Monsters, Book Two: Hour of the Dragon

by Heather Killough-Walden

  Chapter Thirty-two – (Temporary) Sovereign Safehouse, Undisclosed location

  “Okay. So let me get this straight.” Conall Tiarnahn braced his hands on his hips and began a slow pace back and forth across the Monsters clan garage.

  A few black leather couches, armchairs, and accent tables had been placed artfully in the garage, and the open building even sported a well-stocked bar. All along the walls, chrome motorcycle parts gleamed, stacked in neat rows and hanging from pegs for whoever might need them next. Likewise, all along the massive back wall of the large building, the motorcycles those parts went to were lined up in perfect procession, one brutally fast metal beast after another. Conall had spared them a wary glance, as they’d served a healthy reminder of just whose territory he was now on. But he was admittedly pretty focused on trying to get this mess of an ordeal straight in his head.

  He licked his lips and said, “Billions and billions of eons ago – ”

  “Well, not quite that long,” chuckled one of the Monsters members from where he sat back on a bike Conall presumed belonged to him, his long legs crossed at his booted ankles.

  Conall ignored him. “The Great Black dragon Bantariax confronted a kind of god that had somehow found the mortal dimension and was planning to destroy it as he had several others.”

  “That’s how we’ve always heard it,” said another Monsters member.

  Conall nodded. “So that’s probably, what, the very force of entropy that rules our universe? As in, nothing stays in its same state for long. Food rots, soda goes flat, stars burn out or smash into one another, mortals age, and so forth.”

  They nodded.

  He said, “The natural order. Bantariax wanted to stop the natural order.”

  “Unfortunately it’s not that simple,” said Jacob Crow. Conall tried not to shoot the man a dirty look when he met his gaze. “If you’ll notice, all of those things you mentioned still happen in this dimension. The chaos god? Would have made it happen a lot faster and with much more violence.”

  “Think of that dragon creature on My Little Pony who’s voiced by John de Lancie. You know, ‘Discord?’ The one who makes chocolate milk rain and cotton candy clouds and eats the tea cup that leaves the liquid inside still in the shape of the cup?” one of the men suggested.

  His clansman nudged his arm excitedly. “Bro, you saw that one? I told you Discord was off the charts. De Lancie killed it! He was one hundred percent ‘Q’!”

  The first clansman laughed. “Watched it with Chroi. Man, you weren’t joking. The Goblin King is one sick My Little Pony fan.”

  “I think they’re called bronies,” said Crow. “And we’ve gotten off topic.”

  Everyone stopped laughing, and instead of an irate look, Conall now found himself giving Crow a grateful one. Jacob Crow returned the smile with a single nod.

  “Okay,” Conall said, taking a deep breath. “So Maze is worse. Like entropy on fast-forward.”

  “Basically,” said one of the men, now much more serious.

  “So this legendary dragon decides to sacrifice himself, using his power basically twenty-four-seven-three-sixty-five-forever to keep the big bad Discord in another dimension.

  “Yep,” someone said.

  “Only, the dimension he was held in was weakened somehow,” someone else said.

  Conall asked, “How?”

  “We don’t know,” said Crow. “Something about time being stopped for too long, maybe. Honestly, that I’m aware, no one knows. The point is the dimensional wall of Maze’s prison was weakened, making Bantariax’s job even more difficult. Maze, seeing his opportunity as a now or never kind of thing, decides to fight back – hard. And just like that, the dimension shatters.”

  “And now he’s free and Bantariax was injured in the escape and no one can find him.”

  “Right.”

  “Okay, so what does Maze want?”

  “We assume he wants total chaos,” Crow said with a shrug. “But he isn’t yet powerful enough to exact it on the mortal realm. He’s slowly building his strength by pulling it from a source he keeps close by – we assume this is Randall Price, the serial killer. He then turns around and, little by little, he utilizes snippets of his returning power to create more chaos in the world around him.

  “Hence the passenger vehicle crashes and the bad flu and now this,” Conall gestured to the image he’d pulled up on his cell phone screen, of a headline on the phone’s news app declaring a stock market drop that was greater than any in forty years.

  “No doubt that’s also his doing,” said Crow. “Though you do have to give some credit to humans, who are more than capable of wreaking plenty of havoc all on their own.”

  A few of the Monsters clan laughed softly, but it sounded a little like sad laughter, filled more with regret than anything else. Conall looked from one of their overtly handsome faces to another, wondering if the body language he was reading from them was accurate. They actually seemed to care.

  Did these guys genuinely like or even respect the human race?

  Conall Tiarnahn had experienced a hell of a day. In the course of twenty-four hours, he’d had to keep bottom-feeding supes from a human serial killer’s crime scene in Pennsylvania – that one chalked up to the same man Conall had personally threatened to stay the hell away from his warden – until the werewolf detective in charge – that being Detective Hendrix James – could come in and see to it. Then he’d had the very same woman, the one his clan considered their guardian angel kidnapped by a member of another clan, and not just any clan but the Monsters clan. Then he’d learned that the entire Monsters warden clan lived up to their names in a very literal way. Not a single one of them was even remotely human.

  He’d been pulled into the circle of trust on this secret when Faith was taken, and the head of Monsters naturally had to meet with Conall to deal with it. Coming to truly understand the depth of the situation was impossible if Conall wasn’t made aware of the long-standing relationship between Antares Mace and Annaleia Faith. By long-standing, that was fifty years. Give or take.

  It was then a natural domino-deduction for Conall to put two and two together and come up with the realization that it wasn’t just Mace who was non-human. Memories of rumors came back to him, accompanied by things people had noticed, such as the fact that the Monsters clan had never failed at a job, not once. Nor could anyone remember ever seeing any of them sustain a mortal wound that necessitated a sentinel. In fact, no one could remember ever seeing a Monsters sentinel at all.

  Then there was the name of course. Monsters.

  And the cincher was Cain himself. An enigma if ever there was one, and most assuredly not human. It was just that people were literally afraid to admit as much out loud.

  Cain had spared him the dicey prospect of asking point-blank by simply coming out and telling Conall that yes – they were monsters. The lot of them. He’d even said it as if it were no big deal.

  So now Conall looked around at the men in the massive garage and had to wonder if to them, it really wasn’t. He wondered if to them, supernatural beings were no more or less important than mortals. They’d chosen to be wardens, after all. Wardens protected those who couldn’t protect themselves, such as humans.

  It bore some consideration, and it also influenced Conall’s perception of the man who would be working in his clan for two months when this was all settled and done.

  Or if.

  “So what is it exactly that Victor Maze is doing with this Price guy?” Conall asked. He wanted to know exactly what the crazy son of a bitch who’d butchered a bunch of women to make them somehow appear like Annaleia Faith was going to do with his warden, and what Victor Maze’s interest was in that.

  “We think he’s using him as a source of….” Crow trailed off as he tried to think of a proper term, then shrugged and settled on, “food.”

  “How exactly?”

  “Well, once Detective James placed Maze and Price at the same scene together, we w
ondered the same thing,” said one of the Monsters members who hadn’t spoken until then. He was very tall, but they were all tall, and Conall realized he appeared taller because he had excellent posture. He also appeared to have perfectly coifed gold-brown hair as if he’d just come from a stylist. His eyes were notable, and now that Con knew none of these men were human, he was wondering what honest-to-god gold eyes made a man. What manner of monster are you? he wondered to himself.

  “I’m something you’ve probably never heard of,” the man told him with a small smile. The other clan members began to smile as well, all of them watching Conall with eyes that knew so much more than he did. Frankly, he felt like a wounded seal in a sea filled with circling sharks.

  “What would that be?”

  “Nathan’s an Aurum,” said another man, the one Con recalled going by the name Sharpe. But he only remembered that because he used to watch a television show about someone named Sharpe. “A gold blood vampire.”

  Con frowned and blinked. “A what, now?”

  They laughed. Crow said, “An Aurum is a vampire who must feed from an individual whose blood contains, not iron, but gold.”

  Conall had no fucking idea what to make of that, much less what to think of it. But apparently, his mouth had no such qualms. “Wait, I thought gold was caustic to vampires?”

  “Dude, you’re thinking of something else entirely. Like some kind of angel or something.”

  “Getting your monsters all mixed up,” someone else said, chuckling. “I bet you think silver hurts werewolves.”

  “Nah, he’s a warden. He knows silver hurts warlocks.”

  Yes, he did know that. But it only worked under certain circumstances.

  “I know he doesn’t know jack about leprechauns,” another clansman said, laughing a little harder.

  To which another member, one who seemed to have storm clouds trapped in his dark gray eyes and the pitch of a moonless night in his very black hair, said, “Val, I know you meant to say Luricans, so I’ll let it slide. Fuck head.”

  Oh crap, thought Conall. I’m in way over my head here.

  Because they were right. He had no idea what a Lurican was. He had a vague notion that they were some kind of dark fae type creature like a leprechaun, but that was all he knew. And he’d certainly never heard of gold blood vampires. And what the hell did they mean that an Aurum fed off people with gold instead of iron in their blood? That wasn’t even possible!

  The sound of someone clearing his throat brought the room to an absolute absence of noise. Quite suddenly, Con could probably have heard a mouse squeak – on a planet in another solar system.

  “The race of gold blood humans is very sparse,” said Cain, whose boots now rang out like a death knell as he made his way into the garage. All eyes were on him. All backs were straight. All expressions were properly chagrined. “And very old,” he continued. “The term ‘golddust’ was coined for their kind, and nothing else ever had much of a chance to take its place before the race was hunted nearly to extinction.”

  He moved through the garage, taking off his riding gloves as he spoke and his steps sounded in Con’s eardrums. “Golddusts are immortal in that they do not age and much like most supernatural beings, few mortal methods can kill them. But a hungry Aurum certainly can, and unfortunately that is what far too many of them did, leaving the Golddust race dwindled to almost nothing.”

  Conall chanced a glance at the man who’d claimed to be one of these Aurums, and damn if the gold god didn’t have the grace to look ashamed. He’d even bowed his head and stuffed his hands into the front pockets of his jeans.

  “Fewer than a hundred golddusts remained when a very wise and kind Nomad took the survivors and hid them away from the rest of the realms. The Aurums who needed their blood for survival were given a substitute. While it kept hunger at bay, it failed to provide the essence of what gold blood vampires truly needed. Hence, they began to get sick. But while this was happening, the Nomad – along with a handful of carefully chosen mages – was working on a solution.”

  Conall found himself rapt by Cain’s words, caught up in his explanation of the two races as if Cain were telling a very interesting story. Well, I guess he sort of is, Con thought numbly. “What was the solution?” he asked.

  “The Nomad’s team developed a spell that disguised the blood of a golddust, making it appear as if it were iron that ran through their veins rather than gold. Just like any human. The spell was placed upon every remaining member of the species, and henceforth upon every Golddust at the time of birth. In exchange, the golddusts unanimously agreed to donate their blood on a regular basis, which the sovereigns then made certain to distribute fairly.”

  Conall glanced at the tall gold-eyed man again. “And… you have to drink this donated blood what – every day?”

  The man smiled kindly and shook his head. “Nah, not as often as that. Over time, all vampires require fewer feedings, Aurums included. Makes it easier on the golddusts too.”

  Conall had so many more questions – but… wasn’t there not time for this? A wave of strange dizziness swept over him. He felt his brow furrow and touched his forehead to find it slightly warm. Shit, he thought. Am I coming down with something?

  Then he looked up and realized that as Cain had been talking to him, he’d been moving around the room, handing something to each of his clansmen. Whatever it was, they seemed to know immediately what to do with it, as they all began popping it into their mouths and swallowing.

  Cain stopped his rounds in front of Conall. “Take this,” Cain told him, holding out what appeared to be a small matte-black sphere.

  “Oh crap, is this the mind-control blocking thing?” he asked, only now remembering that Katrielle and the others had been working on one to counteract the effects of Victor Maze’s chaos thoughts. And only now realizing that until Cain had arrived, the entire lot of people inside that garage had gone off on a tangent! Shit, he thought. They’d been talking about children’s cartoons and John de Lancie and laughing about what Conall did and did not know, when something devastatingly important was happening right that very minute.

  “Crap,” he whispered again as he took the pill from Cain’s hand and swallowed it down immediately.

  Cain turned away from him then and addressed his men. “I can’t be with you nonstop, but that should help prevent repeats of what I walked in on a few minutes ago.”

  The ashamed expressions deepened, and there was some uncomfortable shifting on the leather sofas and the leather seats of the bikes.

  “In the meantime, we have two humans to rescue. So –” he said with a glance over his shoulder at Conall. “A brief recap.”

  Conall almost sighed in relief knowing that Cain was recapping solely for his benefit.

  “These women, along with Annaleia Faith from the Draco clan, are of no value to Maze. His interest in them resides solely in their interest to Randall Price. Maze promised Faith to Price in return for his cooperation.”

  “And his bad vibes,” added Crow under his breath.

  “Yes,” Cain agreed. “Maze also used Price to get closer to Katrielle.”

  “How so?” asked one of the men Conall didn’t yet know.

  “Maze allowed Price to believe he was unaware of Faith’s location and one way or another, Randall Price sent out a call for a bounty hunter of sorts. Detective James of course responded, which we now know Maze was expecting – as James is Katrielle’s personal employee. We’re assuming Maze took the opportunity of the meeting to comb the detective’s mind and garner as much as possible about Katrielle.”

  “Damn,” someone said.

  There was a thick silence while everyone seemed to be considering the implications of this. All Conall knew was that Maze had some sort of personal plans for the Nomad and that they were no doubt unpleasant. It was after all her first love Bantariax who had trapped the chaos god in the first place.

  “So!” Cain said as he drew the meet to a close, “This dema
nded trade is for Price’s benefit, but if Maze is the opportunist we know he is, we can expect him to take the opening to deal us some kind of blow at the same time.”

  “You know, I don’t understand why he doesn’t just kill Price and maybe try to off the others and be done with it,” said Crow.

  Cain glanced at him, and Conall heard him softly say, “Don’t let Mace hear you say that, Crow.”

  Jacob Crow straightened. “Right. But you feel me?”

  Conall had been wondering the same thing.

  “Honestly no clue,” said Cain simply. “My guess is he isn’t finished with the man just yet. It’s possible he’s tied to him in some way and isn’t yet strong enough to sever the tie. Therefore he has to appease Price for the time being.”

  “So he’s going to do everything he can to make sure Faith winds up in the psycho’s hands,” said Conall. He could feel his blood pressure rising.

  “Not if we can help it,” said Crow. “You know the plan. Just stick to it.”

  All around the garage, the Monsters clan rose from their seats and slid on jackets or gathered holsters or ammo from the wall.

  “Trust us,” said the Aurum member – Nathan, Conall remembered – as he passed by him on the way to gather his own things. “We’ll have her back.”

  “We won’t let her come to harm,” assured the man with hair the color of night.

  “She’s one of our own now too,” said Cain. And to everyone else he said, “Head out.”

  Chapter Thirty-three – Undisclosed location, then Austin Texas, early morning

  Ares heard Annaleia’s heart pounding. The portal’s colors changed, shifting for a final time before the end began to slide open like branching lightning. “Here goes…” she whispered. She started to move toward the exit, but Ares grabbed her wrist.

  “Wait,” he said, pulling her gently behind him just in case. “Give it a sec.”

  He watched carefully as it opened the rest of the way. He couldn’t cast up any more shields or anything while in the portal, but he could at least act as a shield himself.