Old Dark (The Last Dragon Lord Book 1) (10 page)

Miri aimed the can of pepper spray at the car.

“Stop!” she cried.
 

The car screeched to a stop and the driver rolled down his window, aiming a gun at her.

“Drop your weapon,” the man said.
 

“Drop
your
weapon!” Miri said. “You don’t think I saw you following me for the last few blocks? I’ll scream and I won’t go lightly.”

“You’re not in any danger, Miss,” the driver said. He stepped out of the car and tucked the gun into his holster.
 

A voice from the shadows of the car spoke. “No, you’re not.”

Lucan Grimoire leaned out the window. “You’re not in any danger at all.”

XII

Miri kept the can of pepper spray pointed at Lucan.
 

“Put that thing away before you actually use it,” Lucan said. “That’s one of my products, by the way.”
 

He smelled like he had just gotten out of the shower, a eucalyptus and lavender kind of smell that she recognized from the soap section at Gavlin’s. His black hair looked slightly wet, and she couldn’t tell if it was from the shower or hair gel. His green eyes shone from behind his sunglasses, and his navy blue suit was slim-fitted, but his shirt was buttoned wrong, making his upper torso look like a skewed painting.

All that money and you can’t button your shirt.

“What do you want?” Miri asked.
 

Lucan unwrapped a piece of hard candy and tossed it in his mouth. “I should introduce myself—”

“I know who you are.”

She had met him three times, all at university dinners. He had supported the University General Fund, and The Grimoire Company often hired graduates from Magic Hope University.

Every time they met, Lucan never got her name right and he talked to her in his usual schmoozy voice that pretended she was important.

“Well, good then,” Lucan said. “Hey, listen, I need to talk to you.”

“I’m busy.”

“Aren’t we all. You gave the governor some real shit back there. It’s all over the radio.”

“I’m not getting involved in your campaign.”

“I was just complimenting you,” he said, opening the door. “We need to talk in private.”

Miri’s feet felt like they were mounted to the concrete. She was starting to sweat under her coat. She didn’t know what he wanted, but she wasn’t going anywhere.
 

Lucan, visibly annoyed at her lack of compliance, got out of the car. Miri backed away, but he came toward her slowly with his hands casually in his trouser pockets. He pulled the pockets out to show her he was unarmed. Then he dug them back in and walked toward her in what looked like a mix between a stagger and a strut.
 

“Listen, Mary—”

“It’s Miri.”

Lucan’s eyes widened in embarrassment. “Oops … Miri. Doctor—”

“Professor.”

“Sorry for the promotion. But word on the street is that you
were
a doctor, am I right?” He sucked on the hard candy and rolled it from cheek to cheek. “If so, that’s the bullshit of the century.”

“You have a filthy mouth for an elven man.”

“I’m a billionaire. I can say whatever the hell I want.”

“That doesn’t change your image.”

Lucan shrugged. “Let’s face it, Miriam—”

“Miri!”

“Yeah, okay. I
am
running a shit show of a campaign, but I’m not here about that. Not actually. Kind of. But not really.” He crossed his fingers.
 

“Then why are you here?”

“Because you’ve lived for this opportunity.”

“What opportunity?”

“I’ll tell you when you get in the car.”

The driver cleared his throat. “You’re in good hands, Miss. Pardon his manners.”

The man had soft eyes and appeared sensible despite his big frame.
 

So this was a consulting offer. She definitely needed the money.
 

“It’s not that,” Miri said. “I’ve been pitched a lot of offers and I want to make sure I’m not wasting my time.”

Lucan returned to the car. He opened the car door and leaned on it, tilting his head at her. “Mi-ri. I just dropped my daughter off at her mother’s and got chewed out for keeping her past my custody time. I’ve got a campaign-manager-turned-girlfriend who’s probably going to withhold sex from me for making her stand watch in a bog, and a college kid waiting with her who I swear is going to crawl into his mother’s womb at the first sight of danger. I’ve got a campaign staff who’s wondering where I am, and journalists who are going to start sniffing around if I miss another event. I’ve got a gentleman driver here who wants to see his kids before the end of the night, and two thousand more employees who make more in a month than you’ve made in your entire life. I’m rich, you’ve seen me on TV, you know who I am. Every dragon expert in the world would die to work with me, and lucky for you, you’re the first one I picked,
Doctor
. So get in the car
,
or you’re wasting
my
time.”

Miri processed his words. “This is about dragons?”

Lucan gestured to the car.
 

Whatever he meant, he must have been serious. Miri thought about what she had planned to do tonight: nothing. She would’ve spent the night with a glass of wine, watching the governor’s speech, probably yelling at the television the whole time. She hadn’t expected a consulting offer.
 

She tucked her pepper spray into her purse and got into the car. Lucan helped her in.

The interior smelled of fresh leather and the seats faced each other. Her seat creaked as she sat down. She glanced around for danger signs but found nothing out of the ordinary.
 

Lucan eased into his seat, shut the door and rolled up the windows, making it darker in the car than it was outside.
 

“Make a few laps around the block,” Lucan said.
 

Earl tipped his cap and began to drive.
 

Miri crossed her arms. “So, what did you want to talk to me about?”

“What do you know about dragons?”

“I could talk all night about them.”

“What do you know about the traditional ones? And I’m not talking about the ones in Abstraction.”

“So you want to go further back.”

“Oh yeah, way back. Like Fenroot.”

“Before or after?”

“Before.”

“How much before?”

Lucan shifted. He cracked the hard candy in his mouth and swallowed. Miri was amazed he didn’t break a tooth.
 

“I know you’d probably like the short version of this story, but it ain’t happenin’, sister.” He leaned forward, clasping his hands together, and winked at her over the top of his sunglasses. “This morning I had just finished a stump speech when a kid maneuvered his way past security, begging to speak with me. Happens all the time, you understand.”

He was right. In the media, Lucan was being billed as a poster child of the younger generation, a man with an environmental message that resonated with the city’s youth. Still, it made Miri shudder to listen to him talk about himself.
 

“Normally, I keep a few free grimoires in my pocket, and I always take photos with the fans. This kid didn’t want any of that. He said he had something to show me and that I was the only one he could trust. I said, ‘Kid, if I’m the only one you can trust, then you need therapy.’ But he was a bog kid. You know bog people, don’t you? You could tell them the funniest joke in the world and they’d just stare at you. The heavens blessed them with extra tight sphincters, if you know what I mean.”

“I don’t understand what this has to do with anything, Mr. Grimoire.”

“Anyway, Miri, so I told the kid I was too busy and that I couldn’t just quit campaigning to go play with him. And that’s when he whispered in my ear that he’d found a dragon tomb. I said, ‘Kid, people find dragon tombs all the time. What do I care?’ And he said, ‘This isn’t a regular tomb.’ And I said, ‘Oh, so it’s blinged out, eh?’ And that’s when he told me he thought it belonged to Old Dark.”

“Wait,
what
?”

“I know, I know,” Lucan said. “That’s a sore spot for you. You did your doctoral dissertation on Old Dark, didn’t you? The university and the government didn’t like it much, if I remember correctly.”

Miri didn’t want to think about it. She was more familiar with the old dragon lord than anyone of her generation. His policies. His legacy.
 

The government didn’t appreciate her scholarship, nor did the university. It made many of the older dragons uncomfortable, for they had lived during the reign and contributed to much of the savagery. And that was a very difficult position for the now-benevolent contributors to society to explain.
 

The media launched a smear campaign against her research. She came home many a night to find her apartment ransacked, her mail opened. Dean Rosehill stood up for her, but the university took back her doctorate even though she’d earned it. They would have fired her if she weren’t tenured.
 

But that was in the past.

“You must be mistaken, Mr. Grimoire. There’s no proof that Old Dark was ever buried.”

“That’s what I said. I’ve watched the history shows and what little they say about him. Throughout the years, dozens of con artists have claimed they found his grave, and the gravesites always ended up being false.”

“There have been over a hundred alleged spottings,” Miri said. “And there have been stories from time to time throughout history of individuals claiming to possess some of the old dragon’s body parts. But it’s unlikely. He was hit with a curse, probably similar to the one that affected his parents. His body would have withered away. After a few decades there would have been nothing left.”

“Right. That’s what they say.” Lucan paused and then grinned. “Long story kind of short, this kid convinced me to cancel my afternoon appointments and trek over to the Ancestral Bogs. You ever been there?”

“A few times, while I was researching.”

“Real bitch of a place. Hot. Insects that want to eat your skin off. And that water’s got to be diseased. Makes sense that it was the Dark family’s birthplace.”

The bogs
were
unbearable. They were protected under the Magical Lands Act, revered for their inherent magical properties. Only a few people, mostly of elven descent, lived there. The dragons had left hundreds of years ago. It was the kind of locale you read about in books, but not one you’d vacation in. Miri had visited them to learn more about the Dark family, but even she couldn’t tolerate the atmosphere for more than a few hours.

“The kid dragged me through the bog. We found this.”

Lucan shoved his phone into her hands.
 

On the screen was a blurry picture taken from the bog; the white claw lay submerged in the thicket, its marbled texture grainy in the photo.
 

“I’ve seen this before,” Miri said, frowning. “There was a similar one discovered about twenty years ago. It was an empty tomb not intended for a body.”

“Why was that?”

“If there’s one thing you need to learn about dragons, Mr. Grimoire, it’s that they’re purposefully enigmatic. When a dragon dies, its body swells with magic until it decomposes and the magic seeps back into the aquifer. However, the process takes decades, so dragons used to erect false tombs with curses inside to deter grave robbers.”

“Keep swiping.”

Miri swiped through the photos, all taken of the claw at different angles. She stopped at one. It looked like a pink photo filter had been laid over it.
 

Magic. Not unusual, especially for a dragon’s resting place.
 

“It kept disappearing on me,” Lucan said. “I had to find it three different times before I could get these photos.”

Miri held the phone up to her face and scrutinized it. “It still doesn’t explain anything. And there’s no connection with Old Dark.”

Lucan sat next to her and zoomed in on the claw. On the side of the temple was an emblem embedded into the marble—a dragon’s head that looked suspiciously like the old paintings of Old Dark. No one knew exactly what he looked like, only that he was an enormous black dragon, and like his father and mother before him, one of the few to ever exist. The dragon on the emblem was unmistakably black as night.

“Correct me if I’m wrong,” Lucan said, “but I had my assistant research every instance of a tomb discovery. None of them had anything like this.”

“It still proves nothing.”

“Will you come and check it out? That’s all I’m asking at this point. If it’s nothing, I’ll pay you for your time and we can forget this ever happened.”

Miri swiped through the photos again. Her mind reeled as she thought about the consequences.
 

There was no telling what the university would do if she started talking about this topic again. And the media—they’d come after her harder than before. She might have to resign.
 

“Why are you so interested in Old Dark all of a sudden, Mr. Grimoire?”

Lucan leaned back. “Old Dark sat on the biggest magical aquifer reserve in history. If I can find some of it, I can help with the magic shortage. A discovery this big might even solve it. And I’ll win with voters when I unveil it, and the governor will have no choice but to play along.”

“You can’t draw magic from the land. The bog is protected by law.”

“Not if it’s for the good of society. Section seven of the Magical Lands Act grants temporary care, custody and control of a newly discovered historical land to—”

“…an accredited university for the purposes of research,” Miri finished.
 

“Until the school can determine whether such land would be valuable for the private sector to establish environmentally-sustaining operations,” Lucan said, reciting the law from memory.
 

Miri gasped at the revelation.
 

“Now we’re speaking the same language,” Lucan said. “There’s going to be fallout, but fortunately I have a whole fleet of attorneys who’ve advised me, and I’m thinking several steps ahead. Stick with me, Miri, and you just might get the reputation you actually deserve. So what do you say?”