by Aaron Crash
Tessa didn’t move. “Maybe this is too much for me. Maybe I can’t do this. Those guys … Shit, it was Call of Duty: Spec Ops all over again. But more dragon-y.”
“I don’t know what you should do, Tessa, but I do know if you could grab me a Hot Pocket, I’d be forever in your debt.”
The barista laughed and rolled her eyes. “That I can do, I suppose.”
Steven relaxed and fell asleep again.
The smell of the pepperoni-stuffed instant pastry roused him, and there was Tessa, an angel with a bottle of water and food. Food!
He bolted down the Hot Pocket and drained the bottle in a single go. Tessa had parked the Mercedes in a dark corner of the parking lot, away from the other cars. Good. He dressed in new jeans and a T-shirt, then helped get Aria out of the back of the car. In her human form, she was light enough for Steven to carry, though even with the blanket, it was clear she was naked. Nothing they could do about that, however.
While Steven grabbed Aria, Tessa grabbed the Drokharis Grimoire.
No way were they going to carry Aria up the staircase, so they went to the elevator. Steven prayed they wouldn’t meet anyone inside, but they weren’t that lucky.
A middle-aged man and wife walked into the elevator at the same time they did. When the normal couple saw Steven—sooty, pale, smelling like a campfire—they frowned. Scowled, really.
Steven, Aria, and Tessa were going to the top floor while the couple punched the fifth-floor button. The doors closed, and they started upward.
The situation was cringey and terrible.
Steven, holding Aria in his arms, finally had to say something. “Friday night in Firestone, Colorado. Amiright?”
The wife harrumphed. The man frowned deeper.
Tessa came to the rescue. “My friend, she had a little too much to drink. Don’t worry, I’m here to take care of her.”
Anger flashed through Steven. Who were these people to judge him? “Yeah, me, Tessa, Aria, we’re a thing. It’s a menage-a-trois situation. Luckiest man alive, amiright?”
The couple didn’t say a word, but the woman punched the third-floor button and they got off early.
“Uh, we’ll take the stairs,” the man grumbled, shuffling out.
When they were gone, Tessa laughed nervously. “You’re bad.”
“I guess I am,” Steven said with a shrug. “But we gave them something to talk about at their next PTA meeting or whatever.”
The elevator dinged, and they went down the hall to the suite at the end. Back in the comfort of the spacious room, Steven could relax.
Aria was breathing, she was healing, she just needed more time to come around. Or at least Steven hoped that was the case. Could he take her to the hospital? She wasn’t human, and he didn’t know what the protocols were.
She looked so small and hurt in the big king bed.
In the living room, Steven finally had a chance to look at the leather-bound tome, but if it was written in another language, how was that going to help him?
He opened the cover, his eyes widened, and his world changed once again.
FOURTEEN
The words on the opening page were totally unfamiliar, slashes and jagged characters that reminded him of Klingon. As a good dork, he knew what the Star Trek language looked like. But as he sat there, stomach growling, throat dry, the words straightened, and he could read them. It was like some hidden part of his brain had been unlocked.
Right at the top of the page were three sets of words that seemed to have been added later: The Gift of a Book. The Magic of Ink. The Power of the Pen.
Underneath that, the book began in earnest.
It was the spell book of the Drokharis family, compiled by Stefan Drokharis and augmented from other texts.
Tessa sat next to him, looking over his shoulder. “Can you read that?” she asked, brow scrunched.
“Yeah, seems like.” His chest was tight. It was hard to breathe. If he didn’t have a connection to this family and this book, how could he understand the strange language? The Gift of a Book. It was a present for him, he knew it.
He read onward for several long moments until Tessa asked, “What does it say?”
“This guy, Stefan Drokharis, put this grimoire together based on a bunch of other books and scrolls dating back to the Babylonian Dynasty. The Clavis Salomonis. The Sefer Raziel Ha-Malakh Liber Razielis Archangeli. The Picatriz and the Liber Juatus. Plus, one called The Book of Abra-Melin the Mage. Shit, looks like Hammurabi himself contributed, and that was back in the day of cuneiform.”
“And I’m all out of clay tablets,” the barista quipped.
Steven raised an eyebrow at her.
She shrugged. “Yes, dropped out of high school but I didn’t stop learning. I dated an anthropology professor for a bit. She, uh, educated me in more ways than one.”
A quiver of lust ran through Steven at the idea, but then he was drawn back into the book. “Even back then, there were Dragonsouls in the world, but fewer, and they were less powerful. Keeping the secret was harder. It mentions something about the Others, or Outsiders, or the Exiled.”
“Which word is it?” Tessa asked.
Steven was surprised that he didn’t find the barista’s interruptions annoying. Normally, when he studied, he liked to be alone. This felt different. Tessa had a hunger to learn more about the strange world they’d discovered, and he found he wanted to feed her whatever tidbits he could.
“The translation is funky,” he replied. “The word is Zothoric. But yeah, it seems the Zothoric were powerful demons that could kill Dragonsouls, but they haven’t been seen on Earth since Hammurabi. So, that must’ve been like three thousand years ago. And then there’s talk about multiple worlds, other realities. Looks like this Stefan character was trying to learn how to open portals to them. But it says over and over that it’s forbidden magic.”
“Maybe that’s what killed Stefan Drokharis and wrecked his Aerie,” Tessa murmured. “Maybe he did open the door and something really nasty got out. Or maybe something from the ‘darkest timeline’ broke through.”
“Was that a Community reference?” Steven asked, grinning.
“Bingo.” She shot him with a finger gun.
“Cool, cool, cool.” Steven couldn’t believe how great Tessa was. He smiled and read more. “Not sure, but it looks like this Drokharis family was one of the original Dragonsoul clans on Earth. And Stefan was apparently one helluva sorcerer. He could teleport and create doorways here on this planet, in this dimension, from one continent to another, but he was looking for something. Something called the Scrolls of Shanos. Shanos, the Traveler, was some kind of uber Magician. Not sure if Shanos is part of the Zothoric or not, but he seems like one bad dude. Or not. Hard to tell.”
Steven leafed through pages while Tessa watched. Illustrations illuminated the text, sketches of dragons, swords, and people. One of them drew Steven’s attention. It was the drawing of a woman with a name carefully scrawled underneath: Persephone. Unlike the goddess from Greek mythology, this one wore modern clothes—a skirt, a blazer, pumps. The pencil sketch drew out her beauty and accented her long dark hair—hair not so different from Steven’s.
Was there a resemblance? Maybe.
Steven turned the page and his heart leapt to his throat. There, on a full-page spread, was the image of the gaming tree he’d been picturing, a perfect replica of the dragon-shaped skill tree. But this one had a more complete picture, the neck and the tail more filled out. Below that was a list of skills.
Transformatio (Head of the Dragon)
Partial Transformation
Homo Draconis
True Form (Dragonsoul)
Pugna (Tail of the Dragon)
DarkArmor
Exhalants (Left Wing of the Dragon)
Inferno
Veneficium (Right Wing of the Dragon)
Magica Defensio
Obviously, as he grew more adept at using the Animus, he could expand his skills. After tak
ing such a thrashing at the hands of the spec-op guys, he was very excited to see what DarkArmor, under the Pugna category, did. Pugna, as in pugnacious. Those must be combat abilities.
The Exhalants were easy to understand—that was the ability to breathe various deadly things. He recalled his vision that first night after Aria’s kiss; the man in the vision had told him about other things he would eventually exhale: lightning, acid, poison gas, ice. But those weren’t on the skill tree for now.
As for Veneficium? The word quickly shimmered and morphed in his head: Sorcery.
Magica Defensio sounded like shielding magic, which would be super useful in time, but he couldn’t even begin to fathom how he was supposed to cast spells.
Beneath the list of introductory skills, the book had instructions. It said that to harness more of his powers, he needed to understand the Magic of Ink and the Power of the Pen. Like what it had said at the beginning. He held the grimoire, which was the Gift of a Book. Maybe he needed to find a pen and ink? He turned the page. The minute the paper settled, the words on the page faded away. He was left staring at a blank page.
“What? Where did it go?” he stammered.
Tessa touched the blank paper. “I see it, too. No more words. Damn! And it was just getting good.”
Steven stood up to pace. He needed a shower and to sleep, but he wanted to make sure Aria was okay first. The book had answered some of his questions, but it had raised a hundred more. “Okay, so I must be a part of this Drokharis clan. Right? Why else would I be drawn to the book and to the tower? Besides, the woman in there, Persephone, she looks like me, I think.”
The barista sat on the couch with the book on her lap. She swept back pages until she found the sketch. “Yep. Definite family resemblance. Maybe she’s your real mom?”
Speaking of which ... Steven grabbed his phone and hit redial to call his adopted mother. Nothing—just a continuous ringing until the voicemail kicked in. His mom remained MIA, and now he was more worried than ever. What if she was hurt? What if whoever was after him had her? But there was nothing he could do for her, not at the moment, so he shoved the worry to the backburner of his thoughts and continued pacing.
He found himself clutching the pendant.
The burning inside of him was back and hurting like always. He wasn’t at full Animus, and yet he felt so full of power now that he had a little better understanding of how the mystical energy worked. But he had no real idea of what to do with the primal energy. Before, he’d been able to use instinct to change his shape, but this time it felt different. If only he had a teacher. “Okay, I have some Animus, but I’m not sure how to spend it on spells or exhalants. I could try True Form, though that feels kind of extreme. Not sure I can wrap my head around that yet.”
“We should wait until Aria wakes up,” Tessa said cautiously.
“Yeah. You’re right. I’ll shower … and pizza, we should order pizza, and lots of something to drink. Gatorade, an ocean of it.”
“I’ll get right on it while you shower. But before you go, can you show me some of the words?” the barista asked, gesturing to the book. “I want to learn to speak Dragon or at least read it. Maybe even write it. The script is so beautiful and strange.” Her fingers traced over the lines on the page. “Compelling.”
Steven remembered she liked calligraphy and sketching. He nodded and took a minute to point out the basic alphabet that he could somehow read. Tessa wrote down the jagged letters on Marriott stationary. She held up the paper, inspecting her handiwork. “My first spell book. Kinda cool that it’s so ghetto.”
“Ha, nothing ghetto about a Courtyard Marriott,” Steven replied with a small grin.
It was almost midnight, and Tessa somehow managed to find a pizza place that was willing to deliver. She ordered ten bottles of whatever sports drink they had, but it still didn’t seem like enough, so Steven had her order five more.
While they waited, Steven showered. He cranked the hot water up to full tilt and it still felt cool on his skin. He recalled how Aria’s fire hadn’t burned him. It had felt good. Awash in steam, Steven thought boiling water would feel even better, but he had to make do. Clean, he left the bathroom and stared at himself in the mirror. Cuts and scrapes covered him, but he was healing them at an accelerated rate.
He thought about trying to channel Animus into his new DarkArmor ability, which seemed within reach, but what if he could cast a Magica Defensio spell instead? What even was that? He needed to ask Aria about where he should focus his Animus, and why the words on the pages had disappeared. Maybe it was a normal Dragonsoul thing.
But what had the book said? The power of the pen and the magic of ink? He had two more flames on the map to explore. Could one have a pen and the other ink? It seemed as likely as anything else.
He left the bathroom, which is when Aria called to him. “Steven, I need you. Please, help me.”
Fear spiked through his belly. If anything happened to Aria, he’d be even more lost than he already was.
۞۞۞
Edgar Vale walked the smoke-blackened, corpse-littered rooftop of the ruined Drokharis Aerie. The St. Vrain River trickled behind him, and he could smell the wet stink of the bank. That and cinnamon, courtesy of that foreign bitch. There was also a lingering scent of orange blossoms from the Dragonling. He hated the smell more than anything. He kicked at a charbroiled hand and freed one of the magic swords. He’d come to collect them.
He’d known the weakling would come here, along with the pathetic Escort he was collecting. It was late Friday night. Rhaegen Mulk would arrive at midnight, Sunday, for his wedding, which meant Edgar had about forty-eight hours to finish the job. He’d had high hopes the mercenaries could handle the kid. He’d given them swords touched by magic, but he probably should’ve come himself with the Slayer Blade. It rested on his back, sheathed, warm against his spine.
Edgar collected the three swords and wrapped them up in the crispy Kevlar vest of one of the dead assholes. He’d underestimated his enemy again and again, but next time, he would strike with everything at his disposal. He already had spies in place, checking out the possible locations of other Drokharis Aeries. If the Dragonling showed up there, he wouldn’t escape. Not again.
The three doors set in marble animals seemed to vibrate.
While Edgar didn’t know the entire story, he did know that Stefan Drokharis had been messing with shit he shouldn’t. There were things in the universe that would love to devour all life on Earth; Rhaegen Mulk had mentioned them every now and again. He said sorcery was best left to the ancients. Modern Dragonsouls had the power of technology, well understood and controllable. While Mulk did cast the occasional spell, he focused his energy on his exhalants and his combat skills. He had Magicians to do the spell work, like enchanting swords.
But Stefan Drokharis and his entire family hadn’t been slaughtered by otherworldly gods, and they hadn’t been killed because of his studies into forbidden magic. No, Rhaegen Mulk had other reasons for wiping out the Ronin Dragonsoul clan.
Edgar counted the bodies, both on the rooftop as well as on the ground. Four were missing. He would find them. He would encourage them to tell the truth and admit their guilt. They had broken their vows to kill the Dragonling and his small Escort, and there was a price they would pay for such betrayal. When a human swore an oath of fealty to a Dragonsoul Prime, it was an ironclad agreement. For money. For power. For life.
They’d run, but Edgar would find them. And kill them. Slowly. Painfully.
First, though, the Dragonling.
Edgar drove away from the ruined Aerie and soon was on I-25, speeding south. On the way back to Mulk’s Aerie at the top of the Wells Fargo building in Denver, Edgar knew what he had to do.
When he walked into the penthouse, Mouse was there, like always, drinking wine and dreading the return of her husband. The lights were off. Candlelight gleamed off every bit of polished wood and the slick metal of the furnishings. Denver’s lights sparkled as
an echo to the candlelight.
“I want you to help me finish the ritual,” Edgar said flatly. “I can’t wait anymore. I need all the power I can get. And I need it right now.”
Mouse laughed. “Why yes, I’d love to help you kill yourself.” She was wearing a black dress with no shoes, and her hair was mussed. Petite, blonde, and smiling, she was as gorgeous and sarcastic as ever.
“I won’t die. But I will assume my True Form,” he said.
More cutting laughter from the beautiful woman. “No, your True Form is you as you are right now—a rather tall primate. And a stinky one, no less. My True Form is that of a dragon. Please don’t confuse the two.”
“Semantics,” he snapped. “The important part for you to understand is that I want the dragon form. I want to become a full Dragonskin, and I want to do it in the next few hours.”
“Twenty-four,” Mouse mused. “If we start the ritual now, it will take at least twenty-four hours if not more. And it’s gonna hurt, you bastard. It’s going to make you want to die.” She smiled as though enjoying the thought immensely.
“Mulk will do worse to me if I don’t kill this Steven Whipp,” Edgar said.
“He will,” Mouse agreed with a nod. “But that might be better. You don’t know what you’re asking. You don’t know the agony.”
Edgar smiled. “I wasn’t born special, bitch. But if there’s one thing I know, it’s pain. I’ve learned about that all my life, and I’ve learned to like it. So, you’re going to get the brazier, we’re gonna go to the rooftop, and you’re gonna make it hurt so good.”
Mouse paled, closed her eyes, and drained her glass. “For that, I’m going to need a whole lot more wine.”
FIFTEEN
Aria couldn’t wake up, couldn’t escape the pain in her chest, where she’d taken not one but two rocket-propelled grenades. She wished she had spellcasting skills, but her father had said as the Escort of a Prime, she wouldn’t need it. He’d tolerated her combat training but just barely. She’d insisted the world was a dangerous place, and that had struck a chord in him. He’d agreed.
