Hunting Down Dragons (Moonlight Dragon #2)

by Tricia Owens

  "What's the knife for?" I asked, alarmed.

  "I'm going to scratch a gad ko into my skin. It will protect me while the Lwa that inhabits my body calls for your mother's Name."

  "Why is protection necessary?" Christian asked, sharing a concerned look with me. "What's the danger involved?"

  "The wrong spirit may answer." Celestina used the tip of the knife to quickly scratch a symbol into the skin on the back of her left hand. Beads of blood welled slowly from the cut, telling me it was very shallow. As she rubbed some herbs into the wound, she went on. "It shouldn't be a problem, but better safe than sorry."

  On Melanie's other side sat Christian. To my left was Lev. I looked down as he squeezed my left hand with his heavily callused one. His bright blue eyes were soft as they gazed at me.

  "It will be fine, Anne. Don't worry. Better to know, than not."

  "I'm not worried. I want this."

  But what was that they said? Ignorance was bliss?

  I guess I'd soon find out.

  "Lev, please hand out the instruments," Celestina directed.

  More bewilderment as Lev released me to hand a tambourine to Melanie, a drumstick-shaped rattle to me, and a small hand drum to Christian. Lev settled a similar drum in his own lap. This was starting to feel very hippy to me but none of us were willing to question a ceremony that Celestina was obviously taking very seriously.

  The candlelight reflected beautifully off her dark skin and gave her eyes a focused intensity that reminded me a bit of the wolf in Lev. She'd always been one of the more serious and intense of my friends. She was highly intelligent and I was sure she could have found a more lucrative use for her ability to read the future, such as going into the stock market or simply by buying lottery tickets in California.

  But as a second generation American she'd been vehemently opposed to falling back into her family's strange, controversial ways. She'd developed a love for the sea and dropped out of college to compete in surfing competitions along the coast, winning most of them. Had she seen the future and it showed her doing well at the sport? I doubted it. At that time she'd been so opposed to using her talent that I think it would have felt to her like cheating to learn which would be the easiest life path for her.

  A bad wipe out broke her back, requiring two of her vertebra to be fused together. While she was in the hospital, her grandmother died. The two had been close and Celestina had been devastated. Surfing was out, and to drown her grief she'd come to Las Vegas with friends for a weekend blowout. It had been her first visit. One look at all the desperate gamblers, she'd told me, and she'd recognized that this was where she belonged, following in her grandmother's footsteps and keeping alive the tradition Celestina had tried to run from her entire life.

  While she'd thrown the bones for me just for fun, I'd not yet seen her do anything more serious. This séance was looking to change that.

  I expected Celestina to chant or call out for my mother but instead she began to sing lyrics I couldn't understand to a melody that was difficult to follow. Lev began lightly hitting his drum, which was the signal for the rest of us to follow suit with our instruments. I felt more than a little bit silly shaking my rattle. We were out of sync since no one knew what the beat was. But when the candles began to flicker I realized that this wasn't music hour with my buddies. Something supernatural was happening.

  Chapter 6

  Ectoplasm, I thought, but I only knew the word because of Ghostbusters. Lucky guess or not, I knew I was right.

  It began as thin streamers of what looked like smoke exhaled from Celestina's nostrils. Immediately I thought of my friend Liliana, who was a succubus. To remind me that she was a form of demon, Liliana had blown smoke at me.

  Celestina wasn't a demon, so this wasn't smoke. The streamers thickened both in width and opacity. They began to seep from my friend's ears and drizzle down to her shoulders like honey. The streamers from her nose wound lazily through the air like seaweed floating in the sea.

  Melanie made a squeaking noise and dropped her tambourine on the floor. When Celestina abruptly stopped singing that was a cue for the rest of us to set aside our instruments, too.

  I looked around at my other friends. Christian's eyebrows were raised but he looked more surprised than afraid. Lev was nodding and smiling proudly. Clearly he'd seen his girlfriend do this before, which relaxed me. I figured no one knew her better than her boyfriend and a wolf shifter. Dogs were always staring at closets and empty corners of the room, right? If Lev's wolf didn't sense anything threatening, we were probably okay.

  Celestina began to moan. It raised the hair on the back of my neck. Her gaze remained unfocused and ectoplasm continued to stream from her facial orifices.

  "Iris Moody," she sang between the moaning.

  I shivered. This was turning out to be heavier than I'd expected. A part of me wanted to jump up and run out of the shop to the heat outside. I was chilled down to the bone. But it wasn't a physical temperature drop that I experienced. It was a mental and emotional chilling, the fear of contacting what lay on the other side of death.

  Celestina jerked her shoulders back. Her head tilted to the left and then very slowly turned to the right, as though she were panning her gaze over those of us at the table, though her eyes didn't move. I told myself if her head began spinning I was out of there.

  "Daughter…"

  My hands went clammy. My heart began beating at my rib cage. Around the table, my friends shared nervous, excited looks with me.

  "Daughter…"

  The word had come from Celestina. Except this was Celestina plus one. She was channeling something or someone. When her lips moved, spilling more ectoplasm, my mom's voice came out—or what I assumed to be my mom's voice.

  "Beware…Gargoyle…miss you so much…"

  I swallowed hard, steeling myself against possible fraud. It wasn't Celestina I mistrusted but the spirit or whatever it was that we were hearing. It could have been any entity. Everyone in the magickal community knew to be wary of disembodied voices. Hell, anyone who'd seen a horror movie knew that.

  "You ask questions now," Lev whispered from the side of his mouth. "What you want to know?"

  What did I want to know? Oh, man, there was so much. But I had a priority and I knew I needed to stick to it no matter how badly I wanted to learn what my mom's and dad's favorite movies were and what was their favorite memory of us as a family. Besides, this might not be Iris Moody I was talking to.

  "Can you tell us about the gargoyle golem you were investigating when you died?" I asked the spirit inhabiting Celestina's body.

  Her eyes remained half-lidded and she showed no reaction to my question, but after nearly a minute she opened her mouth, spewing curtains of ectoplasm. It looked like she held a knob of dry ice on her tongue and the thick white cold was spilling down her chin.

  "Beware…gargoyle…Texas…from the lake…"

  I hoped someone was mentally noting every word. This was turning out to be similar to a Ouija board reading where the relevance of each word revealed was a mystery that needed to be solved.

  "Who made the golem?" I asked.

  "Us…"

  I blinked at that. "Us? What do you mean?"

  "Dragon…"

  "No," I said immediately. I don't know if I meant no, I didn't believe it or no, I refused to.

  "…under dark…city hiding…dragon… "

  "A dragon sorcerer made the golem," I said. "Is that what you're saying?"

  Celestina said nothing.

  "Look, I need you to—"

  "Easy," Lev murmured. His expression was uneasy. "Must not drive away."

  I forced my fisted hands to uncurl and reminded myself I was dealing with something that wasn't human. This spirit was little more than a collection of memories given the fleeting ability to vocalize. It could barely think. For that matter, was it actually replying to my questions or merely speaking random words?

  Celestina's head rolled on her shoulde
rs, like she was tense and trying to relax. The ectoplasm streaming from her orifices slowed to a wispy trickle. Something had changed. I sensed it in the air, like that suspended moment in between thunder and lightning.

  Above us, the Vodou dolls hanging from the ceiling began to sway in concert. The shop didn't hold a breeze. No one's hair moved, but the dolls moved as one, like a flock of birds did.

  Bang!

  Melanie yelped and I also jumped where I sat. The wooden carving of a skull that normally sat on a shelf holding gris gris bags for sale rolled across the floor and came to a stop against the ottoman where she and I sat. The skull had been carved from a solid block of wood and weighed at least fifteen pounds. A little wind wouldn't have knocked it off like that.

  Beside me, Lev snarled and leaped backward off his chair. He shifted into his wolf form. While normally that transformation was pretty interesting to me, this time the change only inspired dread. Once fully wolf, the black animal snarled in the direction of the kitchen, apparently seeing or sensing something that the rest of us didn't.

  "I hate when dogs do that," I muttered, feeling the hair on my arms rising to match the wolf's ruffled hackles. "Freaks me out."

  "There's something else in here." Christian snapped his fingers to gain the attention of the wolf. "Lev, can we wake Celestina? Is there any danger in that? Lev!"

  The wolf only snarled at him.

  "That's just great," I said as Lev went back to threatening the kitchen doorway. This was becoming a scene straight out of a horror movie. To Christian, I said, "Let's be safe and leave her be. We can handle—"

  The cheese plate went hurtling across the room, nearly striking Christian in the head. We all dove for the floor. The shop began to shake hard enough to make the table legs rattle against the floor. Dolls and candy bars and other offerings fell off the Lwa altar. It could have been an earthquake. We sometimes felt them from California, but I doubted the timing of it.

  Then something entered the room. I was as certain of it as if someone had loudly announced, "I'm he-re!"

  It was big. Bigger than a person, and it displaced air as though it had physical form. I could feel it moving toward us from the kitchen, some kind of wraith, invisible to the eye but registering on my other senses in a bad way. I tried to remember if wraiths could hurt you, but this just wasn't my area.

  "Something's coming," I muttered urgently to Christian.

  "I know. I feel it." He wrapped an arm protectively around Melanie who was whimpering. I was jealous, not going to lie. But I also wasn't content to sit there and wait for whatever we'd allowed into this world to come get us.

  "I've got to do it," I muttered to myself but Melanie's monkey ears were sharp.

  "Anne, you just talked to the Oddsmakers!" she reminded me with brown eyes gone as large as an owl's. "You can't use your magick again!"

  "While I agree it's not the best idea, I don't think there's much choice."

  Calling up my magick to fight really was dangerous, not only because it would ping on the radar of the Oddsmakers but because every time I gave Lucky enough energy to have solid form, I felt the pull of my ancestral blood and that pull seemed to be growing stronger. It was a frightening sensation, like slowly sliding into madness. In this case it was a madness that beckoned and cajoled, offering the allure of power and freedom.

  Just say no to drugs and dragons, Anne.

  Hesitation in a fight or flight situation was what got you into trouble. But I genuinely didn't know what to do. The wraith had reached the middle of the room. Now that it was closer I could see a slight shimmer in the air that made everything behind the wraith appear to be melting. And I could smell it, too: cold, stale and slightly meaty/metallic, like the first air belched from a freezer in the garage that used to hold steaks. Was that the smell of where this thing had come from? Is that where we'd end up if this thing attacked us?

  "Screw it," I whispered. I started to call up Lucky—

  Everything went still.

  Lev stopped snarling. The tension in the air vanished along with the wraith. After a few seconds of quiet, I peeked above the edge of the table and looked over at Celestina. She was shaking her head in little jerks, as if she were trying to clear her ears of water. She stopped doing that when she noticed me staring.

  "Sorry," she said curtly. She smacked her lips. Did she taste the ectoplasm? "That went off the rails for a bit, but everything's fine now."

  "Celestina, what was that?" I demanded as my friends and I climbed to our feet. Lev trotted over to his girlfriend and licked the hand she stretched out to him.

  "At the end? An interloper. When you open the gate between planes, pushy things try to squeeze past. Usually they're bad things. But not always. Sometimes a spirit can't or refuses to let go of their former life."

  "This one was definitely bad, bad, bad!" Melanie scrubbed her arms violently. "I was super scared."

  "That one was not one of the 'good' ones, I agree." Celestina blew out the candles. The smoke that rose up reminded me of the ghostly emissions that had leaked from her face while she was channeling. "Your mom was here," she said, watching me. "In the beginning. The Lwa brought her forward. That part was real. That was her spirit speaking to you."

  The muscles in my chest squeezed tight for a moment. My mom had been here. She'd talked me. As best she could, at least. What was it she'd said?

  Miss you so much.

  I had to blink rapidly for a couple of seconds to stem the emotion that wanted to boil up and over. I never cried over my parents. I cried over the loss of them, over the life I'd been forced to live without them, but not over them in particular. I didn't know them.

  But those four words were a parent's words. A mother's words. Words that I hadn't heard in over twenty years. Later, I promised myself, I would pull up the memory of the séance like a favorite book, and I would pore over every word and allow myself to feel the sorrow and pleasure that they invoked in me. But now was not the time for that.

  "We need to write down everything she said." I looked around for paper and a pen and settled with grabbing Melanie's phone and accessing the memo app.

  I entered the words as my friends called them out. When we were finished, I studied everything I'd typed with a frown. "Was she trying to say the gargoyle now lives in Texas?"

  "Near a lake in Texas," Melanie suggested. "We can look that up!"

  "I think the lake reference was about Lake Mead." I related what Vale had told me about the golem and how it had been made from the mud of the lake.

  "What does the 'like us' comment mean?" Celestina paused in the middle of the room, cheese platter in hand. "Dragon sorcerers can make golems?"

  "Not that anyone's ever told me. Otherwise I would've constructed a housekeeper and a cook by now."

  Christian laughed. "That's all? Oh, that's right, you ran into Vale again. So you're good in that department."

  I gave him a look before concentrating again on what my mom had told us. She had specifically said a dragon had made it. How was that possible? Had my parents been hunting down another dragon sorcerer who'd gone rogue?

  Or was the 'like us' comment something simpler, an indication that the golem-maker was a magickal being? Or perhaps even Chinese? Or a woman? So many possibilities…

  Melanie picked up a fallen piece of cheese, blew on it, and popped it in her mouth. "Are you thinking what I'm thinking?"

  "That's usually dangerous or crazy," I replied. "Or it involves sugar."

  She grinned around the cheese. "What if that dragon we saw out in the desert tonight was the guy who made this golem thingy? What if he's coming for you, too?!"

  I'd already considered that but it didn't make sense to me. "Why tonight? Why come after me over twenty years later? Why not hunt me down when I was just a kid and didn't have a good handle on Lucky?"

  "Maybe they didn't know about you until now," Celestina suggested. "You said you used a lot of magick to defeat the demon inside Vale. Maybe the Oddsmakers
weren't the only ones who noticed when you did that."

  That made sense and it worried me. I preferred flying under the radar. Attention usually came from the wrong sorts of people, even if on the surface they seemed friendly or were admirers. When people came looking for you, they usually wanted something from you, if only a chunk of your time.

  "I hope you're wrong. Both about someone noticing what I've done with Lucky and about the dragon on the playa being a signal that someone's coming after me." I walked to the table and picked up my panda pin. I rubbed it for good luck. "Unfortunately, I won't know for sure until someone one day shows up. Until then, we need to keep digging. We need to find out what Texas means. And this thing my mom said: 'under dark city'."

  "Las Vegas is never dark, so it can't be here," Christian pointed out.

  Celestina clucked her tongue at him like he'd raised his hand and offered the wrong answer. "Have you considered that 'dark' is meant metaphorically?"

  Christian winked at her. "Too large a word for me."

  She rolled her eyes. "Many people would say Vegas is dark and sinful. I say this is referring to the city's underbelly. The seedier sections."

  "So going with that interpretation," I said, thinking out loud, "would mean something beneath the bad part of town. North Vegas or somewhere around downtown."

  "I still think that's playing fast and loose with interpretations." Christian obviously didn't like it. "What if your mother was referring to an old mining town? Someplace abandoned? There are a few around Vegas."

  "We can keep those as options, but Vale said the golem-maker was in the city." I closed the phone. "I think I'm going to spend some time looking at maps and come up with a plan."

  ~~~~~

  I spent the rest of the night on the internet, studying maps of the city, zooming in on street images, and even looking beyond Vegas at the old abandoned towns that Christian had suggested. There were a half dozen old mining towns scattered around southern Nevada, the most promising of which was Nelson, home of the Techatticup Mine where lots of men were killed. It was a regular Wild West killing fields. Sometimes when a place became violent like that, it didn't happen naturally, or else the killings built upon a single event that permanently stained the place with bad mojo. No doubt there was a magickal connection in there that might exist to this day if I looked deep enough.