Hunting Down Dragons (Moonlight Dragon #2) (9 page)

"We're not leaving until we get the information we need. Promise me that, Vale."

"If this troll knows anything, we won't leave until we know it, too."

Melanie looked to me to see if I believed him and in truth, I did. At any rate, what choice did I have? This was Vale's lead, not mine.

The drainage tunnels were locked behind a chain link fence but it was no problem scaling it. Melanie needed a little help just because she was shorter than Vale and I, but soon the three of us were cautiously approaching the bunker-like concrete structure with its three broad openings. We could hear the buzz of traffic along the freeway.

We chose the center opening, though all were equally dark. Leaves and trash cushioned our feet as we walked, but soon we found ourselves on hard concrete again as we moved beyond the wind's reach. Immediately the smell of urine besieged us as we crept along the wide tunnel. While flash flooding was extremely dangerous in the desert and occasionally stalled cars and drowned some people, this wasn't the season for it. The only moisture present was found in the manmade puddles lying at the base of the graffiti-covered walls.

I swept my flashlight over a couple of scorpions on a wall but the place was relatively clean of vermin and insects. The smell of human habitation grew stronger as we walked deeper in.

"These tunnels go for about 200 feet," Vale told us in a low murmur. "Allegedly a thousand people live in here at any one time."

"And at least one troll," I added. "I don't see how. Why wouldn't anyone freak out over a giant monster living here?"

"Unless it doesn't," Melanie suggested almost apologetically.

"It's here," Vale insisted.

We encountered the first "home" about fifty yards in. A man and woman were waiting for us, apprehensively shining their own flashlight in our eyes as we approached. They looked like typical homeless to me, wearing secondhand, mismatched clothes, but I was shocked at their living conditions. It wasn't half-bad.

The square of carpet on the floor I recognized from the Rio. These people must have salvaged it during a carpet repair or replacement. Sitting atop the carpet was a double bed complete with a box spring, a rolling rack for clothes, several milk crates stacked in various configurations to provide storage and an eating surface, and a couple of castoff cafeteria chairs. Everything except the carpet square was balanced on either wooden pallets or bricks, I assumed in case of flooding.

"We're looking for someone," Vale said as we slowed our approach. "Named Stevie. Know of him?"

"Sure, man, we know the dude." The man who'd spoken was unexpectedly friendly and forthcoming, as if now that he knew we weren't cops come to kick them out we were all buddies. He pulled a cigarette from behind his ear and placed it between his lips though he didn't light it. "He's four camps down. Cool dude, though a little, you know." He gave a hoarse smoker's laugh and rolled his finger against his temple to indicate that Stevie might be crazy.

"Stevie lives alone?" I asked.

The woman hacked and spat on the floor. "No one'd want to live with him, lady. He's Looney Tunes."

Melanie, who was huddled by my side as if afraid of infection, whispered, "He sounds scary."

The man wheezed out another laugh. "Nah, he's just loco. Hope he's not your friend, 'cuz he ain't good for conversation."

"We're friends of friends," Vale told them. "Thanks for your help."

"No problem, man. We're cool down here."

We continued on, leaving that sphere of body odor to enter another bubble that reeked of alcohol. Farther on we hit another home or camp, as the man had called it. This one was less fitted out. A dirty red sleeping bag leaking its stuffing was spread across the floor beside an Albertson's shopping cart brimming with plastic bags and, for some reason, four toilet plungers. A plastic bucket holding wadded up newspapers, generic brand window cleaner and a squeegee rested beside the sleeping bag. Cans of Bud Ice lay alongside the walls.

A grizzled, hunched man sitting on the sleeping bag barely glanced up at us as we approached. He picked obsessively at a scab on the back of his hand as we passed him by.

"This place isn't as bad as I'd expected," I whispered to my friends. "Probably better than living out in the open under the freeway. Seems safer. Probably cooler in the summer, too."

"Until the floods come!" Melanie rubbed her arms. "It would be so scary to be here when the rain runs through! Monkeys don't swim so well. I think I'd end up drowned for sure!"

The third camp we came to was empty. It was more like the first camp we'd passed with a chair, a bed made from stacks of blankets and a pallet, milk crates stocked with food items from the dollar store, and a battered Coleman lantern hanging from a wire hanger. I paused to look at the artwork that hung on the walls: pencil portraits of faces from the street. Whoever the artist was, he was talented. Maybe he'd actually been a professional artist and had hit bad times. Some bits of foil and burned spoons on the ground, however, told me the descent might have been driven by darker forces.

Vale pointed at one of the stranger portraits. "That's our guy."

I frowned as I peered closer at it. "It looks like a storm cloud with eyes."

Vale was amused. "He's a troll."

"That doesn't mean he doesn't possess a
face
."

"I should have been more specific: he's a troll who's a golem."

That didn't help me much. My curiosity had reached fever pitch. I couldn't wait to meet this troll who went by the name 'Stevie'.

As we approached the fourth camp, with Vale leading the way, I considered calling up Lucky. While the unknown was fascinating, it could also be incredibly dangerous. However, most magickal beings could sense when magick was being used, and I didn't want to spook the troll before we'd gotten a chance to question him. I didn't like going into this encounter "unarmed", so to speak, but I wasn't about to turn around and leave, either. I just crossed my fingers that this troll didn't try to pound our heads in. I think that was something trolls did. I was a bit rusty on my magickal beings lore.

The stench hit us first. This wasn't the same malodorous cloud of urine, liquor, and B.O. that had risen from the human habitations. This was funky. Think Swamp Thing and Bigfoot wrestling and getting sweaty. I gagged a couple of times. Melanie just moaned in misery and pulled her shirt up over her nose and mouth.

After the stench, which I was sure would become permanently embedded in my hair and clothes, I became aware of the breathing. It was the kind of deep, heavy breathing I imagined Bilbo Baggins had heard when he found the dragon Smaug resting on his treasure.

Melanie's boot dragged on the concrete and she tripped, letting out an "eek!" in the process. We heard a loud snort and I felt the buzz of magickal energy in the darkness ahead of us. I aimed my flashlight into the dark, trying to pierce it.

The light landed on a bushy-haired guy with his hand up, trying to shield his eyes.

"Watch, the light, the light."

His voice was strangely gravelly, like he was gargling rocks, and yet sing-song, too, as though he could only speak in poetic meter.

Vale motioned me to lower the beam of my light. I did, and ended up illuminating the T-shirt the man was wearing: Marilyn Monroe sticking her tongue out through the V of her first two fingers. Charming. Lower down, the guy wore cargo shorts and Crocs with dirty socks.

"You've gotta be kidding me," I breathed.

Vale sent me a warning look so I zipped my lips, but I couldn't believe that
this
was the troll. His human form, anyway.

"Stevie?" Vale stepped toward the blinking man slowly. "Are you Stevie? My name is Vale and these are my friends. I wanted to ask you a few questions."

"Gargoyle in the dark, in the dark with me. Bringing me a dragon, tasty dragon. Tasty dragon."

Vale shook his head. "No eating dragons, Stevie. We're friends. We won't hurt you and you won't hurt us, you understand?"

Though Stevie looked like a slob, he towered over Vale at nearly six and a half feet tall and over three hundred pounds. Fortunately he didn't appear aggressive. He curled his arms over his large belly protectively and nodded his curly-haired head.

"No tasting the pretty dragon, tasty. Dragons good for eating, eating, eating."

We taste like chicken, I thought at him. Too boring.

"Stevie, how long have you lived down here?"

The troll stared at his feet with his dark, beady eyes. "In the dark, in the dark, always in the dark. Where do the tasties go? No sweet tasties for three hundred and ninety moons. Only bad tasties. So many moons, many moons."

Three hundred and ninety…I did the math in my head, assuming thirteen full moons in a year. That made it around thirty years that Stevie had been down here, likely from the moment he'd been created.

I nodded, excited. Thirty years might fit the actions of our golem-maker. Stevie could indeed be one of the first that he had made and then abandoned down here.

I peered beyond Stevie, trying to make out what a troll's abode looked like. There wasn't much to see. No bed or clothing, just two large wine barrels. But rising from them was a stench like no other. Rotting meat for sure, as well as other organics.

A finger of apprehension dragged down my spine. Stevie was eating some kind of meat. Some kind of
bad tasty
. Rats? Dogs and cats? Or something bigger? A lot of homeless people fell off the grid. Maybe they'd fallen into a troll's stomach. Poetic or not, I looked at Stevie in a wary light.

"Have you always been alone?" Vale asked him.

Stevie shifted from foot to foot, as if swaying to the melody of a song only he could hear. "Alone, alone, master forsake us. No more tasties for the forsaken. No more. No more."

At the mention of a master Vale shot me a look of triumph. I gave him a thumbs up. We'd found our golem.

"Who is your master, Stevie? We'd like to become his friends."

Stevie stopped swaying. His beady eyes fixed on Vale with sudden, unnerving intensity.

"Someone asking about the master is bad, bad. Grabs them for the master. No flying away, no flying anywhere, for the master needs the tasties."

The smell of him grew stronger. I felt the raw buzzing of magick in the air.

"Vale," I said in warning.

My voice caught the attention of Stevie, who screeched like a little girl. The high pitched squeal hurt my ears, but I didn't have time to dwell on it because in two seconds Stevie exploded into a black, powdery-looking cloud that stank of motor oil and rotting garbage.

"Run!" Vale yelled, and grabbed Melanie and me by an arm. He dragged us until we could match his speed and then let us go to sprint with him down the tunnel.

I glanced back, thinking we'd left Stevie the troll far behind. Instead, I screamed at the black mass of accumulated trash that blinked glowing yellow eyes at me not ten feet behind us. Like a
Katamari
ball Stevie accumulated beer cans and other garbage from the floor of the tunnel and added it to his bulk. Soon, he resembled the giant boulder from the beginning of
Raiders of the Lost Ark
. And as the golem troll grew larger, it picked up speed.

"Faster!" I screamed.

We raced through the other camps, setting off more screams and shouting as the troll ball pulverized their set-ups and absorbed them. The stench of garbage was so strong it made my lungs convulse. I coughed painfully as I struggled to keep ahead of the troll. The lights of the street still seemed far away at the small opening of the tunnel…

Beside me, Melanie gasped for breath. I could tell from a glance at her red, sweating face that she was struggling. She was shorter, her legs working harder to keep up. She wasn't going to make it to the tunnel mouth.

Which meant I had to stop Stevie the troll before then.

But how did you defeat a ball of garbage? I was reminded of my experience in the Oddsmakers' lair when I was attacked by beings in the curtains. This would be just as frustrating. Stevie had no obvious weak points, and he was partly made up of metal objects.

Stevie is a golem. He's not otherworldly. Someone made him, which means he can be unmade.

What did that mean? Tearing him apart? Turning a hose on him? I wish I had a giant magnet handy.

Think, Anne!

Melanie stumbled. I grabbed her hand and pulled her along while I frantically searched my mind for everything that I knew about golems. I knew they could be made from nearly any material, from mud to clothespins to cooking pots. I knew they weren't alive in the normal sense, which meant they couldn't be killed in the normal sense either. Taking off their heads or stabbing them through the heart didn't do anything because the creatures didn't possess your normal organs.

How could I stop something without a heart? Something that could continue to chase us even without a head? Something that was so dedicated to its master that it couldn't conceive of disobeying it?

When I kicked a smashed beer can out of the way it hit me: golems did have hearts, but it wasn't an organ as we understood it.