Dragon 7 Chapter 21 (Patreon)

I sighed, tapping out an idle beat on the steering wheel while my mind wandered. We were still waiting in that dark parking lot.

The man hadn’t really provided more information besides that Simon’s body was still important to them for some reason.

Eventually the guy had passed out from his nerves, and we were sitting and waiting for Morgana to call. I was starting to get bored, and more than a little anxious.

Rather than continue to wait, I decided it was time to go after my favorite vampire.

Feeling for my marks left on each of my mates, I sorted them until I picked out Morgana’s. Then I put the van into drive before peeling out of the spot.

“Where are we going?” Sarisah asked from the back.

“Finding Morgana.” I opened up the map on my phone and zoomed out, feeling the general direction and finding a highway that vaguely matched that direction. With my goal in place, I peeled out. “She’s moving fast. If I had to guess, Carl got in a car before she got to him.” Which meant chances were he hoped on the highway.

“Can’t she outrun a car?” Chloe asked.

If I knew Morgana, and I was pretty sure I did, she was tailing Carl. “She doesn’t want to catch him, not yet. If he’s running, he’s running to somewhere. Hopefully, it’s somewhere with more people we want to catch.”

I calmed down and pulled onto the highway, feeling Morgana continuing to move further away, even as the van picked up speed and roared down the road.

Clearly, Carl was booking it to wherever he was headed.

Morgana veered off to the side and I pinched at the map, trying to guess the exit based on the head start she had. Picking the one that felt the most right, I continued on the highway for another ten minutes before calmly exiting and continuing to track them.

“My king.” Chloe was looking down at the passed out painter. “What do we do with him? If he has Iapetus’s blessing, then he might break any restraints we put on him.”

“Can you kill him without making a mess? He might seem pitiful, but he is working with our enemies.” I had no sympathy for anyone involved in the current situation.

“Oh, yeah. That’s not a problem.” A blue light came from the backseat as lightning crackled. I heard a few thumps as the man’s body jerked against the floor.

Sarisha cleared her throat. “When we get to a stopping point, I can just melt him with my acid. It should remove any trace.” It was almost eerie how easily she could dispose of a body.

I paused, annoyed as I realized that Morgana and I were not going to get paid for our current case. Now Norton and these idiots have robbed me of hard earned gold.

“That would be best. It would be good to get rid of any evidence.” I wondered if I should tell our client he was involved in illegal activities to help soften the blow.

I pawed at the steering wheel as my dragon instincts craved for ever more gold.

“Are you okay?” Chloe asked.

“Just being a dragon. Mourning the gold we just lost by killing this guy.” I replied.

Sarisha nodded. “That’s okay. I’m sure your investments are making more than that.”

There was a silent pause in the van.

“You do have investments, right?” Sarisha pushed.

I grumbled. “By investments, do you mean a hoard full of gold coins to play in?” I answered sheepishly. Before all of this, I was a college student and I had no savings.

“My king!” Sarisha gasped. “Do you not have a 401k or anything?”

“I mean, pretty sure I’m set for life with Jadelyn. But to answer your question, all my money is in gold coins or gems and sitting in my hoard. But I was made to join as a business partner in multiple of Jadelyn’s enterprises.” I tried to make it sound better.

Sarisha just shook her head. “My king, if you just put a portion of your gold in stocks.”

I growled. “Mine.” Just the very thought of turning my gold to stocks made me unreasonably angry.

She held up her hands. “Alright. But stocks are a wonderful way to make more gold in the future.” She tried to appeal to the dragon, not the logic in me.

“How much more?” I eyed her in the rearview mirror as I drove.

She smiled, seeing that she had me. “You could put a hundred gold coins in and nine years have two hundred.” She tried to tempt me. “It isn’t like your hoard would miss a few hundred or even a few thousand gold coins.”

That sounded more like magic to me than turning into a giant dragon.

Chloe snorted. “We all know that a dragon would miss even one gold coin. But my king, you should do some investments. We are long-lived, and it makes a difference. Even in my eighty years it has made a substantial difference.”

“Jadelyn certainly has some.” I argued.

“Yes, and are you always going to be reliant on your wife?” Sarisha pursed her lips.

That hit me right in my dragon king pride. She had a point.

I grumbled. “How much should I put away?”

“Half.” Sarisha said.

“H-h-half?” My hands nearly wrung the steering wheel into pieces. “No. Not half.”

“At least a quarter of your hoard. It’ll double in nine years. You can take half of it back out in 9 years and then in a few centuries you’ll be rich beyond belief.” Sarisha was trying. “Besides, you need to make room anyway. Larisa is going to add her hoard soon, and then the rest of us hopefully soon after.” There was a purse of her lips that told me I should just nod along.

“So, I have to take half out for nine years. I think, maybe, I could do that.” It made my palms sweaty as shit to think about losing the gold. Gold was safe, secure. It had value. The nebulous world of investments was kind of a black hole to me.

“What if it all goes wrong, like the stock market implodes or something?” I sought a way out.

She frowned at me and let out a sigh before she explained. “If the American stock market implodes, the entire system crumbles. I mean everything. We’ll have bigger things to worry about than you losing some gold.”

Hanging my head forward, I thought about my coins, each one of them was precious to me, so precious.

“If you would like, I can manage that money.” Sarisha offered.

I mulled over it. “How much is in my hoard?”

“You know what’s in there best.” Chloe reminded me and Sarisha pulled out her phone to use as a calculator. “It’s got to be a shit ton. Let’s just talk about gold coins.”

“There are 9,092,873,197 gold coins.” I preened at the size of my hoard and looked back at them, feeling a bit smug. Though, a lot of that had been from my mother’s hoard. She had literal hills of gold coins that I had taken because she wasn’t using.

I wonder if she’ll come to the next conclave and check her cave?

Neither of them seemed shocked about my hoard.

“Okay. So if we talk about half of those, let's just spitball at about 18 billion we can invest.” Sarisha replied. “I think we can avoid the gems and the jewelry. Those aren’t particularly easy to move, and that much gold we are going to have to do in many smaller batches.”

“Nothing about the amount?” I grumbled.

“We all saw the mounds of gold in Tiamat’s cave.” Chloe pointed out. “It’s not exactly a shock. Besides, you should see my father’s hoard. He has been investing since the beginning of the stock market and pulling out little bits into gold every year.”

A low growl rumbled in my chest. “He has more gold than me?” My dragon rose to the challenge.

“Focus on driving. Besides, the Scalewrights probably make more than that in profits every year.” Sarisha replied, pointedly not answering my question. She laughed and shifted forward to pat my shoulder before leaning over the back of my seat. “If we work together, we can have much more gold than Brom in the future.”

“Yes.” I rumbled, the idea of my gold piles being bigger than Brom pleased me.

Sarisha wrapped herself around the back of my seat and kissed the top of my head. “I’ll help you make so much gold. Endless fields of gold.” She rubbed at my chest as it continued to rumble at the thought of gold, gold everywhere.

I had enough thought to pull off on the right exit and slow down as I continued to track Morgana through the grid-like side streets of the suburb.

Sarisha kept promising me gold and calming me down until my phone rang.

I snapped it up, seeing that it was Morgana. “Hello, blue and beautiful.”

“Hello. Wondering where I am yet?” She teased.

“Nope, I’ve been following your mark. But narrowing it down would be helpful.” I replied.

She chuckled, but kept her voice low. “Tulsey Park. Waiting for you in the parking lot. He’s gone into the woods off the trail, but we’ll track him.”

I nodded, remembering seeing the park on the map. It was a big one, but most of it was just a trail, leaving a lot of ground for him to hide within. “See you soon.” I hung up and brought the map up, heading directly for the park. We weren’t very far off at all.

“Going to go FBI agent hunting in the woods?” Chloe asked, with predatory excitement in her eyes.

“He’s in for a big surprise. I just hope that he has something valuable at the end of this.” I pulled off the road into an entrance for the park and followed Morgana’s mark to a parking lot.

It was just a sheet of asphalt next to the entrance to several trails. There weren’t even lights, but a few cars were left in the parking lot this late at night.

When I pulled in, I shifted my eyes and looked around. There wasn’t any security I could find, making me smile. I was tired of having to suppress all my natural instincts.

As soon as I stepped out, Morgana pounced on me. “Got you.”

I rumbled a little in response.

“Oh. He’s all rumbly, I don’t think either of you gave him a blow job on the way, so you were talking about his gold?” Morgana asked the two dragons as they got out. Her voice was a little rough.

“I am not that predictable.” Moving my neck to the side, I knew she needed a drink after running that fast for so long. Vampires worked through their mana stores quickly with such a long run.

“You kind of are.” Morgana kissed my neck and nibbled at it for a second. “But we love you for it.” She sank her fangs in and took a long, deep drink.

The night became brighter as my eyes dilated a little from her venom. I wanted to pull her to me and really enjoy the moment, but it wasn’t the right time.

Sarisha dragged the painter out of the car and put him on the ground before green acid mist sprayed from her mouth, melting the bushes and the body until it was just a sizzling pile of mud.

Morgana came up for air and licked at the wounds until the two dots closed. “Thank you.”

“Of course.” I turned and kissed her. There was something intimate about letting her feed on me. “Which car?” I looked around, but I didn’t recognize any of them.

“The jeep.” Morgana pointed at one and walked over to it. She pulled a short sword out from between her breasts and moved to the front of the car.

We’d done the move before. But my two dragons trailed behind me watching us curiously.

I shifted a finger into a long hard claw, stabbing into the locking mechanism and wrenching the lock to the side.

There was the sound of metal being ripped at the door and a thin scrap of metal as Morgana’s blade punched through the hood.

The car made just the very start of a honk that died instantly. The lights still flashed, so Morgana went around the car, punching in with her blades, severing the cables behind each with a swift stab.

Modernized tools were great and all, but sometimes a sword really did the trick. Nobody made security systems very swordproof anymore. That and super strength was kind of cheating when it came to locks.

“You two, keep a lookout?” I asked Chloe and Sarisha.

They didn’t respond, instantly following my request. They took up a point on either end of the car, their eyes likely shifted to keep watch.

My brute force of the lock had worked, and I was opening the now silent and not flashing jeep to dig through his car.

“Anything interesting?” Morgana asked, peering over my shoulder.

“Food wrappers. Tells me they’ve been living out this thing more than they’d like. Charging cables. A few receipts.” I passed the receipts back to Morgana to see if there was a favorite place, but based on the wrappers on the floor, it seemed that they had only gone to the same coffee chain.

Maybe we could track that down.

“So, we talked to the last guy before we got here. His story is that there is a fae involved.” I caught Morgana up as I continued to pick through the car for clues.

Morgana clicked her tongue and sighed. “I was afraid of that after the fireball. Too quick for a magus, pretty powerful too. So, summer fae?”

“That’s what I figure too. Think it’s someone from the Summer Court?” I asked. “Or do you think it’s someone trying to rile up more strife?”

“Could be any number of motives. Let’s leave it for now. We can bring it to the Queens when we get back. Fae are a tangled web; they can sort it out better.” Morgana grumbled.

Everyone seemed to have bad experiences with the fae. Myself included at first, but Maeve had broken the mold, and Summer and Ikta had proven their loyalty lately.

I had a feeling the Fae Queens knew something I didn’t. Fae were always hard like that, thinking several steps ahead.

It was hard to figure out just what they were after, this one working with Norton in particular. My guess was that they were using Iapetus just as much as he was using them. Well, maybe more so. Iapetus’s men weren’t even told I was a dragon.

I began to wonder if the fae woman was using them as a distraction. They couldn’t hope to succeed with such little knowledge of the real situation.

So that begged the question, what were they after?

My hand fell on a hard cylinder of metal under the backseat. “Shotgun.” I pulled it out of the back seat and handed it to Morgana.

“Oh, it’s a nice one.” Morgana purred and pet the gun before putting it against her shoulder and getting a feel for it. “I’ll take it. Thank you husband. You give me the best gifts.”

I flashed her a smile and continued to dig through the car, but I didn’t find anything else noteworthy. Just some random supplies that wouldn’t interest me or Morgana.

“Nothing.” I said, forming a claw again and slashing the four tires. The last thing we’d want would be him making a run for it.

“Then we just go hunting in the woods.” Morgana lifted the shotgun and shoved it between her breasts, stuffing it into the spatial pocket she had in her bra.

I stared; it caught me off guard every time, like some sort of magic trick.

Morgana smirked, showing off her fangs as I watched. “Off we go. I followed him until he went off trail.”

I jerked my head to the side for the two dragons to follow and Morgana took the lead.

“Girls.” I spoke to the two dragons with us. “Shift your scales under your clothes. We are going to try and detain him rather than outright kill him, so he may get a few shots in.”

Both of them nodded.

“Once we get off trail. Stay alert, watch our back.” I told them.

“But my king.” Chloe tried to argue, but I glared at her.

“Morgana and I have this. Besides, you are just a few feet back. You should be able to react if something happens.” I reminded them, and they both nodded.

Morgana put a finger to her lips and pointed to a spot off trail.

It had been a dry few weeks, so sadly there were no easy footprints to follow. Luckily, we had paranormal senses on our side.

I sniffed the air. The scents came to me individually rather than a big jumbled mix and I picked out Carl. Following that scent, we wove through the woods, staying low and letting my predator instincts rise to the surface.

The beast felt like it was riding just behind my eyes as I started to move carefully, picking my way through the detritus of the forest, silently keeping track of his scent.

A rabbit bolted at my approach making some noise, but I kept low, keeping my ears open.

I smiled as I hunted. Soon, the FBI agent would be my prey.

It was all I could do to stop a satisfied rumble at the thought of catching them and tear them apart.

I licked my lips and continued through the woods until there was a steep drop off.

Out beyond the drop, a RV was stuffed among the woods. There was no clear path leading up to it, indicating it had been there for a while. Long enough for saplings to grow too tight to get it out of here.

That was only confirmed by the rusted corners and peeling side. But with Carl’s scent in the air, it was clear that it was his hideout.

I took a deeper breath.

Several other scents mixed in the air, but they were old. One scent particularly stank of death. Simon’s corpse had been brought to the RV, but I didn’t think it still remained.

There was one way to find out.