Mate Of A Dragon Villain (Skeleton Key)

A
manda Roberts was going
to lose her fucking mind if she didn’t find her trusty red pen, and instead of opening her desk drawer to find it—the kind with the nice fountain ink she’d purchased from JetPens after switching apartments—she saw a skeleton key.

Usually, whenever Amanda lost anything, she got all OCD about it and couldn’t rest unless she found it. Thank God for the Internet when it came to losing her phone. All she had to do was go to a website that would call her phone for her, but pens didn’t have ringers that could be called from her laptop or iPad. Especially not her good luck expensive red writing pens.

Amanda had once turned her apartment upside down looking for the damned thing, and now…

“Where did you come from?”

Now that she held this key in her hands, she almost forgot all about it. She no longer wanted to scratch out another missed deadline on her calendar that stared at her on her kitchen wall, and she didn’t want to sort through the stack of papers on her desk that were waiting for the long, smooth lines of that red pen to edit them before she made the corrections on their digital copies and sent them off to her publisher.

The key was heavy. It looked to be made of glass, and true to the name of skeleton key, there was a skull on the handle.

Amanda squinted at it. She could kind of see her warped reflection in that wide smile all skulls seemed to have.

Amanda twisted her head back to her desk. Dragon King Eldric and Queen Jane weren’t going to finish writing their epic romance for her. She had to do it, and the final chapter was due last week. She just couldn’t seem to say goodbye, or get the characters to behave.

They’d always fought with her; throughout all five books, they’d misbehaved and struggled against her plot twists and awesome ideas, especially the love scenes. Amanda wasn’t good at writing loves scenes, at least she didn’t think she was based on how much she struggled to churn them out, but her readers didn’t seem to mind.

It was her bestselling series. Not that it put her on any bestselling lists, but it paid the rent and allowed her to get a two-bedroom apartment instead of a one bedroom, so she had an office now!

And each book had been harder to write than the last. Now that this was her last one and she was at the finish line, she should have been relieved, but she didn’t want to let them go. She couldn’t let them go. Things didn’t seem right, and even her lucky red editing pen wasn’t helping her.

She was stressed, on about two and a half hours of sleep with a week’s worth of dishes piling over the top of her sink and gathering in her dishwasher, dirty clothes in every corner, and she was avoiding calls from her publisher for the first time since she’d been picked up, and yet…

It all melted away. The key probably should have been cold in her hands, but it was warm. It was calming. Maybe it was part of the design, but it looked like something was churning inside the glass. Like storm clouds.

Pretty.

Maybe it was one of those powered by the electricity of the human body sort of things. Amanda had seen those before.

It didn’t feel like a plastic toy, though. This felt like real glass.

And what the hell was it doing in her desk?

Amanda felt a chill shuddering down her spine. She looked back at her desk.

It was also new. Sort of. She’d found it at an antique shop that was getting rid of it for a song, and she couldn’t resist. Everything about that cherry wood with the tiny scratches on it just screamed respectable writer, professional, and she’d had to have it. She’d grinned like an idiot every time she’d sat down at that desk for over a week, proud of herself for owning the thing.

No. It wasn’t possible that someone could have put it in there without her knowing. Amanda’s last boyfriend had been before she’d bought the desk, and that hadn’t lasted long. He’d only come into her apartment twice.

That meant the key had to have been in that drawer this entire time and she’d never noticed it.

Which was strange because she’d searched that desk top to bottom for any hidden treasures and had come up with nothing.

It must have been in the back of the drawer where she couldn’t see it. It must have jarred loose and rolled to the front after opening and closing the drawer so many times.

Yeah, that made sense.

Amanda went back to the desk to search. It was an old desk, so it had older style locks on it. She checked them all to see if the skeleton key would fit any of them.

She hadn’t been given any keys with the desk. That was one of the things that had been missing, so she couldn’t lock any of the drawers or cupboards, but that had been fine at the time, if a little disappointing.

She checked every single keyhole. The skeleton key was too big for each of those brass locks, and somehow, she was starting to get the feeling the key wasn’t made for this desk anyway.

Amanda’s phone rang, the vibration from the cell making it fall off the desk. She didn’t reach out to grab it off the floor, or answer it. She stared at the key. All her focus, all her attention and energy, was on the object in her hands. It was…so beautiful.

It might make a pretty good paperweight, but that thought, as fleeting as it was, seemed blasphemous in her mind when she stared at the crystalline work.

And that thing that called to her, from within the key, and from somewhere else, got stronger.

A cool breeze fluttered across her cheek. There were no windows open in her office. Or in her apartment. It was late November, and the air was too cold for open windows.

Amanda turned towards the spot where that breeze had come from. The closet door.

As she faced it, another waft of air hit her, as if it was pushing through the cracks around the doorframe. There should have been nothing in there but the crafting supplies she’d used to make her buttons and bracelets for the giveaways she’d taken part in last year. That and her winter coats and spare shoes.

But a whoosh of air and a whistling noise told her there was something else.

Distantly, she thought she heard her neighbor shout something. She rarely heard them make a peep, but this sounded almost like a war cry.

Amanda approached the door. There should not have been a key hole beneath the plastic gold-colored doorknob. That door was cheap and thin and shouldn’t have had something like that on it. But it was there. The rim looked almost silver as it glittered.

No, not silver, that same crystalline glass as the skeleton key in her hand.

Her phone rang again. Amanda looked down. The screen was face up. It was her editor. Probably wanting to know if she was on schedule this time, how the finale of Eldric was coming, if he had finally vanquished and killed the villain, Hargreave.

She wasn’t on schedule and Hargreave was still alive. Amanda wasn’t going to answer.

Another distant shout, and this time a clang of metal, as if someone had hit two frying pans together.

It wasn’t coming from any of her neighbors. It was coming from the other side of that door.

Her curiosity, and whatever that pull was that came from the key itself, drove her to step forward. The skull of the skeleton key was clenched tight in her right hand, the pin and bit pointed towards that lock.

Amanda stopped herself for just a brief half second, then sucked back a sharp breath and pushed the tip of the key into the lock.

It was a smooth, inward slide. There was no resistance, no jiggling or testing or fighting with the key and lock. She turned it, one hand on the doorknob, twisting and pushing the door open.

As if gravity itself had suddenly changed and twisted on its side, Amanda was pulled into the closet, and she shrieked to high heaven as she fell down, down, down, through the grey clouds and through the vast nothingness, as if she had been thrown out of a flying plane thousands of feet in the air without a parachute.