Free The Wizard's Treasure (The Dragon Nimbus) by Irene Radford Page B

lump of fear. It lodged in her upper chest, constricting her breathing.
    “I don’t see anything.” Uustass shrugged as he stepped into the room. His hands remained at his sides, not reaching for the tempting gold.
    “Watch out!” Vareena rushed to her brother’s side. She placed herself defiantly between him and the two figures who stood beside the pallet. Suddenly the narrow cell seemed far too crowded.
    Two ghosts stared at her in surprise, one tall and broad, the other slighter. The shorter one stared at her from pale eyes that seemed to burn through to her soul, his mouth agape.
    As she watched, he faded in and out of her vision, one moment fully formed in this reality, the next heartbeat a pale outline of a human figure that distorted light.
    The taller and darker figure seemed a trifle more solid. He kept his hand on the other’s shoulder. They belonged together. Both wore magician-blue tunics and carried long staffs that had become as ghostly as they.
    Neither had been a ghost long.
    “Two of you?”
    “What!” Uustass whirled and faced the door. “Where?”
    “Over here.” Vareena pointed. “We lost one ghost only to add two more. Both young and healthy. I’ve never seen two ghosts at the same time before.”
    “Wonderful.” Sarcasm dripped from Uustass’ voice as he continued to scan the room. His eyes slid away from the two ghosts as if something blocked his mind from settling on that direction. “Now we’ve got to dip deeper into our dwindling stores to feed two of them. They’ll linger for years before they waste away.”
    “I’ll never be free of this place now,” Vareena moaned to herself.

CHAPTER 8
     
     
     
     
    “ L ook at her, Robb. She’s the most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen!” Marcus held his breath, almost afraid the woman with the crystalline aura would fade before his eyes, like a dragon slipping through the mist. The man with her seemed less substantial, as if he lingered half in the void—sort of like the dead man before he’d gasped his last and emerged from the void.
    “Didn’t you hear her, Marcus?” Robb asked angrily.
    Marcus yanked his concentration away from the slight beauty with blue eyes so vivid they reminded him of Brevelan—Senior Magician Jaylor’s witch wife. But this woman had blonde hair that kinked and curled in a bright cloud of silver and gold rather than Brevelan’s witch-red.
    She was a few years older than he was. Her maturity made her much more beautiful than any woman he could remember.
    The ghostly man with her, older by almost a decade he guessed, looked enough like her to be her brother rather than a lover. His protective stance with the knife when he first thrust open the door suggested a family relationship, too.
    “I wasn’t listening. She’s so very beautiful, she makes my heart ache. What did you say?” Something important was happening, and Marcus couldn’t concentrate, couldn’t think. He wanted to go drifting in the void forever with this woman.
    “She said that we are ghosts and we will linger as ghosts for a long, long time.” Robb’s fingers on Marcus’ shoulders squeezed painfully tight.
    “Ghosts! We can’t be ghosts. We’re alive. I see you and this room very clearly, I hear the wind and the rain outside, I feel pain where you are bruising my shoulder.”
    Robb removed his hand, shaking out some of the tension.
    Only then did Marcus realize his friend held one of the gold coins in his left hand, rubbing it absently, just as Marcus did with the coins he’d slipped into his pocket.
    “Those two are the ghosts,” Marcus continued. “They look like dragons, sort of here, sort of in the void.”
    “Something strange is going on here, Marcus. Something that will delay us a long time from completing our quest and returning to the Commune with the dragons.”
    “Maybe these people are kin to dragons. Maybe we can gather dragon magic from them,” Marcus suggested, his natural optimism replacing the tiny