The Dragon's Secret (The Fay Morgan Chronicles Book 2) (7 page)

We slept afterwards. I remembered tumbling through sleep, thinking of the Grail. The Grail. Nearby. Its light and vitality within reach.

By the early dawn an icy chill had crept through the blankets and into my bones. I felt sore, cranky, and desperate for the perfection of yesterday. Merlin, looking decades younger yet still essentially like himself, lay snoring lightly and smiling in his sleep. I crept away from him and back to where the cup sat.

I did not breathe as I peeked inside and saw a couple drops of condensation at the bottom of the Grail. I grabbed the cup and drank it quickly before putting the cup back down just as it had been. I returned to Merlin and curled up around him. That water danced through me. It was life itself and it sang to me. I would do anything for that water.

Anything at all.

13

The Gray Rock

I came back to the world of warehouses and concrete with a splitting headache. A sharp pain lanced through my left arm as I struggled to sit up.

“Leonard?”

“What?”

“I just snapped my fingers. That was your cue, remember?”

I groaned and looked around for my cloak: my death spell. They’d taken it, along with my jewelry, bobby pins, and buttons. They must have something that could make them see magic. I snarled with frustration as the men nattered on.

“You were supposed to point at me. Not snap.”

“Bullshit.”

“He’s right, Jacob. It was a finger point. Remember how we talked about how snaps are too old school?”

“Idiots.” Jacob pointed at Leonard.

Leonard, a big man wearing khakis and a purple polo came and stood above me. He bent down and put a hand on my shoulder. A blast of heaviness, of gravity, pulled me down, so hard I couldn’t move any of my muscles or bones. My arm, probably broken, exploded with pain and I tried to scream but even my tongue was too heavy to move.

“It’s a relic called the Grand Button,” Leonard said with a smirk. He held up a black button in his other hand. “You have no idea how many weird magical objects we found while we were trying to find the Grail. Now, who are you?”

It took all my power just to gasp in tiny bits of air. My head rolled to the side, and I saw Lila and Adam sitting on the orange couch, gagged and trussed. Two knights stood near them. The pain in my arm didn’t cease, but it started to fade as I saw stars at the edge of my vision.

The man let go of my shoulder, and the weight went away. I sucked in breath. I pulled up strands of dark magic within me, trying to—

Leonard kicked me in the side. “Who are you? Tell the truth, or we cut off the girl’s head.” He gestured to Lila. The knight standing near her turned toward me and showed me a gleaming scimitar.

“Morgan,” I said through gritted teeth.

The knight put the scimitar up to Lila’s throat. She made a gasping sound from behind her gag.

“Morgan le Fay.”

“What? We got ourselves another ancient,” Leonard crowed to his friends. “This is going to be the best cage match fight ever. We’ll leave Morgan and Merlin in there until they get weak, and then we’ll get them to tell us where the Grail is.”

The knight removed the blade from Lila’s neck and stepped away from her as Leonard bent down and lifted me up. As soon as he touched me, the crushing gravity came back and all I could do was lie in his arms. He carried me over to the door that led to the other half of the warehouse. Magic—wild and angry—greeted me as Leonard opened that door and dumped me on the ground. He slammed the door shut behind me.

As soon as I was inside the other room, I jumped up to standing, gritting my teeth and holding my broken arm with my good hand. I scanned the room. The first thing I saw was Y Ddraig Goch, watching me with smoldering eyes. His long, lizard-esque body was the size of a huge moving van. He had raw sores all over him that oozed brackish blood onto the concrete floor. The fiery red scales that I remembered were dulled to a muted rust. His breath, steady and hot, smelled like a thousand blazing forest fires. Some vague and insubstantial wisps lay wrapped around his great neck. His great yellow eyes slitted as he looked away from me and across the room.

I followed his gaze to see Merlin, my love no matter what he thought of me, standing on the far side of the room. He was sweating and pale, and moved his arms around as he muttered. He too had something odd—some kind of shimmer—around his neck. His eyes looked glazed.

“Merlin and Y Ddraig, well met,” I said lightly as I watched him and then the dragon, trying to understand what kept them both here rather than destroying the men next door.

Merlin growled at me.

“Are you hurt or bound?” I asked.

“You will all hurt. You will all die,” he said dully.

Panic surged through me. What was wrong with him?

Y Ddraig’s bellowing, mirthless laughter echoed through the room. “Leave while you can, Morgan. You cannot best me. You will never win this battle.”

I scanned the room. It was empty except for something small in the very center of it. It looked like a gray river rock, smooth and round, no bigger than my hand. But as soon I looked at it, it pulled at me and spoke with a sly whisper. How to describe the sweet and sudden urge to hold it? To have it. I licked my lips and swallowed hard. I took a step toward it. To take it as my own. Something encased me on all sides.

I snarled and looked up to see a huge red pentagram painted on the ceiling. It was intricate and well-made, with no breaks in any of its lines. The circle’s strength lay at its center, where it was coiled tight and drawn with a dozen unbreakable runes. Anyone adept at magic could break free of this circle, but none would be able to break into its middle. As I stared at the circle above, I felt something swirl around my neck. It pulled my gaze away from the ceiling and back to the object in the middle of the room. I licked my lips. I wanted that stone. I needed it.

“I see. You are stuck, the both of you,” I said to the other two. “Trapped and unable to break out of a witch’s circle. How sad.” I raised my hand to throw spells at them, and then winced at the grinding bones in my left arm.

“Stop your pitiful machinations, Morgan. We are going nowhere,” Merlin snarled. His voice sounded raw. “The only one leaving here is me, after I get the stone.” He threw something at me: a nothingness that spread into a black bird with red wings that swooped through the air.

I reacted with a swift blast of fear magic that battered it away. A second later another spell hit me from the other side. The dragon’s burning spell flushed through me. I staggered and swore as it moved so quickly that none of my defenses activated before it had done its work. I stood, dazed and unsteady, wondering what the spell had done. I could still think and breathe. My left arm screamed with pain and my head ached, but not to any greater extent than before.

I tried to take a step forward toward the stone, and this time not only was I not able to, but a screaming sound filled my head so loud that I almost fell. I took a step back, and the hellish noise stopped. Damn the dragon and his deterrent spell. I would still get to the stone, somehow. I had to have it and hold it. I scratched at the thing on my neck, but didn’t think about it. My mind searched for magic and tricks I could use to get the rock out from the center of the pentagram before Merlin and Y Ddraig Goch did. They might want it, but it was destined to be mine, all mine, for now and all times.

The thought was interrupted by the dragon sending a fiery spell toward Merlin, which he deflected with a sharp pound of his staff against the warehouse’s floor.

I dragged my eyes away from the rock and looked up again at the pentagram above us, reading the interaction of the lines and runes. No pentagram is perfect, where was its weakness? I wondered. I could see no way I could get through it, and no way to use magic to reach in and bring the stone to me.

There. I saw the flaw. The dragon and Merlin must have seen it, too. The rock could be moved, yes, but only away from me. A useless flaw that I could not exploit. As soon as I moved it, the dragon or Merlin would snatch it up.

So there I was. And there we were. Each of us wanted the relic at the center of the room. None of us could get it, and we would stay here, until we bested each other. Until we grew weak and useless, and still we would fight each other until the death. Or until the men who’d made the pentagram came in here and bade us to do whatever they wanted, in return for the relic.

I heard laughing. My own. We were all trapped, and none of us were going to leave.

It was worth it for the stone, the lovely stone. I settled my gaze on it with a sigh. I touched my neck again, for something tickled me there. I used my wrong hand: my broken left arm, and the sharp pain flared. For a brief moment that pain freed me from the seductive and inexorable draw of that relic.

In that moment as my broken bone howled within me, I remembered Merlin’s tale of the two dragons stuck beneath Dinas Emrys. How they had worn magical collars, and how neither would leave the lake.

This stone was why. This was the same relic. It had collared and leashed those dragons back then, and did the same now, to all three of us.

If only the knowing changed anything, I thought as my mind filled again with lust for that stone. That perfect stone, and I would have to make a big spell, bigger than any I’d ever made with more magic than I had ever dared to use before to knock out Merlin and the dragon. To kill them if necessary. Then I would find some way to get my stone. I closed my eye and began to pull up great strands of magic from within me.

A spell hit me on my right side, and I fell to the ground to let the spell rush past me and do no harm. I screamed with pain as I landed on my broken arm, and another moment of sanity surged through me.

I fought to keep my eyes closed and my mind screaming, though all of me longed to focus on that rock again. I know this type of hunger, I thought. There is a way to fight this desire that burned forever and twisted and turned a person around until they were no longer a person, not really, but only a bag of bones and want.

I know how to fight this, I thought desperately, as a flash of memory came to me. It came quick enough that I didn’t fall down, but blood poured out of my nose and my forehead pounded with pain.

I opened my eyes.

I knew how to fight this.

14

The Way Out

What I remembered: there was a place inside of myself, a cold and white room with nothing on the walls and only one door with a dozen unbreakable locks. It was a witchy kind of place: made for someone who handled great power. Long ago I had made this quiet place, inside the vivid wilds of my mind. It was empty except for one thing that I could not think about or notice right now, but I would, later.

The room was made to hold dangerous things, and I had no memory of when I’d made it, but I knew how to use it. It was not easy, but I held my overwhelming relic lust, which looked just like the gray stone, and threw it into the room. I slammed the damn door shut and all the locks locked.

It was gone.

I opened my eyes and breathed in the stink of desperate magic that filled the room. Calm flowed through me as I stared at the relic, at the rock. I still wanted it, but it was a manageable hunger.

I glanced at the closed door behind us, wondering what those would-be kings were doing to Lila and Adam. I had to end this battle, quickly.

I considered teleporting the relic away—I could move it away from me. If I did that, a moment later the dragon and Merlin would probably kill me and then disappear in search of the relic. There was no place I could send it where they wouldn’t find it. They would continue their battle elsewhere, and one or both of them would die.

And if I didn’t send it away? I looked at the dragon, and then at Merlin. Decisions. With consequences. These two bore a deep history between them. Of slavery and the sharp desire for revenge. Which one? Which one should I give it to? Scenarios flickered through my head, all of them risky. I will save you, Merlin. My love. I will try.

Another wave of magic filled the air as Y Ddraig Goch breathed out a sooty and slow-moving spell. It drifted upward, soon to release some new flavor of nastiness. Merlin scowled and magic flowed out of his upturned hands, heading upward and dissipating the spell. His shoulders sagged and he looked exhausted.

I heard a scream from the other side of the door.

Lila’s, I was pretty sure.

There was no use waiting. I made my choice, come what may.

With my good hang I yanked at my hair, hard, and held a dozen black strands in my palm. In my mind’s eye I took those hairs and wove them together, with light and motion, with swiftness and surety. It was a small spell that I pulsed into the strands of my hair and then threw into the air.

“
I gyd at Y Ddraig Goch
,” I whispered.
All to the dragon
. My spell shuddered and coalesced as it moved into life, flapping like a hairy butterfly as it darted toward the river stone at the center of the room.

The dragon roared at me.

Merlin screamed.

Then they both leaned forward and squinted at my butterfly spell as they tried to figure out what it was doing and how they might counteract it. Its simple magic made no sense to either of them, and they tried to discern what darker mission it was on.