by Webb, Peggy
Night of the Dragon
Peggy Webb
Copyright 2011 Peggy Webb
Cover design copyright 2011 Marc Fletcher
Publishing History/ Bantam Loveswept
Copyright 1998 by Peggy Webb
Smashwords Edition
CHAPTER ONE
Once upon a time . . . The wooden sign, painted with red lettering in Old English scroll, held promises of faraway places where magic was as commonplace as mourning doves cooing on the windowsill, and dreams could be plucked by the pocketful from golden trees growing along the wayside.
Lydia loved the sign. She had brought it all the way from Pontotoc, Mississippi, in the back of her 1988 blue Ford truck, covered with a tarp so the storm she'd come through in Texas and the blistering heat in New Mexico and Arizona wouldn't warp it and damage its bright colors. Perched on a ladder she'd found in a dusty back room of the bookshop she'd purchased from Michael O'Hurley, she hung the sign over her front door.
"How does it look, Uncle Michael?" she said.
The old man who held the ladder looked like a leprechaun, with three tufts of white hair that sprouted from his head, a face as brown and wrinkled as a hickory nut, and a large hooked nose that dipped down over a generous mouth. His smile showed four gold teeth. He was fond of telling people he had found them at the end of the rainbow.
He wasn't her uncle at all, but a dear friend of her mother, who had worried that when Lydia came to California she would immediately be set upon by thieves or worse. Rachel Star had made Michael promise to watch over her daughter as if she were his own.
And maybe she was. Lydia knew her father only as a man in love with long distance, which meant nothing to her except that her mother was steeped in the lyrical prose and dark moods of Tennessee Williams, and had a fanciful turn of mind.
Michael O'Hurley viewed the sign from all angles before venturing his opinion. "It looks like success to me." He held up his hand. "Let me help you off that ladder. Rachel would skin me alive if anything happened to you on your first week here."
Though Lydia could fight her way through a passel of wildcats and needed no help at all getting off the ladder, she smiled and held out her hand.
The bell over the door had six tiny clappers, and they all chimed when Lydia and Michael went inside.
"I'm going to miss this old place," he said.
"You can come here anytime. Every day, if you like. I'm going to need your help getting to know the customers."
"I don't want to make a pest of myself. Besides, I'll be too busy bowling and chasing women."
Lydia saw right through him. He eyed the bookshelves with the same mixture of bravado and longing that she had felt when she'd pulled up stakes and left her small bookshop and her little white frame house in Pontotoc.
"Don't go," her mother had said.
"I have to."
"But why California? Why not someplace close like Oxford or Tupelo or Memphis?"
Lydia had picked up the picture of Trent Brandon in his ten-dollar frame and million-dollar smile. For two years she'd believed in the sincerity of that smile, and when it had turned out to be as false as the rest of him, she'd sent him packing.
"Because I've always liked the idea of traveling to faraway places, and that's as far as I can get on my finances. Besides, Trent hates California."
She'd considered tossing his picture into the garbage can and along with it her engagement ring, but Lydia believed in rituals. That night after she'd finished packing and her mother had gone home, she built a big fire in her grill. Then she'd sat in her backyard surrounded by fireflies and serenaded by crickets while Trent had turned to a pile of ashes and melted metal. His million-dollar smile had been the last to go. As it curled into a puff of smoke, Lydia tossed her ring into the fire. It turned the color of old wax before it shattered. She'd saluted the splinters with her glass of wine. "I might have known it was a cubic zirconium."
The memory of that cathartic evening still fresh, Lydia picked up a dust cloth and kissed Michael on the cheek. "Thanks for all your help. May you score nothing but strikes and may all your women be beautiful."
"Who said I was leaving?" He picked up a broom. "You go dust book covers while I do the heavy labor."
Lydia brandished the cloth like a sword. Dust billowed around the small back room. Perched high on the ladder, she sneezed so hard, she had to clutch the edge of the bookcase to keep from falling. A row of books toppled to the floor.
"Are you all right?" Michael stood in the doorway, breathless. "Lord a' mercy, I haven't trotted that fast since I chased Susie Breckenridge around the flagpole in sixth grade." He braced himself against the ladder which had already steadied itself.
"Thanks, Uncle Michael." Lydia climbed down, then bent to pick up the fallen books, and he squatted beside her, grumbling.
"What are you doing, anyhow?" He picked up a book with a tattered cover. "There's nothing but worthless old junk back here. I always kept this room closed off."
"Oh, you never know." She knocked dust off as she stacked the volumes in a neat pile. "I might find something so rare and wonderful that we'd both end up millionaires."
He chuckled, entering the game with gusto. "I can see the headlines: Star and O'Hurley Strike It Rich. I'd go to Hawaii and hook up with a hula girl. Where would you go?"
Lydia thought of all the places she'd dreamed of as a child, faraway places with exotic-sounding names: Bombay, Shanghai, Singapore, Jakarta, Santiago.
"Where would I go?" she said, musing. "If I could go anywhere, I'd go back to the days of innocence and dreams, back to a time when there were unicorns and dragons in the woods, and a handsome prince waiting behind every tree." She laughed at herself. "But of course, that's impossible."
Suddenly something as bright as stars flashed before her eyes, and she looked down at the book in her hand. Gold gleamed through the thin layer of dust. The book fell open to an illustration of a knight, sword aloft, shield gleaming with intertwined dragons. Lydia's heart fluttered like the wings of a hummingbird caught in her chest as she traced the handsome face. Her fingertips felt hot, as if they had caught fire, and she heard the sound of distant music, soft, ethereal music made by strings. A harp. Or a lute.
"Lydia? Are you okay?"
"I feel funny, that's all. Must be that sausage I had for breakfast."
"I'll get you a glass of water."
Lydia sank onto the floor with the book cradled against her chest She felt a burning sensation, right over her heart.
"Heartburn," she said, though she suspected a much more complicated cause for her weird disorientation. Pulling up stakes and leaving a place she'd called home for nearly thirty years was not an easy thing to do. Top that with the pain of discovering the man she'd loved didn't love her back, and the pain of separation from her mother and all her friends.
Lydia blew the thin layer of dust off the book in her hands and traced the gold letters on the cover of the book: Camelot: Tales of Truth, Honor, and Sacred Trust.
"What do you have there?" Michael handed her a glass of water.
"This." She turned the book so he could see the title.
"There's a lot of old stuff back here. I had the shop for fifty years, and before that it was owned by a family who came out to California when the railroad was first built."
Gingerly she turned the thin, brittle pages. "This one is over a hundred years old. Uncle Michael, this is a valuable book."
"It's yours."
"But I couldn't possibly keep such a treasure. It would be like stealing."
"A deal's a deal. You bought this store, lock, stock, and barrel. Everything in it is yours."
"My mother was right about you. You're a prince."
o0o
Years ago Lydia had discovered that the best way to relieve tension was to run. After she'd finished at the bookstore, she put on her favorite neon-bright pink jogging shorts, plugged in her portable disc player, and headed to the nearest park.
Accompanied by the sounds of James Cotton's blues harp, she worked up a sweat, then returned to her tenth-floor apartment where she showered and fell into bed with the hundred-year-old book she'd brought from the store.
Settled against her pillows, she let the book fall open where it would and began to read: Guinevere's hair was like the sea, and rising out of that shimmering mass was the grandest knight of all Camelot, Sir Lancelot, glowing as if he were newly born.
The beauty of their love made her heart hurt, and Lydia felt such an intense longing, she squeezed the spine of the book. A lump the size of a quarter pressed against her fingertips.
"What is this?"
She ran her hands along the spine, feeling its cracks and ridges . . . and the strange rounded lump. The spine had long ago separated from the back of the book, and she poked a pencil into the opening to dislodge the lump.
A gold ring fell into her lap and lay in the folds of her white gown. The design was a winged dragon with ruby eyes. Fascinated, Lydia slipped the ring on her finger.
A wave of dizziness overcame her, and as she lay against the pillows her bedroom faded into a smoky mist. The wall facing her bed turned to flames, and hooves thundered across her cracked linoleum floor. A black stallion materialized, and on his back sat the man of every woman's dreams, with cheekbones of the gods, a wild tangle of black hair, and black eyes that pierced her soul. His suit of armor gleamed through the mists, and the shield in his right hand bore the sign of intertwined dragons.
He was so real, Lydia reached out to him. "Who are you?" she whispered.
"Your knight . . . your love."
His hand stole toward hers, and for an instant they touched. As Lydia stared into the deep black eyes of her knight, he scooped her into his arms and settled her onto the black stallion. Through the thin silk of her gown, his hands and arms branded her.
Hooves clattered over linoleum, they leaped over the flames, and, sighing, Lydia settled back against her mysterious night visitor. Phantom? Dream lover? Hallucination?
Lydia didn't care. All she cared about were the sensations that swept through her. Joy. Freedom. Passion.
Mists swirled around them and slowly her bedroom disappeared.
"Where are you taking me?" she whispered, not really caring as long as they went together.
"To the stars and back."
The moon sailed above them, a silver disc that was so close, she could almost touch it, and around them the stars moved in spectacular celestial dance. They rode for hours with the wind at their backs and the stars in their hair. Secure in the arms of her mystery lover, Lydia could have stayed forever.
Time had no meaning. Place was irrelevant. Nothing mattered except deeply felt emotions.
The stars began to fade, mists swirled, and suddenly she was back in her bed, back underneath the sheets. Deprived of his arms, she felt such loss, she cried aloud.
She reached out for him, but the mists were so thick in her bedroom, she could barely see.
"Where are you?" There was no answer except the far-off echo of horses' hooves.
"Who are you?" There was no reply except the sound of the wind coming through her open window.
Lydia thought she would be awake for hours puzzling over the strange encounter. Instead she fell into the most peaceful, dreamless sleep she'd had since coming to California.
o0o
"Rubies," Lydia said.
Michael O'Hurley grunted. "Garnet, or maybe even red glass."
The ring lay on the counter between them, tail curved to form a place for the finger, scales delicately carved, wings lifted for flight, teeth and talons bared. The dragon. A creature of myth and legend.
"I might have known. Anybody who can't tell the difference between a diamond and a cubic zirconium is bound not to know junk from the real thing." Lydia picked up the ring and offered it to Michael.
"Keep it,” he said. “It's yours."
"Are you sure?"
"Absolutely. It's a good omen. No telling what kind of good luck it will bring you."
"No telling." Lydia dropped the ring into her pocket, but she didn't tell him about her dream, nor of the man who had been so real, her hand still burned where they had touched.
o0o
When she got back to her apartment there was a call from her mother on the answering machine. "Is Michael taking good care of you? Tell him if he doesn't, I'm going to skin him alive. Honey, I don't want to upset you, but Trent called and asked for your number, and I gave it to him. What else could I do? I couldn't be rude. When he calls just listen to him, honey, and don't make a big to-do."
Lydia had no intention of listening to Trent Brandon. He'd had two years to have his say, and if he thought there was anything that could make Lydia change her mind after what he'd done, he was sadly mistaken. If he hadn't borrowed her car to go to Memphis, she might never have caught on to him. If he hadn't run into the Fried Chicken Coop sign on Lamar Avenue, she might never have known he'd been with another woman.
She tackled the job of scouring the refrigerator as if it were Trent Brandon's two-timing heart. After she'd finished with it, no mold would dare show its hairy face. Doctors could do surgery on her bottom shelf. Snow White's wicked stepmother could use its shiny surface as her magic mirror.
Lydia was elbow-deep in rinse water when the phone rang.
"Lydia, honey . . ." Even with the distortion of the answering machine, Trent sounded as if he were in the next room. "I know you're there. Pick up. Come on, honey."
"You lost the right to call me honey." That's what she was reduced to: yelling into the bowels of a kitchen appliance.
"Pick up, honey. Are you there?" She slammed the refrigerator door shut, then threw her rag into the sink.
"Lydia ... are you there?"
"Not anymore, you faithless jerk."
She plugged her disc player in and turned the volume up high, then snapped on her fanny pack and slammed out the door.
She was so upset, she forgot to take out her contacts. Only when sweat almost blinded her did she stop on her hell-bent-for-leather run and pop out the dark blue tinted hard lenses.
In high school and college, Lydia had run track. Though she was good on sprints, her specialty was the cross-country run. In Pontotoc she used to run the back country roads, but now she was confined to a short track of cracked pavement After two miles, she lost count of the number of times she circled the track. Sweat soaked her headband, and her body's heat turned her hyper-color shorts and tank top from neon blue to an iridescent purple. Lydia didn't stop running until she was too tired to put one foot in front of the other.
The stars were already out when she finally headed home. To keep up her spirits she did a quick soft shoe on the sidewalk, the red lights in the heels of her running shoes twinkling in the dark. Back in her apartment she sank into her one comfortable chair with a cool glass of lemonade and her ancient book. It fell open at the page she'd marked with a red leather bookmark, and she began to read . . .
Of all his knights, King Arthur loved Lancelot best. But neither loyalty nor honor nor sacred trust could stay Lancelot's love for Arthur's queen. Guinevere was the sun, the moon, and the stars to Lancelot's earth. She was not a choice; she was a necessity. Theirs was a love decreed by fate, a love that would bring down a kingdom.
A shower and dinner were forgotten. Lamplight cast a golden aura over the book, and all the romance and grandeur of Camelot rose from the yellowed pages. A spark the color of a bird's bleeding heart shot through the vision. On the table beside her chair, the gold dragon lay coiled in the ring, its eyes glowing.
Lydia picked the ring up and slipped it on her finger. An image flashed before her, fire so real, she could feel its heat. She shook her he
ad to clear it, then turned back to her reading. Brittle pages crackled under her fingers as the legend of Camelot spilled from the book.
They met deep in the forest in a lush glen beside the waterfall. In their hidden paradise they tasted the bittersweet fruits of forbidden love. Guinevere and Lancelot stole the sacred thing that belonged to the king, a king they both loved. The vows they'd pledged to Arthur stung like wasps as they clung together, still struggling against fate. But in the end their passion outrode their despair, and deep in the secluded glen they wore each other while Camelot tumbled.
A sense of love lost burned through Lydia, burned so hot, she flinched. The glow of the dragon's eyes caught her attention, and as she spun the ring around her finger she saw the doomed lovers locked in a fatal waltz, swirling in the mists of a legend that outlived them both.
Her head began to ache. "Fatigue," she whispered, then leaned against the cushions and closed her eyes. The book slid from her lap and lay on the floor at her feet, the gold letters on the cover, gleaming as brightly as the neon lights on her jogging shoes.
And on her finger the eyes of the dragon turned to fire.
CHAPTER TWO
Passion rode him hard. The woman's heady scent and lush body filled his mind, dominated his senses. He turned in his bed and reached for her, but there was nothing except tangled sheets.
The wolf growled when he sat up, and the sun smote his eyes. He flung back the sheets and prowled his room, naked. He never slept past the sunrise. What had happened? Had he been drugged? Why did he feel as if he hadn't slept a wink when it was perfectly obvious that he'd overslept?
He threw on his clothes and rang for his servant.
"Is there someone new in the kitchen? Did anyone have access to my mead?"
Laird assured him that nothing unusual had occurred the previous night, then went away as confused as his master.
In the stables he mounted his stallion and raced toward the north, his destination clearly in his mind.
But at the fork of the road, his instincts drew him eastward. Bending low over his black stallion, he traveled toward the sun as if his very life depended on it.