by Roxie Spears
Bane’s Dragon: Exile
Book 3
Roxie Spears
Contents
Prologue
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
Epilogue
© 2019 Romance Books 4 U
All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews.
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places, events and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
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Prologue
It seemed as though sirens were a regular thing. Quafin’s population had dropped to five thousand people, its citizens fleeing away to other parts of the country, possibly even other countries. There had never been a city so dangerous, and there was nothing anyone could do about it. Obscure news channels and ambitious conspiracy theorists all over America weighed in on these strange, violent occurrences, often citing supernatural causes and being called crazy for it. Mainstream news channels, however, blamed it on terrorists and crazy white arsonists, and almost no one questioned it. But nevertheless, the citizens of Quafin knew all too well that something much more menacing, much more evil was lurking around, casting a shadow over the city and its people.
These past couple of months had been horrifying for the average seaside citizen. For people who had never experienced war, this was the closest thing to it. Five explosions had taken place last month, reaping the souls of thirty-five people. And the worst part was that no one wanted to intervene. It seemed as though the city of Quafin had broken off the Earth, floating away in space like a tiny, negligible rock catching fire.
As Kristoff stood by the window, he breathed in the ashes of a lost city. He wrinkled his nose and ran his fingers through his hair; he felt good. He wore a silk suit that gave off a subtle gleam under overcast skies. His shoes were freshly polished. He thrived on anarchy. The windowsill felt cool; satisfying to the touch. His fingertips tingled. Kristoff was a man of no regrets, and he planned on keeping it that way. All the billowing smoke in the world didn’t faze him, and neither did all those conspiracy theorists. What drove him absolutely mad wasn’t the fact that they were right, but that they were relentless. If anything, it was like they couldn’t wait to get their hands on the largest megaphone in the world and share their theories with the universe. These people wanted the world to know about the Makinens and the war, they wanted the world to know about them… and to stop them.
Kristoff’s hands turned into loose fists just thinking about it. His urge to abolish peaked for a brief moment before he approached a state of neutrality again.
Suddenly he narrowed his eyes when he spotted someone standing at the gates. The guards let him in, and it was only then did he realize it was the police commissioner. “Not again,” he grunted, tilting his chin up towards the sky. With his hands pinned on his waist Kristoff opened the door, gawking at the big bellied man as he made his way up the driveway. It was a long walk to the door, greenery to his right and left side, a grey brick road leading up to the mansion.
“Morning,” the man said, his voice faded in the distance.
“Maybe you should start making appointments, officer, after all you know I’m a busy man.”
By that time officer Demetri had reached the top of the hill. He stood with his fists clenched, trying to mask the fact that he was struggling to catch his breath. His big belly inflated and deflated constantly, until Kristoff invited him in. “We need to talk.”
“What about?” Kristoff ran a hand over a fresh blond buzz cut. He proceeded to pace the room, his fingers clasped behind his back.
“I’ve been here too many times to count. I’m pretty sure you know what I’m here for.”
“You said it yourself, Demetri. To me it looks like you’ve overstayed your welcome,” Kristoff said, straightening himself.
“You’ve waged war on the entire town. People are dying. What did they ever do to you?”
Kristoff tossed his head back and let out a silent laugh. Water droplets seemed to have precipitated on the windows suddenly, signifying an impending hail storm. Light rain was a rarity in Quafin.
“We don’t want the National Guard coming in, Kristoff.”
With that he threw his head back and let out an audible snicker. Officer Demetri tilted his head to the side and closed his eyes, like he was giving up. “I don’t know if you’ve noticed, Demetri, but the Makinens run this city now. We don’t need to take your orders, and the police will do what we want, or else.”
“That a threat?” he asked, stepping up to him. The two men stared at each other, although one was significantly less threatening. “Because you know I don’t appreciate that.”
“You don’t seem to appreciate a lot of things, such as the fact that you’re still here at all.” Kristoff spun around and pulled his suit jacket together. “We could have you deported any time, you know, sent you flying straight across the border.”
“Being in this country is my right!” he said, almost hysterically. “But in any case-”
Kristoff had already decided. By now, he had better aim than ever. The fire billowing from his throat didn’t touch the furniture. It didn’t crawl up the walls or sting the curtains. When Demetri’s body first caught fire, his first instinct was to run outside, drop to the floor and start rolling around like a tortured animal. Desperate groans escaped his throat, ones that would go unheard or at least, unanswered. Kristoff stood by the door watching him and, realizing it would be rather hazardous to torture the big bellied officer any longer, blasted him again.
His body had blackened. He was still now, lying on his back, unrecognizable. Kristoff pursed his lips and stepped back into the house. Two housemaids had already snuck downstairs, their foreheads wrinkled. Their faces full of distress, they mumbled something to each other than raised their eyes to Kristoff.
“Get rid of him,” he said, cocking his head towards the door. They hesitated for a moment, then headed out.
“What happened?” Edward, his second-in-command, appeared at the top of the stairs. “I heard yelling and-”
Kristoff lit a cigarette. He took one long drag and let it play between his fingers. He kicked an invisible rock. “They should know their place… and now they do,” he said. “The next time a commissioner comes in here, he should do as he was told.”
“They must know better than to break our word.”
“Obviously, they don’t. Exhibit A,” Kristoff pointed to Demitri’s stiff corpse, which was now being carried by the two women. It was quite the peculiar sight; two round aproned women hauling the corpse of a commissioner across his backyard and into the woods, burying him next to a bunch of other victims.
Officer Demetri wasn
’t the first man he’d killed out there. Kristoff usually got a lot of visitors on his property, most of which knew better than to nag, but others, he thought, didn’t quite know their limits. They asked for favors, even begged him to stop sometimes.
As he stared out the window, he noticed that the maids’ noses were wrinkled and their eyebrows were furrowed, like they were cringing, being forced to do a job they never thought they would do. Something vile and unspeakable. Kristoff gawked at them, standing by the door with his hands clasped behind his back, rocking on his tiptoes sometimes, and sometimes sighing. The breeze brought with it a smokey smell, its origin unknown. Kristoff shrugged indifferently, watching the women dig up a hole using a shovel, which they had produced on the way into the woods, and began to bury Demetri.
Funny, he thought with his lips pursed. How people can perish in the blink of an eye. One moment you’re a living, breathing thing, then the next you’re… nothing. Like a ball of clay; inanimate and emotionless.
By the time his pondering stopped, the women were done burying the body. They dusted themselves off and appeared to be taking a moment to catch their breaths. They couldn’t see that Kristoff was watching them, but they knew all too well what he was capable of. Wiping their tears they marched back, not picking their eyes off the gravel.
“We’re getting stronger, more and more powerful,” Edward said, standing up straight, a smile manifesting on his face. He rolled up his sleeves and turned his face away from the window, trying to unsee something terrible, to erase it from his memory. Kristoff walked back and sat with his back to the window, too, smiling to himself like a madman.
He was hungry for power. Ever since the Makinens took over, he had been dreaming about nothing, thinking about nothing but a virtual throne. He was the type that busied himself with all sorts of things, from meaningless sex, to fierce love, to vicious tennis games. But lately all of that changed. He made a lot of money. He hired people. He single-handedly controlled the city, or at least, that was his dream. He had always been ambitious, perhaps a bit too ambitious for his own sake.
That was what his father said. “You’re a crazy man, Kristoff, but you’re my son. I love you as you are, but just know that your ways will get the best of you.”
Every day he thought about his words. They were all too real, but he didn’t listen to anyone. He was blinded. There was a dead man -several dead men- buried in his backyard, and it made him feel nothing.
Kristoff had turned into a monster.
Chapter 1
“We’re still getting poor return,” Alexander, the dock owner, said.
“That’s very true,” Gerald replied, nodding slowly. He heaved another box of fish, weighed it and shook his head in disappointment. “This batch weighs even less.”
“I don’t get it!” Alexander, a tall, broad shouldered man said, throwing his hands into the air. “I put the dock near the stream, I get poor return. I put it downstream, I get even poorer return! Tell me, Gerald, am I cursed?”
Gerald just stared at him. He had grown tired of his daily groaning and infinite complaining, so he just shook his head again. “I don’t get it,” he muttered, pretending to be preoccupied with the lake. “Sometimes you just run out of luck.”
“I never had any luck to begin with!” he stomped his foot against the wooden floor boards. Gerald watched the rolling clouds. It had been a year since he disappeared, and it wasn’t necessarily the best year of his life. But he met kind people, lots of them. Before he moved to the small fishing town of West Haven, Gerald wasn’t even aware that kindness like that existed in the world. His upbringing had deemed him hopeless, cold in the face of potential good. He met people who smiled often on a Monday morning, who didn’t mutter or curse under their breaths. He met simple people, men who didn’t care to sleep on ostrich feather pillows and women who gave compliments. Even though Gerald barely earned a living working on a fishing dock in a town five times smaller than Quafin, he was still somewhat happy.
“You know what we can do?” he said, setting the box of fish gently on the floor. “We can go for a beer after work, get your mind off things. What do you say?”
“Then you’ll have to hear me whine about fishing docks for four hours!” the man said.
Oddly enough, Gerald didn’t mind that. Normally he had a short temper, but living in West Haven made him mellow.
“Think I should move my men up to the Berger Lake, you know, the one near my hunting camps?”
“We can talk about it more when I see you,” Gerald said, giving him a pat on the back. Alexander continued to complain while Gerald weighed the boxes. Eventually his boss’s grunts faded into the background, turning into white noise. Usually he just listened to him rumble, nodding occasionally, shaking his head often. He wasn’t really a talkative guy, but he liked to listen. In fact everyone in West Haven liked to listen. It was only Alexander who rambled and complained about his life tirelessly.
Gerald loved the weather in this town. The air was pure by the lakes. Whenever he encountered smoke, a chill ran up his spine. Quafin had given him more horrid memories than he could count, and in some unusual way, he was glad that he left. He had missed everyone -there was no doubt about that- but he found a freedom in living in a place where no one knew him. He loved feeling like a stranger, and with time he almost got addicted to that feeling, almost like it gave him life. When he first arrived a year ago, the first thing he did was walk around the street during rush hour. He felt no danger. He walked amongst cars and got yelled at like he had no preconception of traffic rules. His arms swung by his side; he was free.
Then, on that same day, he walked to the coastline and watched the sunset. For once, there was no smog in the sky. Clouds rolled over head, instead, eventually making way for rain. Gerald remembered sticking his tongue out and smiling to himself. He had only parted ways with his family a few days ago, but the sea was a form of consolation he couldn’t deny.
“Alright, well, I’ll see ya later,” Alexander said, patting Gerald heavily on the shoulder and strolling past. He breathed a sigh of relief. For the past twenty minutes he’d been nodding and weighing boxes, not even knowing what he was agreeing to. Alexander was a generous man, but he was far from easy.
As Gerald hauled and heaved, he saw Robert in the corner of his eye. He was a fisherman, a pretty handsome one at that. “Hey,” he said, stopping there with his fishing rod over his shoulder.
“Hey,” Gerald replied, hauling one more box and sighing in disappointment.
“I caught a big one today,” Robert said, smiling from ear to ear.
“Oh, yeah? Well, guess what?”
“We caught even less fish than last month, I know.” He paused for a moment, scanning around the dock. Then he hunched over like an elderly man prepared for the conspiracy of a lifetime. “You know what I think? I think they’re putting something in the water.”
“Who?” Gerald asked, suddenly interested.
“The government.”
Gerald’s interest waned. The truth was he had no interest in Robert’s never ending conspiracy theories. He did find them entertaining, though. “Why would the government poison our waters, Bob?” he asked, regretting it straight after. Robert straightened himself and lifted one leg up on the fish box.
“Well, for starters, they want us to think it’s climate change. Then they’ll try to get us to invest in those projects, what do you call ‘em? Initiatives!”
Gerald usually knew when to stop listening, and that was it. Just like Alexander’s endless strain of complaints, Bob’s outrageous claims, too, seemed to turn into white noise.
“And then they take all our fucking money!”
“Well, I don’t know about that.” He was finally done weighing the boxes. “Listen, I’m gonna clock out soon, so I’ll see you tomorrow, alright?”
“Alright.”
Gerald quickly changed out of a fishy uniform and rode the bus to his favorite diner. Usually he walked, but today wa
s just one of those days. He wanted to spoil himself with the comfort of transportation rather than having to walk everywhere. When he thought about life before moving to West Haven, he felt his stomach churn. It was all so different, almost alien to him now. Gerald had maids and butlers and everything you wouldn’t find in the twenty-first century. This, he thought, this was real life. And those were real people. Here he was surrounded by greenery, too, but it didn’t feel isolating, not even a little bit. If anything, the trees encompassed him wherever he went. They didn’t threaten him. And he wasn’t at all concerned about dragons jumping out at him from behind the shrubs. The canopies let in light, lots of it. Nothing about West Haven was threatening.
Saying goodbye to family, though, was the hardest thing in the world. He still remembered the look on his mother’s face, the way her eyes dulled and became wet when she saw him all packed. He remembered dropping all his suitcases and running into her arms, relishing in the warmth of a mother, a feeling he would never experience again. His body shuddered at the thought. Family crossed his mind every day, but what he got out of it usually was agony. He was lonely here, no doubt, but it was for the best. Every day he had to remind himself that it was for the best.
As the bus glided down the road, Gerald smiled. The glass window was cold, sending his skin blooming with goosebumps. His thumbs chased each other. He put his headphones on and listened to the same playlist of five songs, his eyes lighting up like he was listening to them for the first time. He drove scarcely and rode the bus only sometimes, marveling in small beautiful things, shifting his focus to the abundance of greenery and simple life.
