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He was kissing my feet suddenly, and I backed hastily away, the room filling with Christian's most obnoxious laugh.
"I am not worthy of your thanks," Luke said, prostate on the ground.
I cringed, but tried to talk some reason into him. "You are, Luke. Of course you are. I'm proud of you. It sounds like you're doing a really good job, and it's a very selfless thing that you're doing to help my sister."
He turned his head until his cheek lay on the basement's concrete floor, a look of near bliss on his face. "Mistress is so kind. I live to please you, Mistress Jillian," he said.
I sent Caleb a wide-eyed, 'help me', kind of look. Luke's kind of adoration made my skin literally crawl, and I didn't know what the hell to do with it, especially since I owed the strange hunky sub so much for his unexpected help.
Caleb gave me his little shrug. That shrug said it all; Who knows? Who cares? Not me. Deal with it. It was Caleb in a nutshell.
And Christian was even less helpful, of course, just clutching his belly and laughing at me. If he'd been a few feet closer, I'd have kicked him.
"Get going, Luke," Caleb finally said, after an awkward pause. "You know how to contact me if you learn anything useful."
I breathed a sigh of relief when he finally made his embarrassingly adoring goodbyes.
Caleb seemed unaffected by the uncomfortable exchange, getting back to the point after Luke had gone. "We're as sure as we can be that Tianlong doesn't have Lynn. And we're nearly positive that the Chinese took her. That makes Drake our most likely suspect. He's due in town in five days. We need to have a plan for when he gets here. I say we kidnap him, torture him for information, and get this mess figured out, once and for all."
I processed the information while he paused for long moments.
Christian showed considerable restraint, being that he was a dragonslayer and we were talking about an enemy dragon. For all of a minute. "And then we slay his ass!"
I sent him a baffled look, opening my mouth to retort. Caleb beat me to it. "No. We keep him, until we have Lynn back. After that, whatever. Who cares? But we use him alive, as a hostage, until we get her back."
Christian just sighed, not a bit surprised. "A slayer's gotta try, yanno?"
I rolled my eyes. "It's easy to say we'll kidnap him. Harder to do it. We have a plan for that?"
Caleb smiled, his cold, creepy smile. "Yes. You owe Tianlong a date. It's time to deliver."
I groaned. I had been a tiny bit busy since I'd made that promise. I had completely forgotten the stupid thing. "It's not a date. I promised him a meeting."
He gave his little shrug. "You need to set it up, in six days, with the druids to act as intermediaries. I'm sure you can talk Dom into that, for your own safety and all. Drake won't want to come anywhere near that meeting, being that he has to know that you'll suspect he has your sister."
"This will hopefully tie up Tianlong and the druids for a few hours, leaving Drake to Christian and I. And since the druids clearly won't approve of kidnapping one of the few dragons that they aren't actively warring with, you need to get as many of them involved with that meeting as you can manage. Make it real official, real political, and real long-winded. Hell, work the jealousy angle with Dom. If he knows that Tianlong wants you to have his dragon babies, that mess could last for days. If we really luck out, the whole thing might dissolve into outright war. You just have to get your psycho ex mad enough. You seem to have a talent for that. The more time you give us to work, the better our chances are of snatching Drake."
Christian finally piped in, helpful as ever. "We'll call it, 'Operation: Baiting the Bear and Snatching the Dragon.'"
"We're not calling it that," I snapped back instantly.
I closed my eyes, rubbing my temples. Caleb's plans were usually solid, but this one already made me want to beat my own head against the wall. There was no question that I'd rather be in on the kidnapping part, as opposed to the whole meeting fiasco.
"Fine," I said finally, "I'll talk to Dom."
"Good. And while you're at it, get him to set up a meeting for us with their captured dragon."
My eyes snapped open. Dom had mentioned something about that...and then promptly distracted me. "Who is it?" I asked Caleb.
His mouth hardened. Touchy subject. "We don't know. We don't know anything about him, and we haven't been allowed to speak to him. They have him held in some sort of underground compound in the desert, but I haven't been able to get close enough to check it out. Dom won't tell us a thing. He wouldn't even discuss the prisoner with us, until he saw you again."
"Bastard thought we knew where you were," Christian piped in. It had been an unusually long period of silence for him. "He thought that we just weren't telling him." He sounded disgruntled, his English accent growing thicker, at the thought.
I had to smile just a touch at that. Everyone in this room knew that if they had known where I was, and I hadn't wanted them to tell Dom, there's no way in hell that they would have, so him getting defensive about it was just good comedy. And very typical Christian.
"I'll talk to him about that, too," I assured them.
"Make sure to stipulate that we all get to talk to the dragon," Caleb said, a hard glint in his eye.
