by Martha Carr
Strange and Unusual
Goth Drow Unleashed™ Book One
Martha Carr
Michael Anderle
This book is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Sometimes both.
Copyright © 2020-2021 Martha Carr and Michael Anderle
Cover by Mihaela Voicu
http://www.mihaelavoicu.com/
A Michael Anderle Production
LMBPN Publishing supports the right to free expression and the value of copyright. The purpose of copyright is to encourage writers and artists to produce the creative works that enrich our culture.
The distribution of this book without permission is a theft of the author’s intellectual property. If you would like permission to use material from the book (other than for review purposes), please contact [email protected]. Thank you for your support of the author’s rights.
LMBPN Publishing
PMB 196, 2540 South Maryland Pkwy
Las Vegas, NV 89109
First US Edition, February, 2021
(Previously published as a part of the megabook Once Upon A Midnight Drow)
eBook ISBN: 978-1-64971-573-9
Print ISBN: 978-1-64971-574-6
Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Free Books
Author Notes - Martha Carr
Author Notes - Michael Anderle
Connect with The Authors
Other Books By Martha Carr
Books By Michael Anderle
The Strange and Unusual Team
Thanks to the Beta Readers
John Ashmore, Kelly O’Donnell, Mary Morris, Larry Omans, Rachel Beckford, Daniel Wiegert
Thanks to the JIT Readers
If I’ve missed anyone, please let us know!
Angel LaVey
Daniel Weigert
Deb Mader
Debi Sateren
Diane L. Smith
Jackey Hankard-Brodie
James Caplan
Jeff Eaton
Jeff Goode
John Ashmore
John Ashmore
Micky Cocker
Misty Roa
Paul Westman
Peter Manis
Veronica Stephan-Miller
Editor
The Skyhunter Editing Team
Dedications
From Martha
To everyone who still believes in magic
and all the possibilities that holds.
To all the readers who make this
entire ride so much fun.
And to my son, Louie and so many wonderful friends who remind me all the time of what
really matters and how wonderful
life can be in any given moment.
From Michael
To Family, Friends and
Those Who Love
To Read.
May We All Enjoy Grace
To Live The Life We Are
Called.
Chapter One
It was time to do the impossible.
L’zar Verdys felt it coursing through him—the rightness of the moment, the tug pulling at his core to rise to the call and put into motion everything the soothsayer had predicted. For two hundred years, he’d waited for this night.
“Lights out in five.” The night guard strolled down the walkway of cellblock Alpha, his boots clicking on the metal mesh.
L’zar’s neighbor, Relaude, let out a low whistle. “Not gonna give us a pass for the new year, huh?”
The guard’s rhythmic footsteps stopped at the cell on L’zar’s right, and the metallic ping of the man’s cattle prod for magicals echoed through the block, a light tap-tap-tap against the bars. “You don’t get a pass for another fifty years, Relaude.”
“Forty-nine.”
The weapon cracked against the cell bars, emitting a sizzling flash of purple sparks when it struck the cell’s magic-dampening wards. “We can double that if you want. Or you can keep your fat orc mouth shut.”
Relaude let out a low, rumbling chuckle but didn’t say another word.
L’zar Verdys stretched out on the thin mattress of his single bunk, slate-gray arms folded behind his head of white hair as the guard picked up his slow, rhythmic march down the cells lining Alpha block. It sounded like Richardson, and sure enough, there was Richardson’s bulbous nose lit up in perfect profile as the man passed L’zar’s cell. The guard didn’t pause as he swept his gaze over the drow prisoner’s tidy box of a room. He just lifted one eyebrow in contempt, then continued down the row.
It’s the last thing these idiots expect. L’zar Verdys doesn’t make a sound, and it’s almost like he doesn’t even exist. They’ll notice when I’m gone, all right. And by the time they find out which direction I went, I’ll already have everything in motion.
If the gateway between the borders of this world and the other couldn’t stop L’zar from crossing over a dozen times as he sought to fulfill the soothsayer’s prophecy, minor dampening wards and humans with low-tech tasers and fell darts didn’t stand a chance.
Let them think I’ve got my head down for the rest of it.
L’zar sniffed, shifted his head against his folded arms so his pointed ears could breathe a little, and crossed one booted foot over the other.
Tonight, I’m getting out.
Richardson’s echoing footsteps receded down the block. Silence settled over Alpha until the guard in the tower pulled a lever that looked like a breaker reset more than the light switch on a max-security prison. “Happy New Year, convicts. Way to break in the twenty-first century.”
The lights cracked off with an echoing boom. Darkness blanketed Alpha block, punctured only by the red lights flaring to life above the guard tower.
Red for ‘locked up tight.’ What a stupid human misconception.
The block echoed with the coughs, grunts, snores, and farts of Chateau D’rahl’s inmates as a stillness settled over them for the night in their single suites of concrete and metal frames and high-voltage dampening wards. L’zar waited patiently through all of it until the symphony of bodily functions came to a standstill, then he pushed up on his bed, glanced through the bars of his cell door at that dauntless red light, and stood.
“Hey, Verdys,” Relaude gurgled from the next cell over. “Stayin’ up to watch the ball drop?”
L’zar moved toward the steel toilet at the back of his cell.
“Man,” Relaude kept on, “what I wouldn’t give for some end-o’-the-year grog and a battle pit. Might be what I miss most about home.” The orc’s voice brought its usual muffled thickness through his sawed-off tusks, the ends of which protruded at br
oken angles from his thick lower jaw. L’zar saw those tusks in his mind’s eye every time his neighbor spoke. “Hell, I’d even fight you.”
L’zar snorted. “You’d lose.” The drow worked around his prison-issue sweatpants to relieve himself. Just another inmate hittin’ the John before hittin’ the sack. The whole time, he was counting down to the perfect moment.
Relaude snorted. “You don’t think I could kick your drow ass back to Ambar’ogúl?”
“Not if we were already in an ‘Ogúl battle pit, greenskin.”
Another low chuckle came from the next cell over. “That how you got popped and dragged into this hellhole? Tried to mind-fuck the CDO into lettin’ you off clean by arguing semantics?”
“You know what ‘semantics’ means?” L’zar flushed the steel toilet and took two steps away from it along the back wall of his cell.
A thump rattled the cement wall, doubtless from Relaude’s thick fist. “Hey, if you were as smart as you think you are, you wouldn’t be locked up next to me, would ya?”
“Watch me,” L’zar whispered.
An irritated growl permeated the opposite wall of the orc’s cell. “Shut the hell up, Relaude. Trying to sleep.”
“Aw, come on. You don’t wanna count down to midnight with me, Troj?”
“Listen. If you don’t shut your fat green face, when these doors open in the morning, I’ll count down to your last breath.”
Relaude chuckled, and the cot beneath the massive orc groaned when he flopped back onto the thin mattress. “Y2K. Gotta give it to these human chumps, am I right? Makin’ such a big deal about the end of the world and all. They don’t even know the half of it.”
That might’ve been the only thing out of Relaude’s mouth in weeks L’zar thought incisive, yet saying so to the orc was only an invitation for more attention.
Relaude scratched his hairy green armpit, a blade scraping a whetstone. “Dumb and tiny and weak,” he groused.
“Shut up!” came Troj’s exasperated voice. “I swear by all that’s unholy…”
Positioned less than a foot from the back wall of his cell, L’zar waited for his pesky orc neighbor’s laughter to fade. Alpha block settled into another round of half-enforced silence, and the drow closed his eyes to listen for his next signal.
The door to the guard tower clicked open and shut behind whichever one of them had drawn straws to re-up on their coffee for the night shift. L’zar’s pointed ears twitched at the muffled thump of the other guard’s boots propping up on the console. That was Jones, then, settling in for a night of reading whatever cheap book he’d grabbed off the library cart.
And L’zar stayed beside his toilet, facing the wall like he’d lost his mind.
The drow’s fingers worked an intricate pattern in front of his thigh, undetectable by the swiveling cameras set high on Alpha block’s walls. The air shimmered around him, and his illusion spell formed at the back of the cell. Any guard who checked the cameras or stepped past while on patrol would see the drow’s back as he stood beside the toilet. The real L’zar would be long gone before anyone realized his projected image hadn’t moved in hours.
He placed his other hand on the concrete wall and muttered the words he’d been waiting twenty-five years in this dump to say. Just a whisper, but the spell phased his hand through the wall, and the rest of him followed. No alarms, no flashing lights, nothing.
L’zar had discovered Chateau D’rahl’s budget could not pay for wards on all four walls of every cell.
Relaude was right. Dumb and puny and weak.
L’zar glanced both ways down the abandoned corridor stretching behind Alpha block’s newer cells. No one was there. Not a single guard knew the original bones of this place. Smirking, L’zar closed his eyes and brought up the memory of the prison’s layout. Almost fifty years ago, he had known he’d be making his way through these walls from the inside out instead of the other way around. Before the renovations.
He set off for the sealed staircase. Mundane construction, yet it could stop him as well as any warded wall, not to mention the ten-foot box he’d called home for a quarter-century. For a drow thief, impossible didn’t exist. Not tonight.
Fifteen minutes later, L’zar crouched beneath the grove of bare cherry trees beyond the fence around Chateau D’rahl.
“Barbed wire.” He snorted and shook his head. “Humans have so much to learn.”
His fingers moved in twisting gestures, and a tailored, pinstriped suit took the place of his gray prison pants and white t-shirt. The long white hair pulled in a knot behind his head shortened and darkened, followed by the erasure of the dark gray, nearly purple pigment of his race’s skin. He flexed much shorter fingers on pink-hued hands, his flesh now bright beneath the moonlight. No one would see the pointed ears of his race beneath the light-brown curls he’d adopted.
Destiny tugged at him like a hook through his chest. Beneath the bright lights spilling over so much stone and concrete and iron while dressed as a businessman in a trim suit from the 1920s, L’zar turned from Chateau D’rahl and followed the tingling trail of magic he could no longer ignore.
“Where is she?”
By human standards, the night was chilly, yet the drow thought nothing of the cold. He moved down the frontage road, away from Chateau D’rahl and toward the heart of Washington D.C. Even if he’d driven, it wouldn’t have taken him as quickly as his own two feet through the industrial district hiding the high-security magical prison. He was a blur in the moonlight as he crossed the river into Capitol Hill and encountered the overwhelming New Year’s glimmer of lights and traffic and bars.
He hurried along the sidewalk and fought to keep his eyes open as he followed the trail of magic.
Not her magic, no. Mine. And the magic of our—
L’zar wouldn’t let himself finish the thought. He had to find the woman first, whoever she was—putting the magical cart in front of the flying horse wouldn’t do him any favors.
Once he made it to 16th Street, the busy street echoed with the undertones of live bands blasting from every bar, of laughter rising from open car windows and restaurant doors. A bellhop in a bright-red suit with gold buttons nodded at L’zar as the 1920s businessman stepped in front of the hotel entrance. The man pushed a luggage trolley across the sidewalk toward a car waiting at the curb.
L’zar froze. A tingling feeling yanked him sideways. Slowly, he peered at the hotel’s entrance and noticed the illuminated silver and white St. Regis Hotel sign’s marquee. Below it, a half-dozen silver balloons buffeted about in the stiff breeze blowing down 16th Street.
I’ve seen those balloons before. This is it.
L’zar made his way through the revolving doors and stopped himself from phasing through the glass partitions. D.C.’s most elegant socialites filled the lobby and beyond. They had come to welcome Y2K with a bang. The thought made the drow smirk as he scanned dozens of faces. The soothsayer hadn’t given him a name or an image or even a specific year. However, tonight felt different from all the other nights. Tonight, the call blazed like a siren.
The right place at the right time. Now I need the right…
A group of females in short, glittering dresses and beaded headbands passed by as they headed toward the event room off the bar. One woman offered him a coy smile, which the drow politely returned.
No, not her. Still…
The magic of prophecy in his veins pulled him after the women. L’zar waited as they made superficial conversation with two men standing just inside the ballroom doors. He waited until they entered the room, then went to follow. A man in a tuxedo stepped in front of him and cleared his throat “Your invitation, sir?”
The drow reached into the manufactured inside pocket of his jacket and whipped out a blank piece of cardstock. Without looking at the concierge, he snapped the fingers of his other hand, and his illusion spell did the rest.
After seeing whatever it was he wanted to see on the fake invitation, the man handed it back.
“Enjoy your evening, sir.”
L’zar snatched the card and made a show of tossing it into a silver trashcan by the doors. The fake invitation disappeared in a swirl of thin white smoke, and the drow moved into the ballroom like a panther on the hunt.
A four-string quartet played in the far corner, accompanying a man in a suit very much like L’zar’s and singing a Louis Armstrong song. Silver tinsel hung from every surface, silver ornaments dangling from the ceiling. A massive banquet table lined the wall on his left, laden with caviar and finger sandwiches, cocktail shrimp, beef tartare, artisan cheese. After a quarter-century of gruel that didn’t begin to meet state prison regulations—Chateau D’rahl wasn’t state-regulated, of course—it took every bit of his will not to go to the table, shove people out of the way, and fill multiple plates.
A golden light caught his eye as it shimmered at the other end of the ballroom. The drow’s body tingled from the pull buzzing through his veins. “Where are you?” he whispered, scanning the faces. “Show yourself…”
“Champagne?” A woman in a short cocktail dress passed in front of him with a tray of full, bubbling champagne flutes.