Heart of the Dragon King Read online

  That one isn't from anything at all.

  And it's moving.

  Sam catches his breath. He feels a prickly feeling on the back of his neck that crawls up behind his ears.

  It's moving toward the back of the bar.

  He follows it because he knows that's what it wants him to do.

  It goes behind the bar, and into the little storeroom in the back where there are things in boxes and then into the restaurant kitchen that smells like old grease and old chili. He follows it back past the giant refrigerator door that's shiny and silver and has a big lever on it for a handle.

  There's another door back here.

  The shadow slips under the crack at the bottom.

  The doorknob is old and painted black, and some of the paint is chipped off so Sam can see it was green underneath once, a long time ago.

  He opens the door. There are old wooden stairs going down. It smells stinky here, and the air that pours up the stairs feels damp on his skin.

  He doesn't see the shadow. It's too dark.

  He doesn't want to go down there.

  But the thing that's calling him wants him to.

  He feels around on the walls, and there's a switch. It turns on a faint yellow light.

  He holds onto the railing going down.

  The wood is very old, and very smooth under his feet.

  The floor at the bottom is made of dirt. It's cold and damp.

  There are a lot of old boxes down here—wooden crates and plastic containers and some cardboard boxes that have green and black stuff growing on the outside of them.

  The shadow is gone.

  But he knows where he has to go.

  He pushes into a small gap between some boxes, back towards the wall. The walls down here are all made out of stone blocks. Except the stretch behind all the boxes is different. It's all made out of bright red bricks here, held together with sloppy mortar.

  He puts his hands against the bricks.

  They're warm.

  From the other side of the bricks, he can feel it.

  It feels like a heartbeat.

  12

  It’s the next afternoon. Max and I are standing in front of a mural painted on the side of an old brick building. Six angry pandas tower over us in a row, each easily fifteen feet high. All of them have evil expressions on their faces. All of their eyes are a bright, piercing violet.

  I decide they all look like they’re about to launch an evil plan for world domination together. Their teeth look really sharp. Like smaug teeth. I shiver.

  “In the basement?” Max shifts his helmet to his other hand, runs his fingers through his beard and looks thoughtful.

  “Sound asleep,” I say. It freaked Zara and I out: it took us almost an hour to find Sam. When I finally did, down in the basement by that weird brick part of the wall, I wanted to yell my head off.

  Fortunately, I didn’t. I carried him up to my old room and tucked him in under the blankets, and he slept until noon. When he woke up, he didn’t seem to remember being down there at all.

  “What do you think he was doing?”

  I shake my head. “Sleepwalking, maybe?”

  I look back at the motorcycle, where Sam sits in the sidecar with Moose. Sam’s starting the mural with big, round eyes, and Moose, the dog, is watching us. “Maybe he needs a bed down there,” Max says.

  “It’s not the best basement for sleeping. It might even be one of the worst basements on the planet. My uncle never let me go down there.”

  Max had picked us up at Poe’s. He looked momentarily startled when he saw me with Sam, but to his credit, he didn’t miss a beat after that: he knelt down and shook Sam’s hand solemnly and then introduced him to Moose. I showed him how to hold his hand out flat, so Moose could sniff it. Moose plastered him with his big pink tongue and Sam had giggled, and then the two of them had started running round in the street together, fast friends.

  We’d piled into the bike and then had what Max termed the ‘the single, perfect espresso’ from a coffee shop on West Broad, near the university. It was almost as good as one of Zara’s. Sam had a steamer that left a white foam mustache on his upper lip.

  Then: murals. They’re hidden around the city where you least expect them. The first one was an elephant wearing a striped shirt and suspenders and holding a ball full of arrows. The second had been a girl bathing in a bowl of jam.

  Max seems to love them. They add a lot to Richmond, too. I get the sense that Max knows a lot of details about each artist, when each mural was painted, and what the artist was thinking while painting it. But he’s not doing that thing guys do where they need to tell you everything they know. He’s just letting me check them out.

  I like that. While we look at each mural, we talk some, about Sam, about the incursion, and even a bit about my hashtag vanlife with Michael, despite my better judgement. He’s good at getting me talking.

  I don’t know much about him yet, though.

  I think I want to.

  “Do you think maybe he feels safe down there?” Max says.

  I shrug. “I wish he would tell me.”

  “Can he actually, physically talk?”

  I nod. “He talks in his sleep.”

  “What does he say?”

  “Sometimes he’s talking to his parents, I think. And sometimes...”

  “Sometimes...?”

  “Sometimes he’s just saying ‘No,’ over and over again.”

  “Poor kid,” Max says. “Maybe we should find a better mural to look at?”

  I look back at Sam, staring up at the evil bears looming over him. He looks tiny. “Yeah, couldn’t hurt.”

  Back over at the bike, I check Sam’s harness. “You sure you have enough room in there, kiddo?”

  Sam nods and throws his arm around Moose, who leans his big furry body back against him. I make sure his helmet is tight.

  We climb on: Max in front, I’m on the seat behind him, using another borrowed helmet. I can’t help but wonder who might have worn it before me, though I realize that’s a little premature for me to be thinking about.

  He pulls out slowly onto the street, and I need to lean up against him to hang on.

  I think I could learn to like motorcycles.

  We head west through the Bottom, where all the bars are, and then up through the towers of the financial district. In the university area, there’s some sort of protest going on. People are carrying signs and walking quickly in the same direction we’re going, toward the river. The signs are anti-refugee and anti-smaug in particular, and they say things like “Lizard Go Home,” “Not Our War,” and “Scale-Free Zone.”

  There are an awful lot of grogans in the crowd, but a lot of humans and of course a few fae, too.

  I shake my head, even though no one is looking at me. I really want to think we’re better than this. Why can’t we find places in our city for anyone who wants to live here? And how would we feel if we needed somewhere to run to and people were protesting against us?

  We approach where they’re gathering, and I realize it’s the Refugee Services office where Zara works. It’s a small brick building on a corner, pretty beat up, with a dented metal roof and a small flower garden in the front that’s now getting trampled by the protestors crowding around it. A news truck is there, and people with cameras are focused on a guy with a bullhorn who’s trying to get a chant going.

  The guy doing the chanting is Oswald, the grogan I’d gone to school with.

  It figures. There’s a whole pack of young guy grogans in front of him, cheering him on.

  I tap Max on the shoulder. “We need to stop,” I say, putting my helmet up closer to his. “My roommate’s in there.”

  He nods and pulls over to the other side of the street. Sam’s nervous—he huddles down in the sidecar with Moose, who looks around anxiously too.

  I get my phone out and text Zara. Hey, u ok? Just passing yr office—WTF??

  Through the windows, I can see some people w
ho must work there looking nervously out between the blinds.

  Zara sends me back a shrug emoji and says We’re ok—they’ve been going for a while now. But damn.

  As I watch from the street, Oswald peels away with a bunch of groupies and starts marching south, toward the river. Others follow, and then more people join in too.

  I think I know where they’re heading.

  “That way,” I say. I point toward the Hill. It’s just across a bridge, over the interstate.

  “You sure that’s a good idea?”

  “No. I’m sure it’s a pretty bad idea. But we should go anyway. I’ve got a friend down there too.”

  He studies me for a sec, looking concerned, and then nods. “On it.”

  We follow.

  Sure enough, they cross over the highway, and head into the Hill. Oswald stops right in front of Xyr’s house.

  He climbs up on the stump of an old tree and starts shouting into the bullhorn again, his face all red. The other grogans begin to snort and spit around their tusks and they pump their fists in the air.

  More of a crowd starts to show up.

  A smaug looks out of one of the top windows, but quickly ducks back behind a curtain.

  I’ve got a bad feeling about this, but I can’t turn away.

  Spittle is flying off of Oswald. It’s hard to understand his shouting around his tusks, but the crowd reacts to his energy. Then he falls into a chant of ‘Hey hey, ho ho—lizard men have got to go” and a lot of the crowd follow along.

  They yell and scream and shake their signs in the air.

  Someone from the expanding crowd throws a rock. It smashes through one of the upper windows.

  Someone else pitches another one, and it slams against the rotting wood siding.

  The news trucks pull up, and the reporters and their cameras jump out and start setting up again.

  Three male smaug pour out of the door of Xyr’s house. I recognize one of them as Xyr’s son, and the other two are even taller than he is. They’re dressed in clothes that used to be regal, robes that drift in an invisible wind, and they’re each holding a thick quarterstaff.

  The staves are made of white wood, and their ends are bound in black metal.

  They take up defensive positions: standing sideways to the crowd, knees bent, staves held low and ready.

  “We should go,” Max says.

  And I know he’s right. But I can’t look away. I climb off the bike and take off my helmet. I hand it to him.

  “I’ve got to do something,” I say. Three smaug against a big mob? That’s just not right.

  That’s not who we should be.

  Xyr’s son yells, “Leave us alone! We have our children and families here! We have done nothing wrong!”

  But Oswald’s not hearing any of it. He climbs off the stump, pushes his way through the crowd, and gets right up into the smaug’s faces, shouting curses and insults through the bullhorn.

  It’s too much for the smaug. One of them cracks his staff over the speaker, smashing it out of Oswald’s hands and into the ground.

  Oswald reacts by pulling out a knife and throwing himself at the smaug.

  “No!” I yell.

  I ignore Max’s cry of surprise, and what sounds like a scream from Sam, and I start to shove myself through the crowd.

  But it’s too late.

  13

  Oswald’s knife sinks up to the hilt in the smaug’s neck. The smaug lets out a scream and swings wildly with its staff, but then he staggers backward and falls to his knees. Dark blood is soaking down the front of his robes.

  I glance back, but I don’t see Max or Sam through the crowd. People are pouring in from the street. Where are they all coming from?

  I’m really glad Sam’s not seeing this. I hope Max is keeping him safe.

  I try and push closer, but there are so many people. I’m stuck in the middle of the crowd.

  But I can still see what’s happening all too well. Xyr’s son yells and aims a wild swing at Oswald, striking him square in the chest. There’s a blast of light, and a sound like thunder from the staff. Oswald is thrown high into the air, back over everyone’s heads, and the whole front of the crowd is shoved backward.

  With a crazed yell, Oswald’s mob of grogan groupies surge forward into the gap.

  “Stop!” I yell. “This is insane!” I’m nearly at the front now. But my voice is lost in the roar of the crowd.

  I’m trying to figure out what I can do to stop this whole thing, and I’m not coming up with any ideas.

  I see the third smaug grab the wounded man and pull him back inside the house. Xyr’s son steps in front of the door to protect their retreat, holding his staff up before him. A shimmer forms in the air there before him, a half-dome of a shield that’s crackling purple and blue.

  The first grogan to hit the shield bounces back into the others. The second one swings at it with a bat. But the bat slows to a stop in the shield like it’s been pulled into thick mud. The guy has to yank hard to get it out.

  They all keep beating on the shield, but Xyr’s son keeps it up, staring fiercely back at them.

  His violet eyes glitter, and he bares his teeth back at them. The sun catches his scales and it looks like he’s some sort of medieval knight, all dressed in shining armor.

  The rest of the crowd is yelling and cursing and waving signs.

  And then more people surge forward.

  At the same time, more smaug start pouring out of the other doors down the street. Men and women, even teenagers, some of them with staves but a lot of them with makeshift weapons—wooden chairs, kitchen utensils.

  It all goes to hell really fast.

  I hear someone scream, and I don’t know if its human or smaug.

  Someone else is crying.

  I’m shoved to the ground, and I realize this is really stupid—I could die. I don’t want to leave the smaug on their own against the crowd, but I need to get back to Max and Sam and get us the hell out of here.

  I try and push my way backward.

  One of the grogans turns and sees me.

  It’s one of the guys I saw with Oswald on the street.

  The one with the bat. This is going to be really bad.

  “Lizard lover!” He snarls and points at me, and charges in my direction with that same bat in his hand.

  The crowd all spills away from me, stumbling to get out of his way.

  I want to call up my fire, but I can’t, not with all of these people around. Plus the news crews.

  So I try to back away, but he’s moving too fast.

  The hell with it. I call up some fire and light up my hands, but it’s too late.

  He’s nearly on top of me.

  I stumble backward and catch myself. The fire goes out.

  My uncle put me through years of aikido training—it was something we did together twice a week, all through high school. But none of that’s coming to me right now.

  And then, out of nowhere, a huge wolf shoves into the space just in front of me.

  It’s easily the biggest wolf I’ve ever seen in my life.

  It growls long and low in its throat. Its teeth are enormous.

  The grogan sees the wolf, and he shakes his head like he can’t believe it’s actually there. Loose spittle flies away from him like a wet dog after a bath.

  He takes a step backward, but then he shakes his head again and starts to swing his bat back and forth in the air in front of him. “Come here, doggie doggie,” he yells. He lowers his tusks like he’s ready to charge.

  The wolf looks back at me and then back at the grogan.

  It growls another warning.

  The guy stands his ground.

  I’m thinking he must be drunk or high not to turn and run as fast as he can. If that wolf was looking at me like that, I know I would. That thing is the size of a car.

  But he doesn’t. He’s just swinging that bat with a rigid grin on his face.

  He snorts and opens his mouth
to yell something else, and then it’s too late.

  The wolf surges forward.

  It throws him to the ground and sends his bat flying, and then it rips into his abdomen with razor-sharp teeth.

  The grogan starts squealing long and loud, like a deep-throated pig.

  There’s a hand on my shoulder.

  I spin around, ready to call up my fire again despite the consequences, but it’s Devon, the guy who questioned me from the bar.

  He’s in riot gear, carrying a big plastic shield and wearing a mask and a big POLICE sign on his chest and back.

  “Ms. Walker!” he yells. “Kylie! You’ve got to get out of here.”

  I see there are more police here now, and I hear some small explosions.

  I see canisters flying into the crowd, and they start spewing smoke.

  Tear gas, I think. Not good.

  Devon throws me a mask. I hold it over my face.

  I turn back to the wolf.

  But it’s gone. And so is the grogan—all that’s left of him is a big smear of blood on the sidewalk.

  I turn back to Devon, and he motions for me to follow him. He uses his shield to push through the crowd, and I stay close behind him.

  We manage to get out into a clear spot on the street.

  I don’t see Max’s motorcycle anywhere.

  “Are you ok?” Devon pushes back his own mask.

  “I think so.” I’m breathing hard.

  The palms of my hands still feel hot—like they’re ready to explode, whether I want them to or not.

  Not now. Not now.

  “I didn’t think I’d see you involved in something like this,” he says.

  “We were riding by. I wanted to see if I could help stop it, I guess.” I can feel the adrenaline still surging through me. “I knew the guy who was leading it, from high school. Ozzie Franklin? He was always trouble. It was a pretty dumb idea.”

  He reaches out and touches the side of my face, and his glove comes away with a little red on it. “You’re bleeding a little,” he says. “Here.” He hands me a bandage from a pouch on his belt, with a sympathetic look.

  “Thanks,” I say. I put the bandage against my face and stand there awkwardly for a second. He does too, and for a minute, I wonder if he’s about to ask me out or something.