by Justin Sloan
She was damn glad Danny had sided with her instead of Gregor and his pack that night. If she had to count the number of times he’d saved her and been there for her when she needed him since that night, she’d run out of breath before examples, and so she owed him her life, just as he owed her his. The worst of them came from the other groups of werewolves when they caught up with them, as they often seemed to do. Even with her healing abilities, she still had a nice scar on her left thigh from their last encounter.
Danny’s light vanished ahead.
“Danny?” she asked.
“You’re almost there,” he said, his face appearing not far off, the light aimed at himself. “Come on, you got it.”
She reached him, and he helped her down the small drop-off. When she was back on her feet, she gathered her nerves and breathed deeply, reminding herself that she wasn’t trapped, she was going to find the cure.
She hoped.
It appeared they were now in some sort of inner chamber. They walked its perimeter, the circle of wall reaching up to form a dome over their heads. Immense marble columns loomed at six points along the walls.
Danny stood at a large pile of crumbled rock that may have once been a throne. He dropped his pack and looked at her with a raised eyebrow. “It’s like the New Mexico caverns, the crypts of Louisiana….”
“Don’t say it,” she said, desperately searching for any sign that they were in the right place.
“It’s all dead ends, Kat.” He approached the center of the room, holding his light up to better see the dome above, and nearly tripped on something at his feet. “Maybe this had been something once, but not anymore.”
She hated the words, but a knot in her stomach told her she was in for more disappointment. Every time she felt close and allowed herself to be excited, it fell away and left her crushed for months on end.
The last time it’d happened, she had almost given up. She still remembered the way Danny has convinced her to keep looking, telling her about these very caves. It’d given her hope at the time, but now she was starting to remember why she hated hope.
Something caught her eye. Rocks, out of place on the floor.
“What’s that?” she asked, walking over to take a look. She knelt beside what was a low circle of rocks. It was shaped like a well, but the stone surface of its floor wasn’t far down. Curious, she traced it with her fingers, then noticed a layer of dust covering an engraving beneath. She brushed aside the dust with the palm of her hand, and her heart skipped a beat. “The star.”
“It could be any star,” Danny said, but his voice betrayed his hope. It was hard not to miss, as so many movies had used it to symbolize the devil or dark magic. But what many knew as a pentagram, they’d come to learn was highly associated with real-life werewolf lore.
And she had to believe it meant they were one step closer to their cure.
“This time it’s different,” she said, voice shaking.
He knelt next to her, putting a hand on hers. “And if it’s not?”
“We can worry about that if it’s the case. But until then….” She pulled her hand away, and then placed it on the star in the center of the stone well, then pushed. It wasn’t solid, not completely. She knocked—hollow.
Even Danny’s eyes were shining with excitement now.
“Maybe we need to get Babur in here,” he asked. “I mean, if this is really something….”
“No, not until we know for sure.”
She stood and kicked at the star. It broke away, nearly taking her with it, but Danny caught her. They looked into the darkness below, hearing the rocks clatter at the bottom.
“The rope,” Danny said, going to his pack.
He secured the rope to one of the marble pillars. A quick test, and then he took the lead and lowered himself into the hole. When it was her turn, she took hold of the rope, lowered herself into the darkness below, her breath coming in quick bursts, and then wrapped her feet around the rope so that she could lower herself with out much upper-body strength. She hated this almost as much as the tunnel she’d had to crawl through earlier, but at least the hole soon expanded into a room of darkness.
His flashlight was already moving about the room when she was halfway down the rope. Judging by the distance to the walls, it appeared to be a vast chamber.
“The natives worshiped here?” she said, thinking how horrible it would be to come down into this darkness more than once.
“Somebody certainly did.” He glanced around, looking at the walls. “Though, I have to imagine they had another way of getting down here.”
“Or it was where they’d send people for punishment,” she said. It wouldn’t be the first odd part of a werewolf religion they’d found—including torture chambers, or rooms of pure darkness but for an opening above where the full moon could shine in. Various groups believed the werewolf would only emerge under extreme circumstances, so they tried to fabricate those circumstances.
Danny held the rope steady for her to dismount, then turned with his light to take another look around. She pulled her flashlight from her belt, noticing something glistened ahead in Danny’s flashlight beam. As they approached, they saw a glow, rippling and reflecting on the cave ceiling. An underground pool of water.
For a moment they stood, staring at the water.
“So much for your cure,” Danny said. “Sometimes, you have to know when to quit.”
“How do you know this isn’t something?” She walked toward the water, flashlight aimed at it. The walls on the other side were carved into circular patterns, the star evident in two places, though worn down over the years. When she approached the water’s edge, she paused, shining the light into the water. But nothing seemed special about it.
“This might be a neat archeological discovery,” Danny said with a scoff. “Nothing more.”
He turned to head back, but stopped, and two beams of light flashed on the water.
Katherine glanced over her shoulder to see the lights, but she couldn’t make out the source. She held up her light, and then froze.
Soldiers.
They wore Special Forces gear, all black, with pistols strapped to their thighs and rifles with mounted lights in their hands. One stood in their path, on the ground, and two more were climbing down the rope.
***
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Turn the page to read an excerpt from The Last Dragon Lord by Michael La Ronn.
EXCERPT: The Last Dragon Lord
Ancestral Bogs, Western Continent
Year 1020
The wind whistled around his wings and the stars glittered off his black scales as Dark flapped furiously, pushing a torrent of air toward the ground to cushion him as he touched down on a rickety boardwalk in the middle of his family’s ancestral bog. The boards trembled beneath his weight.
His claws scratched the rotting wood as he stood upright on all fours. The water, like purple velvet wavering in the starlight, seemed to swell upon his presence, sending slow, pulsing ripples downstream. He had prayed just yesterday at the altar of the bone-white mausoleum submerged in brush and shadow in the distance, offering a bloody tribute of heart and lungs to his grandfather in the great beyond, never imagining that it would be the starting point of a hunt today.
Dark folded his wings close to his body until they rubbed against his scales. He reached his long neck down and rubbed his nose against the wood.
He sniffed, taking in the remnants of peat long burned away, decaying fish, flecks of mercury on the water, and the blood and sweat of human slaves one hundred years ago toiling over this bridge. How they had screamed when Dark had struck them down. How they had gasped as the water pulled them under quickly and silently as Dark knelt and prayed.
Intermingled with it all, he sensed something fresh.
Sweat. Gathering in an armpit, pooling on the chest.
Yes, this sweat was recent.
And something else. Cloth. The crude, astringent dye from the northern continent that reminded him of austerity. That telltale smell of all things elven.
He sniffed the edge of the water, dragging up a ragged circle of dead grass on its surface and revealing a murky patch where a black fish darted away in fear.
He lost the scent.
He tracked down the boardwalk with his nose low to the ground. He picked up the scent again about halfway down. It grew stronger the closer he approached the mausoleum, and he moved into a new nebula of scents so powerful he could almost see them wafting among the fog.
He licked the air.
Salt.
The kind that beaded up on the backs of humans’ necks whenever fear was close. But the scent was slight. Whoever was here hadn’t been here long. Perhaps they were overcome with fear at the sight of the mausoleum—his family’s resting ground, a massive, curved tooth that rose into a patch of navy blue sky. It had been designed for that very effect—to show humans and elves what their place was in this world.
The mausoleum was still locked. The thick marble doors hadn’t been disturbed. The coward Dark was chasing was foolish, but not foolish enough to disturb his ancestors’ rest.
The salty smell veered off into the brush, like the arc of a comet leaving celestial dust in its wake. Dark leaned into the sweaty scent until it grew stronger.
He reached grassy, damp ground. His feet sank into the mud, and he immediately realized his mistake.
Dragon tracks in the mud. That wouldn’t do.
He extended his wings and lifted himself effortlessly into the air, high over the broken treetops. In flying he would lose the ability to track the scent, but he would gain the benefit of higher ground.
The benefit of surprise.
As he took to the sky, he couldn’t help think that this would have been a perfect time for a group formation, two dragons flanking him as he charged in front, grinding his teeth to sharpen them for the meal ahead.
You should let us come with you, Norwyn had said.
No. I’ll handle this myself, Dark had replied.
You could be playing into their trap.
You forget who I am, Norwyn.
Very well, My Lord.
Dark’s shoulders tensed as he thought of Norwyn, the thin white dragon who served as his advisor. He was the most cautious dragon Dark had ever known. His recommendation to hunt in a group had been valid. Most of Norwyn’s advice was. In any other circumstance, Dark would have listened, taking a pack with him. And they would have hunted like wolves in the mountains of the northern continent: swift, relentless, victorious.
But this was personal. Whoever was running away in the bog below had tried to poison him.
Dark and his regime had been on their normal route and had descended upon an elven village, demanding all their magical goods as part of their monthly tribute. A little elven girl had offered them a dead deer carcass, and Dark had almost sunk his teeth into it when the body glowed.
Fyrldr, a red dragon, was less cautious. He tore into the deer offered to him, and magical venom seeped through his body, killing the dragon in a slow, writhing death. Dark hadn’t been surprised in a long time—very little surprised a dragon lord—but he couldn’t believe his eyes as Fyrldr convulsed at his feet.
Then he’d heard a metallic clink of metal and frantic footsteps behind him.
Dark lashed out with his tail instinctively and slashed the elven assailant, drawing blood. The man ran, and before Dark could chase him, the villagers mounted an attack and the man disappeared in a sea of people.
Dark left nothing of that village.
He couldn’t let such a blatant attack go unpunished. It could not be known that he, the great Dragon Lord, Dark the Wicked, had almost been poisoned like his parents before him.
This coward running through the bog needed to be ripped apart, if only to teach the rest of the world that its lord was invincible.
A faint glimmer crisscrossed through the trees. Dark almost missed it, but it floated horizontally in the vertical patch of birches, against the grain of nature.
Dark knew that glint. He recognized it from all the wars that he’d been in, flying over the battlefields as his dragons fought humans and elves.
It was a sword hilt. The sword was bouncing up and down in the hand of someone running, making jagged metal cracks against the undergrowth.
Above, a cloud slid away and revealed the moon.
Dark spread his wings and dove toward the glint.
His wings sliced the treetops, and the branches were like knives against his scales. But he pushed harder into the dive and came upon the running man.
Dark swung to the left and around the man, and with a snap of his wings he about-faced and hovered in the air, blocking the moon. He let himself fall, shaking the ground with a tremendous boom.
The man wore a bandana over his mouth and dark green shorts. He lay on his back, flabbergasted as Dark stepped toward him slowly. He was shirtless, with a cursive rune tattoo across his chest. One of his pointed ears was tinged with blood from where Dark had struck him.
Dark growled, blowing a thin cloud of smoke from his nostrils into the elven man’s face. Then he grinned. “Good evening.”
The man placed a trembling hand on the hilt of his sword, but Dark slashed it out of his hand with his claws. The impact broke the bones in the man’s hand, and the crunch reverberated throughout the bog.
The man screamed.
“Is this what I have to do to get respect?” the dragon roared, resting his claw on the man’s chest with just enough force as to not break any more bones. “You tried to kill me.”
The wounded man nodded, his chest heaving up and down.
“You magicked a deer carcass. I’ve never seen that before. How did you concoct the spell?”
The man struggled under the weight of Dark’s claw, but a pained smirk crept across his pale face. “We forged it out of the hatred you’ve created in this world.” He spit in the dragon’s eye. “My family is going to finish what we started. Just like we did to your parents.”
His parents.
This was worse than Dark thought. He had assumed the assassination attempt an isolated incident. There had been many. But this man wasn’t acting alone. This felt organized. If a family was involved, there was a plot.
More than a plot.
A conspiracy.
His blood curdled at the thought. “Oh, so it’s a family affair.”
Dark dug his claw into the man’s chest and drew out a line of blood. “Tell me, my brave elven coward, what is your family name?”
“I’ll never tell you.”
“And so you’ll disgrace them in death? Don’t I have a right to know so that I may unburden them from their troubles?”
“You’ll know soon enough.”
Dark dug his claw deeper into the man’s chest and the man screamed. “Where shall I bury them? I think the bog would be a fitting place. But don’t worry yourself with that. No, my son, we must first decide what I’m going to do with you.”
Dark clutched the man in his claws and stomped to a nearby pond. He held the man’s head over the water. “Should you drown? No. That would be far too weak a punishment. It would make me look ineffectual. Can you imagine what my dragons would say? They’ll say, ‘My Lord, of all the possible ways you could have crushed this elven boy, you let him drown?’ And what will I say in my defense? Nothing! I’ll look soft …We can’t have that, not in light of your little scheme. At a time like this, it is important to look strong, stronger than ever before. One must have strength that seems to come from the heavens!”
Dark slammed the man to the ground and pinned him by the neck with his tail.
“There’s a meal that’s worth making from you,” the dragon said, laughing. “I could call it coward soup. Grind you up and feed your bones to the desolate, hungry children in another elven village.”
“My bones will give them strength.”
Suddenly, Dark stopped speaking and took the man’s arm in his mouth. With a quick, ragged motion, he ripped it off. Blood spilled down his lips as the elven man lay in a bloody pool.
Dark licked at the blood and let out a sigh. The taste energized him, made him delightful with rage. The hot blood rolled across his tongue and he roared, reveling in the sound of wilderness and strength and revenge and closeness to the earth.
He tore into the man’s chest and mauled him, ripping out chunks of flesh and flinging them in every direction. He dug into the body until his claws reached soil, crushing the man’s bones in his vicious rampage.
Finally, nothing was left of the body but the man’s head. The eyes rolled upward and the mouth was frozen in an expression that looked like the beginning of a curse.
“I’ll not pray over you,” Dark said. And then fear struck him, his heart swelling in his chest as he thought about the gravity of the assassination attempt.
Assassins were nothing new. He had dealt with many of them. But never a conspiracy, and never someone clever enough to trick him with strange magic. This conspiracy would strike again, and he had no idea where or when it would come.
He had the strong urge to talk to his father. The old dragon would know what to do. He always did in situations like this.
A dull gold sparkle in the dirt caught his eye.
It was a golden, winged bracelet. It must have been around the man’s wrist. He picked it up. A rune was etched into it. Dark recognized it from the western continent, but couldn’t decipher what it meant. Elves were skilled metalworkers—he needed to remember that.