Heart of the Dragon King Read online

  Heart of the Dragon King

  J. Boothby

  Flying Walrus Studios, Ltd.

  Copyright © 2020 by J. Boothby

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  This edition is sold exclusively from Amazon.com and may not be transferred, resold, or stored electronically by any means without the express written permission of the author.

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  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

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Also by J. Boothby

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  1

  There's a blast of desert wind overhead and I startle awake.

  It's hot. There's grit in my mouth. Blood too. Somewhere I hear someone sobbing.

  I push myself up out of the sand. I'm covered: it's in my red hair, which is pretty messy on the best of days. It's in my green eyes, which feel right now like they're rolling around in holes of sandpaper. It's in all of my clothes, covering most of me—like I was a kid getting buried by my dad at the beach.

  Only I'm not a kid. I'm not at the beach. And I don't really remember my parents—they died a long time ago.

  I spit bright red grit. “Claire?” I call out, blinking. “Alex?”

  What's left of our tent is collapsed and twisted on top of me. It flaps in another gust of wind. I crawl out of it and into the light. “Ella?”

  Bright Nevada desert sunlight blasts me. I can't see a thing. I stumble to my feet, with my arm across my eyes. I squint, and it takes a minute for my eyes to adjust.

  They don't like what they see.

  “Oh no,” I say. “No no no.”

  Our camp is completely destroyed. So is everyone else's. Tents are collapsed, trucks and U-Hauls are smashed in or flipped over onto their sides. A few RVs are on fire. Huge, quirky sculptures have been blown over and crushed, and some of them are melted. Bikes with thick sand tires are scattered everywhere, twisted and bent.

  There were a lot of us here for the festival. We come from everywhere and show up every year, and we spread out across the Black Rock desert for half a mile, in a semi-circle around the gigantic statue in the center.

  The statue we set on fire last night.

  The statue that blew open, and let the darkness out. A fiery darkness from another place that hit us all like an atomic bomb blast.

  I remember hearing screaming.

  I remember flying through the air. I remember dark figures running across the sands.

  Figures that moved in ways that humans can't.

  I can't think about that now. “Alex? Claire? Where are you?” I just can't believe they're not here. There were so many of us this year.

  There's no one left. They're all gone.

  Everyone.

  The sound of the wind is harsh in my ears. I smell smoke and ozone and something else. It's cloying, flowery. Cloves and lavender. Dark spices that don't have a name, at least not in any language that I know.

  I've known those smells all my life. They mean trouble. I need to get out of here, as quickly as I can.

  But I can still hear the sobbing. Off to my left.

  It sounds like a kid. A little kid.

  I push my way through the remains of someone's art house. “Hey,” I call. “Is anyone there?”

  I sprint around a half-buried Airstream trailer, climb over a wrecked Jeep, and I see him.

  He's little, maybe five or six.

  He's standing in his underpants in the middle of a circle of flipped over cars.

  “Kid,” I call. “Hey, kid. Are you ok?”

  He turns to me. His dark hair is tangled, wind-blown. His face is streaked with dust and dirt that smeared with tear tracks from his sobbing. His brown eyes are bright with fear, and his mouth works awkwardly but no sound comes out.

  He holds his hands out to me. There's a look of horror on his face.

  His hands are wrapped in dark fire. Black and purple flames flicker up and down his forearms, his palms, his fingers.

  He holds them out to me with a look that says Help Me.

  Shit. This is about to go really, really badly.

  I sit down in the sand, right where I am.

  “It's ok,” I tell him. “It's going to be ok. Just take a deep breath.” I try and keep the worry out of my voice. I almost succeed. “You need to stay calm,” I say. I make calming gestures with my hands, like that's going to help.

  But he's so little.

  He shakes his head and lets out another fearful sob. He starts shaking, and all of that makes the flames spread.

  They crawl past his elbows, up his shoulders.

  His eyes are wide and terrified, and he looks down and lets out a scream as they wrap around his chest.

  “Look at me,” I yell. “Over here. Look at me. I'm Kylie. What's your name?”

  He starts shaking his head, back and forth, and then stumbling around in a circle. The flames spread down across his thighs.

  It's not going to work. He's too freaked out.

  He's not going to make it.

  There's no time. I stand up and lunge forward and tackle him.

  I drag him down to the sand and wrap my arms around his tiny little body.

  And then I call up my own fire.

  It explodes out from my palms and wraps up and around me, and it envelopes the two of us, hot and black like a cape or a cloak. A cloak made of fire.

  “It's ok,” I whisper in his ear. “It's ok, it's ok, it's ok.”

  I tuck his head back against my shoulder. I burn for a minute, hot and shiny and dark.

  It's fire that's right out of another place, too, just like last night's. But this is under my control.

  At least for now.

  I hold him in close, so close I can feel his heartbeat, his breathing. When I drop the fire, his drops too—like a blown-out candle.

  That was close. Too close.

  I take a deep breath. I stand up and help him up to his feet.

  The sun is bright. There's dust in the wind, that spice smell of the Elhyra again. He holds up his hands, turns them over, and then he stares at me in disbelief.

&
nbsp; “It's ok,” I say again. “You're ok. That happens to me all the time. You're going to be just fine.”

  They're lies. His life will never be the same. But I'll deal with that later if I have to. I hold out my hand to shake his.

  “I'm Kylie,” I say again. “Kylie Walker.”

  He looks at my hand and then up at my face. Then he ignores my outstretched hand, jumps forward and wraps his thin arms and tiny body around my legs in a tight hug.

  I rest a hand on the top of his sandy head, and then I lean down and hug him back.

  He doesn't let go for a long time. I don't blame him.

  On the back of his neck, I see it: the mark the flames leave. He's still so young, so it just looks like a birthmark or a welt. But it's distinctly in the shape of a small spider.

  Mine are birds. Now that I'm older, they look like tattoos.

  And there's a new one now on my left hand, where my thumb and forefinger come together.

  A raven. Wings out and ready to fly.

  I find him some clothes that almost fit. When I ask him if he came to the festival with his parents, he nods, so we search around to see if we can find them or anyone else. But out of the tens of thousands of people who came here, the tens of thousands who were here last night drinking, partying, performing, there's no one left.

  They've all been taken.

  He looks utterly lost, the poor kid.

  And I feel lost now too, and incredibly sad. I've come back here every year, just to see these people again. I met my ex-boyfriend Michael here, and though that didn't end up well at all, it was good for a little while. Alex, Claire, Ella—they were my great friends. Alex lived in Montana and built art cars that shot fire. Claire was a dancer from the Bay area and would perform on long lengths of silk suspended high above the desert. Ella wore these tremendous top hats, made the best whiskey drinks, and juggled fire. Normal, regular fire.

  I hold it together for the kid. He doesn't leave my side as we check through the wreckage for any other survivors. He studies my face carefully. I find some food, but neither of us feels like eating.

  Closer to what must be noon, the wind starts to pick up something fierce, whipping the sand around. In the distance, I can hear thunder.

  Soon, I know there will be people coming. People who I don't want to talk to.

  It's time to go.

  “We need to go somewhere else,” I say. “Do you want to come with me?”

  He looks at me solemnly for a long minute. Then he nods.

  I take his hand. We find Russell.

  Russell's the light green, old Ford pickup truck that I got from my uncle Uriah. Now he's covered over in sand and has a large new dent in its hood and some deep scratches down the passenger's side. His front license plate hangs by a thread. But Russell is Russell; it all just gives him more character. He's bad on gas, handles like a tank, and unlike every other guy in my life, he has never failed me.

  He starts right up. We pull away slowly.

  When everything is gone, where do you go?

  You go home.

  We drive east across the desert. Toward the Atlantic Ocean. Toward Richmond.

  “What's your name?” I ask the kid. He looks at me but doesn't answer. “There's some paper and a pen in the door there if you want to write it down.”

  He does. Three big, shaky letters in a little kid's handwriting.

  S-A-M.

  “Sam,” I say. “It's nice to meet you.”

  If he was older, I might say Sam, I'm Kylie Walker. I'm a twenty-five year old freak. Whether I want to or not, I stand in between two worlds, ours and the Elhyra.

  And soon it will kill me.

  Instead I reach out and tousle his hair again. “It's going to be ok, Sam,” I lie again.

  It's only after he falls asleep on Russell's huge couch of a seat that I pull over to the side of the road, and let the tears come for those friends I'll probably never see again. My shoulders shake, and when I look in the mirror there are rivers running from my eyes, down across the desert of my sandy face.

  And then I pull it together, since no one else is going to do it for me.

  Someone's going to pay for this, I think, not for the first time.

  I'm going to make sure of it.

  2

  The fire has subsided. The truck is gone.

  The wind whips low across the sands, kicking up dust devils that spin and whirl across the wreckage of campers and vans, of tall statues of people and animals, of trees and angels. It pushes hard against the frames of rusted art cars, of elaborate houses on wheels that have fallen backwards and still smolder.

  Nothing moves.

  Almost nothing.

  The sun jumps off shattered windshields, sand-scoured metal.

  It jumps off mirrors. Many mirrors.

  Rear-view mirrors, side view mirrors, hand-held camping mirrors, mirrored tiles across the hoods of art cars, sculptures of ships made entirely of…

  …Mirrors.

  Imagine a calm mountain lake: smooth, still.

  Imagine, then, a vast thing rising to the surface of that lake.

  It doesn’t break the surface.

  It can’t break the surface. Not yet. It’s a creature of that shining silver place.

  But it’s a creature with teeth.

  It has been waiting a long time.

  It is very, very smart.

  It is very, very hungry.

  It’s not alone.

  It looks out from the mirrors, all of them at once, toward the east.

  Toward the truck, driving slowly away across the sand.

  It remembers a scent. A taste.

  A power.

  Soon, it thinks, in its own language. Very, very soon.

  It slides forked tongues over black teeth the size of swords.

  And as one, every mirror in that desert cracks.

  3

  I’m not old enough to remember back before the smaug were here. I don’t even remember a time before their war.

  But my uncle told me it started the way all of our contacts with non-human races have started. Rumors first. Blurry pictures posted on fringy internet sites. Conspiracy theories: the government had made contact with another place but was keeping it secret.

  It had gone that way with the fae in the sixties, the shifters in the seventies, and then the grogans in the eighties.

  But while the fae just wanted drugs and sex, the shifters just wanted to keep to themselves, and the grogans were, well, just so very grogan, the smaug were different.

  Beautiful. Elegant. Stylish. Articulate. Apparently rich, at least the ones we saw at first.

  And, well, basically dragons. Or at least descended from them. Which is where the name came from: Smaug, the dragon from The Hobbit? The one in the Lonely Mountain, with all of the treasure?

  No one knows who thought that up, but it stuck. People imagined extravagantly romantic castles in the Elhyra filled up with treasure.

  It didn’t take long before the smaug were everywhere. Smaug on TV news, smaug models on the covers of magazines. Smaug-influenced clothes on celebrities. Smaug action figures. A smaug ambassador meeting with the president. There are even pictures of what the smaug call an oldmother—and what you and I would think of when we think of the word ‘dragon’—flying low over the Macy’s Christmas Parade in New York.

  Then their war happened, and suddenly the smaug were gone. More than a decade went by with no contact of any sort.

  Then refugees started showing up. Small groups of once-beautiful smaug carrying everything they owned on their backs, telling stories about a horrible war, and how it devastated the Elhyra.

  Refugees weren’t stylish. They weren’t elegant, really. They needed help.

  And that’s never been our strong suit.

  It was another few years before the kidnappings began.

  “You bought us a kid?” Zara says. “Our very own kid?” She looks at Sam, asleep on the beat-up couch we found on the street.
Zara just moved in three months ago. “Was he expensive? I’ll pay you for my half. I love kids, Kylie. I like the way they eat.”

  “They way they eat?” I say. Zara is very cool. She’s smart and funny and probably the best roommate on the planet.

  “Yeah, you know. They dive right in with their hands! They shove it all in their mouths at once. They chew with gusto.” Zara runs her hands back through her straight black hair and ties it back behind her head in a way I never could that looks thoroughly professional. “At least all of my cousins are like that.”

  “I don’t think I have ever said the word ‘gusto’ in my life.” I make a sincere attempt at a smile. It’s morning, and I’ve been driving for way too long, catching what might or might not have been sleep in interstate rest areas. I can’t imagine what kind of disaster I look like, but I bet it’s a big one.

  “You are missing out. Guuuusssssto.” Zara bustles around the kitchen. She is beautiful, too, with perfectly tan skin and a strong nose and the best eyebrows I have ever seen. She straightens the collar of her blouse. “Gusto gusto gusto,” she says, over the hissing of the coffee machine. She wears real clothes for a real job, working for an agency that helps refugees get settled in Richmond.

  “I didn’t actually buy him,” I say.

  “Kidnapping is probably much more cost-effective.” She hands me an espresso.

  What kind of roommate hands you an espresso? The best kind.