The Dragon Blood Collection, Books 1-3

by Lindsay Buroker

  She caught movement out of the corner of her eye and realized her mistake immediately. She ducked and fired at the same time.

  Something leaped out of the darkness and slammed into her, taking her to the ground. Metal glinted, reflecting the orange of the nearest lantern. A knife? She fired again, her barrel pressed into someone’s abdomen.

  A hand like a claw gripped her shoulder. She pushed and kicked at the man—she’d already shot him once, if not twice. He couldn’t possibly want more of her. But her opponent was huge, protected by layers of blubber. His hand tightened, and his other arm raised, a dagger clenched in his fist.

  On her back and jammed against the wall, Cas kicked out again, aiming for the blade this time. Her foot connected, and the weapon flew out of the man’s hand.

  She expected to hear it clunk off the wood paneling or clatter to the floor, but someone gasped instead. Not daring to glance away, Cas fired into her assailant’s gut one more time. Finally, the claw-like grip on her shoulder slackened. Even though he had stopped fighting, pushing him off was like moving a log. She squirmed out, nearly losing her prison tunic in the process. Blood coated her hands and her body.

  “Got him, Moon,” came the captain’s voice from the navigation room.

  Someone had opened the door.

  Cas scrambled to her feet, but didn’t take more than a step before halting in stunned silence. The dagger. It had flown from her attacker’s hands and cut into the throat of someone walking—or maybe fleeing—out of navigation. The man—she thought she recognized him from passing by him on the Night Hunter—was leaning against the wall, clutching at his neck with both hands. Blood poured between his fingers.

  She stared in horror, less because he was dying—there were men dying all around her—but more at the freakishness of the accident. She couldn’t have known the knife would strike someone; she’d only been defending herself.

  The captain charged out of the navigation room, his temple bleeding and more blood spattering his garish bone breastplate. He had a pistol clutched in his hand, and when his gaze landed on Cas, she lowered into a tense crouch. She was still armed. If he aimed his pistol at her...

  Hells, why wait? This man was a criminal. She didn’t know who these intruders were, but if she could fire first, she could eliminate the biggest obstacle in her path to freedom. He stared at her, his hand tightening on his own pistol, as if he read every thought in her mind.

  A gurgle came from the man with the cut throat. He stretched out a blood-drenched hand, then collapsed.

  At the same moment, footsteps sounded behind Cas. Fearing some new enemy, she backed into the cross corridor, the narrow stub that led to the dirigible’s exit doors. She never took her eyes off the captain. He glanced toward the dying man, his empty hand twitching in that direction, as if he wanted to help.

  Now. This was her chance.

  But Tolemek charged into view, with a burly man on his heels. He too was armed, and blood smeared one of his arms. His own? Or someone else’s? She didn’t see any wounds on him, but couldn’t tell for sure.

  Whether intentionally or not, she didn’t know, Tolemek stepped between her and the captain. “What happened?”

  Reluctantly, Cas lowered her weapon.

  “Moonface is dead,” the captain said. “Torin too. That’s what happened.”

  “One of these intruders almost cleaved my skull in half with an axe,” Tolemek said. “Who are these people?” He looked at Cas.

  “I have no idea, but two of them charged into my room,” she said. “After trying the door, finding it locked, then going off to locate a key. It seemed rather deliberate.”

  “All this to get at you?” Tolemek stretched a hand toward the dead pirates. “The bounty they placed on your head isn’t that big.”

  “Maybe someone didn’t like my idea.” The captain touched his temple and scowled up and down the corridor. “I thought I had everyone going along with it, sold them on the notion of looting—” he glanced at Cas. “Nobody openly objected.”

  Cas glowered at him. Looting what? Going after the colonel wasn’t enough? Now, these cretins had another scheme they were planning? Why hadn’t she shot the captain when she had the chance? Her hand flexed around the pistol’s grip. Tolemek was still standing between the two of them. She turned her glower onto him, but he was looking at the dead men in the corridor instead of her.

  “Even if they didn’t agree with your idea,” he mused, “what would killing us do? Didn’t you already set things in motion?”

  “Yes. Yes, I did. And we’re not discussing it further here.” The captain pushed past Tolemek and lunged toward Cas.

  She lifted the gun, stepping back to put more space between them so she could shoot, but her shoulder rammed against the corner of the intersection. The captain moved more quickly than she had anticipated, too, smacking the pistol out of her hand. He grabbed her before she could decide if she should duck and try to dart after the weapon. As soon as his hand wrapped around her forearm, she knew it was too late. She had missed her chance. Fool, why had she hesitated? For Tolemek’s sake? That was ludicrous.

  “Congratulations.” The captain sneered at her. “You’re our pilot now.”

  Chapter 11

  Dawn was bleeding pink into the sky beyond the portholes when Tolemek, yawning so hard his jaw cracked, made his way up to the navigation cabin. One of Goroth’s fighters had dragged the bodies of the dead into an empty cabin, but smears of blood painted the walls and the floor. That was going to be hard to explain to an inspection team. As was the big fog-making machine sitting on the deck in engineering. Tolemek had finished his modifications, but he needed to tell Goroth that there wasn’t enough of the murk-making materials to last long, especially not if they planned to blanket the whole city. Or maybe he didn’t need to tell Goroth. Maybe he ought not to help this scheme along too much. Hadn’t he caused Iskandia enough grief already?

  Sighing, he pushed his hair back over his shoulders and opened the navigation door. He was relieved to find Goroth and Cas sitting in the chairs, if not in amiable silence then at least with neither sporting any new bruises. He had been reluctant to leave them alone when Goroth sent him back to finish his work in engineering, especially after catching them in the corridor with guns almost aimed at each other instead of at the injured foes on the floor.

  Goroth waved him in, a sandwich in his hand. “You’re just in time, Mek.” He smiled, oddly chipper, considering he hadn’t slept all night, either, unless he had dozed up here, but he doubted he would dare leave Cas unattended. A pilot could do all manner of sabotage.

  “Oh?” Tolemek asked.

  Cas smiled over her shoulder at him, a surprisingly cheerful and agreeable smile. In other words, one Tolemek had yet to see from her. A queasy feeling came over him that had nothing to do with the grayish colored meat dangling from between Goroth’s pieces of bread. There was a crumb-decorated plate on the control panel beside Cas too. In all the chaos, Tolemek had forgotten to bring her a meal. Had she found a chance to eat the day before? She hadn’t in the hours she had been with him. She must have been ravenous. Ravenous enough to accept food from her mortal enemy? Goroth was clearly eating from the same plate, but he was tricky enough that he could have inserted something into one sandwich unseen.

  “Yes,” Goroth said, “we’re about to have a chat, me and your pilot friend here.”

  “About?”

  “Zirkander. Where he lives. Who he knows of the magical-sword wielding persuasion.”

  Instead of tightening her lips and glaring the way she usually did when someone tried to extract information on Zirkander, Cas nodded and smiled again.

  Tolemek closed his eyes, feeling sick. Goroth had been in his laboratory, had even packed a bag for him. Slipping a few vials of the truth serum into a pocket would have been easy. After all the years they had worked together, Goroth knew about most of Tolemek’s formulas and where he kept them. Applying the liquid serum to something l
ike bread or meat would be difficult, but... he eyed a smudge of mustard on Goroth’s upper lip and fought the urge to think bull’s-eye and punch him.

  “Don’t look so irritated, my old friend,” Goroth said. “You want this information too. I know it. Zirkander for me. Sword for you, yes?” He held out a fist, inviting the clashing of knuckles pirates sometimes did to seal deals.

  Though his hackles were up at the idea of tricking Cas into betraying herself, he couldn’t bring himself to walk back out and leave the questioning to Goroth. Tolemek did want the information. She might hold the answers, however inadvertent her knowledge, that could lead him to the prize at the end of his years-long quest. And this was a better way to get those answers than through brutal means, wasn’t it? That was why he had invented the serum after all.

  Wordlessly, Tolemek bumped knuckles with Goroth, then leaned against the wall beside the door. He opened his palm toward Cas, inviting his friend to do the questioning. Tolemek knew everything about the serum, so he knew Cas would remember this later. He couldn’t bring himself to be the one who asked her to betray herself, though he supposed all that made him was a coward. She wouldn’t likely think any more highly of him for standing in the background and listening, for not doing anything to stop this.

  Goroth finished his sandwich and rotated in his chair to face Cas, his hands on his knees, his face intent. “So, Lieutenant, is there anything you’d like to share about your commanding officer? Colonel Zirkander?”

  “I don’t think so. Why?” Cas smiled.

  Tolemek grunted, amused by the scowl that flashed across Goroth’s face. Maybe she would find a way to fight the effects of the serum. He doubted it though. He had made it well and tested it often.

  “Where does he live?” Goroth asked.

  “On the army base behind the pilots’ barracks, Griffon Street. He and the other senior officers have little cottages there. His is the third house after the fountain, south side.”

  Goroth plucked a notepad off the control panel and scribbled down the information. He had come in prepared, it seemed. Beyond the window, the sun was coming up, and the sea below gleamed beneath its warm rays. There wasn’t a cloud in the sky, though a red hue to the horizon made Tolemek suspect a storm might be coming. Too bad it wasn’t there now. Goroth wouldn’t have dared question his only pilot if she had been busy keeping them from being struck by lightning or blown off course.

  “He also has a cabin on a lake,” Cas volunteered. “That’s his, not military quarters. I haven’t been there, though, so I’m not sure exactly how to find it. I think it’s a couple of hours out of the city by horse.”

  “Guess that answers one of my questions,” Goroth told Tolemek.

  Tolemek lifted his brows—he hadn’t gotten anything out of that addendum, except that Cas wasn’t holding back information anymore.

  “Whether or not she’d slept with him,” Goroth explained. “I can’t imagine how someone so young would get onto Wolf Squadron otherwise.”

  He couldn’t imagine another explanation? Hadn’t he seen her shoot? Tolemek glowered.

  “I was actually hoping that would be the case,” Goroth went on. “Then Zirkander would be more attached to her, and she would work even better as bait for a trap. You know how stupid men get when they come to care about women.”

  Tolemek would have had to have been stupid and deaf to miss Goroth’s censure for him in that comment. He folded his arms across his chest and said nothing.

  “No,” Cas sighed. “He never asked. I used to wish he would. A lot.”

  The admission struck Tolemek like a dagger to the heart, and he forgot all about Goroth. For whatever reason—the age difference, maybe, or the fact that she never got dreamy-eyed mentioning the man—Tolemek hadn’t suspected she might have romantic feelings for Zirkander. His head thunked back against the wall. Apparently, instead of asking her if she would pick Iskandian lads with nice hair over him, he should have been asking about infamous pilots.

  “After I got out of flight school and joined the squadron, it didn’t take long to see he thinks of us all like little brothers and sisters.” Her disappointed face... erg, she was twisting the knife and didn’t even know it.

  Goroth was stroking his chin. Doubtlessly mulling over whether a “little sister” would be effective bait for a trap.

  “How did you get selected for the squadron?” Goroth asked.

  “Me? Zirkander picked me. It wasn’t... an obvious choice.” She waved to Tolemek, her face gone wry. “Nobody else wanted me. I thought I’d be lucky to get a job swabbing the hangar deck. I never even would have gotten accepted to flight school, if the colonel hadn’t stepped in on my behalf.”

  “Why?” Tolemek found himself asking, despite his resolution to leave the questioning to Goroth.

  Cas shrugged. “Because of my father. On the official city records, he’s just a bodyguard who specializes in security services—” she rolled her eyes, “—but everyone knows he’s killed some important people, some criminals, yes, but some who weren’t. Anyone in the government who had a problem with his career, or with him... well, they had a tendency to disappear. Apparently people decided it was best to leave him alone and pretend he didn’t exist.” Another shrug. “It wasn’t any secret that he was raising me to follow in his footsteps—good money, he always said, job security. Someone always wants someone else dead. I’m not sure that was always his plan, but after the fire—after my mother was killed by a vengeful relative of someone he’d killed—he wanted to make sure I could take care of myself. It suited me fine as a kid—he spent time with me, in the city and out in the woods, and we practiced hitting any and every kind of target. It was fun. It wasn’t until I was older that I learned it was a little strange to teach a little daughter to use guns instead of to play with dolls. But I didn’t care, not until the targets shifted from bales of hay to living, breathing things.” For the first time in the interview—for the first time since she had consumed the truth serum—her expression grew pained. She looked away from Tolemek and out the window. “I didn’t want to be a sniper after that. Growing up, he’d taught me to distance myself from emotion somewhat, to not dwell that much on the pain and feelings of others, thinking that was a wonderful thing. I suppose it is if you want to kill people for a living. And I have to admit, he did a good enough job that it wasn’t empathy that made the job unacceptable to me. I just didn’t want to do it for money. And I didn’t want to kill people who were targets just because someone had money. If I was going to do it, I wanted it to matter. When the Cofah started coming more often, and our reprieve from the war seemed to be over, I realized I wanted to use my skills to protect people. I wanted to protect our country. What was the point of money if the world was in ruins?” She turned her eyes back on Tolemek, her expression beseeching. Her voice dropped, and she whispered, “I tried to explain my feelings to him, but he said I was being foolish. That if things got too bad, we could leave the country and find another place for our business. He didn’t understand. I ran away from home. I was sixteen at the time. He didn’t come after me; guess he figured I’d be back, or that I would figure out that I didn’t have many other skills to rely upon, so I wouldn’t be able to make it without him and his money and his job contacts.”

  Tolemek found himself listening to the story in fascination as the words flew out of her, in part because he cared—whether she ever would reciprocate that feeling or not—but also because his own father had been such a problematic figure in his life. He thought Goroth might be scoffing or cleaning his fingernails throughout this tale, but he was hard to read at the moment. He was listening and watching her though.

  “In a way, he was right,” Cas said. “I didn’t have a lot of friends—our house was on the outskirts of the city, and I don’t think it ever occurred to him that a child should have peers to play with when growing up—so I really had no one to turn to. Not many friends of the family either, oddly.” Her lip quirked. “I ended up living on
the street down near the harbor—it’s not the best area for a girl—and stealing to eat. I saw an army officer walking after dark, wearing a leather cap with goggles up on his forehead and looking lost in his thoughts. I wasn’t dumb enough to try and steal from someone with military training, but some ten-year-old boy was—and got caught. I figured the officer would either knock the wings off the kid’s flier or turn him over to the law. Instead, they ended up in this in-depth conversation about some air battle or another, and the officer and boy were soon using dented cans and other street litter to represent airships and fliers. All this in the middle of one of the worst neighborhoods in the city. I later learned that the man had grown up there and didn’t see it the way others did. At the time, I crept closer, curious about him, and I got caught up in the story of this air battle too. He was a good storyteller. Near the end of it, this pack of street toughs walked up, brothers or cousins or some relation to the boy, and one of them told the officer to give him those fancy goggles and how they would take them if he didn’t. They all had pitted knives and homemade clubs. They figured they were what passed for fierce in that area.”

  Cas glanced at Tolemek’s bracers and Goroth’s breastplate before quirking her lips again and continuing on. “The officer said he’d prefer to keep his goggles, so they’d have to take them if they wanted them. I’m not sure what I was thinking, but I grabbed a fistful of rocks and started pelting those thugs. My aim’s decent.”

  Tolemek grunted, imagining these kids taking rocks in the eyes.

  “They decided they didn’t want to deal with me and the officer, so they ran off. The boy ran off too. The officer—I later learned this was Zirkander, of course—turned around, at which point I caught a glimpse of a gun holstered under his jacket. I felt silly, but he tipped his cap, gave me his name, and thanked me for my help. He also suggested that I ought to sign up for the military. I lied about my age and did so the next day. Under an abbreviated version of my father’s name. I served two years, and nobody figured out who I was—and my father never bothered me, though he must have known where I was—until someone recommended I take the officer candidacy exams and apply to flight school so I could take my marksmanship skills into the air. At that point, there were background checks. I arranged to cross Zirkander’s path again, explained my situation and that I didn’t want anything to do with the family business, and that I’d be a good officer. He remembered me—I wasn’t sure if he would—and vouched for me. Four years later, when I graduated, I heard that my father had made a threat or two, and that nobody wanted me assigned to his unit. I guess he hadn’t minded when I was soldiering and studying—he probably still thought I’d end up working with him and that the military training couldn’t hurt—but he thought only fools volunteered to throw themselves into the sky. And it’s true that there aren’t a lot of pilots who live long enough to retire, not when we’ve been a target for the Cofah for as long as anyone can remember.” She gave Tolemek a dirty look. He wondered why Goroth didn’t receive a similar look, but she had been telling most of this story to Tolemek with only a few glances to the side. “Anyway, in the end, the colonel was the one who took me. I have no idea what kind of conversations he may or may not have had with my father over the last year and a half, but he’s definitely not someone to back down to bullies. Or superior officers he doesn’t respect, either.” She grinned. “I don’t think my father would go after him, anyway. That’s one assassination the government wouldn’t look the other way for. There are a lot of people who would avenge his death.” Her grin disappeared, and she glared at Tolemek and Goroth again.