Where Sleeping Dragons Lie (Skeleton Key)

by Cristina Rayne

  Feeling her heart sink, Briana reached a hand to that enormous talon and carefully laid her palm onto its shiny surface. She was a bit surprised that it was warm. She had expected it to feel rough like bone, but instead, it was as though she was touching a talon carved from pure obsidian.

  “So that’s it,” she said softly, looking up at him with sympathy despite what she was about to say. “You were just toying with me when you hinted that you had the skeleton key from the drawing because you’ve believed since the first day you met me that not only did I have Beatrice’s book, but also the key.”

  Briana raised an eyebrow when he shook his head. “I’m pretty confident you don’t.”

  She frowned, now feeling utterly confused. “Why?”

  “Because you’re currently here with me,” Taron replied simply, “and looking at that picture should have incited a stronger emotion than just the curiosity you’ve shown.”

  Her frown deepened. “I don’t follow.”

  Taron stared down at the place where her hand rested against his talon for a long, uncomfortable moment. Finally, with a heavy sigh, he abruptly pulled his hand back, startling her. The expression in his eyes was suddenly unreadable.

  “Taron, what—”

  And then she felt it, something hard, cool, and smooth beneath her left hand that still rested where it had fallen against the vellum page when Taron had pulled his hand away so unexpectedly. Briana yanked her hand away with an oath, the book nearly falling off her lap with the sudden movement.

  Without warning, a humongous dragon’s snout flooded her vision, his T. rex-looking teeth mere inches away from her face. She flinched so hard that she nearly fell backward. The smell of ashes inundated her senses as gust after gust of almost too hot to bear dragon’s breath washed over her as he seemed to be hyperventilating.

  “It’s here! It’s here!” Taron roared, making Briana wince and cover her ears in pain in response to the extra decibels. “You did it! You did it!”

  Did what? she thought dazedly, sure that everyone in the whole state had heard his shouting.

  “Quickly! Pick it up. I dare not touch it.”

  “Pick what up?”

  “The key of course! The skeleton key.”

  The giant dragon head disappeared from her field of vision, and only then did Briana slowly remove her hands from her ears. They still rang from taking the full brunt of his booming voice.

  “Forgive me,” Taron said, his voice back down to an infinitely more tolerable volume. “I didn’t mean—in my excitement—but the key—”

  Briana automatically followed his gaze back down to the book in her lap, and her eyes widened when she saw a semi-opaque key about four inches long with a skeleton head and two delicate-looking teeth wedged into the crease of the book, a key that looked impossibly like the drawing beside it.

  A key that had not been there moments ago.

  “What in the world…” she said weakly, unsure if anything would ever make sense again.

  “Please take it,” Taron pleaded. “Take it before it disappears. Quickly!”

  It was the look of absolute desperation in his eyes that had Briana scooping up the key despite not wanting to touch it at all. Once it was in her hand, Taron all but collapsed onto his belly and closed his eyes, looking so exhausted that it made her throat tighten with emotion.

  “I thought this day would never, never come,” he admitted roughly.

  “I don’t understand. What the hell just happened?” she asked, eying the key in her hand as though she was holding a sleeping viper.

  It was more substantive than she had expected, perhaps weighing around a pound.

  “The key only appears to the one that’s meant to use it,” Taron said, “That is its lore. Now I can go home. Now I can save Dagon and restore order to my kingdom once again.”

  “Um—I hate to be a wet blanket, but how do you know that it’ll unlock the door that leads to your world? You said the stories about the key talked about various people opening a door to paradise or heaven. That could mean anything and anywhere.”

  Taron opened his eyes and slowly grinned. “Because I found you, and the key appeared.”

  “That’s it?” Briana asked incredulously. “That’s your logic?”

  “There’s also the fact that Beatrice wrote the book in the language and alphabet of my people.”

  She had completely forgotten that Taron had been able to easily read the strange writing.

  “Okay…so what now? I stick this key in the nearest lock and the door will just open up to your world?” she asked skeptically. “Just like that?”

  “It was my thought to use it on the door whose threshold I initially fell across two hundred years ago to enter this world. My gut tells me that is the correct path.”

  “Your ‘gut’ tells you, huh? Maybe you should read this book some more before we do anything,” Briana suggested wryly. “For all you know, this might be a one-shot deal.”

  “We?”

  Briana snorted as she stuffed the key into the right front pocket of her jeans. Magic key or not, just touching the thing made her extremely uneasy.

  “Of course I’m going to help you, you big lizard.”

  Flashing her a chastising look, Taron pulled himself back up onto his haunches. “Then this ‘big lizard’ will fly us directly to England right now. The castle I appeared in is currently empty as well as owned by me. I needed to make certain that the door and its lock were preserved. We can study the contents of the book there while that bugger, Cabak—”

  A rapid narrowing of his eyes was her only warning before Briana was suddenly snatched up roughly by one red hand, followed by a deafening crash behind her that sounded as if the building was cracking open. She looked over her shoulder in enough time to see a large boulder hurtling towards them, a dark mass of blue a shade lighter than the surrounding sky blotting out the sun behind it. A split-second later, the world became a jumbled mess of blues, reds, tans, and grays as she was jerked around in several different directions until she felt as though her neck would snap, Taron’s hand also squeezing her just a bit too hard and making it difficult to breathe.

  Then the world just as abruptly became upright again, and though dizzy, Briana was at least able to breathe more easily—for about two seconds. A stream of orange-red fire a million times more powerful and impressive than his earlier demonstration shot out from Taron’s maw, instantly heating the surrounding air. Her lungs felt as though they were being scorched when she involuntarily gasped.

  Her arms trapped once again within Taron’s fist, Briana tried to protect her face from the heat by pressing it closer against the smooth scales of a large index finger. Then the brutal heat was suddenly gone, and another huge hand formed a cover over her head, plunging her into darkness.

  “Speak of the Devil and of course he comes,” Taron snarled. The sound of vigorously flapping wings reached her ears even through the insulation of the hands around her, followed by a violent jerk upwards that made her teeth snap together painfully. “Looks as though that trip to England will be a tad bumpy, after all.”

  With both the skin on her face and the lining of her lungs feeling tight and burning with pain, Briana could only lay the side of her head against a few of his scales, squeeze her eyes shut, and groan miserably, wondering if her face now resembled a boiled lobster. She was also keenly aware of the skeleton key in her pocket digging sharply into her upper thigh, reminding her mockingly of her agreement to help Taron get back to his home world.

  Considering she had just been in the middle of a freaking fight between two monstrously enormous dragons, she had come out of it relatively unscathed. How close had she come to becoming a wet, chunky stain in the concrete by the huge boulder that other blue dragon had thrown at her? She was damned lucky that she had come out at the other end of a battle that included literal rivers of fire and rocks the size of a house with nothing worse than what would probably amount to the equivalent of a sunburn.


  Now would be a good time for me to wake up, she thought with a choked laugh.

  Too bad the pain in her body pretty much guaranteed she wasn’t asleep.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  For the first hour of the flight, Briana endured sudden, stomach-churning drops and lightning fast ascensions that made her nearly pass out with the added g’s of force. She even thought she heard the crackling roar of Taron shooting fire from his mouth a couple of times, which meant that they had yet to shake the blue dragon from their tail.

  Then after a long while of steady flying, Taron carefully maneuvered her a bit higher until she could see a portion of one fiery-colored eye through a small gap between a couple of the fingers he had cupped over her head for protection.

  “Are you all right?” he rumbled over the sound of his wings flapping and the whistling of the wind as they sliced through the air.

  “I am now that the horribly bumpy rollercoaster ride seems to be over,” she shouted, unsure if he could even hear her puny voice. How keen was a dragon’s hearing, anyway? “Was the dragon that attacked us what’s-his-name that came looking for you in the bookshop?”

  “Cabak,” Taron growled, the utter loathing in his voice practically tangible.

  Yep, he could hear her just fine, which was a relief. At least if they could talk, it would take her mind off her discomfort and the surge of claustrophobia she was beginning to feel at being unable to move her arms and legs with very little light shining through between his fingers.

  “I’ve managed to lose him for now,” he said, “but that means we’ll have to take the long way around to the castle.”

  “Won’t that be the first place he goes looking for us?”

  “Only the Hildebrands know that I own it. I used a fictitious name when I purchased it and haven’t stepped foot in it since Cabak entered this world two years ago.”

  “Should we expect more dragon-shifters to come after us?” Briana asked worriedly.

  “No—at least for the moment. Until Cabak appeared before me, there were no other dragons present in this world.”

  “That you know of,” she said. “Just look at how many old myths about dragons we have all over the world. Now that I’ve met a real honest-to-God dragon, I don’t think that’s a coincidence. Either dragons have been coming here from your world for ages, or they came long ago and stayed long enough for stories of them to be passed on.”

  “Only the Ansi have the power to open portals to different realms,” Taron said, sounding troubled. “If dragon-shifters have been coming to your world, then they are doing so with their aid in absolute secrecy.”

  “If I were you, I would keep a closer eye on the Ansi when you get back to your world,” Briana said dryly. “It seems they may be up to a lot of sketchy things besides stabbing the firedrakes in the back. I wouldn’t think a group powerful enough to travel to different worlds would be satisfied being ruled by anyone, even someone as powerful as a fifty-foot-tall fire-breathing dragon. Maybe they really haven’t sided with the stone dragons in your civil war. Their actual reason for helping to incite the war could’ve been to weaken both sides enough to stage a coup of their own.”

  Taron fell silent for a long moment. Briana almost regretted her words. Having a potential second usurper come into the picture had likely never entered his mind, and now that she had pointed it out, she had just added something else for him to worry about along with his mountain of other worries.

  “Perhaps the Fates have heard my pleas after all,” he said finally, an odd note in his tone. Then he asked a bit more sharply, “You do still have the skeleton key?”

  Yeah, it’s giving my thigh a new bruise as we speak.

  Briana frowned. Although she hadn’t had the time or the desire to study it more carefully before she had banished it into her pocket, at first glance and feel, the key had appeared to be made from a glass-like substance. Should they be worried that it could crack given how firmly it was being pressed between Taron’s scaly hands and her body?

  “I didn’t drop it if that’s what you’re worried about,” she retorted, “but you might want to ease up on the squeezing if you want the key to make it to England in one piece.”

  “I’m more worried about it disappearing. I ran across more than one story that claimed the key was indestructible—at least by fire, sword, or blunt force.”

  Although he probably couldn’t see her face properly through the crack of his fingers, she scowled at his eye, nonetheless. “After all the trouble you went through to get the damned thing, do you really want to test that theory? Besides, I think my legs have gone numb.”

  She was relieved to feel the pressure around her body lessen slightly. “Better?” he asked, amusement coloring his tone.

  “Not really, but I just realized that we’re probably somewhere close to orbit right now, and I’d rather not risk literally slipping through your fingers and falling to my death.”

  He chuckled. “We aren’t quite that high up. Although traveling at a higher altitude would shave a few hours off our journey, a human like you would both freeze to death—despite the extra warmth radiating off my hands—or suffocate at those kinds of elevations.”

  “Oh, right…” Briana replied with a grimace. “But—aren’t you worried about showing up on someone’s radar?”

  “My scales prevent that.”

  When it became apparent that he wasn’t going to elaborate, she decided to let it go in favor of a more pressing concern. “So, where are we right now?”

  “We’re nearly clearing Antarctica.”

  “What the hell are we doing in Antarctica?”

  Somehow, she had thought “taking the long way” meant going across the Pacific rather than the Atlantic Ocean.

  “I managed to ground Cabak in the Caribbean. I saw a storm brewing towards the south, and the added ozone in the air was just the thing I needed to disrupt my scent trail. I’m hoping he believes that I’m trying to get you back to my penthouse in New York, or at the very least, not even consider the possibility of me flying this far south. With any luck, we’ll be in England in about an hour.”

  “An hour? Just how fast can you fly?”

  “Not quite as fast as Superman,” he replied cheekily.

  A surprised laugh burst from her lips. “Hearing a dragon talk so casually about a comic book character is just plain weird.”

  “I’ll have you know that I adore reading comics,” Taron said in a particularly posh accent. “Although, Batman has always been my favorite.”

  “Me too!”

  It was in this vein, finding out that Taron was very much serious about loving to read comics—a hobby she also shared—and pretty much nerding out about various comic storylines that they passed the time during the rest of their flight. Not once did they bring up the skeleton key, Cabak, or even Beatrice’s book. When he abruptly announced that they were coming up to his castle, Briana was genuinely shocked at how quickly the time had passed and how easily he had made her forget the throbbing in her slightly-singed face and her discomfort of not being able to move anything other than her neck.

  “If it’s safe, can you remove your top-most hand so I can see it?” Briana asked.

  “Of course. Just let me descend a bit more, first.”

  A few seconds later, she felt her stomach drop as Taron rapidly descended and then was momentarily blinded as he removed the hand that had formed a protective dome over her head. It was probably around four in the afternoon, London time.

  Briana hissed and blinked rapidly as her eyes started to water. She struggled against the massive dragon hand curled around her body for a long, frustrating moment until she managed to pull her left arm free to rub the tears from her eyes vigorously.

  Sitting in the center of a sprawling estate with lots of trees and surrounded on all sides by farmland, Taron’s castle looked, to her immense delight, just as she expected it to. It was a weathered, medieval fortress of a light gray stone with five squa
re towers of various widths and heights and around a six or seven-foot perimeter wall surrounding the entire structure.

  “Wow. It’s gorgeous! I supposed it fits that it’s owned by a prince.”

  Taron snorted. “You should see my kingdom’s royal palace. Most of it is a fortress carved into the side of a mountain. One of the ballrooms, alone, would dwarf the whole of this structure.”

  Briana rolled her eyes as Taron flew over the perimeter fence and landed on the front lawn only a few feet away from the entrance. “Yep, definitely a spoiled prince,” she teased.

  Another snort as Taron carefully set her down onto the cobblestone driveway in front of a short, stone staircase leading up to the front door. “Dragons are not spoiled.”

  Luckily for him, she was too busy trying to keep her numbed legs from collapsing from under her to retort. They were already starting to hurt something fierce with that pins and needles sensation she hated.

  Then she did fall over onto her rump in surprise as the huge, red firedrake began to contort and shrink in front of her. Within seconds, a black-haired man covered from head to toe in shiny, red scales stood before her—a very naked, very well-endowed man with the muscular body of an athlete. Briana froze, so completely caught off-guard that a gear in her brain seemed to have gotten stuck in mid-thought.

  The scales seemed to rapidly sink directly into his skin until only his tanned, human skin remained. Even the pupils of his eyes had rounded until she was staring with wide eyes into the same sunset-colored eyes she had first seen in Carol’s bookshop.

  A slow, cat-like smile stretched his lips. “Like what you see?”

  Shaking her head and laughing, Briana accepted the hand up he offered, careful to keep her eyes above the waist. However, she couldn’t resist ogling his chest muscles just a little bit.

  “You’re awful!” she scolded. “I hope you have at least a pair of pants stashed away here.”

  His wicked grin widened. “We’ll just have to see, won’t we?”

  It was strange to hear him speak with his human voice. She had gotten so used to the dragon in the past couple of hours that it was almost just as weird to see the gorgeous man of before that had intimidated her so much. It made some of her early shyness return with a vengeance, and she couldn’t quite keep from blushing just a little bit. He had absolutely no shame at all.