Dragon's Luck: The Dragonbound Chronicles

by Bryan Fields

  Angus said something venomous in Dark Elven and let Aerin go. He came to the table and leaned into the image, looking for minute details.

  Aerin wrapped her arms around her chest and asked, “What are those?”

  “Claymore mines,” I said. “They’re designed to blast shrapnel into everything in front of them. At short range, one is pretty damn lethal.” I caught the look in Aerin’s eye and shrugged. “I learned about them playing Glory of War. Sue me for paying attention to the power-ups.”

  Angus pointed to something I couldn’t see. “Trigger wire, right there. Follow it.” Rose obliged. The wire ran straight to three deadman switches buried under Lilah’s unconscious form. “Those are a problem. If we move her too much, the mines go off.”

  Rose pulled the view out and up, showing us miles of surrounding countryside. “They’re going to be watching,” she said. “They’ll want someplace elevated, shady, and easy to conceal.”

  Aerin snorted. “You’ll never spot anything from this altitude.”

  Without looking away, Rose said, “I can see mice from this altitude. Be quiet.” As she said it, Rose zoomed in on a group clustered in the shade of a rock overhang a quarter mile from the camp site.

  Some of them were scarecrows, but the others could still pass for Human. Two were watching the area with binoculars, while two more napped, leaning against the rock face. Number five was prone under a camouflaged tarp, watching the camp through the scope on a high-caliber rifle. The sixth sat cross-legged next to a small camp stove, making meticulous cuts around her eye socket with the broken tip of a hobby knife blade. More blood oozed from numerous welts and gouges on her back and sides, soaking her already filthy tank top.

  Angus circled her with his finger. “She’s the leader. We need her alive.”

  “You take them,” Aerin said. “Once they’re down, I’ll get Lilah.” She took a sword belt with a matching pair of not-quite katanas off her charm bracelet and handed them to Angus.

  Angus nodded and donned the sword belt. He looked at the image of the scarecrow’s campsite, touched one of his rings, and vanished.

  The guy with the rifle lost hand, head, and one arm in a single stroke. Both sentries lost their heads at the same moment, one to each sword. A bare trickle of blood between the shoulders marked the cut that severed the leader’s spine. Angus stabbed both sleepers through the heart and flicked the blood off his blades as the first sentry’s head hit the ground.

  I’d never seen anyone move that fast, not even the elders at Stonewall. Just watching him, I felt like twice as much of a noob as I had been. I shook my head and asked, “Can he cut those trigger wires fast enough to keep the mines from blowing?”

  Geneva shook her head. “Cutting those wires will set the mines off.” She pulled out her phone. “Explosive ordnance disposal, Las Vegas immediate.” She looked at Aerin and said, “Gilead says two minutes.”

  Aerin shook her head. “Screw that.” She tapped her ring and vanished.

  “Shit!” Geneva dropped her phone. “Focus on Lilah, focus on Lilah!”

  Aerin might have issues with impulse control, but she wasn’t stupid. She’d appeared twenty yards from the camp site, standing on a table-sized slab of rock. Riki jumped off her shoulder, then another Riki followed, and another, and another. Thirteen identical mongooses spread out, racing across the camp site. They looked at, burrowed under, searched, sniffed, and climbed on top of every object in the area, squealing and chittering as they cleared the place.

  Aerin levitated herself a good ten feet off the ground so she had a good view of the shelters. As soon as the last Riki got clear, she waved her hand and the shelters vanished, along with the gear, the mines, and a foot of the rock and soil everything had been sitting on.

  I felt a little faint. “Huh. I guess that’s one way to disarm the mines.”

  “I hate it when she does this shit,” Geneva muttered. “Nadia, can you give us a ride out there?”

  “I can take two,” Nadia said. “Three would be risky.”

  “I can take one, if you’ll give me a few minutes.” Danya leaned over Rose’s shoulder to get a good look at the area.

  Nadia snorted. “A little behind on your studies, I see.”

  “I have a career,” Danya snapped. “And a full-time relationship which I know I’ve been neglecting…”

  “I managed to keep in practice, even when I was working and going to school full time. And since I’m only Human, I did it while having to sleep at night.” Nadia put her hand on her hip with a so there flourish and an I win smirk.

  Danya’s brow furrowed and lightning arced across her eyes. “You were the one running around convinced you could cast the Charm of Endless Dance by shouting ‘Do the Hustle’!”

  Nadia turned dark red. “That was Natasha!”

  “Shut it, both of you. Good grief! Can we please leave your mother as the only full-time teenager I’m stuck babysitting?” Geneva tapped Rose on the shoulder without waiting for an answer. “Come on. You can search the bodies all you want while we clean up.”

  I kissed Rose goodbye and Nadia teleported the three of them away. Danya retreated to her room to prepare for the spell, leaving me alone in the kitchen with Josephine—and Aerin’s crystal ball. I sat down, looked into it, and asked, “What can I do to bring this whole mess to an end?”

  Well, what would you have done?

  I couldn’t close my eyes, or get up, or let go of the table. Then the table, the patio, and the hotel dropped away and the world rushed toward me at incontinence-inducing speed. I went past the Grand Canyon and across northern Arizona, dodging cars and people and buildings and dogs and cactus before coming to an instant stop inches from the front grill of a rusted-out Atomic-age land barge with giant tail fins and a bubble-top, the kind that opens by sliding the middle section back on rails, like the canopy on a jet fighter. It sat behind a building, next to a maze of vintage junkers and modern wrecks, all caked with red dust and baking in the sun. A sign on the office building read, Kayenta Auto Salvage.

  “Find this car and return to the casino at seven fifteen tomorrow night.” The voice was all around me, but I couldn’t see anyone.

  I couldn’t help it—I said, “Only a madman talks to thin air, and I am not mad. Show yourself.”

  Then I was in a great hall, carved into the heart of a mountain peak. Behind me, a set of steep narrow stairs cut into the dark stone led down and down until they vanished in the dark, fog, and snow. The air was thin and cut my lungs as I tried to breathe. The wind whipped whorls of snow around my feet and out into emptiness, to fall on jagged ice-covered peaks far below me. Above, green, gold, red, and blue auroras danced under billions of stars as hard and bright as diamonds.

  The only object in the hall was a throne, featureless and grey and rimed with frost, looming above me. It was… Imagine the Lincoln Memorial, but without Lincoln sitting there, just his shadow. The shadow glared down at me and said, “I have answered.”

  I took a step back. Ice-covered stone gave way. I fell, staggering backward, away from the table in the kitchen and away from Aerin’s crystal ball. I found a dish towel and threw it over the crystal before staggering into the bathroom.

  My phone told me Kayenta was a small town on Navajo land near Four Corners. Did I want to navigate to this location? I was still trying to decide when Danya knocked on the bathroom door to tell me she was ready. I put the phone away, washed up, and let Danya teleport us out to the campsite.

  None of these scarecrows had gold teeth, much to Rose’s annoyance, but the guy with the sniper rifle had a gold-plated .50 caliber Desert Eagle semi-automatic pistol in his gear bag. The thing looked like it would have a starring role on Pimp My Arsenal. At least Rose is strong enough to shoot it without getting klonked in the forehead due to the recoil.

  Danya hurled herself on Willow and teleported the two of them back to the hotel. I doubt any bookie in Vegas would lay odds against an evening of crying, chocolate, and make-
up sex.

  Lilah was up and around, looking none the worse for wear thanks to Aerin’s healing. Aerin had described her as looking like a barbarian queen, and damn, she fit the bill. During the attack, she killed two of the scarecrows with a wood axe and injured three more, and that was after being hit with a Taser. The women in her group were generally coping well, and none had more than minor injuries.

  Angus lifted the surviving scarecrow and leaned her against the rock face. “You might want to reconsider your loyalties,” he told her. “I lived four hundred years under your boss’ rule. I’ve seen what she does to failures. You won’t like it.”

  She didn’t say anything, but then she saw me. Her body convulsed and every inch of skin on her front side burst out, away from her bones, spraying a cloud of blood at me. Some caught the arm of my shirt. It thickened and spread, hissing and boiling as it did, trying to eat through my shirt sleeves. Turgid ropes of blood snaked up my arm, lashing around my bicep and digging in.

  I yanked my shirt off and pulled it inside-out over the blood-blob. I couldn’t get my hand out in time. The monster seized my hand from thumb to ring finger. Just like that, I couldn’t move my fingers, but I could feel the blood-thing’s touch burning like acid. My arm jerked back just out of reflex and I pulled my hand free.

  Most of the skin was burned off and the muscle was in bad shape. The blood spray that hadn’t hit me coalesced together and lurched forward, absorbing the remains of my shirt and the blob inside it. The mass pulled back long enough to form more ropy tendrils, lashing them at my face and arms.

  This time, I had Kindness.

  I ignored the tendrils and sliced across the central mass. Two tendrils collapsed into a noxious heap of putrefying ooze. The remaining two wrapped around my arm. They tried to pull me into the slime; I went with it and brought Kindness down in a diagonal chop, slicing the thing in half. The chunks recoiled, hissing and dissolving just as the tendrils did.

  I stepped back and fell to my knees. Kindness slipped from my grasp as the pain from my burned hand overloaded the adrenaline in my system. Angus caught me and lowered me to a sitting position. He recited a prayer in Gaelic, holding his palm over my injured fingers. A wind came up, swirling around us. It was cool and moist, rich with the smells of the deep forest. My whole hand glowed green, and in the light, muscle filled in and skin grew back until my hand was whole.

  My hand didn’t have any scars, or calluses, or any dirt under my new fingernails. Nor did it have any tan to it. It was as soft, smooth, and pink as a newborn’s backside.

  “Mmm. Probably need a glove. Wear sunscreen for a month or so. May I tend your blade?”

  I wasn’t sure how to answer, but I could tell the gunk on Kindness wasn’t coming off with a flick of the wrist. I nodded. “Please. I’m not sure what to use on killer blood slime residue.”

  Angus rummaged through the hidden pocket of his leather wallet and withdrew a bundle of leaves tied with string. Inside, he had a pile of gritty black ash. The ash burst into flame as he sprinkled it on the gunk. Once Kindness was clean, he sprinkled half the bundle on the blood beast and on the remains of the priestess. The fire consumed both in the time it took me to draw two breaths.

  “Phoenix ash. It’ll purify anything.” Angus tucked it away and removed another bundle. This time he unrolled a ten foot by ten foot Movable Hole onto the ground, making an instant pit twenty feet deep. “Mind lending a hand with these assholes?”

  “Sure.”

  Rose joined us for the body-tossing. When we finished, Nadia made a scooping gesture and every bit of dirt and soil the bodies had touched or bled on flowed over the edge and into the hole. Angus gave the area another going over before peeling the Movable Hole off the ground and rolling it up again. Where the hole had been, the ground was back and not a stone was out of place.

  The women in Lilah’s group filled their guide’s Suburban, all asleep, even the guide. Lilah gave Aerin a goodbye kiss and spared the rest of us a smile. “Nice to meet you all, and thanks for the help.”

  Aerin caught a stone out of her swarm and handed it to Lilah. “Hang on to this. It’s got three full-power Painwebs, one Volcanic Death Cloud, and half a dozen Paralytic Stuns.”

  “What’s the command word?”

  Aerin shook the stone and held it up to her ear. “The usual. FYA.”

  “That’s good, but I can’t drive, aim, and raise the Impudent Finger at the same time.” She tossed the stone into the air and it vanished. “I’ll call when we get to Barstow.”

  “You’d better.” Aerin kissed her again, lingering a moment before stepping away and casting another spell. When she finished, I couldn’t look directly at the Suburban. Trying harder just gave me a headache. I couldn’t tell you when it drove off, other than Aerin turning to cry on Angus’ shoulder.

  But it did give me an idea.

  Chapter Sixteen

  Road Trip

  “Well, that was Crom, all right.” Nadia drummed her fingers on the patio table. “I know he’s given others the same experience when they needed some encouragement. He wasn’t trying to intimidate you; he just wanted you to know he’s real.”

  The memory of that mountaintop was enough to make me shiver. “I didn’t have any doubts on that score. That still doesn’t explain what this junker in the middle of the desert has to do with anything. I mean, I get that it’s a McGuffin of some kind, but I’d like to have a better idea of what’s happening before waltzing into the middle of it.”

  Rose tossed a road map or Arizona on the table. “With two people and some magic, I can maintain sixty miles an hour, as long as we don’t go too high. Four hundred miles, with rest breaks, seven hours. Any chance someone in this tiny little town will have a nice juicy cow they won’t miss?”

  “You might score some javelina on the way,” I said. “Nadia, what about teleporting us?”

  “I’d have to see the target landing zone,” she said. “Mother’s crystal can take care of that if we use it in the morning, but I’ll be down a lot of spell energy if things turn hairy.”

  “How exactly do your spells work?” I asked. “Is it like spell points, or a mana pool…”

  Nadia arched one eyebrow. “Seriously? Game mechanics? You’re going to ask this shit now?”

  “Yes,” I replied. “It would help if I understood how you power your spells and how much you have available to dump out when things go sideways. It’s in a way of being important here.”

  “Fine.” She rolled her eyes, but continued. “Spell memorization is the closest system, but that’s a terrible description. I charge up the spells I want to use and hold them until needed. Casting them is faster and they hit harder than if I cast using my personal energy. I need to be rested to charge up my spells, unless I’m standing on a ley line. I can cast spells for less effect, or burn a lot of power and overcharge one. Does that help?”

  “Yes. Do you know any spells capable of repairing cars?”

  That set her back in her seat. “I…know a few spells for mending broken items. The only thing I’ve done with a car was repair a flat tire and pull air in to re-inflate it. I could try a few spells, but…honestly, I think you’d be better off fixing it manually rather than waiting to see if I can fake something up.”

  “With luck, it won’t be an issue,” I said.

  Rose got up and retrieved Aerin’s crystal ball. “If there is a chance this car will need repairs, we will need as much time as possible to carry them out. I think we should teleport in, grab the car, and get the repairs started. Nadia, we’ll find a hotel and let you get your rest. Anyone have a better idea?”

  None were forthcoming.

  Rose leaned over the crystal ball, cupping her hands around it until an image of the salvage yard in Kayenta appeared. The sign on the door said they were closed, but a guy in his early twenties was in the garage overhauling a carburetor while a huge 1980s-era boombox hanging on a pegboard blasted out a collection of disco classics. The yard was dark,
but the area around the office had plenty of light.

  Nadia looked at the projection from several angles and nodded. “Let’s do this. Maybe this guy can suggest a good hotel.”

  Rose dismissed the image and stretched until her back made popping noises. “Bathroom first. I will never understand why you Humans weren’t designed to recycle your body’s water after filtering waste. It’s just so much more efficient.”

  Nadia stopped and stared at her. “You know, I don’t think even the most high-nosed of Elves could manage a good retort to that.”

  “That’s why my people are the paragons all other life forms envy and aspire to become.”

  They disappeared down the hall leading to the first floor main bathroom, so I didn’t catch Nadia’s reply. I ducked into the cook’s alcove and resolved not to get pulled into the discussion. When a Dragon, an Elf, and a Human walk into a bar, the Human is always going to be the punch line.

  When I came out of the bathroom, Aerin was checking on Josephine, rattling off her vitals in a sharp, professional voice while a quill pen transcribed her words into a battered leather-covered journal. The only part I understood was that both pupils were equal and reactive, which I’m pretty sure is a good thing. The nylon gear bag she was working out of had a logo on the side for Santa Barbara’s emergency services. Inside it, I could see a crapload of medical equipment and supplies.

  Aerin hung an IV bag of lactated ringers on a collapsible stand and slipped the needle into Josephine’s arm, moving with unusual speed and grace. Once she taped down the tubing, Aerin set up a blood oxygen meter and taped the pickup to Josephine’s finger before noticing me. She gave me a short nod and finished with her notes.

  When the quill stopped writing and the book closed itself, I said, “I know the Llewellyn family tries to stay away from regular doctors, but…isn’t there anyone available who has medical training?”