“I must go for a time,” Zav said.
“Go?” I asked.
“Back to my home.” He looked at Greemaw. “Family matters.”
I thought of Moonleaf’s words of how Zav’s family was struggling to maintain control.
“Does Dob’s presence here have something to do with it?” I asked, even though he was looking at Greemaw, not me, and probably didn’t want me to butt in.
Zav looked sharply at me. “It is possible he was sent to distract me. Or to vanquish me here where there would be no witnesses.”
Ugh, I thought to Sindari. I knew I wasn’t crazy to worry about what would happen if I was riding on his back when that other dragon showed up.
I am surprised that you did not insist on coming here in your automobile.
It was faster this way.
Zav looked at the map, then faced me. “I will take you back to your city. When I return, we will find Dobsaurin with this information Greemaw has provided us.”
Even though he was far more polite with Greemaw than with me, he didn’t thank her. Maybe please and thank you weren’t in the dragon vocabulary. You’d think a race with a language that favored words twenty characters long would have room to squeeze in pleasantries.
“How long will you be gone?” I asked.
“I don’t know.”
If he was gone as long as he’d disappeared last time—weeks—I doubted I would have the patience to wait for his help with the panther brothers. And if I had to deal with them by myself, this detour and research for him would have been a waste of time.
No, I corrected. That wasn’t true. If the silver dragon was kidnapping people, I needed to know everything about him, because as Willard had pointed out, it would fall to me to deal with him. Which I might also have to do on my own if Zav didn’t return in time. A bleak thought.
15
Someone had broken into my apartment again.
I stood in the hallway, staring at the door slightly ajar, all four of the deadbolts I’d coerced the landlord into letting me install unlocked. A three-year-old with a couple of hairpins could have thwarted the cheap doorknob lock but not the deadbolts. They weren’t even visible from the outside.
Sighing, I summoned Sindari. Whoever had done this had probably long since gone, but there was a chance he or she was still inside. Or they.
I didn’t sense anyone magical, but mundane humans could ransack my apartment as effectively as an irritated panther shifter.
There is nobody inside, Sindari informed me after he materialized. Do you wish me to go in first in case the thief left booby traps?
I don’t know. Are you more in the mood to be dangled upside down from the ceiling than I am?
With my speed and agility, I am unlikely to be dangled at all.
In that case, you should definitely go in first. I pulled out Chopper.
Sindari pushed the door open further and padded inside.
A click sounded from across the living room. Still in the hallway, I dodged to the left, whipping my sword across defensively. Something tinked off the edge of the blade and clattered against the floorboard before hitting the thin gray carpet. A tiny silver dart.
Warily, I picked it up. A gunky blue residue smeared the tip. Poison?
“Clearly, I need a taller tiger,” I said.
My height is perfect for seeing over the tall grass on the Tangled Tundra on Del’noth.
“Helpful.”
Very much so in hunting there, yes. Sindari padded farther into the room, avoiding the lamps, books, and clothes strewn across the floor. I’d just gotten everything cleaned up from the last break-in.
“It may be time to move again.”
Perhaps you should not use your real name when you lease an apartment.
“You have to. They do credit checks before renting you a place. Gone are the good old days when you could lie about everything and pay in cash.”
Living in the human world requires an unsettling lack of privacy.
“Tell me about it.” I itched to go inside and try to figure out if the intruders had only come to ransack the place or if they’d taken anything. My giant wine jug of change was still sitting on the bookcase beside the door. Nobody ever stole that. Either it was too heavy for the average intruder to lift, or nobody wanted to deal with rolling coins to get the bank to take them.
I see the slender tripwire leading from the door across the ceiling and to this shelving unit. Sindari looked up at the ceiling, then put his paw next to my signed hardback of Elric of Melniboné. By some miracle, the Moorcock books were still on the shelf. Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings hadn’t fared as well. A heavy vase I’d picked up at a thrift store was the bookend on that shelf and the object of Sindari’s attention.
Something akin to a miniature crossbow has been affixed in here. It looks like that was the only dart.
I held it up and sniffed the tip, but my olfactory senses weren’t good enough to identify poisonous substances more exotic than arsenic and cyanide. “I may need to visit Zoltan again.”
Sindari checked the kitchen, small dining area, and bedroom and bathroom. I eyed the deadbolts. They hadn’t been forced open, at least not with a clumsy tool that would have damaged them. When I squinted across the apartment, I saw that the sliding glass door to the balcony was still closed and the recently added wood board that kept it from being forced open was in place.
When Sindari’s perusal resulted in no other ominous clicks, I walked inside and picked up a box of sandwich baggies on the floor. Almost everything from the kitchen drawers was on the floor. All of the cabinets had been rummaged through and most of the plates and cups knocked off the shelves. Because this had happened before, I kept plasticware instead of glassware now. Nothing classy and breakable for assassins with enemies.
Whoever did this appears to have been looking for something specific, Sindari said. Everything was searched, but little seems to be missing.
“You’ve inventoried my whole apartment already? You are impressive.” Despite the joke, I was inclined to agree with him. The television I never used was on the stand, and my laptop was still plugged in and sitting on the little desk in the living room.
I have been here numerous times, and I have the keenly observant eye of an apex predator.
After slipping the dart into a plastic baggie, wrapping it up, and using masking tape to bundle it so the needle wouldn’t poke out, I walked toward the shelf with the crossbow. As I passed my laptop, I noticed the poster Zav had given me was rolled in a different way than I’d left it when I tossed it on the desk. Before, it had been rolled in a tight tube. Now, both ends furled toward each other, with a small bone dagger thrust through the paper and into the wood.
I gripped my chin and stared at the dagger for a moment, then nudged the furls open enough to see where the blade had gone into the poster. Zav’s stern, haughty face.
“Even though that’s roughly what I had planned for this poster, I feel affronted that someone sneaked in here and defiled it.”
I tugged out the dagger. Whoever had thrust it in there hadn’t been weak. The design was smooth and simple, and there weren’t any markings. For some reason, I thought of the dark elves and the big statue on the pedestal that had been made of bones and fossils.
Val? Your bathroom door has a dagger in it.
“Another one? Was there a two-for-one sale at the local hunting-supply store?”
Sindari, whom I’d never taken shopping, did not respond to that.
“Is it made from bone?” I headed to the compact bathroom, where he stood halfway inside, his neck craned to peer around the back of the door.
It appears so, yes.
“It’s not stabbing a picture of a shape-shifted dragon, is it?”
Do you keep such a thing in your bathroom?
“Oh, sure. They’re all the rage now.”
This one is stabbing your underwear, and there’s a note. Sindari scooted out, so I could step inside.
<
br /> “My underwear? That’s more disturbing than a poster.”
Indeed. I wouldn’t have suspected you to wear anything black and lacy.
“Every now and then, a girl likes to dress to impress.” I grimaced at the bone dagger that impaled a black bra that hadn’t seen action for a while. The intruder would have had to dig it out from deep in my underwear drawer. “It goes through the left cup. Is that supposed to be where my heart would be? It’s a little low.”
Dark elf hearts are on the left side, lower than human hearts.
“Ah. So this is exactly as creepy as I think it is.”
I pulled out the dagger and grabbed the note. It was written on a single piece of paper—army stationery from a pad I’d kept after Willard had thrown it at me for saying something snarky.
“Huh. It’s in English.”
You were expecting Dwarven?
“Dark elf, actually.” I perused the handful of dark brown lines of text—I’d wager the ink was blood—then read them aloud for Sindari. “Do not believe you have defeated us or that we did not notice that you stole something of value. Return it, or we will slay everyone dear to you.”
Did you steal something from the dark elves?
“Just the artifact they supposedly stole from Zav’s people. You wouldn’t think they’d be so uptight about something that wasn’t theirs to start with.” I gazed toward the living room and the poster of Zav. The message had to be for me, but they must not have forgiven him for his part in ruining their ceremony and destroying part of their tunnel system. “Oh, and that notebook. The one I gave to Zoltan for translation. You think that’s what this was about?”
A dark elf would have been able to sense if the magical dragon artifact had been here before even entering the building. If the notebook is only pages and a binding without an element of magic, he or she would have had to search manually for it.
“While leaving a few bone daggers stabbed into things along the way?”
Perhaps the dark elf was frustrated by the search. You left the notebook with Zoltan, did you not?
Yeah.
And Zoltan had even warned me someone might come looking for it. Ugh. I would have to warn him.
“I’ll let Willard know in the morning that the dark elves are still active. They might try to search her office too.” I scowled. “It would be nice if they could have waited a few weeks. This week is already reserved for dragons and shifters. I don’t have room in my daily planner for dark elves.”
Perhaps if you left a note and a calendar pinned to your door outside, your enemies could schedule their assaults and break-ins for more convenient times.
“I think my sense of humor is rubbing off on you.”
My phone buzzed from my nightstand, waking me up. It was pitch dark in my apartment, and I felt like I’d just fallen asleep. After fumbling for the phone and checking the time, I realized I had just fallen asleep.
“What is it, Nin?” I answered without turning on the light.
“Val! I got a call from the commissary yard where I park my truck. Somebody I do not know said it is on fire.”
“Shit.” I was going to kill those shifters, whether I had evidence that they’d committed these crimes or not.
“Will you meet me there?”
“Yeah. Send me the address.” I threw the covers aside, climbed out of bed, and grabbed my clothes. “And don’t go in without me. Whoever started it could still be there.”
“If they are there,” Nin said, her voice as hard and determined as I’d heard it, “I will shoot them.”
“Good, but wait until I’m there to do it. If you kill someone and get arrested, you’ll spend the rest of your life in jail, and your family will never get over here.”
She hesitated. “What if you kill someone and get arrested?”
“It won’t be the first time.” The address of the storage yard popped up on my phone. “I’ll be there in twenty minutes. Don’t go in without me,” I repeated.
“Thank you, Val. I will be there.” Nin hung up.
She hadn’t confirmed that she wouldn’t go in without me.
Cursing, I dressed as fast as I could, shoving my feet into my boots and grabbing my weapons. My gaze snagged on the military flak vest hanging in my closet, the supposedly bulletproof Kevlar still riddled with holes from magical projectiles and claws. I’d worn it consistently for a while, but as I’d found out during three encounters in a row, the sturdy material didn’t do much against magic.
Still, getting shot earlier in the day almost made me grab it anyway. No, I’d ask Nin to make me something magical if we both got through this. She’d mentioned something about branching out into armor, and with the way my month was going, I had a feeling I’d need some. Badly.
16
The address Nin gave me was on the southern end of town, near the Old Rainier Brewery. That meant it was a lot closer to her apartment than mine. Even with little traffic, it took me more than twenty minutes to get there from Ballard, and I worried that was enough time for Nin to have gotten in trouble.
Who had called her, anyway? Someone she didn’t know, she’d said. The police? The fire department? Someone laying a trap for her?
Plumes of smoke floated from behind the obscured security fencing of the compound, hazing the city lights as they rose to mingle with the cloud cover. Surprisingly, there weren’t any police or fire trucks at the front gate when I pulled up. How could this not have been reported? It wasn’t a residential area, and everything was closed for the night, but still. The smoke had to be visible from I-5.
As I parked my Jeep outside the gate and hopped out, the tingle of magic washed over my awareness. I couldn’t tell if whatever artifact or charm I sensed was keeping the outside world from knowing about the fire, but it was a possibility. I also sensed the aura of a magical being—several of them.
Nin’s pale blue Volkswagen Beetle was also parked out front, but she wasn’t inside. Damn it. She hadn’t waited.
Where are you? I texted her as I approached the front gate. It was ajar, not enough for a vehicle to drive in, but enough for a person. The lock had been melted off.
Val? a text message came in, but it wasn’t Nin. It was Dimitri.
Unless you’re in trouble, I can’t talk now. Nin’s food truck is on fire.
With Fezzik in hand and my ears and magical senses alert, I stepped inside. The crackling of fire came from beyond a large building, a commercial kitchen and bakery, the lit sign over the door promised. Twenty food trucks were parked in parallel spaces across from it and a few more were in the back where the smoke was coming from.
I opted for following the fence instead of going straight down the wide center aisle. One of the magical beings I sensed was close to the fire, maybe crouching atop the fence and looking down. The others—I picked out two more beings—were on the far side of the compound. Nin would have gone straight to her beleaguered truck.
When I stepped into the shadows between the commissary and the fence, I paused to summon Sindari.
Can you take me to Nin? I asked as soon as he materialized.
With only one-quarter gnomish blood, her magical aura was very faint. I wouldn’t be able to pick her up until I was standing next to her, but Sindari could smell her.
Yes. Are we going into battle?
My grip tightened on Fezzik. I hope so.
Excellent. Sindari continued along the fence, padding silently through the shadows. Is Nin in danger?
She may be. She didn’t wait for me outside like I told her to.
And she hadn’t answered my text. What if that shifter or whoever was looking down on the facility had captured her?
Oddly, Dimitri hadn’t responded to my text either. I didn’t want to have a conversation while we were sneaking up on an enemy, but the lack of a prompt reply was puzzling. Maybe that magic I felt was a spell that isolated this fenced compound from the rest of the world. I’d messaged him from outside and then stepped inside.
> As I trailed Sindari, the crackling of fire was the only thing I heard. Before entering the gate, I’d been able to hear the freeway traffic a few blocks away and a horn from a train passing through the city. In here, we had quiet isolation.
You sense the magic around this place, right? I asked silently.
Yes. An insulating bubble covering the same area as the fence.
An insulating bubble that would keep anyone from seeing or hearing what’s going on in here? And keep calls from getting through?
That is a possibility. I smell kerosene.
The light of fire bathed the fence ahead and reflected orange on Sindari’s silver-furred head. We were almost to the burning truck.
A gun fired from that direction. From atop the fence, someone returned fire.
Sindari sprang up to the fence and ran along the top. I rushed forward, using the building as cover until I saw Nin’s food truck.
The roof and back side were burning despite the material not looking like it should be flammable. What had been white with cheerful signage was now charred. The back door was open, and someone crouched there with a gun in one hand and a hose in the other. Nin.
Charred boxes had been thrown out onto the pavement, bullets spilled all around them. Because they were ignitable?
A squawk came from atop the fence, the figure obscured by the smoke, followed by a feline roar. Sindari had reached whoever had been firing at Nin.
As I rushed forward, I called her name so she would hear me coming and wouldn’t turn her gun on me.
“Val. Here, take this.” Nin handed me the gun and claimed the hose in both hands, going back to what she must have been doing before her attacker had fired.
Flames burned inside the kitchen, and she sprayed them down, even as she lifted her hand against the heat roiling out of the truck.
“Let me trade you.” I thrust the gun back at her and took the hose. “I’ve got protection from fire. But be careful out here. Sindari is after the shooter, but there are two more people on the other side of the compound.”
Battle Bond: An Urban Fantasy Dragon Series (Death Before Dragons Book 2) Page 14
