by Tricia Owens
Hunting Down
Dragons
Moonlight Dragon
Book 2
Tricia Owens
Copyright © 2016 Tricia Owens
All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof
may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
Cover art by Ravven
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.
Acknowledgments
Yet again Samantha Ashpaugh was my hero for this. Thanks for keeping me in line!
Thanks most of all to my mom. Thank you for keeping me excited.
Read more from Tricia Owens at http://www.triciaowensbooks.com
Moonlight Dragon series
Descended from Dragons
Hunting Down Dragons
Trouble with Gargoyles (coming soon)
Forged in Fire (coming soon)
Hunting Down
Dragons
Chapter 1
"I gotta pee."
It was hands down one of the worst things I could've heard.
At least at that moment, anyway. My best friend and I were in the middle of the desert, dozens of miles from anything resembling a port-a-potty. And of course as soon as Melanie said it, I realized I had to go, too.
"Damn you, monkey!" I gritted my teeth and looked around. Prospects for sparing our dignity didn't look so great.
We were about twenty or so miles away from the Strip, out in the middle of literal nowhere, as in I'm sure our location would have shown up on Google maps as Nowhere, Nevada. The Spring Mountains were jagged darkness to our left and the glowing lights of the Las Vegas Strip were ahead of us, with California to the south. That was about as much as I could have told anyone about where my friends and I were. And yet somehow we were surrounded by a good hundred people who'd also come out to blast the hell out of things under the guise of celebrating the Fourth of July.
The sun had gone down an hour ago. It wasn't dark, though. Fireworks were both lighting up the sky and clogging it with clouds of pale gray smoke. Periodically, someone across the desert set off a series of loud explosions that sounded like machinegun fire. Elsewhere, people lit things that spat fire and whistled as they hurtled through the air. A big pile of wood pallets and trash was on fire about fifty yards to our left. Music blasted and people randomly cheered and shouted. The scene was a low rent and far less cool Burning Man.
My friends and I had been coming out here for four years. Holidays in Vegas weren't celebrated like they were in other cities across America. Businesses rarely closed here because holidays saw huge influxes of tourists. But a holiday like the Fourth was different since all the celebrating occurred late at night. My friends in retail were usually able to get off work in time for us to come here. Since I was the temporary owner of my business, a pawn shop in downtown, I turned off the Open sign as soon as I felt like it.
Some years the police drove out here and politely ran us all off. Other years we were left to demolish all the scrub brush and lizards that we could. It looked like this year we'd be left alone and I was glad. This was one of the rare times when I felt a connection, however tenuous and temporary, with my fellow locals. The skies above the entire Las Vegas valley periodically sparkled with legal and illegal fireworks, temporarily stealing the thunder from the city's famous neon signage.
I would have preferred more darkness at the moment, however. I glanced around at my friends. Celestina, my fortune teller neighbor, was arguing about something with her boyfriend Lev. He was currently in his human form, but by his expression it was apparent he wished he had shifted into his wolf form ages ago.
A bit away and smirking in sympathy with Lev stood Christian, Melanie's on-again-off-again red-haired boyfriend. He was a water fey who naturally craved large bodies of water, but who had chosen to make arid Las Vegas his home. None of the three was paying attention to my best friend and me, but still…
"We don't have a choice," I said with resignation. "We're going to have to pee in public."
"I've done it before you know," Melanie said with a quick, apologetic grimace.
She was dressed like an airship pirate since her current obsession was with steampunk. Her previous fascination, cyberpunk, had left its mark in the form of her pale blue hair. I hoped she wouldn’t eventually move on from the steampunk fandom with a mechanical arm as her souvenir.
"I used to go camping with my brothers all the time and I can't just whip it out like they can! Not even in my monkey form. So you know what I did? I bought a funnel, Anne. A pee funnel! Can you believe it?"
I winced in sympathy. "Sounds cruel and unusual."
Actually, spending too much time with Melanie's family at all sounded like low-grade torture. All of them were monkey shifters and all, though incredibly nice, were high-strung and excitable. Worse than Chihuahuas.
"It was a low point, for sure. And worse, I didn't position it right and I peed all over—"
I held up my hand. "Say no more." I randomly chose a direction that I thought was dark enough. "I'm going over there. I'll meet you back here in five."
Though my reason was slightly embarrassing, I actually enjoyed heading into the darkness, away from the others. As I walked across the hard-packed desert floor beneath a half moon, I felt in tune with the Paiute Indians who used to call this place home. Of course, I had to block out the sound of car radios blasting the latest club remixes and m80 firecrackers blasting the hell out of soda cans, but nonetheless, it was the closest to nature that I'd been in a while.
A light night breeze curled against my bare arms, warm and dry like being brushed by a sheet of fabric softener. Dirt crunched beneath my sandals but here and there I saw some flower-type growths that were probably weeds but were still an improvement over the concrete jungle of the city. And even though I could hear firecrackers and radios, I probably had the best chance at that moment of also hearing the passage of a living creature. It was a nice change from my usual surroundings.
I ran my Uncle James' pawn shop in downtown Las Vegas, so I spent most of my waking hours selling and trading all sorts of junk, both harmless and cursed. Things like typewriters and electric guitars sat beside cast iron cauldrons and evil eye wall decorations.
Normally, it was a pretty mundane gig. Curious tourists and desperate gamblers were my typical customers. The occasional witch or other magickal being stopped by, too, of course, sensing that Moonlight Pawn was magick-friendly, but for the most part it was a retail job like any other.
That had changed only once, when Christian, who at that point was a stranger to me, pawned a gargoyle statue that I hadn't known at the time was his best friend Vale. Vale had been unable to shift back into his human form and had suffered the double whammy of also being possessed by a demon. After a lot of sorcery and a lot of bruises, my friends and I managed to remove the demon and allow Vale to assume his human form once again.
In the course of doing that we'd also stopped the dark spirit named Vagasso from using that same demon to take over Las Vegas. It had made for a dramatic two days. On the negative side, I'd made an enemy of Vagasso. On the plus, Vale Morgan and I had formed a connection.
I smiled in the darkness, but it was a smile edged with wistfulness. Vale wasn't like typical guys and not merely because he could transform into a gargoyle that turned to stone when the sun rose. Vale was different, but d
isappointingly, I hadn't seen him since we thwarted Vagasso.
When I felt that I'd reached the darkest spot of the desert and wouldn't be visible to anyone, I took care of business. Fireworks sparked out across the valley, over the neighborhoods of Henderson and Summerlin, and nearer, above my head. Summer nights were always gorgeous in Vegas. I wouldn't have minded spreading out a blanket and camping out here. However, scorpions and snakes had a funny way of making you decide it might be more fun to hit up a bar or the Blueberry Hill restaurant.
As I was finishing up, I felt a curious buzz in the air. While I walked back through the darkness to my friends, I tried to decide if I was being paranoid or if I had really just felt someone using magick. The sensation grew, pulling me to an incredulous stop.
"Who in the world would risk showing off in front of ordinary humans?" I asked aloud.
While Las Vegas was packed with magickal beings ranging from pixies to shapeshifters to sorceresses like me, ordinary people were completely oblivious of this magickal underbelly. That was because the Oddsmakers ran the city and they prohibited any use of magick where ordinary humans could see it. You absolutely did not want to cross the magickal bosses, not if you wanted to continue using magick or, you know, breathing.
My first thought was Vagasso. Any dark spirit willing to summon a dangerous demon in an attempt to take over the city would have the balls to do what I was feeling now. No one knew exactly who or what Vagasso was except that he was powerful. And yet my friends and I had managed to ruin his plans.
It was safe to say he wasn’t a member of my fan club. The demon he'd summoned? I'd banished it back to Hell. Summoning demons was no easy thing, and now he'd have to start all over. If I were him I would've been pissed at me, too. And I would have chosen this night, with me alone in the middle of the desert, to retaliate.
Granted, I wasn't completely alone. I called up my magickal familiar, which was a golden Chinese dragon I called Lucky. Lucky could be a wisp of air or a worthy opponent of Godzilla, depending on how much of my life energy I fed to him. There was also the trick that if I gave him too much power, I sort of lost myself to my ancient dragon blood and I became a dragon. That was the worst possible thing that could happen to me. Previous dragons in history had destroyed villages and caused terrible loss of life. If I gave in to my nature, too, I would be hunted and killed by the Oddsmakers.
That wouldn't happen tonight, though. Fingers crossed it happened never.
I called forth Lucky only his weakest form, so that he presented as a gust of circling cold air. Not much of a threat, but I'd drawn enough bad attention to myself when Lucky and I had fought off Vagasso the first time. It was a miracle I hadn't yet been called before the Oddsmakers to answer for how much sorcery I'd used.
A hundred yards away, above the desert, something red and gold streaked through the sky. I gaped. That hadn't been a Roman candle.
I stared at that patch of sky, feeling my eyes beginning to burn from the dry desert air and the gunpowder that hung heavy like storm clouds.
This time it was unmistakable: what moved through the sky wasn't a form of firework. It coiled and reared up like a cobra, but it had wings that spread out into fans of fire. I guessed from the distance that it must be at least fifty feet long. Its body was mostly a blood red color, but was gold on the wings and where plates flared along its spine like fins.
It was a magickal European dragon.
My eyes rounded as the dragon blasted fire in a streamer worthy of a Mad Max flamethrower. On the ground beneath it, people cheered. Car horns honked. They all thought it was some kind of advanced pyrotechnic. I hoped they continued to believe that, because if any one of them guessed that the dragon was created by sorcery…a lot of bad things were going to happen.
"Anne! Anne!" Melanie sprinted to me and grabbed my arm once she'd skidded to my side. "It's a dragon!"
"I know." Sweat slid down my spine as the red dragon lazily circled overhead, really putting on a show and attracting the attention of the hundreds of people gathered here.
"I didn't know there were other dragon familiars in Vegas," Melanie said.
"Me, neither."
"It's like they're showing off," my friend went on, watching the display with horrified fascination. The light from the dragon turned her blue hair purple. "Or, like, they're thumbing their noses at the Oddsmakers! Anne, this is crazy!"
It was more than crazy. The longer the dragon performed, the more I realized this was catastrophic.
"You don't think the Oddsmakers would blame me for this, do you?"
But as soon as I asked the question I knew the answer: of course they would. That was the point of this seemingly pointless and risky magickal display: someone was setting me up.
~~~~~
To say I was paranoid during the drive home was an understatement. I kept craning my body around in the front seat so I could monitor the sky from every angle through the front windshield and side windows.
"Anne, I don't think they're going to swoop down out of the sky and smash my car," Melanie said with a nervous little laugh. "I mean, they'd better not. I still have a year's worth of payments on this thing!"
"I guess not," I muttered, but I honestly wasn't sure. I turned around in my seat to look back at Christian. Though he was relatively new to Las Vegas, his mother was a witch and his father, before he died, had been a water fey. Those were old school beings with deep connections in the magical community.
"Have you ever heard anything about anyone being summoned by the Oddsmakers?" I asked him, hoping his witchy mother might have been a bit of a gossip hound. "Do they receive a certified letter in the mail or are they snatched up by a giant eagle, or what?"
He smirked, because it looked good on him and Christian was the sort of guy to know exactly how he looked at all times. It didn't make him a bad guy. In fact, he'd saved Vale and me by helping to run off Vagasso.
"No one actually knows someone who's faced the Oddsmakers," he told me, "because those people conveniently disappear." The wind from our open windows stirred his red hair around his eyes as though he were a model in a wind tunnel. "But everyone has heard stories of people who've been summoned by them."
"So what stories have you heard?"
"You know about the warlock who used a Cambodian luck spell at the Tropicana to win a couple of million dollars?"
I nodded. "Rumor says he's buried somewhere in the desert."
"I don't know if that's true or not, but I heard that the Oddsmakers grabbed him by shrinking him down to the size of a cellphone and then pocketing him and walking out of the casino."
I laughed, though if the story were true, it wasn't funny. "Then they could have just flushed him down a toilet, not gone to the effort of burying him out in the desert."
He grinned at the suggestion. "It's just what I heard. No one knows much about the Oddsmakers except to steer clear of them."
Celestina, sitting beside him, gave a snort of derision. Stretched across her lap with his head out the window was Lev, now in his wolf form.
"Oddsmakers are like the Mafia for magick," she said. "They don't operate for the good of anyone but themselves. Threaten their bottom line and they'll erase you."
I found that an interesting analogy. "So what's their bottom line? Surely they're not motivated by money?"
"They're motivated by a hunger for power. No one can do anything of major magickal significance without their permission."
"Well, I guess someone has to take some kind of control," I said. "Otherwise we'd have sorcerers and shifters running free all over the place and the government would be snatching up the rest of us for testing and military experiments." I shuddered. "Better to have rules than be poked and prodded, right?"
"You assume the Oddsmakers exist to protect us." Even in the dark interior of the car, I could read Celestina's skepticism. "It's all about power. Always."
I didn't doubt she was right, which set my mental gears turning. "How did they come abou
t? Did they take control on their own or were they elected?"
"Ooh! Ooh! I know this!" Melanie took one hand off the wheel to wave it above her head. "My dad told me the Oddsmakers showed up in Vegas in the late 1950s because huge amounts of chance magick were building up here. A lot of the vintage places like the Sands, the Sahara, and the Horseshoe were doing well by that time and bringing in a lot of business. God, Anne, most of them have been imploded, how sad is that?!"
"It is sad, but keep going," I urged, trying to keep her on target. I loved her, but as a monkey shifter Melanie could have an attention span shorter than a six year-old's.
"Okay, so the valley is like a big bowl, right? The mountains surround us in a ring. And there's nothing nearby to soak up all the chance magick that grows every time someone makes a bet. I mean, you flip a coin and a tiny bit is generated even from that. So imagine thousands of people betting on everything, twenty-four hours a day. It just kept building and building and the Oddsmakers realized someone nasty was going to come along and try to take advantage of it all. So they decided to begin monitoring the place to make sure no one was tapping into it for the wrong reasons or being sloppy and revealing magick to ordinary people."
It was interesting, and I wanted to know more, but history needed to take a backseat to my current nervousness. "But who are they?" I pressed. "Some of the original Oddsmakers must be dead by now. Were they replaced?"
Melanie could only shrug. "I don't think my dad knows anything about who they are. I'm not sure that anyone does."
"When you find out, Anne," Christian said, "let the rest of us know."
"Ha ha," I muttered at his unsubtle suggestion that I would be picked up soon and brought in for questioning.
He laughed at my sour expression. He was of zero interest to the Oddsmakers, so this discussion probably meant little to him. Unless he planned on putting on a SeaWorld show in the lake in front of Bellagio, no ordinary human was ever going to learn that Christian was a water fey.