Elven Doom (Death Before Dragons Book 4)

by Lindsay Buroker

  “I’d been thinking about it as a possible solution to the problem with the Justice Court since before Shaygorthian showed up,” Zav continued. “I wanted it to be a solution, so you would be mine, and I could take you whenever and wherever I wished.”

  This hypothetical presumptuousness and stealing of my freedom should have affronted me, and I would have been furious if he’d ever tried to make this a reality without my consent, but these admissions, after the numerous times he’d told me he didn’t want me, got me hot instead of disgruntled.

  Zav, who hated this vermin-infested planet and had reasons to hate anything even vaguely elven, wanted me. A mongrel who hadn’t a clue how to use her power.

  He looked away from me. “When I am in my native form and not as affected by human sexual desires, my thoughts are clearer. I know you would not want to be my property, and even if you did, as I said, this link between us places you in harm’s way. When I have successfully captured all the criminals on my list, I will remove my magical mark and free you.”

  I was supposed to feel relieved, not disappointed that I’d been cast aside, and I understood that he wanted to protect me. Still, my words came out bitter when I spoke. “Good. You’re right. Humans don’t like being other people’s property. In this country, when you get married, you’re equals.”

  “That is not the dragon way.”

  “That’s because dragons are assholes.”

  He was the one who looked disappointed when his gaze shifted back toward me. But before he said anything, headlights appeared on the street ahead and glared in our eyes. Dimitri pulled up in his van.

  I got out of the Jeep. It was time to forget about disappointments and dragons and see what Zoltan had for us.

  13

  We had to sneak in through a different yard since the new owners of the main house had not only moved in but were throwing a party. A dozen cars were jammed in the driveway and along the curb out front, and laughter flowed out through open windows.

  The old haunted carriage house at the back of the property was shrouded in its usual darkness, the landscaping lights not daring to stray too close. The playhouse that dark elves and I had collaborated to partially blow up had been removed.

  A dog barked as Zav, Dimitri, and I hopped the fence, but it was in the house. I wondered if it knew about the vampire in residence in its back yard.

  Dimitri didn’t comment on the dog, simply leading us through the root-cellar entrance and under the carriage house. Red eyes glowed in the secret tunnel we entered, and he paused.

  “It is a mechanical sentry.” Zav lifted a hand. “I will destroy it.”

  “No!” Dimitri flung up his own hand.

  I grabbed Zav’s arm and stepped in front of him. “Dimitri made it. It’s Zoltan’s guard tarantula.”

  “If it does not let us pass, I will destroy it,” Zav said matter-of-factly.

  “Dimitri?” I waved him forward. “Does it have an off switch?”

  “It’s controlled by remote. Let me text Zoltan. Distract your aggro dragon, will you?”

  “I’m doing my best.” I patted Zav’s arm. Too bad I was pretty sure I couldn’t make him tingle the way he could me. Maybe I ought to carry ribs in my pocket for distracting purposes.

  “Aggro?” Zav asked. “What is this? Your dictionary does not have this word.”

  “Kind of like aggressive.”

  “It’s from MMORPGs,” Dimitri said, speed-texting Zoltan. “When you wander too close to a hostile mob, and it attacks your party, it’s because it’s aggro.”

  Zav looked at me. “M-what?”

  “Don’t worry about it.”

  “He’s calling it back,” Dimitri said.

  Clanks sounded as the glowing red eyes retreated. The mechanical sentry hid itself in a large alcove as we passed, the six-foot-plus metal spider impressively large and also impressively well fanged. With luck, I could avoid having to fight this one.

  The door to the lab opened, and the glow of infrared lights spilled into the corridor. Like a good host, Zoltan stood on the threshold, wearing a perfectly tailored white suit with a red cummerbund and red bow tie.

  “Greetings, my fine business partner. And my dear robber. And my dear robber’s recently acquired mate.”

  The word mate made me think of our conversation in the Jeep, and I grimaced.

  “Hey, Zoltan.” Dimitri strode in without acknowledging the rest.

  As I walked in ahead of Zav, he said, “Is this vampire attempting to be witty?”

  “He’s probably burbling because he’s nervous about hosting a dragon,” I said. “But you’ve met before, haven’t you? I seem to remember you coming here before we were working together.”

  “He has indeed visited my humble abode before,” Zoltan said. “He was frosty and aloof. Unpleasant all around.”

  “Aggro,” Zav said.

  Dimitri wrinkled his forehead at this dubious use of his word.

  “Did you find out anything about that shard, Zoltan?” Social norms probably suggested we should banter for another fifteen minutes, but I would prefer to get to business.

  “The shard that my business partner was oddly interested in and requested I investigate?” Zoltan quirked his eyebrows at me and then at Dimitri.

  “Yeah,” I said. “Dimitri is into dark-elf artifacts.”

  “Who isn’t?” Zoltan waved me toward one of his lab benches, then pointed at Dimitri. “Have some brandy, my young business partner. And when you’ve relaxed, do check out those crates of tinctures and lotions that I put together. Do you think they will work well in the store? I labeled them as aptly as I could, but I didn’t know where to place those barcode stickers you suggested. Maybe you can apply them as needed.”

  “I can, yes.”

  “Barcode stickers?” I asked.

  “Nin insisted we have them made to facilitate scanning for the retail point-of-sale system we’ll need to get,” Dimitri said. “I’m learning a lot about business.”

  “Like how to put stickers on bars of soap?”

  “Among other things.”

  Zav wandered around the lab, peering in cabinets and opening books while Zoltan showed me his work station. It was clear Zoltan didn’t believe Dimitri had been the one behind the request for research. I suspected a bill would find its way to me soon.

  “I melted the shard down and analyzed it here.” Zoltan waved to an electric crucible and data on a computer screen.

  “You melted it?” I pressed a hand to my cheek.

  “Of course. It would have been impossible to identify the constituent materials without doing that. Is that a problem?”

  “I guess not. I was supposed to bring the shard to Willard to examine after you looked at it.”

  Technically, Willard had wanted it first.

  “Your lowly government officers can’t discover anything I can’t, but I can let it harden, so you can take it with you if you wish. The melting point was quite low. There’s a lot of gallium in it.”

  “Gallium? Is that a metal?”

  “Yes, my dear robber,” he said patiently, as if speaking to a slow three-year-old.

  “What’s it used for?” I debated looking it up on my phone, so I wouldn’t have to deal with a pedantic vampire, but the reception wasn’t that great in his underground lair.

  “Occasionally as a non-toxic substitute for mercury in thermometers. Gallium arsenide is used to make laser diodes, LEDS, solar panels, and mirrors.”

  “That’s it? I was hoping for something more nefarious.”

  “It also holds magic well,” Zav said from across the lab.

  “Yes, I was getting to that.” Zoltan frowned over at him.

  “You meander, vampire.”

  “I have a name,” Zoltan said.

  “Don’t bother,” I told him. “It took me ages to get him to stop calling me mongrel and use Val.”

  “What did you do to prompt a change of such magnitude?”

  “I’m not
sure. It may have been when I kissed him.”

  “I refuse to engage in such a practice.”

  “I don’t think he wants your fangs near him anyway.”

  “Unfortunate. Drinking dragon blood would give me enhanced vitality for centuries.” Zoltan pushed a printout over to me. “Here are the rest of the physical ingredients. They are interesting only for their ability to hold shape and magic. They are typical favorites of the dark elves. Bone is one of their preferred substances for religious ceremonies, but it is a poor conduit of magic and even worse for a store of power.”

  The list of metals didn’t enlighten me in any way. “Got anything else? Like maybe where this stuff would have come from? I’m trying to locate their new lair. They’ve disappeared from the city, and Zav has been flying all over the Pacific Northwest, but they’re well hidden.”

  “You could order these supplies online easily,” Zoltan said.

  “Do dark elves do that?”

  “I haven’t quizzed them on their shopping practices.” Zoltan pushed another printout over to me. “Magic is more difficult to analyze, but I have alchemical formulas that do help. I can say with a high probability that the shard was from one of the pleasure orbs you described and that I read about in the journal that you, my dear robber, stole from their lair.”

  “They stole it back if that pleases your sense of morality.”

  “From your apartment?”

  “From my boss’s secured vault in the basement of a secured building. She said her people did a fingerprint dusting but didn’t find anything.”

  “Naturally not. Dark elves are professionals at skulking about and not being found.”

  Which frustrated me immensely. If I believed they had gone into hiding and had no plans to bother humanity again for a few centuries, I wouldn’t have cared if we never found them, but… that wasn’t what Willard’s intelligence gathering suggested, and that alchemist had told me straight up they’d been trying to get rid of me because I was a threat to their big plans. Whatever they were.

  “Do you have any idea what those orbs do besides getting people so addicted to pleasure fantasies that they forget to eat and drink and sometimes die?” I asked.

  “I believe that is all they do.”

  “Unless they intended to put one in every house, they couldn’t have taken over the world or even Seattle like that.” I eyed the list of ingredients. “You don’t think that’s their plan, do you? How much gallium is there in the world?”

  “It’s moderately abundant in the Earth’s crust at five parts per million. But, my dear robber, there were numerous recipes and other data in that book. To think their entire plan, if there truly is one, relies on one simple type of artifact seems shortsighted.”

  “Other data,” I murmured, my mind sticking on that. “Willard said something about numbers in the back and that her team hadn’t figured out their significance. You did the original translation. Did you think anything of them?”

  “I recorded them but did not consider them deeply. The alchemical recipes, as you might imagine, interested me more, and the directions for building magical devices were also of interest.”

  “What sorts of things caught your eye specifically?” I’d skimmed through the headers after Dimitri had given me the translation but given it all to Willard without reading everything line by line. Most of it had been confusing gibberish to me. Like reading advanced chemistry papers without a background in the sciences.

  “I’ve already made their susceptibility formula, the wrath reflector, and a couple of their poisons. One never knows when one might have to defend oneself. I have new neighbors.”

  “By neighbors, do you mean the new owners of this property?”

  “Indeed. The ten-year-old girl was already sucked into the haunted carriage house for attempting to take a puzzle off a shelf. The house is quite possessive about its belongings.”

  From across the room, Dimitri grunted in agreement.

  “I assume she got out?” I asked.

  “The house spit her out the next day. She had a wild story for her parents. They didn’t believe her, but they also forbade her to go in there again. Excellent for my privacy. One doesn’t want to listen to footsteps thundering around overhead while one is working.”

  “Have you drunk any of your neighbors’ blood yet?” I wondered how long it would be until this family also moved out and put the house up for sale.

  “Their guests’ actually. They host card-game parties regularly that get quite boozy. This prompts guests to stay overnight with their throats available to anyone who climbs up the drainpipe and through the window.”

  “I’m sure that’s a lot of people.”

  “Myself and the occasional burglar.”

  Zav came over and stood next to me to look down at the analyses. He had never seen the dark-elf notebook.

  Realizing he might be the best resource we had on all things magical, I asked Zoltan, “Do you have a copy of your translation that we can see?”

  Zoltan pulled a three-ring notebook off a shelf and slid it over to me without getting too close. He did glance at Zav’s neck, but I highly doubted he would make that move.

  “How familiar are you with dark-elf alchemy and artifact creation?” I asked quietly.

  “Not very.” But Zav flipped through the notebook and mentioned that he’d seen a couple of the formulas and artifacts before. “This is what they used to kill the thirty thousand shifters.”

  The sketch managed to be both vague and menacing. I shivered, imagining such artifacts placed around a town and oozing power that slowly killed people.

  Zav turned to the pages in the back. More than ten were filled with numbers in a long series without breaks but with numerous decimal points.

  “There was no white space between any of these digits, Zoltan?” I touched a page.

  “No.”

  “But these have to be a lot of numbers, not one long one, right? You’d never have more than one decimal in a value, unless dark-elf math is special.”

  “Math is the same everywhere,” Zav said. “The different species have different methods for recording and solving numerical problems, and some don’t use base-ten math—not everybody has a pair of hands with five digits—but the elves and dark elves have developed similar systems.”

  Zoltan nodded. “The problem is that since they didn’t put white space into this book, we would only be guessing.” He pointed. “Is that 3.458 and 2.72 or is it 3.4 and 582.7 and 2?”

  I gazed down at the rows and rows of numbers, trying to see a pattern. “I suppose Willard’s people would have dumped everything into internet searches, and probably searches in other databases, to see if any matches came up.”

  “It would be difficult to do such a search without context.”

  “Don’t we have context?” I asked. “It’s a book full of chemistry and magic. And they’re dark elves. What kinds of data would be of interest to them? These numbers couldn’t represent people who died in their experiments, not with decimals. Pints of blood poisoned?”

  Zoltan snorted.

  “Perhaps they were recording data from the world around them that could affect their experiments,” Zav said.

  “If this is data that is publicly available out there somewhere, it should match up with a search.”

  I grabbed a pen and paper and started writing out the first couple of rows, taking guesses at where the splits would be.

  “If I had the original,” Zav said, “I could determine if all the numbers had been entered at once or if they were recorded over time.”

  The original that had been taken out of Willard’s vault. I plugged my number guesses into my phone and waited while it did a slow internet search, limited by the poor reception.

  “I had the original,” Zoltan said, “and I could not determine that.”

  “You are not a dragon,” Zav said.

  “I fail to see how your ability to fly and incinerate buildings makes you more as
tute at analyzing data.” Zoltan sounded miffed.

  “I also have the ability to detect magic and smell and sense details about the world around me. Including ink on a page.”

  Plugging a mass of numbers into a search engine didn’t return anything useful. I flipped to the very first page of data. The first entry was a single digit followed by a decimal point and more digits. How big were dark elves on zeroes? I didn’t see that many of them. Using the first entry as a pattern setter, I assumed each number set started with one digit, using zero through nine, followed by a decimal point and the subsequent digits.

  “I already have a headache,” I muttered, tapping my possible numbers into another internet search. “This is why I give the intel stuff to Willard. She likes numbers. She likes problems of all kinds.”

  “Willard is the grumpy colonel with all the weight equipment in her apartment, right?” Dimitri asked. “Who told me to get out of her way because she was as busy as a one-legged cat in a sandbox?”

  “That’s her. Don’t let the Southern accent or the country idioms fool you.” I glanced at the time and wondered if it was too late to call her for something non-dire.

  I still didn’t get a match from the new figures I searched, but adding the white space started getting me partial matches on some of the sets of numbers. None of the hits seemed relevant as I skimmed along, and I was about to give up when something on the seventh or eighth page made me pause.

  “Earthquake in Thailand, 5.1,” I read a webpage title. I doubted our dark elves had anything to do with events in Thailand, but the report made me reconsider what the lists of numbers might signify. “If you lived underground, earthquakes might be a concern, right? What if all this data represents numbers on the Richter scale?”

  “What is the Richter scale?” Zav asked.

  “Our way of measuring the severity of earthquakes. It’s logarithmic.” I ran a finger along the lines I’d copied. “These would all be fairly low indicators of seismic activity. That 5.1 is the highest in this batch.”

  “Would other data not have to be included for the list to be useful?” Zoltan asked. “Such as dates?”