He wasn’t about to invite her into his Escort, but he did pick up her reptilian hand. It fit nicely in his own. “Thank you, Uchiko. I’m sorry for what we had to do to your friends. It seems to me they died honorably. And when you called off the other warriors, they had honor as well because they followed your orders. If I’ve learned anything, it’s that some rules are made to be broken. Especially when you’re in a fucked-up place like this.” He let go of her hand.

  She gave him a nod. Then, quick as a wink, she disappeared into the darkness of the jungle.

  Tessa sighed. “If we can, we’ll have to come back and help them. She could’ve sent every single ninja after us, and we’d have burned through Animus protecting ourselves. She gave us a gift even though it hurt her so much.”

  “Cry me a fucking river,” Mouse spat. She inhaled deeply. “Sorry, sorry, sorry. I’ll try to be nicer. But come on. We didn’t kill her, which turned out to be a really good decision. Tessa was right. Fighting through hordes of ninjas would’ve sucked hard.”

  “Like in gaming,” Tessa said. “Sometimes it’s fun to be a murder-hobo and murder your way through levels, but sometimes, especially if your ammo is low, it’s best to use your brains and not your bullets. And you get to make friends that way, and those friends can help you later.”

  “Ugh, video games.” Mouse rolled her eyes. “Anyway, Uchiko is alive. Yeah, her life probably just got harder, but oh well. Anything that has to do with Dragonsouls means bloodshed and bummer times. Whatever. We have less than ninety minutes to chat with something that has freaked the shit out of everyone and everything on the planet. How about we get on with it?”

  “Weren’t you going to be nicer?” Steven asked.

  “I wasn’t being nice?” A surprised lilt filled Mouse’s question.

  Tessa shook her head. “Not really. There was that whole ‘ugh,’ eye-roll thing. Not nice.”

  A wince from the blonde. “Sorry. I’ll try harder.”

  “I agree with Mouse. But I will agree without having to curse or use sarcasm,” Aria joked.

  Tessa unloaded her guns, taking out the normal bullets and sliding in the new ones. The moon had come out, and since the Onari Guard had stepped aside, the way was clear. They walked across stones, now silvered with moonlight, until they reached a clearing.

  In front of them was a pit at least five hundred feet in diameter. It went straight down. The stone path became a circular staircase hugging the rock edges. Water dripped from the jungle to fall in little waterfalls down into the depths. A terrible stink wafted up from the edge of the hellish hole gouged into the crust of the Earth. Steven had never seen such a thing … had never smelled such death and decay.

  “So, that’s where Old Matchstick lives,” Tessa whispered. “He might be, uh, big. Do Dragonsouls get bigger as they age?”

  Aria was breathing harder. The fear was catching up with her as well. “Who knows what powers this ancient being has. We usually don’t live long enough to grow more than our adult size. Then the stories turn into myth and then into legend. I will say this.” She paused. “I believe it is in our best interest to refer to him as Mathaal. I do not want to die just because of a rather insipid on-the-nose nickname.”

  Mouse bent over laughing at that one. Steven knew it was to cover up her own nervous terror.

  He couldn’t imagine what they would find at the bottom of that dismal, awful abyss.

  TWENTY-THREE

  Steven didn’t want to use magic to get to the bottom of Mathaal’s lair. They had plenty of Animus, even after their encounter with the Onari Guard, but he didn’t want to waste any more. He also wasn’t confident in his ability to fly down. Aria and Mouse would be fine, but he didn’t want them out of his sight.

  So instead, as Homo Draconi, he, Aria, and Mouse crept down the slippery stone steps followed by Tessa. Someone … or something … had carved the circling staircase into the igneous rock of the island. The walls were porous, black, and filled with life. Spiders of every size scurried underneath the leaves of vines and other growth. Mossy patches of green splotched the stone here and there. Everything was wet from the rains and humidity. The deeper they went, the heavier the air grew, and the stench worsened.

  It was the smell of the Denver sewer on a hot day. It was lawn clippings left out in the rain and baked to purification by a merciless sun.

  Steven sucked in the hot air. He had scales, so he wasn’t exactly sweating, but he was hot and uncomfortable.

  Tessa’s pink shield gave them light, though she’d changed the size so it was only about a foot long and a foot wide. Her face glowed with perspiration in the weak light. She kept her voice down to complain. “It’s like walking on the sun in the rain. Only, the sun is made out of a garbage dump where giants have pooped after too much Mexican food. This is wicked gross. And Uchiko wanted us to stay away? Damn, she should’ve just let us smell the place. Anyone with any sense would’ve skedaddled.”

  Aria turned. She held a talon to her lips. “Shhh, my love. We don’t want to wake the beast if we don’t have to.”

  Tessa nodded. Some small part of Steven, however, knew they couldn’t walk out of the pit without first interrogating the ancient dragon. What secrets might he have?

  Three hundred feet down, they came to strange set of copper awnings that jutted from the walls, encircling the edge of the pit. Five-foot long eaves, greening from oxidation, created an overhang, protecting the walls below. At first, Steven couldn’t see what the awning was protecting, but when they opened a metal hatch leading down, he saw that the steps had become wooden.

  And the eaves? They were protecting books. Though not very well.

  Bookshelves lined the wall, and crammed into them was every kind of book in every kind of language. A good number of them had swelled to three times their size. Some had broken out of their spine or their covers had long since rotted away.

  Steven recognized a few different languages: Japanese kanji, Chinese hanzi, Korean swoops, Thai scrawl, the loops of Arabic—even the Cyrillic alphabet of Russia and Greece.

  The bookcases had been built to accommodate the stairs, so they continued their descent. Steven caught some titles that were in English: Moby Dick, On the Origin of Species, T.S. Eliot’s The Wasteland, Finnegan’s Wake, a whole series of law books, and on it went on every subject. The moss, vines, and spiders were still present, but now the spiders had homes in the pages, as did worms and any number of moths. A bat rushed out of a little nook he’d made in a copy of The Brothers Karamazov. He squeaked and wheeled away.

  “Amazon ain’t got nothin’ on this place,” Tessa whispered, eyes wide. “Looks like our boy Mathaal is quite the reader.”

  As they descended, the air grew drier. They came to another copper roof overhanging the next section of books. These tomes, farther down and protected, were in better condition. Also, they took a definite turn into the occult. Steven recognized books that were referenced in the Drokharis Grimoire like The Picatriz and the Liber Juatus.

  But he also saw titles about American and European folk magic: The Cunning Man’s Handbook, The Long-Lost Friend, Discoverie of Witchcraft, Deum’s Herbal Manual, The Black Pullet, and a nine-volume set of Key of Solomon.

  Oddly enough, mass market paperbacks filled in the spaces between the magic books, everything from Stephen King to Sherrilyn Kenyon to Louis L’Amour. There was even a complete set of the Travis McGee novels by John D. McDonald.

  Tessa’s pink light could only reach so far, but straining his eyes, he saw that the bottom of the hole was rapidly approaching. Around and around they went under the bookcases until Steven stopped, not wanting to get too close to their quarry. His Escort stopped with him.

  The stink was better for a minute, but then something big, something with massive lungs, exhaled. And that smell swept up to them. An inhale, long and slow and deep, then an exhale. Mathaal indeed seemed to be sleeping. That breathing was rhythmic, in and out, like an ocean tide of stank breath.

  “Tessa, lower your light down,” Steven said in a hushed voice.

  She swept her pink square down until it hovered over the room below, about twenty feet down, at the end of the sloping steps they stood on.

  This was the bottom of the hole and the lair of Mathaal. It was just a giant single room, the floor made from smooth stone, worn down from age and use. There was furniture ringing the walls—more bookcases, sofas, chairs, end tables, chests, dozens of beds—but all were worn and rotten. The Dragonsoul himself was resting in the middle of the room on a sea of mattresses, blankets, bedspreads, and pillows, which would’ve cost a fortune. It was one giant, filthy crash pad.

  Mathaal was in his True Form and one hell of a sight to behold. He was a monstrous bone-white beast, and his long beard rested in a forest of matted pearly whiskers under his chin. He was fifty feet long if he was an inch, about twenty feet longer than Steven when he was in his True Form. Old Matchstick would dwarf Aria and Mouse. The talons on his hands and feet were a sickly yellow color, like the teeth of a three-packs-a-day smoker with lung cancer. Ivory barbs covered his tail.

  Teetering precariously around him on his odd “bed” were stacks of books … quite the To-Be-Read pile. Steven squinted, studying one particular section of wall that seemed different … off. Between several bookcases were splotches of igneous rock. Nothing odd about that, exactly. But the igneous rock was pockmarked with odd black spaces. They looked almost like holes, but holes into nothing. And those odd holes were damn near everywhere. He craned his neck forward. Seriously. What in the hell were those? Steven just couldn’t tell.

  “Tessa, hand me the topaz pen.” He reached out for it.

  The barista put the magical pen into his hand. He lifted it up to see if he could find his father’s second spell book. It glowed a rainbow color, and he searched the walls, but there was no corresponding light. He had no choice but to go down and face the beast.

  “Stay up here,” he told his Escort. “There’s no way we can find the second volume in all these books. I’m going to have to wake Mathaal and talk to him.”

  Tessa took the pen back and nodded. “Yep, stay up here. I hear ya. Great. I’ll just grab something to read.” She stood next to a section of the bookcase that held mostly scrolls curled up into tubes. She pulled one out, but a spider the size of her fist hissed at her from the hole. She slid the scroll tube back into place. “Probably wouldn’t believe me, but it turns out I already read that scroll. It was too scroll-y. Besides, the main character was too much of a punk. I like to read about real men.”

  “Steven, you can’t go alone,” Aria said.

  Mouse intervened. “I think I know what he’s planning. We’ll stay.”

  Steven nodded. “Yeah, you stay here. If I can talk to Mathaal, we won’t have to fight. If we do have to fight, you three can jump out and surprise him. Tessa, Mouse, you attack from the rear. Aria, I want you to distract him. Get in his face. But all of you, don’t die.”

  “We can die if we want to, but you can’t,” Aria said. “You are our Prime.”

  “Not yet I’m not,” Steven replied. “But I’m working on it. When I get to the bottom, douse the lights, Tessa.”

  She blew him a kiss. Her face was pallid, and she swallowed hard. They were all giving him a brave face, but he knew the truth. Every one of them, including himself, was close to panicking. This was Bilbo and Smaug shit.

  He padded down the rest of the way. Once he hit the bottom of the steps, he changed into his human form.

  Tessa’s pink light winked off.

  A strange light drifted out from the walls, moving, shifting, warbling. Then he saw what those strange black spaces were. A multitude of tiny windows had been crafted into the rock, showing the water deep under the Indian Ocean. Lights flickered on the outside—magic lights it seemed—giving the place a ghostly glow. When schools of fish swam past, they threw shadows, as did the waving fronds of plant life at the bottom of the ocean. It was like being in an aquarium at night.

  The Dragonsoul Conclave had fashioned a prison for Mathaal, but they had tried to make it comfortable and interesting.

  Steven walked across the smooth stone floor until he came to the odd mega-bed. It squished under Steven’s feet. Something shuffled over his bare foot, something big, hairy, and with lots and lots of legs. Yeah, this place was awful no matter however interesting.

  The shifting light reflected off the ancient Dragonsoul’s scales, but he was so old, there were patches of his body that were bare. Under them was pale flesh, vulnerable. That might come in handy if they had to fight. Too bad they hadn’t brought Bard’s black arrow from Laketown.

  Steven moved closer to the ancient dragon and took up a position by Mathaal’s head. “Mathaal,” he said in a booming voice. “Wake up.”

  Old Matchstick’s eyes fluttered open. They were white, covered in thick cataracts. “Who’s there?” the dragon asked in a weak voice. “Who has come? Uchiko?”

  “No. I’m Steven Drokharis, the last of the Drokharis line. I’ve come for my father’s spell book. And I need help, Mathaal, and I think you might be able to give it to me.” Steven, as a human, and a naked human at that, felt like an insect compared to the might and power of the thing in front of him. However, he kept his voice strong.

  “Stefan Drokharis? Is that you?” the ancient dragon asked in a creaking voice. “Come for one of my portal scrolls? You always did like my writing.”

  “He’s dead, Mathaal. My father is dead. I’ve only come to collect what I think he might’ve given you. And to ask you a few questions.”

  “Death. Dreams of death. The dead dream of kindness denied them in life.” Old Matchstick tried to say something else, but his voice failed him. Then he gasped. “I long for release, and yet I’m afraid. For if I fall into a nightmare when I am dead, there will be no waking. Rahaab knew. Rahaab? Is that you?”

  “No, not Rahaab and not Stefan. I’m Steven. I’m a new Dragonsoul.”

  Mathaal sniffed. “Young. You have the stink of youth on you. And there’s a human about. I can smell those stinking apes. Came down from the trees to take over the world? Ha. In our infancy, we traveled between stars. Until the Outsiders. The Beyonders. The demons of which I will not speak. We found it, the three of us, a blue-and-green gem pressed into the velvet darkness. A yellow sun gleaming. Sunrises and sunsets. Can you feel the spin of the world, boy? Can you feel the spin of the galaxy? I can. I can.”

  Steven sighed. This was going to be harder than he thought. It was going to be a chore to steer the conversation away from the past to the present. But Mathaal’s words were interesting. He took a chance and walked out in front of the dragon’s eyes. He didn’t want the old guy to turn to sniff for Tessa, because that was who he was smelling, obviously.

  Steven waved his arms to get Mathaal’s attention. “I was human up until a few weeks ago, hidden from the eyes of my enemies. My father hid me before he was murdered.”

  “Murder. We killed Icharaam. I remember his cries for mercy. He wanted to fight. But there was no fighting, only dying. Stefan, it’s you. I know you. But you are young. Am I young? Can I be young again?” The old dragon’s voice broke. Tears leaked down his face to splash onto the already soaked bedspread, wretched from rot.

  “I’m sorry, Mathaal. I’m not Stefan. I’m his son. Did Stefan give you a book?”

  Mathaal sat up, back onto his legs, raising his gargantuan body up. Buried in his chest were more books, pushed into his flesh where his scales had sloughed off. If he turned around, he would see Steven’s Escort hiding against the wall on the steps.

  Steven had to keep the ancient dragon’s attention. “Mathaal, here I am. In my human form. But my True Form is that of a Dragonsoul.” Steven triggered his ability and grew into a thirty-foot-long obsidian dragon with only the scruff of a beard.

  That was something the old dragon saw right away. “Ah, you are but a pup. A child of a dragon. You haven’t even a proper beard. What are you doing in my hole? Why are you here, pup?”

  “Did you cast any magic to keep the murderers of Stefan Drokharis hidden?” Steven asked.

  “Stefan has been murdered?” Mathaal croaked. He was missing teeth. Some had been rubbed to their nubs. “Stefan was my friend. But he was like Icharaam. He was like my brother, but this time, I wasn’t going to let my fear get to me. Still. Stefan was murdered? By whom?”

  “Rhaegen Mulk.”

  Mathaal threw his head back and sent an ocean of black fire skyward. The walls were far enough away that the books weren’t destroyed. That Exhalant, that was ShadowFlame, and the heat was incredible. “Mulk. The secret Conclave. They put me here! Gave me my library, as if that would placate me. They murdered Stefan Drokharis, and they put me here! The vote. The vote. The vote. Three times for three pieces of treachery. The Onari Guard. Stefan Drokharis. And me. All those Primes, comfortable in their power, and yes, I ripped out Icharaam’s throat and drank in his Animus, but it was a mistake. We are stellar creatures of the heavens. We were not meant to cower among the apes.”

  The information blasted through Steven’s brain, and he felt the world reel beneath him.

  What? If what this creature said was true, then it wasn’t just Mulk who was responsible for his family’s death … there were a whole slew of Primes who would need to pay. It was crushing news. But it was clear that the ancient dragon hiding the true nature of the Drokharis clan’s slaughter wasn’t Old Matchstick.

  Mathaal whirled on Steven. Before he knew it, the dragon had his talons around Steven’s throat. “Why are you here, pup?”

  Steven was too close to an answer to ruin it by fighting. “I’m here for a missing part of my father’s grimoire. Did Stefan Drokharis give you a spell book before he was murdered?”