Fire Song (City of Dragons) (31 page)

There was no response except the wind in the branches above.

I made my way across the porch. The wood was bloated and gray, the pieces warped as they jutted up against each other. I tested each step before putting my weight down. It just didn’t seem sturdy.

But I managed to make it to the door.

I tried it.

Locked.

Oh, of course. Of course it was locked. Because if Anthony Barnes really was the killer—and he was, at least I
thought
he was—then he wouldn’t want to let anyone into this place.

I scampered back across the porch.

And my foot went through one of the boards with a loud, splintering crash.

I fell flat on my face.

Ouch.

It hurt, pain shooting up from my ankle all the way through my leg, little stings on my arms and hands where I had caught my fall.

I howled.

I pulled my foot out of the porch and cradled it. Damn it.

Now, certainly Lachlan had to have heard that. He’d come running from wherever he was.

I waited.

I could hear the sounds of insects in the woods, a low-level sort of chirping noise that I realized was underscoring everything.

Lachlan never appeared.

I managed to get up. I hobbled off the porch and down to the ground. I tested putting some weight on my foot. It wasn’t too badly hurt. I took a few more careful steps. Okay, I could walk normally. Good.

I started to walk around the house. “Lachlan!” I called again.

And then I stopped.

He should have heard me already.

But he hadn’t.

So… what did that mean?

I took another slow step, peering around the house.

The back of the house came into view.

The wraparound porch continued. There was a ramp up to the back door.

Which was standing open.

Oh.

Okay, so what should I do? Because if Lachlan hadn’t heard me, and the door was open, then did that mean something had happened to him?

I fumbled with my phone. I really should call for that back-up. Even if I looked like an idiot, I needed to cover our asses, because for all I knew, Anthony Barnes
was
here, and he’d captured Lachlan, and maybe—maybe—
I dialed with shaking fingers.

It didn’t work.

My phone had no service.

No. Damn it. No.

I tried again.

Nothing.

It had worked in the front of the house. Maybe if I went back there…

I hurried back around the house, but my phone still didn’t work.

I went over to my car. Nothing.

Standing there right next to the car, I considered that maybe the best thing to do would be to drive out of here until I could get service and call the police.

But what if something happened to Lachlan while I was doing that?

I took a deep breath. “Okay, Penny,” I whispered. “You are a goddamned dragon. You burned a vampire gang leader to death, and you can handle this.”

Right.

I stalked forward, walking back around the house, stepping up on the ramp and striding over the porch and into the house.

I emerged into a dark kitchen. It was old. It had rusty appliances that looked like they’d been installed in the 1950s. The linoleum was cracked and peeling in spots.

But there was a strong smell of bleach, as if someone had been cleaning in here. Funny, I couldn’t figure out where. Everything looked filthy.

I tiptoed through the kitchen, gathering my magic as I walked. If anyone jumped out at me, I’d blast them.

Once I made it through the kitchen, I entered a hallway. There was a doorway to the living room to my right. The room was empty except for a moth-eaten couch against one wall. The room had wood paneling. Light streamed in around the boards on the windows, illuminating dust in the air.

I turned left and went down the hallway.

After about four feet, I came to a door on my left. It was cracked open a bit.

I pushed it open.

Inside, the room was completely dark.

I couldn’t see anything for a second, and then I made out the outline of a toilet and an old claw-foot tub. A bathroom.

I backed out of that room.

I continued down the hallway.

There was another doorway, across the hall. The door stood wide open, but it was pitch black inside.

I poured a bit of magic down my arm, into the palm of my hand. And then I was holding a small flame, like a torch. The flickering light illuminated the room, which wasn’t a room at all.

At least… it didn’t have a floor.

There was just water.

It was an indoor pool.
This
was the bleach smell, I realized. Chlorine.

What the fuck?

I shone my makeshift torch around the room some more, and I made out a ladder at one end. The pool was half the size of a normal sized pool, and I couldn’t figure out why anyone would want a pool in here.

The door was odd too, I realized. It was made of thick steel, like some kind of industrialized door in a factory or something. The walls of the room seemed to also be reinforced.

Why would anyone make a room like this?

Whoever had done it did it more recently than the rest of the house. This wasn’t something that had been made in the 1950s. This was much more recent.

I backed out of the pool room, shaking my head.

None of this made any sense.

I looked down the hallway, back into the living room.

And then I started further back the hallway.

Wait.

That wasn’t right.

There was something in the living room. Something was on the couch.

I turned back, and sure enough, there was a figure on the couch. No one had been lying there before. I was sure of it.

Wait. Was that Lachlan?

I started for him. “Lachlan!” I called out.

A streak of movement from behind me.

I whirled, shooting fire at the movement, throwing balls of heat and light and smoke in the direction of the danger.

“Fuck!” A painful-sounding curse.

But before I could see what damage I had inflicted, something bit into my arm.

I looked down to see that a strange metal shackle was around my wrist. It was covered in glowing runes, and I felt…

Cold. My magic, it was…

Anthony Barnes loomed in front of me, his teeth bared. He had another shackle in his hand, and he brought it down on my other wrist.

I tried to throw fire at him.

But all of my fire, all of my magic, it was gone.

“These shackles are seeded with dragon sacrifice,” he said to me.

The strongest kind of magic.

“How else do you think I kept those girls from getting away?”

“You
are
the killer,” I said.

He shrugged. And then he grabbed a piece of wood that looked like it might have come from the porch. He raised it above his head.

I tried to duck.

But there was only pain.

And darkness.

“Penny,” whispered Lachlan’s voice.

My head hurt. My foot hurt from where I’d fallen outside. And the shackles at my wrist felt like icy knives digging into my skin. I forced myself to sit up. To open my eyes.

We were in a tiny, dark room. There was one window, which had been boarded up from the outside, and a little bit of light seeped around the cracks. A bare twin-sized mattress lay on the floor in one corner.

“Tell me you called someone,” he said. “Tell me someone knows where we are.”

I shook my head. “I didn’t have service.” I felt around in my pocket. It was empty. “I guess he took our phones.”

Lachlan sighed. “What are you doing out here, anyway?”

“I was worried about you. When your phone cut off, I thought that maybe he had gotten you. I guess I was right.”

“No, when my phone cut off, it was just because I lost service,” he said. “He didn’t get me until later.”

“Oh,” I said. “Well, even though I couldn’t call anyone, people will know where we are, right? You told someone you were coming out here.”

“No,” he said.

“Well, they’ll go through your property searches,” I said. “They’ll find us.”

“Maybe,” he said. “But we shouldn’t wait for that.”

“What are we supposed to do?” I held up my wrists. “He took my magic.”

“What do you mean?”

“These shackle things. They’re seeded with dragon sacrifice. It makes them the most powerful talismans. Dragon sacrifice is how they made the gargoyles, you know.”

“So, we just get them off you?” he said. “Or I drink your blood again?”

“Don’t you still have magic from the last time you drank my blood?”

“I don’t think so,” he said. “I kind of wanted it out of my system. I sort of used it all up.”

“It won’t work drinking it now,” I said. “The shackles are sucking up all my magic. There’s nothing to get from me.”

“So, we’re back to getting them off you.” He eyed them. “They don’t look that tight. Maybe you can slide them off.”

I tried. They were definitely not coming over my thumbs. “They sort of snapped on. Like handcuffs.”

He seized my hand and surveyed one of the shackles. “Looks like they come off with a key. There’s the lock. Maybe we can pick it.”

“Can you do that? Pick locks?”

“I never have, but necessity is the mother of invention and all that,” he said. “How hard can it be?”

“Great,” I muttered.

He looked around the room. “What the hell can I use to pick a lock?”

I bit my lip. “You think this is where he kept them? Sophia and Dahlia and Elena?”

Lachlan was on his feet, stalking around the perimeter of the room. “Probably. We need something like a paper clip.”

“I don’t see any paper clips around here.” I hugged my knees to my chest. “He said that he put these shackles on them. It made them powerless against him. But I can’t figure out what that pool is for.”

“Pool?” He raised his eyebrows.

“You didn’t see it?”

“I didn’t make it into the house. I got up on the porch and that was it. He must have been hiding in the woods or something.” Lachlan had made an entire circuit around the room. “Nothing to pick a lock in here.” He pointed at me. “Does your bra have an underwire?”

“No,” I said. “I’m not even wearing a bra. I have on like a tank top with a shelf bra.”

“What does that mean?”

“That there’s nothing metal on me,” I said.

“Well, damn it,” he said.

“Sorry,” I said. “Underwire bras are really uncomfortable to me.”

“You don’t have to be sorry.” He turned in a circle, looking around the room. Then he went to the door and jiggled the doorknob. “Had to try that. If it had been unlocked, and we hadn’t tried it—”

“That would have been too good to be true.”

He rested his forehead against the door. “All right, he’s got to have the key on him, right? We’ll get it from him.”

“Just ask him for it?”

“He’s a drake,” said Lachlan. “Did you say that drake’s blood—”

“Is practically as good as dragon’s blood to give vampires magic,” I said. “So, if you can drink his blood—”

“I’ll have magic,” said Lachlan. “I can pin him to the wall and force his pockets to empty themselves.”

“Okay,” I said. “Well, I guess we just wait for him to come back, then.”

But he didn’t come back for a long time.

The light that was coming in through the boards around the windows grew dim and turned orange and then red and then disappeared.

It was pitch black, and it was cold out here. There was no heat in the house, and it was still getting down into the upper thirties sometimes at night. I didn’t know if it was quite that cold, but as the night wore on, we got progressively chillier and chillier.

I shivered on the mattress, my teeth chattering.

Lachlan paced in the darkness.

“So,” I whispered eventually. “Do you have body heat?”

“What?” he said.

“I mean, technically, you’re dead, right? So, does that mean you’re cold?”

“Not when I have blood in my system,” he said. “If I don’t get blood, I get cold, the wound that killed me starts opening back up… I die again.”

“Oh,” I said. “So, when was the last time you had blood?”

“On the way here. I had some in the car.”

“So, that means you’re warm?”