Bad Times in Dragon City (12 page)

Belle gaped at me as I shook the pain from the punch out of my hand. “It’s all right,” I said to her. “I can show myself out.” 

C
HAPTER
N
INETEEN

It was getting dark, but I just couldn’t stomach going back to Danto’s quite yet. I had Schaef drop me off at the Quill instead. I rationalized it by telling myself that I needed to grab some clothes and things — what little I’d picked up since my place had been destroyed — for my stay in the wizard’s tower.

But while I was there, I didn’t see the harm in grabbing a drink or three. 

The bar was packed when I got there, but Thumper had kept my table clear for me. In all the years I’d been coming to the Quill, I hadn’t ever had a single table I’d called my own, but now that I was living upstairs from it, I found that I’d gotten a bit more particular about where I sat. Maybe I was getting old, or maybe just paranoid, but I liked having my back to the wall and a clear view of the door. 

When I walked into the room, the roar of conversation and clinking glasses ground to a halt. In the silence, everyone turned to stare at me. The dragonet, who’d been dozing on my shoulders for the entire flight down from the Elven Reaches, picked up his head to look around at all the people goggling at him. 

“Hey!” Thumper, my favorite bartender in the world said as he waved me in. “It’s Max!” 

As if that answered every question everyone in the room might have, they turned back to whatever they’d been doing, and the dull roar in the room started up again, just a bit more muted this time. For the most part, the patrons there ignored me. A few gave me uneasy, sidelong glances, but if they had anything to say about me and the dragonet, they kept it to themselves. 

Wise folks. I wasn’t in the mood for that kind of trouble. More to the point, I was in the mood for a fight, and if anyone got in my face, I was likely to give it to them. 

By the time I reached the bar, Thumper had a beer waiting for me in a magically chilled mug. I tipped my hat at him in thanks, then made my way to my table, only to find Moira sitting there with Kells, Cindra, and Kai. 

“Oh, hey,” Kells said. He stood up to apologize. “We didn’t think you’d be in tonight, so Thumper gave us your table. If you want some privacy —“ 

“Then you’re out of luck,” his wife Cindra said. She stood up next to him and wrapped me in a heartfelt hug, taking care not to squeeze the dragonet in her embrace. 

I actually tensed up for an instant, unsure of how the dragonet would take someone being that familiar with me. He had good instincts about friends and foes, I had to admit, and they held true. Instead of bristling at Cindra’s approach, he brought back his head and licked her ear with his tongue instead. 

She pulled back with a giggle, a girlish sound I don’t know if I’d ever heard from her before. “That tickles.” She wiped her face clean, smiling, then reached up to pet the dragonet, who leaned into her touch and purred in appreciation. 

Kai stayed seated and snapped a salute at me, and Moira raised her glass toward me in her one good hand. “The way you took off during dinner, I figured you’d be out all night — or at least head straight back to Danto’s. You learn anything?” 

“A little,” I said. “Maybe. I found out that Belle’s parents are repulsive.” 

“I could have told you that,” Moira said. 

I sat down in an empty chair. “If you know everything about them, then, can you tell me what they did with Fiera’s body?” 

“You think they had something to do with it going missing?” Cindra said, concern marring her face. 

Kells shook his head. “That doesn’t seem likely. They’ll have to give one of themselves up to the morgue in her place then, won’t they? Makes for an odd motive.” 

“They’re odd people,” I said. “Even for elves.” 

“They got any enemies?” Kai said. “That’s where I’d start looking.” 

“Are we talking now?” I said. “Didn’t you try to sell me to a bunch of thugs working for the Ruler of the Dead.” 

He snorted. “All the other shit I’ve done in my life, and you’re going to hold that against me?” 

I couldn’t help but laugh at that. “They’re elves. Of course they have enemies. Probably other elves with obscenely long memories who have been hoping for a chance to take them down since before our grandparents were born. How am I supposed to untie that knot?” 

“You been paying attention to your backside while you been roaming around town?” Kai said. 

I squinted at him. “What are you talking about?” 

“He seems to think you’re being followed,” Kells said. “He won’t shut up about it.” 

“I don’t think it,” Kai said. “I’ve seen it. They were outside the place we were at last night, ready to seal the deal if the jokers inside blew it.” 

“Which they did,” said Cindra. “So why didn’t they attack Max then?” 

“We had a whole gang of guards around us,” Kai said. “And then we flew off in a Guard chariot. You figure it out.” 

“Who are we talking about here?” I said. Kai might not be the most trustworthy of my friends, but he knew the streets of Dragon City as well as anyone. If he said I was being followed, I believed him. 

He gave me a cold stare, daring me to disbelieve him. “Black Hand. Four of them.” 

Moira shuddered so hard at that name she almost dropped her glass. I took a long belt of my beer to help hide my own nerves. She and I had almost been killed defending ourselves from a single Black Hand assassin. The bastard had killed her boyfriend and taken her hand off at the wrist. I’d fed him to the zombies outside the Great Circle for his troubles. 

“You have to be kidding,” Kells said. “I thought there was only one.” 

Kai held up his own hand, his fingers spread wide. “It’s a hand,” he said. “There are five. Max killed one of them.” He folded in his thumb. “That leaves four.” 

“Four of the greatest assassins in the world, working together and pissed that you took out their thumb?” Cindra gave me a pitying shake of her head. “Speaking of people who know how to make enemies, you’re no slouch, Max.” 

“And you say they’re after me? Still?” 

Kai smirked. “You’re not dead yet, are you?” 

“We can’t just sit here and wait for them to attack,” Moira said, her head snapping back and forth as she tried to keep an eye on every window in the place. “We need to get Max out of here.” 

“Already on it,” Kai said. 

“You?” Moira gawked at him. “You’re just sitting there!” 

Kai nodded. “But Danto’s not. He’s in the stairs outside of Max’s room here, casting an illusion to keep the killers busy.” 

I put down my beer. “And you don’t think we should be doing something about that?” 

He waved off my concerns. “We’re safe for now. They think you’re upstairs, and even if they figure it out, you really think they’re going to come in here and take on a whole bar full of your friends?” 

Cindra grunted in agreement. “They might be good, but I’ll bet they got that way by picking their battles better than anyone else. It’s the key to winning any fight: set it up on your own terms, not those of your foe.” 

“But what happens when I want to leave?” I wanted to kick myself for not going straight to Danto’s instead of coming here first. 

Kai leaned over the table and lowered his voice. “We get you out of here through the secret tunnel behind the bar.” 

“If they’re that good,” I said, “what makes you think one of them’s not already in there?” 

As the words left my lips, I heard a crack of thunder in the upstairs part of the bar. I could smell the ozone in the air. 

The entire bar went silent again, but for the sound of scores of people reaching for their weapons. I put my gun in my right and my wand in my left. 

“I think they might be upstairs,” Kells said in a tone both sarcastic and scared. “But that’s just a guess.” 

C
HAPTER
T
WENTY

“Everyone stay where you are!” I said as I marched toward the stairs, my friends dogging my heels. “We’ll take care of this.” 

Cindra grabbed me by the shoulder as I got to the foot of the stairs and pushed me aside. “They’re expecting you,” she said. “I’ll go first.” 

I wanted to argue with her, to point out that she and Kells still had to get back to their kids tonight, but the sight of a pair of twinned revolvers in her fists — hand cannons, really — put an end to that urge. In the old days, Cindra had always been first into the fights, and for good reason. I’d never seen anyone as handy with a gun as her. 

Despite that, I wasn’t about to let her race up there on her own. As she moved past me, I took the opportunity to slough the dragonet off my shoulders and send him flapping toward Thumper, whom he knew as well as anyone, having spent the last week here. If these killers were after the dragonet, I wasn’t going to offer him up to them on a platter. 

I let Cindra get two steps ahead of me, and then I followed right behind her. Kai came up after me, and Kells brought up the rear. Moira had disappeared somewhere, but that was the way she’d always done things. She wasn’t much use in a toe-to-toe fight, but she was fantastic at slipping a knife between an unwary foe’s ribs. 

Cindra stepped over something at the top of the stairs, and I looked down to see Danto lying there on the floor. His robes had been scorched black, and what little hair he had left all stood on end. I knelt down to check if he was breathing and stared into his wide-open, unblinking eyes. He’d been stunned, but his chest was still moving. 

I heard a series of explosions from my room and leaped up to see Cindra standing in the doorway, letting loose with both of her guns as fast as she could. When the hammers of her twinned pistols fell on empty chambers, she tapped the barrels of the two guns together, then started firing again. 

Kai knelt next to her in the doorway, bringing his shotgun up low and scanning the inside of the room for any threats. He didn’t pull his trigger. 

“He going to make it?”

 I looked up to see Kells peering over my shoulder at Danto, and I moved out of his way. “Maybe.” 

Kells reached into the large shoulder bag he carried with him everywhere, and he fished out a glass vial filled with a thick, green gas. As Cindra and Kai moved into the room, Cindra still blasting away with her guns, Kells snapped the top of the vial off, and waved the gas under Danto’s nose. I stood up and took a step back. 

The wizard inhaled a large puff of the small green cloud that spilled out of the vial and collected on his neck and chest. He jerked as if someone had stabbed him in the back, then sat straight up and launched into a coughing fit. 

Kells grinned up at me. “He’s going to be fine.” 

“So you say!” Danto said as he fought for control over his lungs again. “That’s a horrible way to wake someone up.” 

“You want me to let you die next time?” Kells stood up and put out a hand to help Danto to his feet. 

The wizard took Kells up on his offer, still trying to hack out the last bits of the gas in his chest. “You might want to consider it,” Danto said. “Some things are worse than dying, you know.” 

“They got away,” Cindra said as she emerged from the room, the barrels of her guns smoking. 

I looked over her shoulder. “Where’s Kai?” 

“He went after them.” 

“Out through the window?” 

“Through the hole.” 

I didn’t want to ask “What hole?” but I had to know. I slipped past Cindra and into the room to examine the damage. 

The lightning bolt had blasted the shutters off my window and expanded the window itself by turning the edges of it to glowing-red charcoal. It had arced through the room and split there, it seemed, blasting apart just about everything in the place, from my bed down to the book I’d been reading the night before. That forking was probably what had saved Danto. If the full bolt had speared through him, he’d have been nothing but a charred skeleton rather than that coughing wreck in the hall. 

“Did you see any of them?” I called back to Cindra just as she slipped in behind me, her pistols still at the ready. 

She nodded. “Three or four shapes out there on the opposite rooftop. Couldn’t see much of them in the darkness.” 

“Did you get any of them?” 

She frowned and shook her head. “They were ready for someone to come back at them like that. They weren’t seriously trying to kill you. Not yet. They were just testing your defenses.” 

“They did a good job on Danto for not being serious.” I capped the only exposed glowglobe in the room, plunging the place into darkness. 

“He opened the shutters, I think, and turned on the lights. He might as well have put his head on a chopping block for them.” 

“Whose idea was it to send him up here to distract them again?” I moved back toward the window and peered out into the Dragon City night, my wand held out and ready before me. I could have brought out the shotgun, but it was made for close-in fighting, not blasting away across rooftops. 

“He volunteered.” 

I spotted someone appear silhouetted against the opposite rooftop, a darker shadow among shadows. Cindra came up to the window and leveled her pistols at the figure, but I blocked her with my arm. 

“It’s Kai,” I said. “Checking out where the killers were standing.” 

She lowered her barrels. I peered past him, keeping my wand at the ready, just in case one of them was lying in wait for one of us to wander over there looking for clues. “He find anything?” she said. 

I didn’t say a word. I just kept watching, straining my eyes for any kind of threat that might emerge from the darkness. I have to admit, I wasn’t looking at the sky. 

A beam of light shot down from high in the air and caught Kai in it like a frightened deer. He glared up at it and put his hands up to shade his eyes. 

“This is the Imperial Dragon’s Guard!” someone behind the light shouted. “Drop your weapon!” 

The Quill had patrons from all over the city, but it was an odd bar in that regard. Most of the time, people stayed in their own parts of town, and when they wandered out, they didn’t do it by way of the rooftops — not unless they had larcenous intentions or worse.