The Scarlet Dragon Saga

by J. P. Rice

  The Morrigan leaned over and adjusted the red laces of her black leather boots. “Well, I’m not just going to sit on my ass and let this happen.”

  “Great.” Hades chuckled and swirled his drink around, staring at it intently. “Let me know how that all works out for the two of you.”

  “Who had possession of Gareth last?” I asked, unable to hold my tongue any longer.

  Hades set his drink down and pushed his chair back. “Man goes by the name of John Jenkins. Lives in your city,” he said and tilted his gleaming bald head at me, referring to Pittsburgh. He opened a desk drawer and pulled out a little scrap of paper with some writing on it. After some hesitation, he finally slid it across the desk.

  Before Hades pulled his hand away, the Morrigan jumped up and snatched it off the tabletop. She turned to me, “He lives in the South Side.”

  “Do you know anything about this guy?” I asked Hades.

  He responded immediately, “He supposedly has Dank Artistry tattoos all over his arms. As far as the reports say. Is any this to be trusted? Who knows? No one I know has ever heard of him before.”

  The Dank Artistry was the form of magic practiced by the demons of the Red Cavern. Drawing from demonic spirits made sense since they had a wealth of power and knowledge.

  The Morrigan said, “I’d bet they are drawing on dark and pure spirits.”

  “I won’t take that bet,” Hades said with a reserved smile as he tapped the rim of his drink glass. “You might not get Gareth to talk, but I think you can squeeze some information out of this Jenkins fellow.”

  “Perhaps we’ll stop by his house for a nice, friendly conversation,” the Morrigan said, capping the statement with an evil, drawn-out laugh.

  I wasn’t ready to believe some random guy that no one had heard of was the driving force behind this. If the Morrigan and Hades didn’t understand what was going on, someone at the top of the food chain had to be pulling the strings. John Jenkins was nothing more than a puppet. He had someone else’s hand up his ass, as Owen would say. A puppet could always be made to talk against his or her will, though.

  Or it could be someone running a distraction to set up a larger plan. Which was a scary prospect. You never knew. However, this was the only clue we had, so it would be a dereliction of duty to sit on our hands with this info. My hopes weren’t exactly sky high on this one.

  I also had to be careful around Pittsburgh. The Morrigan had told me I was in the clear with the Celtic Gods regarding my father’s murder. However, I wouldn’t put it past my mother to continue blaming me. If she could convince a few Gods it was me, my days would be numbered.

  Running scared wasn’t in my blood. Plus, I couldn’t hide from the Gods if they really wanted to find me.

  It was time to pay John Jenkins a visit.

  Chapter 9

  The Morrigan and I didn’t detect and living beings inside the apartment. Titania picked the lock easily and pushed against the door, slowly cracking it open. I held my nose with my gloved hand upon entering. The Morrigan and I were wearing gloves to avoid leaving fingerprints, although I doubted ours were in any human database.

  The pungent body odor laced with an unctuous gaminess intensified and made my eyes water. It was the kind of funk that got stuck in your nostrils, making your stomach constantly churn. The three of us entered a messy living room, and as I looked around, it appeared as if someone had robbed him. Had someone already found Gareth?

  “Little funky in here. Let’s open some windows,” I said, and we popped open a couple of windows in the living room.

  “It’s not that bad, you baby.” The Morrigan smirked. I’d almost forgotten she was the Goddess of Death.

  I went into the kitchen. The smell wasn’t as strong in there. Still a sloppy mess, though. Titania landed next to me and walked under the table, looking for clues.

  “Come check this out,” the Morrigan called from the bedroom.

  I walked through the small living room, entered the bedroom and gasped. A man had been hanged in the center of the room. The noose dangled only a few feet from the ceiling. He had either been hanged naked or his clothes had been removed after he’d died. The tall man’s toes scraped the floor as he swung gently back and forth, occasionally spinning in a circle. The overpowering funk from the body caused me to gag and back out of the room.

  It differed from most dead human bodies I’d sniffed before. Either he wasn’t human, or I’d never encountered a body at this stage of putrefaction.

  This stuff didn’t bother the Morrigan, who strolled leisurely out of the room. She asked, “So what do you think?”

  “Let me catch myself so we can go back in and check out the tattoos Hades mentioned.” I pulled my shirt sleeve out through my coat and held it over my nose. In a nasally tone, I said, “All right. Let’s go back in.”

  We entered the room again, and I located the tattoo on his right biceps. Oh, and there was one on his other arm too. I held my breath and moved in close. Even on a dead body, I could tell that the tattoos were new because of the raw skin around them.

  Both matching tattoos had the cursive words, Dank Artistry, with the symbol in the middle. There was a big problem though. “You see this,” I said to the Morrigan pointing at the tattoo.

  She squinted and said, “That is not the right symbol. No crossbones.”

  I backed away from the body and said, “It looks like whoever killed him, also tattooed him and then went the extra step to make sure he was naked so that everyone would see his tats. He doesn’t look like Lee Majors, but we found our fall guy.”

  The Morrigan gestured to the door, and I followed her into the living room. She commented, “It looks like this John Jenkins got in over his head.”

  “You can see right through this staged suicide too, right?” I asked and dropped to my hands and knees.

  The Morrigan cleared her throat and spit on the floor. As I searched under the couch, she said, “Seems like people always kill themselves right after they find out some juicy information. Strange how that works. I guess we should look around for the dagger, but I’m pretty sure that’s why this guy lost his life.”

  I wanted to include my new friend, so I suggested, “Titania, why don’t you check trash cans? Let’s see if these murderers left us any clues to go on.”

  “You got it.” Titania zipped into the kitchen.

  The Morrigan closed one window and stopped the arctic blast. “I can use the Raven’s eye that I embedded in you to run a check on fingerprints. I’d bet their prints are all over this guy’s clothes. We just need to find them and then scan them through the raven’s eye.”

  I shifted my vision to another dimension so that I could detect fingerprints on the body. Pinching my nostrils, I entered the room again. Much to my surprise, I couldn’t find a single fingerprint, not only on the body, but anywhere in the entire room.

  I went back out to the living room and stared at his coffee table. Completely clean. That meant the professional killers had cleansed the entire apartment before leaving. I gave up on tracking down fingerprints and searched the apartment for other clues.

  I ripped the cushions off the couch. “Bingo.”

  “What?” the Morrigan asked, pulling her head out of the closet.

  I held up three used death cards, and the Morrigan’s eyes widened with interest. “Well, well, well.”

  I handed them to the Morrigan and noticed another one jammed in the fold under the armrest. I plucked it out and tears filled my eyes. With a trembling hand, I held up my father’s death card.

  Never the comforting one, the Morrigan slapped me on the back and said, “We’ll get the bastard responsible.”

  It was best not to dwell on his death right now. “What if it’s a her?”

  “Girls can be bastards too. Don’t be sexist.”

  “I was aiming for the opposite.” We searched around more, and I found floor plans for a laboratory used for producing the death cards. “This is obviously fake t
oo.”

  The Morrigan agreed, “John Jenkins was the fall guy, no doubt about it. The people responsible are trying to make us think that it was just this guy working alone. Then they’re trying to make the cops think that it was someone mixed up with the demons. Maybe this isn’t just a couple of two-bit practitioners, because they’ve covered several angles.”

  I pointed out, “They didn’t think about the future. If these crimes keep happening, ole Johnny, can’t be the perpetrator considering he’s dead. So either the framers stop the killings or it kind of blows their cover.”

  “I still can’t find much to go on. It looks like we really need to dig into John Jenkins’ past and find out who he was rolling with,” she said, searching behind the couch. She popped her head back out. “He’s got the fake Dank Artistry tattoos, but I don’t think for a second that this is a Red Cavern operation.”

  “I was thinking the same thing. Those tattoos are fresh and make for the perfect alibi for the cops to call him a devil worshipper. Too bad nobody expected two old salts to be on the trail.”

  The Morrigan smiled wide, always comfortable around the dead. “Bloodhounds ain’t got shit on a couple of blackbirds like us.”

  I argued, “I’m more of a scarlet dragon than a blackbird.”

  “You can be both. Both are predatory creatures. Just like us.”

  I agreed with her to avoid an argument and we went back to combing the area for clues. The killer or killers had done a good job covering their tracks. The assisted suicide was obvious, but they hadn’t left a single fingerprint or evidence for us to go on.

  I was ready to give up when Titania zoomed into the room with a little piece of paper.

  “I think I may have found something worthy,” she announced and flew over to me. She extended the little ticket, and I took it from her.

  The Morrigan moved in closer and looked over my shoulder. It was a pawnshop ticket. I pulled it closer to our eyes and read the words.

  Bam Bam Bigelow Pawn

  3210 Bigelow Boulevard

  Item # 213741

  Locker # 4439

  Processed by Jake Fletcher

  I flipped it over and it had $22 Loan written in black Sharpie.

  I turned to the Morrigan. “What could this possibly be for?”

  “One big-mouth dagger, I would assume. Perhaps he knew the walls were closing in and got rid of the item that could get him killed. Gareth isn’t really anything special without the talking. His two ruby eyes hold the only value and they aren’t worth much. $22 sounds about right for what more or less amounts to a kitchen knife with two tiny gems. Probably just loaned out the value of the rubies.”

  Titania flew right in front of our faces and hovered. “Exactly. That’s exactly what I was going to say. She just beat me to it.” Titania always wanted to be in the middle of everything.

  I looked around at the trashed apartment, and said, “We should hurry. Who knows how safe it is in a pawnshop?”

  “I was going to say that, too,” Titania added as we left the murder scene.

  Apparently, John Jenkins knew some heavy hitters were on his trail. I surmised that he had tried to hide the dagger at the pawnshop, basically burying it out in the open. It would be sitting right in the middle of the city under everyone’s noses.

  That left one problem. Eventually, if John didn’t pay back the loan, the pawnshop owners would sell the item. I guessed he was banking on the fact that the knife didn’t appear valuable enough to warrant prime real estate in the main display cases. In all likelihood, the pawnshop owner would pluck out those rubies to sell separately and toss the worthless dagger.

  WE CRUISED ACROSS TOWN and parked in the lot behind the Bam Bam Bigelow Pawn shop. I turned to Titania in the backseat. “You wait here. I wish it was different.”

  Pittsburgh had started accepting more supernatural life than I’d expected, but creatures that resembled insects were in constant danger of being swatted.

  She lowered her head. “I understand.”

  There were several cars in the lot and most of them looked abandoned. The rusty ones appeared as though they hadn’t been driven in a while and only two vehicles seemed operable. The beat-up cars had several inches of snow on the hoods, windshields and roofs, but I could see the rusted bodies. It appeared the pawnshop bought junkers and tried to fix them up.

  The Morrigan and I got out of the car and hustled around the building to the front door. Shivering, I opened the door and passed through the security sensor that released a pleasing tone. It did the same for the Morrigan. If it only knew.

  The security guard lifted his chin sharply with the ‘what’s up signal’ as we passed him and walked up to the glass display cases with an employee standing behind them. I peeked back at the security guard with short blond hair.

  He was a mountain of a man, tall and husky, but certainly no match for the Morrigan or me. He grabbed the giant headphones around his neck. I heard music coming from them as he lifted them over his ears and adjusted them for comfort. Then he closed his eyes and bobbed his head.

  Quite the lackadaisical security guard considering death herself was looming just eight feet away. I focused on the employee behind the counter, who was inspecting a silver ring. He was wearing a set of glasses in the form of headgear with a single eye magnifier on it.

  The man took the eyewear off and set it on the glass counter. He looked up at us with a big smile of crooked teeth and said, “How can I help yinz lovely ladies on this frosty day?”

  People had called the Morrigan and I many things in our day. Lovely or lady was never one of them. I grinned at the man and said, “We’re here to pay off a loan and pick up an item.”

  I grabbed the ticket out of my pocket and set it on the counter. The employee picked it up and squinted, holding the ticket an inch from his eyes. He quickly got frustrated and riffled through his back pocket. He produced an eye-glass case, opened it and put on the pair of spectacles.

  He read the ticket again, and said, “Are you making a payment or paying the whole thing off?”

  “We’re going to pay it all so we can take the item back,” I answered.

  “Looks like that’s gonna be, $22,” he said, walking toward the cash register at the end of the counter.

  As I walked down to meet him, I opened my purse and grabbed a twenty and a ten. I slapped the money down on the counter and said, “Keep the change.” I was a generous tipper.

  “Well now. That there’s much appreciated. I just gotta run into the back and grab this out of the locker,” he said, shaking the ticket right under his chin. “Be right back.”

  The gentleman went into the back and I waited impatiently to talk to this dagger. All we had to do now was shake down Gareth and find out who was behind this operation. If we hurried, we could be done by week’s end and I could concentrate on ending the werewolf-vampire war. Everything was falling into place.

  The employee screamed from the back, “Thief. Help. Call the cops.”

  The Morrigan and I wasted no time and hopped over the counter. I looked back and saw the security guard with his eyes closed, bobbing his head. We hauled ass into the back and encountered a maze-like room of storage lockers for the pawned items.

  The man screamed again, “Holy shit. Are you Bigfoot? Why are you stealing that knife? It’s worthless.”

  I tried to follow the man’s voice but kept running into dead ends in this pawn shop labyrinth.

  I snaked around the dull yellow lockers and came out to an open area on the other side of the storage facility. The employee was lying face down on the ground. I looked ahead, and the back door slammed shut. Not wasting any time, I hopped over the employee and reached the back door a few seconds later.

  I pushed down on the flat knob and kicked open the door. With the Morrigan right on my heels, I searched around the parking lot for the culprit. The Morrigan pointed to some fresh tracks in the snow that appeared to belong to Sasquatch.

  A track of giant
, three-toed footprints led to the left. Like a men’s size 25. I didn’t see the monstrosity anywhere as my head jerked left and right. Were the prints a decoy? I hadn’t seen the creature before the door slammed shut. A foul odor that resembled feces hung in the winter air and gave me an idea.

  I ran over to my Jeep and opened the door. Titania flew out, and asked, “What’s the word, hummingbird? Everything all right?”

  “I need you to see if you can smell or hear anything in the vicinity. Specifically, a big stinky monster,” I instructed.

  “Anything for my best friend,” she announced and darted off. She flew over to a pile of shoveled snow taller than me.

  Titania zipped back over to us. She whispered, “Something is hiding under that pile of snow.”

  The three of us stalked carefully toward the pile. As we got closer, I heard heavy breathing. Without warning, chunks of compact snow showered up from the pile and into the air. A large figure materialized in front of me.

  I took a few steps back and eyeballed what had to be an eight-foot creature covered in brown fur. The best way to describe it was a cross between Bigfoot and Chewbacca. The beast growled and raised his hands above his head, the magic dagger clutched in his huge right hand.

  “I’ll take care of this,” the Morrigan said and turned to one of the junker cars in the lot. Using telekinesis, she picked up the rusty vehicle and sent it hurtling toward the hirsute creature. Nimble as a dancer, he moved three steps to his right and did a front somersault to avoid the car. The vehicle cratered into the earth and crumpled like an accordion.

  The Morrigan picked up a rusty station wagon, and as it floated in the air, she waited for Bigfoot to make a move. He crouched down and got on the front of his feet, ready to dodge the next offering. The car levitated about ten feet above the ground as the Morrigan decided how to launch her attack.

  Without warning, the car flew across the lot, the front grill screaming toward Bigfoot. From the crouched position he jumped and launched himself about fifteen feet in the air. The car flew under him, smashing into the snow and tearing apart the earth. Two tires fell off the vehicle and one rolled harmlessly across the lot, leaving a track in the snow.