The Emerald Dragon (The Lost Ancients Book 3) Read online

  I guess the moral is to be grateful you’re not one of the ones smashed five hundred feet below.

  Covey dropped down to the ground, almost sniffing the dirt, then rose back to her feet and prowled around the tree we’d stopped in front of. Covey’s people were very good hunters with an exaggeratedly talented sense of smell. She usually put that skill aside as one akin to her berserker ancestors and rarely displayed it. It spoke to how concerned she was about Alric, that she was willing to drag it out now.

  “I believe whoever took the faeries waited at this tree.” Covey shook her head. “No. They waited in this tree, up there.” She scowled up into the leafy branches above us as if they would tell her their secrets. She stepped forward; her eyes still locked on the branches, and stepped on something. Swearing, she stepped backwards and picked up a cracked spell ball. This one was bright orange and yellow, made of something clear, but stronger than regular glass, and had the remains of a string and twig tied to it. She held it to her nose then pulled back in disgust and shoved it in my face.

  An overwhelming stench of sugar, ale, and what smelled like rusted nails slapped me in the face. “Gah! What is that?” I shoved it back at her but she let it drop to the ground. Then she shattered it by pounding on it with her right foot a few times.

  “They used an old faery trapper; I’m surprised anyone still knew the recipe. One whiff of that and the faeries would have been easy to grab.”

  I looked around. The girls would have been right around here since I told them to investigate but not go over the plains. “So whoever grabbed them did so…why exactly?”

  “Probably to use them to grab Alric. Or you. But considering Garbage was insistent only he come searching for the rest of them, I’d say it was him.”

  “She wouldn’t have set him up.” I knew my little orange faery was a pain in the ass, but she wouldn’t betray Alric like that.

  Covey stomped around the tree some more, but shook her head as she walked. “No, she wouldn’t. Nevertheless, that spell ball could have been used to plant a suggestion in her head. She thought she missed being taken, but I doubt that was the case.” Covey picked up the shreds of a spell wrapper. Pre-made spells weren’t that uncommon. Before my newfound magic had kicked in, I’d had to use them myself. Unfortunately, this wrapper was too shredded to see what spell it had held.

  “Wait, they went through this elaborate abduction set-up, then are messy enough to leave evidence behind? Sloppy. And why would someone want to take Alric?” I didn’t have either the tracking skills of Alric, or the scenting skills of Covey, but I looked around as well. It really didn’t make sense that someone, or ones, would take the girls with the idea they could get Alric.

  Covey shrugged. “That is a damn good question, but someone did. Most likely he’d been up to something he didn’t tell us about.” She made one more pass around the area. When she found nothing, she turned and headed back to town.

  “Wait, so that’s it? Someone took him, and we’re just leaving?” I jogged to keep up, as she was moving quickly. My worry at him being gone was overlaid with the fact that Glorinal had once been able to strip Alric of his magic. What if Glorinal had taken him again?

  Covey stopped and turned to face me, but kept her voice extremely low. It was a trick she was trying to teach me, you spoke on your outward breath in a whisper. “No, that’s not it. But we can’t find out anything more here. And we’ve been watched for the last five minutes.”

  She glanced over her shoulder quickly, and then smacked me when I made to do the same. “They are still following us, I can’t see who they are, and no, don’t look.”

  We headed to a break in the trees. The right path went back into town, the left went toward the ruins.

  “At the break, you go left. I’ll go right. I’ll follow behind once they follow you.” She didn’t give me a chance to respond as she made a sharp right turn with a wave. “I’ll see you later, then!”

  I didn’t have much of a chance to do anything else. So I went toward the ruins.

  The path here was narrow and overgrown; this wasn’t a common way to get to the dig sites. I went a full minute before I heard a rustling behind me.

  I didn’t turn at first, in case the person following me was just that incompetent, but changed my mind when the sounds grew louder.

  And saw Covey wrestling Alric in the forest path.

  Chapter Fifteen

  “What are you doing?” I wasn’t sure if I was yelling at Covey or Alric.

  Covey had Alric pinned and was pulling at his hair. Considering I’d seen her fight many times, that tactic was unfamiliar to me.

  “Who are you?” She punched him when he tried to squirm away.

  That was another thing. I’d seen Alric fight, and this thing wearing Alric’s face wasn’t doing anything but trying to get away.

  “Another changeling?” An army of Alrics might be handy if they could fight in a battle, but so far these seemed to look like him but not have any of his skills. “Why isn’t he vanishing like the other one did?”

  Covey nodded back behind her. A pack similar to the one Alric had previously been carrying lay in the bushes behind her.

  “Search it. I bet you’ll find the spell ball inside.” Covey grunted as the fake Alric managed to get a strike in with his flailing.

  I stepped around them and grabbed the bag. Yup, nothing but rags, and an unbroken spell ball. I turned back to the wrestling match. “What are we going to do with him? Or it?”

  “It is going to tell us who sent it here and what it was supposed to do.” Covey accented her words with a few well-placed punches, and I saw the changeling flicker between Alric and the skinny gray thing I’d see in Covey’s house.

  “I’m Alric! I am him!” The thing’s voice was sort of Alric’s, but whereas the first changeling had sounded exactly like him, this one was muted, like it was a copy of a copy. I peered down closer to see his face and it looked a bit off too. The features were more rounded than Alric’s.

  “Look, we saw you drop your disguise, and we already caught the other one of your kind. You might as well fess up if you don’t want to meet the same fate.” With any luck, it would think we killed the first one.

  The thing gave one final burst of strength, which was met by a few more punches from Covey. Finally, it lay still.

  “I am a changeling, yes, but I was hired to take the previous form.” The thing’s speech was now refined and crisp. The accent was unrecognizable. “I do not know who hired me, it was through another party. I have never been in this…city…before, and I can assure if you let me go, I will never return.” Its superior attitude dropped a bit. “So you have killed my brother?”

  Research may say they didn’t have genders but they obviously thought they did. At least they’d adopted them to communicate relationships.

  Covey remained sitting on him, but hadn’t hit him again since he changed. She finally shrugged. “I don’t think the other one is dead. It used its spell ball to escape.”

  I took the ball out of the bag and threw it down next to the changeling, but too far for it to reach. “No, you can’t have this one back.” I squatted down next to it. “You were wearing the face of someone I care about. That doesn’t make me happy, especially since he’s gone missing. So you can either give my friend some answers, or you can see how angry I can get.” I narrowed my eyes. “Did you hear what happened to the last two groups of people who tried to mess with this town?”

  He shook his head, but there was a big dose of fear in those strange ice blue eyes. He knew something.

  “They aren’t alive anymore and suffered horribly before they died.” Now granted that was a stretch, a big one. I was there, but I didn’t directly kill any of them.

  “You are the terror of Beccia?” If possible, he now shrunk even further into himself and was even skinnier than he was before.

  I had never heard of the terror of Beccia, but I could work with it. “What do you think?” I leaned for
ward looking as fierce as I could. I also started to pull one of my knives out of its sheath.

  “Now, you know how messy it was the last time you went after someone like this. We don’t need that kind of trouble again.” Covey winked; she was having fun playing with this changeling.

  “I’m telling you—I don’t know anything. We were hired to make it seem like this elf was still in town. Started yesterday. There were two of us in different areas.”

  He paused, as if trying to recall something, then shook his head when it didn’t surface. “The person we’re playing is gone. We stepped in to make sure that it looks like he is still here.” He managed to snake one hand out from under Covey. “No, we don’t know where the person has gone to. They leave us imprint, money, and instructions.”

  Imprint? During the start of my magic training, Alric had briefly spoken of magical imprints. Unfortunately, he hadn’t gotten far beyond the basic concept. A magical image of a person was hard to capture and very difficult to work with. “So the imprint was what you copied. How do they leave it for you? He looked at me as if I was an idiot. “In a spell ball. We have two in our package: the maker and the escape.”

  He looked like he said something he shouldn’t have. The escape? That was what the one that escaped from Covey’s house used.

  Covey looked like she agreed. She leaned forward a bit to grab the spell ball and the changeling took advantage of her distraction and kicked her off. Covey was on her feet immediately and after the fake Alric.

  I tried to catch up, but she had much longer legs and was built to run. The best I could do was try to keep her in sight. At least until I rounded a bend and slammed right into her.

  “Dang it, don’t stop like that.” I fought to untangle limbs and push myself away.

  Covey swore and dusted herself off. “It got away.”

  “That wasn’t my fault; you’re the one who stopped in front of me. I could have caught up on my own.” Doubtful, but beside the point right now.

  “I know,” Covey said as she peered up into the trees above us. “It went up. Damn it, we’ve lost it for good.”

  A thought hit me. That changeling hadn’t been just running to get away, he seemed to be heading somewhere specifically. “Do changelings pick up anything from their targets? Like, anything they might have been rattling in their heads when the imprint was taken?” I was running off an assumption based on where Alric was when they saw him, and how the changeling appeared to have a specific destination in mind as he took off.

  Covey resumed walking the way she’d been running but still looked up in the trees. “I have no proof, but I’d think they’d have to get something from them.”

  I nodded down the path the changeling had gone. “So, could another hiding place have been in Alric’s mind when the spell was cast? Like one of the many we know he’s had in the ruins?”

  “I wouldn’t know for certain, but I could make an educated guess, that yes, that may very well be the case. Since we thwarted this one from vanishing,” She held up the spell ball in her hand, “he may be looking for anything else to help him get out of here.”

  Covey tilted her head, either listening or—knowing her—smelling for our friend. I was about to tell her I knew where all of Alric’s known hidey-holes were when she nodded to herself and started down one of the lesser-known trails. One that wasn’t near any of Alric’s places. There went my theory about the changeling.

  Anyone else I would have badgered until she told me where we were going. I’d learned years ago that when Covey hunted something, in a book or in a forest, to let her be. Within about fifteen feet, she lost whatever she’d been following.

  Covey paused a split-second, then barged forward through some bushes. I think she stopped just to make sure I followed, as she seemed far surer than someone with no trail on the ground should be.

  I’d never been this way before, but it seemed to be leading us around to the older ruins, the ones the Antiquities Museum, or rather the money behind them, had decided wasn’t worth the effort to try to excavate.

  The trees here were even older and more massive than the ones in the rest of the ruins, and considering the roots on the gapen trees in the main part of the ruins were often wider than me, that said something. Many of the above ground roots we climbed over were wider than five of me. And they took some serious scrambling.

  “I think he’s stopped, the scent is drifting here.” Covey kept her voice down and I peered around to see if anything was moving. Problem with massive trees—their equally massive tree canopies. It felt like a permanent twilight in here and visibility for folks like me wasn’t great.

  Leaves dropped on my head. Not surprising given where we were, but this was a lot of leaves. What was it with these changelings and trees? I looked up, but only caught his foot as he vanished into another tree. I followed, but trying to climb over giant roots and still watching the branches above wasn’t easy. Then I realized Covey wasn’t behind me.

  “Covey! He’s getting away!” I didn’t want to shout; best way to get lots of folks coming to you when you didn’t want them was to yell that something interesting was going on.

  “Here.” Years of teaching had given Covey the magic art of raising one’s voice loud enough to be heard without actually yelling. Of course more than a single word would have been helpful.

  The branches overhead had stopped moving, so either our changeling had moved on, or he’d heard us and was being smart and froze in place. I recently explored the dryad line of my family, but I think only a full-blooded one could climb one of these beastly trees.

  So much for following our lead. With a sigh, I turned around and trekked my way back to Covey. She’d gone a few more feet away from where I’d left her, standing in what looked like a huge, ancient, and prickly, mass of bushes. Or one very large one.

  “How did you get in there and why in the hell would you think I would follow?” The monster pile of shrubbery was at least up to my chest and looked meaner and more potentially outright aggressive the closer I got to it. Three-inch-long thorns curved in the best way to pierce skin, and if they didn’t get you, the thousands of tiny barbs in the branches and even on the leaves would.

  I’d been digging in Beccia for fifteen years and I’d never seen a plant like this. “Another question, what the hell is this?”

  Covey smiled and nodded as if we were out for tea at the café. “You noticed. Very good. There may be hope for you yet. This is a Flomixinian Rose bush. Deadly, poisonous, and some history books say carnivorous. It also died out thousands of years ago.” As she spoke she swung her hand right through the middle of it. I held my breath waiting for blood and screams, but she pulled her hand up with no bloody wounds that I could see. “It’s a spell placed on an ordinary crumpet bush. Just walk right through.”

  Alric might as well put out a sign for Covey that said, ‘here’s my hiding place’. Before she’d become obsessed with elves, Covey had been extremely into plants. New ones, old ones, fictional ones. Growing up in a land mostly filled with deserts, she loved plants. Normal people would take one look at the beastie before me and do what I still wanted to, run in the opposite direction. However, it was a green flag for Covey.

  I started walking through the mirage. Even knowing it wasn’t real still didn’t stop me from cringing as I took the first step in, then almost got knocked over by a suspicious whap to the side of my head.

  “We here! We help!” Garbage was the one who hit me. Leaf and Crusty had overshot and were tumbling in the air past us, both giggling and laughing like mad fiends. And both going way too fast.

  I started to shout as they were aiming right for one of the giant gapen trees, but both changed course, split around the tree and crashed into a smaller one behind it.

  “Is okay! We good!”

  They almost flew past me again, but spun at the last minute. I ducked so instead of hitting me they slammed into the crumpet bush.

  “Let me guess, the three of you f
ound some more tea?”

  “Yes. Nice people leave cups for us.” Crusty answered this time. It took her three fly-bys to finally land on me.

  “You stole tea from the café?”

  Garbage stuck out her lower lip. “We no steal. They give. When they leave.”

  I didn’t want to know what they did to make the people leave their tea. But I probably needed to. I would be back to my ostracized status if I couldn’t let them go anywhere that might serve tea.

  “Okay, what did you do?”

  “Is this the time for this?” Covey had been patient for her, but she was on the hunt and wanted to keep going. “We lost the changeling, but there is definitely something hidden here. It may give us insight on Alric’s disappearance.”

  I waved at the giggling, hyperactive blurs of color zipping around us. “I’d say I need to know what kind of trouble I’m looking at.”

  Garbage hadn’t joined the other two as they played dodge and weave with the trees in the area. At least hitting them fifty percent of the time didn’t slow them down. “We no…fine. Bunky scare them we take drink.”

  I rubbed my forehead. This was even worse. Now people would be afraid of poor innocent Bunky. “Where is he anyway?”

  That killed Garbage’s buzz, even Leaf and Crusty slowed down and looked more serious. I was terrified that someone had hurt him while he helped the girls get their fix.

  “He go with Queen Mungoosey. She come by, said need talk.”

  Crusty flew up in front of me, a tiny frown on her face. “But she no talk at us.”

  That wasn’t good, but not surprising. The wild faeries, led by their tiny, flying cat-faery queen, had stepped in to help save the town when the glass gargoyle, or rather the people behind it, tried to open a portal to another dimension. The problem was that the faeries had their own prophesies, and helping us wasn’t on the list. The situation got worse when more of the wild faeries started hanging out with my three troublemakers and became domesticated.