Celesse lay in bed, looking out at the downtown skyline. She felt rosy and didn’t want to get out of bed, even though she had at least five phone calls to make to donors. She had to schedule meetings. And at least one speech had to be rescheduled.
What was her future with Lucan?
She liked to think she had made an honest man out of him, but in the back of her mind, she knew better.
The election was their horizon. Though it was weeks away, its weight bore down on her and she knew she couldn’t lose it.
She couldn’t lose him.
All her responsibilities as campaign manager raced across her mind again, and already she felt guilty for not being on her phone.
But she had been through hell these last few days.
She closed her eyes and told herself that she’d sleep for only a few minutes...
Bartholomew and Tony took the elevator from the restaurant. They rode from the top floor all the way down to the lower level of the high-rise, switching elevators twenty stories down.
Bartholomew was festering.
Tony was silent and stayed out of his way.
Their t-shirts were wet from washing dishes.
Normally in an establishment like this, the police would have just taken them to jail for not having the money to pay the restaurant bill. But Lucan had sway with the chef, and he had urged him to offer a deal. It only made the incident the more humiliating.
“He’s a bastard,” Bartholomew said. “He gives elves everywhere a bad name. I can’t understand why you thought you could trust him.”
Tony said nothing.
The elevator stopped in the parking garage.
They walked in silence through the garage, which was empty except for a few cars. It was dark and cold. The green walls gave the area a sickly glow.
“What do we do now?” Tony asked. “I told you we should’ve just left it alone.”
“Grimoire is going to pay,” Bartholomew said.
“Just because you don’t agree with him politically doesn’t mean—”
Bartholomew shushed him.
Ahead, a man was sitting on the hood of their van. He wore a suit and sunglasses, and he tapped his palm with a baseball bat.
The car’s windows were busted and the panels were dented in.
“You Bartholomew?” the man in the suit asked.
Bart stood in front of Tony. “Who’s asking?”
The man jumped off the hood of the car. “We want to talk to you.”
Several men in suits stepped out of the shadows with baseball bats resting against their shoulders.
Ennius Grimoire stood on a platform in a park giving a powerful speech. He walked across the stage, talking about the future of Magic Hope City under his third term. A crowd of thousands applauded him, and as he railed on his nephew, Norwyn’s silhouette hovered around him, barely visible.
Miri and Laner met at the Ancestral Bogs, about a quarter of a mile from the site of Old Dark’s tomb.
Miri could see the felled trees from the mound she stood on. She had sprayed herself with bug spray and she was ready for the heat.
Laner wore a sun hat, t-shirt, and shorts. He carried the papers with him.
“You ready?” he asked.
“Ready as I’ll ever be,” Miri said.
They descended the mound where a group of researchers waited for them.
As they approached, Miri felt the familiar pangs in her stomach and wondered if she was doing the right thing. She straightened her hat, smiled, and waved at her new team.
Dark screamed as Gus and Orion hit him with another paralysis spell. They fastened his muzzle on, and when they left the room, a janitor entered, making a quick sweep and mop of the cage.
Gus and Orion left and told the janitor, a short elven woman, to be quick.
She mopped the floor, never taking her eyes off Dark.
She began to polish the bars as Dark regained his strength. Seeing the dragon start to move, she ran out of the cage and locked it just as Dark moved his legs.
He roared and lunged towards her, banging his claws on the bars. She stumbled back, startled, and struck a pile of grimoires a few feet away from the cage. The stack toppled over and the spell cards flew everywhere.
Gus and Orion ran into the room, and Dark laughed at them. They cleaned up the grimoires and used a forklift to move the stack further back.
When they shut off the lights and left Dark alone, he lifted his claws and grinned at the small stack of grimoires that he’d stolen in the shuffle.
“Now this is interesting,” he said, holding up one of the grimoires to his eye.
TO BE CONTINUED…
If you want to be notified when Michael La Ronn’s next novel is released and get other cool stuff, please sign up for his mailing list by visiting: http://bit.ly/1r6kNTG Your email address will never be shared and you can unsubscribe at any time.
Authors live and die by reviews. If you enjoyed the book, please consider leaving a review wherever you purchased it. Even just a few lines about your thoughts on the story would be immensely helpful to the author and other readers. Thank you!
Turn the page to read the first two chapters of Old Evil, the second book in the series.
Old Evil Excerpt
I
Old Dark had to wait longer than usual for the paralysis to wear off. Every limb of his body was frozen in a tense muscle spasm. He couldn’t move, and his body was suspended in the air, shaking uncontrollably as two men swept his cell and swapped out his meat buckets with fresh, bloody pork.
The men, Gus and Orion, had made sure their paralysis spell was extra effective this time. As they cleaned, they cursed at him.
“You think you can get out of here?”
“Where you gonna go, you stupid dragon?”
“You think we want to be in here cleaning up after you?”
They worked quickly. Dark was only able to move his eyes, and he followed the men’s every move.
They had grimoires in their pockets. Thin stacks.
Dark had gotten adept at observing them; just before they came into the cell, he would smell cigarette smoke, and then he would hear their footsteps down a hallway.
Then the doors would open.
Several steps more and then the lights would come on, blinding him temporarily.
By the time he could focus, they would be at his cell with grimoires in their hands. They wore the same uniform—white shirts with brown pants, and black skullcaps over their foreheads. Wheels of pink light sprouted in front of their faces, and then they would hit him with the spell, a blue ball of energy that rendered him immovable.
It was the same way every time, six times a day.
As he shook, he wished he could growl. The iron muzzle over his mouth dug into his scales, and they were raw from where the straps scratched him.
His jaws, shut closed for twenty hours a day, hurt like nothing he’d ever felt, a sharp, insistent ache that he couldn’t ignore.
His eye socket pulsed and throbbed, and he wished for his eye back. Once a day the men removed his eye patch and spread a tingling salve on it. It didn’t bother him as badly as it used to, but Dark didn’t know what was worse—his eye, his joints, his jaws, his scales, or his claws. Everything ached from confinement and old age.
Because, if Miri was to be believed, he was old. He was one thousand five hundred years old when he fell asleep; now, one thousand years had passed, and if it was true, he was now two thousand five hundred years old, the equivalent of a seventy-year-old man.
Gone were the days when he could fly.
Gone were the days when an entourage of dragons followed him everywhere.
If his parents were dead, he had no one to rely on.
He was a failure.
A dragon lord failure.
His claws arced in anger every time he thought this, but soon they relaxed, for there was nothing he could do. And so he sank deeper and deeper into despair and quiet rage.
> This time, as Gus and Orion zapped him, he was numb. He barely felt the energy pulsing through him, and he focused on the machinery several yards outside of the cage. He had learned to use one of the conveyor belts as a focal point. Every time his muscles seized up, his eyes wandered to the conveyor belt. It gave him a small comfort, and made the paralysis dissipate faster.
Gus and Orion tore off his muzzle and threw it on the floor.
It was time to eat.
The men clanged the cage shut and turned off the lights.
The paralysis wore off and a wave of relief spread through Dark’s body.
He felt the bulge in his throat.
He waited until Gus and Orion’s footsteps were far away, and then he waited a little longer to be sure they were gone.
He heaved, and his throat burned. He heaved once more, throwing his entire body into it. A stack of grimoires flew out of his mouth along with a spray of spit.
The white cards slid across the floor.
Dark had to rest several minutes before he could catch his breath. Finally, he picked himself up and snatched one of the cards off the ground.
This was his first chance to inspect them. He had managed to steal some grimoires in a scuffle.
The card he held was magical. He was sure of it. He had seen Gus and Orion use cards just like it many, many times.
But how did one use it?
He twirled it between his claws. The card was still smooth and glistening, despite having been hidden in his throat. One side was blank, and the other side had a three-dimensional pentagram that seemed to rise off the card stock if he held it the right way.
He imagined casting a spell. Suddenly, the card lit up and a ring of light surrounded his face.
“Oh, my…”
He stared in disbelief at the hundreds of runes that glowed in front of him. There were spells for everything—fire, ice, paralysis, and earth movement. Runes upon runes.
He had never seen anything like this.
As a dragon, he only had to think about the kind of spell he wanted to use, and then it happened. The key was remembering the cost of the spell.
This was a magical shortcut. Everything you needed was right here.
Dark selected a paralysis rune. A display in glowing letters appeared.
Paralysis
Stun your foe.
Cost: Numbness in the feet.
How were elves able to decode magic so quickly?
This was exactly what he had tried to stop in his reign. Elves would abuse magic, waste it on things like this. The less of it they were able to cast, the better.
He would have never allowed this.
He would have never let them manufacture these cards!
He growled at the thought of a thousand years passing by while he slept. How much better this world would have been if he had only been awake!
If only he could cast magic.
Could he?
When he had awakened in the catacombs, he had tried to cast a spell, but it backfired on him, damaging his claws.
The grimoires could be a temporary substitute for him. But how would he defend himself when he was in a cage? No, he needed offensive spells. These self-defense spells might work for Magic Eaters, but this was not the stuff of the aquifer, not the smooth, ancient spells that his mother and father had taught him…
He stopped thinking about magic, and the wheel of light dissolved.
As angry as the cards made him, they would have their use. He scooped the cards up and gathered them into a pile. Then he ate from the buckets of raw meat and drank warm water from the trough in his cell until he gained a little of his energy back.
A dragon living like a dog … that’s what they had done to him. Lucan Grimoire had made sure of it.
He was the dragon lord.
Pacing around his cage, he wondered how he could escape.
He tried to flap his wings. They were still in bandages, and he had a hard time commanding them to move.
His mind went back to the grimoires lying on the floor.
He grabbed one and activated a wheel of light. He cycled through the runes by dragging his claw across the air.
And then he found it.
Restore
Revitalize a wound.
Cost: Severe stinging that lasts for hours; fever dreams.
A crude version of a restoration spell. Surely this would not heal an entire body … or would it?
Dark tapped the grimoire, as he’d seen Gus, Orion, and Lucan do, and a shimmer of light engulfed the cage. Warmth gathered over his wings. It radiated throughout his entire body. He could get used to restoration like this. For the first time, all his pain went away.
But the feeling was short-lived. It burned off like alcohol on the skin. Then a wave of needles localized in his wings.
He yelled as the needle pain grew stronger.
On the night of his attack, elves had driven stakes into his wings. He grimaced as he remembered, reliving the pain as he dropped to the ground.
“Gah!”
He rolled across the floor, landing on his wings, pinning them between his body and the floor. The pressure helped somewhat, but the pain kept intensifying.
The lights turned on.
Dark scooped up the grimoires and swallowed them as fast as he could. The sharp edges of the cards cut his throat on the way down.
A few seconds later, Gus and Orion were in front of the cage. They struck him with a paralysis spell, and the stinging sensation mixed with the muscle spasms.
The men clamped the muzzle back on. They tightened the straps harder this time, and his cracked scales began to bleed.
“You want to keep making noise, we’ll make your life even more difficult,” Gus said.
They left him on the ground, moaning.
Had they been able to tell that he had used magic?
They weren’t paying attention. The brutes moved as if nothing had changed.
The lights turned off.
He lay on the ground, spasming.
The paralysis faded.
The stinging stopped.
Dark stared up at the iron beams in the ceiling. He imagined a starry nighttime sky just above, the heavens gleaming like they used to when he would pray from the depths of the Ancestral Bogs.
I will not break. I will not let them take my dignity.
I am the Dragon Lord.
He dug his claws into the floor, and with all his strength, he pulled himself to his feet. His legs trembled, and he didn’t know if they would hold him up.
He concentrated on his wings.
He willed them to move, imagined them flapping in his mind’s eye.
The bandages rustled.
His eyes widened.
His broken wing, bandaged and bloody, lifted.
The spell had worked.
He was a proper dragon now, with wings that moved!
Dark grinned and let the wing fall to his side.
He grabbed an empty bucket and filed his claws against it, sharpening them.
II
Lucan Grimoire walked through Skyscraper Park with his daughter, Madelaide, holding her hand.
The park was on the ninety-fifth floor of a skyscraper. Long bridges connected a diamond-shaped complex of several blue, glass skyscrapers. The bridges were lined with flowers and trees in planter boxes.
The path they walked on was lit by square LCD lights on the surface of the bridge, and by magical street lamps that glowed pink. The crescent moon was high in the sky, the stars like pinwheels of milky light. The air had the sweet smell of freshly watered greenery, and sprinklers sprayed fine mists of water on the plants at controlled intervals.
Lucan liked this place. It was one of the few places he could go in the city to be alone, and the tranquility was a welcome distraction from all the action in the last few days.
Madelaide let go of Lucan’s hand and looked over the bridge. Below, a shimmer of lights flickered as a cool ocean breeze blew across th
e city. The ocean and its endless horizon lay several buildings away, and they could hear the distant roar of the waves.
“What’s your wish?” Madelaide asked.
Lucan shrugged. “I didn’t know it was time to make a wish.”
“Last week we saw a shooting star, remember? You said you had to take a call, but that you’d make a wish next time.”
He didn’t remember that, but that’s what happened when you only had custody of your daughter on weekends. Some weekends. Building a billion-dollar business and running for governor tended to make you forget things.
“How could I forget?” Lucan asked, smiling. He joined her at the edge of the bridge and looked up into the navy sky with her. “I made my wish.”
“What did you wish for?”
“I’m not supposed to say.”
Madelaide’s blue hair glowed in the moonlight. The hair dye that he had bought for her was fading, replaced here and there with lustrous black streaks.
The breeze rippled her white dress. Her teeth were stained purple from eating magic pretzels. Lucan had taken her to a bakery for a late snack, feeling guilty for neglecting her these last few days. The pretzels had weird flavors, like turkey and gravy or beef stew, and they had a magical dye that made kids’ teeth change colors. It was a new fad that Lucan didn’t understand. But then again, there was a lot about kids these days he didn’t understand.
“You can tell me what you wished for,” Madelaide said. “It’s not a superstition. Miss Oakmire says so.”
“Miss Oakmire, of course. She’s your teacher, right?”
“No, Daddy. You never remember anything.”
“Heh. Heh. Of course I do. She’s the nanny.”
“That’s Miss Chriselda!”
“Oh, then I give up.”
“She’s my counselor, remember? Or wait, I mean—” Her face wrinkled up as if she’d just told a forbidden secret. “Oops.”
“Counselor!”
Two joggers passed by, and he waited until they were out of earshot.
Old Dark (The Last Dragon Lord Book 1) Page 20
