The Glow of the Dragon's Heart: A Paranormal Fantasy Romance Prequel

by Willa Hart

  I jumped at the sound of loud clanging echoing through the room. It was coming from an old-timey phone on “my” desk. The thing was big enough that I would have to hold it with both hands to carry it — not that I wanted to. The grimy plastic looked to have once been a snazzy avocado green, but after a thousand or so years of use, it looked more like a dying head of broccoli. I’d heard about rotary phones before, but I’d never seen one up close. I gaped at Uncle Max, astounded that the obsolete relic still worked.

  Unsure how to answer the antique, I started blankly at Max. He looked confused and bemused at the same time, then rolled his eyes and picked up the phone next to him.

  “Maximus Investigations.” He listened for a moment. “Sorry, wrong number.”

  As soon as the heavy receiver dropped back into its cradle, I just had to open my big mouth. Hell, it was already hanging open in surprise, but I didn’t have to go stick my foot in it.

  “Hey, Uncle Max, is this an office or a museum?”

  Oh shit. I clamped my lips tightly, wondering to myself why I had such a penchant for sabotaging myself. The last living members of my family had kindly and generously taken me in, and I just had to go and insult them.

  Instead of kicking my sassy ass out of his office, Max simply chuckled. He gave me an appraising look, as if he was seeing something more than my face when he looked at me. I could almost see the passage of time flickering in his eyes, a kind of ancient quietness that both calmed and unnerved me at the same time. It was the same feeling I imagined one might get when standing in front of the remnants of some ancient monument to a forgotten god — small, naive, inconsequential.

  “I was starting to wonder if you’d inherited any of your father’s smartassery,” he said. “The answer appears to be a resounding yes.”

  I let out a breath I didn’t even know I’d been holding. As relieved as I was he’d found my comment funny, my heart started pounding as it finally sunk in that this man, both family and a stranger at the same time, was probably the only person left on the planet who could tell me more about my parents.

  It wasn’t as if I had forgotten everything about them. They were always present in my heart, crystallized in time, preserved in my memory exactly as they were before they died. But only in pieces. I’d only been five when…

  I sniffed away the familiar burning at the back of my eyes that came whenever I thought of my parents. What few memories remained of them were the bits I relived in my dreams — mostly nightmares. The dream I’d had the night before was the one that visited me most often. It started out so warm, so cozy and comforting, only to tip into horror halfway through and leave me trembling and sweating when I woke. As much as I hated the end of the dream, I craved more of the beginning. I wanted to fill in the massive gaps in my memory and know my parents as the people they were — even before they became my parents.

  I never admitted it to anyone — and I never would — but a small, dark part of me wondered if I wasn’t somehow to blame for their deaths. Any psychologist worth her salt would have told me I was suffering from survivor’s guilt, but in those low, black moments when I missed them so much I could feel the ache in my bones, no amount of logic could penetrate. I knew in my heart they had lived beautiful, robust lives before me, and I was sure they still would have been if I’d never been born.

  “Do you remember them?” I asked.

  A misty expression clouded his face. “Very well.”

  My stomach flip-flopped and I took an eager step closer. “Tell me about them. Please? Anything at all. You said I’m a smartass like my father, but what about my mom?”

  He thought about it for a moment before answering. “Well, you’re the spitting image of your mother. Honestly, I did a double-take when you stepped off the bus. Except your eyes. Those are your father’s. I have a feeling you take after him more than anyone knows.”

  “How?” I wanted details, not vague, cryptic comments. “I want to know everything about my parents.”

  He gave me a warm, sympathetic smile and patted me on the shoulder with his huge hand. “There will be plenty of time for that, Favor. There’s no need for me to reveal all of their secrets in one fell swoop. We have all the time in the world.”

  His words triggered a memory buried deep within my heart and I went rigid for a moment, recalling those same words in my mother’s voice. When he spoke again, his tone soothed the pain and slowed my thudding heart.

  “I’m not going anywhere, Favor. And neither are you, not if I can help it. Face it, kid, you’re stuck with me.”

  The urge to fling myself into his arms nearly overwhelmed me, but I managed to fight it off. It wasn’t the first time a foster had offered me forever. It had never taken long for every single one of them to rip the rug out from under me and take it back. “Forever” meant next to nothing to me. It was so much easier to assume the worst. Safer too.

  Still, I couldn’t totally ignore that comfortable, at-home feeling I got whenever I was around Max and Shirley. Aunt Shirley and I shared a fun camaraderie, and I felt strangely close to Max, despite his gruff exterior. It was almost as if I’d been holding my breath for twelve years and was finally able to exhale. I wouldn’t let my guard down right away, but I really hoped it would all work out.

  Max cleared his throat and pushed off the desk. “Let me show you my office.”

  His limp looked to be getting better as I followed him down the musty hallway. The office was smaller than the main space, but seemed bigger. Some of the illusion was due to the sparse furnishings, but mostly it was thanks to a large, shaded window facing the outer office. I’d only seen them in TV shows, but I knew a two-way mirror when I saw one.

  “Paranoid much?” I asked with an arched eyebrow.

  He shrugged. “I’m a private investigator. Comes with the territory.”

  “I suppose you see all sorts of likely suspects, don’t you? But isn’t a two-way mirror a little…modern for your taste?”

  Max shook his head as if he were disappointed in me. “Actually, the two-way mirror was invented in 1903 by a brilliant Russian inventor by the name of Emil Bloch, who was living in Cincinnati, Ohio when he applied for the patent. Quite a remarkable man, a visionary of his time…”

  As he rambled on about all of Mr. Bloch’s accomplishments, I shuffled around the room, doing my best to tune him out. As much as I liked Max, I was far less interested in the history of boring crap than he seemed to be. An antique cabinet on the back wall caught my attention. With each step closer to it, a strange, rhythmic sound reverberated through my body, almost like a heartbeat.

  Only it wasn’t my heartbeat.

  I glanced over my shoulder to make sure Max wasn’t watching me. I had no reason to think he would care about me checking out his office — he’d invited me in, after all — but some prehistoric instinct didn’t want him to see what I was about to do. Thankfully, he seemed fully engrossed in his history lesson, pointing to various parts of the mirror with his back to me.

  As quietly as I could, I pulled open the cabinet door and peered inside, my heart beating in time with the thrumming sensation. It took a minute for my brain to think of the word associated with what my eyes were seeing. Lucite! Sitting on the top shelf was a perfectly smooth, rounded blob of Lucite. It was shaped like a massive drop of water and about the size of a large grapefruit.

  Unlike any other clear acrylic I’d ever seen, this stuff was cloudy. So cloudy it almost obscured the object embedded inside. It looked vaguely heart-shaped, but the blob sat too deeply in shadows to tell for sure.

  As soon as I picked it up, I could see the object was some kind of grayish rock, but only when I pulled it out of the murky cabinet did I realize it looked more like a crystal. It caught the overhead light and sparkled like it was on fire. In fact, it looked as if it were glowing red from the inside.

  No, not glowing…pulsing.

  Before I could focus my eyes, Max snatched the blob of acrylic out of my hands and peered at me
with an intensity I hadn’t seen before. I couldn’t tell if I’d crossed some imaginary line, so I played dumb. Which I was.

  “What is that?” I asked, my heart finally slowing down to a nearly normal pace.

  “Oh, this?” he asked, waving the blob around as if it meant nothing to him. “Just a prize I won at a carnival many years ago. Completely worthless, outside of sentimental value. It would kill me for it to break.”

  I smiled benignly and shrugged, as if it didn’t matter to me. Naturally, I was curious about it, but I was more curious about why Max had just lied about it. I had no idea how I knew, I just did. Before I could decide whether or not to press him, the outside door opened. We both glanced over at the two-way mirror and watched a very large man skulk through the doorway.

  “Stay here,” he said as he headed for the door, the blob tightly in his grasp.

  Chapter Four

  The big man in the lobby perched on one of the desks, as Max had done earlier, and shot a curious glance at my purse. If he so much as moved toward it, I was going to scream and run out to stop him, but he stayed where he was. Obviously he was waiting for Max.

  So was I. I’d expected him to come into view almost immediately, but both the man and I waited about ten seconds before he showed up.

  Without the blob.

  He must have stashed it somewhere, and fast. Faster than I would have expected a man of his age to move. Maybe that was just one of the things you learned how to do as a P.I..

  “Good to see you decided to come in today, Rufus,” Uncle Max snarled, jamming one hand on his hip and the other on the desk. “After you missed your shift yesterday, I was starting to wonder if I’d ever see you again.”

  Rufus wasn’t just big, he was massive. His clothes barely contained all of the muscle underneath, and I was pretty sure he could knock down a wall with a single punch, if he was so inclined. His dark red hair was in a short crew cut, like a middle-aged action film mercenary, but there was a gentle simplicity in his brown eyes that made me like him immediately.

  “I’m really sorry, Max,” Rufus mumbled, rubbing the back of his neck with a big paw of a hand. “Had another gig and I forgot you needed me yesterday.”

  His voice was a deep rumble, and he pronounced each word slowly. I got the impression he wasn’t exactly a quick thinker, but he spoke from the heart.

  “Another gig? I don’t mean to pry, but mind if I ask where you’re finding another ‘gig’ good enough to blow off your day job?”

  Rufus shifted uncomfortably, avoiding Max’s gaze for a few moments. Max sighed and rubbed his temples.

  “Look, Rufus, I’m not mad. I know things have been slow around here lately. But if you feel the need to moonlight, I’d rather know about it so we can work something out to keep it at moonlighting, understand?”

  Rufus looked reluctant, but finally, he let his shoulders slump, and he mumbled something under his breath.

  “Come again?” Max asked, an edge to his voice.

  “Drakonis,” Rufus confessed in an apologetic tone, looking up to meet Max’s gaze this time.

  Max drew in a sharp breath and clenched his fists.

  “Drakonis?” he shouted. “As in Drakonis Security Systems? You’ve been moonlighting for my nephews?”

  My eyes went wide. Max got upset every time Aunt Shirley brought up their nephews, but I’d never seen him so angry.

  “That’s why I didn’t want to say anything,” Rufus said, holding up a placating hand and furrowing his brow. “I knew you’d be mad.”

  “You’re damn right I’m mad! How else am I supposed to react when my best employee misses shifts to work for the competition?”

  “I’m not working for the competition,” Rufus said, holding his ground. “I just picked up a little bit of their overflow on what’s normally my day off. It won’t happen again.”

  “You sound just like Danic, always acting first and then fumbling over excuses.”

  “Danic’s a fine detective,” Rufus retorted.

  Max and Rufus were getting more defensive with every passing second. I wasn’t a stranger to arguments between adults, but I rarely saw two such imposing men take shots at each other. It made me nervous, as well as something else I couldn’t place immediately. Then it hit me.

  I felt irritated, and I had no idea why.

  “Oh, is that how it is?” Max balked. “You’ve got to be kidding me, Rufus. Running off to Drakonis to relive old times isn’t going to make them come back. Or is something else drawing you there?”

  “Well, they’ve got a modern office, for one. Real big open spaces, lots of natural light, and it doesn’t smell like a locker room.”

  “My office doesn’t smell!”

  “I never thought so either, until I spent a little time at Drakonis.”

  “Unbelievable! What else do they have over there? Floating chairs that give you a back massage while you wait for work to fall into your lap?”

  “C’mon, that’s not fair.”

  “I’ll tell you what’s not fair,” Max nearly roared. “All five of my own nephews walking out on me, and now they’re poaching you! And for what, a little modern glitz? Is that all it takes for you to betray me too?”

  “Maybe I wouldn’t have to moonlight in the first place if you gave me more work,” Rufus shouted, his facing turned a deep russet. “I’ve got bills to pay, Max! You gotta know the scraps you’re giving me aren’t enough to keep the lights on.”

  The irritation that had been building inside me turned into full-blown anger. I still wasn’t sure why, but the fight between Max and Rufus was obviously the trigger. I clenched my fists and tried to control myself.

  “You’ve never talked about this to me, Rufus,” Max shouted back. “You just come and go!”

  “I shouldn’t have to talk about it. You’re a fucking investigator, you’re paid to know things!”

  That was it.

  How dare Rufus talk to Max like that? Rationally, I knew it was none of my business, but despite having only known him for a few days, I was rabidly protective of my uncle. I’d never felt such loyalty to any of my fosters, and I had no clue why I was feeling it now. I only knew I was done watching. That Rufus guy was about to get a piece of my mind.

  As I tore my gaze away from Rufus to go out there and chew his ass up one side and down the other, something caught my eye. For a fraction of a second, I thought I saw something that simply couldn’t be real. I performed a classic double-take, then blinked my eyes rapidly as my brain tried to catch up with my eyes.

  Rufus had changed. It was subtle, like when you looked in a trick mirror and then stepped to the side. But this was no trick. The man looked…bigger, as if that was humanly possible. He glowered down at Max, when a moment before, I could have sworn he was only slightly taller. And that wasn’t even the weirdest part.

  From a distance, it was hard to see at first. Only when I looked really hard at the man’s face did I realize.

  Realize you’ve gone nuts.

  I couldn’t remember what color his eyes were when he’d walked in — brown, maybe? — but they hadn’t stood out as unusual. Now they flashed a wholly unnatural neon green, and as he grew, so did they. So much that it didn’t take long for me to see his pupils morph from a perfectly normal round shape to vertical black slits.

  And just like that, I was five years old again, sitting in the back of my parents’ car, fiddling with the seatbelt. My skin went all clammy and my hands shook like crazy. Then I realized I couldn’t breathe. I couldn’t move, like in a night terror, and when I remembered those big yellow eyes boring into me through the back seat window, the whole world tilted on its axis.

  Loud voices penetrated the fog and pulled me out of the darkness. I’d slumped into Max’s desk chair at some point, and when I focused on the men arguing in the outer office, I came fully back to the present. Rufus was red-faced, but he wasn’t a giant, and his eyes were the ones he came in with.

  I shook the dream memorie
s away. My mind had never played tricks on me like that before, but it had obviously decided that tormenting me at night just wasn’t enough, now it had to be an asshole during daylight hours.

  Speaking of assholes, that Rufus dude still needed an ass-chewing. Launching myself from the chair, I stormed out of Max’s office and marched right up to Rufus. Sure, I had to crane my neck back until I pinched a nerve, but I didn’t care.

  “Who the hell do you think you are talking Max like that?” I shouted.

  Rufus looked as surprised as I felt, picking a fight with a man who had a good foot and more than a hundred pounds on me. But I didn’t back down, and he must have seen something in my eyes because I could have sworn I saw fear flash across his face.

  Or maybe I was simply delusional again.

  Either way, I felt emboldened by his small cringe, and shouted, “Why don’t you pick on someone your own size, huh?”

  As the threat came spewing out of my mouth like hot steam, I gave him a hard shove. His chest was solid rock, and I almost pushed myself off-balance from the recoil. While I caught myself against a desk, his wide eyes darted between me and Max, then he took a step back.

  “S-sorry,” he said, raising both hands in front of him in surrender as he stared at Max over my shoulder. “I shouldn’t have… I didn’t mean… Sorry!”

  Before I could gloat in triumph over stopping a case of elder abuse, he ran through the front door, leaving me alone with Uncle Max. Then it dawned on me that I — an orphan who didn’t know any of these people — had just screamed at my uncle’s employee for no reason I could verbalize. I froze again, this time out of fear that Max would drive me straight to the train station. As I slowly turned toward him, I planned out what I’d say in my apology letter to Aunt Shirley.