Sleeping Dragons Book 1: Animus
Read Sleeping Dragons Book 1: Animus Online
Authors: Ophelia Bell
Sleeping Dragons
Book 1
Animus
Ophelia Bell
Copyright 2014 by Ophelia Bell
Cover design by Dawné Dominique
All rights reserved.
Contents
Chapter One
E
rika always got a little damp between the thighs on the cusp of an archaeological find, but this wasn’t just any old pile of ancient bones she was about to uncover. Today her entire body thrummed with excitement. If the coordinates were right, this would be the find of the century.
The vine-covered rock wall in front of her was the final barrier. Her heart pounded in anticipation of what she hoped lay beneath. With passionate rips, she yanked the foliage away to display the elaborate, smooth carving of a dragon wound into a disc-shape.
The image sent a thrill through her.
Hot-damn, we found it!
The culmination of her hard years of graduate research rested in the darkness somewhere behind that slab of vine-covered rock. She and her team would be the first to set eyes on it.
In spite of her conviction that they’d finally reached the end of their quest, she glanced back to her geologist for confirmation, itching with impatience.
Eben’s eyes widened and he looked up from the handheld GPS unit. “I just sprung wood, baby,” he said, echoing her own thoughts. “Fuck yeah! This is it!”
Cheers erupted from the group behind them. They deserved to celebrate after enduring an exhausting trek through the remote reaches of the Sumatran jungle to get here, but the true celebration would have to wait just a little bit longer.
“Yeah, but it’s just a wall.” She swept her hands over the ridged face of the stone slab in front of her, ripping down more vines as she went. “How do we get inside, assuming there’s an inside to get to?”
Eben slunk up behind her, pressing his tall, muscular body against her back. His hands covered hers while they explored the rock face. The arousing scent of his heady musk hit her nose and she inhaled. “Maybe extra hands are necessary,” he whispered in her ear. “Those old dwarves could be horny bastards, wanting their stones touched by everyone.”
“Dwarves… You’ve been watching too many movies. But I know someone’s a horny bastard,” she whispered, shifting her backside against his obvious hard-on.
She let him take control of their exploration of the hard surface before them. Eben had an uncanny ability to suss out the secrets of just about any mineral. He also had a particular skill at sinking his rock-hard shaft into her deeper crevices whenever the mood struck them. It was why she’d been so attracted to him during their undergrad years. Post-graduation, she’d kept him around because he was every bit as ambitious as she was to explore the deeper reaches of the world and all its secrets. It also didn’t hurt that the tall, irreverent blond was very easy on the eyes.
“Here,” he said, pushing her fingertips into a cleft she hadn’t noticed. She grabbed onto the edge of the fissure and followed it down, pressing as she went until she felt it give. She gasped when the entire face in front of them receded at least a foot and began to slowly shift aside with the rough grinding of stone on stone. More cheers sounded behind them as their team looked on.
“We’re inside!” she yelled, pulling away from Eben and raising her arms up in triumph.
Cool, dry air rushed out, carrying with it a familiar, pungent aroma. Her skin prickled with gooseflesh at the memories that surfaced in response to that scent as much as from the sudden chill of the air.
She’d been dreaming of this place ever since her dad had hinted at a mythical dragon race, spinning bedtime stories that rivaled those her friends heard from their parents when they were children.
In retrospect, she believed her father had left his research notes out deliberately to entice her. She’d read them over multiple times from age ten onward and fantasized ever since about finding the elusive dragon temple her father had always been searching for. All he’d had were small clues, one of which was the tiny jade carving of a dragon she wore around her neck right now. Another was a jade bottle, empty, yet still holding the lingering, spicy scent of whatever substance it had once contained.
Her father had died wondering, and Erika had vowed afterward that she would find it for him. And here she was, about to cross the threshold with the same familiar smell from her father’s old bottle filling her lungs with each breath.
The opening displayed a dark corridor lined with smooth, pale stone. She reached inside and slid her fingertips across the rock. In spite of the cooler air beyond the threshold, the ethereal warmth of the walls sank into her fingertips. Once the door stopped sliding open with a heavy
cachunk
, a series of recessed sconces that lined the corridor began to glow one by one.
“Whoa,” Eben said. “Magic?”
“Engineering, most likely. Old school… I bet there’s a trigger somewhere in that door pocket that lights these up when the door is opened. Hey, Corey!” she called back behind them. “You’ll love these lights. Get up here and document how they work.”
The athletic, dark-haired figure of her tech nodded from behind the digital camera he held. “You got it, boss.”
She held her eagerness in check for the time being. Instead of giving in to the urge to run inside and begin exploring, she took over camera duty for Corey and let him do his job. He diligently tested the air quality and gave her a swift thumbs-up indicating all was good on that front. The glowing sconces, on the other hand, caused his dark eyebrows to arch high on his tanned brow.
“It’s like nothing I’ve ever seen,” he said. “They come pretty close to light bulbs, but we both know better than that. Take a look…” He reached a leather-gloved hand into one of the half-moon-shaped recesses. What he pulled out continued to glow brightly when he held it up before her. Heat radiated off the oblong shape. It was round and bulbous at the lit end, dark and tapered at the end Corey held. The others circled around murmuring in awe while the glow gradually subsided. When it emitted only the brightness of a low-burning ember she reached out a tentative finger to touch it. Heat still lingered in it, but it felt solid, more like a stone than a fragile glass bulb.
“See,” Eben said. “
Magic.
”
She rolled her eyes and took the odd stone from Corey, her first artifact from the temple. Corey grinned at what she was sure had to be a giddy expression on her face. She certainly felt like a kid on Christmas morning.
“Ready to conquer the dragon temple?” Corey asked with a quirk of his mouth and a wink. The epitome of professional behavior and honorable to a fault, Corey had always felt like the protective older brother of the group. She eyed him curiously now. Even though he’d traveled with three very attractive, intelligent single women for months, not once had he given any hint of flirting. Until now.
Dismissing his odd behavior as a side effect of the same excitement that afflicted her, she returned the camera to him. She turned back to the doorway and with a deep breath stepped slowly into the wide opening, caressing the pale stone walls as she went. The lights illuminated the translucent stone in a warm glow and she could just make out the beginning of a staircase several yards ahead.
“Jesus, this place is paneled entirely in jade.” She paused to study a section of the wall, noting the faint green and gold coloring that threaded through the white stone in amorphous serpentine patterns. Her footsteps echoed in the wide space as she went further in. She reached the end of the corridor and paused to stare down at what appeared to be an endless staircase.
“You guys ready for this?” she asked the group behind her. Of course they were ready, she chided herself. But was
she
ready? So far the place had exceeded her wildest dreams and she was barely in the door. How deep would it go? What kinds of wonders would she find inside? And the biggest question that occupied her mind: Would her father’s research be proven true after all? If there really were dragons down there, would they be as intelligent and powerful as her father’s notes suggested? Too many questions, but she was a scientist. The only thing to do was… Well, fuck.
Boldly go, dammit! That’s what you do!
As if sensing her hesitance, Eben stepped up beside her and placed a large, warm hand on her shoulder. “Need a hand to hold, babe? This is your discovery. You should be the one to take the first step down. We’re all right behind you.”
After the first step, the anxiety disappeared and excitement returned. It took a lot of effort to maintain a casual pace, her curiosity making her itch to move faster. A hundred steps into the depths, she began taking steps two at a time, impatient to get to the good part. How deep was this place?
Fifteen minutes later, they finally reached the bottom and were faced with an elaborately decorated door. Onyx and gold shone in the light of a pair of larger sconces that flanked the door, the decorations depicting several dragons that appeared to be tangled in the throes of mating, but not with other dragons. All their partners appeared human. In the center of the carved coil of bodies was a small, circular depression with a starburst pattern of upraised black nubs.
“What kind of crazy sex dungeon did you bring us to, Erika?” Dimitri asked, his words accented with subtle drawn-out syllables that belied his Greek ancestry. He stifled a chuckle. “Not that I’d complain, but that looks kinky even for me.”
“Y’know, Dimitri, sometimes I wonder if I didn’t pick
the
horniest team on the planet. But maybe you guys are meant to be here. All the lore I’ve managed to find suggests that dragons have particular sexual appetites. And I suppose this is our first clue that it was accurate.”
They paused to take pictures and record more for the ongoing documentary they’d been filming. The door was locked, but they were prepared for this one. Eben pulled out the solid gold disk they’d found a month ago in Myanmar and fitted it into the depression. It fit neatly, the nubs in the door filling in small holes within the disk. Eben twisted it and the door swung open, almost seeming to float on its hinges.
“I’ve got another hard-on,” Eben whispered in her ear. She elbowed him and he laughed, but she had to admit she was turned on in the extreme.
Beyond the door they all paused. Her entire team let out a combined exhalation of awe.
“Yeah, we kick ass don’t we?” Erika said.
Eben let out an excited whoop and picked her up, spinning her around. The others cheered and hugged. Once Eben set her down again she took a deep breath and gazed around in wonder.
The chamber beyond the door was immense, with long, curved walls, white and glowing with recessed lights like the corridor they’d just passed through. The entry led down another staircase to the center of an elliptical amphitheater surrounded by tiered stone benches that extended from the floor to the walls. At the far end was a high dais occupied by a throne elaborately carved out of jade, the translucent grass-green of it reflecting the light of a pair of those impossible lights that sat in two shallow alcoves behind it.
“Wow, check those out,” Eben said. “Nothing like what we’d imagined they might be.”
He pointed toward the pair of large, white dragon guardians that flanked the throne, and Erika’s eyes widened at the sight. The guardians each rested on their haunches supported from behind by thick tails. Both sported large, erect phalluses jutting up between their scaled thighs. They’d have made interesting guest seats, that’s for certain.
“Yeah,” Erika said. “That’s almost obscene, isn’t it?”
He chuckled. “No more than you shoving my face into your wet pussy and telling me to eat you like a starving man...”
She dug a knuckle into his ribs and glanced around to see who might have heard, but the others were already spread out scouting the room. Not that it was any secret that she and Eben occasionally slept together. That kind of thing was hard to keep quiet when you shared a campsite with five other people for weeks at a stretch. But she knew Camille had a thing for Eben and didn’t want to rub the younger woman’s face in it unnecessarily. Her relationship with Eben had always been built out of convenience and mutual need. She sensed he had a limit that he would hit long before she hit her own. He’d been her best friend for years, but he wasn’t the man she was meant to be with. If that man even existed.
“Look at those doorways behind the dais”. She pointed at the pair of double-doors that rested deep on either side of the throne. “What do you think is back there?”
Eben shrugged. “The dungeon? The kitchen? What do dragons eat anyway? Pretty virgin princesses?” He glanced at Camille who was still gaping in awe in the doorway just out of earshot of his joke. “If I were a dragon I’d
love
eating virgins.”
Eben grinned at Erika, irritatingly confident that she’d appreciate his sense of humor. He walked down the stairs and crossed the floor in long strides, taking the steps up to the throne two at a time with her following close behind.
“I wonder why the throne is empty,” he said. “Usually an elaborate religious display like this would have the object of worship in plain sight.”
Erika countered sharply. “You’re a geologist, what the hell do you know about religious displays? To me this looks like a place to hold court. Not symbolic. Functional. See the alcoves in the mezzanine?” She pointed at the second tier above them. “I’d bet you anything those lead to more rooms behind the seats, maybe back into the surrounding structure as well. This place is more than just a shrine, it’s a compound. People—or dragons—actually lived here.”
And maybe they still do.
“Well, I guess we’ll have to wait for the experts to say otherwise, huh?” He raised an eyebrow and crouched in front of one of the draconic figures that flanked the throne. “They look so real, like they could wake up at any second.”
“Master artisans, I guess.” She walked up to the other statue and stroked the dragon’s snout affectionately, trailing her fingertips over its polished white brows and the curling horns that extended backward from its skull. Her fingertips tingled strangely and her nipples hardened against the coarse linen of her shirt.
The stone was so smooth and warm it would have felt like flesh if it had any give to it. It really was a fantastic representation—polished to leave no evidence of the maker’s tools anywhere. When she looked over at Eben, he was stroking the prominent stone phallus of the dragon statue in front of him.
