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Informationen zum Autor Since escaping from university with a pair of degrees in theoretical physics, Kevin Sands has worked as a researcher, a business consultant, a teacher, and a professional poker player. He is the author of Children of the Fox and the bestselling Blackthorn Key series. He lives in Ontario, Canada. Klappentext "In the sequel to Children of the Fox, Callan and friends must face the consequences of resurrecting their dying friend, Lachlan".-- Leseprobe Chapter 1 Lachlan was dying. We could hear it in the way he was breathing. Each gasp, ragged and agonizing, broke at the end, a slow hhhhhh-uh. We might have explained it away as pain. Except now, as we carried him through the brush, Lachlan paused between each breath, taking in no air at all. Every one of us knew what that meant. I suppose it shouldn’t have come as a surprise. We’d watched our friend get run through the gut by a burning sword. The blade had been wielded by the Lady in Red, a fire elemental—a construct made of living flame, bound through magic in the shape of a woman. Lachlan had been burned all over his back, too. When we’d killed the enchanted elemental, it had exploded in a blazing burst. It was a miracle Lachlan was still alive at all. But now he was fading, and fast. What we needed, then, was a new miracle. We needed to find something to save him. The Old Man watched from inside my head. I could almost see him, lounging with his back to one of the trees, filling his pipe as I trudged past. What are the odds of that? he said. Not good. You think I’m a fool, don’t you? I said silently. The Old Man sounded amused. If you have to ask that question, then you already know the answer. I sighed. Because he wasn’t wrong. He rarely was. It was one of the things I’d always found so infuriating. The Old Man—he’d never told me his real name; I’d just called him “Old Man” from the start, and he’d seemed to like that—had raised me. He’d rescued me from the streets when I was six years old and taught me his trade: how to manipulate people. I’d learned to read their thoughts, their feelings, their hidden intentions, from the way they moved, from the words they said—or the words they didn’t. The Old Man had turned me into a younger version of him: a gaffer, a charmer, a silvertongue—or a con man, a swindler, and a dirty rotten cheat, depending on whom you asked. The Old Man was gone now. He’d abandoned me half a year ago, after one too many fights between us, when I finally told him I wouldn’t run any more gaffs that might snaffle decent people. But he wouldn’t leave my head. Good thing, too, boy, he said, puffing on his pipe. You should have at least one person in this skull of yours talking sense. I don’t need you to remind me, I grumbled. Trying to save Lachlan, with his injuries so severe; it was ridiculous. And yet. I still led this band of misfit thieves into the trees, away from the smoking volcano Bolcanathair. Deep inside it, in the ancient Dragon Temple, we’d defeated Mr. Solomon, a powerful Weaver of magic, and his elemental. Now, bent over, my back aching, I followed a faintly glowing trail of red that cut through the grass underfoot. The trail wasn’t easy to see. Would have been impossible, actually, if it wasn’t for the artifact that had attached itself to my left eye socket. The Eye—the Dragon’s Eye, to give it the full name the Weavers called it—was capable of seeing enchantments and the magical energy that powered them: life. That was what I followed now. The glowing red trail was Lachlan’s life energy, draining out as he died. It was leading us somewhere, to something, though none of us knew what. On its own, the trail would have been no trouble to spot. The problem was that everything living, plant or animal, had a glow through the Eye, each with its own special colo...
