Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Windy City Dragon
Windy City Dragon
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Books By Genevieve Jack
The Dragon of New Orleans: The Treasure of Paragon, Book 1
Copyright © Genevieve Jack 2018
Published by Carpe Luna, Ltd, PO Box 5932, Bloomington, IL 61704
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This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
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All rights reserved. No part of this publication can be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, without permission in writing from the author or publisher.
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First Edition: March 2019
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eISBN: 978-1-940675-47-3
Paperback: 978-1-940675-48-0
v 2.7
Chapter One
Gabriel Blakemore was running out of time, which was laughable considering time had never meant anything to him in the past. As an immortal dragon, his life thus far had flowed like an endless river, each new day guaranteed by the last. Not anymore. He thumbed the emerald ring on his finger. Already the curse at its center gave the jewel the appearance of a cat’s eye in bright light, a thin black pupil visible at the center of the green. His affliction was spreading.
Hunched over the seventeenth-century Spanish baroque desk in his office at Blakemore’s Antiques, he sifted through the stack of papers in front of him, praying for a savior, anyone who had the slightest potential for breaking the curse. None of the candidates seemed powerful enough. He needed more options.
Anxiously, he tugged at the bond connecting him to his manservant. Richard appeared at the door to his office almost immediately, carrying a stack of papers that he squared on the desk in front of Gabriel. “More for you.”
Gabriel nodded at the man. Impeccably dressed, as always, in a pinstripe three-piece suit, Richard had proved a crucial asset these days, researching magical options when Gabriel could not. Gabriel had bought the former slave’s freedom in 1799, a wise choice. Not only had Richard become a close friend over the centuries, he’d retained a sharp wit and an eye for detail.
The man dusted off his hands before rubbing his sternum. “You don’t need to scream down the bond, you know. I’m in the next room. I want to find a cure as much as you do.”
Gabriel grunted.
“Are all dragons as friendly and chipper as you, or was I just lucky to be bonded to the best of them?” Richard folded into the chair across the desk, throwing a lanky arm across its back.
“How are sales today?” Gabriel asked, ignoring the man’s gibe. He hadn’t meant to cause Richard discomfort, but he didn’t plan to apologize for it either. Not when the situation was so dire.
“Strong enough that if we all live another year, we can throw one hell of a party,” Richard said. “How’s that plan coming along? You find a way for us to do that? Live another year? There must be something here. For God’s sake, we live in the voodoo capital of America, the home and burial place of Marie Laveau herself.”
A whiff of cinnamon and molasses curled off Gabriel’s coffee, and he took a long, steadying drink. “Marie would roll over in her tomb if she knew who was running this city now.” New Orleans was brimming with humans claiming to have supernatural abilities. Liars, most of them. Unfortunately, the voodoo priestess who’d cast the curse on his ring was the real thing, and she did not take prisoners. Anyone left with true power in the city was either on her side or too afraid to oppose her.
Gabriel snorted. Three hundred years in this realm, only to be turned to stone by the jealous rage of a woman who couldn’t take no for an answer.
The thought made his fingers drum against the desk. Tap-tap-tap. Always in threes. The compulsion to tap was so strong when it hit him, not doing so resulted in pain. Muscle tremors ran the length of his arms and hands. He flipped his thumb against the corner of the paper nearest him, hoping it would curb the impulse.
Richard frowned at his fidgeting. “You should rest, Gabriel. It’s getting worse. This is the third time this morning.”
“Soon.”
“That’s what you said an hour ago.”
Gabriel pulled the pile of papers toward him. His hands cramped with the effort, and the stack spilled across the walnut desk. He cursed, but the word caught in his throat. A woman’s picture had been revealed in the collapse, instantly catching his eye. He lifted the folded newspaper to get a better look.
Enchanting. That was the only way to describe her. He couldn’t look away. The woman had eyes the color of deep water and curly black hair as wild as the hint of trouble she carried in her smile. He had the sudden intense desire to kiss away that lopsided grin and further tangle that hair. Where had such an urge come from? A dragon like Gabriel didn’t often find himself drawn to human women. He closed his eyes and gave his head a well-deserved shake.
“Who is this?” he demanded.
Richard leaned over the desk in order to get a better look, and Gabriel turned the article in his direction. Richard groaned. “That, my friend, is a long shot.”
Ravenna Tanglewood opened her eyes to darkness. She blinked and blinked again, but the eyelid flutter didn’t seem to help. This was new. While she’d slept, an irregular blotch had formed in her vision, partially obstructing her view. Now it painted itself like black ink against the sterile white walls of her hospital room.
A Rorschach test, she thought. What did she see in it? An oil slick. A dark cumulus cloud. A rough joke told by her brain cancer.
Cancer. That fucking bitch.
The aroma of this morning’s half-eaten eggs and the tang of antiseptic brought her fully awake. She was in the exact same place she’d been every day for the past three months: the hospice at Ochsner Medical Center in New Orleans. Only the last time she’d drifted off, there wasn’t a stain obstructing half her field of vision.
She rolled her head and the dark splotch followed, blotting out the left side of the room. She closed her eyes again, counted to ten. No change. Damn, that couldn’t be good.
Through her working eye, she watched her mother sleep in the chair next to the bed; she at least was the same as Raven had left her. A Cosmo was sprawled across her mother’s lap as if she’d drifted off midsentence. Though now that Raven looked more closely, the lifestyle magazine was wrapped around a disturbingly worn copy of Surviving Divorce by Amy Dickerman, PhD. Raven winced. So her father’s pronounced absence had come to this. Or maybe it was a preemptive read, a talisman against the inevitable. As far as she knew, her parents had only separated—the burden of her illness giving rise to separate bank accounts, separate bedrooms, separate lives—in that order. Her care had become an act o
f full-time charity her father could not abide.
As usual, her mom was bearing the parental weight alone this morning, although the chair beside her held her older sister Avery’s rosary. When had she dug that thing up? Raven hadn’t seen the likes of it since their aunt had gifted it to her for her first communion. Avery had never been the praying type. Leave it to death to bring out the inner Falwell in everyone.
Did she think she could pray the cancer away? Raven snorted at the thought. Pull the plug. That’s what she’d say if she had a say, and if she were plugged in to anything more than Mr. Drippy, her full-time fluid and drug-delivery companion. So far, she could breathe on her own and swallow, unlike the man across the hall. Stopped the vent, she’d heard the nurses whisper.
Lucky bastard.
“Hey, beautiful,” Dr. Freemont said.
Raven rolled her head back to center, then slightly to the left so she could see him clearly out of her good eye. Dr. Freemont was a balding, portly man whose gray temples gave away his advanced age. Still, he was more fun than his stodgy contemporaries. She liked him.
“Hey, ugly,” she responded, although the words sounded choked off and raspy.
His bushy silver brows sank over his bulbous nose. “What’s this about? You’re holding your head at an angle. Raven, can you look at me straight on?”
“No,” she drawled. “Dark.” Every word was like lifting a two-ton boulder from the depths of her skull and carrying it through a labyrinth of synapses to finally hoist over her lips. It was exhausting.
Dr. Freemont placed one hand gently on her head, then drew a penlight from his pocket. He swung it in front of her right eye, then her left, where the light disappeared inside the dark fog.
“Squeeze my fingers,” he commanded, touching her right hand. She did as he asked, then wondered why he never placed his fingers in her left, although he’d walked to that side of the bed. Or maybe he had. She could no longer feel that hand.
As Dr. Freemont continued his assessment, she noticed a trend. Her left side wasn’t working. Not just her eye, but also her shoulder, her hand, her thigh, all the way to her pinky toe. Numb. Dead. She was dying in halves.
“Why?” she demanded, but she knew.
“The tumor,” he said simply. “The pressure in your brain.” He kept speaking, but Raven’s mind couldn’t keep up with his medical explanation. She did catch the word stroke. It didn’t matter. They wouldn’t treat her for it anyway.
“Donate?” she asked.
Half cloaked in shadow, his face turned grim and he lowered his voice. “Yes. The cancer is only in your brain. You’ll be able to donate your organs. It’s all arranged.” His voice was funny, and she wondered if he was lying. Normally Dr. Freemont didn’t talk to his patients much about organ donation, but she’d pressed him about it early on. For her, it was a light at the end of the tunnel. Every time he reassured her of her donation status, her heart leaped a little. She’d do something with this life. Leave a part of herself behind that mattered.
If he was lying, she didn’t want to know the truth.
“Long?” she asked. He knew what she meant. How long until she died? They’d been at this for over five years on and off. Through railroad spikes of pain that left her begging for someone to bash her head in. Months of chemo that turned her inside out. There was nothing left to try. There would be no more chemo. No more surgeries. Raven wanted to live, but if living wasn’t possible, she would settle for being free.
His pale eyes met hers, and he gripped her fingers on the right where she could feel his reassurance. “Not long now.”
Not long now. She tried her best to smile. “Good.”
Her mother roused, her magazine-wrapped book falling from her lap and clattering to the floor. “Oh! Doctor. Excuse me. I must have drifted off. How is she?”
When he turned to look at her, his eyes glossier than usual, his face changed. A mask slipped into place, clinical and authoritative. Raven rolled her head on her pillow to see her mother, and the dark splotch swallowed most of Dr. Freemont’s head. She couldn’t see anything above his shoulders when he answered.
“I would never put an expiration date on your daughter, Mrs. Tanglewood… Sarah. We both know how strong she is.”
“Yes, I know. This one came out fighting.” Her mother still believed Raven could beat this thing.
She was wrong.
“Raven’s comfort measures are working. We’ll maintain the course.” He straightened as if he might leave.
Raven squeezed his hand. “Do it,” she said. It was the best part of her day. She wouldn’t let him leave without giving it to her.
He turned an impassive expression toward her, half light and half dark as she looked at him straight on. “I have no idea what you are talking about, Raven.” The corner of his mouth twitched.
With whatever part of her face was still working, she sent him the sternest glare she could muster.
Raising one eyebrow, he backed up a few steps and glanced into the hall. “You know, I don’t do this for all my patients. Only for you.”
She smiled lopsidedly.
He removed his white lab coat, cleared his throat, and glanced again at the door. There was no one out there. Ceremoniously, he wrapped his coat around Mr. Drippy, holding the neck in place with one hand and gripping the sleeve with the other. He squared his shoulders.
“I get no drip from champagne…,” he began to sing, deep and throaty, in the style of Frank Sinatra. He swayed with her IV pole as much as the length of the tubes leading to the port in her chest would allow. “Mere Toradol doesn’t move me at all, but morphine and fentanyl too… Yes, I get a drip out of you.” He cradled the screen of the IV pole and dipped it below his round belly, careful not to upset the hanging medications. His lips puckered in an air-kiss toward the screen.
Raven couldn’t help it. She started to laugh. Her mother did too, which made her laugh even harder. As always, the sight of that normally stiff and paunchy man dancing with her IV pole tickled something deep inside her, something that bitch cancer hadn’t ruined yet. She laughed and laughed until her throat constricted like the valve of a pinched balloon.
Her laugh turned into a cough and then a wheeze.
Dr. Freemont stopped singing.
The next moment he was leaning over her, his pale hands gently shaking her shoulders, and she realized she’d been unconscious. Not long, judging by the look on his surprised face.
“Welcome back,” he murmured. He was half dark again.
“That’s never happened before,” her mother said nervously.
“That’s just Raven’s body telling us she needs rest,” he said. “I’ll leave you to it.” He removed his lab coat from Mr. Drippy and shrugged it on before nodding his goodbye.
“Well, that sounded promising,” Mom said after he was gone. “You just need more rest.” She stood up and tucked Raven in, her face positively glowing with denial.
Raven adjusted her head so her good eye was pointed at the door. Not long now, he’d said.
That was the day cancer stole her laugh. It was the last time the doctor sang for her. The last time she was awake long enough to ask him to. There were flashes of color and light, the feel of anointing oil crossed on her forehead and wrists as prayers were whispered over her, Avery’s rosary dangling from her fingertips above her chest, Dr. Freemont’s humorless face as he answered her mother’s questions. But most of the following days consisted of darkness.
Until, one night, he came for her.
Chapter Two
Death stood at the end of Raven’s bed, looming and dark, and she welcomed him with open arms. Open arm. Only her right was under her control. Oh, how she longed to be free of her broken body.
If any part of her had questioned the true identity of her visitor, the skepticism was short-lived. The aura of the supernatural surrounded him. Raven’s first clue was his suit, or rather that he wasn’t wearing scrubs. An eternity had passed since someone who wasn’t
a medical professional or close family had entered her hospice room. Her own father didn’t come anymore. It was too sad. A lost cause.
Death’s miraculous presence aside, there were stranger things about his visit. Her IV had stopped dripping. Mr. Drippy’s digital face was frozen, the impossibly full belly of her next drop of morphine hovering by a silver thread at the center of the machine’s plastic chamber. She shot a glance toward her mother, hoping for an explanation, but the woman was motionless and rigid, staring, catatonic, toward the darkened hospital windows. The clock had stopped. Midnight.
Raven’s time had finally come.
She took stock of the man who must be Death, the new growth of her hair rustling against the scratchy pillowcase as she turned her head. It was the only sound in an otherwise silent room. Under the fluorescent lights, she studied him. This was the one who would carry her home? He wasn’t what she’d expected.
Death was a babe.
Dark. Brooding. Heavy boned and unshaven. There was something handsome about him nonetheless, alluring enough for her failing body to send her a flicker of desire, something she hadn’t felt in over a year. It was the eyes, black eyes that seemed to burn into her, with flecks of red and mahogany that radiated from pitch-black pupils. His substantial eyebrows were too full to be considered conventionally attractive, but they balanced a generous nose and lower jaw that had no use for frivolity. He was olive-skinned, full-lipped, and big. Really big. Professional wrestler big. Although, based on his sunken cheeks and long, tapered fingers, she got the sense he could be bigger, like he was perpetually hungry.
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