Moonlight Dragon Collection: Urban Fantasy

by Tricia Owens

  And maybe, just maybe, I could learn a little more about them.

  "Can we do it tonight?" I asked Celestina hopefully.

  She brightened. "No problem. For the best chance at success, though, I need something that has a connection to them. Something personal. Significant; not like a photo or something."

  "Ah." That might be a problem. I didn't have anything of my parents except... I snapped my fingers. "I have the perfect thing." I turned to my other friends. "I'll be right back."

  It was nearly four a.m. now, but in Vegas the skies were deceptive. They would never be fully dark this close to the city, not like where Vale and I had been dumped out in the desert. Rainbow colors from the casinos lit the sky as I jogged the short distance to the metal fence surrounding the property of my shop, Moonlight Pawn.

  I didn't bother lowering the defensive wards since it was only me. I quickly let myself inside the dark shop. It smelled weird inside, though I wouldn't say it was a bad smell. Just a mix of grandma's attic and occult gift shop. I ran past shelves holding haunted jewelry boxes and cursed toys which sat beside mundane items like guitars and piggy banks shaped like Elvis' head. Bead curtains separated the selling floor from the studio in back where I lived.

  This was my home, though it wasn't very impressive. A full-sized bed, a TV on a stand, a wardrobe, bathroom, and a small kitchenette. Definitely not worthy of being called a "crib." It was fine, though, for my needs since I didn't really own anything besides clothes. When friends came to visit we socialized in the shop.

  The bathroom, however, was a disaster, not because it was moldy or the tiles were cracked; it was cursed. Sometimes it appeared as though the ceiling dripped with blood and the walls looked like Freddy Kreuger and Jason had gone on a rampage together. Also, a usually horrifying image of a spirit tended to stare back at me from the mirror above the sink.

  I hesitated, and then flipped on the light.

  Vale was right about the vampire bite. I pulled back my dark hair and verified that no marks were visible on my neck where it had bit me, thank goodness. I stared fixedly at the smooth skin and managed to mostly ignore the reflection of a young, freckled man who stood beside me and was soundlessly yelling. His head was on fire, the skin of his forehead blackening and peeling off in flakes. I flipped off the light, and the image vanished along with the illumination. I still shivered, though. Even as accustomed as I was to the effects of the curse, I wasn't emotionally immune to them.

  Back in the shop, I went directly to the register.

  "The dead are coming for you, Anne Moody..."

  "Fear the dead!"

  "Death to Anne Moody!"

  "Death! Death!"

  "Well, screw you right back," I muttered to the glass counter where I kept smaller items like jewelry. The cursed Victorian cameos lay in their own velvet tray. All were carved from coral and adorned broaches, pendants, and rings. Their pretty Victorian faces were screwed up into bitchy sneers and scowls that made them a tough sell disregarding the fact that they were cursed.

  One day, I vowed, I would sell the lot of them and I'd never have to listen to their insults and predictions ever again. They were by far the most annoying curse on the shop, even if my friends thought they were funny. Sure, they didn't have to listen to the things screech every day like I had to.

  And they didn't have to wonder if the cameos were telling the future.

  The cameos had predicted that I would meet Vale and fall hard for him. What if they were right again now? Was I really about to face something so dangerous it could kill me? Or were they referring to the artifact, which allegedly possessed the power to raise the dead? I needed to ask Celestina what she thought of the cameos.

  On that note...I grabbed the panda pin that my mother had given me. It was my only physical tie to her. Hopefully it would give Celestina the psychic boost she needed to make a connection.

  I locked up and jogged outside. On the cracked sidewalk just outside Moonlight's yard, I paused.

  What had happened out in the desert tonight could have meant nothing, just an innocent expression of magick by someone who'd had a few too many beers and lost their sense of discretion. But I didn't buy it. I found it difficult to believe in magickal coincidences. Someone had known I'd be out on the playa tonight and they'd used a dragon form on purpose, either in warning or to get me in trouble.

  The trouble I'd deal with. The Oddsmakers were scary, but I wasn't about to let anyone, even a bunch of old magickal beings, intimidate me. But if the magick show had been a warning...

  I searched the streets, paying closer attention to the darker pockets of shadows between the houses. The neighborhood was zoned for both commercial and residential use, which meant most of the buildings around me were house conversions. Typically some type of business was conducted in the front while the back served as living quarters for the owner, as was the case with Moonlight Pawn.

  Most of my neighbors' houses were dark, the exception being Tomes, the occult bookshop where Vale's exorcism had been held. Also, the art gallery. The latter caught my interest. While I suspected the gallery wasn't ordinary and in fact dealt in magickal art of some sort—a visitor having literally lost their hand there one day being a big clue to that—I couldn't recall seeing the lights on behind its frosted windows after 10:00 p.m.

  Interesting, but ultimately non-threatening. Annoyed by my paranoia, I hustled back to Celestina's shop.

  I let myself in the front door and discovered my friends had been busy. They'd dragged Celestina's reading table, the circular one where she performed her palmistry and placed her tarot card layouts, into the center of the room and arranged the loveseats and ottomans around it so everyone had a place to sit. Three black wax candles in tall glasses screen printed with images of the Vodou Lwa were aglow in the center of the table. Beside them was a symbol drawn with what looked like talc. The air was streaked with gray and was pungent with the scent of smoking herbs. Celestina must have smudged the room to clear the energy.

  "I always figured we'd end up around a Ouija board before we attempted a séance," I said to the room as I closed the door behind me.

  Lev immediately jumped in front of me, clad only in a pair of gym shorts.

  "No mention Ouija board," he said in a low voice and with an urgent shake of his shaggy, black-haired head. "Celestina no like. She thinks very fake."

  I found his Serbian accent cute, but Lev was a tricky one. While he reminded me of Wolverine from the X-men in that he was kind of wild-looking even in his human form, he also had that great body. His wolf got a lot of exercise, apparently, and anyone with eyes couldn't help appreciating it.

  But if Celestina ever caught you checking out her boyfriend when he wasn't in his wolf form...well, let's just say a wise woman wouldn't cross a Vodou priestess. Not that Celestina actually was a priestess. She was second generation American who'd become a surfing champion in Huntington Beach. But when your grandmother used to be a well-known mambo in Haiti and later in Santo Domingo, you commanded respect.

  I did the zipping motion with my fingers and lips. "Never again," I promised Lev.

  He grinned, revealing slightly overlarge canines, and patted me on the arm. "We will learn good things," he told me enthusiastically. "Not to worry, Anne. Celestina is very skilled. You will see."

  He was sweet and I wanted to hug him, but I also didn't want to see my effigy hanging from the ceiling tomorrow, pierced with needles. I'd already experienced being a living Voodoo doll during Vale's exorcism.

  I walked to Celestina and handed her my panda pin. "This was my mom's. She gave it to me when I was three or four."

  She held it in her hand for a moment, eyes closed. "Yes. This will do, Anne. What was her name?"

  "Iris."

  "Fine."

  She'd pulled her dark, braided hair back beneath a multi-colored scarf, which told me she was in business mode. I belatedly noticed the pop music was gone. I took a seat on one of the ottomans beside Melanie.
<
br />   "How is this supposed to work?" I asked.

  Celestina placed the pin face up in the middle of the talcum powder symbol, beside the candles. "All magickal beings have a Name," she said, though she didn't look at me. Her dark gaze was fixed to my right, on a point somewhere above and beyond the candles. "I'm going to request the Lwa to call upon that Name and bring your mother's spirit here."

  I was familiar with the concept of Names. Vale had once refused to give his, citing the power it gave someone to curse him or worse. A Name wasn't what was printed on your driver's license. It was like a magickal fingerprint unique to each person. I didn't know what mine was, and though I'd never admitted it, I worried I didn't have one. I was only half of a Chinese dragon. My dad had been a non-magickal human. Maybe being a mutt made me ineligible for the cool stuff.

  "How do we know what my mom's Name was?" I asked.

  "We don't." Celestine shook out her shoulders and visibly relaxed. She rolled her neck to loosen it. On the table in front of her sat a steak knife and a shallow dish containing powdered herbs. "But a sorceress leaves traces of herself even after she passes into another existence. All magickal beings do. We cling. Not to our bodies, but to our Names." She picked up the knife. "If we're fortunate, the Lwa will be able to pull that Name from your pin."

  "What's the knife for?" I asked, alarmed.

  "I'm going to scratch a gad ko into my skin. It will protect me while the Lwa that inhabits my body calls for your mother's Name."

  "Why is protection necessary?" Christian asked, sharing a concerned look with me. "What's the danger involved?"

  "The wrong spirit may answer." Celestina used the tip of the knife to quickly scratch a symbol into the skin on the back of her left hand. Beads of blood welled slowly from the cut, telling me it was very shallow. As she rubbed some herbs into the wound, she went on. "It shouldn't be a problem, but better safe than sorry."

  On Melanie's other side sat Christian. To my left was Lev. I looked down as he squeezed my left hand with his heavily callused one. His bright blue eyes were soft as they gazed at me.

  "It will be fine, Anne. Don't worry. Better to know, than not."

  "I'm not worried. I want this."

  But what was that they said? Ignorance was bliss?

  I guess I'd soon find out.

  "Lev, please hand out the instruments," Celestina directed.

  More bewilderment as Lev released me to hand a tambourine to Melanie, a drumstick-shaped rattle to me, and a small hand drum to Christian. Lev settled a similar drum in his own lap. This was starting to feel very hippy to me but none of us were willing to question a ceremony that Celestina was obviously taking very seriously.

  The candlelight reflected beautifully off her dark skin and gave her eyes a focused intensity that reminded me a bit of the wolf in Lev. She'd always been one of the more serious and intense of my friends. She was highly intelligent and I was sure she could have found a more lucrative use for her ability to read the future, such as going into the stock market or simply by buying lottery tickets in California.

  But as a second generation American she'd been vehemently opposed to falling back into her family's strange, controversial ways. She'd developed a love for the sea and dropped out of college to compete in surfing competitions along the coast, winning most of them. Had she seen the future and it showed her doing well at the sport? I doubted it. At that time she'd been so opposed to using her talent that I think it would have felt to her like cheating to learn which would be the easiest life path for her.

  A bad wipe out broke her back, requiring two of her vertebra to be fused together. While she was in the hospital, her grandmother died. The two had been close and Celestina had been devastated. Surfing was out, and to drown her grief she'd come to Las Vegas with friends for a weekend blowout. It had been her first visit. One look at all the desperate gamblers, she'd told me, and she'd recognized that this was where she belonged, following in her grandmother's footsteps and keeping alive the tradition Celestina had tried to run from her entire life.

  While she'd thrown the bones for me just for fun, I'd not yet seen her do anything more serious. This séance was looking to change that.

  I expected Celestina to chant or call out for my mother but instead she began to sing lyrics I couldn't understand to a melody that was difficult to follow. Lev began lightly hitting his drum, which was the signal for the rest of us to follow suit with our instruments. I felt more than a little bit silly shaking my rattle. We were out of sync since no one knew what the beat was. But when the candles began to flicker I realized that this wasn't music hour with my buddies. Something supernatural was happening.

  Chapter 6

  Ectoplasm, I thought, but I only knew the word because of Ghostbusters. Lucky guess or not, I knew I was right.

  It began as thin streamers of what looked like smoke exhaled from Celestina's nostrils. Immediately I thought of my friend Liliana, who was a succubus. To remind me that she was a form of demon, Liliana had blown smoke at me.

  Celestina wasn't a demon, so this wasn't smoke. The streamers thickened both in width and opacity. They began to seep from my friend's ears and drizzle down to her shoulders like honey. The streamers from her nose wound lazily through the air like seaweed floating in the sea.

  Melanie made a squeaking noise and dropped her tambourine on the floor. When Celestina abruptly stopped singing that was a cue for the rest of us to set aside our instruments, too.

  I looked around at my other friends. Christian's eyebrows were raised but he looked more surprised than afraid. Lev was nodding and smiling proudly. Clearly he'd seen his girlfriend do this before, which relaxed me. I figured no one knew her better than her boyfriend and a wolf shifter. Dogs were always staring at closets and empty corners of the room, right? If Lev's wolf didn't sense anything threatening, we were probably okay.

  Celestina began to moan. It raised the hair on the back of my neck. Her gaze remained unfocused and ectoplasm continued to stream from her facial orifices.

  "Iris Moody," she sang between the moaning.

  I shivered. This was turning out to be heavier than I'd expected. A part of me wanted to jump up and run out of the shop to the heat outside. I was chilled down to the bone. But it wasn't a physical temperature drop that I experienced. It was a mental and emotional chilling, the fear of contacting what lay on the other side of death.

  Celestina jerked her shoulders back. Her head tilted to the left and then very slowly turned to the right, as though she were panning her gaze over those of us at the table, though her eyes didn't move. I told myself if her head began spinning I was out of there.

  "Daughter..."

  My hands went clammy. My heart began beating at my rib cage. Around the table, my friends shared nervous, excited looks with me.

  "Daughter..."

  The word had come from Celestina. Except this was Celestina plus one. She was channeling something or someone. When her lips moved, spilling more ectoplasm, my mom's voice came out—or what I assumed to be my mom's voice.

  "Beware...Gargoyle...miss you so much..."

  I swallowed hard, steeling myself against possible fraud. It wasn't Celestina I mistrusted but the spirit or whatever it was that we were hearing. It could have been any entity. Everyone in the magickal community knew to be wary of disembodied voices. Hell, anyone who'd seen a horror movie knew that.

  "You ask questions now," Lev whispered from the side of his mouth. "What you want to know?"

  What did I want to know? Oh, man, there was so much. But I had a priority and I knew I needed to stick to it no matter how badly I wanted to learn what my mom's and dad's favorite movies were and what was their favorite memory of us as a family. Besides, this might not be Iris Moody I was talking to.

  "Can you tell us about the gargoyle golem you were investigating when you died?" I asked the spirit inhabiting Celestina's body.

  Her eyes remained half-lidded and she showed no reaction to my question, but after near
ly a minute she opened her mouth, spewing curtains of ectoplasm. It looked like she held a knob of dry ice on her tongue and the thick white cold was spilling down her chin.

  "Beware...gargoyle...Texas...from the lake..."

  I hoped someone was mentally noting every word. This was turning out to be similar to a Ouija board reading where the relevance of each word revealed was a mystery that needed to be solved.

  "Who made the golem?" I asked.

  "Us..."

  I blinked at that. "Us? What do you mean?"

  "Dragon..."

  "No," I said immediately. I don't know if I meant no, I didn't believe it or no, I refused to.

  "...under dark...city hiding...dragon... "

  "A dragon sorcerer made the golem," I said. "Is that what you're saying?"

  Celestina said nothing.

  "Look, I need you to—"

  "Easy," Lev murmured. His expression was uneasy. "Must not drive away."

  I forced my fisted hands to uncurl and reminded myself I was dealing with something that wasn't human. This spirit was little more than a collection of memories given the fleeting ability to vocalize. It could barely think. For that matter, was it actually replying to my questions or merely speaking random words?

  Celestina's head rolled on her shoulders, like she was tense and trying to relax. The ectoplasm streaming from her orifices slowed to a wispy trickle. Something had changed. I sensed it in the air, like that suspended moment in between thunder and lightning.

  Above us, the Vodou dolls hanging from the ceiling began to sway in concert. The shop didn't hold a breeze. No one's hair moved, but the dolls moved as one, like a flock of birds did.

  Bang!

  Melanie yelped and I also jumped where I sat. The wooden carving of a skull that normally sat on a shelf holding gris gris bags for sale rolled across the floor and came to a stop against the ottoman where she and I sat. The skull had been carved from a solid block of wood and weighed at least fifteen pounds. A little wind wouldn't have knocked it off like that.