Barry let out a long sigh, and then spoke again. “In the end, though, the artifacts that I remember the most are actually the ones that are unremarkable. Everything that comes in here is usually so incredible, that I remember when something is plain and boring. Like we had this old walking stick come in that had belonged to one of the ancient dragon kings. The thing had been carved with scenes from an ancient dragon battle, and it was really beautiful. But it didn’t have any powers. It ended up being transferred to Falcon Cross for their museum of ancient artifacts. We just don’t have enough stuff here to start a museum of our own.”
Seth raised an eyebrow as he looked around the room. “Looks like you’ve got plenty of stuff in here.”
Barry shrugged. “Anything with powers, even weak powers, has to be stored securely, away from the general public. That doesn’t leave very many objects to put on display. The only other thing I can think of right now that had no powers to speak of was a bag of old dragon coins. They looked really cool, but they didn’t actually do anything. In fact, they should still be in here. I think they were even stored over by where you’re standing.”
Barry walked over and started to shuffle through the pile that Seth and Claire were standing in front of. “Huh. That’s funny. I could have sworn they were here. Oh well. Maybe someone moved them. Or maybe they got transferred to Falcon Cross, too. Anyway, there’s not much in here that has no powers at all.”
Seth felt his heart pounding. He didn’t dare look at Claire right now, for fear that Barry would see in their glances that something more was going on here than a casual look at the inventory.
The coins had to be it. And he knew exactly who to call to talk to about this.
“Well, I think I’ve seen everything there is to see here,” Seth said, so hurriedly that even Claire looked up in surprise. “Thanks a lot for your time, Barry.”
“Sure. Come by anytime. I always like getting visitors, and Councilor Isviar is usually the only one who bothers to come by.”
“Thanks for the invite, man. You’ve been quite hospitable.”
Seth got out of that building as fast as he could, practically dragging Claire along behind him. When they finally made it out the front door, she turned to him and raised an eyebrow.
“I’m assuming you know something about those coins that Barry doesn’t?”
“I don’t,” Seth said. “But I know someone who does. Come on. I’m about to introduce you to another one of Torch Lake’s dragons.”
Chapter Eleven
Claire held on tightly to the handle above the passenger door as Seth’s truck bounced along the bumpy road going at least double the speed limit. He didn’t seem the least bit worried about getting a speeding ticket, and he was handling the truck reasonably well, so Claire clenched her teeth together and didn’t make any comments on his driving. Besides, she was just as anxious as him to get to Leif’s house.
Seth had explained to her that Leif, another dragon shifter who worked at the Dragon Utilization Department, had been his boss at one time. Along with Evan, the three of them had rescued an undercover agent, Sofia, from some Dark Warriors who had kidnapped her. In a true romantic twist, Leif and Sofia were now sweethearts. But that wasn’t the part of the story that interested Seth. Seth explained to Claire that, at the end of Sofia’s rescue, they had recovered a bag of golden coins and jewels from the Dark Warriors.
“None of us knew what it was,” Seth said, not even wincing as the truck went over a large bump and went slightly airborne for a moment before hitting the pavement with a hard thud. “None of us except Leif. He said the coins were some sort of ancient dragon coins that used to contain supernatural powers. Apparently most people these days think the coins no longer have powers, because they’re usually just displayed at museums. That’s probably why they ended up sitting around in the intake room. My guess is they would have eventually been sent to the museum in Falcon Cross. But if the Dark Warriors are so interested in getting them back, I’m worried they know something we don’t. Maybe those coins hadn’t lost as much power as everyone thought they had.”
Claire breathed a sigh of relief as Seth screeched into the driveway of a large white house and came to an abrupt stop. She wasn’t sure how much more of this crazy driving her stomach would have been able to take. On wobbly legs, she hopped out of the truck and followed Seth up to the front door. He placed his hand protectively on the small of her back, and she felt a rush of warm excitement at his touch. She had been afraid to talk about what they had done back in their office. She worried that if they discussed what they’d shared together, that he would blow it off as no big deal, and the magic of the moment would be lost. But he didn’t seem to be looking for excuses to pull away from her, now that they’d slept together. In fact, he seemed to find every possible excuse to touch her, as his hand on her back indicated. Claire bit her lip to keep from grinning like an idiot. It had been a long time since she’d found a guy worth falling for. Was it possible that Seth was the one? Was she crazy for even thinking that?
She didn’t have much time to ponder the issue. Seth was already reaching up to knock loudly on the door, and Claire pushed a few stray strands of hair back from her face. It had been a long day, and she hoped she didn’t look like a complete wreck. Despite working with so many celebrities and famous people, she still felt nervous to be meeting another dragon.
The door creaked open, and a man who was almost exactly the same height as Seth came into view. All of the dragon shifters seemed to be exceptionally tall.
“Seth? Good to see you man, but I have a feeling you’re not visiting at this time of night just to say hello. What’s going on?”
“A lot,” Seth replied. “Can we come in?”
“Of course.”
Leif opened the door wider and Seth gave Claire a little push forward. “Leif, this is Claire. She’s the girl I pulled out of the burning Torch Lake Today building. Claire, this is Leif as I’m sure you’ve guessed by now.”
Leif shook Claire’s hand. “Claire, I’ve heard a lot about you. Nice to meet you in person.”
Claire looked over at Seth. “You’ve been talking about me?”
Seth winked at her. “All good, I promise.”
“So to what do I owe the pleasure of this visit?” Leif asked.
“It’s kind of a long story, but I’ll try to make it brief. Is Sofia here tonight, by the way?”
“No, she’s out with friends. Magic book club night. It usually goes late and she usually has to get a cab home. They tend to take the wine part of the night quite seriously.”
Seth laughed. “Sounds like Sofia. Well, then, I’ll jump right into it. I thought she might have some good insights on what I’m going to tell you, but I don’t want to wait until tomorrow to ask about this.”
Leif nodded and led them into his living room, where they all sat on some of the most comfortable leather couches Sofia had ever encountered. Seth quickly caught Leif up to speed on the whole story, starting with what Claire had seen in the Torch Lake Today building. He explained the High Council’s lack of concern over the matter, and how he and Claire had watched surveillance video until they found the footage of the two men breaking into the room in the Bureau of Magical Artifacts. He finished by explaining how they had gone to the intake room itself to look, and after talking to the guard had realized that what the Dark Warriors had taken was actually the bag of coins that had been captured during Sofia’s rescue. When Seth finished talking, Leif’s face looked somewhat pale.
“Are you sure that it’s the Dark Warriors behind this?” he asked.
Seth frowned. “I guess we don’t know for sure. But it seems like the most likely scenario. Who else would want to cause an explosion in a major building in Torch Lake, and then steal coins that are seemingly powerless? I don’t know of any groups that would be organized enough to pull that off. And besides, it makes sense when you think about the fact that the Dark Warriors actually had possession of the coins at
some point. They wanted them back. But why? What makes them so valuable?”
Leif drummed his fingers anxiously on the side of the armchair he was sitting in, frowning and looking like he wasn’t exactly sure what to say next. Claire felt a little out of place, sitting here with two dragon shifters. They seemed to have a much better grasp than she did about what was going on, and if someone was going to have to chase down the Dark Warriors and get the coins back then she definitely didn’t have much to contribute. She was a makeup artist, not a soldier. She would only get in the way on any sort of military mission.
“This is bad news,” Leif finally said. “I’m just not sure how bad.”
“Care to elaborate any more than that?” Seth asked when Leif didn’t say anything else for a few moments. In response, Leif stood and started to pace the room.
“If the coins they stole are in fact the same as the ones we took from them during Sofia’s rescue, then they could be very dangerous. The coins are old, and many people think they don’t work anymore. But many experts believe that these coins never truly lose their power. They just go dormant when they haven’t been used for a long time, and they are very difficult to reactivate. There’s a lot of disagreement on how to reactivate them, but if the Dark Warriors were so intent on getting them back, that makes me think they know something about the coins. Maybe they know a way of reactivating them. Or at least, they must think they know that. And it’s really bad news for us if they’re right.”
“Why?” Claire asked, speaking up for the first time. “What kind of powers do the coins hold?”
“The coins were used in ancient times either to remove poison from water, making it safe to drink, or, if you had evil intentions, the coins could be used to poison otherwise clean water.”
Claire frowned, trying to understand where this was going. “But I mean, being able to poison water isn’t that big of a deal, is it? Most likely the people they would want to poison, like the High Council members or the dragon shifters, aren’t going to be that easy to get to. They’d have to be able to get the coin into a glass of water the Councilor or shifter was going to drink before they drank it, and then remove it before it was seen. That doesn’t seem like it would be all that easy to do. The Councilors all have private security guards, and you shifters seem pretty well able to take care of yourselves.”
Leif smiled sadly. “Well, I appreciate the vote of confidence, Claire, but you can never rule out the possibility that the Dark Warriors have someone on the inside working for them. It sounds like that might have been the case with the break-in into the intake room. Although, I actually think they might have used dark magic to influence the guard and then done a memory wipe so he wouldn’t remember it.”
Seth groaned. “The Moderor spell. Why didn’t I think of that? Of course that’s what they did.”
“The Moderor spell?” Claire asked, her eyes widening. “You mean the dark magic spell where someone is put under the control of someone else?”
“Yes,” Leif said grimly. “The Dark Warriors are apparently quite talented at it, and have been using it frequently to get good wizards and shifters to do what they want them to do. It would have been easy to catch a guard by surprise, put him under the curse, and use him against his will to open the door to the intake room. Then, a quick memory wipe on the way out would have removed any recollection he had of the whole incident ever happening.”
Claire felt sick to her stomach. “These people are terrible.”
“You’re telling me,” Seth said. “But something tells me that no matter how terrible they are, they wouldn’t have gone to all this trouble to steal a bunch of coins just to poison a few Council members. They must have a bigger plan.”
“I’m pretty sure you’re right,” Leif said. “I think they’re planning to poison all of Torch Lake.”
“All of Torch Lake?” Claire gasped. “But, how? Are a few coins really powerful enough to poison a whole lake?”
“Well, not if you just threw them in the middle of the lake itself. But this lake is fed from Torch River, which starts as barely more than a trickle about seventy miles north of here. If the coins were placed at the very beginning of Torch River, then all the water flowing into Torch Lake would be poisoned. It would take a few weeks, but eventually, the concentration of poisoned water in the lake would become so high that it would start making people sick or even killing them. And, as you know, Torch Lake is the main water source for the whole city of Torch Lake.”
Claire still couldn’t believe that it was possible to poison a whole town using a measly bag of coins. “But even if they could poison the whole lake, the water is filtered, isn’t it?”
Leif shrugged. “It doesn’t matter. Poison from magical sources can’t just be filtered out by ordinary means. It would take a special counterspell, and I’m not sure anyone here even knows one that would work.”
“So what do we do? Stop drinking the lake water? The town won’t be able to survive for long without it.” Claire could feel a sense of despair rising from the pit of her stomach. There must be a way to stop the Dark Warriors. “Or maybe we could send soldiers to capture the coins away from them at the beginning of Torch River.”
“We have to go stop them!” Seth said, jumping to his feet now, and joining in on Leif’s pacing. “I’ll talk to the High Council. They’ll authorize an army, and we’ll go teach those fools a lesson.”
But Leif didn’t look so convinced. He was shaking his head. “No, Seth. That’s not a good idea. I guarantee you that if the Dark Warriors think they have a way to poison all of Torch Lake, they aren’t going to let go of it easily. My guess is they have some spies in the military here, ready to report back at the slightest threat of an attack. They know they can’t stand alone against the strength of the Torch Lake army, so they would retreat and hide.”
“You really think they have spies here?” Claire asked. She felt like her whole safe, secure world was being turned on its head.
Seth sighed. “Leif’s right. They likely have spies. If not inside military ranks, then they at least have people on the outside watching for any sign of military.”
“Yup,” Leif said. “And my guess is that they have people watching the whole area around Torch River’s source for at least twenty or thirty miles. At the first sign of someone suspicious coming through, they’ll hightail it out of there. They’d be willing to bide their time and wait for another chance to strike. The opportunity to kill a whole town of good wizards and shifters would be worth waiting for.”
“So how do we stop them, then?” Claire asked.
“One of us should go,” Seth said to Leif. “One dragon shifter can sneak in and steal the coins. Surely, they won’t notice just one person.”
Leif shook his head. “We’ve played that trick before, Seth. They know now that we don’t always come in with an army. They’ll be on the lookout for even one person. And invisibility spells won’t help either. All of the dark wizards have become experts at breaking through the invisibility shields since even before the Great Dark War ended.”
“What else can we do though? We can’t just do nothing.” Seth’s face had become almost as pale as Leif’s at this point. Claire was sure that if she looked in the mirror, she would see that the color had drained from her own face as well. This problem seemed too big for the three of them to solve alone. And yet, the more people they talked to, the more likely they were to tip off the Dark Warriors that they knew about the coins. The Dark Warriors seemed to have ears everywhere. Even telling the High Council felt risky. Did some of the Councilors’ assistants report back to the Dark Warriors? There was no way to know for sure, but nothing felt impossible at this point.
Then, suddenly, Claire had an idea. It came to her in a flash, and it seemed so simple and perfect that she laughed out loud. Seth and Leif both looked at her like she had lost her marbles. Nothing about this seemed funny to them.
“I know how we can fool them. Seth, you could dress up like an
old man, and rent an RV. Then drive through the town near Torch River, acting like you’re retired and on some big road trip.”
Seth still looked at her like she was crazy. “Claire, even if I wear a wig, and clothes baggy enough to hide all my muscles, my face is still too young. No one is actually going to believe that I’m an old man.”
Claire stood up now, too. She was too excited to sit down. “Seth, you’re forgetting! I’m a makeup artist. I can put makeup on you that will make you look like an old man. It won’t look like makeup at all. You’ll actually just look really old. It’s the perfect disguise. No one is going to worry that a little old man in an RV is going to attack them and steal coins. They’ll never know what hit them. They’ll scan you for magic spells, and when they don’t find any they’ll just assume that you actually are an old man. They won’t realize that it’s just old-fashioned, non-magical makeup until it’s too late.”
Seth didn’t look quite so doubtful now. “You can really do that?”
“Yes! It’s easy. I…I’d have to go with you to make sure the makeup stays fresh and touched up. But it won’t be hard to do.”
Leif was starting to look excited, too. “This is perfect. If you really think you can pull it off, Claire?”
“She can,” Seth said. “I’ve seen her work, and she does a damn good job.”
Claire’s eyes met Seth’s, and she felt like she might melt under the intensity of his gaze. Realizing how much he believed in her warmed her heart, and she smiled at him gratefully. “Thank you.”
Leif was frowning. “I think this might work. But Claire, you’ll have to disguise yourself, too. It would be kind of suspicious to have an old man traveling around with a young woman like yourself. I suppose you could explain it away as being his daughter or something like that, but it’s better to just avoid arousing suspicion as much as possible.”
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