Heart of the Dragon King

by J Boothby

  We’re almost there, buddy, he says, though he can feel Sam is completely asleep.

  The key is hot against his chest now.

  It pulses faintly, like a heartbeat.

  He takes a deep breath and puts his hand flat against the glass.

  Like a rock thrown in a pond, rings on the glass ripple away from his touch.

  Here we go.

  32

  It’s been a while since I woke up with someone. Particularly someone so hairy. And with such bad breath.

  I open my eyes to a mass of dark hair that swivels around to look at me and lick my face.

  It’s Moose. He’s curled up in the bed with me.

  “Hey,” I call down to Max. “Your monster decided to join us.” How did Moose get up the ladder? He’s not telling. He just looks at me and thumps his tail on the blankets.

  There’s no answer from below. It’s quiet—I can hear the traffic going by outside.

  I sit up, and Moose jumps off the bed. He whines and flies skillfully down the narrow steps. He barks at the back door, and then again at the base of the loft steps. He clearly wants out.

  Did Max go out for coffee or something? It seems a little strange. He’s probably in the bathroom.

  My phone says it’s 9:47 am; I should probably get moving.

  I reach for my key on the floor. It’s not there.

  It probably slid under the bed, I think—I took it off in kind of a hurry. I’ll find it in a minute or two. Moose can’t wait.

  Out the back door is a small yard with a high wooden fence around it—I let him out to do his thing.

  There’s no note or anything that I can see. The bathroom door is open—no one in there.

  There’s coffee by the pot, so I start some brewing.

  There’s a kid-shaped pile of blankets on the couch. “Sam,” I say. “Wake up, kiddo. We should probably get going.”

  The kid, I think, is a heavy sleeper. He must have moved back down to the couch in the middle of the night. I hope Max got some actual sleep.

  Up in the loft, back over at the bed, I feel around for the key. Nothing.

  I look under the bed. It’s not there. This doesn’t feel right.

  I let Moose back in and pour some food in a bowl for him, and I pour some coffee into a mug.

  I walk over to the couch to wake up Sam. I touch the blankets to shake him gently, but they’re kid-free.

  Did Max take him out somewhere to get some breakfast, maybe, while I was still sleeping?

  He wouldn’t need the key for that.

  He shouldn’t need the key for anything.

  Shit. Oh, shit shit shit.

  I put the coffee down fast. I walk around the apartment again. There’s no one in the bathroom, for sure.

  I look out the window to the street. Russell’s gone too.

  I feel a sinking feeling deep in the pit of my stomach.

  What have I done? I’ve really screwed up now. This is really bad.

  Not knowing what else to do, I call Zara.

  She picks up sleepily but then is immediately awake. “Oh, hell,” she says. “I’ll be right there.”

  I down the coffee while I watch for her out the window and beat myself up. What was I thinking? Yes, Max seemed like a nice guy. Yes, we got along well. Yes, he was a good cook.

  But here I go again, making choices about guys that end up in disaster.

  Now I’ve put someone else in danger. Someone that I was responsible for. Someone who trusted me.

  What does Max want with the key? And why take Sam too?

  It has to be something to do with one of the mirrors, either the one in the basement of Poe’s or the one in the smaug house.

  If it’s the one in the basement, Max would be looking for the woman’s casket or the stone heart that was full of aether near it.

  Or both.

  What would he want with them? The rock had a lot of power. Could that be it?

  I shake my head. I don’t know what he’d do with it.

  But I’m struck with a cold sense of fear. If Sam encountered that much aether, I’m not sure what would happen to him. Would he be able to control it? I know I couldn’t at his age.

  I didn’t ask him about what had happened to him at the Blackstone lab.

  If Max was heading for the smaug house instead, he’d be trying to get to the Whisperlands, and then probably to somewhere else through another mirror.

  But that meant he could be anywhere.

  With Sam.

  I might never find them. I shake my head. I have to believe that’s not possible.

  What did Max know that he wasn’t telling us? None of this makes any sense to me.

  I lean my head against the glass and stare into my reflection. There are dark circles under my eyes, and my hair is a ball of mess. Moose comes over and stands by me and slumps against my leg.

  What kind of person leaves their own dog behind?

  The same kind of person who steals a kid, that’s who.

  I clip a leash onto Moose and go outside on the street to wait.

  Zara pulls up in an Uber. She jumps out and hugs me. “I’m sorry,” she says. “He seemed like a nice guy to me too.”

  “It’s not your fault.” I’m embarrassed.

  We all pile into the back seat of the Uber again. The driver looks at Moose a little funny, but then shrugs and asks where we want to go.

  I give her the address of Poe’s.

  “You think he’s going for a mirror?” Zara asks. She had probably five minutes to get ready while waiting for her ride and, of course, she looks perfect. She’s even wearing earrings.

  I nod. “I just don’t know which one.”

  But Russell is parked awkwardly outside of Poe’s, with one tire up on the curb.

  And the front door is ajar.

  I jump out of the car and sprint through the restaurant, and then down the stairs into the basement. I need to use my phone for light since the power’s out.

  But there’s no one here.

  The mirror reflects me back at myself. I’m a mess.

  I put my hand on the surface of it and push, but nothing happens.

  I reach out and pull in some aether, and I try and use that to get the mirror to activate in some way. The pale violet fire crawls across the surface of it, but the mirror still doesn’t react.

  “That’s amazing, that you can do that,” Zara says, coming up behind me.

  “But it’s not helping,” I say. “It’s not good enough.”

  I push more fire at it, but it just wraps the mirror in a purple haze.

  I bang my fist against the glass. I need that key back.

  “Should we try the other mirror?”

  “I guess it couldn’t hurt.”

  I grab a spare set of keys for Russell from upstairs. The apartment is trashed: the living room windows are all blown out, and there’s not much left of the furniture. Parts of the walls and the floor are burned out, and the kitchen is a disaster. Someone has torn apart the bedrooms too, searching for —what? I guess whatever they could find.

  But it’s all fixable. At least I’m going to keep telling myself that.

  We pile into Russell and grab keys at Zara’s office on the way.

  We let ourselves into the smaug house. The mirror is still there.

  I try the same thing, calling up the aether and pushing it against the surface of the mirror.

  I get the same result. I bang on it, frustrated.

  I call Xyr’s name, in case she’s still in the Mirrorlands. In case she can hear me.

  No luck.

  They’re simply gone.

  33

  Zara takes me back to her parent's house, which is in a suburb of Richmond called Midlothian. Out here, there are nice houses, nice lawns, and golf courses. It's only on a rare occasion that a sinkhole opens up and swallows up a house or two as a result of the old coal mines that used to be here.

  Their house is enormous—you could fit five other ho
mes inside of it, I think, and still have space for a big party.

  Zara's mother Majida is tiny and energetic, with Zara's long, straight hair, her beautiful skin, and her sense of style too. She's an executive at some sort of think tank that works with the government. After we meet, she returns to typing furiously on her laptop at the counter.

  Zara's father George is smart too and quirky, with crazy hair that sticks straight up off of his head, fantastic eyebrows, and Zara's strong nose. He's the one that raised her as a kid, and he gives me a big hug when Zara introduces me. “Zara has told me great things,” he says. “Great things!” He immediately starts bustling around the kitchen, preparing food.

  If I wasn't so worried about Sam, this would be fun. It's cool to see how each of her parents has contributed to make up Zara.

  Her parents also have a standard gray poodle named Anuki, who likes Moose at first sight. We send the two of them out to the expansive back yard to run around.

  Zara makes me take a shower and gives me some clothes to wear. When I come out, her parents have made us an elaborate breakfast—thick black coffee in a press pot. Puffy flatbread called baladi, with dips made from fava beans and olives and spices. Some things that look like big falafels called taameya, and eggs cooked in ghee with dried beef.

  Even though I'm worried, I can still eat, and it's fantastic. I thank George profusely, and he blushes happily. We take the food out on their deck and sit under an umbrella. We stare out at a lake that has ducks and a fountain in it.

  I can't stop thinking about how stupid I've been.

  “We're going to find him,” Zara says. “You'll think better on a full stomach. Have more baladi.”

  I have more baladi. “All I had to do was to keep the key a secret,” I say. “If I had done that, Sam might still be here.”

  “Coulda, woulda, shoulda,” Zara says. “We need to figure out what we're doing next.”

  She's right.

  Step one: more coffee.

  “By the way,” she says. “Thank you for accepting my own secret.”

  She looks out the lake, and I realize she's nervous.

  “Oh my god,” I say. “You know you saved my life, right? Like, probably twice?”

  She grins. “Well, OK, there's that.” She sighs with relief. “You know, Kylie, you're kind of awesome.”

  I stand up and hug her. “Do your parents know?”

  “Sure.” She nods. “Of course. It's a family thing on my mom's side. You know the Egyptian god Annubis, right? The wolf god who escorts people to the underworld? It skips a generation.” She sips her coffee. “They feel pretty guilty about it.”

  “Guilty?”

  She shrugs. “A lot of the family decided not to have kids. They really wanted one. They found a doctor who thought that the right drugs and nutrition might keep it from happening, but no luck. So here I am.”

  “Lucky for me. Do you have, like, a pack?”

  She shakes her head. “Some people do. It's just easier that way, to hang around with others who get what you're going through? But that whole 'alpha male' thing never really worked for me, though.”

  I grin and think of Michael for a second. “Me either. Who started all that, anyway?”

  “Some guy, I'm sure.”

  “I'm sure.” I laugh. “Hey, I'll be your pack. And we can swear to be alpha-free.”

  “Deal,” she says, smiling. We clink our mugs together. “So what do we do now?”

  I sit and think for a minute. Out in the water, a duck goes under the surface and comes back up a few feet away, and two other ducks follow right behind it. The dogs run down to the edge of the water to bark at them, but the ducks don't pay them any attention.

  “We need to figure out Max,” I say. “What he's thinking. What he's doing. Where he went.”

  “Back to his place, then?”

  I nod. “Definitely. Is it OK if Moose stays here for a while?”

  Zara looks out at the two dogs barking together. “That's not going to be a problem at all.”

  Traffic is annoying. It takes almost an hour to get back downtown. At Max's, we go through his things, pretty ruthlessly. Dirty laundry, old video games—Mario Kart, Skyrim, Portal 1 & 2. Some Stephen King books. An old laptop that's password protected. The motorcycle and sidecar.

  But there are an awful lot of paintings. We turn them all around.

  There are more people, seen at strange angles. A bald man buys a hot dog from a cart, seen from the top down. A gigantic woman jumps into a pool, seen from below: she's all rear end and feet. There are some fae at a rave, some grogans at the gym.

  There are a few paintings of smaug, too. The smaug are all seen from below, a child's perspective.

  But most of the paintings are all of that same kid's bedroom, painted obsessively over and over again. There must be more than thirty of them.

  There are toys on the floor that change locations. A chair moves around to different parts of the room too. The sheets and blankets on the bed change colors. But it's the same specific perspective, always painted as if the viewer was sitting in the bed. Legs are under the blanket, the feet sticking up.

  And in each of them is the incursion, bisecting the far wall from floor to ceiling.

  Emerging from the incursion in most of them is a male figure. He's clearly a smaug, but it doesn't look like any smaug I've ever seen pictures of.

  He's very dark, almost like a shadow, and very slender.

  He's also remarkably tall and has to bend over to fit into the kid's room. He's dressed impeccably, in a black Victorian suit with a lace shirt that has a high buttoned collar and jacket with exaggerated lapels and a row of buttons at the wrists. He wears spats, and his buckled shoes are long and glossy. He carries a walking stick..

  He's also got wings. They're black and shiny, and they glisten in the light of the incursion. As traditionally dragon-like as they are, I've never heard of a smaug actually having wings.

  It's impossible to make out his features. While everything else is painted with Max's particularly detailed style, the face is painted with a violent blur of reds and purples and grays in vicious smear. Though I can sure see the teeth. They're wicked and sharp, and they gleam in the light of the room.

  And at the man's brow is a circlet of gold, with a single violet stone set into the center of it.

  I take a deep breath. “Are you thinking what I'm thinking?”

  Zara nods. She looks a little shocked, with her hand over her mouth.

  “Holy shit,” Zara says. “That's—”

  I nod. 'That's got to be the Narrow King.”

  Zara sits back, and her eyes go wide. “Then Max is working with him? Or for him?”

  I study the paintings with a sinking feeling. “If the pictures are true, they've been in contact since he was a little kid. He probably wasn't any older than Sam.”

  “That's pretty creepy.”

  “Definitely.”

  Zara looks thoughtful. “What would a king in the Elhyra want with a child on Earth?”

  I shrug. “A key to walk the Whisperlands? Someone who can open incursions?”

  “They're already opening incursions, though. Somehow.”

  “True.”

  “And Max doesn't open them, does he? He's not a—”

  “A harbinger?” I shake my head. “I don't think so. But Sam might be someday.”

  “There's no way they'd know about Sam when Max was a kid, though.”

  “Right.” I step back to try and take in as many paintings as I can at once. Zara gets up to make some of Max's coffee. I decide to line all of the paintings up next to each other and consider each of them sequentially. The incursion is in the same spot in each, though the colors in each one are subtly different. The toys on the floor change too, as do the occasional views of what I'm convinced are Max's feet.

  I sort them into what looks like chronological order and plop down cross-legged in front of them. Stuffed animals turn into toy cars that evolve into
dinosaurs and Star Wars ships, and then to Dungeons & Dragons figures and maps. Max's feet get bigger, too.

  When I do that, the colors in the incursions trend darker over time. Paler blues, golden yellows, and sharp reds early on trend into more deep violets and even some grays and shots of black in the later pictures. The Narrow King changes as well. In earlier paintings, he looks more like other smaug and his clothing is lighter--dignified grays and light violets, pale shirts with looping smaug patterns. Sometimes a tall gray hat, with drawings around the brim.

  But as time progresses, he gets darker, as well as taller and slimmer, until he's nothing like the early paintings.

  His blurred face never changes, though. And neither does the sharp gleam of his teeth.

  Zara brings me a mug. “I don't want to say what I'm thinking.”

  “That the Narrow King has a thing for young Earth boys?”

  She frowns. “Why is the face so smeared and angry, and everything else is sharp and detailed? Maybe that's a sign of abuse.”

  “And Max is bringing him his next victim? That's pretty sick.” I think about it. “Max didn't seem interested in Sam as much as he was the key, though.”

  “So, we're back to the crypt and the stone.”

  “The heart stone,” I say. “Maybe that's what the Narrow King wants, and he needed Max to find it for him.”

  “Why Max?”

  I think about this for a while. “What if Max is the only person on Earth the Narrow King knows?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean, besides my uncle. If Max's father, my uncle, and mom opened the way to the Elhyra, and then they lived there for a while, the Narrow King might know them. If they all died, then, except Max, my uncle, and me…”

  Zara's nodding. “Max would be one of the people he was most familiar with. Then why hasn't the Narrow King found you too?”

  “My uncle kept me hidden? And Max's family did not?” It makes a lot of sense to me, all of a sudden.

  Why my uncle never talked about any of the rest of the family. Why we were always so separate. Why he taught me to keep my abilities secret.

  We were hiding from someone.

  Or some thing.

  “So Max's family let the king of the Elhyra visit his bedroom?”