The Dragon Conspiracy

by Lisa Shearin

  For now, the authorities didn’t see them as anything more than a boat full of partiers who had been randomly targeted by New York’s newest terrorist—some maniac on a boat with a grenade launcher, according to the chatter on Rake’s radio.

  Apparently the harpies’ instructions had included staying out of sight, so at least flying harpies wearing bandoleers of grenades wouldn’t be going into the police reports.

  That was the good news. The bad news was that the police were stopping any and every boat on the water. If the harpies hadn’t already blasted Roy and his folks out of the water, the cops’ search and seizure would apply to them as well.

  The boat jerked sharply to the side. Rake swore in goblin.

  “What is it?” It occurred to me I didn’t know where the life jackets were, or if Rake even had the things. Then I remembered the General Slocum and had a moment of panic. Though if Rake had life jackets, at least they wouldn’t be loaded down with lead bars. The goblin had money and from what I’d seen of his sex club, penthouse, and this boat, he didn’t mind spending it.

  The goblin hissed air out from between his teeth and, with a firm grip on the wheel and slight throttle adjustment, guided us back into smoother water. Though right now, smooth was relative; it had also become nonexistent.

  “We’re in the Hell Gate.” Ian came up from the back of the boat where he’d been talking to Yasha to sit beside me. “It’s an area of converging tide-driven currents. It’s not the safest place to take a boat. There’s been a lot of shipwrecks through here.”

  “Oh lovely. To get to the haunted island, we have to go through the Hell Gate?”

  “Actually, it extends to and surrounds North Brother Island.”

  A Coast Guard patrol boat was also battling the currents where the second boat carrying Kain’s men had gone down. There were bodies covered with tarps on the deck of a Coast Guard patrol boat.

  “All our folks live,” I said. “Kain’s men drown like rats.”

  “SPI has friends in watery places,” Ian reminded me.

  The mermaid and her merfriends had been busy—both saving and drowning.

  “I suppose it’s too much to hope for that Viktor Kain is under one of those tarps.”

  “Dragons can hold their breath for prolonged periods,” Rake said. “And they are most proficient swimmers.”

  I slid over to a seat away from the sides of the boat.

  “He’s turned dragon and he’s . . .” I made a slithering, swimming motion with my hand and arm.

  “He’d want to get to the island quickly,” Ian said. “To do that—and to keep from being attacked by the merfolk—he would have to turn dragon. Can we go any faster?”

  “I take it, then, that you’re through seeing the sights.” The goblin indicated the drowned Russians. “We’re now in more open water.” He pushed the throttle up farther and the boat leapt forward, taking my stomach with it. “Let’s annoy Mr. Kain by arriving at the party first.”

  24

  NORTH Brother Island wasn’t my idea of a party spot. However, if you were looking for a haunted island on Halloween night, I had to admit it rocked.

  North Brother Island was between the Bronx and Riker’s Island, home of the New York City Department of Correction main jail complex. Riverside Hospital had operated here until 1963, when it was closed and the island abandoned and officially declared off-limits to the public.

  Tonight, for one night only, the hospital was again open for business.

  Only this time, the cure would kill. Permanently.

  The rest of the ride over was spent doing a quick review of the island’s layout, what buildings were where, and which one was the most likely candidate to hide and activate death-dealing diamonds. At one hour until midnight, we didn’t have time for a tour.

  We went with the hospital’s tuberculosis pavilion. It was the largest building on the island, the most recently built—if you could say 1941 was recent—and since it was the newest, it was also the best preserved.

  Its preservation was the main reason we chose it as the winner of our most likely lair location. I’d think that it’d take some of the stress out of hatching an evil master plan to kill thousands if you didn’t have to worry about the roof caving in on top of you.

  There was an old dock on the west side of the island. We didn’t go there. Instead, Rake fought the currents and piloted his boat around the east side of the island to the north shore, beaching his boat in a tiny cove. It was also the closest access point to the tuberculosis pavilion. In addition, the goblin had deemed this the landing site least likely to be guarded by whatever we were going to encounter.

  I could see why.

  Mama Nature had constructed a defensive barrier all by her lonesome.

  The water extended right into the undergrowth—and overgrowth. Sleeping Beauty’s prince wouldn’t have been able to hack his way through this. Rake had assured us on our approach that it wouldn’t be a problem. I could see right now that I was going to have a problem with Rake’s assurances.

  “Did you bring a chain saw with you?” I asked Rake. “With a silencer?”

  “I will not need one.”

  “Then you’re going to politely ask the plants to move?”

  “Actually, I was going to command them.” The goblin finished shutting down the boat and its lights. Suddenly, the only sound was water lapping against its sides, and the only light came from the reflection of the high-powered lights on the water from Riker’s Island. Let me tell you, when the city lit a prison island, they didn’t mess around. I almost felt like they had a spotlight on us.

  “Sense any wards?” Ian asked.

  “No,” Rake and I said together.

  “I was unaware you could sense wards, Makenna.” Rake’s intense yet pleased scrutiny was uncomfortable to say the least.

  “A little,” I said. “Enough to keep me from stumbling into things. I’m sure it’s nowhere near what you’ve got up your sleeves.”

  “If we’re dealing with someone who can put harpies into suspended animation,” Ian said, “you’d think they would have wards, especially since they had to know we’d be coming after them.”

  “They could be saving their strength for securing the hospital,” Rake said. His dark eyes carefully surveyed the trees beyond the nest of brambles at the shore. “They could be using more primitive security measures out here to prevent interruptions from reaching their doorstep.”

  “Primitive such as?” I asked.

  “Harpies with hand grenades,” Ian said. “Though whoever is in charge of this tropical paradise would want to keep it quiet. They want to destroy supernaturals, not attract the NYPD by staging their own mini war.”

  As we had witnessed out on the river, New York’s mortal authorities reacted swiftly to anything that went boom. Ian was right; the harpies would keep their grenades to themselves. However, harpies could dispense death just fine without explosives.

  That was only one of the surprises that people sneaking around a spooky island at midnight on Halloween didn’t need. Eddie the gorgon was another one. And since he was a gorgon, we’d only be surprised once.

  Ian checked what weapons he had. We’d been expecting to tail a car, not storm a building that looked like a castle. Rake appeared to be going with the “my body is a weapon” approach. I spotted a couple of knives on him, but his clothing was so tight, there was no way he was hiding anything else.

  “We don’t have any way of knowing if we’re dealing with Eddie,” Ian was saying, “the thief, three harpies, or if they have other friends playing bouncer.”

  “So it won’t be a cakewalk,” I said. “Check.”

  The boat rocked violently as Yasha the almost-werewolf went over the side. The water was only up to his knees—his bare knees.

  Yasha was naked.

  Though when your bo
dy was now covered with that much fur, clothes were redundant.

  It appeared that Yasha had decided that like the Hulk, clothes were just going to get in the way of completing his transformation. From what I could tell, he was danged near there.

  The Russian raised his muzzle and inhaled like he was trying to suck all the air out of our little cove of horrors. Then with a fang-filled, wolfy grin, Yasha threw his head back.

  “No howling!” Ian whisper-yelled.

  Yasha’s grin flowed into a lip-rippling snarl. He didn’t like being told no, but he didn’t howl, either.

  I felt myself smile. “Unless they’ve got a Hulk, they’ve got a problem.” I was suddenly feeling a little better about our chances of actually surviving this thing, or at least reaching the hospital in one piece. “We have a werewolf. A werewolf who’s decided that he will live past midnight.”

  25

  SINCE Yasha was naked and therefore not wearing shoes, he offered to carry me to shore. I gratefully accepted. October in New York wasn’t that cold, but slogging around an island in wet shoes? No, thank you.

  The instant my feet touched solid ground I felt it.

  Two massive ley lines running deep beneath the island.

  We had ley lines running under the mountains in North Carolina where I grew up, but nothing like this. Maybe the thief had made some kind of magical preparations, or the presence of the Dragon Eggs on the island had gotten the ley lines riled up. Whatever had done it, there was no denying that these ley lines were awake; it felt strange saying this about something that existed only as energy—but they felt angry. I didn’t know how raw energy could be pissed, but that was the literal vibe I was getting. The ground under my feet was vibrating. I glanced up at the sky. No planes, either coming or going from LaGuardia, though I would have felt and heard them if they’d been there.

  I glanced over at Ian. My partner had taken off his shoes and was wading to shore. Yasha hadn’t offered to carry him. Maybe he was still miffed at Ian telling him not to howl. Regardless, he didn’t look like a man whose feet were vibrating.

  Rake had gotten to the beach by going to the end of his boat’s bow and leaping like a big kitty cat. It was easily ten feet to the nearest dry and undergrowth-free spot. Not surprisingly, the goblin nailed the landing.

  I pointed toward the ground. “You feel anything funky?”

  “If by ‘funky’ you mean the nexus of the ley lines, then yes.”

  Ian went still. “You can feel it?” he asked me.

  “Oh yeah.” I stepped from one foot to the other. “It feels like a seriously ticked-off nexus.”

  “It’s the diamonds,” Rake said. “Their mere presence calls to the energies below this island.”

  “They’re not going to call on it to cause an earthquake, are they?”

  “I’d much prefer an earthquake over those diamonds being activated.”

  Ian finished putting his boots back on. “Let’s see what we can do about preventing both.”

  Rake had told us that the machete-worthy vegetation wasn’t going to be a problem.

  I’d taken that assurance with a grain of salt.

  However, once again, the goblin had delivered as promised.

  He’d commanded, and the plants had moved. Literally. Parted like the Red Sea. And if the branches couldn’t bend far enough to clear our path, the plants had committed hari-kari by ripping themselves out of the ground by their roots.

  The path stayed clear behind us. While I liked having an escape route I could take at full speed, if we left this much destruction, whatever guards the thief had dragging their knuckles around the island would find our boat. Nothing said disappointment like running for your life only to find your boat under the water rather than on top of it.

  Ian was having similar concerns. “You got a ward for your boat?”

  Rake’s laugh from ahead of us was soft and low. “She can take care of herself.”

  “How about us?” I asked. “Yasha has wolf-vision going, and you can see in the dark like a cat.” I jerked a thumb at Ian. “Mere mortals like us are at a distinct disadvantage. Yeah, we’ve got a full moon going, but with those clouds, it’s not doing us a bit of good.”

  “I can shield us from sight and sound, though we will need to stay close.”

  “I was kinda planning on doing that anyway.”

  The goblin glanced at Yasha with obvious distaste. “However, there is nothing I can do to mask scent. Air must flow in and out, and that includes smell. You may use a small flashlight, but please keep it as dim as possible so as not to disrupt my own vision. Even with light to see by, my night vision is infinitely superior to yours.”

  Well, la-di-da.

  “Good,” Ian said. “Because Yasha’s sniffer can smell Viktor Kain. And since right now we’re downwind from the rest of the island, he’ll know about Kain before Kain smells him. Do it.”

  Rake did. After a few words and a couple of gestures, the goblin simply turned and headed off into the forest.

  I didn’t feel any different.

  “I’d advise that you keep up, agents of SPI,” Rake called back. “The shield only extends to a radius of three meters.”

  Ian and I both had penlights, but they didn’t do much to keep us—okay, me—from tripping over roots, rocks, and building debris that seemed to be everywhere.

  The island was only thirteen acres, which wasn’t very large when you thought about it, but add in near pitch dark and what appeared to be a forest primeval looming around us, and it made a perfect obstacle course, which I felt like I was doing while blindfolded. It also turned every building, tree, and kudzu-covered, crumbling wall into an ambush waiting to happen.

  Before we’d landed, I’d distracted myself from the high potential for drowning by scanning some of the web pages about North Brother on my phone. One guy had been right on target by describing it as what you’d get if the world suddenly ended and nature took back what was hers, growing around and through the trappings of civilization. And to add to the island’s vacation destination potential, there was an actual morgue in a building that used to be the chapel. It was across from the island’s physical plant and coal house, and next to the main dock. I guess it was practical to have any dead bodies close to the place where they could be loaded up and taken off quickly and quietly.

  The wind had picked up, pushing the clouds off to the east that had obscured the nearly full moon for the entire night until now, filling the open spaces between trees and buildings with light, making the shadows even darker by contrast. Now even Ian and I could see.

  My eyes went from the moon, following the bright white light down to what once must have been a road leading to the front of the pavilion but was now covered in kudzu that carpeted the pavement and climbed the trees growing up on either side. Instead of a yellow brick road, we had a green kudzu road; and instead of ending at the gates of Oz, it ended at an abandoned hospital’s tuberculosis pavilion. The one-story-high, rectangular entryway reminded me of the entry into the Dendur Temple at the museum. A rectangle of pale gray that looked almost white with the moon, surrounding the stairs leading up to the recessed doorway—all concealed where the moon didn’t shine. Pitch-black.

  The kudzu continued up the side of the pavilion. In the center of the building, its elaborate brickwork and broken windows half covered in ivy or kudzu, was a four-story . . . “Tower” was the only word I could think of to describe it. And along the top, the brick masons had constructed what looked like battlements. Heck, they even had . . .

  I stopped. Ian was forced to either do the same or run into me. Ahead of us, Rake and Yasha stood motionless; Yasha’s muzzle was raised, analyzing the air.

  Thankfully, we were still in the shadows.

  Four harpies crouched unmoving on the edge of the tuberculosis pavilion like gargoyles on a castle tower.

&n
bsp; Four, not three.

  The triplets we’d been dealing with were now quadruplets.

  They were perched four stories directly above the main door into the building.

  “Is there another way in?” I asked Ian in the barest whisper.

  He shook his head.

  That wasn’t the direction I wanted to see his head go.

  Yasha looked back at us and nodded once.

  Ben was in there; Yasha’s nose said so. Unlike Rake Danescu’s assurances or ulterior motives, I believed everything Yasha’s nose told him the same way I believed the sun was going to rise tomorrow. That sun was going to come up. Though the way things were going, I might not be alive to see it.

  Rake glanced up and signed in weary resignation, as if the Amazon-sized, and so far unkillable, harpies were nothing but an annoying influx of mosquitoes at a pig pickin’. As if all we needed to do was light some citronellas, fire up the bug zapper, and we’d be done.

  And even if Yasha’s nose hadn’t led us here, I would have known that this was the place, and so would have Rake. The two massive ley lines met under the tuberculosis pavilion.

  Ian and I had no more weapons than we’d had the last two times we’d tangled with these girls, and now there were more of them. Yeah, we had a highly-motivated-to-survive werewolf, and a goblin who was reputed to be deadly in a fight. Yes, he’d done everything he’d bragged he could do so far, but I’d rather not bet the farm—and my life—that he was as good as he thought he was.

  The clouds moved all the way away from the moon, showing us what none of us wanted to see.

  The entire length of the building’s flat roof, not just the pavilion tower, was dotted about every fifteen feet or so with its very own harpy. And the trees I thought were simply shorter than the others, in actuality had their top branches weighted down by yet more harpies.

  I didn’t bother to count them; one was too many. When that one snapped me in half when we tried to make a break for the pavilion doors, thirty more piling on top wouldn’t make me any deader than I already was.