Dragon Hunted

by Haley Ryan

  Dragon Hunted

  The Dragon of 23rd Street

  Haley Ryan

  Page Nine Press

  Copyright © 2020 by Haley Ryan

  All rights reserved.

  Published by: Page Nine Press

  Cover Design, Layout, & Formatting by: Page Nine Media

  This is an original work of fiction. All characters, names, places, and incidents are products of the creative imagination of the author or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons (living or dead), businesses, institutions, places, or events is entirely coincidental. No part of this book may be used, reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any manner without the written consent of the author, excepting short quotations used for the purposes of review or commentary about the work.

  https://www.authorhaleyryan.com

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Thank you for reading

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Dedication

  For Jeff. Because you don’t run away screaming every time I have a shiny new idea.

  I guess this is your fault, too.

  One

  “You can’t shelve books in your underwear,” I said firmly, “and that’s final.”

  A mutinous gargoyle glare greeted my pronouncement.

  “It is not underwear, as I have explained. Gargoyles do not wear underwear. This is drapery.”

  It took everything I had not to let my gaze drop to what really amounted to a sheet draped around the gray-skinned gargoyle’s hips. Though frankly, I had no desire to know what the guy did or didn’t wear underneath that sheet.

  “I don’t care what it’s called,” I repeated, for what had to be the millionth time since Hugh had come to live with me. “You’re going to have to put on some clothes when you’re in the bookstore.”

  Hugh drew himself up, his hunched shoulders straightening in the extremity of his offense. “I am an Idrian gargoyle. This is the clothing I have worn for nearly eight hundred years, and none of my previous tenants have complained. Therefore I will not be changing my completely suitable garments to appease the sensibilities of a few Earth-dwelling humans.”

  I opened my mouth to explain that it wasn’t so much about people’s sensibilities as it was about the potential for public indecency, and therefore some concessions would have to be made, but he didn’t give me the opportunity.

  “And I will most especially not change it for the Earth-dweller who was responsible for the destruction of my ancient and beautiful home.”

  Oh, and there was the real problem.

  Me. Kira Everleigh. Dragon shifter, bookstore keeper, and occasional destroyer of castles in the long-abandoned world of Idria.

  About four months ago, I’d crossed through a magical gateway into Idria—the world where all the magical races now populating Earth had originated. These days Idria was abandoned and decayed, home only to monsters, plus the occasional traitor hiding in an imposing stone fortress while plotting to overthrow the fae king with an army of shadow beasts.

  With a small group of friends, I’d helped destroy the beasts and the fortress, along with Llyr—mastermind of the plot and erstwhile heir to the fae throne.

  In the process, though, I’d destroyed Hugh’s home. Somehow the gargoyle had survived the fall of Idria and remained loyal to his castle for the fifty long years since everyone else abandoned it. When the castle finally crumbled, he’d been left in need of a new place to call home.

  And once the Fae Court had finished questioning him over his part in Llyr’s plots, he’d demanded restitution.

  From me.

  Which was how I ended up with an eight-hundred-year-old gargoyle living on my front porch, terrorizing everyone who dared to walk down our side of Twenty-third Street.

  “I didn’t pull down your castle, Hugh.”

  “My name is not Hugh.” He said it with a shudder, as though even uttering the syllable somehow polluted his mouth.

  “Well, you won’t give me any other name, and I can’t just go around saying ‘Hey, you in the sheet’ now, can I?”

  When I first started calling him Hugh, I’d hoped it would provoke him into giving his real name. Not his true name—those were kept secret—but the name he preferred to be called.

  It hadn’t worked. So I continued to call him Hugh, while somewhat patiently trying to manage the havoc he introduced into my life on a near-daily basis.

  To be fair, I’m pretty sure he was trying to be helpful. In Idria, he’d managed an entire castle, and had announced his intentions to manage my business almost as soon as he’d arrived at my house-turned-bookstore in Oklahoma City.

  But grasping the idea of buying and selling books was a fair ways from actually dealing with customers, and that was a concept Hugh simply hadn’t mastered.

  It had taken a full month to convince him to stop sitting by the front walk in his stone form and simply changing every time he saw customers coming. Humans were accustomed to Idrians by now—we’d been living among them for fifty years after all—but anyone would be freaked out when a statue with gaping jaws, flaring horns, clawed feet, and a serpentine tail suddenly came to life and asked whether he could help them find anything while gradually shifting into a gray-skinned man wearing nothing but a sheet.

  To my surprise, traffic had increased since his arrival, as though people were actually hoping to be scared half out of their minds. But Ever’s Afters catered mostly to older ladies who were voracious readers of romance, and I couldn’t afford for them to be too scared to walk through the front door.

  Or too scandalized by the sight of my would-be store manager in his “drapery.”

  “Look,” I said patiently, “I’ll make you a deal. You stay behind the counter today, and I’ll pull up some men’s clothing websites on the computer for you to look at. You can choose whatever you want to wear, and I’ll buy it for you, just as long as it isn’t in constant and perpetual danger of falling off. And when you’re not working in the store, you can continue to wear your drapery, and I won’t complain.”

  I wasn’t a total jerk—I had no problem respecting his traditional clothing choice when he wasn’t dealing with customers, provided it stayed on.

  Hugh lapsed into muttering balefully and retreated behind the counter, where he was instantly greeted with purring enthusiasm by Chicken, my aunt’s Sphynx cat. I would say this for Hugh—he couldn’t be all bad, because both Chicken and my giant adopted dog, Waffles, adored him.

  And, when he thought I wasn’t looking, he loved them back. I’d seen him letting Chicken ride around the shop on his shoulders more than once, and he was constantly sneaking food to Waffles while complaining that I starved the poor creature. I didn’t—the enormous dog was likely half Dane, and therefore naturally lean—but Hugh wouldn’t be happy until the brindle beast was round as a Bassett.

  True to my word, I pulled up a few websites on the computer, and while Hugh browsed them—wearing an expression of extreme distaste—I retreated thankfully to the back of the store to sort through the stacks of acquisitions for the week.

  It wasn’t my favorite task, but I needed something to distract myself from the frustrating lack of progress in all of my searching—for my Aunt Morgan, for whoever had betrayed me to the fae, and for the true iden
tity of the black dragon who had saved my life.

  Aunt Morgan is also a dragon shifter. Under her human name, Morgan Everleigh, she ran the bookstore Ever’s Afters, but under her dragon name, Morghaine, she was also known as a mercenary. One of her jobs had gotten her entangled with the traitor fae prince, Llyr, which had led to her disappearance last fall. When I’d finally caught up with her, in Idria, she hadn’t seemed at all happy to see me. Hadn’t seemed to want to be rescued.

  I knew part of why she’d been disappointed. At the time we found her, I’d been in my dragon form, which she’d spent my whole life teaching me to hide. Not only did other dragons want me dead, my bronze scales were apparently known to be impenetrable, which made me a hot commodity on the market for dragon-skin armor. In defiance of my aunt’s orders to hide what I am, I’d finally learned to shift in order to save her, but she’d flown away without a word.

  I was still grappling with that abandonment. Still hoping she’d had a reason and would return to explain it.

  But it had been nearly four months now. I was reasonably certain she was somewhere on Earth—she just hadn’t chosen to come home. I had to believe that she was still trying to protect me somehow, but every day it got harder to hold onto that hope. Harder to believe that someday she would just show up and tell me how much she loved me, and everything would go back to the way it used to be.

  As I sat on the floor and began to sort books into stacks by genre, I thought about the other disappearance that troubled me—Misty, the pixie who used to live on the street behind the store.

  I’d known her forever, and she’d once been my aunt’s closest friend. She took care of my animals while I was gone, and I’d believed her to be the one person besides my aunt that I could trust.

  But I’d gained enough evidence while in Idria to suggest that she’d actually been a spy—that she’d betrayed me and my aunt to the fae. I’d intended to confront her as soon as I got home, but she was already gone. Chicken and Waffles had obviously been well taken care of, but Misty was nowhere to be found, and even now, almost four months later, there was no sign of her.

  It didn’t bode well for her innocence, but I’d almost lost hope of ever learning the truth.

  I’d almost lost hope on other fronts as well. As I organized a stack of shiny paranormal romance paperbacks, I forced myself not to stare at the shirtless cover models and wonder about the guy they reminded me of.

  The one who promised we were partners.

  The one who said he’d always find me.

  The one I hadn’t heard from since I last saw him, standing under the street lights in Highlands Ranch with snowflakes in his hair.

  Nope, nope, nope. Pathetic Kira was not going to make an appearance today. I was Mature Adult Kira, and I was going to sort these books until they knew they’d been sorted, and then I was going to buy the gargoyle some clothes.

  And then I would call for some barbecue take-out and mope over my brisket while I tried to figure out what to do next.

  In reality, there was only one of my big life questions I had much hope of making progress on—the identity of the black dragon who’d saved my life. After some internet searches about missing dragons turned up exactly nothing, I’d realized the Idrian community probably had their own resources and turned to the most resourceful guy I knew.

  Faris is an earth elemental, owner of The Portal (a popular Idrian bar), and my aunt’s former boyfriend. I say former, but it wasn’t like they’d actually broken up—they hadn’t had a chance. As far as I knew, they hadn’t talked since my aunt disappeared. But after what we’d seen during our little field trip to Idria, Faris seemed to have even more suspicions than I did, though he never discussed them in front of me.

  Weirdly enough, Faris and I had bonded over our losses. And while I tried not to bother him too often, it had been at least five days since I’d been to The Portal to ask him whether he had any news.

  Tonight then. After I closed up shop, I would go see Faris and hope—for information, for news, for anything to ease my mounting worries.

  And not just my worries over Aunt Morgan. As I began to pick up the newly organized stacks and ready them for shelving, I couldn’t quite push away the uncomfortable reality of my own financial situation.

  I’d discovered only after she disappeared that my aunt had financed the bookstore by doing highly-paid mercenary work for the Idrian community. As much as I loved Ever’s Afters, the store in no way paid for itself. Once I’d recovered from my adventure in Idria, I’d braved the mysteries of our bookkeeping and realized that I could probably keep the place afloat until the end of the year. After that? Unless I got another job, I would have no way to pay bills. No money to eat.

  I had to do something, and fast. But what?

  After we closed the store, I left Hugh watching one of those British miniseries with period costumes—which he seemed to find hilarious—and walked south through Mesta Park until I could catch a streetcar to Bricktown. In early March, the weather could be anything from tornadoes to snow, so I was grateful not to have to walk all the way.

  We’d brought Aunt Morgan’s Subaru back from where it had been abandoned at Lake Overholser, but it remained parked behind the store awaiting her return, because I had yet to get my driver’s license.

  I told myself there had never been anywhere to drive, so why would I need one? Still, my aunt had never even suggested it was a possibility. Had she really just been trying to keep me safe? Or had she been trying to keep me dependent?

  When I got to my stop, I hopped off the bright pink streetcar and jogged across the brick-paved street to where The Portal was tucked between a bar and a Mexican restaurant, looking to most eyes like any other club. But if you were strictly human, it would appear to be dark, even on a busy Saturday night, and the sign in the window would read “Closed For Renovation.”

  The Portal was a place where Idrians could go just to be themselves. To let their glamour go and relax. There was drinking, music, and dancing, just like in a human club, but the only ID you needed was the ability to see past the front door. All Idrians were welcome, but they had to leave their disagreements at the door—fights would get you in serious trouble.

  As I stepped inside, I recalled my first look at the place and reflected on how much had changed.

  Not The Portal itself—it was still incredibly loud, with fae music blasting through the sound system and a diverse mix of people laughing, talking, drinking, or making some sort of attempt at dancing. Trolls, goblins, fae, and elementals mingled freely, along with shapeshifters, dryads, and a few I didn’t recognize.

  And on the outside, I hadn’t changed much either. I was still dressed entirely wrong for the club scene—a hoodie and jeans, with no makeup and my copper-brown hair in a simple ponytail—while everyone else seemed to have made an extra effort to stand out.

  And everyone in the room was still bigger than me. By a lot. Most Idrians were taller than humans, while I was shorter than average, so it wouldn’t have been that surprising if they’d overlooked me entirely.

  That had once been the case, but no longer.

  The moment the door closed behind me, I caught the slightly luminous amber eyes of Seamus, the tall, shaggy-haired shapeshifter behind the bar. He immediately set down the glass he was polishing to call out, “Kira’s here!”

  I was greeted by a cheer, as the regulars crowded around me to bump shoulders—carefully—and offer to buy me a drink. I declined—fae potions just weren’t my idea of fun—but I couldn’t stop the smile that plastered itself across my face.

  Even if their enthusiastic greeting had more to do with Faris than with me, it was always a relief to remember that there were people here who knew my name and were happy to see me.

  As hard as my aunt had tried to keep me invisible, I couldn’t bring myself to regret having stepped out of the shadows. I hadn’t known how lonely I was until I remembered how it felt to have friends.

  “Hey Seamus, is Faris
here?”

  “Where else would he be?” The shifter grinned as he handed me a ginger ale. “He’s in one of the private rooms with some important guests, but I’ll let him know you’re here. How’s things at the store?”

  I shrugged, not wanting him to guess how worried I really was. Ever since we’d come back from Idria, Faris had been almost overwhelmingly inclined to fuss, and I really didn’t want Seamus letting his boss know how badly the bookstore was sinking. Faris would only try to bail me out, and I was determined to make it on my own.

  “That good, huh?” Seamus might come across as casual, but in a place like The Portal, he wouldn’t have lasted long without a pretty sharp sense of people. “You need anything? The gargoyle giving you any trouble?”

  “Nah.” I grinned. “Hugh has developed a taste for Arthurian epics and architectural journals, but he’s actually pretty good at keeping the shop going during the day. As long as I can keep him from frightening the customers.”

  “Want me to ask Faris to have a word with him?”

  I fixed the other shapeshifter with a stern glare. “You say one word about this to Mr. Fussy McFusserson, and I’ll tell everyone about our little side deal.”

  Seamus actually turned a little red under his neatly-trimmed beard. “Yeah, yeah, fine. I won’t say anything. You, uh… got anything new for me?”

  I pulled a paperback out of my hoodie pocket and slid it across the counter, front cover down. “Someone brought this in yesterday.”

  He picked it up and peeked at it, flashing me a quick smile before tucking it under the counter. “Is it a good one?”