Dragon Blood

by Linsey Hall

  The temple containing the daggers had been built by supernaturals over a thousand years ago. Like other temples of its kind, it was magically protected. Clarence’s intel would save us a ton of time and damage to the temple if we could get around the enchantments rather than breaking through them.

  “Dvarapala. A big one.”

  “A gatekeeper?” I’d seen one of the giant, stone monster statues at another temple before.

  “Yep.” He nodded slowly. “Impossible to get through. The temple’s as big as the Titanic—hidden from humans, of course—but no one’s been inside in centuries, they say.”

  Hidden from humans was a given. They had no idea supernaturals existed, and we wanted to keep it that way.

  “So how’d you figure out the way in?” Del asked. “And why haven’t you gone in? Bet there’s lots of stuff you could fence in there. Temples are usually full of treasure.”

  “A bit of pertinent research told me how to get in. And I’d rather sell the entrance information and save my hide. It won’t be easy to get past the booby traps in there.”

  Hide? Snakeskin, more like. Though he had a point. I didn’t think he’d last long trying to get through a temple on his own.

  “So? Spill it,” I said, anxious to get going.

  He leaned in, and the overpowering scent of cologne and sweat hit me. I grimaced, held my breath, then leaned forward to hear his whispers.

  As soon as Clarence walked away, the communications charms around my neck vibrated. I jumped, then groaned. Only one person had access to this charm.

  I shoved the small package Clarence had given me into my short’s pocket and pressed my fingertips to the comms charm, igniting its magic.

  “Hello, Mr. Oribis.” I swallowed my bile at having to be polite.

  “Girls,” he grumbled.

  Nix made a gagging face. We hated when he called us girls.

  “Change of plans. You need to go to the temple tonight.”

  “What? But it’s dark. We’re going tomorrow.” He never changed the plans on us. This was weird.

  “I need the daggers sooner. Go tonight.”

  My mind raced. “The jungle is more dangerous in the dark. We’ll do it if you pay us more.”

  “Twice the usual,” Del said.

  A tinny laugh echoed from the charm. “Pay you more? You’re lucky I pay you at all.”

  I gritted my teeth and said, “But we’ve been working for you for four years without a raise.”

  “And you’ll be working for me for four more years. And four after that. And four after that.” Annoyance lurked in his tone. So did his low opinion of us.

  Del’s and Nix’s brows crinkled in distress. We’d always suspected that OMB wasn’t planning to let us buy our freedom, but he’d dangled that carrot in front of us. What he’d just said made that seem like a big fat lie, though. One we could add to the many others he’d told us.

  An urge to rebel, to stand up to the bully who controlled our lives, seethed in my chest.

  “No,” I said. “You treat us like crap, and I’m sick of it. Pay us fairly.”

  “I treat you like crap, as you so eloquently put it, because that is exactly what you are. FireSouls.” He spit the last word, imbuing it with so much venom I thought it might poison me.

  I flinched, frantically glancing around to see if anyone in the bar had heard what he’d called us. Fortunately, they were all distracted. That didn’t stop my heart from thundering in my ears as rage replaced the fear. I opened my mouth to shout at him, but snapped it shut. I was too afraid of pissing him off.

  “Get it by dawn,” he barked. “Or I’m turning one of you in to the Order of the Magica. Prison will be the least of your worries. They might just execute you.”

  I gasped. “You wouldn’t.” Our government hunted and imprisoned—or destroyed—FireSouls.

  “Oh, I would. And I’d enjoy it. The three of you have been more trouble than you’re worth. You’re getting cocky, thinking you have a say in things like this. Get the daggers by dawn, or one of you ends up in the hands of the Order.”

  My skin chilled, and the floor felt like it had dropped out from under me. He was serious.

  “Fine.” I bit off the end of the word, barely keeping my voice from shaking. “We’ll do it tonight. Del will transport them to you as soon as we have them.”

  “Excellent.” Satisfaction rang in his tone, and my skin crawled. “Don’t disappoint me, or you know what will happen.”

  The magic in the charm died. He’d broken the connection.

  I collapsed back against the chair. In times like these, I wished I had it in me to kill. Sure, I offed demons when they came at me on our jobs, but that was easy because they didn’t actually die. Killing their earthly bodies just sent them back to their hell.

  But I couldn’t kill another supernatural. Not even OMB. It might get us out of this lifetime of servitude, but I didn’t have it in me. And what if I failed? I was too afraid of his rage—and the consequences—if I didn’t succeed.

  “Shit, shit, shit.” Nix’s green eyes were stark in her pale face. “He means it.”

  “Yeah.” Del’s voice shook. “We need to get those daggers.”

  “Now,” I said.

  “I wish I could just conjure a forgery,” Nix said. “I really don’t want to go out into the jungle tonight. Getting past the Dvarapala in the dark will suck.”

  Nix was a conjurer, able to create almost anything using just her magic. Massive or complex things, like airplanes or guns, were outside of her ability, but a couple of daggers wouldn’t be hard.

  Trouble was, they were a magical artifact, enchanted with the ability to return to whoever had thrown them. Like boomerangs. Though Nix could conjure the daggers, we couldn’t enchant them.

  “We need to go. We only have six hours until dawn.” I grabbed my short swords from the table and stood, shoving them into the holsters strapped to my back.

  A hush descended over the crowded bar.

  I stiffened, but the sound of the staticky TV in the corner made me relax. They weren’t interested in me. Just the news, which was probably being routed through a dozen techno-witches to get this far into the jungle.

  The grave voice of the female reporter echoed through the quiet bar. “The FireSoul was apprehended outside of his apartment in Magic’s Bend, Oregon. He is currently in the custody of the Order of the Magica, and his trial is scheduled for tomorrow morning. My sources report that execution is possible.”

  I stifled a crazed laugh. Perfect timing. Just what we needed to hear after OMB’s threat. A reminder of what would happen if he turned us into the Order of the Magica. The hush that had descended over the previously rowdy crowd—the kind of hush you get at the scene of a big accident—indicated what an interesting freaking topic this was. FireSouls were the bogeymen. I was the bogeyman, even though I didn’t use my powers. But as long as no one found out, we were safe.

  My gaze darted to Del and Nix. They nodded toward the door. It was definitely time to go.

  As the newscaster turned her report toward something more boring and the crowd got rowdy again, we threaded our way between the tiny tables and chairs.

  I shoved the heavy wooden door open and sucked in a breath of sticky jungle air, relieved to be out of the bar. Night creatures screeched, and moonlight filtered through the trees above. The jungle would be a nice place if it weren’t full of things that wanted to kill us.

  “We’re never escaping him, are we?” Nix said softly.

  “We will.” Somehow. Someday. “Let’s just deal with this for now.”

  We found our motorcycles, which were parked in the lot with a dozen other identical ones. They were hulking beasts with massive, all-terrain tires meant for the jungle floor. We’d done a lot of work in Southeast Asia this year, and these were our favored forms of transportation in this part of the world.

  Del could transport us, but it was better if she saved her power. It wasn’t infinite, though it
did regenerate. But we’d learned a long time ago to save Del’s power for our escape. Nothing worse than being trapped in a temple with pissed off guardians and a few tripped booby traps.

  We’d scouted out the location of the temple earlier that day, so we knew where to go.

  I swung my leg over Secretariat—I liked to name my vehicles—and kicked the clutch. The engine roared to life. Nix and Del followed, and we peeled out of the lot, leaving the dingy yellow light of the bar behind.

  Our headlights illuminated the dirt road as we sped through the night. Huge fig trees dotted the path on either side, their twisted trunks and roots forming an eerie corridor. Elephant-ear sized leaves swayed in the wind, a dark emerald that gleamed in the light.

  Jungle animals howled, and enormous lightning bugs flitted along the path. They were too big to be regular bugs, so they were most likely some kind of fairy, but I wasn’t going to stop to investigate. There were dangerous creatures in the jungle at night—one of the reasons we hadn’t wanted to go now—and in our world, fairies could be considered dangerous.

  Especially if you called them lightning bugs.

  A roar sounded in the distance, echoing through the jungle and making the leaves rustle on either side as small animals scurried for safety.

  The roar came again, only closer.

  Then another, and another.

  “Oh shit,” I muttered. This was bad.

  ~~~

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  Author’s Note

  Thank you for reading Dragon Blood! If you have read any of my other books, you might be familiar with the fact that I like to include historical places and mythological elements. I always discuss them in the author’s note.

  There were a few interesting elements in Dragon Blood. First, the pub in Nottingham is based upon a pub called the Ye Olde Trip to Jerusalem, which was established in 1189 according to the current owners. It is built against the side of Castle Rock, upon which sits Nottingham Castle. The pub is attached to several caves carved out of the soft sandstone, and patrons can sit in tiny rooms built right into the earth. The pub name is a reference to the Holy Wars that were being fought during the time that the pub was first established. Though there is no documentation to verify that the pub was in fact established in 1189, the caves in the pub were possibly used as a brew house for the castle and may date to around 1067, when the castle was built.

  In the book, I modified the name of the pub to be Ye Olde Trip to Brigadoon. I wanted a magical take on the name, and Brigadoon is a magical Scottish village that rises out of the mists for one day every year. The concep came from a 1947 musical with the same name. It was made into a movie in the 1950’s.

  The island of Eleuthera is a real place in the Bahamas that is inhabited by many kind people (no supernaturals that I know of, but then, they probably wouldn’t reveal themselves to me anyway). There are many caves on the island, and the pirates’ cave was based upon those. The pink sand beach that the siren led them to was inspired by French Leave Beach, which has beautiful pink sand made from the conch shells that are so common in the ocean around the island.

  Aeri’s fondness for the scientific names of marine life was apparent during the shark scene. Galeocerdo cuvier is the Tiger shark and Carcharhinus leucas is the Bull Shark. These are two of the most dangerous types of sharks, and they do happen to live in the Bahamas, but I should note that under most circumstances, sharks are not dangerous. They do not seek humans out as food, and most incidences of shark bites are due to the shark feeling confused or threatened. I’m still scared of sharks, though.

  In this book, there were three scenes scenes inspired by Die Hard. Did you spot them? They were the elevator scene, the glass room scene, and the dangle-the-villain-off-the-roof scene.

  One of the most dangerous scenes in the book—the one where Aeri jumps off the boat to cut the weeds away from the propellor—was inspired by my mother. When I was young, my parents had a sailboat named Bonnie Doon (if you ever check the publishing company for my books, you’ll notice that we named it after the sailboat). The Bonnie Doon had a propellor, and one night, a rope became tangled around the blades as we were powering through Sodus Bay, in Lake Ontario. It was dark out, and the water was cold, but we weren’t going anywhere if someone didn’t cut the rope off.

  Of course my mother volunteered. One of my most formative memories is of my mother, wearing her teal swimsuit, climbing down into the water with a knife between her teeth. My mother is pretty badass.

  I think that’s it for the history and mythology in Dragon Blood—at least the big things. I hope you enjoyed the book and will come back for more of Aeri and Mari’s adventures.

  For Regena and Charles, with love.

  Acknowledgments

  Thank you, Ben, for everything. There would be no books without you.

  Thank you to Jena O’Connor and Lindsey Loucks for your excellent editing. The book is immensely better because of you!

  Thank you to Orina Kafe for the beautiful cover art.

  About Linsey

  Before becoming a writer, Linsey Hall was a nautical archaeologist who studied shipwrecks from Hawaii and the Yukon to the UK and the Mediterranean. She credits fantasy and historical romances with her love of history and her career as an archaeologist. After a decade of tromping around the globe in search of old bits of stuff that people left lying about, she settled down and started penning her own romance novels. Her Dragon’s Gift series draws upon her love of history and the paranormal elements that she can't help but include.

  Copyright

  This is a work of fiction. All reference to events, persons, and locale are used fictitiously, except where documented in historical record. Names, characters, and places are products of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.

  Copyright 2019 by Linsey Hall

  Published by Bonnie Doon Press LLC

  All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form, except in instances of quotation used in critical articles or book review. Where such permission is sufficient, the author grants the right to strip any DRM which may be applied to this work.

  ISBN - 978-1-942085—83-6

  Linsey@LinseyHall.com

  www.LinseyHall.com

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