Black City Dragon

by Richard A. Knaak

  “It burns . . . Master N-Nicholas.”

  I couldn’t let him suffer. You know what I want . . .

  Of course . . . I could feel his satisfaction. I promise not to burn him . . .

  I’ll do it.

  He chuckled. Very well. . .

  Bracing myself, I leaned close to Fetch.

  “Y-Ye best not touch me,” he warned.

  “I won’t.”

  Breath . . .

  I didn’t need the dragon’s coaxing. I took a deep breath, then exhaled.

  The chill of winter turned my breath into a thick cloud that draped over Fetch from muzzle to tail. I clamped my mouth shut for fear of burning him.

  The sinister ice shroud melted immediately. Fetch leaped to his feet and trotted a few steps away from me.

  “That was a bit of a scorcher there, Master Nicholas, though I’m not complaining about being free, mind ye?”

  Dismissing both the dragon’s breath and his eyes, I stood up. “What happened?”

  Fetch shook his coat free of any remaining pieces of ice. “I followed the trail. Realized the bimbo had turned the corner. Ran low to evade an attack—and then it got damned cold.”

  “Did you see him? Was it a pale-looking man in a dark coat?”

  “Aye.” Fetch bared his teeth. “Looked human. Didn’t smell like one, though.”

  “I know what you mean.” I looked around, then thought of something. “Get in the Packard and warm up. I’ll be right back.”

  “As ye say, Master Nicholas . . . be careful.”

  How sweet. . . the dragon interjected.

  Quiet. Leaving Fetch, I headed back to the warehouse, in part because I couldn’t leave the place unlocked. I’d convinced the owner to give me a key, which I’d promised to return when we met at the diner. It wasn’t that he’d seen me as so trustworthy; a little bit of the magic of the Gate had allowed me to influence him. The effect would last only long enough for me to finish the task; then, he would immediately forget he’d ever even called me.

  When I’d entered earlier, I’d done so knowing I was hunting. For that, I’d used the dragon’s eyes and left most of the lights off to lull the Wyld into a false sense of security. This time, though, I switched on the lights. I had one short task left . . . or rather, one curious matter to investigate.

  I hadn’t had a chance to see what Lon—or maybe Her Lady—had thought so important to bring me. It would mean trouble, of that I was certain. Still, I’d learned a long time ago not to avoid such things.

  I got to the spot, only to see nothing. I knew that wasn’t right. I’d let it drop in a pretty empty spot. There was no way it could’ve crawled off . . . at least, I hoped.

  Then, I saw it. Not on the wall, but pinned to a crate with a nail someone had pulled out of the same container. Lon had evidently returned after Fetch and I’d gone after our pasty-faced friend.

  I stared, suddenly thinking I recognized it. Inside me, I felt a tension that I knew was the dragon’s. Yeah, he recognized it, too. We shared a moment of disgust and dismay as it verified other things we’d run across over the past couple months.

  It was a small clasp shaped like a stylized creature. A mythic one. A dragon.

  A dragon with a canine maw from which sprouted several tongues. Until recently, I hadn’t seen its like in centuries, but I could never forget it. It was called a Dacian Draco. It had served as the ensign of the troops of an ancient land that had been swallowed up by the Roman Empire long before I was mere tribune who would someday be called, by those who didn’t know better, Saint George.

  It was also the symbol of the man who had, even more than Diocles—or Diocletian, as he had been known when he’d been emperor—been responsible for my death and all that had followed.

  “Galerius . . .” Even whispered, his name sent chills through me.

  And then another chill immediately overwhelmed me, one not from fear for myself, but for someone else who had their own unique tie to him.

  Claryce . . .

  CHAPTER 2

  After a quick stop to settle with my “client,” I drove from the south side—where the warehouse had been located—to the bookstore near Old Town over which Claryce now lived. The sleek maroon Wills with the black top, which Delke Industries had given her in return for acting as executor of their owner’s estate, sat by the bookshop over which she lived. The board of directors had bent over backward to get everything tidied up quickly after William Delke’s “death.” I’d little doubt that some of them had been aware of his true identity—that of Oberon, exiled king of Feirie—but with him gone I’d had nothing to fear. Oberon wouldn’t have left anyone around him at Delke who could become a potential threat. In fact, some of the board had even retired immediately after and left for parts unknown.

  Parking the Packard across the street, I settled down in the driver’s seat while Fetch spread out over the back ones. I could’ve used the dragon’s power to make things warmer, but I’d endured far colder times and hadn’t wanted to ask anything more of him. Each time I had to use him risked my control. It was bad enough I needed his eyes.

  I must’ve been more exhausted than I realized. Even though in general I needed little sleep—often going for days without—I drifted off without realizing it.

  And so the dream—nightmare—began again.

  I was astride my horse. Once more clad in the armor of a Roman tribune and with my spear poised, I urged my mount across a winding valley that had little in common with the actual landscape of lost Silene. At that moment, though, I didn’t care. All I knew was that it was urgent to reach my destination. The dragon had the princess. The dragon had Cleolinda.

  A monstrous roar reverberated throughout the land. The hills transformed into shadowy buildings vaguely resembling Chicago. I tried to ignore them, only concerned with saving her. Yet the buildings began rising up in front of me, forcing me to pull hard on the reins and direct the horse to a better path.

  A second roar shook everything. The tall buildings became the silhouettes of bootleggers and mobsters, all wielding automatics and tommy guns. They opened fire on me, a rain of sinister black missiles pockmarking the landscape.

  Somehow, the horse and I evaded the attack. The silhouettes fell aside, leaving me once more on a hilly, empty landscape.

  A new sound echoed throughout the area. A woman’s scream. Cleolinda’s scream . . .

  No. Clarissa’s . . .

  No. Claryce’s . . .

  Although she appeared far in the distance, I could see her face as if it were only inches from my own. Fair of hair, twenties, a hint of the Mediterranean in her past. She had full lips and dark chocolate eyes through which she could express so much more than mere words could.

  Claryce.

  She screamed again, and as she did, her face split, the second close but not identical to the first. The hair darkened and grew longer. The face a little thinner.

  Barely had the two separated then both split again. Two more variations of the same woman continued screaming.

  Even as I urged my mount to greater swiftness, the macabre act repeated again and again, no two exactly the same, but so close that it was impossible not to know that they were meant to be one woman and one alone.

  And with the exception of Claryce and the first variation, every one of them had died violently despite my best efforts or because of my ignorance of the danger to them.

  The horse was a powerful one, yet we got no farther. I bent low, steadied the spear. I’d dreamed this dream in all its variations enough to understand what was to happen next.

  A new roar drowned out the screams. The landscape around the many incarnations of Cleolinda / Claryce rose up and took on the form of a titanic beast with wings and claws. A dragon. The body defined first, then the leathery wings. As the wings spread and the dragon roared yet again, the fearsome head finally coalesced for me—

  Only, the head was nothing like that of the dragon I’d slain in Silene, the dragon whose
blood mixed with mine as we fought.

  The dragon who I had not known at the time was also the unwilling guardian of the portal separating the mortal plane from Feirie.

  No, this time the dragon had a head familiar to me in other ways. This time it had the lupine head of the Dacian Draco.

  The roar twisted into laughter at my dismay. The head reshaped, becoming a swarthy human one with a short beard that framed the jaw and did not include a mustache. I knew those baleful black eyes as well as my own.

  Galerius the dragon laughed a moment more, then leaned forward and opened his mouth wider.

  Fire engulfed us, fire so hot it melted my armor and burned my flesh to the bone. Now it was my turn to scream, my turn to—

  “Nick! Nick!”

  I jolted, then opened my eyes. For a moment, I thought I was trapped in some new infernal version of the nightmare, but then I realized the face leaning over me in deep concern was real.

  Claryce finished opening the driver door. She put one hand on my arm, the other on my cheek. “Have you been here all night?”

  I blinked and saw that there were a few hints of daylight. “No . . . just half.”

  “Were you dreaming—that horrible dream—again?”

  I looked in the backseat, where Fetch sat with his ears flattened. “Someone could’ve woken me up before this. I doubt I was just sitting there asleep.”

  “Wasn’t my fault, Master Nicholas! Ye slept like a dewdropper, so deep I finally went to get Mistress Claryce!”

  Only then did I notice that the back door on the driver’s side was also open. Even without hands, Fetch could open most doors with ease.

  “You could imagine how that was,” Claryce muttered. “I felt like I was in a Rin-Tin-Tin movie! You should’ve seen the motions he went through just to get me down here!”

  “I liked Where the North Begins,” Fetch offered needlessly.

  I grunted an apology to her. Fetch had had to go well beyond the reach of the magic that enabled him to speak when he’d gotten to her apartment. I could only imagine his attempts to communicate with her.

  Claryce straightened. She wrapped her arms around herself despite the overcoat she had on, reminding me that it was still pretty cold outside. “Let’s get inside. I finally managed to get some of that tar you call coffee. I’ll make some for you.”

  I looked at Fetch as I climbed out. He didn’t meet my gaze, instead darting from the back and catching up with Claryce. On our way here, I’d mentioned what Lon had left me. It wasn’t as if he hadn’t already heard my earlier suspicions a couple of months ago, after Claryce had noticed an odd tattoo on the neck of a Wyld serving the undead serial killer H. H. Holmes.

  She’d initially described it as a dragon head circled by a tail. That alone had stirred old memories, but then, once I’d managed to casually get a slightly better description from her, she’d recalled the lupine shape to the head and the multiple tongues darting out.

  That’d been the final nail. I didn’t believe in coincidence.

  Fetch refused to look back as we climbed the steps to the apartment. I paused just before entering to take a look and see if there might be a blue Oakland coupe in the vicinity, but saw nothing. I wasn’t mollified.

  Claryce’s apartment was a sharp contrast in neatness to the house I used in Old Town. Everything here was in its right place. That most of the pieces in the apartment were new was no excuse for the state of my place. Fire had forced her out of her previous home, fire that we both suspected in retrospect had been set by agents of Oberon to force her to accept “William’s” offer to use one on the Southwest Side. Oberon had known who and what Claryce was and had used her for bait. She had been offered the use of that same house after his death, but had declined to spend any more time there.

  “Sit,” she ordered, as she took off her coat. I frowned at sight of the blued Smith & Wesson M1917 holstered at her side. I understood why it was there but regretted the fact that it was. It didn’t help at all that Claryce could use it better than most of the hoods in either Moran’s or Capone’s outfits. The simple fact that she had to have it meant that I’d already failed in many ways to protect her.

  She didn’t see it that way, naturally. Claryce was every bit as strong of will as any of her previous incarnations. More so, to be truthful. I’d discovered quickly after meeting her that while there was Cle-olinda in Claryce, Claryce herself was like none of the previous incarnations . . . and that’d already made a lot of difference for us in so many ways.

  Keeping the revolver on her, Claryce disappeared into the kitchen. Fetch curled up on a circular rug in the center of the living area. I debated between the long couch or the thick chair and decided on the latter. The nightmare had left me nearly as exhausted as if I hadn’t slept at all, but I was determined to stay awake.

  Of course, the dragon began humming a lullaby the moment I sat down.

  I shook my head to clear him away. It didn’t work. The next thing I knew, Claryce had returned with the coffee. She handed me the cup and saucer, then sat down on the couch with a set of her own.

  “Don’t think you’ve converted me,” Claryce remarked as she sat back. “This is some good old safe and better-tasting Chase & Sanborn.”

  I nodded, then took a sip of mine. It was good. Better, in fact, than when I made it. I told her so.

  “You might try not brewing it to death. Are you actually attempting to turn it into tar?” Claryce took another swallow. “I haven’t heard from you in four days. I called the house. What’s going on, Nick? Is it her again? Is that why you were outside and not at the house?”

  She referred to Her Lady, she whose name wasn’t to be spoken or even thought of unless one wanted to attract her attention . . . which most did not.

  “No, although I did run into Lon.”

  “Lon.” Claryce grimaced. “You have an awful sense of humor sometimes, naming that thing like that.”

  “I could’ve called him ‘Buster’ or ‘Charlie.’”

  “Very funny. That worries me. When you try to be funny, that means things are really bad. What is it?”

  “Have you seen anyone lurking around?”

  “‘Lurking’? Nick, everyone in your world lurks around—I’m sorry! That wasn’t nice.”

  “But pretty true.”

  She crossed her arms, her hand instinctively near the revolver. Another “gift” I’d given her. “I’ve seen some shadows from a distance, but they’ve always seemed to be focused elsewhere. I know I can’t see them the way you do, but I think I’ve kept pretty safe.”

  “I’m sorry. I should be—”

  “What? Be keeping watch over me? While that would be cozy, it would hamper what you need to do, and I do have things to deal with also.” She leaned forward. “We are together now, Nick, and nothing will ever separate us. But that also means relying on each other to be careful when we can’t physically be there for one another. Do you understand that?”

  I nodded, the safest reply. Then, “So, nothing much out of the ordinary.”

  “I didn’t say that.”

  I tried to read her expression. She had something uncomfortable to talk about. I decided to let her go first. “Tell me.”

  “You remember I told you how I first learned to shoot. Thanks to my boyfriend Mike.”

  Try as I might, I couldn’t fathom what this was leading to. I doubted she was going to tell me that he’d somehow come back from the dead. According to Claryce, he’d died in France while serving in the American Expeditionary Force during the Great War.

  “I received a letter from a friend of his. Tony Ford. They served together. I met him once. Didn’t speak much, but pretty polite. Big guy.”

  “Why’s he contacting you?”

  She retrieved her coffee. Reminded of my own, I took a strong swallow.

  “He said he was supposed to pass on something to me from Mike. Something he’d promised to bring to me years ago.”

  Now I was suspicious. “And
he waited all this time? Where was he?”

  She gazed at her coffee. “Trying to deal with his own demons. That’s what he said in the letter anyway.”

  “I’m assuming that’s not literal. Do you trust this? Does it make sense?”

  “I do. It’s just that . . . it made me feel guilty. Mike was more than eight years ago. I hardly even think of him anymore, especially since you and I found each other. In fact, knowing what I know about us and our past, it makes my time with him seem even more just a momentary thing. You and I . . .”

  “Have sixteen hundred years of history together? A little imposing, isn’t it?” I cocked my head. “Do you want me to be here when he comes?”

  “I honestly haven’t decided. I just wanted you to know.”

  “Since Holmes, you’ve had two near accidents that I don’t trust were accidents. I want to make certain that this isn’t some sort of setup. If you think there’s any problem, I’m sure Fetch’ll be happy to act as guard dog in my place.”

  His head popped up. “Sure, I’ll see everything stays copacetic, Mistress Claryce. I promise.”

  “I’ll think about it. Thank you. I’m sorry, Nick. I meant to hold off on telling you, especially after finding you outside watching the apartment, but I couldn’t stop myself.”

  “Memories can be very uncomfortable. I can appreciate that more than most.” I reached into my pocket and pulled out the clasp. “You recognize this? The symbol anyway?”

  Claryce took it from me. She stopped blinking.

  “It’s a dragon,” she whispered. “Like the one I mentioned back after Holmes. But not exactly. It represents the same thing, though, doesn’t it?” After I nodded, Claryce stared at it intently.

  Too intently, in fact. Not only did she continue not to blink, but her eyes narrowed.

  I had a sudden sick feeling. The dragon, silent for some time, chose that moment to chuckle. He had evidently recognized the truth before I had.

  “You know what it is,” I managed.

  Claryce swallowed. “I’ve been doing research in my spare time. A lot of research. I won’t stay ignorant, Nick. I’m not safe doing that.”