The Dragon's Secret (The Fay Morgan Chronicles Book 2) (6 page)

BOOK: The Dragon's Secret (The Fay Morgan Chronicles Book 2)
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The warehouse was divided in half by a large wall. On the side I stood on, it was mostly empty. There were a couple of orange couches and refrigerators, as well as half a dozen tables set up with monitors, whirring computers, and a tangled mess of cords. On the other side of the wall? I couldn’t see past it, but that was where the magic came from. Where the dragon and Merlin were.

“So you were geo-caching?” A man’s nasally voice floated up from below me. “We know all about treasure hunting. Do you have any idea who we are?”

Adam smiled easily and shrugged. “Important people?”

The nasally-voiced man typed into a tablet he carried at his side and handed it to Adam and Lila. “We’re only the youngest billionaire titans of tech. See, it says so right there in the headline. This is a picture of when we all met, when we went to a photo shoot for this article in
Valley Wag
. Come on, let me tell you all about it.”

He turned and headed for the couches.

Lila and Adam hesitated, and then followed him, flanked on both sides by the other men.

“There are twelve of you in the picture,” Lila said as she flopped down onto the couch. Adam sat beside her, alert and ready. “Where’s everyone else?”

Good. She was seeking information that might be useful to me.

“Not everyone made it to the end game.” The man grinned and shrugged. “It’s been a rough journey, but worth it. Wanna know what I asked everyone at this photo shoot?”

Lila nodded and smiled. As I began to walk forward over the roof’s rafters, carefully moving toward the wall that divided the room, I admired Lila’s steady gaze and the way she leaned toward him, giving away none of the fear she must be feeling. “Sure, I mean we’ve got to bounce soon, but I guess so.”

“I asked all the billionaires if they liked video games. Everyone did, of course. Then I asked them if they could go on an epic quest with real magic and adventure, would they do it? Leonard answered with something lame about that sounding like a good new startup. We could call it RealGames. Idiot.”

A man, presumably Leonard, answered, “I didn’t know. You were being weird.”

“A real adventure, neat. Kind of like geocaching,” Lila said. “Which reminds me, we should be going and

.”

“Then I told them we could become a band of secret knights that hunted down the world’s best treasure, and someday we wouldn’t just be billionaires, but immortals. I told them there was a secret world they knew nothing about.”

My lips curled into a scowl as I moved closer to the middle of the room, slowly, carefully. I had no noise deadening spells. If I could just get to that wall, I could slip through it and get to Merlin and Y Ddraig Goch. It was still a good fifteen feet away.

“Wow, immortal?” Lila said.

“Okay,” Adam added carefully.

A different man spoke. “We told Jacob if that was true than he should prove it. He told us to come to his car.”

“His car?” Lila said breathily and touched Jacob’s knee, almost as if by accident.

The man sat up straighter. “I drive a Tesla, of course. I popped the trunk and showed them my cage.”

“What was in it?” Adam asked.

“A couple of Kikimuris I’d bought the last time I was in Moscow. They made squeaky noises and pushed their weird chicken hands through the metal bars. I let everyone play with them for a while before I killed them. They were stinking up the back of my car.”

Kikimuris were gentle creatures who never harmed anyone.

“I

don’t know what that is,” Lila said quietly. “I don’t understand what you all are saying about stuff that’s not real, but it’s cool that you are having fun with it.”

I stared down at the five men below me. I’d known men like them. I’d always known men like them, and there they sat, a new form of monarchy but kings nonetheless. I held back a hissing breath and a stream of invectives. I would deal with them after I freed the dragon and the wizard.

“So we banded together and became knights on a quest, modern style, and we made a list of all the steps we needed to become immortal. So that’s what we’ve been doing the last three years—Grail hunting.”

With those words a sudden rage I didn’t entirely understand filled me. I will end them, here and now, I thought. I will end them and their quest.

 

 

 

 

 

11

The Bro-quest

I started spinning and weaving a spell that would be these men’s end. Killing people was easy. It was one of the more elemental things that magic could do, and what I planned to do to them? It needed no nuance.

“Immortal?” Adam voice drifted up from below me. “That’s a tall quest, man.”

“You want to know how we’ve been working on it? I’d tell you but then I’d have to kill you both. Just kidding. It doesn’t matter what you know.” Something nasty lay beneath his voice.

“We started by analyzing big data.” He paused and spread his arms wide and made his legs go wider as though his testicles were expanding. “Millions of terabytes of data. That’s when we hit our first problem finding the Grail.”

The Grail. My mind pulsed with repressed memories, wanting to go back to that time: to remember more of it. I fought a wave of pain and nausea as I forced the memories away. I dropped some of the strands of the magic I pulled up from within me.
Focus
, I willed myself, as I started to make my death spell again.

One of the other men below me added, “The Grail’s trail went cold eleven hundred years ago. I mean, we researched the hell out of it, but there was just nothing. No word of it.”

I glared at him as I pulled up thick strands of hate and loathing from the deep wells within me. I tied them together with the red string of rage.

Another man added, “So we had to reverse-engineer it. You think Grail and you think Camelot, the round table, and all that, right? So the next question was, who’s still around from that time? Dragons, of course. We found out the great dragon of Wales was living large in the middle of Greenland in the secret Dragon Nation. Before we even went, we figured out how we could trap him. Tricky.”

“Really tricky,” another added. “We had to get a relic. Not easy. Good thing we had a bunch of magicians at our service, who kept dying, but oh well. So we got the relic and went to the Dragon Nation. So epic. They explode with fire when you cut their heads off, even the ones who look human. We got our dragon.” He pointed to the closed door that led to the other room of the warehouse.

The man with the nasally voice said, “Our dragon is on the Welsh flag. He’s the most famous dragon in the history of dragons and we control him. He’s our bitch.”

Lila laughed like she didn’t believe any of this. She fidgeted where she sat, and I think she realized that leaving this place would be no simple act.

“That’s sick, man,” Adam said lightly. “You saying dragons are real? Can I touch one?”

“If you want to be immolated, be my guest. He’s already made burnt marshmallows out of two of us. We control him, but we can’t get too close.”

A new and powerful wave of magic pulsed out of the room I couldn’t see into. It was Merlin’s magic this time. It filled the air with a spicy, peppery scent and distracted me from my own spell again.

I gritted my teeth and turned my attention fully inward, blocking out any noise, smell, or magic as I worked quickly and pulled up sticky-black stagnation magic from a dark well and aligned it with an equal amount of despair, spinning them together. I wove in smaller strands of boredom and exhaustion with my other strands, and let all of them get muddled together as I made blood knot after blood knot with them. Finally, it sat within me, potent and ugly. Now that it was made, I had to put it into some object that would be a good vector to kill them. Something large and dark. I pulled off my black felted cape, and fed the bitter spell into it. I had the urge to drop the thing as soon as it was made: to have nothing more to do with it. But it still needed a couple of minutes for the spell to coalesce.

The men below me blathered on.

“So we got our dragon. Come on, that has to be on anyone’s bucket list. You know what he told us? That King Arthur never even came close to the Grail, but there was another from that time. Another who was still alive, who our pal Y Ddraig hated and was going to go after some time or another, only living in Greenland was pretty chill and he hadn’t gotten around to it yet. We were pretty sure he was telling the truth and not just getting us to hunt his enemy down, since we made his daughter follow us and threatened to behead her. Anyway, Y Ddraig told us if we wanted the Grail to go find the wizard. He’s in there with the dragon and they are going to get us the Grail.” The man grinned and cocked a finger toward the closed door.

The Grail.

The Grail.

The Grail.
The words echoed in me as memories rose, insistent and needing me to remember them fully. I pushed them away, barely.

Lila and Adam sipped their sodas and did their best not to look utterly terrified. Just a minute now, I thought toward them. Just a minute more and then I will end this. End them. My spell was almost ready.

“That’s such an interesting story,” Lila said, speaking fast with a high and breathy voice. “Like a fairy tale or something, which I was never into as a kid, but maybe I should have been. And it’s really neat and all to have a dragon and Merlin. Wow.”

All the men froze.

“We never said Merlin,” one of them said slowly.

Another one stood and began pacing back and forth. “It wasn’t like we were going to let you leave here alive, but are you telling me you’re some kind of spy? This is not going to go well for you.”

“No. I didn’t mean,” Lila licked her lips. “Um, help?” She didn’t look up at me, but I heard her message.

Yes. My death spell was finally ready. Hellfire and revenge was coming to these Grail-hunting knights. I jumped off the rafter into space, just about to utter the words which would activate a floating spell in my shoes. But before I could say them, the Grail memories that wanted to be known surged within me. I fought not to black out. I tried to push the memories away, but they grew distinct and clear as they pulled me back to a time, long ago and far away. I felt myself falling, fast and unmoored. Just before the memories fully engulfed me, I felt my body hit the ground hard.

 

 

 

 

 

12

Grail Memories

Merlin and I drank, passing the Grail back and forth, both desperately thirsty to swallow all of that sweet water. We took tiny sips, staring our love at each other, and making this last. As that water entered me, it was lightness itself and it rewrote me on a cellular level.

It had been so hard to find this cave in the Aral Mountains. Nearly impossible to find this cup that did not wish to be found and did not wish to be owned. I understood that about it now that I held it. The Grail was a relic made for freedom. It was a thing so resounding with pure life force that it shouldn’t be contained.

Merlin handed the cup back to me and my fingers clenched around it. I savored the coolness on my lips as I took a small sip and forced myself to hand it back to him. There was little water left.

He drank and handed it back. Only a few drops left now.

I eyed it and glanced at Merlin.

“The last is yours,” he said. He licked his lips and I could tell how much he wanted it. As did I.

I drank those last drops like a woman dying of dehydration, even though I wasn’t. In plain fact, I would never die. Not of old age, anyway.

“Immortal,” I whispered. We had been chasing this relic for so long that I had started to doubt it truly existed. We had been following the treacherous trail for so many years that I wasn’t sure what our life would be lived for, now that this quest had ended. “Immortal,” I said again, trying to believe it.

“A long life,” Merlin said. “With you. My long life will be lived with you, Morgan.” He smiled shyly and rested his forehead against mine. The bright light, either real or imagined as we were transformed, began to fade around us. “I do not know what I have done to be so lucky and blessed, but I vow I will live and love well. I will be a good man and help others. I will—”

“Yes,” I said, kissing him. There was something about the Grail magic that made me want to be and do good, too. Not that I didn’t want that before, but it was a living thing inside of me, something physical, like a new kidney, this goodness. “We will be the secret do-gooders of this planet. We will earn this gift.”

We kissed for a long while as the Grail’s light fully died down.

The cup of cups turned drab, gray, and dented. Merlin cooked us dinner on the tiny fire he made at the front of the cave. I set up our bedroll and lit our lantern. We both kept glancing at the Grail that we’d place back in its stone nook on the cave wall. We both kept trying not to look at the Grail.

We ate a simple meal of dried beef, a salty broth, and one mealy apple. A feast for kings, we agreed. Food tasted amazing in our new mouths. Our new bodies. We made love in the cold air and moonlight, making a heat between us that drove away the winter’s bite. Though we were used to hitting each other with spells of pleasure, we did not use any spells on that night. Our skin was too raw. Each touch was a small universe of intensity and pleasure.

BOOK: The Dragon's Secret (The Fay Morgan Chronicles Book 2)
11.32Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

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