Patterns in the Dark (Dragon Blood Book 4) Read Online Free PDF Page A

said.
    Sardelle’s snort wasn’t quite in agreement.
    Two seagulls squawked and leaped from perches high in the rocks above the cave. Cas frowned in that direction. Anything might have startled them, but now that she was out in the open, she once again had that feeling of being watched.
    “Everything all right, Ahn?” Zirkander asked.
    “I have a bad feeling about this island and these people,” she said.
    “Will it make you feel better to learn that you’re not the only one?”
    “It’ll make me feel better to leave.”
    “Let’s check on that, then.”
    Zirkander didn’t have to go far. Tolemek and Moe had come closer to the entrance, to look at the drawing in the sunlight slanting inside. Cas twitched when she realized the women had disappeared. The rope had been pulled up, so they must have gone across the bridge or up one of the staircases. It bothered her that she hadn’t noticed—and that there was apparently more than one way in and out of that cave. She should be watching in both directions.
    “Not a very good drawing, is it?” Moe asked, his spectacles on his nose again as he studied Tolemek’s handiwork.
    Tolemek stepped up to his shoulder, frowning down at him. Moe was a couple of inches shorter than he and had a smaller frame than Zirkander too. “I was drawing it from the back seat of a flier while an Iskandian pilot with the nickname Raptor bobbed and weaved through the clouds like a drunken crow in a storm.”
    Cas squinted at him. “It’s not my fault there’s so much turbulence in the air off the eastern coast of Cofahre. Duck and the colonel were having just as much trouble keeping a steady course.”
    Moe looked up at Tolemek, who still cut a grim figure, even if he had lost the spiked bracers and other pirate regalia he had favored when Cas first met him. He might have a handsome face, but his bare, muscular arms, battle scars, and the ropes of black hair falling about his shoulders made him look more like a warrior—or a particularly menacing hoodlum—than a scientist. “Ah, my apologies. I thought you might have purchased it in some bazaar.”
    “No,” Tolemek said coolly. He pointed at the flowers. “That one is purple, that one is blue, and that one’s red.”
    “Yes, I guessed that was the case. That’s a marsoothimum .”
    Sardelle nodded—she had already identified that one for him.
    “That one is a… oh, I don’t know the proper scientific term for it, but the natives call them blood bellies, because they’re carnivorous and eat flies and other insects. The blue one is a keshialys ? I think that’s the word. They’re all over the mountain meadows above the tree line on Tsongirs Island.”
    “Tsongirs Island?” Tolemek asked softly, his gaze flicking toward Cas. His face was still, but his dark eyes brimmed with tamped down emotion. “Is that where all of these flowers can be found?”
    “No, the marsoothimums are farther south. And the blood bellies, where did I see those?” Moe dug out his journal again and flipped through the pages.
    Cas kept her focus toward the rocks and the approach to the cave, but she glanced toward his journal and saw surprisingly good drawings, everything from maps to seeds, cones, and flowers to reproductions of hieroglyphics and rock carvings. Small but tidy script accompanied most of the images.
    “Ah, here’s my sketch of the area.” Moe tilted the book toward the sunlight, revealing a map of equatorial islands not far south of Cofahre. He produced a stubby charcoal stick. “Saw the blood bellies there, the keshialys there, and the marsoothimums are all through here,” he said, touching different islands as he spoke. He drew lightly on the page, shading in areas. “Possible intersection points… Rat Island and the Bolos Keys, but none of those volcanoes has the altitude necessary for the alpine keshialys. I should know. I would have climbed them if they did.”
    “Volcanoes,” Zirkander said. “I was hoping we’d