“You’ll fight better if you’re relaxed,” Anyan said, chuckling evilly. His hands were at the waistband of my jeans, his clever fingers undoing my zipper.

Make-out! Make-out! Make-out! my libido chanted, doing a happy-libido dance at the sound of my fly opening.

And then it nearly keeled over when someone pounded at the door.

“Jane? Anyan? You decent?” came Blondie’s voice, but she was already opening the door to our suite’s room.

“Jesus, get a room,” she said. “Oh wait, you do have a room. Sorry.”

Laughing at her own joke, she came and plunked down next to us in the bed, putting her arm around me.

Anyan did my pants back up, although the Original eyed him reproachfully.

“You don’t have to do that,” she purred, waggling her eyebrows at me. “Sex is good for relaxing after battle.”

“What did you find out, Cyntaf?” Anyan said, pulling me closer to him and away from Blondie. She sighed, wiggling closer anyway.

“The problem with coming to town and landing on a building, then tearing it up, all while shaped as a dragon, is that you rarely get a chance to read signs.”

With that, Blondie pulled a flier out of her back pocket, handing it to me. I unfolded it, unable to stop the laughter that bubbled to my lips.

“The relics are on a tour,” I told Anyan, passing him the flier. “Like a rock band, only bones. A real, honest-to-gods tour.”

Anyan’s wide mouth pursed as he read the fine print.

“They’re arriving in York this week,” he said, moving to stand. “We’ve got to go.”

“Now?” I asked. I’d had hankerings for another date. A Paris date.

My only answer was their retreating figures. That’s when I decided this mission officially sucked. After all, I’d come to Paris, and I’d barely had one iota of romance.

Not to mention any stinky cheese.

CHAPTER TWENTY

Apparently, the Alfar were rather pissed at me, so we had to take the Eurostar back to London. It was an amazingly short ride, and there was actually very little tunnel. I thought we’d be underground forever, and was prepared to deal with much claustrophobia. Instead, I barely even noticed when we went in, let alone when we came out.

There were seven of us on the ride home, so we had two tables to ourselves. Blondie, Anyan, and I sat at one table, while Gog, Magog, Lyman, and Griffin sat at the other

Griffin and Lyman were our devil’s bargain. We got to work without a full contingent of rebels and Alfar shadowing our every move, but we had to take both second-in-commands. Meanwhile the rebel leader, Jack, and the Alfar Leader, Luke, were going back to England to meet with the human prime minister. As the territory with the most established connection to its human counterparts, the Great Island was leading the clean-up operation necessitated by Morrigan’s attack on Notre Dame.

Blondie was snoozing, waking up occasionally to stare at her phone. I was happily eating the stinky cheese and baguette that Anyan had bought for me at the train station as a consolation prize. Anyan was watching Griffin and Lyman speculatively, while Griffin and Lyman watched each other with distaste.

We were a regular dysfunctional Brady Bunch, but with more magic and fewer bell-bottoms.

“What’s the plan?” I asked, after I’d finally had enough and pushed the wedge of brie away. Then I started in on the bunch of grapes we’d also bought.

Anyan turned back to me, cadging his own grape before responding.

“We’ll be met at the train station with our luggage, and then get on a train to York. And hopefully we’ll hear from Hiral soon.”

“I gotta say, he’s an annoying little shit, but he’s good.”

Anyan nodded. “The best. At both annoyance and espionage.”

That’s why we were missing one foul-smelling little gwyllion. Hiral had managed to find where Morrigan’s entourage was watching her tear up Paris a safe distance away. They’d apparently looked as horrified as we had. She was full of surprises, that dragon, even for the supernaturals she worked with.

Hiral had made himself useful and invisible, hitching a ride with Morrigan’s entourage when they’d left with the dragon’s own departure. Now we were waiting to see what he discovered as we made our way to York, in the far north of England.

“So we wait for Hiral to tell us more about what Morrigan’s up to, and we try to nab the bones from the Minster?” The Minster was York’s great cathedral, where the relics were appearing that week.

“Yep. We’ll need to do it as quietly as we can, after what happened in Paris. No more news crews.”

“No,” I said. “No more news crews.”

“Blondie, can I use your phone?” I asked, leaning over the table to nudge the Original.

She pulled it from her pocket and punched in the code to unlock it, before handing it over.

“Thanks,” I told her. She only grunted and closed her eyes again in reply.

“I’m going to do some research on the Minster,” I told Anyan, as explanation for why I wanted Blondie’s iPhone instead of my own crappy, but sturdy, cell. I stared at the screen for a bit before looking at Anyan helplessly. “Um, if you’ll help me…”

Anyan smiled at me, his grey eyes warm with affection. Granted, I think he thought it was cute I was so incompetent with technology, but it was still sweet. He then showed me how to work the touchpad of the phone, pulling up Safari and then Googling what I told him to. First I made him look up the Minster for me, where we found a link for the tour, itself. It even had its own Facebook page.

Centuries dead bones have a Facebook page, and I don’t, I marveled. Then I thought about the way we found housing, and congratulated myself roundly.

The bones we were chasing after were purported, at least according to the humans, to be the bones of Saint Nicodemus. I wondered if they’d always really been the White’s bones, or if the Alfar had done a switch. If so, I wondered what they’d done with the “real” saint’s bones. Something tells me they wouldn’t go through too many pains to make sure they were safe.

Anyan kept the phone, going where I asked him to, or punching new things into Google. Eventually, I started making him pursue completely random shit. For while he did so, I marveled at his hands, imagining them running all over my body with the same surety with which he worked the phone.

“You’re drooling, Jane,” said Blondie, her husky, sleep-roughened voice cutting through my reverie.

“Hmm?” I asked, completely distracted. Blondie sighed, mumbling something about selkies before raising her voice so I could hear it over the quiet clatter of the train.

“You’re drooling. You two need some alone time before you combust.”

I made a face, partially to punctuate the irony of the Original who was a one-woman cock-blocking machine encouraging us to have some “alone time.”

“Oh really?” I said, but my sarcasm was lost on Blondie. So I switched to the other issue I had with my current naked barghest obsession.

“I shouldn’t be thinking about anything besides our mission,” I said, guiltily.

“Nonsense,” Blondie said, before yawning so ferociously her jaw popped. “The only thing that goes better with battles than blood is battles and sex. Battles and bloody sex.”

“Ew,” was all I could come up with in response to that piece of “wisdom.”

“Hey, indoor plumbing’s a recent luxury,” the Original told me, at which point I remembered she actually had the invention of the toilet inked on her skin as a magic-video-tattoo.

“It’s true,” Anyan rumbled, his big hand finding my knee under the table. He worked his fingers into the joints in a mini-massage that made my whole leg relax. “Sex has gotten a lot cleaner. It used to be way grittier.”

“More real,” Blondie disagreed, eyes shining with memories.

“Grittier,” Anyan insisted, obviously not caught up as fondly in memories of post-battle-sexytimes-past as Blondie was.

“I rarely like the word ‘grit’ unless it’s preceded by ‘cheese,’ and accompanied by some sort of barbequed meat,” I said, throwing that out there in case anyone cared. No one did.

“And my point is,” Blondie continued, “that you shouldn’t feel bad about wanting to feel alive at times like these. Or wanting to enjoy your body.”

“It could, after all, be blown to bits,” was my wry aside.

“Exactly! We could all die tomorrow.” Blondie’s tone was almost happy, her eyes still focused inward as if remembering all of her glorious moments as a warrior.

I wanted to tell her that such things were easy for her to say. She was, after all, the most truly immortal being I’d ever met. Even Alfar’s bodies eventually wore out. Yes, it took millennium. But they wore out. Blondie, however, had been kicking around the earth since the dawn of man. I don’t think she thought much about death or mortality, except as an interesting and noble, if entirely foreign concept… like I might think of flying. Or going on a diet.