Where Sleeping Dragons Lie (Skeleton Key)
Read Where Sleeping Dragons Lie (Skeleton Key) Online
Authors: Cristina Rayne,Skeleton Key
WHERE SLEEPING DRAGONS LIE
(Skeleton Key)
CRISTINA
RAYNE
The
characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to
real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.
Copyright
© 2016 Cristina Rayne
Published
by Fantastical Press
All
Rights Reserved
No part
of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in
any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or
otherwise, without express written permission of the author.
“You know, you’re
practically drooling, right?” Briana said with amusement as she watched her
friend, Carol, stare down with bright, excited eyes at the book she had brought
from her late grandmother’s collection as though the book was the true
Book
of the Dead
.
“If there weren’t
customers milling about, I would be squealing like a little girl seeing a
unicorn in her backyard,” Carol joked.
“From your reaction, I
take it Granny Ruth never showed this book to you, either?”
Some of the excitement dimmed
from the older woman’s eyes. “No. She must’ve acquired it right before
she—passed. Or rather, I imagine it was a sudden, unexpected find given that
she never mentioned that she was hunting for anything even remotely like this
beauty.”
Briana’s eyes once again
fell on the old, leather-bound book that Carol was carefully examining with
gloved hands. The leather appeared to have darkened over the years, whether
naturally or because of the preservation efforts of its previous owners
remained to be seen. There were a few cracks along the spine from years of
being open and read, though there was thankfully no initial evidence of red
rot.
“The book was on the
center shelf in her rare books case,” Briana said. “I must’ve walked by it
dozens of times over the past month before I finally noticed it.”
“Maybe because of the
archival sleeve?” Carol offered absently as she carefully opened the book to
its title page. “It’s the same type Ruth used for all her rare books, so I
wouldn’t think it would particularly catch your eye.” She raised her eyes and
looked back at Briana with a flash of grief. “Plus, you’ve had too many things
weighing on your mind and heart these days to notice something as innocuous as
a new book.”
Briana shook her head.
“But I
shouldn’t
have had to notice it at all. Granny Ruth
always
called me the moment she found a book even remotely interesting, but an obvious
treasure like
this
? You haven’t said much about it, but all teasing
aside about the drooling, I can see it in your eyes. This book is something
special. Even factoring in her heart attack—” She cut herself off, a knot of
grief abruptly forming in her throat before she forced it down and shook her
head again. “It’s just—strange,” she continued thickly.
“Hmm…it doesn’t appear
to have been oiled by its previous owners. I don’t see even a hint of
bleed-through along the spine.” Carol suddenly gasped, and her eyes narrowed. “What—
is
this?”
“I know, right?” Briana
replied with an excited grin, reaching down with a white-gloved hand to point
at a series of strange, fading symbols that were handwritten—or drawn—on what
she assumed was the title page. “I figured this was why there wasn’t any kind
of title etched in the spine. The writing doesn’t even remotely match any kind
of alphabet I’ve ever seen. The whole book is written in it. I might be jumping
the gun here, but it reminds me a lot of the
Voynich
manuscript, only
without the strange pictures.”
Carol looked over at her
sharply before carefully opening the book a few pages in. “Don’t tease me like
that. I don’t recognize the writing either, but for all we know, this could
just be a prank or someone’s old journal written in their own personal cipher.”
Briana nodded. “I
thought so, too. I didn’t want to get you excited for nothing, so I took a few pictures
with my phone of blocks of writing from different pages and ran them through a
Google image search. The search brought up a lot of pictures of old vellum,
handwritten pages, but none of the writing on them even remotely matched these—letters?”
“I can see why you would
hesitate to call them that,” Carol said. “Each line of writing just looks like
a stretched out water hose twisted with kinks here and there of various-sized
loops surrounded by a random number of dots and diagonal, short lines. The writing
in the Voynich manuscript at least had letters that
resembled
our
alphabet.”
“A water hose, huh,”
Briana echoed with a grin. “I was thinking more along the lines of a weirdly
embellished EEG line, but a twisted up water hose works, too.”
The older woman snorted.
“You would have water hoses on the brain, too, if you had spent a couple of
hours spraying weed killer onto your lawn this morning like I had, but go ahead
and laugh at an old woman.”
“I wouldn’t dream of it.
Don’t bite the hand that feeds you and all that.”
A familiar bell abruptly
chimed behind her, signaling that a customer had entered the book shop.
“Oh, shoot,” Carol
muttered as she began to take her gloves off. “I forgot I had an appointment
this morning. A new client.” Her eyes flitted longingly back down to the book
they had been examining.
“I’m not going
anywhere,” Briana assured her. “I don’t have any more lectures today, so we can
study the book together all day if
you
can spare the time.”
Carol still looked torn.
“If he weren't so interested in buying my latest acquisition, I would
reschedule and close up shop for the rest of the day, but…”
“Go,” Briana said,
giving her back a nudge towards the door. “I’ll call Melody in the meantime and
see how soon she can fit us in to have the book carbon dated.”
“Good idea.”
Ten minutes later, Briana
was just ending her call with Melody when the door suddenly opened to reveal
Carol. Surprised, Briana opened her mouth to ask if the older woman had
forgotten something before the words froze in her throat when she realized that
someone was following Carol into the room.
A black-haired man dressed
in a stylish, black suit sans tie that wouldn’t have looked out of place at a celebrity
red carpet event paused behind her friend just a couple of steps beyond the
threshold. His age could have been anywhere between late twenties to
mid-thirties. His short hair was just a bit longer in front and artfully tousled,
and he had about a couple of days’ worth of stubble above his upper lip and along
his jawline.
This
was Carol’s
new client?
He turned his head slightly
from left to right as he briefly glanced around the room until his gaze
abruptly paused, then settled on her, his expression openly curious.
He was so far afield
from the shop’s usual clientele that Briana was thoroughly caught off guard,
and it took every ounce of her self-control to keep her expression neutrally
friendly when confronted so abruptly by the face of one of the most gorgeous
men she had seen in possibly
ever
.
“This is Mr. Taron Hildebrand.
Excuse us for a moment,” Carol told her absently as she led the striking man to
the series of glass cases that took up the entire back wall of the shop’s examining
room.
The older woman paused
in front of a case that contained the rarest books in the shop’s collection.
Briana’s heart sped up in a different kind of excitement. The store’s finances had
been getting worryingly lean this year no matter how hard Carol had been trying
to hide that fact from her, and one big sale could instantly turn that all around.
Carol was Granny Ruth’s
best friend, and over the years of spending countless hours researching and
obsessing over the ancient tomes that came in and out of this rare books shop
with the two older women, she had become much the same to Briana. Had she not
had Carol to lean on and mourn with, Granny Ruth’s abrupt death would have
destroyed her. Her friend deserved this windfall and more.
“I apologize for making
you come back here,” Carol said, her voice breaking through Briana’s dark
thoughts. “I had a bit of unexpected excitement this morning and didn’t get to
transfer the book to one of the viewing cases in my office.”
“It’s fine,” Mr.
Hildebrand assured her in a strong, totally sexy and British-accented bass that
seemed to reverberate throughout the room and pleasantly over her senses. “I
had hoped for an opportunity to physically examine the book during this
meeting.”
With an internal sigh,
Briana carefully closed her grandmother’s mysterious book. It seemed her
continuing examination of the book would have to wait, at the very least
another hour, until Carol was finished with her appointment.
“I’ll give you two some
privacy.” She carefully picked up the book. “Carol, I’ll just put this in an
empty case in your office while I go out for breakfast in the meantime.”
Briana turned her
attention to Carol’s gorgeous new client just as he was turned to look back at
her over his shoulder. “Can I offer you some tea, coffee, or juice, Mr. Hilde—”
Her words cut off in a
sharp gasp as his eyes had fallen on the leather book in her still-gloved hands
and in the next second, all but lunged towards her with a wild, scary look in
his eyes. She instinctually flinched away and took a couple of unconscious steps
back until the small of her back bumped into the examining table’s edge.
As her mind shrieked in
warning, Mr. Hildebrand stopped just short of touching distance and then all
her frantic mind could focus on was a pair of strangely orange-tinted hazel
eyes the color of an ocean sunset regarding her with an intense, laser focus,
even while her heart was threatening to beat out of her chest.
“I’ll pay you five
hundred thousand dollars for that book right now without examination,” he
offered firmly, both hands raised slightly towards her with fingers flexing as
though he longed to just snatch the book away from her.
Briana swallowed against
the knot of fear that had suddenly formed in her throat and exchanged a quick,
startled look with Carol, whose frozen, shocked expression probably mirrored
her own.
“I’m sorry,” she replied
slowly, struggling not to squirm under that fierce, unnerving gaze, “but this
one isn’t currently for sale.”
After a horribly tense,
though brief, moment of silence where even the very air seemed to be holding
its breath, the corners of his lips slowly quirked up into a mild grin while
those sunset eyes continued to bore into her disconcertingly. “I figured as
much, but I had to offer all the same.”
He took a few steps back
until she no longer felt as though her personal space was being invaded, and his
expression turned sheepish as he joined his hands together behind his back into
a more relaxed pose. “I thought I recognized—well, forgive me. It seems my
enthusiasm got the best of me again, and I gave you an unintentional shock.
That was terribly rude of me.”
Gripping her
grandmother’s book a bit more tightly, Briana straightened and offered him a
small smile of forgiveness even though all her senses were still screaming
danger
!
“That someone can get that excited about a book in this day and age should make
us all happy.”
He chuckled. “Indeed.”
He looked over his shoulder and nodded towards Carol, who was currently
watching their exchange with anxious eyes, before turning back to Briana.
”Perhaps I’ll have better luck with the volume I initially came to examine. If
it’s not too much trouble, I’ll accept a cup of black tea with a dash of cold
milk if you have it—or if not, a cup of coffee, black, will be fine.”
Despite some lingering
misgivings about leaving her friend alone with Mr. Hildebrand, Briana nodded.
“I’ll be just a minute.”
Carol’s bookshop had a
small coffee and cappuccino bar in the front to cater to both the casual
browser fresh off the street and the serious rare book collectors that had
become regular buyers over the years. As she waited for Carol’s part-timer,
Misty, to prepare a cup of black tea to order, Briana’s pulse still continued
to race even though it was several minutes after that initial shock.
In that split-second when
Taron Hildebrand had shot towards her, she imagined that sudden burst of terror
she had experienced was the same terror a rabbit felt in the face of an
unexpected viper’s strike. Maybe that’s why her heart still couldn’t be calmed.
His alarming behavior, on top of being observed with such uncanny eyes, had triggered
all the warning bells in her mind. Was she a complete idiot to ignore them for
the sake of being polite to a new client and a desperately needed lucrative
sale?
The sound of a door
creaking open had her neck instantly craning towards the back of the shop.
Although she shouldn’t have been, Briana was still surprised to see Mr.
Hildebrand hurrying back into the sales room with an anxious-looking Carol a
few steps behind. His cell phone was pressed against his left ear, drawing her
eyes to the slight frown and intense expression darkening his eyes. He gave her
a curt, distracted nod as he passed the coffee counter on his way to the shop’s
exit.
The sound of the bells
on the entrance door clanging were still echoing in the shop as Briana turned
to Carol with a bewildered look. “What happened?”
Carol sighed. “Just
plain old rotten luck, I would guess. I had just placed the book he came to
examine on the table when he suddenly received a phone call. I could tell he
was irritated with the interruption, the way the muscles in his face kind of
hardened, but he answered it immediately, nonetheless.”
“Something work
related?” Briana hazarded.
“Probably. He hung up
rather quickly and apologized for having to cut his appointment short. Then he
headed towards the door, telling me over his shoulder he’d call and
reschedule.”
“Tea?” Misty offered
with a wry grin, setting the steaming cup of black tea she had been preparing
for their wayward guest in front of Briana.
“Sure.” She picked up
the teacup and gestured towards the back with her free hand. “I hate that your
potential buyer flaked out on us, but I’m really dying to get back to examining
Granny Ruth’s book. Breakfast can wait. Do you think Joseph would be willing to
drive up to meet with us tomorrow morning? If anyone has a chance of knowing
anything about that strange writing, it would be him.”