Branded (16 page)

“There’s always a choice.”

“Okay, Confucius. But the alternative sucks. Like, literally. As in, I’ll be sucking blood. And I happen to like real food.”

Sly grunted, nodded, and seemed to come to some internal decision of his own, though I’m not sure what. Maybe he had planned on trying to talk me out of breaking into a dragon’s lair and stealing a piece of his treasure. I just might have let him, too, despite the sucky alternative option. He didn’t try, though.

“You better get going,” he said. “I’ll take care of this.”

“Thanks, Sly. I owe you big time.”

He snorted, but left it at that.

Without any more excuses to delay, I left for the dragon’s lair.

Detroit used to have a Chinatown a long time ago. But the only evidence of its existence was an old sign welcoming visitors to Chinatown, kept around either as a historical landmark or to confuse people. Not sure which. But now, where Chinatown once stood, was a new grand display of Detroit culture. And by grand, I mean the MGM Grand Hotel and Casino.

However, underneath the MGM Grand, there remained a piece of Chinatown’s history. A rather big piece, actually.

Not many knew about the underground complex where Detroit’s last dragon went to hide when his home was forcibly removed by the ever growing progress of a city. But the complex stretched well beyond the confines of the casino. In fact, I’m not sure if anyone really knew how large the place was. For the few of us in the magical community who knew of its existence, I don’t know of anybody who had been inside. Yet Toft Kitchens had claimed to know exactly where the vault containing the dragon’s booty was located. When I had asked him how he knew, he had blown off the question. I assumed it was the same way he knew this Brand of Gelding was in the vault to begin with. I couldn’t argue. I had to trust his intel. Had to go with the flow.

I hated the flow.

I used the casino’s valet parking. Made things easier than searching around for a parking place. I handed over my keys and headed inside, out of the humidity and into a chilly yet comfortable air-conditioning. I quickly threaded my way across the casino floor, the ping and pling of slot machines and video poker near deafening. I could smell grilled steak and onions from the casino’s Wolfgang Puck. A fair amount of people occupied the casino despite the late hour—it was after midnight by this point. Most of the patrons were over fifty. A good number well over fifty.

I made my way directly to the high limit room. I kept my head down and my pace brisk. I wanted as few people to notice me as possible. Especially since the next few moments would get strange.

I snuck into the high limit lounge and hung back in a corner. Luckily, I had the space mostly to myself and could scoot back out of sight from anyone outside the lounge area.

Then I pulled out the ghost blood and took a sip.

I felt the effects immediately. The fluid went down cold, like liquid nitrogen. A shiver raked through my whole body, shaking me like a mini seizure. My stomach did a couple flips as if I were going through the loops on a roller coaster, then I felt myself…fade. Really the only way I could describe it. It felt as if I was in a dream, that moment right when you drift from waking to sleep. It’s that same time when the sensation of falling can sometimes snap you back awake.

When I looked down at my hands I could see right through them. Everything from my skin to my clothes took on a glowy white kind of appearance, like headlights through fog.

I glanced around to make sure no one had walked in on me. Last thing I needed was a bunch of people screaming about the ghost in the casino. Then, my stomach doing another little spin, I let myself drop through the floor.

Passing through solid objects is weird. What’s weirder is the feeling. It’s like a really bad rash all over. While you are in the solid stuff, you get super itchy. Only, you don’t have any skin you can scratch. It is bizarre.

I floated down, using my thoughts to control my decent. It wasn’t much different navigating in ghostly form as walking. You didn’t have to concentrate. You just
went
.

I must have traveled through twenty feet of concrete and steel before my head finally cleared the ceiling of the underground complex in what was supposed to be the dragon’s vault.

Supposed to be.

Instead, I glided down into a bathroom.

A spacious and luxurious one, granted. But still a fucking bathroom.

The room was nearly as big as my entire house. A hot tub large enough to accommodate a full-sized van was in one corner. All the fixtures on the tub and sinks gleamed golden. The floor was made of a salmon-colored marble. Gold trim lined pretty much everything.

I guess dragons needed a lot of room to bathe, though the toilet seat, while solid gold, was regulation sized. Dragons typically operated much like vampires or shifters. They had a human form they used when walking among mortals, and then their natural form. Limitations such as mass and weight didn’t apply. A twenty-foot-long dragon could turn himself into a one-hundred and twenty pound person without much thought.

That’s why they call this stuff magic, kids.

I wasn’t sure how many house guests the dragon entertained, but it appeared he spent at least some of his time down here in mortal form. All well and good, and an interesting bit of learning. But it didn’t do me any good for my particular mission. I highly doubted the dragon kept any loot in his damned bathroom.

Kitchens had flubbed this up good.

I only hoped the vault was close. I did not have time for a long tour of the dragon’s lair. The ghost blood would only last another ten minutes. Then I would need the second dose to get out. I sure as hell wasn’t going to go wander around in corporal form. I could spend a decade searching the massive underground complex that way.

Quickly, I started floating through walls, traveling from one room to another. A spacious bedroom. A garage with so many shiny makes and models of cars, I couldn’t count them. A gallery with sculptures and paintings I recognized from a Humanities class I took as a blow off in high school. Something told me these weren’t prints or copies.

Wow.

I even went through a wide hall with suits of armor lining each side like a royal guard, only each suit was different from the next, encompassing all lands and eras. A few were battered. Many had scorch marks. I had a feeling these may have belonged to fabled knights and their attempts to slay this particular dragon. Unlike the story books, they hadn’t fared so well. I wondered how many distressed damsels had ended up as dragon food. One for each suit of armor? More?

Probably more.

Thankfully, I found the vault at the end of this hall. The vault’s massive round door was covered by an ornate curtain. I whisked through the curtain and then right through the door and into…

Well, it wasn’t anything like I had expected. No piles of gold coins and crowns and jewels. No piles of any kind for that matter. Instead, countless numbers of plastic bins of various sizes set on metal shelves twenty-feet high. Each bin had a number on it. Most of them six digits or longer from what I could see. The vault looked more like a Costco than home to a dragon’s collected treasure.

The massiveness of the job I had before me struck me hard. A pit dropped in my stomach as I stared down near infinite aisles of stuff. How the hell was I going to find one piece of treasure in all of this?

I hadn’t asked myself that question going in because I had hoped a solution would present itself. In other words, I would wing it because I had no freaking clue.

For a moment, I thought all was lost. Even in ghost form, I couldn’t fly through and check each of the thousands of bins for one item. I only had about five minutes left in this form anyway.

I almost sank right through the floor in my despair, then I looked up at the bins again.

The numbers. Some kind of indexing system? Dragons had long memories, but there was no way he could remember everything he had in here and which number corresponded to what. He had to have some kind of reference. A giant book?

I didn’t know. But I had to find it.

I flew through the warehouse/vault like a mad banshee, at one point passing a forklift parked in an aisle. Eventually, I came to a computer terminal. I had to laugh. Looked like even dragons had entered the modern age.

I hovered in front of the terminal for the last couple minutes of the ghost blood’s effects. I returned to corporeal form with a soft
pop
in my ears as if I had adjusted to a new pressure level. I dropped a couple inches and landed on my feet. For a moment, my body felt twice as heavy as it was since I had grown used to gravity not affecting me.

I shook off the feeling and wiggled a mouse next to the keyboard of the terminal. The monitor flickered to life. The system was instantly recognizable as a standard database kind of thing. It would be like looking up a book at the library. I just hoped the Brand of Gelding was on a low shelf. I didn’t want to waste time driving around in that forklift.

I clicked into the search field and typed in Brand of Gelding. Tapped the ENTER key.

A little hourglass popped up on the screen, tipping over and over while the machine thought. Twenty seconds later a result popped up. A few columns which had the item’s name, its index number, the date it was shelved, and another number labeled “aisle.”

“How sweet is that?” I said and clapped my hands.

I strolled off to find the proper aisle. I probably walked the equivalent of a city block before I found it. Then another half block to arrive where the bin number should have been. I craned my neck back and scanned downward until I found my number. Luck was on my side. I was looking at a bin on the bottom shelf.

For once, something about this cluster-fuck I had found myself in came easy.

The bin was only about three feet by two feet. When I slid it off the shelf, I noticed it didn’t weigh much. I popped the lid off and a dank scent wafted out. It smelled like…rotten flesh?

But only a single item lay inside. And it matched the picture Kitchens had sent to my phone exactly. A long, rusty looking brand like a cattle rancher might use to mark his stock. The brand on the end was a round symbol that didn’t make any sense to me. Frankly, I didn’t care. If this somehow could fix my vampire problem, I would take it. Though, in the back of my mind, I wondered if I needed to be literally branded by this thing.

Something told me the answer was both ugly and obvious.

Never mind all that. I grabbed the shaft of the brand in my left hand, pulled the last dose of my ghost blood out with my right. I popped the rubber cork out of the bottle with my thumb and let it roll away on the floor. I wouldn’t need it. I chugged the bottle while gripping the brand tightly, worried irrationally that it might not discorporate along with me, even though it should.

And it did.

I tossed the bottle aside. It floated wistfully away for a moment, but then turned solid, dropped to the floor, and shattered. Whatever I had in contact with me when I disapparated had to stay in contact, or the effect would wear off. So I’d best hang onto the brand.

Only one thing left to do.

Get out.

I shot straight for the ceiling like Superman taking off. The ceiling in the vault was at least forty-feet high. I didn’t know where it would come out at, or who might see me when I came up, and I didn’t much care. I would fly away before they could be sure they actually saw me. Give them a ghost story to tell their kids.

Everything was working out.

Until I hit the ceiling.

I actually didn’t come in contact with the ceiling itself. I hit some invisible force about a foot shy. I tried a couple more times at different spots, and continued to come up against it. I tried going through the vault’s walls with similar results. So then I tried the way I had come in, through the vault door.

No dice.

Some kind of magical field had me trapped inside. But why hadn’t it kept me out?

Then I heard the vault door
clang
. The sound echoed through the silent vault. The giant door swung inward on its oversized hinges, and standing in the entrance—the Detroit dragon, Kuan-Yin Chern.

He was in human form. A slight old man with a long mustache, its gray wispy ends hanging several inches beyond his chin. He wore small round glasses. His gray hair was pulled back in a pony tail that stretched down to his waist.

The smile on his face explained why the vault’s magical field kept an intruder inside rather than out. It was a honey trap. And I’d been lured right in.

This dragon had caught himself a free meal.

Chapter Twenty-Two

The good news was, with the ghost blood in my system, I could slip through a dragon as easily as I could a wall. So, with the door open, I hoped I could blow right through him and out of the vault. I clutched the brand more tightly and shot straight toward the dragon.

His eyes widened behind his circular lenses. He staggered a step to one side, but not soon enough.

I passed straight through his body and on out through the vault door. Nothing stopped me. I was home free.

Once I cleared the vault, I turned upward and plunged into the ceiling. A few seconds later, I rocketed out of the floor in the middle of one of the casino’s slot rooms. The machines dinged and pinged all around me. I hesitated for a brief second to get my bearings.

In that pause, an old lady sitting on the end of a row of slots glanced in my direction. The plastic bucket of coins she held in one hand slipped from her grip. Quarters jangled loudly as they poured out of the bucket. The woman’s mouth opened wide to show an ugly set of dentures that were in desperate need of a good Polident soak.

I smiled at her as if playing the friendly ghost might soften the blow of my sudden appearance.

Made things worse.

She screamed, her voice cutting through the electronic din of the machines filling the room.

Other faces turned in my direction. Their intense and shocked stares pushed against me like a physical force. I felt pinned in place despite my ethereal condition.