he’d expected. All she’d figured out was that ‘dragon law’ required the Court and the Brood along with it to disperse to the four corners of the Earth. The reasoning for that was vague, but Camille had suggested their laws assigned each dragon a jurisdiction. Geva had confirmed that suggestion when they moved to London.
    He was literally royalty, in the dragon sense, and his ‘kingdom’, as it were, encompassed all of the United Kingdom and Scandinavia.
    The locales of the others began to make more sense to her after that, though there were really six corners to the Earth if their assignments were any indication. She’d begun to see the pattern with them as well. The number six kept recurring. Six dragon colors, six ultimate matings among her team, six separate fragments of the magical artifact they were trying to assemble.
    Six generations, Geva had said, since they’d been forced into these cycles. He’d only said it once, then grew broody and muttered something about how six was enough. Erika had been reminded of her father complaining about politics not long before he died.
    She stepped under the steaming water of the shower with a sense of sadness and a sudden pang of homesickness. Not for the huge, empty house she’d left behind in Boston when she started college, but for the memory of that same house when her father was alive and it still felt like home to her. She longed to share the success of her discovery with her father.
    At first it was a sense of pride and excitement over confirming what her father had always believed was the truth but had never proved. Today, however, she had the strongest wish that Geva and her father had had the chance to meet. It was absurd to think she saw aspects of her father in her lover. She was probably projecting due to having too much time on her hands now and feeling particularly sentimental.
    “My legacy is your destiny,” she remembered her father saying when she was a teenager testing her boundaries and rebelling against his need to share his life’s work with her. “You’ll understand when you have your own child. The need to pass this on will become a priority. I won’t live forever, Erika.”
    She’d of course rolled her eyes at that comment. Gabriel Rosencrans was strength personified—immortal in her own eyes. Now she realized he’d been making more frequent comments about his own mortality at the time. It wasn’t until the cancer had advanced beyond his ability to hide it that he finally told her he was dying.
    And to think if he’d found the Temple and mated a dragon he might have lived. Here she was instead, carrying on her father’s work but with no young, bright, inquisitive mind to impart any of that wisdom to. It had never occurred to her what she might have meant to her father until now. She’d