Dragon Knight (The Collegium Book 3) Read Free

centuries. I don’t want to be the one to reveal her to the Collegium, and any magic I bring from her, you can’t test or trust since you lack magic, so you’d have to ask one of the senior mages to study it.”
    It was a conundrum. One she’d considered a hundred different ways. But there was no wriggle room. No way for her to protect the secret of Morag’s existence and yet convince Lewis to trust her, Gina, just a little.
    Silence. Stalemate.
    Gina watched his hands resting idly along the sides of his thighs. With a start, she realized that he was allowing her the full twenty minutes of the interview she’d claimed by virtue of Uncle Asey, but Lewis wasn’t about to change his mind. He wouldn’t accept Morag’s offer. He would refuse to learn the Deeper Path.
    “It won’t take many lessons,” she said. “Attaining clarity of sight is the hard part, and you’ve done that. Meeting with Morag, you’d only have to be away from the Collegium maybe four or five times.”
    “The guardians would insist on accompanying me. That would reveal your secret dragon.” He pointed out the flaws in her reasoning, but not as if they mattered. He sounded distracted, probably pondering some problem unrelated to her.
    She was losing him…had never really had him. “I thought of that. You’d need a cover story, a personal reason to leave the Collegium, and that would be me.”
    He blinked and focused on her. “You?”
    “I’ll pretend to be your girlfriend. I have a cottage on Cape Cod. There’s a portal about three miles from my home. You can use the portal here in New York to travel to my place, and from there, Morag can translocate us. That’s how I travel to her.”
    “People would notice we weren’t at your cottage.” Suddenly he was giving her suggestion, and her, his complete attention.
    It was unnerving, that intensity. She could only imagine that trainee guardians had fainted in front of him when he’d been their commander.
    She, however, was a dragon knight. She stiffened her spine. “My home has been in the family for two centuries. Each generation has reinforced the privacy wards. People underestimate house witchery and that works to our advantage. Believe me, no one will be able to tell whether we’re in the house or what we’re doing.”
    “Sidhe Hotels. Your family has the Avalon Inn in Wiltshire.”
    “Yes.” She knew where his line of questioning led. “Through the years my family has used the same magics on what is now my home, so privacy is assured.”
    The Avalon Inn was a small, discreet service her house witch hotelier family offered to a chosen few. In reality, the inn didn’t exist. Its stated physical address was a cow field in the Wiltshire countryside, not all that far from Stonehenge. But it was a cow field saturated with privacy wards, look-away spells and see-what-you-will enchantments. Selected guests could register as staying at the non-existent hotel and everyone would believe the address, but the guests wouldn’t be there. They could be anywhere in the world.
    “Have you ever registered at Avalon?” she asked.
    Lewis shook his head. “Someone at the Collegium has always known where I was.”
    It gave her an itchy feeling to imagine her comings and goings always monitored. She was a computer hacker to the core: a rebel. “Even with your secret missions?”
    “There are no black ops at the Collegium.” As much give in that statement as hitting a concrete slab from twenty stories up.
    “I was thinking more about your personal life,” she countered.
    No response, although he continued to stare at her. Something was going on in his brain.
    She didn’t dare check her watch, although she suspected they’d gone over her allotted twenty minutes.
    “Four or five trips to see your dragon, you said?”
    Her breath caught. She almost choked. “Yes.” He was going to do the unexpected and agree!
    “I’ll offer you a bargain.”
    “Pardon?” She was presenting him with a