by Blair Drake
“Where was I when all of this was said?” He hated they talked about him and he didn’t know it.
“You were lying at our feet. Queen Gaanne was sure you were dead. It was a good thing I brought along all the dusts I had. I was able to revive you enough to get you into the trunk of Strix’s car and get you out of there. The battle wasn’t over when you went down, and you were a distraction. They needed to be in the air, but they were worried for your safety. They made me bring you here.”
“What about my dragon? Is he okay?”
A tear rolled down Woli’s cheek as she slowly shook her head. “It’s been a terrible week.”
A week? It had only been hours, he was sure of it. The passage of time couldn’t be more than a day at most. His head hurt too bad to think about it anymore.
“I thought the underground wasn’t safe?” Dylan said.
“It’s safer than Craydusk right now.”
“What about the citizens? Are they okay?” Dylan thought about Professor Tully, Portly, the girl with her brother on the cruiser, the talking dog.
“That’s why you don’t look at them. They are separated from us in a way. They can only be harmed if they interact with you. The darkness came with you. You never interacted with them, and so the darkness didn’t affect them. It did, however, burn down the church on the south side of town. I just couldn’t get there fast enough to put out the fire.”
Dylan didn’t really get it, but he breathed a sigh of relief. “I’m so sorry anyone was hurt or lost their life. This is all my fault for coming here.”
Woli reached down and grabbed his hands. “It isn’t your fault. The king, he said it was there before you arrived, but your arrival accelerated it. So it would have come anyway, we just didn’t know how fast.”
He released Woli’s grasp and put his face in his hands. “I keep thinking I’m going to wake up from this nightmare. But I never wake up, and it keeps getting worse.”
Woli kneeled down in front of him. “It’s almost over. The Grim Train arrives soon. When it gets here, we’ll get onboard and get your stupid book. Then you can go home and the nightmare will be over.”
“Or it will only have just begun,” Dylan whispered.
“What was that?” Woli was looking over her shoulder, toward the train station.
“Nothing.”
Woli continued to touch Dylan as they waited for the train, and he could feel the warmth of her healing as it spread through him.
“Are you doing that with pixy dust?” he asked.
She smiled. “No, this comes from compassion. It’s a natural thing for pixies.”
She moved from kneeling to a sitting position with her legs straight out in front of her.
“I’m gonna miss you,” Dylan said.
“Me too,” Woli said.
They sat there in silence until the Grim Train could be heard roaring into the station.
The ground rumbled and shook, and Dylan wondered if it was the battle above the ground, or the train. But when the sound of the screeching brakes stopped, so did the rumbling.
Woli stood and reached down to give him a hand up. “Here we go. Let’s find your book.”
Somehow, Dylan thought this might be worse than the battle in the sky.
“Three things to remember when we’re in the underground: we are outsiders; no one is your friend; no one is coming to help us.”
Dylan walked beside Woli, trying not to look around to see who was with them, even though he could hear lots of footsteps. If he was in his world, he’d say he could hear the people around him, but he was pretty sure the things moving around him weren’t humans. He was going to call them people for simplicity. Heck, he knew a lot of people who qualified more as creatures than as decent human beings.
“About the train: it’s like a moving city. It travels so people can get to work and go where they need to go, but it only serves the underground. No topside stops for the Grim Train. And even though it was originally a passenger train, it now has restaurant cars, potion shops, sleeping cars, and a lot more. We’re looking for the pawn shop.”
“Does the shop have a name?” Dylan looked up at the open doors of the train cars.
“Pawn Shop,” Woli said, and grabbed his hand to drag him along the platform.
He couldn’t force himself to look down any longer. When he looked around, there had to be hundreds of people milling around. They all seemed in a hurry with places to go. Orcs, trolls, dwarfs, fairies who looked both kind and evil, almost ordinary looking folks (if you didn’t look too close), and many creatures he couldn’t name, seemed to have somewhere to be. And there were a few people who looked a lot like the citizens of Craydusk, keeping their heads down and walking at a brisk pace. Other than being bumped a few times, no one paid them any attention.
The train looked similar to a subway train, except it was matte black and the cars had no windows. He figured that was for the safety of the passengers. If what everyone who spoke of the underground was telling the truth, knowing what was beyond the train tunnels might be deadly.
When the doors opened, every other car spilled its passengers, and the other cars opened their doors for business.
Standing outside the train car doors were what his parents would call barkers. “Potions, we’ve got potions of all kinds.” “Sludge fried lizeerds on sale today, best lizeerds in the land. Today only.” “Angel dust, devil dust, we have what you need.” And he saw worker bees at the far end of the train. “Raw honey. Great for eating, wearing, or using in your potions.”
Outside one of the cars stood a human-sized lizard, wearing a doorman’s suit. He didn’t call out, just stood quietly and nodded to the people entering the car. Dylan leaned around Woli to get a glimpse into the car. Pods, like the kind he saw on first class international flights. The things were entering the car and disappearing into the individual pods. When the pod was occupied, it turned a sickening green. Vacant pods stayed white. What he wouldn’t give for the opportunity to get into one of those pods and sleep for a few days.
Woli kept walking, so Dylan did, too. Nothing among the twenty-something train cars looked even remotely like a pawn shop. When they reached the end of the station platform, Dylan’s heart sank. They were never going to find his book of magic.
“Did I miss something?” he asked. “I thought you said there was a pawn shop on the train?”
Woli turned on him. Her hand on her hips, and her legs wide, as if ready for battle, she said, “You are so impatient.”
“I am not. I just thought you said there would be a pawn shop.” He felt defensive at her comment.
“This isn’t the only train track. The Grim Train has several lines underground. I was just hoping it would be this train because it’s the easiest to access, and the safest.” She looked around. “But if Portly pawned the book to buy back a piece of his soul, it was probably on the east side of the underground.”
Dylan thought about the connotation of “the east side.” In Chicago, it was where the housing projects were located, and Cicero. The east side of his hometown was where the gangs claimed territory. And he was pretty sure everyone knew the reputation of East L.A.
“Let’s go, we have to get to the other side of the underground.” She linked her arm in his, then pulled it out and looked at him. “You need to change clothes. You’ll stick out and probably get us killed.”
Dylan looked down at himself and his armor. “Back to the clothes I was wearing before the battle?”
“No, that won’t do. That might be worse. Combat boots and a black trench coat.”
Dylan closed his eyes and pictured his favorite wizard, Harry Dresden, and what he imagined he’d look like in person. When he opened his eyes, he smiled.
Woli laughed. “Okay, futuristic boy, now you’ll attract more attention than we want. Try something more gold rush cowboy looking, but keep the boots. Those boots are sick.”
Gold rush cowboy? What the hell did that even mean? He tried to thi
nk of any old Clint Eastwood movies, maybe Wyatt Earp. Yes, he had it, Doc Holliday. He closed his eyes again, picturing Val Kilmer.
Woli clapped her hands. “Lovely.”
Dylan opened his eyes and looked down at his clothing. He could feel the stiff collar of the white shirt, and he could just see the gray ascot. He wore a black vest with silver pinstripes, and a long black leather duster. The coat was heavy, but he liked it.
“I need to learn to morph into other beings, not just change my clothes.”
“You’re pretty good at changing clothes, though.” She wiggled her brows.
Dylan blushed. He never thought about what he looked like when he was changing. Had Woli seen him naked? He’d never wished for a big, athletic body before, but now he seriously hoped Woli didn’t see his scrawny, naked body when he changed clothes. He was too embarrassed to ask what she saw when he morphed.
She again linked her arm in his, and they walked away from the first train. The station would soon be empty, as the “barkers” stepped back into their cars and the doors closed.
Dylan stood with his feet wide to keep his balance as the train pulled out of the station. The “people” around him continued to their destinations, bumping and jostling others on the platform as the ground shook.
“That must be one powerful train.” Dylan continued to stare at the place where the train used to be.
“Let’s go. We need to be quick about this before someone catches your aroma.”
“Do I smell that bad?” he asked, suddenly more self-conscious.
“You smell other worldly. The underground doesn’t like outsiders, remember? We’ll be going to some dark areas to get to the other trains. Hopefully, we won’t have to go too many places. Sometimes it’s easy to get turned around and not know how to get back the way you came.”
Woli squeezed in closer to Dylan and maneuvered him down an alley. Dylan didn’t like this idea. Bigger crowds seemed safer, but what did he know?
“Aren’t they going to sniff you out? I mean, you have purple hair and you’re wearing a tutu. You don’t exactly fit in.”
Woli looked at him and smiled. “I’m going small. People who see you will think you’re walking alone.” She disappeared.
What the…
Chapter 20
Woli fluttered near Dylan’s ear and told him which way to go, then she settled on his shoulder.
As soon as they turned off the busy platform, he came to a stop. “You mean I’m a sitting duck?”
“No, I’m here, but I’m not visible in a sense that will bring attention to us. And with the black duster and those combat boots, you look like you mean business. Lizard skin would really make you fit in.”
He thought about that idea for less than a nanosecond. No way in hell. He didn’t want to be a lizard man.
“Let’s just get there. Less talking, more walking. Unless there’s an Uber in the underground.”
“Uber?”
“Never mind. I’ll just walk a little faster.”
Thank goodness Woli wasn’t heavy this time and he could keep a quick pace. He took long strides to cover the ground without looking like he was running.
He’d never been in the back alleys of a big city, but this was exactly how he imagined it: dark, smelly, and damp. He put his hand up to his face and held the back of it under his nose, to cut the rancid smell a bit. If he had to place the smell, he’d say it was vomit, urine, and old beer. Just thinking about it made his stomach lurch. He fully expected to see rats crossing their path. Instead, he kept seeing pairs of red eyes.
And as they continued down the alley, the eyes seemed to be multiplying.
“Woli?”
“Snotlings. Just walk faster. They aren’t very big, and they won’t leave the alley. This is their habitat. They are food for trolls, so they hide in the alleys. The problem is they work in gangs. And I’m starting to see a lot of them. Shit.”
The closer they got, the stronger the smell. “Who could eat something that smells like that?”
“Trolls don’t smell much better,” she whispered, as if she was afraid the snotlings would hear her.
Dylan nearly tripped on one of the little guys. The dim light from the top of the building showed him that what he’d tripped over was about a foot tall, with blue-green skin, pointed ears, and a terrible overbite. He wondered if they offered braces in the underground.
“You’re on our turf,” the green thing hissed. His overbite made it difficult for Dylan to understand him. At least he assumed it was a him.
“We’re just passing through. We mean no harm,” Woli said.
The snotling looked around. “Who said that?”
Dylan cleared his throat. “Um, I did.”
He looked around, and now there had to be at least a hundred snotlings surrounding them.
“Keep walking. They aren’t likely to attack.”
Not likely to attack, his ass. He could feel them biting at his calves. “Ouch, shit. Ouch.” He kicked out.
“No, don’t be aggressive. No.” Woli yanked at Dylan’s hair. “Run.”
Dylan did his best to run, but he had two snotlings latched onto his left ankle and one on his right calf. As he ran, another one leapt up and grasped the sleeve of his duster. He shook his arm as hard as he could and the snotling flew off and landed on a pack of his buddies. He could hear the grunts and groans and decided it was time to lose the leg biters, too.
He stopped.
“Run, Dylan, run,” Woli yelled.
But he couldn’t continue to run. The gang was closing in on him, but he kicked his leg out hard and dislodged the two on his ankle. The calf biter wasn’t so easy. Dylan tried to reach down and pull him off, but he just bit down harder.
“Ouch, you mother…”
“Just run. I’m telling you. Get out of the alley.”
He finally decided Woli was right, and even with the nasty snotling hanging onto his lower leg by just his overbite full of Dylan’s flesh, he ran. With every step, the snotling bounced, yanking and sending a shooting pain through his leg. It was worse than dragging it with someone hanging on for dear life.
He was three strides from the end of the alley when the snotling let go.
“And stay out. Don’t come back this way. We’ll know, and we’ll be waiting.” The snotlings lined up three feet from the edge of the alley, staying in the shadows.
Dylan stood on the sidewalk, trying to catch his breath. He was a runner, sure, but that thing had to weigh at least twenty-five pounds, and he had three of them dragging him down. He bent over and lifted the leg of his trousers. There was a gaping hole where the snotling stretched the chunk of skin he bit into.
Woli stood next to Dylan, now full size again. She reached into her work pouch and bent down to get a closer look at his injury. “Those suckers have some sharp teeth.” She sprinkled a pinch of orange dust on his wound.
“Like a damn pit bull with those strong jaws,” Dylan winced as the dust hit his skin.
The orange dust glowed and burned like hell. Dylan gritted his teeth then there was no pain, no feeling at all. When he looked back down, the flesh no longer hung loosely either.
Woli shivered.
“Cold?” he asked.
“The temperature is much colder on this side of the underground.” She rubbed her upper arms with her hands.
Dylan took his duster off. He was sweating from running and kicking, so he was happy to give it to Woli. “Here.”
He held it out, and she shoved one arm in then the other. He lifted it over her shoulders, and she turned around. “It’s a little big but so warm.” She sniffed. “It smells like you.”
“Sorry,” he said, imagining the smell of a sweaty locker room.
“Not in a bad way.”
“Thanks for fixing me,” he said.
“Booyah!” Woli danced around him. “I’m so good.”
She giggled and skipped down the sidewalk as if she didn’t have a care in the world.<
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The streets were deserted in this area of the underground, or so it seemed. They hadn’t seen a single vehicle of any kind, no one floating by in a bubble. Come to think of it, there were no bubbles. He kept looking to the shadows, sure there was someone watching them. It was too deserted, too quiet. Something didn’t feel right.
“One more alley,” Woli said. “Just up there.”
“Oh goodie. I can still feel the phantom bite from the last snotling attack.”
“No snotlings in this alley, or at least there never used to be. Snotlings don’t fair well with baby dragons.” She stopped on the corner of the street, just before turning down the alley. “You ready?”
He shrugged. “What do I need to be ready for?”
Woli grimaced. “Just about anything. Dragon Alley isn’t really baby dragons. It’s more like teenage dragons. Think gangs with nothing better to do than harass innocent people.”
Dylan took a deep breath. “Isn’t there another way?”
“I want you to stand here for just a minute. I’m going to do some recon. There’s a chance it’s late enough. The boys will be out looking for trouble, instead of hanging out in the alley.”
The duster dropped to the sidewalk as Woli shrunk down to the size of a butterfly again.
As soon as she was out of his line of sight, he saw movement in the shadows. He knew they weren’t alone.
Quicker than he could react, he was slammed against the building, a rotted black hand against his throat. A mess of natty dreadlocks surrounded the face of the person choking him.
“Who are you?” she said, her voice sounding hollow in his ears, making him wonder if she actually spoke, or if he thought it.
“Who are you?” he croaked from the pressure on his throat.
“I belong here, you don’t. I can smell your foreign smell. It’s powerful.” Her breath now rancid in his nostrils.
“Get your bony fingers off me,” Dylan said.