Trinkets, Treasures, and Other Bloody Magic (33 page)

No one spoke.

“So it shall be.”

The golden-haired dragon shrugged his shoulders and turned toward Kett. Red-eyed and fanged, he was huddled against the pillar where he’d rolled. He was shaking, but he didn’t appear to be wounded. His body healed but depleted his magic as it did, hence his obvious need for blood.

“No,” I cried. “I do. I stand up for the vampire, for Kett.”

“Nonsense,” Suanmi said. “Even if your magic had any power here, you have no right to claim the vampire as your own. You’re a witch.”

“Not solely,” Qiuniu said for the third time. Suanmi turned to glare at him.

The golden-tanned dragon twirled his sword, waiting to lop off Kett’s head.

“I do …” I said, stumbling over my words. “I saw … he could have run. He could have easily gotten away from the demon, but he saved a girl’s life.”

Suanmi curled her lip. The golden-haired dragon stepped toward Kett and raised his sword.

“Wait, wait,” I cried. “I’ve saved his life twice now —”

“His life?” A pale blond man with a Norwegian accent snorted.

Suanmi’s lip quirked, but she restrained herself — with obvious effort — from undignified snickering.

“He owes me a life debt,” I declared. My voice rang through the round room. Desmond screamed his mountain lion call, but I didn’t look at him. I locked my gaze with Kett, who closed his eyes as if pained and then nodded his head once. I felt the magic shift between us — tying Kett to me, just lightly.

“And so it shall be,” the ancient Asian dragon said. He looked nothing like Buddha, but I gathered from his smile that they shared a philosophy.

“Imbecile,” Suanmi said. “Vampires are not pets.”

“He is my friend, my mentor,” I said.
 

Suanmi laughed. “Even worse.” She nodded her head toward me but her gaze was on the sword-wielding dragon. He spun toward me and my heart skipped a beat.

They were going to kill me anyway —
 

I felt a blast of hot breath on my back and spun away as the demon raised its head behind me.

Double shit.

The dragon brought his sword down. No fancy moves or jumps needed. He cut off the demon’s head. Severed from its body, the head twisted through the air as it disintegrated into ash and dust. Then the body collapsed similarly.
 

The ash was sucked back through the portal, which then snapped closed as if it had never been opened or disturbed. On this side, the portal looked like a North American native-carved wooden door.

I just stared in shock at the pristine marble floor.

“Not of our world,” the golden-haired dragon said. Then he sauntered back to rejoin the other dragons.

Not of our world … that explained the demon crumbling to ash, but not why Kett’s magic did the exact same thing when removed from his body. Vampires turned to ash as well. I’d seen it three months ago. I turned to stare at Kett. He still had his eyes shut. His face was a map of pain and suffering.

“Sorry to see one of your brethren go?” the Norwegian taunted.

Kett opened his eyes and looked at me.

“Vampires are descended from demons?” I asked. My voice was barely a whisper.

“Created from them. Thousands of years ago. By God, if you believe in such things,” Kett answered.

“Now, who will stand up for the witch who can open portals?” Suanmi asked.

I was going to have to deal with the Kett/demon/created-by-God thing later.

“Witches cannot open portals,” Pulou said. How he wasn’t sweating buckets in that mink coat, I didn’t know.

“Well, obviously, your wards have been compromised, treasure-keeper. Perhaps you should question the witch.”

“She is not solely a witch.” Qiuniu, now grinning like a madman with an explosive secret, said it again.

“Alchemist, then!” Suanmi snapped. “But only dragons should be able to open and travel through portals —”

“Exactly,” Qiuniu said.

Silence fell among the dragon group. One by one, they all turned to stare at me. I’d never been so scrutinized in my life. I shifted on my feet. My shoes were ruined. My hair had to be an utter blood-crusted mess. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d freshened my lip gloss.

“Impossible,” Suanmi said.

“Look again,” the ancient Asian dragon coaxed.

Then one by one, they all turned and looked at the golden-haired, golden-tanned dragon with the sword. He continued to stare at me. His face was deadly serious, an expression that didn’t suit him at all.

“An abomination,” Suanmi said.

The golden-tanned dragon threw back his head and laughed. And laughed.

“Intolerable!” the Norwegian shouted.

“Warrior!” Suanmi snapped.

The golden-haired dragon stopped laughing, though he was now wiping tears from his face. “What is your name, fledgling?” he asked me.

“Jade. Jade Godfrey,” I said, feeling a little faint around the edges.

“I’m Yazi,” he said. “The warrior of the Guardians.”

“The guardians of what?” I asked, not quite believing that was my first question.

“Of the world and all the magic within it, little one,” the ancient Asian dragon answered. “I’ve been waiting to meet you. Impossibilities are supremely interesting.”

“A little warning would have been nice, Chi Wen,” Yazi said.

The Asian dragon shrugged, though his grin stayed firmly in place. “I see far, warrior. How was I to know that today was that day?”

“Well, the Kalkadoon’s have a wicked sense of humor,” Yazi murmured, his eyes on me.

“A fertility ceremony!” Suanmi cried. “You’re a dragon. You didn’t need to answer their summons!”

Yazi laughed. “You didn’t see her mother dressed in nothing but the firelight, the moon, and the magic.”

Pulou snorted.

“Wait,” Drake said. “Half-witch, half-dragon?”
 

I was really glad I wasn’t the only slow one in the room.

“So it seems,” Suanmi answered. She tugged the preteen through one of the archways and out of the room.

The other dragons broke rank at the same time but didn’t leave.

I gazed at the golden god of a man across from me. My mind was reeling and my thoughts unfocused. He looked maybe thirty-five if I attributed the crinkles around his eyes to age, rather than to sun and laughter.

He let me look at him. His sword had returned to wherever he pulled it from. His arms were at his sides, palms open to face me … in surrender or acceptance?

“I have my mother’s eyes,” I said, releasing the breath that had been blocking my ability to speak.

“Yes,” Yazi, the warrior of the dragons answered. “But every other inch of you is me.”

He was right. I was his spitting image.
 

Half-witch, half-dragon. Well, that was one mystery solved.

I smiled, hitting him with one of my best efforts ever.

“Hi, Dad,” I said.

∞

“I have to go back,” I said for what I thought was the fourth or fifth time. It was easy for words and thoughts to get lost among the guardian dragons.

“Not today, fledgling,” Chi Wen said. All the guardians, except the ancient Asian and my father, had left through the doors from which they’d arrived.

“Dad?”

Yazi, who hadn’t yet taken his eyes off me — as if I was some great wonder — turned to question the still-smiling Asian dragon. “You have gazed into the distance, far seer?”

Gold rolled across the old dragon’s eyes, seemingly clouding his vision. “Not so far, warrior. Your daughter will choose to remain.”

“But —”

“You would bring great pain when you mean to help, warrior’s daughter.”

“But my mother and —”

“We heed the seer, child,” Yazi said. “It is rare that Chi Wen choses to share his visions.” Despite his words, my father was frowning at the Native American-carved door over my shoulder.

“I cannot change what is meant to be,” the Asian dragon said. “Only redirect what does not need to happen.”
 

“Visions,” I scoffed. Yeah, rude, but I really needed to get back to Scarlett and Kandy. And Mory, I was fairly sure I’d seen Sienna get away with Mory.

Chi Wen’s smile broadened. He raised himself up on to his tiptoes to lay his hand on my head. The heavily-spiced bitter cocoa of his magic seared through my curls into my brain, and in the briefest of flashes — as if that was all of the vision he thought I could bear — I saw what he foresaw.

I saw myself standing in the cavern before the altar. The stone table was surrounded by the mangled bodies of everyone I loved. Scarlett, Kandy, Mory … Desmond and Kett crumpled off to one side unmoving. I squeezed my eyes shut as if that would stop me from seeing the streams of blood collecting in a pool at my feet. And Sienna. My sister was sprawled, dead and decaying, across the altar. Her dark, blood magic was still writhing in her veins, spilling out of her mouth, and mixing into the lifeblood of those I loved. I could see the blood-coated knife in my hand. I had killed my sister, but not the darkness she’d created, that she’d allowed to inhabit her.

“This is my destiny?” I cried.

“You will stay, Jade Godfrey,” Chi Wen said, his voice pulling me from the clutches of the vision. “Train. Learn your magic. You will walk among the humans once again. But not today.”

I nodded, tears running down my face unchecked. What else could I do?

The following pages are an

EXCERPT

from

Treasures, Demons, and Other Black Magic

aka Dowser 3

by
 

Meghan Ciana Doidge

With one hand on the invisible knife at my hip and one hand twined through the wedding ring charms on my necklace, I stepped out from the golden magic of the portal onto the shores of Loch More. Yeah, Loch More, as in Scotland.

The ground underneath my feet thrummed with wild magic and untapped power. Supposedly, all the grid points around the globe — where natural magic reigned — teemed this way. Too many thousands of years ago for me to comprehend the guardian dragons set up a network of portals anchored at these points. I gathered the portals were rather helpful when it came to saving the world, which the guardians did constantly.
 

Thankfully such responsibility wasn’t my duty. No, my focus was much more personal.

I drew a little more of the shielding magic from my necklace, and the hair on the back of my neck settled. I unclenched my teeth. The land around me glowed — I could see for miles in all directions — but not with any specific color of magic. Rather, all the natural hues of the earth were intensified. I could actually see magic in the air I breathed.
 

I’d expected snow, seeing as it was the first week of November, but there wasn’t any. I wondered if that was like people who didn’t know Vancouver expecting it to snow there all the time, which it hardly ever did. Unlike the rest of Canada.

The sun was low in the sky. I’d misjudged the time, which reminded me I also wasn’t sure of the exact date, though I’d tried to keep a rough calendar based on my infrequent calls home. My sleep schedule was erratic, now dictated by exhaustion rather than the rotation of the earth.

Time moved oddly in the dragon nexus. At least three and a half months had passed while I’d trained, studied, and pretty much did anything to avoid the fate waiting for me in the Sea Lion Caves, but it felt like more and less all at the same time. I supposed that was what destiny felt like … or was that inevitability?

Memories of the terror my sister Sienna had created in the caves along the Oregon coast — which, ironically, were a tourist attraction for some people — had melded over the past months with the bloody vision that Chi Wen, the far seer, had shared with me. A vision that showed my loved ones slaughtered on an altar. A vision that had stopped me from following Desmond and Kett back through the portal and kept me training like a woman fueled by vengeance. A vision, mixed with a memory, that had me formulating a plan.

The portal snapped shut behind me, leaving me alone for the first time in a very long time. Maybe as alone as I’d ever been. That was an odd thought.

Anyway, to the point. The shores of Loch More looked like any other lake surrounded by rolling green hills in the late afternoon light of a sunny, crisp day. So pretty. A really, really vibrant green, and seemingly in the middle of nowhere.

Actually, this was the middle of nowhere. It was my second visit. I was seriously glad to see the empty pickup truck parked about a dozen feet away at the edge of the single-lane dirt road. I really hoped it wasn’t a standard shift. I might have forgotten to include that specification in my request. Yeah, look at me, Miss Plan-And-All-That.

I took a step toward the truck, my supple leather knee-high boots crunching the grass. It was obviously colder than I thought it would be. I could have put a jacket on over my leather getup, if only for show. Though to get my hands on a jacket, I’d have to seek out humans, and that was contrary to the objective of this brief excursion. I wasn’t interested in getting into a situation where Chi Wen’s horrific vision of the future had a chance to manifest. I was dodging destiny today … and caves … and loved ones for that matter.

So yeah, a jacket would have been a good idea. The dragons believed in training — and fighting, actually — in laced leathers. If I’d tried to change before leaving, I would have tipped my hand. Thankfully, I still had my trusty Matt & Nat satchel. My katana — a gift from my father — nestled between my shoulder blades where I wore it slung across my back. The two-handed, single-edged sword was easily accessible over my right shoulder. Its twenty-eight-inch blade was deadly sharp. The sword had been commissioned specifically for me — well, the alchemist part of me — and created as an empty vessel into which I could channel and store magic. The responsibility that came with such a gift weighed on me heavily, and I’d put my current plan into action only two days after Yazi had presented the sword to me.

Yazi was the warrior of the Guardians. Also, my father. My newly found father, who I’d never known and was still trying to get to know in between his guardian duties and my training schedule. He wanted me to train and train and train until I was strong enough to actually stop a train. Pulou the treasure keeper wanted me — rather obviously — to treasure hunt with him. And Suanmi, the fire breather, wanted me out of sight and out of mind. The six other dragons hadn’t really weighed in, but I’m sure they would — given a hundred more years or so. Time held little meaning for any of them.