Branded

by Rob Cornell

  When I looked down at my hands I could see right through them. Everything from my skin to my clothes took on a glowy white kind of appearance, like headlights through fog.

  I glanced around to make sure no one had walked in on me. Last thing I needed was a bunch of people screaming about the ghost in the casino. Then, my stomach doing another little spin, I let myself drop through the floor.

  Passing through solid objects is weird. What’s weirder is the feeling. It’s like a really bad rash all over. While you are in the solid stuff, you get super itchy. Only, you don’t have any skin you can scratch. It is bizarre.

  I floated down, using my thoughts to control my decent. It wasn’t much different navigating in ghostly form as walking. You didn’t have to concentrate. You just went.

  I must have traveled through twenty feet of concrete and steel before my head finally cleared the ceiling of the underground complex in what was supposed to be the dragon’s vault.

  Supposed to be.

  Instead, I glided down into a bathroom.

  A spacious and luxurious one, granted. But still a fucking bathroom.

  The room was nearly as big as my entire house. A hot tub large enough to accommodate a full-sized van was in one corner. All the fixtures on the tub and sinks gleamed golden. The floor was made of a salmon-colored marble. Gold trim lined pretty much everything.

  I guess dragons needed a lot of room to bathe, though the toilet seat, while solid gold, was regulation sized. Dragons typically operated much like vampires or shifters. They had a human form they used when walking among mortals, and then their natural form. Limitations such as mass and weight didn’t apply. A twenty-foot-long dragon could turn himself into a one-hundred and twenty pound person without much thought.

  That’s why they call this stuff magic, kids.

  I wasn’t sure how many house guests the dragon entertained, but it appeared he spent at least some of his time down here in mortal form. All well and good, and an interesting bit of learning. But it didn’t do me any good for my particular mission. I highly doubted the dragon kept any loot in his damned bathroom.

  Kitchens had flubbed this up good.

  I only hoped the vault was close. I did not have time for a long tour of the dragon’s lair. The ghost blood would only last another ten minutes. Then I would need the second dose to get out. I sure as hell wasn’t going to go wander around in corporal form. I could spend a decade searching the massive underground complex that way.

  Quickly, I started floating through walls, traveling from one room to another. A spacious bedroom. A garage with so many shiny makes and models of cars, I couldn’t count them. A gallery with sculptures and paintings I recognized from a Humanities class I took as a blow off in high school. Something told me these weren’t prints or copies.

  Wow.

  I even went through a wide hall with suits of armor lining each side like a royal guard, only each suit was different from the next, encompassing all lands and eras. A few were battered. Many had scorch marks. I had a feeling these may have belonged to fabled knights and their attempts to slay this particular dragon. Unlike the story books, they hadn’t fared so well. I wondered how many distressed damsels had ended up as dragon food. One for each suit of armor? More?

  Probably more.

  Thankfully, I found the vault at the end of this hall. The vault’s massive round door was covered by an ornate curtain. I whisked through the curtain and then right through the door and into…

  Well, it wasn’t anything like I had expected. No piles of gold coins and crowns and jewels. No piles of any kind for that matter. Instead, countless numbers of plastic bins of various sizes set on metal shelves twenty-feet high. Each bin had a number on it. Most of them six digits or longer from what I could see. The vault looked more like a Costco than home to a dragon’s collected treasure.

  The massiveness of the job I had before me struck me hard. A pit dropped in my stomach as I stared down near infinite aisles of stuff. How the hell was I going to find one piece of treasure in all of this?

  I hadn’t asked myself that question going in because I had hoped a solution would present itself. In other words, I would wing it because I had no freaking clue.

  For a moment, I thought all was lost. Even in ghost form, I couldn’t fly through and check each of the thousands of bins for one item. I only had about five minutes left in this form anyway.

  I almost sank right through the floor in my despair, then I looked up at the bins again.

  The numbers. Some kind of indexing system? Dragons had long memories, but there was no way he could remember everything he had in here and which number corresponded to what. He had to have some kind of reference. A giant book?

  I didn’t know. But I had to find it.

  I flew through the warehouse/vault like a mad banshee, at one point passing a forklift parked in an aisle. Eventually, I came to a computer terminal. I had to laugh. Looked like even dragons had entered the modern age.

  I hovered in front of the terminal for the last couple minutes of the ghost blood’s effects. I returned to corporeal form with a soft pop in my ears as if I had adjusted to a new pressure level. I dropped a couple inches and landed on my feet. For a moment, my body felt twice as heavy as it was since I had grown used to gravity not affecting me.

  I shook off the feeling and wiggled a mouse next to the keyboard of the terminal. The monitor flickered to life. The system was instantly recognizable as a standard database kind of thing. It would be like looking up a book at the library. I just hoped the Brand of Gelding was on a low shelf. I didn’t want to waste time driving around in that forklift.

  I clicked into the search field and typed in Brand of Gelding. Tapped the ENTER key.

  A little hourglass popped up on the screen, tipping over and over while the machine thought. Twenty seconds later a result popped up. A few columns which had the item’s name, its index number, the date it was shelved, and another number labeled “aisle.”

  “How sweet is that?” I said and clapped my hands.

  I strolled off to find the proper aisle. I probably walked the equivalent of a city block before I found it. Then another half block to arrive where the bin number should have been. I craned my neck back and scanned downward until I found my number. Luck was on my side. I was looking at a bin on the bottom shelf.

  For once, something about this cluster-fuck I had found myself in came easy.

  The bin was only about three feet by two feet. When I slid it off the shelf, I noticed it didn’t weigh much. I popped the lid off and a dank scent wafted out. It smelled like…rotten flesh?

  But only a single item lay inside. And it matched the picture Kitchens had sent to my phone exactly. A long, rusty looking brand like a cattle rancher might use to mark his stock. The brand on the end was a round symbol that didn’t make any sense to me. Frankly, I didn’t care. If this somehow could fix my vampire problem, I would take it. Though, in the back of my mind, I wondered if I needed to be literally branded by this thing.

  Something told me the answer was both ugly and obvious.

  Never mind all that. I grabbed the shaft of the brand in my left hand, pulled the last dose of my ghost blood out with my right. I popped the rubber cork out of the bottle with my thumb and let it roll away on the floor. I wouldn’t need it. I chugged the bottle while gripping the brand tightly, worried irrationally that it might not discorporate along with me, even though it should.

  And it did.

  I tossed the bottle aside. It floated wistfully away for a moment, but then turned solid, dropped to the floor, and shattered. Whatever I had in contact with me when I disapparated had to stay in contact, or the effect would wear off. So I’d best hang onto the brand.

  Only one thing left to do.

  Get out.

  I shot straight for the ceiling like Superman taking off. The ceiling in the vault was at least forty-feet high. I didn’t know where it would come out at, or who might see me when I came up, and
I didn’t much care. I would fly away before they could be sure they actually saw me. Give them a ghost story to tell their kids.

  Everything was working out.

  Until I hit the ceiling.

  I actually didn’t come in contact with the ceiling itself. I hit some invisible force about a foot shy. I tried a couple more times at different spots, and continued to come up against it. I tried going through the vault’s walls with similar results. So then I tried the way I had come in, through the vault door.

  No dice.

  Some kind of magical field had me trapped inside. But why hadn’t it kept me out?

  Then I heard the vault door clang. The sound echoed through the silent vault. The giant door swung inward on its oversized hinges, and standing in the entrance—the Detroit dragon, Kuan-Yin Chern.

  He was in human form. A slight old man with a long mustache, its gray wispy ends hanging several inches beyond his chin. He wore small round glasses. His gray hair was pulled back in a pony tail that stretched down to his waist.

  The smile on his face explained why the vault’s magical field kept an intruder inside rather than out. It was a honey trap. And I’d been lured right in.

  This dragon had caught himself a free meal.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  The good news was, with the ghost blood in my system, I could slip through a dragon as easily as I could a wall. So, with the door open, I hoped I could blow right through him and out of the vault. I clutched the brand more tightly and shot straight toward the dragon.

  His eyes widened behind his circular lenses. He staggered a step to one side, but not soon enough.

  I passed straight through his body and on out through the vault door. Nothing stopped me. I was home free.

  Once I cleared the vault, I turned upward and plunged into the ceiling. A few seconds later, I rocketed out of the floor in the middle of one of the casino’s slot rooms. The machines dinged and pinged all around me. I hesitated for a brief second to get my bearings.

  In that pause, an old lady sitting on the end of a row of slots glanced in my direction. The plastic bucket of coins she held in one hand slipped from her grip. Quarters jangled loudly as they poured out of the bucket. The woman’s mouth opened wide to show an ugly set of dentures that were in desperate need of a good Polident soak.

  I smiled at her as if playing the friendly ghost might soften the blow of my sudden appearance.

  Made things worse.

  She screamed, her voice cutting through the electronic din of the machines filling the room.

  Other faces turned in my direction. Their intense and shocked stares pushed against me like a physical force. I felt pinned in place despite my ethereal condition.

  More cries and gasps mixed with the bleeping and dinging. Some pointed. Others scampered away on unsteady feet.

  Then came the rumbling.

  Directly under my feet. Even though I floated a good six inches above the red carpeted floor, I could feel the vibrations emanating upward. It sounded like a tank boring its way through the foundation.

  Nope.

  Not a tank.

  “Oh, shit.” I flew forward, passing through a bank of slots right before the section of floor I’d been hovering above broke open. Chunks of concrete and shreds of carpet flew in a geyser straight up to the ceiling. Through the hole rose a dragon’s head. The head was the size of a golf cart, covered in gray scales, a small row of wicked sharp horns above each of his yellow eyes like deadly brows. His slit pupils flicked from side to side as he thrashed his head about in an effort to wrench the rest of his body out through the hole.

  I floated backward like an ice skater, transfixed as the Detroit dragon rose out of the cracking and crumbling floor, first clearing his shoulders, then his front legs, then his folded wings which whooshed open the moment they came free.

  The wings knocked slot machines aside as if they were made of paper. Quarters and half dollars flew in all directions, scattering like candy from a busted piñata, the tinkling sound like a thousand wind chimes caught in a storm.

  People screamed and ran.

  A few were knocked aside along with the slots, bodies flung like rag dolls, hitting the walls or tumbling along the floor. I heard more than a few limbs crack.

  The dragon was oblivious to his destruction. He twisted and bucked until his entire body came out of the hole and he crouched among the debris around him. His tail flicked, punching a hole in the far wall where it got stuck for a moment. The dragon whipped his tail free and took most of the wall with it.

  Pieces of the ceiling rained down.

  Most of the people who had avoided getting struck by flying chunks of floor and slot machines quickly cleared the room. Screams and shouts rippled outward through the casino as the news traveled that a dragon had come up through the floor.

  The dragon swung his head from side to side, scanning the room. Until his serpentine eyes found me.

  He peeled his lips back from a set of teeth that would make a great white weep with envy—right before it swam away in terror. The dragon huffed, and smoke blew from his wide nostrils on the end of his snout.

  “Oh shit,” I said again, reduced for the moment to a two word vocabulary.

  The dragon opened his mouth and sprayed a plume of fire at me.

  The ghost blood was still working, so the flames didn’t touch me. They did, however, melt everything around me. The piles of loose change turned to liquid metal. The carpet was obliterated to nothing and the floor underneath was scorched black.

  When the dragon finished breathing, I hovered in a ring of fire and embers.

  The dragon narrowed his eyes when he saw me unscathed. A growl grew in the back of his throat until it burst out his mouth in a full-on roar. His raging voice shook the rafters.

  It also shook me out of my daze.

  Time to split.

  I turned and floated my ghostly body out of there. I paid no attention to what I flew through or who I passed. I did not pause or hesitate until I had cleared the casino entirely and burst out into the humid night.

  I wished I hadn’t used valet because I had no idea where my car was. The last thing I wanted to do was search the parking structure with a raging dragon out to get me. I could fly away, but I wouldn’t get far before I lost the potion’s effects.

  So what? I could put significant distance between me and the casino. Then catch a cab after the ghost blood wore off. I’d come back tomorrow. Or a week from now. Who knew? Maybe I would get lucky and the MGM’s parking structure would still be intact with my car somewhere inside. Either that, or I’d find a giant crater in the heart of what had once been Detroit’s Chinatown.

  I whirled around, ready to soar away from the casino.

  Then I heard the screams. I heard the crashing and breaking. And the angry roar of the dragon. In his rampage to find me, he would tear that place apart. He didn’t care what he destroyed or who he hurt. Anger had completely blinded him. I knew dragons took treasure stealers seriously, but I had no idea how insane it could make them.

  I had been joking about coming back to a crater. But I had a feeling Kuan-Yin Chern might live up to the joke if he didn’t find me.

  I couldn’t leave him to do that. Couldn’t let these folks suffer for my actions.

  Damn it.

  With a ghostly sigh, I sailed back into the casino. By this point, the dragon had crashed his way out of the slot room. I couldn’t tell what room he had plowed into, though, because he had thoroughly trounced it. Video poker maybe?

  I floated into range and waved the brand over my head like a flag. “Hey, Chern. Right here big boy.”

  The dragon swung his head around and glared at me.

  “Let's take this outside,” I said.

  The dragon narrowed his eyes. More smoke plumed from his nostrils. A sound like an idling semi truck engine rumbled in his throat.

  I slowly glided backward, keeping eye contact, making sure he saw where I was headed. Instead of p
assing through the walls, I made my way through the actual passageways of the casino.

  The dragon chuffed and followed, keeping low either in readiness to pounce or to keep from crashing through the ceiling. Since he hadn’t shown any concern for the casino’s structural integrity yet, I went with pounce.

  I only hoped I could lead him out before the ghost blood petered out and he could eat me.

  He crept through the casino’s corridors as I led him back toward the exit. His wings brushed the walls and ripped giant gouges down them as he came.

  It seemed to take forever, but I eventually led him out the casino’s valet entrance, which he promptly destroyed on his way out. The few valets on duty ran screaming.

  When I floated out onto Third Avenue, I stopped in the middle of the street by the median with its well manicured grass and trees. Small spotlight in the ground illuminated the median’s landscaping. This time of night, there wasn’t any traffic. Me and the dragon had the street to ourselves.

  “You can’t touch me, you know,” I said, craning my neck back as he approached. One large scaled paw stepped onto a compact Ford and crushed it under his weight. Bits of glass from the car’s windows sprayed through my ghostly form.

  The dragon lowered his head until his snout came mere inches from my face. The heat from his sulfur-scented breath made the air ripple like water between us.

  “Might as well give it up,” I said.

  He huffed. Snot blew from his nostril and landed, sizzling, on the pavement.

  “No need to hurt anyone else. This is over.”

  The choppy grunt that came from him next sounded kind of like a laugh.

  Then I noticed the tingling across my skin and realized it was a laugh. Dragon’s are old. They know magic more than most anything that still walks the Earth. He had sensed the ghost blood’s effects wearing off before I had.