Maps, Artifacts, and Other Arcane Magic (Dowser Series Book 5) (2 page)

I flipped open the book as I followed the fledgling back to my research prison — err … table. The smooth leather of the lower back cover and spine were blackened, as were the last dozen or so pages. As Drake had worked out in seconds based on the span of the dated entries, the journal had been kept by the former treasure keeper. The English was old-fashioned, stilted, and written by a cramped hand, but still readable. Pulou had said that his mentor’s journals had all been destroyed in a fire — hence the singed back cover — but this one was obviously an exception. Not surprising, given the way it seemed capable of flight — or a directed and malicious launching capacity at least.

“Could this book have been following me?”

Drake shrugged and then picked up his pace. I was fairly certain he’d spied the box of cupcakes on the table I’d claimed for my piles of fruitless research.

The random pieces of furniture strewn about the nexus library had obviously been gathered from different eras. I’d unearthed the utilitarian vintage wooden table exactly where it still stood swathed in parchment, and surrounded by the stacks of books I’d gathered over the last three months. The curve-footed table could have been a Restoration Hardware reproduction, but I was pretty sure it was actually a rectangular dining table from the Ming dynasty. I’d found a black-leather-quilted, dark-wood-framed chair that I was pretty sure was Victorian in an aisle between the nearby bookshelves. It had carved tassels coming out of the mouths of fish on either side of the back frame, and the arm supports were carvings of a woman’s face and chest. Though it was the carved Vs on the front corners of the seat that were the dead giveaway.

Yep, I was so bored I was studying the furniture.

I could clearly taste the magic of the tattooed map that I’d spread out in the center of the table. A tattoo that had once resided on the back of the former treasure keeper, who had also apparently written the feisty journal I was barely managing to keep a hold on.

Drake reverently lifted the lid of the bakery box I’d propped up on three hand-drawn atlases. He gazed inside it as if he were uncovering an ancient relic.

“Do all guardians write journals?” I asked him.

“I don’t know,” Drake answered. “I don’t think Suanmi or Chi Wen do.” Then, his eyes full of epic sadness, he whispered, “Only three cupcakes remain.”

“Eat slowly.”

“Yes!” he declared, his mood instantly shifting. “I will savor as you’ve been teaching me.”

The final seventy-five or so pages of the journal were blank, including the ones with the singed edges. I’d have to double-check the dates, but I was fairly certain the entries stopped at least fifty years before the Pulou I knew had ascended in the late sixteenth century. Though the spine and back cover of the journal were burned, the leather wasn’t flaking off. The page groups — signatures, I think I was supposed to call them — were hand sewn.

“Tell me the tale of this cupcake,” Drake demanded as he dramatically held a newer creation of mine aloft.

I glanced up from the last handwritten page of the journal. “That’s a
Vixen in a Cup
. Chocolate gingerbread cake with a salted caramel icing.”

“
Vixen in a Cup
,” Drake whispered as he carefully peeled the paper off the cupcake. Earlier this year, I’d tried to do away with cupcake holders by using silicone cups to bake. But they were fiddly — the moist, delicate cake broke more often than not — and my customers had rebelled at the breaking of tradition. At least the paper cups I used were compostable.

The final line of the journal read:
Shailaja has broken with the guardians. She has broken with me.

“Who is Shay-la-ja?” I asked Drake, attempting to sound out the foreign name.

The fledgling, who’d stuffed the entire cupcake in his mouth, could only shrug in response.

“Way to savor.” I shook my head and returned my attention to the journal. A rune was drawn in the bottom corner of this half-empty page. A rune that looked like a decapitated, legless stick-person. I set the journal down on the stack of books to the right of the map and anchored it there with a tiny pulse of my alchemist magic. I guess I shouldn’t be surprised that a journal written by the treasure keeper — who could create magical portals at will — liked to wander.

Or hide.
That was an odd thought. Why would a book be hiding? And in a library? That was a little obvious, though I guess there was that hiding-in-plain-sight thing …

The journal rustled its pages as I withdrew my hand, but it stayed put. I didn’t want to alter its magic. I just wanted to be able to read it later. The rune looked seriously familiar — as in, I’d watched Warner collect silver pendants decorated with that same rune from the bodies of sacrificed sorcerers three months before. It was in the fortress that had hidden the first instrument of assassination — aka colorful braids that could kill a guardian.

Warner had attributed the decapitated stick-figure rune to a sect of eternal-life seekers. A supposedly extinct sect of sorcerers whose members — through some sort of human sacrifice — might now be living their afterlife as shadow leeches. They’d manifested in that form in the fortress, at least. I hadn’t laid eyes on one since, so they might have been vanquished when the fortress collapsed. I dug around the papers and books strewn across the desk. I had one of the rune pendants here somewhere to compare …

“And this?” Drake asked, holding up a
Buzz in a Cup
.
 

I went into caffeine overload every time I baked that mocha fudge cupcake with mocha buttercream icing, probably from inhaling the Illy espresso powder I preferred to use. “You’ve had that one before.”

“I know, but you like describing them to me. Rituals are important.”

“Just eat it,” I said. I wasn’t fed up with the fledgling, though I’m sure it sounded like it. I was just utterly fed up with trying to figure out how to trigger the second map that Pulou insisted was to be found within the dragonskin tattoo spread on the table before me.

All I saw were blotches of green and blue, and triangles that I was fairly certain were ocean, land, and mountain ranges. A motif of flowers and leaves adorned one side of the map, while a series of interconnected mechanical-looking blocks were tattooed on the other.

The intersected rainbow from which I’d pulled a key — literally — three months ago, which I’d then used to unlock the first map, had disappeared sometime between us collecting the five-colored braids and the next time I’d unrolled the map. The five-colored braids that were also referred to as an ‘instrument of assassination.’ One of only three ways to kill a guardian dragon. A completely benign-looking weapon that could kill my father, the warrior.

Yeah, I was freaking frustrated to have wasted this much time between collecting the first and second instruments.

“Is that the map?” Drake asked. He paused his cupcake worship to peer over the stack of atlases I’d spent endless days collecting and poring over, carefully comparing each and every hand-drawn page to the tattoo.

A librarian would have been a welcome sight.

“Here.” Drake held a crumpled piece of paper toward me.

I took it. It was already sticky from frosting and I hadn’t laid a hand on it yet. “What is it?” I asked as I smoothed the paper open on the table.

“From Chi Wen,” Drake answered around the last mouthful of his final cupcake, a simple buttercream-frosted lemon cake I’d dubbed
Joy in a Cup
.

Ah, damn.

I might not have opened the note had I known it was from the far seer. Of all the guardian dragons, I feared the ancient Chinese gentleman the most. Even more than Suanmi the fire breather, who thought of me as an abomination that shouldn’t be allowed a continued existence.

The far seer had shown me my future — which he often referred to as destiny — twice now. Neither time had been a particularly pleasant experience. It wasn’t just the terrible sensation of displacement and disorientation that came with the far seer sharing his visions, or the feeling of having a tiny bit of your soul ripped away. It was also the terrible belief that what lay before me was ultimately unalterable. The idea that even if I chose to not walk the path before me, the events would still come to pass.

I stared down at the charcoal drawing I’d spread on the table. It depicted what appeared to be a centipede. If centipedes were made of riveted metal plates.

“It’s from the oracle, Rochelle.” Drake picked crumbs out of the now-empty bakery box.

“Double shit,” I muttered.

Drake snickered. “Chi Wen said you’d say that.”

“Of course he did.”

“But it’s not a vision. The oracle is not in a seeing state right now.”

I had no freaking idea what that meant, except I was seriously glad I wasn’t looking at a picture of me dying, or a vision of someone I loved being killed, since that’s what Rochelle usually saw and committed to paper in prophetic charcoal. Up to now, I’d avoided seeing her drawings in person, but the gist had been described to me by Audrey, the beta of the West Coast North American Pack.

“What is it, then?” I asked.

“A tattoo,” Drake answered. “ ‘To match yours,’ Chi Wen said. Got any chocolate?”

What did the far seer mean by ‘Match yours’? I didn’t have a tattoo.

I sighed and set the drawing aside to pull a brand new Ritual Chocolate bar out of my new moss-green Peg and Awl satchel. It was a gift from Warner to replace my ruined-by-salt-water one. Unfortunately, two near drownings in the Bahamas were too much for my beloved Matt & Nat satchel. Yeah, the sentinel certainly knew how to woo me … and, apparently, he had my Etsy password. The satchel had been on my ‘things I love’ wish list for over a year.

Drake attempted to snatch the 75 percent Madagascar, made-in-Colorado chocolate bar from me, but I danced away from him with a grin.

He laughed. “Shall we wrestle for it?”

“It belongs to me, fledgling.” My tone was far more severe than my smile.

Drake backed off in acknowledgement of my ownership. I was learning how things worked in the dragon world. If you were the strongest, you could hold any territory you wished, as long as it had been evenly and equally divided. No one dragon had a greater gift or responsibility than another.

I unwrapped the bar, then broke it in half. It snapped with the clear, crisp sound that accompanied only the finest chocolate.

“Oooo, it has a stamped batch number and everything … zero seventeen, so you know it’s going to be great.” I was already salivating for my taste as I handed the other half to Drake.

The fledgling perched on a stack of books that shouldn’t have been capable of bearing his immense dragon weight. The books barely shifted.

Ah, to be a full-blooded dragon full of grace and wisdom …

A silver dragonfly flitted down over the bookshelves behind the fledgling and landed on his shoulder. It appeared to be an exact replica of a living, breathing bug. But it was constructed out of metal and animated by a magic I couldn’t taste within the concentration housed in the library. Its gossamer silver wire wings fluttered, then stilled.

“Err, is that a dragonfly made out of platinum?”

“Silver,” Drake answered, every ounce of his attention on the chocolate in my hand as he waited patiently for me to begin the tasting ritual.

“Silver?” The dragonfly flitted away as quickly as it had appeared. “Magic and silver? Those two things don’t go together.” Silver didn’t hold magic the way gold and gems did, so most alchemists didn’t even bother working with the metal.

Drake shrugged. “It belongs to Pulou. The treasure keeper has many unusual artifacts in his collection. It’s constructed through metallurgy. The chocolate?”

Okay, metallurgy — yet another thing to add to my ever-growing list of all things magical that it would take centuries to research and figure out … if I didn’t actually have a limited brain capacity, which I was beginning to suspect I did, along with a terribly short attention span.

I broke a single square of the chocolate — or a skinny rectangle in this case — off my half. I smelled it until the scent filled my nasal cavities and tickled my taste buds. Then I popped it in my mouth and slowly sucked on it.

Drake copied my movements.

We sat in silence as the smooth chocolate — with just the perfect hint of creaminess — softened on my tongue.

“Rich cacao and strong, almost overwhelming citrus notes …” Drake murmured. “Is this what magic tastes like to you, warrior’s daughter?”

I smiled.

Drake nodded, his expression sage and far too old for his face once again. “What a gift that would be, to taste magic like you do.”

I laughed as I attempted to carefully fold the remaining chocolate up in its gold foil, managed to mangle it as always, then slipped it back into the box.

Life lessons from a fourteen-year-old. I never seemed to grow wise enough to not need them. The grass was always greener, indeed.

∞

I settled in with the journal after Drake wandered off, but the chronicle was a difficult read. The English was archaic. I would have to ask Warner to look at it.

Though the sentinel wasn’t exactly the reading type … hmmm …

“What are you smiling about?” Pulou’s voice boomed around the library, jolting me out of reminiscing about Warner’s and my last make-out session.

With two deliberate and heavy steps, the treasure keeper was looming over my study table. Pulou appeared to be somewhere in his mid-fifties, though he was more like six hundred years old. He was bundled in the floor-length fur coat he always wore, but it was actually a manifestation of his guardian power rather than a fashion misstep. Today, however, he also had runes inked across his forehead.

Well, that was … unusual.

He glared at me as he continued to dwarf my table.

“Umm …” I really wasn’t going to confess to lusting after Warner to a guardian who was also sort of my boss.

Pulou placed an ordinary but expensive-looking pen on the table. It appeared to be a slim, gold Cartier. It wasn’t.

Uh oh.

I watched the inked runes disappear from Pulou’s forehead.