Hunting Down Dragons (Moonlight Dragon #2)

by Tricia Owens

  "Are you sure he's the only one with motive?"

  "The timing is just too perfect, Celestina. And it totally fits what I've read of him. He bullied all his students. But too bad for him because I'm not intimidated by bullies."

  I'd had enough experience with them as a kid, after being teased for being a half-breed or alternatively, for being too Chinese. I'd learned how to handle them. The key was denying them what they wanted, which was a reaction. And if lack of reaction didn't put them off, you had to go on the offensive.

  That's coming soon enough, buddy.

  Celestina turned her back on the shop and Lev to face me. Much like Vale, she could do serious very, very well. Her dark eyes bored into me. Her lipstick was burgundy red and flattering on her. Whenever I tried red I ended up looking like a prostitute version of Snow White.

  "I could do a reading for you, Anne. Take a peek into the future, see what it holds for you and for Dearborn. A bit of knowledge could change the odds."

  I took a deep breath, resisting my first instinct which was to say yes. This was more complicated than it seemed.

  "How fixed will that future be?" I asked her, searching her eyes. "If I know that Dearborn gets hit by a car tomorrow, and I decide to rent one, will that make the prophecy come true because I hit him? Or will I accidentally sideswipe the car that was fated to hit him off the road and end up keeping him alive?"

  "The future isn't set," she acknowledged. "Nothing is permanent and this goes for the future more than anything else. Interference leads to changes. Usually, the less you know the better."

  "So if knowing the future is a bad thing, why would I want a reading?"

  She smiled slightly, as if in remembrance. "There's a caveat that makes me suggest it. I once had a client come in, a young guy from Toronto. He wanted to know if he ended up with his secret crush. She was in his study group, but they'd never spent any time alone together. He asked me if I could see a moment when he asked her out and she accepted."

  "Did you see it?"

  "I saw them together, yes."

  "Well, did you tell him?"

  "I told him a lie."

  I waited in vain for her to tell me she was kidding. "Celestina, why would you lie to the poor guy?" I cocked my head with interest. "Do you lie to all your clients? Someone once told me that's what fortune tellers do: they tell you what you want to hear and you're so pleased by it that you keep returning."

  Her eyes narrowed. "That's a load of bull crap. Maybe it's true of the fakes at county fairs but it's not true of genuine spiritualists." She tapped her fingers on the countertop restlessly. "Sometimes I bend the truth if I feel like the future isn't malleable. And by that I mean if one seemingly insignificant change to the present will make a dramatic difference on the future, such as deciding to order a latte instead of your usual cappuccino at Starbucks means you end up being paralyzed when a piano falls on you later, then you're better off not knowing the future."

  "Jesus! Has that happened?"

  "The piano? No, but I've seen little choices make big differences. I've also seen the reverse, however, where it would take a lot—moving out of the country suddenly or deciding to take your own life, for instance—to majorly impact the future. With this guy…his future was a piano. A little change in present behavior would have ruined the future he wanted."

  "How?"

  "If he knew that the only way to win over this girl was to continue being shy so that she could make the first move, he would have begun ignoring her and playing it cool, trying in his own misguided way to show her that he wasn't going to approach her first. But that would have put her off."

  I liked this story. "So what did you tell him instead?"

  "I told him I didn't see her accepting a date request from him. Ever."

  "What? Celestina!"

  But she only laughed. "He left me looking like a broken puppy. He was heartbroken and bleeding unrequited love. And that's what his girl would sense: someone who loved her but saw no hope in approaching her. I knew that would intrigue her and draw her in. That would be the reason she would ask him out for coffee at the end of the week. For him, coming to see me was the best thing he could have done, though I'm sure he didn't feel that way when he left."

  Lev had dragged out a stuffed Elvis doll and was shaking it vigorously back and forth. Apparently the investigation was over and it was now playtime.

  "I don't know, from what you've told me, knowing the future won't be much help," I said with a sigh. "I'll probably end up changing it for the worst."

  "But what if you can change it for the better? What if one alteration can prevent someone from getting hurt? Some events can be avoided altogether if you're clever enough. Careful enough."

  I shuddered at the possibility she painted. Did I owe it to my friends to look ahead and see? I hadn't wanted to drag them into this in the first place and yet I had. If any of them were hurt, it would be on me.

  "Talk to Vale about it," Celestina said, patting my arm. "He's the one putting the most on the line with you."

  "I don't think I could stop him even if we knew that in the future his statue gets sold to Kim Jong Un's interior decorator," I said honestly.

  From the corner of my eye I saw her nod approvingly. "He likes you."

  "That doesn't mean he should die for me."

  Celestina snorted. "Then manipulate the future to keep him safe."

  But that scared me. I wasn't some genius at strategy. Far from it. I sucked at Risk. Plants vs Zombies gave me hives. If people were depending on me to play around with Fate and win, well, they were betting on the wrong horse.

  "No," I said hoarsely. "No reading. What's going to happen is going to happen. If I try to manipulate things—I don't want to make anything worse."

  I expected her to argue, but Celestina only nodded and turned back around to watch her boyfriend continue to maul Elvis.

  "It's your choice, Anne, and I respect it."

  But rather than comfort me, her words only increased the foreboding sense that something terrible was right around the corner.

  Chapter 10

  The thing about foreboding—the way I understood it, anyway—was that it was supposed to take some time. It was supposed to be an unnerving feeling at the back of your mind that something was wrong and was about to get worse. Foreboding was supposed to make you nervous. It was supposed to leave you a wreck of stretched nerves as you waited and waited for your fears to take shape.

  Not my brand of foreboding, apparently. My brand was from New Jersey. It whacked me upside the head with a two by four, because eight hours later, I saw it on Facebook.

  For a long time I was uncomprehending. I recognized the words that made up the article on the screen as well as their meaning, but none of it was absorbed. It kept bouncing off me. My mind had shut down along with my heart. I wanted nothing to penetrate either.

  It must have been sometime around dinner that my defenses finally fell and the hordes stormed me. I heard the sound of the shower running in the back, which meant the sun had set and Vale had transformed back into a man. As I listened to him moving around, the impact of what I'd read finally sank in and poisoned me.

  I didn't cry. I wanted to. I needed to. But I didn't deserve the relief that tears would grant me. Celestina had offered me the chance to save my friends and I had turned it down. Selfishly, because I hadn't wanted to take on the responsibility of knowledge.

  Well, look where that's gotten you, Anne. You must be so proud.

  I wasn't Wonder Woman. I wasn't even someone a little girl in the ghetto would want to look up to. I was flawed and afraid. I was too clingy and needy. And yet because of something beyond my control—my ancestral blood—I was being put forth as the one who could do some good.

  Sure. I did a hell of a lot of good today. I did the exact opposite of good.

  There weren't any customers in the shop that I needed to kick out. They would have gotten a rude boot out the door if there were. I walked on sha
ky legs to the Open sign and turned it off, but stood against the locked door wishing that I could barricade it with steel and magick and a thousand dragons. It was a pointless wish that was too little too late. It wouldn't end what I'd already set in motion.

  Vale finally entered the shop, his hair damp and curling at the ends. I smiled at him, thinking I had it all together.

  He knew better.

  "What's wrong?" he demanded at once, his brows drawing down.

  I pointed at my computer instead of answering.

  I watched him read the article about the gas explosion that had occurred this afternoon at the Gold Panner Apartments on Koval. I watched his expression grow grimmer and grimmer as he read about the two bodies discovered in apartment 8B. Zach and Rob's apartment.

  "He killed them," I said when Vale finally looked up. "Dearborn murdered them because I went to them."

  "You don't know that, Moody. He was already aware that they'd plotted against him once before. Maybe this was revenge for sending Jeremiah."

  "Or punishment for trying to send me."

  I wrapped my arms around myself. I was freezing. How could I be freezing in Vegas in July?

  Vale approached me slowly, as if sensing that I was on edge. When he wrapped his arms around me I resisted at first. I didn't deserve this comfort either. I didn't deserve him. But he said, "Stop it," in a firm and gentle way, and wouldn't let me pull away.

  So I collapsed against him, and to my relief he didn't fall beneath the weight of my sins.

  He cupped the back of my head. "It'll be alright."

  "I could have saved them."

  He groaned. "Moody, what are you talking about?"

  I had to shut my eyes as I admitted the horrible truth. "Celestina asked me if I wanted to see the future, in case there was something I could do to keep everyone safe…I told her no." My face blazed, not with embarrassment but with shame. My eyes stung as if burned with acid. "I was a coward. I was afraid of what I might learn and what I'd be required to do. Vale, I let Zach and Rob die!"

  "No, you did not," Vale ground out, his arms tightening around me momentarily as if he couldn't help himself. "You were right to turn Celestina down. Knowing the future won't make it better, only more unpredictable."

  "I could have done something—"

  "And you might have done the wrong thing," he cut in. "Any decision you made would have been a gamble. You could have set events in motion that would have saved Rob and Zach but killed the rest of us, or yourself. Tampering with Fate is a bad bet, Moody. I will never, ever condone it. You did the right thing by saying no, and if anyone argues that then you can send them to me."

  The band of pressure squeezing my heart eased just a notch.

  "The only person responsible for this is Dearborn, if it is indeed his work."

  "It is," I said dully against his chest. "He's evil."

  It wasn't a throwaway line from someone who was angry. I said it from a place of knowledge. Vale must have caught something from my tone for he began to rub slow circles against my back with his palms. His chin rested on the top of my head as he murmured, "Tell me what you know of evil, Moody."

  Only one other person knew the story, and it wasn't Uncle James. I hadn't wanted to tell him. He'd instilled in me since I was young that using my magick wasn't supposed to be the second or even third option. It was supposed to be an action used only to preserve my life. Had he learned the truth about all that I'd done since he told me that, he would have been deeply disappointed with me. No…devastated.

  "In my junior year of high school my class went on a field trip to Utah," I began reluctantly. "It was to see the annual Shakespeare Festival in St. George. I wasn't a big fan of Shakespeare, but I was looking forward to the trip itself since we were scheduled to stop at a ghost town just over the border. At a place called Agatha."

  "A mining town?"

  "A failed one. The mine went dry after a year. After that, Agatha was only populated because of its two largest buildings: a saloon and a brothel."

  I felt Vale smile against my hair. "I'm sure Utah appreciates that legacy."

  "I'm pretty sure those bastions of 'offensiveness' have since been bulldozed into the ground."

  "What happened while you were at this ghost town?"

  I took a deep breath as I sank into the memory. "Both the saloon and the brothel were alleged to be haunted. That's all I cared about, not that the place was still awesomely preserved, which it was at the time. I'd read that the brothel was the site of something truly awful. The brothel owner had chained one of the prostitutes, a fourteen year-old girl named Angelique, in one of the rooms and left her there without food or water. No one came looking for her. She died like that, chained alone in that room. It was her ghost that reportedly lingered in the brothel over a century later."

  I swallowed, feeling again what I'd felt that day as I'd explored the dusty hallways of the dimly-lit brothel. "Can you imagine dying that way? It had to have been from dehydration, which meant she'd suffered. It had taken time. Knowing that really bothered me, and I got it into my head that maybe I would be able to make contact with her ghost and somehow, I don't know, make her feel better. I had this idea that I could be some kind of spiritualist and free her."

  "Because you're a good person, Moody."

  I pretended that I hadn't heard.

  "I slipped away from my friends and the chaperones and crept downstairs into the basement. I'd read from a blog that it was supposed to be the heart of the brothel. It turned out to be a black heart. I found sigils, candles, words in blood written on the wall…The reason the brothel owner had done what he had to Angelique was because he'd become unhinged. Twisted. He'd been dabbling in black magick and performing rituals for demons beneath the brothel. He'd summoned Liliana."

  Vale lifted his head in surprise. "The succubus from the strip club?"

  "The same. It would have been okay had it only been her. But she wasn't alone." I buried my face against Vale's chest, trying to shield myself from the memory. "There was something trapped down there with her that the brothel owner had summoned. He had to have done it by mistake. It was something from the deep, something so terrible that it tortured even demons."

  Vale rested his palm on the back of my head. "Was it torturing her?"

  "Every hour it flayed all of the skin from her body with a whip made of fire, leaving her completely bloody. She can't die, Vale. Her skin would regenerate and then it would happen all over again. Every day since the mid-1800s. Her screams were what led me to them."

  "I'm sorry you found that."

  I just nodded. My mouth was as dry as Death Valley.

  I would never tell anyone what else I glimpsed in that basement, or what I heard. It wasn't that I was trying to protect Liliana's dignity. She was a demon; she didn't have any. I was trying to protect my sanity. To recall what I'd seen was to look into the abyss, and the more often I did that, the closer I came to falling into it forever.

  "I'd never used Lucky for anything major before then," I told Vale. "Uncle James had taught me not to because of the Oddsmakers. They didn't rule over the town of Agatha, however, because it was in Utah. But even if they had, that wouldn't have mattered to me at that point. I was so sickened…" I released a long, quivery breath of tension. "I blasted everything with fire. I attacked that thing with every ounce of my being. For at least an entire minute, Vale, I was a dragon. Nothing human remained in me. Nothing."

  I felt my pulse racing beneath my skin at the memory. "The only reason I came back to myself was because of Liliana, though she doesn't know what she did for me that day. She pulled me out of my form, just like she did it to you, so she could thank me for saving her. To this day, she still acts like she owes me. But the truth is, if she hadn't done that…I'd be a dragon right now, imprisoned by the Oddsmakers. The Anne Moody you know would be dead."

  "You would have found yourself again, Moody. I know you would."

  His confidence in me was unfounded. He
hadn't been there to see how I'd completely lost it. He hadn't seen the side of me that gave up when it realized it was too weak.

  I pulled out of his embrace. I placed my hand on his chest and felt his heartbeat beneath my palm. It was steady, solid. He wasn't disgusted by me, but that was only because he hadn't seen me that day.

  "I promised myself that if a human became warped by dark magick then I would stop them from becoming another brothel owner. I would stop there from being another Angelique. Another Liliana. That doesn't mean I'm not terrified. Vagasso scares the crap out of me. Dearborn is no different. And—I'm just as afraid of losing myself again. But it doesn't matter. Dearborn surrendered his human membership card by murdering my friends. That means he's fair game and he needs to be taken down."

  Vale nodded, as somber as the grave. "Then we're doing more than retrieving the necromancy artifact."

  "That's right," I said, holding his gaze, "we're putting an end to him."

  Vale didn't flinch before my dragon. "I'll help you do it."

  My knees shook. There was so much I wanted to say to him. But I settled with, "Thank you," and I could see from his face that it was enough.

  ~~~~~

  During my research, I had failed to determine if Dearborn ever left his condo in the North Nirvana Tower. These days you could have Vons deliver all your food to you and Amazon delivered the rest. Dearborn didn't have a car registered to him and he had no other relatives in town. I assumed that if he'd ever dated, he'd probably sacrificed the poor women during the creation of a curse. He seemed like that kind of guy.

  Ambushing him looked to be out of the question. We'd have to pry him out of his spider hole. But I didn't like it. Not at all. I might not be Napoleon, but I knew better than to head directly into the fortress of the enemy.

  "So we lure him out," Vale said as he studied a map of Las Vegas on my computer.

  "Or simply call him out. If I sound like I'm mad with grief and want a confrontation that may appeal to the bully in him. He'll come running, figuring I’m too distraught to be much of a threat."