Trampolining with Dragons
Page 1
Trampolining With Dragons
S. W. Clarke
Ramy Vance
Keep Evolving Studios
Contents
Join The Clan!
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
The Gonegod World Needs You!
GoneGod World - Catalogue
Tara and Percy - Cooking Marshmallows with Dragons
An Infernal Heist!
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
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About the Author
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Chapter 1
We’d botched the mission. And by botched, I mean royally so.
Frank, Grunt and I were now running for our lives in our starched, stuffy tuxedos. And let me tell you, fleeing across somebody’s lawn at night isn’t easy when you’re dressed up like a maître’ d.
Behind me, Frank let out a sharp yell. That was followed by the sound of his muscle-less accountant’s body tumbling across the pristine front lawn of the Hamptons estate we were trespassing on.
“GoneGodDamn it.” I skidded to a stop. “Frank, if I can run this fast in a penguin suit, you can, too.”
“Go on without me,” he groaned into the night.
“Tara!” Grunt called back. Even in this semi-darkness, he was impossible to miss. A big, hulking ogre dressed up like waitstaff.
I reached into my tuxedo, yanked out the scroll. When I threw it to him, he caught it with ease. “Take it. We’ll catch up to you.”
Grunt didn’t wait; he turned and ran, thundering into the darkness. For an Other of his size and heft, he could move. Of course, every step made the ground vibrate beneath me.
Whatever. They’re already chasing us, anyway.
When I got to Frank and reached out my hand, he took it at once. I yanked him to his feet. “We don’t leave anyone behind. Least of all you.”
He bobbled on one leg. “I think my ankle’s sprained.”
I ducked under his arm. “I’ll be your other leg. Let’s go.”
Together, Frank and I started across the grass. He limped, and I practically dragged him along. We hadn’t gotten ten steps before that now-familiar sensation came over me.
Heat along my limbs, the sudden loss of control.
Mariana had taken over.
She ducked down, pulling Frank with her. The moment she did, an object whistled through the darkness above us.
In the next second, I was back in control.
“Box of frogs,” I said to her in my head, straightening with Frank. “That sounded like a blowdart.”
“That’s because it was,” Mariana said.
“How did you know?” I asked.
“They have a very particular, reedy sound in the moment they’re blown.”
Well, I wasn’t about to dig into the minutiae of how she’d learned about the sounds blowdarts made. I was just grateful she’d saved us—again.
Over the past six weeks, I’d come to trust Mariana’s instincts, her judgment. How could I not? In a month and a half, she’d gotten us out of tight spots more times than I could count on two hands.
We’d already accomplished more together than I ever would have alone, much as I was loath to admit I wasn’t a strong, independent woman who didn’t need the other half of her soul.
“What was that?” Frank asked as we started moving again.
“Blowdart.” Ahead, I could see the spot where we’d parked the RV. Grunt had climbed in, and the brake lights shone bright red in the night.
I felt Frank cringe next to me. “You said this would be a low-key mission.”
We came onto the asphalt of the driveway, knocking over a potted plant. “It was. Until Grunt decided to shatter the glass casing around the scroll with his fist.”
Lesson learned: never invite an ogre on a stealth mission.
“Listen,” I said as we came to the side of the bus, “we’re OK—”
Another dart whistled through the night. Mariana took over for a split-second, falling right. When I had control again, I looked up to see a dart sticking straight out of the bus’s metal siding.
“Thanks,” I said to her in my head. “Again.”
Mariana’s anxiety surged through me. “Just get us out of here. I suspect I know what’s shooting at us, and it’s close.”
Before Frank and I could approach the door of the idling bus, a tiny voice ricocheted through the night. “Do not move, brigands!”
Sheesh, Others with their archaic speak. I had half a mind to give this guy a lesson in modernity. But then I remember the blow darts and how, technically, he was right. We were brigands, pirates … thieves.
Frank and I slowly turned around. Behind us floated a green-haired pixie, illuminated within a halo of yellow light. He held a peashooter the size of a cigarette in front of his mouth, ready to dart me square in the forehead.
And he was naked.
I cleared my throat. “I’m sorry, but what’s this all about?”
“You have stolen from The Bismarck’s treasury,” the pixie cried. “His security is coming to apprehend you. If you move, I will shoot you both before you can cry out into the night, which I know you would, filthy humans.”
I set an indignant hand to my chest. “My goodness, you’ve got the wrong people. You see, we work for The Bismarck.” Long shot, but why not? Others had fallen for less.
“This is a lie.” This pixie clearly wasn’t charmed by my fluttering eyelashes. “I have witnessed you in your cowardly retreat. You took the scroll. Where is it?”
“Oh”—Frank pointed past the pixie—“is that the security you were talking about?”
Of course, there was no one behind the pixie. But the little guy did glance over his shoulder for a second.
Like I said: Others had fallen for less.
Nice work, Frank.
I reached under the jacket of my tuxedo and yanked Louise, my seven-footer bullwhip, from my belt. I shot her out at the pixie, cracking the peashooter right out of his hand. “Let’s go, Grunt!” I spun and dragged Frank toward the bus’s door.
The bus’s engine roared, and Grunt got it rolling down the driveway the moment I called out.
“Stop,” the pixie shrieked from behind us. “Deceivers!”
Frank and I didn’t stop.
His ankle must have come un-sprained, because I think he was running faster than me away from that hellacious pixie.
We rushed up to the bus like a moving train, climbing aboard through the open door. When we got up the steps, Grunt slammed his foot on the gas, sending Frank and me both tumbling to the floor in the fancy kitchen.
I climbed to my feet as we careened down The Bismarck’s driveway and through the open gates. As we did, I stared out the window at the pixie, his little halo still rushing along behind us.
And far off, standing on the veranda of the lavish mansion, som
eone was watching us. It’s hard to be sure when the person you’re robbing looks like the human version of a peacock, but I could have sworn I saw The Bismarck smiling.
As we pulled out onto the road, I dropped into the copilot’s seat beside Grunt. “Are we being followed?”
He glanced out the side-view mirror. “Not that I can see.”
The vision of The Bismarck flashed again through my head. He was supposed to be a vastly wealthy Other with an enormous collection of museum-worthy artifacts and a library the size of an NYC apartment block.
And he had been smiling at us as we’d driven away with the scroll.
For whatever reason, I had a feeling we weren’t followed. That the guard pixie had only been sent out to make us feel as though we had done something The Bismarck didn’t want us to do.
But I had no idea why he would let us go.
“He let us get away,” Grunt said into the silence.
“My thought, too.”
“What?” Frank said, his face appearing between our seats. “I nearly died on that lawn, and you think The Bismarck let us go?”
“He’s one of the richest, most powerful Others in the country,” Grunt said as we sped down the road away from his mansion. “And we didn’t see a single guard from the time we stepped inside until ...”
“Until you smashed the glass?” I folded my arms, shooting the ogre a look.
Grunt glanced at me and shrugged. “How were we supposed to get the scroll otherwise?”
I pulled my multitool from my belt, rifled through about ten different devices. “Oh, I don’t know. Any one of these special tools, one of which is designed specifically to cut glass?”
He eyed the multitool, then his gaze returned to the road. “I wonder if we shouldn’t have just asked The Bismarck for the scroll. He’s supposed to be sympathetic to Other causes.”
“You could have mentioned that before we hatched our break-in scheme,” Frank groaned.
At this point, I didn’t really care. We had what we needed.
I eyed Grunt. “You do have the scroll, right?”
He retrieved it from his jacket and extended it toward me. “What, you thought I would drop it?”
“Right—it’s Frank who’s all butterfingers.” I accepted the scroll, even as Frank’s dismayed objection sounded from behind us in the bus. When I turned, he was seated in the booth, rotating his foot. “Was that a complaint about what I said, or about your ankle?”
“Both.” He winced as he shifted his foot to the left. “Running in oxfords is not for the weak of heart.”
“Grunt will patch you up once we’re back.” I turned around, lifting the scroll and unrolling it. I couldn’t resist; we’d been planning to nab this for three weeks, and now we finally had it—just in time.
When I had it fully open, I just stared. “Son of a motherless goat.”
Inside me, Mariana’s confusion blossomed. “That cannot be.”
Grunt glanced away from the road, toward me. “What?”
I angled the face of the ancient piece of paper toward him. “There’s nothing on this.”
Grunt grunted. “It’s bad light.”
I reached up, turned on the over-bright cabin light above us. Still, nothing. “It’s GoneGodDamn empty.”
Grunt ventured his gaze off the road once more, this time for longer. “That can’t be.”
“Did you grab the wrong one?”
“There was only one. And it was inside a glass case to prevent degradation.”
I rolled it back up. “But it’s supposed to have writing on it, no?”
Grunt growled, both hands tight on the wheel. “Yes … the explanation of the ritual.”
I groaned, thumping my head against the seatrest behind me. This scroll was supposed to be the only copy in the world explaining the ritual of “humanistic vessels.”
It was supposed to give us a lead on how Lust planned to inhabit Ariadne.
In the past six weeks, we hadn’t managed to get any closer to her. Every time she appeared on TV, every time she joined a radio show, every time she came out in public … she’d managed to evade us.
Either it had been her adorers keeping us at bay while she slipped off, or we’d gotten there just after she’d departed.
She was quick. She was squirrelly. She was infuriating.
I hadn’t seen Percy’s face in six weeks; I had no idea where she’d taken him or what she’d done with him. It had practically killed me, not knowing whether he was well or sick, alive or dead.
All I knew was she’d promised a grand entrance on New Year’s Eve, and—as much as I hated to think it—I hoped that meant riding in on Percy’s back.
Then I’d have a shot at saving him.
At least Seleema had appeared next to Lust occasionally, which had given Frank the drive he needed. When we last saw her on TV, she’d been seated next to Lust, dressed in a crisp, draping gown like some sort of medieval courtesan. And Frank had burst into tears, saying, “She hates taffeta!”
I felt for Frank. To see your beloved and not be able to reach them—that was the worst kind of hell.
And Erik? He’d been off doing his World Army super-secret stuff, tracking Lust in his own way. We checked in every week, but talking on the phone hadn’t felt very intimate. Plus, he couldn’t tell me about any information he’d acquired; it had all been one-way.
I didn’t like to admit it, but I wanted that Norwegian hunk by my side. He was a capable fighter and … well, let’s just say he was capable of a lot of things, first and foremost offering me comfort. And that was something I desperately wanted right now. Comfort. Reassurance.
Someone to talk to when I was going crazy with worry for Percy and what that bitch Lust was doing to him.
My poor hatchling. Only the GoneGods knew what kind of sick shit she was into.
We were down to our last twenty-four hours. Tomorrow night was New Year’s Eve, Times Square, the ball dropping—all of it. And Lust had promised to be smack-dab in the middle of it all, bringing a smile to our faces.
But if the scroll was empty, that meant the past three weeks had been for nothing.
“Tara,” Grunt said.
I rolled my eyes toward him. “What? I’m busy moping.”
“You said the scroll is completely empty. Not a mark on it, right?”
“You saw for yourself.”
“Check again.”
I sighed, unrolling the brown piece of paper once more. “Nada.”
“So why would The Bismarck keep a completely empty piece of paper under a piece of glass designed to prevent degradation?”
My heart hitched. “He wouldn’t.”
Grunt accelerated the bus. “That’s right.”
“So what, then?”
“We’re going to the grocery store.”
“Now I know you’ve got a big appetite, but is this really the time to be feeding that endless pit you call a stomach?”
He huffed. “We need lemon juice.”
Frank’s face appeared between us. “Did you say lemon juice?”
I glanced between the two of them, ready to make a crack about a juice cleanse, when it hit me. “Lemon water,” I said. “Holy box of frogs … that’s so perfect.”
“I still don’t get it,” Frank said.
I pinched his pudgy little cheeks. “Just be patient. It’ll all make sense in a few minutes.”
Grunt pulled us off the road and into the enormous parking lot of a Trader Joe’s. “Let’s make this quick.”
I reached up, clicked off the overhead light. “You get the lemons. I’ll get the lighter.”
The ogre’s eyes flashed at me in the almost-darkness, and it struck me again how three would-be enemies—me, Mariana and Grunt—were working together. It only took Lust trying to take over the world. “I knew there was a reason I stuck with you, Tara Drake.”
Chapter 2
We didn’t even wait until we’d gotten back to the apartment—not after all the
trouble we’d gone to to get this ancient GoneGodDamned piece of paper.
As soon as we climbed back in the RV, we stood in a huddle in the kitchen with our grocery store bags floating to the floor at our feet. Frank held the small lemon spritzer above the scroll, which Grunt had stretched out from end to end and held flat under the overhead light.
“Be judicious with the lemon,” Grunt told him.
Frank unscrewed the long-stemmed spritzer and shot the ogre an aggrieved glance. “You’ve got to be kidding me.”
“Judicious,” Grunt repeated, extending the scroll toward him.
I stood ready with the lighter. “You know, when I did this kind of thing as a kid I never imagined I’d be learning valuable life skills.”
Grunt’s eyes swiveled to me. “I don’t know what you’re talking about, human. Did you also release ancient wisdom through subjecting words to bittersweet fruit and flame?”
I half-smirked. “The way you put it makes it sound way cooler.”
Frank ignored us both. True to his word, he gave the scroll a judicious spritzing from left to right, covering most of its surface area. When he stepped back, I didn’t even hesitate to step forward—we’d been waiting weeks for this information, after all. My thumb jerked down on the lighter’s flint with a click, and the small flame burst into existence on the first try.
I wasn’t going to brag, but they didn’t used to call me the Girl Who Spits Fire for nothing. Of course, having a brand-new light helped, not that it took away from my awesomeness.
I held the lighter under the scroll’s center, and we all leaned in, staring open-mouthed.