Monsters, Book Two: Hour of the Dragon

by Heather Killough-Walden

  Spell Spiders: Very large rainbow colored spiders invisible to all but magic users. They are often used to spin magic webs as traps.

  Bookas: Tall, gangly white-skinned humanoid figures with ram’s heads, giant ram’s horns, and white eyes as if afflicted with cataracts.

  Shadows: (Four Types)

  Pan Shadows (aka “Lost shadows”): Shadows that have lost their way, seemingly permanently separated from their mortal mates and hence darkened by this separation in every respect. The Pan are a dangerous breed, fueled by an empty bitterness and unfulfilled longing.

  Sinumbras: People without their shadows who become depressed, frantic, manic, empty, different in a manner unacceptable to society, or simply go crazy.

  Shadows (normal): Those shadows that all of us normally possess.

  Dark Fire Phoenix: A phoenix made of dark fire, which is so hot it burns blue and which only exists in the Shadow Realm as the sole source of heat for that realm.

  The Nimbus – Shadow rider army led by Lord Pitch, the Shadow King. They inhabit the portion in the realm of shadows known as the Dark.

  Night Terrors (Terrors, Sometimes referred to as Doppelgangers): Can live disguised as a human or possess another being by slipping into its bloodstream through an opening in the skin like a cut. In their true form they look like long dragons with no wings, such as the Chinese dragon.

  Dwellers: A creature impossible to fully describe, as it exists in constant movement underground but for the tentacles it sometimes shoves up through the ground to ensnare its victims. The rest of the Dweller remains hidden.

  Cantorips: Clouds of purple gas that put their victims to sleep by infusing them with poison and absorbing their vitality until the victim is comatose.

  Dark World (DW) Griffons: All black, and rather than half eagle, half lion, they’re half vulture, half Dire dog. They are enormous and terrifying, and give off an aura of fear that keeps would-be thieves away from their finds or kills

  Peyton: Amber colored stag with shining fur, griffon-like wings, antlers with jagged edges like knives, and feathers cascading in more long, luxurious tails

  Alacans: equines the size of draft horses, replete with the furry legs of Clydesdales. Their fur is either jet black, snow white, or slate gray. They have massive wings, composed of flower petals or leaves that come in a rainbow of colors. They all have a single horn, wound in a spiral of crystalline deep blood red, and composed of pure gemstone similar to garnet or ruby, sharp as razor blades..

  Fearfells: eight-foot-tall beasts with extremely soft rainbow-colored fur but mouths filled with rows of razor teeth and claws of chipped black stone that slice an opponent to ribbons without trying. They have eyes the same iridescent white as the walls of a transportation portal

  Epilogue from Monsters, Book One: The Good, the Bad, the Cursed

  Cain grinned and shook his head when Angel made it to the Vincent motorcycle before Jake did, and rapidly straddled it. Damn, she was fine when she straddled a bike. He laughed softly at Jake’s discombobulated expression when she started the machine up with one kick, and it purred beautifully beneath her ministrations.

  “You lose,” she told her lover. “Fair is fair.” She grinned, flashing those cute little fangs she was so proud of. “I get to ride solo.”

  Jake swore softly and ran a hand through his hair. Then he mumbled something about women not playing fair because they were fucking hot and that was distracting, and Angel laughed, revved the bike, and tore out of the lot. Several Monsters clan members tore out after her, flashing Jake shit-eating grins.

  Cain laughed harder as his second-in-command stood with his hands on his hips for a moment, then broke into a blurred run toward the garage, and came out a split second later with another motorcycle, a Softail Springer from mid last-century. His tires ripped the tarmac up as he raced after his girl, and the remaining clan members laughed as they gradually followed suit.

  After a few seconds, Cain alone remained in the Monsters safe house lot.

  In the solitude and the sound of a V-twin idling underneath him, Cain leaned back in the saddle and looked up at the night sky. His vision was quite a bit better than that of a human’s. He effectively blocked out the light pollution from the city and gazed steadily into the milky substance of the cosmos.

  He thought about the events of the last few weeks – and what they meant for the future.

  Michael Clemens was still out there somewhere. No one knew where. Not even the seers. Victor Maze had been easier to find than the warlock. But then again, Maze had wanted to be found. There was no telling how much trouble Clemens was going to stir up in the days to come.

  Malek Taal and the Unseelie King had come to an agreement of sorts and things were tense but quiet. The fae were experiencing a kind of cold war. It was an uncomfortable time, and it would continue to be so until the Taal got this shit figured out.

  Cain had respect for Malek, in all honesty. At the very least, he could certainly relate.

  Dmitri Voronin was out there too. But knowing what he knew of Voronin now, and with Angel having been turned, Cain had a feeling the Apex wasn’t going to pose any further problems.

  Speaking of Angel, she’d decided to stay with her clan for the time being. The Vega clan was her family. But at Jake’s begging bequest, she agreed to move into the Monsters safe house any time the boys were in town. And of course, she reserved the right to change her mind at any given point in the future. She was a woman, after all.

  Cain took a deep breath and let it out through his nose in a steady sigh. He turned his head to face south, but remembered too late that his favorite star wasn’t there right now. It would be back in the winter. At that time, Sirius would once more shine brighter than any star seen from Planet Earth.

  He leaned forward, twisted the throttle a few times, and kicked up the stand of his bike. Then he shoved his hands into the pockets of his jacket to retrieve his skullcap. But when he did, his fingers closed over a folded piece of paper instead.

  He pulled it out and studied it a moment before opening it and reading.

  Wow, three brand new enemies in as many days. I’m impressed.

  But then, no one is better than you at antagonism, Cain.

  Hell, you’re pretty much the god of it, right?

  But one of these days, it’s going to come back to bite you in the ass.

  Don’t say I didn’t warn you.

  – Forever, “A”

  Prologue

  Part One – From the diary of Antares Mace

  It was 1966. That was the year I left the Dragon Realm for good.

  I guess I don’t have too much issue with admitting I can be… difficult. I know damn well there’s a darkness in me. It’s more than scale-deep. It runs right through my blood and pumps all three of my hearts, and I’m well aware of that.

  I’ve never been an easy man to know, an even harder one to like. I would guess I’m damn near impossible to love.

  Annaleia would agree.

  When I made the decision to leave, that darkness inside had all but taken me over. At the time, I had no friends and I’ll admit this too, yeah it was my fault. Honestly, I didn’t care. It was easy for me to leave the Realm and enter the world of humans. The Dragon Realm was bullshit anyway. It was under crooked rule, tyrannical and sideways. A new king and queen would take over at the turn of the century and turn that train wreck around. But in ‘65, the Realm was stifling. And I needed out.

  So I started looking for my next exit, comparing the other realms to each other.

  Being a dragon means living forever, more or less. As far as humans are concerned, it may as well be forever. You’re talking thousands and thousands of years, sometimes hundreds of thousands of years. The upside of that I guess is no wrinkles or arthritis and you get first dibs on the classics and good stocks. Yeah, like most of my clan brothers I own stock in the good shit, and I mourned when Steve died. I’ve also got one hell of a selection of rides.

  The
downside of living forever is that after a few centuries, you’re seriously sick of the same equally-immortal faces, the unendingly same personalities. Married couples think they have it rough after forty years? Try forty-hundred with the same crowd. It’s like an extended family of bitter, jaded megalomaniacs with the power to back up the attitude. Imagine Thanksgivings.

  They say people never change. But that just isn’t true. Humans do change, to some extent. They grow old and they grow up, most of them. Well, they grow old. Dragons on the other hand really don’t ever change. And that shit gets old. It’s bad for any kind of dragon, but especially for black dragons. Others learn to deal with the constancy through careful diplomacy. Maybe the way Vulcans do on Star Trek. I don’t know.

  But black dragons would be Klingons in comparison. We get really damn impatient. We get antsy as hell, and we don’t suffer fools. The end result is that after a while, we either leave or all hell breaks loose. And after all this time, the Dragon Realm knows it. No one tries to stop us when we take off.

  In general, we pick a realm we haven’t been to or one we know we fit into well or at least one where we won’t be bored. We’ll take on the forms of that realm’s creatures and species, then spend a few decades mingling with their kind. But me, personally, I have a soft spot for the mortal realm. I just seem to keep coming back.

  Dragons can become just about anything. I’ve been fae, shadow, shifter, were-beast and even vampire. And that’s just within the mortal realm. But only the oldest and most powerful of us can manage to doppelgang other supes right down to their specific powers, much less hold the disguise for long. So we usually just choose to be human. I am one of the oldest. I can remain in an altered form for an admittedly long time. But humans intrigue me.

  Humans are fucking crazy.

  And they like junk food, just like dragons. We’ve got three hearts. It takes a lot of energy to keep them beating. There’s no inhuman creature in any realm as fond of sweets as dragons. I have to say “inhuman” because when it comes to loving sugar, mortals might just have us beat.

  Plus, being human allows dragons to keep a foothold in the mortal world, which tends to come in handy from time to time. You’d be surprised how many dragons are in positions of power in the human realm. You’d probably be even more surprised that those dragons don’t… do more while in those positions. But as full of it as it sounds, the truth is, we try not to interfere more than necessary. Interference can make a bad situation even worse. Got a few human wars under our belts to prove as much.

  Then again, we do step in from time to time. Dragons live so long, it can be decades before one or more exist in the mortal realm. There’ve been times in history when we lost touch for centuries, only to come back and find some form of unnatural abomination taking place, and no deity in sight to stop the slaughter. The Spanish Inquisition… that was one.

  We put an end to it. Would have done so sooner had we known.

  But for the most part, we let humans make their mistakes without any help from us.

  Despite being able to morph into just about anything, dragons are limited in a few key ways with their altered appearances. Black dragons for instance will always have black hair and black eyes, with varying degrees of luminosity and sometimes strange deviations. Sometimes my eyes literally sparkle like someone dumped a bunch of fucking diamond dust into my irises. Makes me feel like a goddamn fairy. It comes and goes with my mood, and I can’t do anything about it. These anomalies are impossible to undo, and they’re like that for dragons.

  We have to retain our original sex, too. Some things are set in stone for dragons.

  But I can be a ten year-old or an octogenarian, depending on what the situation calls for. Age is something a dragon can change.

  And so, in 1966, after studying the realms again for about a year, I became a six-foot-three eighteen-year-old with black hair and black(ish) eyes. It was the easiest thing in the damn world for me.

  What happened after that was probably the hardest.

  In the fall of that same year, I found myself at Mayhill High in Philadelphia, registering as a seventeen-year-old new student in his junior year. I kept my name. Why bother changing it? Magic flows through my veins and one of my three hearts. I’m powerful enough that I never have to worry about hiccups in history where someone by the name of Antares Mace lives a little too long or looks a little too young for it to be normal. Dragons figured that shit out a long time ago.

  I know a few werewolves who have to worry about it though. One is a cop of all things, the chief of police. No lies. In all honesty, he looks a lot like a black dragon… same hair as mine, in fact. And in some respects, Daniel Kane is a fellow biker I would readily call brother. But he’s in the public eye, and werewolves live two or three times as long as humans. Alphas even more so, and Kane’s as alpha as they come. Sooner rather than later, things will start getting dicey for him and that pack of weres he keeps around him in the House. I’d rather not add to my own troubles by association.

  But I digress.

  August 26th, 1966 was a Friday. I walked through the front doors wanting to get the registration over quick so I could get to the motorcycle shop before they closed. If I had to be human, I needed a human mode of transportation.

  Hardly anyone was at the school that afternoon. Friday was late registration day. Most kids had gone in earlier in the week and now that the weekend was here, they had better things to do.

  But she was there.

  The first thing I noticed about her was the way she smelled. She smelled clean.

  You might think it goes without saying that most people are generally clean, but you’d be damn wrong. It’s the twenty-first century, and all you have to do is try to board public transportation during rush hour and you learn fast that humans still haven’t mastered the art of personal hygiene. As bad as it is now, it was so much worse back then. It was the sixties. It was the age of musk perfume and “innovative” cleaning methods. Like crystals as deodorant. I’m here to tell you that unless that crystal has been bespelled by a powerful witch, it isn’t going to do shit for that mess under your arms.

  So many people were rubbing patchouli on their wrists and washing their hair with lavender oil instead of shampoo, the scent of soap actually stood out like a candle in the dark. And Annaleia, well, she smelled like the cheapest, strongest soap on the market. You know – that stuff that pretty much dries the skin to sandpaper if you don’t use lotion right after, but sure as hell kills all the germs. She smelled like that, like Dial and Ivory and Coast. And most of all, she smelled like White Rain shampoo.

  The clean, fresh scent of her literally brought me to a stand-still. She was rounding the corner when I turned in place and looked up. I will never forget those six seconds. They’re imprinted on my memory like a film reel made of titanium. Some nights it’s on loop in my damn head. A dream and a nightmare in one.

  The first part of her to appear was her left boot. Knee-high, block-heeled, corset-laced, red suede. I remember my gaze fixing on those laces and following them all the way up as more of her emerged from behind that wall… smooth bare thigh, off-white linen long-sleeved mini-dress, brown suede vest… and buckets of natural strawberry blonde hair. She hadn’t ironed it like a lot of girls had started to do. Instead, it fell in waves that looked careless.

  It was perfect. I loved careless.

  She was looking down at the floor, lost in thought and mumbling something about not being allowed to take advanced physics because she had ovaries. Her inner dialogue gave me just enough time to stand there like an idiot and study her profile, taking it all in.

  White Rain girl was a little younger than my human form, maybe fifteen or sixteen. A sophomore perhaps. She had a clear complexion, probably from that extra-drying soap she used. Her lips were full and pink, but she was worrying the bottom one with her top teeth. Those teeth were slightly crooked at the canines, and very white. It was seriously cute.

  There was a light ca
fé-au-lait birthmark on her left temple but I didn’t dwell on it long before my eyes were continuing on their way. Her eyelashes were long and thick, easy to spot in profile. She had yet to look up, so I still couldn’t see her eyes. She had a small chicken pox scar on the apex of one cheek, but like her birthmark it did nothing to mar her beauty. It only made her seem more careless. More free. Unafraid to scratch that itch.

  My head filled with the sound of her footsteps, leather soles on linoleum. I zeroed in with dragon sense and isolated the sound of her breathing. Her breaths were shallow and quick, the kind humans got when they were pissed or anxious. I zeroed in further and caught the rapid-fire beating of her heart.

  This physics thing was troubling her, which would explain the furrow in her brow.

  She was maybe half a foot shorter than me. And wonder-of-the-sixties-wonders… she wasn’t wearing a bra. With a linen dress, that was gutsy. I couldn’t help but wonder what that material felt like against her... skin. It wasn’t a soft material. And I knew without even touching her that she was soft. The knowledge of that contrast had a hard effect on me, pun intended. I’d been human all of two days and I was already having to use magic to hide my very physical response to her.

  When she finished rounding the corner and was heading toward me, a lock of her hair flew in front of her face, making my body flush hot – and she finally looked up.

  Purple. White Rain girl had ever-loving purple eyes. I’d seen purple eyes before, but never on a human. When she looked up and those eyes met mine, I swear I felt like someone had cold-cocked me. There I was with several thousand years of social lessons under my belt, and what did I do while she approached? I stood completely frozen in place and watched her like a nine-year-old boy who’d just caught a glimpse of his older sister’s boobs.

  She watched me right back for a few beats. Then she tilted her head to the side and smiled. That white, slightly crooked smile was hands-down the most beautiful thing this black dragon had ever seen.