Fire Marked

by Val St. Crowe

  Connor pointed at the wall. “The suite next to this one.”

  “No way,” I said.

  “Yeah, it’s awful, isn’t it?” said Connor, hugging himself. “I’m lucky that I turn automatically to stone, because I was so freaked out after reading this last night, I wouldn’t have been able to sleep otherwise.”

  I wasn’t sure how he could know that, considering the only way he did sleep was by turning to stone, but I didn’t say anything. Connor was fond of making dramatic pronouncements. “Well, how would a murder draw rogue dragons here?”

  “I don’t know,” said Connor, “but I got to thinking about it, and I thought that maybe the hotel is haunted, and that the power of the haunting is like drawing the dragons somehow.”

  Lachlan snorted.

  “What?” said Connor. “You don’t think so?”

  “There’s no such thing as haunting,” said Lachlan. “There’s no such thing as ghosts.”

  “You better take that back,” said Connor. “The ghosts heard you, and now they’re going to torment you until you believe.”

  “I’ll take my chances,” said Lachlan.

  “Anyway,” said Connor, turning back to me, “if you look at the last page there, you’ll find the contact information for the woman who owned the hotel when the murder happened. Thought you might want that.”

  “Oh, thank you so much,” I said. “That’s great. We definitely have to go and talk to her, right Lachlan?”

  “There are no such things as ghosts,” he said again.

  * * *

  “Oh, God, it wasn’t the murder that made me sell that place, it was what happened afterward,” said Maeve Hall. She had met us for lunch at the Pink Flamingo Cafe, which was right down the street from my hotel.

  “What happened?” I said. “Is the hotel haunted?”

  “Definitely haunted,” said Maeve.

  I expected Lachlan to jump in here about how there were no such things as ghosts. But he was in interrogate mode, so he didn’t. He just nodded, looking concerned and interested. He knew that contradicting her would only make her hostile, so he was pretending to agree with her. “How did you know?”

  “Well, some of it was… iffy,” she said. “It was the kind of thing you could explain away. I’d always hear these noises coming from that suite. Sounded like people talking really loudly, and I’d go up to tell them to keep it down, but when I knocked on the door, the guests inside would be asleep, the whole place dark, and they’d be annoyed with me for waking them up. And then I’d always hear other strange things, especially when I was alone at night. My suite shared a wall with that suite, and I’d hear pounding on the wall, things like that.”

  “Oh my God, that’s crazy,” I said. “That’s absolutely terrifying.”

  “It was… unnerving,” she said. “I eventually had to sell the place.”

  “You sold the hotel because of some unexplained noises?” said Lachlan, whose concerned-and-interested mask was slipping.

  “Oh, no, that wasn’t all that happened,” said Maeve. “No, one day, I woke up and I went into my living room, and all the furniture had been pushed to one side of the room.”

  “No,” I said, my heart racing.

  She nodded. “The door was locked from the inside, so no one had come in to do it as a crank or something, although I really wanted to believe that they had.”

  “What about the balcony?” said Lachlan.

  “What about it?” said Maeve. “Unless someone flew up there—”

  “It has steps,” I said.

  “Not when I lived there,” said Maeve, “although that’s a good idea. If all the balconies to the suites had steps, they’d have beachfront access, and then you could probably charge a good bit more for each of them…”

  “Well, yeah,” I said. “That’s the way it works.”

  “So, you put the steps on?”

  “No, they were there when I bought the place,” I said. “The guy who owned it after you must have done it.”

  “Must have,” she said. “Anyway, where was I?”

  “The furniture,” I said.

  “Right,” she said. “So, anyway, all the furniture had been moved. It was utterly terrifying. I didn’t know how furniture could have just moved across the room on its own.”

  “I don’t either,” I said.

  “Anyway, I couldn’t spend another night there,” she said. “I was too scared. I tried to run the hotel while living somewhere else, but it was too difficult, and it got so that I didn’t like being inside it at all, so I sold it.”

  “The murder didn’t have an impact on the property value?” asked Lachlan.

  “Well, I did my best to keep it quiet,” she said. “But the truth is that a hotel on the beach is a hotel on the beach, no matter what happened there.”

  That had actually been my experience as well, after a magical battle between Alastair and me had terrorized my guests and damaged the building. I thought no one would ever want to stay there again. I was wrong.

  “Wow,” I said, shaking my head. “Wow.”

  “I guess you’ve never experienced anything weird?” she asked me.

  “No,” I said. “No noises or anything like that.”

  “I never heard any complaints from the guests either,” she said. “Sometimes I wondered if it was all in my head, if I was going crazy.”

  “I’m sure it was real,” I said.

  “Maybe the effect of the murder wore off over time,” she said. “Like a spiritual stain that’s fading away.”

  “Maybe,” I said. “Although something weird is kind of happening at the hotel.”

  She raised her eyebrows. “What?”

  “It keeps being attacked by dragons,” I said. “And I thought maybe the residual energy from what happened here during that murder could be the thing that’s drawing them.”

  “I’ll bet it is,” said Maeve. “I bet dragons can sense things like that.”

  Actually, we couldn’t. But maybe the rogues could. Of course, the rogues didn’t seem to be sensing much of anything. They just flew and breathed fire and smashed things.

  I tapped my chin. “Well, I can’t sell that place. It’s my home. I’m going to have to get the ghosts out of there, instead. I’ll just clean it up and make sure that no more spirits are around anywhere.”

  * * *

  “Weird things do happen there sometimes, Lachlan,” I said as we walked back to the hotel. I peered at it, sitting against the blue sky. It was late summer, mid-September, and the hotel stood tall, only two stories. I gazed at the sign, which read The Purple Dolphin Hotel and Suites. The sign was accented by a drawing of a purple dolphin. I had been so excited when I bought this place, which seemed like a perfect investment property. A home and a business in one.

  “Weird things do not happen in the hotel,” he said.

  “They do,” I said. “Stuff goes missing all the time, and it turns up in places that it should never have been in.”

  “That happens everywhere.”

  “But is it blatant?” I said. “Because yesterday, when I was looking for my comb, I looked everywhere until I just got pissed off and said that I hated my stupid comb, and then suddenly, there it was. It was in a really strange place, too. It was in the kitchen by the toaster oven.”

  “You took it there yourself,” he said. “You don’t remember it.”

  “That’s what I told myself,” I said. “But what if it’s actually ghosts?”

  “If there were ghosts from a murder,” he said, “why would they move around furniture and make it sound like people were partying in the suite? Wouldn’t they scream and yell for help? Wouldn’t they try to communicate something about getting their killer?”

  “I don’t know how ghosts work,” I said. “And for that matter, you don’t either.”

  “Because they don’t exist,” said Lachlan. “They are not real. There are no ghosts in the hotel. I frankly think it’s ridiculous you’re giving so m
uch credence to this.”

  “It’s only that there are dragons coming to get us, and something has to be causing it.”

  “Okay, so if this place has been haunted for fifteen years, then why did it start only happening now?”

  “It’s because you and I are having lots of sex close to the murder site. The murder was probably sexually motivated, and we cued right into it.”

  “Eew,” he said, making a face. “That’s not even a thing, is it?”

  “It’s totally a thing,” I said.

  “The murder wasn’t sexually motivated, though,” said Lachlan. “A guy killed his family, right? That’s not about sex, that’s about despair. That’s about some screwed-up idea that your family is an extension of you and that if you kill yourself, you need to take them out with you.”

  “Really?” I said.

  “Weren’t we just talking about understanding the criminal mind?”

  I sighed. “Okay, well, I guess you’re right then. Maybe it’s my magic, then. Doing magic at the hotel has kicked loose these spirits.”

  “The whole idea is crazy,” Lachlan muttered.

  “I need an exorcist,” I said.

  “Exorcists get demons out of people’s bodies,” said Lachlan.

  “Oh, right,” I said. “I guess I was thinking of an exterminator. Like for bugs. Only for ghosts. And that word sort of sounded right.”

  “Like the Ghostbusters?”

  “Exactly like that,” I said. “But I think I’ll just ask Ophelia if she can do it.”

  Lachlan snorted. “She’s going to tell you that you’re nuts. There’s no way a mage—” He broke off. “Are those flames coming from behind the hotel?” He pointed.

  I looked.

  At that moment, the sounds of screams came through the air.

  “Shit,” I said, taking off at a run.

  Lachlan was right on my heels.

  I ran up the sidewalk and careened around the corner.

  A dragon had knocked down the fence surrounding the pool, and it was standing on the diving board, breathing flames into the air.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  The guest ran over the lounge chairs, knocking them over, tripping over them. They tripped over themselves. They screamed and screamed.

  Mothers picked up children, hauling them out of the pool under their armpits.

  Girls in their twenties who were sunbathing with their bikini tops untied tried to run and cover themselves at the same time.

  I reached out with one hand, thrusting magic at the dragon.

  It toppled backwards off the diving board.

  I turned to the guests, using magic to hurry them along. I literally picked them all up off the ground and floated them through the air, over the fence and back to the door of the hotel.

  They shrieked and swore.

  I set them on the ground and turned back to the dragon. As long as they were safe, that was all that was important.

  The dragon was hovering in the air over the pool, flapping its wings, gazing at me. Its eyes were black and empty, full of fury. But it wasn’t attacking. Just hovering there.

  I stared it down.

  The dragon alighted on the diving board again. It folded its wings in. It didn’t move.

  I approached it. “Hey, there,” I said in a soft voice. “Is there someone in there?”

  The dragon turned its blank, dead eyes on me. There was no one in there.

  I shuddered.

  “Penny, you shouldn’t get so close,” came Lachlan’s voice.

  I turned. He was behind me, wary, holding his gun with two hands, his arms extended. He had the barrel trained on the dragon.

  “Move out of the way,” he said to me.

  I swallowed hard, and I took several steps backward, out of his shot. I felt a surge of gratefulness that he was here, that he could do this. I didn’t think I could kill a dragon, no matter how empty its eyes were. “Thank you,” I whispered.

  “Get behind me,” he said.

  I did.

  He pulled the trigger.

  The gunshot seemed to echo against the clouds and the waves.

  * * *

  “You said something about a cleanup crew,” I said to Clarke Gannon, who I’d called. Every other time there had been a dragon, she’d simply showed up, but not this time. This time, I’d had to reach out to her. I hadn’t exactly wanted to. After all, she was the enemy.

  I mean, I guessed she wasn’t the enemy. Not really. And I had to admit that when I’d met Clarke Gannon, I’d had a grudging respect for her. But I couldn’t help thinking about my parents. How they had gone off on a vacation together and never come back, and how my grandparents had explained to me about dragon slayers, about greedy people who killed us to sell our bodies, and the horror of that—no matter what, that horror was fresh.

  It was too awful to think about. Too awful to comprehend. I was fairly certain that the only way I functioned was to block out the knowledge that there were people in the world who would do something like that to me, or to my family, to my child. Assuming my little guy would even be able to shift into dragon form. We didn’t know if that would happen or not. Half-dragon, half-human children almost never could.

  Anyway, I needed the dragon corpse gone from my pool, so I’d called Clarke.

  Now, we were standing out back on either side of the thing. It was slumped over the diving board, bleeding into the water.

  “Yeah, I have some guys I can call,” she said.

  “What do they do with the bodies exactly?” I said. “Is there any attempt made to try to identify the dragon, locate its family?”

  She snorted. “Why would we do that? Assuming this thing was once a shifter, there’s nothing good that can come of figuring out who it was. What we do is illegal, or perhaps you hadn’t heard?”

  I gritted my teeth. “Well, that’s because what you do is murder.”

  “Are we seriously going to have this argument again?” she said.

  My shoulders slumped. I guessed not. “Someone should try to find out who this dragon was.”

  “You could try,” she said. “Have your little cop boyfriend call this in. Watch how fast the coroner loses the body.”

  I had considered calling it in. Lachlan and I had talked about it, especially since he’d discharged his weapon. But I had been against it, because I hadn’t called in any of the other dragons. And I’d let Clarke cart off those bodies. I didn’t know how it would look to the police to involve them now.

  After being arrested for murder, I was a little less trusting of the authorities than I used to be.

  And Lachlan wasn’t nearly as straight of an arrow as he’d been before. If he ever really had been. Truthfully, he’d been willing to look the other way on lots of not-strictly-legal things I’d done.

  “I should call it in,” I said.

  She shrugged. “Go ahead.” She turned to go.

  “Wait,” I said.

  She stopped and turned to me.

  “What does the cleanup crew do with the bodies?”

  She shoved her hands into her pockets. “Well, they cut them up and sell them.”

  My throat closed.

  “I know,” she said. “I wouldn’t deal with them if I had another option. For one thing, I think the tainted dragon meat does things to the drakes. For another, I just don’t approve of it. If I had another option, I would use it. But I don’t. It’s this or leave the bodies lying around—”

  “And why not do that?” I said. “You’re the one who wants to expose this ‘conspiracy,’ right?”

  She scuffed her toe against the ground. “I used to live near this farm. You could look out the window and the field of cows was right up against our yard. Just a fence between them and me.”

  “Is this related?” I said.

  “Well, I remember one night, all the cows were bellowing, just making these awful noises. It was so bad that I couldn’t sleep. And when I asked why, I found out it was because they had ta
ken all the calves away from the mother cows, and the mothers were crying for their babies.”

  “What does this have to do with anything?” I had to admit the story made my heart jump into my throat.

  “There’s a lot of evidence that animals are as emotionally intelligent as we are, and we raise them for the express purpose of killing them.”

  I gaped at her. “What are you talking about? You can’t possibly be comparing killing dragons—killing people—to eating animals, because it’s not the same, not remotely, and it’s offensive that you would—”

  “The world’s a brutal place, is all I’m saying.” She raised her gaze to mine. “Bad fucking shit happens all the time, and it’s the nature of things. Kill or be killed. Everything gets ahead by eating the living, even if the living thing it’s eating is a plant. Things die. And this dragon? It was just a husk of a thing, flying around and destroying stuff. Barely even alive, if it ever was. There was nothing there. So, anyway, it’s the way of the world to pick its bones clean.”

  I folded my arms over my chest. “Do you really believe that?”

  She lifted her chin. “Wouldn’t have said it if I didn’t.”

  I thought of the dragons empty, black eyes. The fury inside them. Blind rage. I felt like crying, but I nodded. “Call your damned crew.” And then I stalked off.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  “What happened over there this afternoon?” Ophelia asked me. Ophelia was a mage. She owned the Pink Flamingo restaurant. She was a tall, black woman with a voice like apple pie. She and I were talking outside the Flamingo in the dusk. There was a little lull in the dinner crowd, and she said she had a minute to talk to me.

  “Well, that’s part of why I’m coming to talk to you,” I said. “Lately, we’ve been attacked by these rogue dragons.”

  She raised her eyebrows. “Rogue dragons? What?”

  “I know. I didn’t believe it either,” I said. “But now that I’ve seen it, it seems to be true. All those conspiracy theorists who are always going on about how dragons are out there burning people to death… well, there might be something to it.”

  “I’ve never heard of that conspiracy,” she said. “Well, maybe once or twice. Freak forest fires, things like that. But still, I never thought it could be true. Dragons aren’t cruel.”