Fire Brand (City of Dragons Book 6)

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Fire Brand (City of Dragons Book 6) Page 10

by Val St. Crowe


  “What kind of questions?” said Henry. “You want an alibi? When did this crime take place? I rarely go anywhere, and my location can usually be vouched for by the servants who work here, so I think you’ll find you’re wrong about your theory.”

  “We know you didn’t kill anyone personally,” said Lachlan. “You aren’t one of the people that went into his hospital room the night he died. If you’re involved, you must have paid someone else to do it.”

  “Paid someone?” Henry laughed. “You think I’d waste money on trash like Beckett? Never.”

  “What’s your relationship with Paloma Stanley?” said Lachlan.

  “Who?” said Henry.

  Lachlan let out a breath and then sat back against the couch.

  Henry pointed at me. “You. You’re awfully quiet. Why are you here? And if he called you an associate, does that mean you’re a police officer too, or—”

  “I’m a consultant,” I said through clenched teeth. I was still seething mad at this guy.

  The door opened.

  “Oh, good,” said Henry. “The tea.”

  But instead of a woman with a tray of tea and cookies, a young man came into the room. He had a similar set of his eyes and teeth as Henry. They looked related.

  “Dad,” said the young man, “what are you doing?”

  “Oh, hello, Donovan. Just entertaining some visitors from the Sea City Police Department who think I murdered that gargoyle Beckett. As if killing him could even be termed murder. It would be more like… unplugging my malfunctioning toaster. If I’d done that back when he first started his upstart ways, maybe his infection wouldn’t have spread to the other gargoyles so quickly.”

  Donovan winced. “Dad, really, you can’t say things like that.” He turned to us. “I’m terribly sorry. My father is very old, and he’s set in his ways. I realize he looks young, but it’s just magic keeping him going at this point. He used spells to bolster his physical form, but I’m afraid his mind is slipping.”

  “I’m still as sharp as the day you were born, boy,” protested Henry.

  “I’m sorry,” said Donovan, ignoring him, “but if you want to talk to him again, I’d really appreciate it if you contacted me so that I could be present.”

  “But we need to talk to him,” said Lachlan, “not you.”

  “Well,” said Donovan, “that’s just fine. Talk to him, then.” He folded his arms over his chest and waited.

  “Paloma Stanley is Beckett’s niece,” Lachlan said to Henry. “She’s connected to this family in some way, and I think you know who she is.”

  “Well, I don’t,” said Henry. “Never met her. If she’s a gargoyle, I don’t actually spend much time talking to things like that. Especially not the female ones.”

  Donovan’s face had gone pale. “I think that’s quite enough for today,” he said in a tight voice. “You’ve tired my father out. You’ll have to leave.”

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  “It’s a very well-groomed cemetery,” Lachlan said as we strolled down the pathways of the cemetery where my family’s vault was located. The cemetery was in Connecticut, a five-hour drive from Sea City. We’d gotten up early and packed Wyatt in the car for the drive.

  He’d been pleasant for the first few hours, and then he’d taken a nap. But when he woke up from the nap, he’d spent the remaining hour screaming his head off, and nothing would calm him down at all. I was regretting my decision to bring him with us, because now we were going to have to turn around and drive five hours back, and I didn’t know if I could handle the screaming.

  Right now, Wyatt was happy enough. He was strapped into a baby carrier that Lachlan was wearing. Lachlan had put Wyatt facing outward so that he could see what was going on. Wyatt was waving his arms and gurgling at the fallen leaves.

  The cemetery was full of fallen leaves. Most of the trees had shed theirs, but a few straggling red and yellow leaves clung to the mostly bare branches. The sun was directly overhead and it shone down on the headstones and the spires on the top of the vaults.

  “Are you kidding?” I said. “Look at all these leaves. Does no one rake around here?”

  Lachlan considered. “Yeah, I guess that’s a thing you’d typically do. But I never really understood raking leaves. I think it looks much better when they aren’t raked. And besides, wouldn’t they be good fertilizer for the soil?”

  “Too many of them and they choke out the grass,” I said.

  “I guess that’s true,” said Lachlan. He pointed. “That your family’s vault up there? The one with the dragon-shaped spire on top of it?”

  “That’s it,” I said.

  “It’s pretty,” he said. “Big. Formidable.”

  I chuckled. “Yeah, I think that’s what they were going for, all right.” The vault was made of white stone with flecks of shimmering quartz embedded within it. The doors were made of metal. They were tall, reaching for the sky.

  Wyatt reached out with both hands. “Babadaada,” he said.

  “That’s right,” I said, reaching in to tickle his tummy. “That’s the vault of your ancestors too, little man.”

  He screamed with laughter.

  I tickled him again, unable to resist hearing him make that joyful sound again.

  He giggled some more.

  Man, there was possibly no better sound in the world than Wyatt’s giggling.

  Lachlan smiled at me over the baby’s head.

  And I grinned back. I reached out and linked hands with him, leaning close.

  He squeezed my fingers. “Thanks for bringing me here,” he said quietly. “It means a lot to me to be included in something that’s part of your family.”

  “Lachlan, you are my family,” I said, peering up at him.

  His smile deepened.

  We walked in silence for a bit, our feet echoing against the stone walkway.

  And then we had reached the vault.

  Lachlan furrowed his brow. “How’s it open? There’s no lock.”

  “It’s sealed with magic,” I said. “I have to pump fire into the metal to loosen it.”

  “Sounds complicated.”

  I remembered that the last time I was here, I’d had trouble with this. I’d felt intimidated by it all, worried about my abilities. But I was a different woman now. I had faced down evil and darkness—not only in my adversaries, but within my very soul and within Lachlan’s. I had done lots of terrifying things, and I knew that I was strong.

  So, I reached out and put my palms against the doors. I poured fire magic into them, and the gates grew warm under my touch. They swung inward.

  I remembered that last time, it had seemed to take a lot of magic to get them open. This time, it hadn’t seemed that way, but I knew that it must be the same amount each time. I probably felt differently because I had a different perspective on what a lot of magic was these days.

  We stepped inside the vault.

  It was dark inside. I pushed magic down into my hands. Flames ran over my fingers and knuckles. The flames illuminated a long tunnel deep into the ground. On either side were metal sculptures—dragon heads. Each was constructed to look like the person had in his or her dragon form. The rows of dragon heads gleamed in the light of my glowing hands.

  “Wow,” whispered Lachlan.

  “Ba!” said Wyatt. And then he giggled again. His laughter bounced around the enclosure, echoing against the sculptures.

  Somehow, the place seemed less solemn and grand. Somehow, it seemed warmer now. Like I had come home.

  “So, uh… how do we get the artifacts?” said Lachlan.

  “Each of these statues sits on top of the bones of one of my ancestors,” I said. “I’ll reach out with magic, and ask for what we need, and the essence of my ancestors will guide me to the proper artifact.”

  Lachlan shivered. “That’s kind of creepy.”

  “No, it’s not,” I said. “It’s cool.”

  Wyatt laughed again, bouncing up and down in the baby carrier a
s if he agreed with me.

  I shut my eyes and sent out little questing threads of magic. For Lachlan, I thought. To protect our son.

  The threads shot out, down the tunnel. The older artifacts were up there. The tunnel was organized with the oldest dead in the front and the newest dead buried deepest. We tunneled deeper as others died. Most of the very oldest bones had been plundered by now. Still, I didn’t expect us to go too deep, because the most powerful artifacts would be the older ones.

  One of the threads stopped, and I felt a little tug on it, almost like catching something on a fishing line. “Come on,” I said, leading them deeper into the tunnels.

  Lachlan hesitated. He looked up at the dragon statues, a wary expression on his face.

  “It’s okay,” I said.

  “Yeah,” he said softly. “I don’t know. I think you and Wyatt are more at home here than me. You both have Caspian blood. I’m an outsider.”

  “You’re not,” I insisted. I grabbed his arm and tugged on it. “Come on.”

  We wound our way down, down into the tunnel, deeper and deeper. As we descended, the statues began to look newer and glossier. It was warmer down here, but it also smelled musty, like a cave.

  Then I felt another tug on the thread of magic, and I stopped. “Wow,” I said. “I didn’t expect this to be so new. But… this is what it says you should have. The teeth of Fergus Caspian. He’s only been dead for two hundred years.”

  “Only?” said Lachlan.”

  “Well, I mean, I guess he’s my great-uncle?” I said. “My grandfather’s older brother.”

  “Whoa, right,” said Lachlan. “I guess I wasn’t thinking about dragon lifespans. How long you guys live.”

  I reached down and opened the tomb to remove the artifacts. They sang to me in a bright, smoky song of rightness. These belonged to Lachlan. They were going to help him. This was the gift my ancestors were giving to me and all their descendants. This magic.

  I held out the teeth to Lachlan. “Do you want to hold them?”

  “Well, I’ve kind of got the baby,” he said.

  “Right,” I said. I put them in the bag that I’d brought along.

  And then the smoky song in my head cut off. “That’s it,” I whispered. “That’s all you need, apparently.”

  “Well, okay,” said Lachlan.

  Wyatt giggled again.

  I made a face at him. “This will all be yours someday, too, little one. I’ll teach you how to open these doors yourself, to ask for the guidance and help of those who came before.”

  He puffed out his lips and blew a raspberry.

  I laughed.

  Lachlan glanced up at the ceiling, a wary look on his face. “Should we be laughing in here?”

  “It’s okay,” I said.

  “Well,” he said, “if we’ve got everything, can we, uh, can we go? This place is kind of creeping me out.”

  I laughed again.

  Wyatt caught my laughter and joined in.

  “Great,” muttered Lachlan. “You two are ganging up on me.”

  “Just go back for the door,” I said, giving him a little shove.

  He didn’t need to be told twice. He hurried ahead of me.

  I was fairly sure that we got out of the tunnel faster than we’d gotten in.

  When Lachlan and Wyatt were outside, I turned to look down the long tunnel. I extinguished the flames on my fingers, plunging myself back into blackness. “Thank you,” I whispered into the darkness of the crypt. “For your gifts and your guidance, we are humbly grateful.”

  And then I backed out and sealed the doors shut again.

  * * *

  After getting the artifact, we decided that we simply couldn’t cram ourselves back into that car for another five hours right away. So, we stowed the dragon’s teeth away safely and I took Lachlan and Wyatt on a little tour of the town I grew up in.

  A lot had changed. It seemed like all the places where I used to hang out as a kid had been turned into housing developments or strip malls.

  I guess everyone feels that way. People are always talking about how much growth there has been during their lifetimes, and how much emptier things used to be when they were young. There are more and more and more of us on this planet. Dragons don’t reproduce much, but given our long lifespans, we are still multiplying.

  Sometimes, I think about the fact that we will eventually run out of space on earth. That it’s inevitable. That there are simply too many people in the world.

  And then I think of that story that Lachlan was told the night that Wyatt was born, about how this world was a dumping ground for another world. A world sent all its nightmares here—and that’s why there are dragons. That world didn’t want its dragons, and so it sent them here. The shifters of this world were able to merge themselves with the dragons. The other dragons were only monsters.

  I don’t know if I believe the story. It’s strange to think that this world’s origins come from something like that.

  But if it is true, does that mean there are other worlds out there besides this one and the one beyond it? I met some travelers once, a long time ago, and they claimed to be from another world. At the time, I brushed it all aside, but I do wonder if they weren’t telling the truth now. I know that I haven’t seen them in a long time, and that they took a friend of mine with them back to wherever they were going. Someplace called Helicon, I think.

  I don’t think their world was the place the dragons came from, because they seemed stunned by the dragons. I don’t think there were dragons in their world.

  Still.

  Maybe there were no dragons in their world because all the dragons had been sent here.

  And if we do run out of room in this world, will we be able to go to another world? Or will we just run out of space here and all slowly die?

  After I thought that, I decided it was best to stop that train of thought. No good could come from pondering that kind of stuff. Instead, we found a restaurant, and we all had a nice, long lunch. We got Wyatt some french fries, which was a special treat for him. He loved them, but they weren’t healthy at all, so I tried not to give them to him too often.

  And then finally, we did have to get back on the road and head back to Sea City.

  Wyatt slept for some of the way again, but he was in a bad mood when he woke up, and there was more wailing.

  Then, we didn’t get home until late, and it was Wyatt’s bed time. But having spent the whole day cooped up in the car, he was not the least bit interested in sleep. I let him stay up and play for a few hours, which turned out to be a bad idea, because then he was even fussier and more rambunctious when I had to put him down later. It ended up taking another hour to get him to sleep, and then it was basically my bedtime anyway, so I threw myself into bed.

  Lying there, I thought about our day, how we’d gone to a dragon crypt and got magical objects. And yet, how it had all been so mundane and domestic in the end. No matter what we were doing, Wyatt’s happiness came first. His moods could ruin me faster than any enemy we’d ever faced. Raising him was truly the hardest job I’d ever had.

  Exhausted, I slipped off to sleep, and I hoped that I wasn’t screwing up at being a mother.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  ~Lachlan~

  Penny was exhausted after wrangling Wyatt that evening, Lachlan knew, and he understood when she went to sleep a little early. He, however, was infused with some kind of restless energy. He couldn’t sleep, and he knew it.

  He decided, now that he had the artifact, that there was no reason not to get in contact with the mage that Ophelia had told Penny about. Sure, it was late, but mages often kept late hours. Besides, it wasn’t as if they weren’t going to pay the guy.

  Lachlan called Waverly Garrett, and the mage said he’d be happy to get started on it right away if Lachlan wanted to bring it to his apartment. Waverly gave Lachlan directions.

  The mage lived in the center of town in a cluster of apartments by the bay. He li
ved on the top floor in a big loft apartment. The building was old and it had an old freight elevator in it, with vertical sliding doors Lachlan had to pull apart and everything. He took the elevator to the top floor.

  There he was greeted by Waverly.

  Waverly looked exotic.

  There was no other way to put it. The man had toffee-colored skin and some kind of European accent that Lachlan couldn’t place. The mage was wearing a black silk shirt, open over his bare chest, which was decorated with swirling, tribal tattoos. His hair was short on the sides and long on the top and back. He wore a little bit of sparkling eyeliner, and his arms were encircled with brass bangles.

  “Lachlan,” said Waverly, arms wide when he met the vampire at the elevator. “You made it.” The mage wrapped Lachlan in a huge bear hug. Lachlan was engulfed in the scent of incense and Old Spice. Waverly released him. “I can call you Lachlan, right?”

  “Uh, sure,” said Lachlan, who was feeling a little off-kilter by the man’s huge presence.

  “And you call me Waverly or Wave or even Way. My friends call me that.”

  Lachlan shrugged. “All right.”

  “Well, let’s see those dragon bones, okay?” Waverly held out his hands.

  Lachlan got them out. He hesitated a moment, unsure if he wanted to hand them over to this strange, exotic man. It wasn’t that he didn’t trust Waverly. Ophelia had vouched for him, after all. But he wasn’t sure that he wanted to let go of these bones that had belonged to Penny’s ancestors.

  Sometimes, Lachlan had dark thoughts about the future. In them, both Penny and Wyatt were long dead, but he still lived on. In them, he was thousands of years old, out of touch with the world and with everything, but he lacked the courage to kill himself, and so he just kept living.

  Having these bones made him think about those dark thoughts, made him think about Penny being nothing but bones anymore.

  He knew that Penny wanted to leave her bones behind for those who came after her, to be part of that legacy. But Lachlan didn’t know if he could ever let any part of her go.

  Waverly raised his eyebrows. “Well?”

 

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