Old Dark (The Last Dragon Lord Book 1) (14 page)

And then a strange sensation from his left eye. It pulsed like the beating heart of a small animal in flight. He tried to narrow it again, but the eyelid wouldn’t move.
 

Strange.
 

He brought a claw up to his eye, then recoiled as he felt both dried and liquid blood all over his scales. The blood blotted the floor in a sweeping arc. Some of it was fresh. He couldn’t tell how long it had been there.
 

He tried to blink the eye. It didn’t respond.
 

He felt his eyelid again. It was soft and indented. He felt his other eye—full, round, how an eye should have felt.
 

He patted his left eyelid, pushed on it and grimaced as raw pain took hold of him.
 

The eye was gone.

He breathed in and out quickly, trying to calm himself down.
 

Memories of the night before rushed back all at once.
 

How could he have forgotten?
 

Fenroot. Moss. The villagers singing out of tune. The uprising on the beach. The betrayal. Norwyn. The sleeping sensation that had overcome him and rendered him useless in the battle.
 

Fenroot’s evil grin flashed across his vision. The image laughed as Dark replayed his words.
 

This has been in the making for a hundred years.

Dark swelled with anger at the memory.
 

“Fenroot!” he screamed. His voice echoed. “Where are you?”

He stumbled and crashed into a wall, shaking the room.
 

“Fenroot!”

He gripped his bleeding eye socket and roared. “Come out, you coward!”

He slashed the wall, putting claw marks through the painting of himself. Now that he was close, he could make out the details. His name was printed under the painting: Alsatius II.
 

He stepped back, studying the rest of the wall.
 

It was full of painted dragons.
 

He knew the wall from his earliest memories, from when he had buried his grandfather and grandmother and sent them to the great beyond. He and his father had overseen the human painter who painted their picture on the stone. His father had barked orders the entire time about the man’s brush strokes not being accurate.
 

Many hundreds of years later, Dark had prepared this wall for his parents…

His parents. Where were they?

Why was he in the mausoleum?

Why was his image painted on the wall? That was only reserved for the departed.
 

He touched himself all over. He was alive. Alive!

He had to find Fenroot. He was going to eviscerate him and Moss for what they’d done.
 

“I am the Dragon Lord!” he yelled.
 

Something fell out of his mouth and bounced across the floor.
 

A tooth. Yellow and decayed.

“No,” Dark said, sweeping the inside of his mouth with his claw. He felt gums. More than normal. He couldn’t see himself, but half his teeth must have been missing. The others, loose and rotting. “No, no, no!” His voice came out weaker and reedier than normal.
 

He noted the only path out of the room, a mouth of gaping darkness. Remembering the floor plan of the mausoleum as best as he could, he lumbered toward the exit. In a thousand steps he would be out. He would be free.
 

“I am the Dragon Lord!” he screamed, stomping toward the darkness.
 

He stepped on something slimy, and a pool of sticky liquid erupted under his feet. It smelled rotten, like decomposing bodies in wet soil.
 

He lifted his foot and noticed the shards of a sharp shell under it. The shards had pierced his foot and it was bleeding.
 

What in the world was this?

Then he saw dozens of eyes like black nebulas scattered across the room. He turned his head several times so that he could see them with his one eye.
 

There was no mistaking the smell.
 

Magic Eaters.
 

He had dealt with them before, but not for at least a hundred years. He couldn’t recall the spell to vanquish them, and he didn’t even know if he had the strength to cast any spells.
 

The Magic Eaters slithered toward him, sucking their teeth loudly.
 

What were they doing in his family resting place, and why had they been allowed to enter it?
 

“You dare defile the tomb of the Darks?” he roared.

His body shook with rage. He slashed at the Magic Eaters with his claws, knocked them away with his tail. He splattered the walls with them, stomped on them, crushed them with his gums. But they kept coming.
 

“I’ll not stop until I destroy every last one of you!” he cried.

He weathered the onslaught, killing all the dumb creatures until the tomb grew silent.
 

Growling, he made his way to the exit, when another unfamiliar scent stopped him.

He sniffed. Through the fetid smell of the dead Magic Eaters, he smelled something else.

Something fresher.

Something alive.

Something he couldn’t quite place.
 

Sweat.
 

Perfume. Two kinds. One, a sweet, heady scent that reminded him of hibiscus, the other, a spicy fragrance that he’d never smelled before...

Was there cloth? Yes, a lot of it, different kinds of textiles. And strips of metal, jewelry perhaps?
 

He sniffed again.
 

He heard a small whimper, then a whisper.
 

It came from behind a pillar next to the entrance.

He slashed the pillar in half, and as it crumbled to the ground, a woman screamed.
 

He sniffed again and discerned, through the dust, the intermingled scent of human and elf.
 

Three people emerged from hiding with their hands up.
 

They said something that he couldn’t understand.
 

“You are behind the Magic Eaters,” Dark said.
 

One of them stepped forward. It was a male. He looked elven, but not quite.
 

He said something else, but Dark could not understand him. He spoke quickly and did not make any sense.

“No one will stand in my way!” Dark screamed as he swiped at them.

XX

Lucan cursed and jumped out of the way of Old Dark’s claws.
 

“Hey, stop!” he cried. “We’re the ones that saved your ass!”

But the dragon growled and swiped at him again.
 

Lucan’s senses heightened as he rolled out of the way. Time seemed to slow down as the dragon charged at him.
 

He didn’t know what he had expected, but certainly not this.
 

Old Dark was ... well, old. In this guy’s heyday, they would have been roasting on a spit by now. Good thing he hadn’t breathed fire yet.
 

Lucan had watched him tear through two hundred Magic Eaters like they were nothing, even in his debilitated state. He didn’t want to take any chances.
 

What spell is going to stop him? C’mon, Lucan, you only get one shot.

Dark ran at Lucan, separating him from Miri and Celesse, who ran to the back of the room.
 

There’s nowhere for them to go.

Lucan stood with his back to the door. Old Dark stalked toward the women, smoke flowing from his nostrils.
 

You’re not touching them. Only one that touches the redhead is me, buddy.
 

The dragon said something, but Lucan could only pick up every other word.
 

“In ... name ... you pray?”

“We aren’t your enemies,” Miri said. She was resolute, staring the old dragon in the eye.
 

“In ... name ... PRAY?”

Lucan readied his grimoire.
He’s going to slice them into ribbons.

Miri reached into her pocket and pulled out her grimoire. A pink wheel flashed over her head and she navigated through her runes just as Dark leapt into the air.
 

Lucan scrambled as he tried to find a spell that could stop the dragon.
 

But he was too late.
 

A brilliant light ripped across the room and Lucan shielded his face, hoping the two women weren’t flattened.
 

A wall of light surrounded Miri, and Dark was perched on top of it. The professor held her hands out with her eyes closed. Dark’s teeth were inches away from Miri’s hands, and only the wall separated them.
 

Dark’s eyes widened.
 

“We won’t pray in your name,” Miri said.
 

The wall flared away, flinging Dark across the room.
 

Toward Lucan.
 

Lucan ducked as the dragon flew over him, barely missing impact.
 

BOOM!

Dark slammed into the wall and rolled across the ground, dazed.
 

“I’m impressed, Professor,” he said.
 

Miri was lying on the ground. Celesse took her in her arms and screamed for Lucan.
 

But Dark pulled himself to his feet. He looked more surprised than angry. Then the old dragon’s face hardened and he held up a claw that began to glow with pink energy.
 

He aimed it at Lucan.
 

“Oh, no you don’t,” Lucan said. He reactivated his grimoire on a blast rune—he was prepared to blow Old Dark out of this place, even if it meant dealing a serious injury to himself.
 

He wasn’t taking any chances.
 

Dark roared as more energy gathered into his claw.
 

“I dare you,” Lucan said. “I
dare
you, you stupid reptile.”

An orb formed around Dark’s claw and he attempted to fire it.
 

Instead, the orb exploded, engulfing his claw in a blast. Dark howled and shook the magic out of his claws.
 

Lucan sighed with relief.
 

“You ... tarnish ... The ... of ... ancestors ... curse!”

“Yeah, well, whatever the hell you said, stick it up your ass!” Lucan yelled.
 

The dragon’s face flushed with fear, and he limped into the darkness.
 

Lucan dashed down the steps and slid to Miri and Celesse. Miri panted heavily. Celesse tried to hold her up, but even Miri’s small frame was too much for her.
 

Miri licked her lips. Her arms and legs had turned to stone.
 

Lucan clicked his tongue. It was the worst kind of reaction.
 

“The spell protected her, alright,” Celesse said. “How are we going to get her out of here?”

“I’ll be fine,” Miri said. “We have to go after him.”

“So he can cut us to pieces?” Lucan asked.
 

He scanned the room, spotting a wooden cart loaded with gold and jewels. He threw them off and rushed the cart over to Miri. He and Celesse hoisted her onto it, and then he took the handles.
 

Outside, they heard Dark roar.
 

Then gunfire.
 

Lucan’s stomach turned on itself.
 

Earl, Tony, and the contractors were outside.
 

And they didn’t have magic to protect themselves.

XXI

Dark tore out of the mausoleum, breaking the great double doors off their hinges.
 

His shoulders ached from the impact.
 

He felt the humid air of the bog, a welcome blast of fresh air that his lungs needed.
 

Then he heard screams.
 

Humans and elves, at least a dozen total, sat inside yellow carts made from metal. They wore strange, thick clothes that he had never seen before.
 

Dark roared and the humans and elves screamed again.
 

Dark stomped over to a nearby yellow cart and smacked it with his tail.
 

CLANG!

He had expected it to fly over the tree tops, but the cart did not move.
 

His tail was bloody from the slash.
 

What kind of contraption is that?
he thought. He snapped at the cart, and the human inside pulled a metal lever with a ball on top of it and the cart reversed toward the water.
 

“What kind of conveyance is that?” Dark asked.
 

No response.
 

“No matter,” he said, plowing into the cart. The impact overturned the cart and threw the man into the water.

The air filled with a strange sound. He had never heard anything like it.
 

He whipped around.
 

Fire erupted from the humans’ hands, then disappeared.
 

Something ripped through his scales. He looked down. In his shoulder were several small holes. Then something tore through his arms, ripping his insides as it burst out of the other side.
 

And then the pain hit him and he roared.

What kind of magic was this?

He charged at the men, scattering them as they ran into the woods.
 

He wasn’t fast enough.
 

Another yellow cart with a shovel in front of it slammed into him. The impact cut through his scales and he tried to balance himself.
 

But more of the yellow carts cornered him.
 

He couldn’t take many more blows. He had to fly. If only he could make it into the air. They wouldn’t be able to touch him there!

He tried to spread his wings, but they didn’t respond. One of his wings flopped on his back and wouldn’t move, no matter how much he willed it.