Old Dark (The Last Dragon Lord Book 1) (27 page)

Celesse lay in bed, looking out at the downtown skyline. She felt rosy and didn’t want to get out of bed, even though she had at least five phone calls to make to donors. She had to schedule meetings. And at least one speech had to be rescheduled.
 

What was her future with Lucan?

She liked to think she had made an honest man out of him, but in the back of her mind, she knew better.
 

The election was their horizon. Though it was weeks away, its weight bore down on her and she knew she couldn’t lose it.
 

She couldn’t lose him.
 

All her responsibilities as campaign manager raced across her mind again, and already she felt guilty for not being on her phone.
 

But she had been through hell these last few days.
 

She closed her eyes and told herself that she’d sleep for only a few minutes...

Bartholomew and Tony took the elevator from the restaurant. They rode from the top floor all the way down to the lower level of the high-rise, switching elevators twenty stories down.
 

Bartholomew was festering.
 

Tony was silent and stayed out of his way.
 

Their t-shirts were wet from washing dishes.
 

Normally in an establishment like this, the police would have just taken them to jail for not having the money to pay the restaurant bill. But Lucan had sway with the chef, and he had urged him to offer a deal. It only made the incident the more humiliating.
 

“He’s a bastard,” Bartholomew said. “He gives elves everywhere a bad name. I can’t understand why you thought you could trust him.”

Tony said nothing.

The elevator stopped in the parking garage.
 

They walked in silence through the garage, which was empty except for a few cars. It was dark and cold. The green walls gave the area a sickly glow.

“What do we do now?” Tony asked. “I told you we should’ve just left it alone.”

“Grimoire is going to pay,” Bartholomew said.
 

“Just because you don’t agree with him politically doesn’t mean—”

Bartholomew shushed him.
 

Ahead, a man was sitting on the hood of their van. He wore a suit and sunglasses, and he tapped his palm with a baseball bat.
 

The car’s windows were busted and the panels were dented in.
 

“You Bartholomew?” the man in the suit asked.
 

Bart stood in front of Tony. “Who’s asking?”

The man jumped off the hood of the car. “We want to talk to you.”

Several men in suits stepped out of the shadows with baseball bats resting against their shoulders.
 

Ennius Grimoire stood on a platform in a park giving a powerful speech. He walked across the stage, talking about the future of Magic Hope City under his third term. A crowd of thousands applauded him, and as he railed on his nephew, Norwyn’s silhouette hovered around him, barely visible.
 

Miri and Laner met at the Ancestral Bogs, about a quarter of a mile from the site of Old Dark’s tomb.
 

Miri could see the felled trees from the mound she stood on. She had sprayed herself with bug spray and she was ready for the heat.
 

Laner wore a sun hat, t-shirt, and shorts. He carried the papers with him.
 

“You ready?” he asked.
 

“Ready as I’ll ever be,” Miri said.
 

They descended the mound where a group of researchers waited for them.
 

As they approached, Miri felt the familiar pangs in her stomach and wondered if she was doing the right thing. She straightened her hat, smiled, and waved at her new team.
 

Dark screamed as Gus and Orion hit him with another paralysis spell. They fastened his muzzle on, and when they left the room, a janitor entered, making a quick sweep and mop of the cage.
 

Gus and Orion left and told the janitor, a short elven woman, to be quick.
 

She mopped the floor, never taking her eyes off Dark.
 

She began to polish the bars as Dark regained his strength. Seeing the dragon start to move, she ran out of the cage and locked it just as Dark moved his legs.
 

He roared and lunged towards her, banging his claws on the bars. She stumbled back, startled, and struck a pile of grimoires a few feet away from the cage. The stack toppled over and the spell cards flew everywhere.
 

Gus and Orion ran into the room, and Dark laughed at them. They cleaned up the grimoires and used a forklift to move the stack further back.
 

When they shut off the lights and left Dark alone, he lifted his claws and grinned at the small stack of grimoires that he’d stolen in the shuffle.
 

“Now
this
is interesting,” he said, holding up one of the grimoires to his eye.

TO BE CONTINUED…

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Turn the page to read the first two chapters of
Old Evil
, the second book in the series.
 

Old Evil Excerpt

I

Old Dark had to wait longer than usual for the paralysis to wear off. Every limb of his body was frozen in a tense muscle spasm. He couldn’t move, and his body was suspended in the air, shaking uncontrollably as two men swept his cell and swapped out his meat buckets with fresh, bloody pork.
 

The men, Gus and Orion, had made sure their paralysis spell was extra effective this time. As they cleaned, they cursed at him.
 

“You think you can get out of here?”

“Where you gonna go, you stupid dragon?”

“You think we want to be in here cleaning up after you?”

They worked quickly. Dark was only able to move his eyes, and he followed the men’s every move.
 

They had grimoires in their pockets. Thin stacks.

Dark had gotten adept at observing them; just before they came into the cell, he would smell cigarette smoke, and then he would hear their footsteps down a hallway.
 

Then the doors would open.
 

Several steps more and then the lights would come on, blinding him temporarily.
 

By the time he could focus, they would be at his cell with grimoires in their hands. They wore the same uniform—white shirts with brown pants, and black skullcaps over their foreheads. Wheels of pink light sprouted in front of their faces, and then they would hit him with the spell, a blue ball of energy that rendered him immovable.
 

It was the same way every time, six times a day.
 

As he shook, he wished he could growl. The iron muzzle over his mouth dug into his scales, and they were raw from where the straps scratched him.
 

His jaws, shut closed for twenty hours a day, hurt like nothing he’d ever felt, a sharp, insistent ache that he couldn’t ignore.
 

His eye socket pulsed and throbbed, and he wished for his eye back. Once a day the men removed his eye patch and spread a tingling salve on it. It didn’t bother him as badly as it used to, but Dark didn’t know what was worse—his eye, his joints, his jaws, his scales, or his claws. Everything ached from confinement and old age.

Because, if Miri was to be believed, he
was
old. He was one thousand five hundred years old when he fell asleep; now, one thousand years had passed, and if it was true, he was now two thousand five hundred years old, the equivalent of a seventy-year-old man.