Fae, Flames & Fedoras Read online

  “What’s that?” Morgan finally asked as the Fae took in the site of the slaughter before them. It took Talus a moment to realize the Unseelie was pointing at an odd black shape at the edge of the light.

  “Check it out,” Talus ordered, focusing the light to spread slightly forward as Morgan carefully stepped through the killing ground to check it out.

  “One of them’s been burned!” Morgan shouted in surprise. “Almost to ash. The rest are torn t’ shreds. What the hell could do this?”

  An iron ball seemed to materialize inside Talus, dragging his stomach down to his ankles.

  “We all know,” he answered shortly and dropped the veil. The faerie flame shot together from the pool on the ground, shooting to the roof of the cavern to illuminate its full contents.

  They stood halfway down the sloping side of an immense cave, easily two hundred feet at its height and a thousand feet across. The center of the cave was a hollow four hundred feet on a side and unknowably deep, as it’s center was piled fifty feet higher than the rest of the cavern with gold and silver coins and artefacts.

  One side of the cave contained rows of chests and bookshelves, all overflowing with scrolls and books. Another contained a collection of brightly painted statues that it took Talus an instant to realize were Greek marbles. The far side of the cave held the original exit, a Power-carved tunnel angling out at a smooth and consistent grade.

  “What the hell did we find?” Caleb demanded.

  “A dragon’s lair,” Celia said grimly. “It couldn’t be anything else—that’s what they dug up down here.”

  The light of the Faerie flame Talus had conjured to light the cavern shone over the faces of the five Fae Nobles, variously lit with greed or fear.

  No single Fae could defeat a dragon, so those who successfully killed one split the dragon’s hoard. The contents of a dragon’s lair, even split five ways, would be wealth beyond any possible need or desire, even for a Fae Noble.

  “You said it couldn’t be a dragon!” Caleb shouted, turning to Morgan.

  “I was wrong,” the big ex-marine Unseelie replied simply.

  “We are going to be so rich,” Michael muttered, a considering grin spreading over his face.

  “We are all going to be so dead,” Celia snapped. “Veil yourselves. Kill that light.”

  She was too late. Even as Talus released the faerie light he’d held for too long, the dragon erupted from the mound of gold in the middle of the room.

  To the superhuman eyes of the Fae, the sheer warmth of the dragon’s internal fire lit the room like a small sun. Talus blinked against the brilliance of the creature and then stumbled as fire blasted across the room from the great beast’s mouth.

  They were taken completely by surprise, utterly unprepared, and faced with one of the greatest creatures to walk the Earth—but they were Fae Nobles.

  Five shields of telekinetic force flashed into existence before the fire reached them, and the burst of fire, hot enough to burn bone to ash, scattered across the cavern.

  “Run for the exit,” Talus snapped, diving forward with a sprint that any Olympic athlete would have envied.

  Gunfire echoed through the room as Caleb and Morgan ignored Talus’s words, emptying their tommy guns into the monster. Silver, salt, and cold iron bullets bounced from the dragon’s scales, and fire hammered the two Nobles’ shields.

  Michael had discarded his gun, though, and Talus felt the entire cavern chill as the Fae called Power to himself. Glamour and telekinesis wove protections around the Unseelie Noble, and he struck the dragon with a bolt of ice forged from will and power.

  The ice pierced the dragon’s scales, drawing a single drop of ancient blood.

  For a moment, Talus allowed himself to slow, to believe that they might have a chance. Then the immense wyrm, easily a hundred feet long and wrapped in scales of gold that glittered in the fire, drew itself on up its hind legs and wrapped its wings around itself such that it appeared to be wearing robes.

  Then Michael died.

  Talus sensed but did not see the bolt of pure power that ripped through the Noble’s defenses like tissue paper. It latched around the Unseelie’s heart and ripped it from the man’s chest.

  “Run!” Talus yelled back at Morgan and Caleb. Celia had reached the exit from the drake’s cave, and he was only a few steps behind her.

  The Seelie and Unseelie tried. The dragon turned on them, fire scattering from their shields as it began to close in on them. Talus stopped at the edge of the cave, turning back to watch them in helpless rage as Celia ran on.

  Power rippled through the cavern again, lashing out at Caleb. For a moment, Talus though the last of his Seelie companions was dead, but then he emerged from the burst of shattered stone where he’d stood, continuing to run forward. He’d changed his shields—while running—to deflect the dragon’s attack to the side rather than stop it.

  Neither of the two Fae was going to make it, and Talus began to tense, ready to rejoin the fight, when Morgan made the decision for him.

  The big ex-marine Unseelie took a look behind him, realized how close the bounding monster was, and closed his eyes in a moment.

  When he opened them again, his gaze locked on Talus’s.

  “Hey, Seelie!” he bellowed. “Catch!”

  Caleb had no warning or chance to react. A shovel-sized hand scooped him off the ground and spun him around in a perfect javelin throw that sent the Seelie flying straight at Talus.

  Surprised, Talus caught the other Fae and set him on the ground, his gaze still on Morgan. He realized what the Unseelie was going to do.

  “Run yourself,” Morgan ordered and then turned back to face the dragon, armed only with the power and wrath of a Fae Noble.

  Talus ran, dragging Caleb after him. Against most opponents on Earth, that power would be more than enough—but here, in its lair, the dragon was unbeatable.

  They caught up with Celia after a few moments, the Unseelie woman redoubling her speed as they caught up with her.

  “You’re alive?” she exclaimed. Despite maintaining a sprint that the greatest Olympic athlete would have turned white with envy at the sight of, none of the three were out of breath.

  “Let’s see how long that lasts before we start cheering,” Talus told her, releasing Caleb as the other Fae finally got his feet under him. “I can hear that thing following us now.”

  Morgan had bought them almost a full minute, which was about five times as long as Talus had expected but infinitely less than he wanted.

  “Watch for side-tunnels,” he told the other two Nobles as they ran. “There’s got to be one too small for the beast to follow us.”

  They ran in silence for a few moments, the rough ground shifting unevenly under their feet as the loose rocks slid.

  “There!” Celia shouted, pointing to a gap in the side of the tunnel. A ball of light flashed forward from her pointing finger to illuminate what had been a side tunnel barely big enough for a man.

  About twenty feet back from the main tunnel, the side tunnel was collapsed, the roof brought down by the weight of the city above it.

  “Damn,” Caleb barked. “Keep running!”

  Talus heard faint crunching noises behind them as they continued to run, the dragon beginning to close in on them as it followed them up its escape tunnel.

  “Another side tunnel!” Caleb shouted, taking the lead of the three Fae, only to curse and try to run faster as he passed it.

  Talus saw that one had been blocked too, the roof collapsed just back from the main tunnel. When they passed a third blocked tunnel, even he was starting to grow short of breath.

  “We’re being herded,” he gasped out to the others. “The bloody thing has us trapped—and it’s catching up.”

  The crunching sounds of the dragon’s running feet were growing closer, and Talus growled, slowing to a stop.

  “This won’t work. We need time,” he told the other two. “Help me.”

  He was
actually surprised when the other two Fae stopped and joined him. “Those side tunnels gave me an idea. Focus your power—we should be able to bring the roof down.”

  Suiting actions to words, he reached out with the telekinetic strength of a Fae noble and began to splinter the stone of the roof. A few pieces fell down, and then more as the other two nobles joined in.

  Sparks lit the tunnel as the dragon turned a corner, coming into view of the three Fae nobles. It was a majestic creature even to Talus’s terrified eyes.

  It had the long snout of a lizard, surmounted by bright, humanlike eyes that were currently lit with rage. The dragon’s wings, feathered in black and gold, were slightly spread, allowing it to balance as it ran forward on its two massively powerful legs. Twice the length of a train car and more, its half-spread wings stretched from one side of the tunnel to the other, and its aura of Power filled what space its body didn’t.

  Panic lent Talus strength, and he focused his power on the earth above them. A massive surge of Will coursed through him, and he felt the mighty stone above him crack. For a moment, he was convinced the dragon was going to reach him, and then the roof of the tunnel gave way.

  Stone and earth crumpled down. The dragon reared back, the first of the stones striking it before the collapsing tunnel hid it from view.

  Then the tunnel collapse continued towards them, and the nobles had to throw their power into holding the same roof they’d broken up. For a few seconds, it seemed their success was going to crush them.

  Stones collapsed towards them, the tunnel reaching out to crush them, and finally, finally, stopped a few feet away from them.

  A stone the size of a man dropped from the roof last and rolled slowly towards them to stop inches from Talus as it hit his shields and wards without enough force to drive through.

  He looked at the rock, which would have crushed him had it fallen closer to him or faster, and breathed a sigh of relief.

  As the sighs of the three Fae nobles faded, he heard another sound. A scratching, crunching sound.

  The dragon was digging through.

  “Keep going,” Celia said to the two Fae desperately, and Talus laughed.

  “What else were we going to do?” he demanded before taking off up the tunnel after her.

  Caleb was running hard, to the point where Talus was, with what energy he had to spare, worrying about what the Noble was going to do to himself. It took a lot for a Fae Noble to do the equivalent of “pulling a muscle”—but it was also a lot more severe of an injury.

  The other Seelie Fae passed Talus and Celia, conjuring a bright faerie light to bring the tunnel to the brilliance of day. Talus was about to tell him to shut down the light and then realized it didn’t matter—nothing they could warn they were coming could be more dangerous than what was chasing them, and until the dragon was through the cave-in, it didn’t matter.

  The next several side tunnels were the same as the ones before, collapsed several feet back from the entrance. Talus said nothing to the others, just watching his steps before him, but it didn’t ring right to him—if the dragon had closed off the side tunnels, the beast’s magic would have left no trace of them, but there was no way the tunnels had all been sealed by natural process.

  His paranoia kept him watching the tunnel ahead of them, which was why he saw the tripwire before Caleb ran into it.

  “Stop!” he snapped, filling his words with the command of a Fae Noble. Caleb, despite being a Fae Noble himself, stopped in his tracks—inches from the tripwire.

  “There are traps in the tunnel,” Talus told him, pointing at the tripwire. It was a thin wire, painted black to disappear in the gloom of the underground tunnel, and suspended at about the level of Talus’s abdomen—ankle-high on the dragon.

  “That’s set for the dragon, not for us,” Celia observed. “What the fuck is going on?”

  “As soon as I work it out, I’ll tell you,” Talus snapped. “Just watch for more traps—I want to escape the dragon and find who set them, in that order, not be crushed or blown to smithereens.”

  Caleb took the lead again, a stormy look on his face as he ducked under the tripwire and took off again. Talus watched Celia follow, making sure she made it under, and then ducked through himself.

  He was the last to start running again, and he heard a sound behind him he thought the others missed—the rhythmic thumping and fluttering of the dragon’s odd run.

  With a muttered curse, he took off.

  Another fifty or sixty meters up the tunnel, Talus had to leap another tripwire at chest height to a man. Two more came along afterwards, and now he could smell the cordite and explosives they were set to trigger.

  He ducked under the fourth then rounded the corner into an open chamber, only half the size of the dragon’s lair but still huge for under the city. Roots of a hundred trees were woven together across the roof, helping explain the size and the presence of the strange chamber torn from the earth. Globes of faerie light illuminated the room, filled with boxes and the tableau of figures in front of him.

  He stopped dead in the entrance to the chamber, facing down the barrel of a Thompson sub-machine gun trained perfectly on him, Celia, and Caleb by Owen, the Keeper of New York.

  “You built this chamber,” Talus said simply to the Gille, whose powers over trees answered how a new cavern had opened over the dragon’s escape route. “How did you know his tunnel came here?”

  Celia and Caleb were still silent, focused on the gun. Talus focused on Owen. Somehow, the Keeper had set this up. He recognized weapons woven into the tree roots now, trained on the entrance into the root-supported cavern. Either the bazookas from the display cases in the hotel or their very similar sisters had been mounted in niches custom-formed for them around tree roots, and then linked together by some very professional demolitions work to be fired by a single trigger—in the corner of the room, where an extremely shaken but quite large dark-skinned man stood.

  “I asked the trees,” Owen said simply. “I didn’t expect so many of you to survive. I’m impressed,” he admitted.

  “You betrayed us,” Caleb snarled, and Talus felt the other Noble gather Power to himself. “I am a noble of the Summer Courts. Mine is the wrath of the coming storm, and you betrayed…”

  Power coalesced around Caleb, a glittering sphere of light and flame, only to shatter as Owen calmly pulled the trigger. The tommy gun had the same load as the ones he’d sent them into the tunnels with—rock salt, silver, and cold iron.

  Rock salt shattered the construct of Power that Caleb had gathered. Silver and salt overloaded his wards and defenses, breaking the shields that guarded the Noble’s flesh. Cold Iron, the ancient bane of the Fair Folk, pierced flesh that could withstand tank shells and ripped apart a heart that could heal any other wound.

  Caleb didn’t even finish his righteous proclamation before the Thompson’s heavy bullets ripped his chest apart. He crumpled wordless, dead before his body hit the ground.

  “Why is it that no Noble of either court ever knows when to shut the fuck up?” Owen asked conversationally, training the gun back on Talus. “Now, are we going to play nice now?”

  “Four Fae Nobles are dead by either your hand or your lies,” Talus said quietly. “Both the Courts and Council will hunt you to the end of the Earth. The Queen will have your head. What makes you think you’re going to get away with this?”

  “Because you’re the only witnesses,” the Keeper replied, “and a quarter of a dragon’s hoard is one hell of a bribe. You need my weapons—and I could use the two of you to help hold the drake in place.”

  Tradition stated that all Fae involved in bringing down a dragon split the hoard between them—obviously, Owen was including the mundane engineer he’d drafted. A quarter of a dragon’s hoard was wealth beyond imagining, enough to buy small countries. It was as he said—one hell of a bribe.

  Talus caught Celia out of the corner of his eye, slightly shifting her weight to slowly sidle away from him.
If she kept it up and he kept Owen distracted, the Keeper would only be able to point the gun at one of them.

  “The weapons are already here, Owen,” Talus reminded the Keeper. “Your man over there has wired them. I’d say, in fact, that you need us—and we don’t need you. And you murdered our friends.”

  The Keeper laughed.

  “You are Nobles, and you barely met each other,” he told Talus. “Your kind doesn’t make friends.”

  “You sent six Nobles down here without telling us about the dragon, planning for us to die,” Talus wondered aloud. “Why take that chance? Why not just tell us what we were hunting?”

  “The six of you might have been enough to kill it,” Owen said simply. “Plus, a seventh didn’t seem like enough to be worth the risk.”

  The Keeper still held the heavy sub-machine gun perfectly steady, lined up on Talus with an inhuman precision. Talus knew that Celia had moved away, possibly enough to surprise the Keeper but not enough to save his life if she did.

  “My uncle hunted dragons,” Talus told Owen. “He said our tradition of treachery had let more of the creatures survive than any action the dragons took.”

  “You’re a preachy fuck, aren’t you?” the Keeper said conversationally and gestured slightly with the gun. “Are you going to work with me or not?” he demanded.

  Talus hesitated and heard, behind him, the thumping steps of the dragon. The great beast was getting closer—almost as close as…

  “You should have worked with us from the beginning,” he told Owen sadly.

  The dragon hit the first tripwire.

  Owen’s root-supported cavern shuddered as the explosives in the tunnel behind them went off, dropping tonnes of stone on the dragon behind them. A bellow of anger echoed down the tunnel, the floor shifted, and the gun he had trained on Talus shifted off target.

  The Fae Noble dived sideways, and Owen fired, a stream of bullets tearing through the air where he had stood. Talus hit the ground then popped back up onto his feet as a burst of telekinetic force ripped the front half of the tommy gun away, leaving Owen holding only a trigger and stock.