Dragon's Blood

  A Prequel to The Dragon Thief

  Marissa Brandt

  Philtata Press, LLC

  Copyright © 2021 Marissa Brandt

  All rights reserved

  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.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, or 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 publisher.

  Cover design by: Jacqueline Sweet

  Chapter One – Trade Goods

  Mesa de Fuego Federal Dragon Reservation, Arizona

  My breath sounded like a badly-tuned truck engine by the time I finally reached the top of the ladder.

  At least they left me a ladder this time. Never mind it was a rickety structure of wood bound together with rope that looked like twisted grass or yucca fibers. Fan-fucking-tastic.

  Dad had always told me to look on the bright side. Then again, he’d been a relentless optimist right up until the day pancreatic cancer took him.

  Once I’d caught my breath a bit, I stepped on the very top rung and heaved myself over the edge of the cliff, trying not to kick the ladder over.

  Mission accomplished.

  I crawled forward a few feet on my hands and knees, feeling smooth, dusty rock beneath my palms as I put some distance between me and the long, long way down.

  Despite making this climb up the canyon wall once a month, my hamstrings and ass muscles burned with fatigue, mostly thanks to my heavy backpack.

  The first time Calvos sent me to the Mesa de Fuego Dragon Reservation, I’d climbed up to this cliff shelter using a mountain-goat path. It had taken me two hours of grueling effort, and I’d been convinced I’d keel over from a heart attack before I finally reached my destination.

  Back then, I’d been a soft college professor, used to an occasional workout in an air-conditioned gym.

  I wasn’t a professor anymore. Or soft.

  But I still hated heights and the weird, woozy feeling I got whenever I looked down to where my truck was parked at the bottom of the canyon, as tiny as a kid’s toy from this height.

  The morning sun cleared the canyon rim, making the banded red, orange, and cream-colored rock of the cliff walls glow like fresh lava.

  When I’d convinced myself I’d crawled far enough from the cliff edge to avoid accidentally falling over, I climbed to my feet.

  And came face-to-face with a large female dragon.

  “Holy shit!”

  The primal part of my brain shrieked at me. Run! Run! Now!

  No. Don’t act like prey, whatever you do. I forced myself to take a deep breath, hoping for calm.

  It didn’t help. I’d gone to a Japanese taiko concert once, and sounds of the giant drums had pulsed through my bones and skull. My pulse sounded like that now, pounding in my ears in a furious, deafening rhythm.

  My leg muscles twitched with the instinctive urge to flee. The silver-plated sword at my hip—because guns were prohibited on dragon reservations—felt completely inadequate.

  Before the vampire coup, I used to teach at the University of La Reina. I also wrote books and gave lectures about dragons and dragon behavior. My publisher’s PR department advertised me as “Dr. Fynn Drake —the Number One dragon expert in the world!”

  The label had gotten me regular gigs on talk shows, documentaries, podcasts, and the local news whenever the producers needed a talking head to discuss a dragon-related incident.

  The coup had put an end to my academic career, but my books were still popular enough to earn me a decent living. Even with the peace treaty in force for twenty years now, people were still fascinated by dragons. Kids loved reading about them, and the children’s book I had originally written for my daughter, Izzy, was still my best-selling work.

  Back then, I’d never actually come face-to-face with a dragon.

  Boy, how times had changed.

  And I was acquainted with this particular dragon. She was my occasional liaison with this dragon colony. Familiarity didn’t do much to tamp down my instinctive terror of the big, toothy beast, though.

  The dragon’s feathers rippled and her crest rose, body language I’d learned meant she was laughing at me.

  Her body plumage was mostly deep red, with a crest of shimmering peacock-green feathers topping her huge, triangular head and cobalt-blue patches on the top of her wings.

  She reminded me of a pet parrot my parents' next-door neighbor used to own.

  Yeah, right. She’s just a giant, really scary parrot. With a muzzle full of long, serrated black fangs.

  What the hell was she doing out here today? She never waited for me unless there was a problem of some kind.

  God, I hope she’s not hungry and in the mood to grab a quick snack from yours truly.

  On most of my trading runs, the arrangement was pretty simple. Pick up the crates of filled vials left in the dragon colony’s plaza. Deliver crates of empty vials, plus whatever trade goods we’d agreed upon as payment. I hardly ever spotted any of the colony’s dragons on my trips.

  The default payment was medical supplies—veterinary painkillers, suturing kits, bandages, stuff like that. Even in a functional colony, dragons regularly settled their disputes with fangs and claws.

  But occasionally, I’d find clay tablets printed with rows of the dragons’ cuneiform-like script, requesting special items they wanted me to bring on my next run out to the reservation. I’d reply by writing out how many filled vials the requested good would cost them.

  For the usual payment of pharmaceuticals and first aid supplies, I usually managed the transaction in one trip up and down the cliff face.

  But for special requests, especially those made in person—in dragon? Well, in five years of working as Richard Calvos’s dragon blood broker, I’d hauled some pretty weird shit up to that ladder.

  If the dragons wanted booze or guns, both of which were banned on dragon reservations, it’d cost the feathered beasts a lot.

  And even with Calvos’s bribes distributed liberally to the Bureau of Dragon Affairs hierarchy in the area, I’d sweat the entire run. Because there was always That One Guy, the one who prided himself on being incorruptible.

  Or, more likely, who hoped to shake down Calvos for a bigger bribe.

  Calvos wouldn’t let him get away with it, of course, but that wouldn’t help me if I was arrested first.

  “Sister-Dragon Kishar,” I said in Draconic. “May the morning sun be warm upon you.”

  I was one of the few humans who spoke and read Draconic. Which is why I had been spared after the vampire coup of La Reina. Richard Calvos, the bloodsucking overlord of La Reina, found me useful.

  I looked past Kishar, who sat on her haunches in the center of the large circular plaza, scanning the tall, square sandstone buildings surrounding the plaza. The structures predated the dragons here, and rose to the roof of the big overhanging cliff shelter. They had huge door-windows located halfway up the facades. No ground-level doors. And no ladders, of course. Because all of the residents here could fly.

  No other dragons in sight. And no sign of the “special package” I’d been promised on my previous trading run. Just the crate of filled vials that usually sat here in the plaza, waiting for me to pick up and transport it back to La Reina.

  Crap. That meant there really was a problem of some kind.

  “Trader Fynn,” Kishar acknowledged. Her breathy, whistling speech sounded oddly bird-like coming from something as huge and predatory as she.

  Kishar wasn’t her real name, of course. On my first trip to the reservation, she had informed me that dragons hated having their true names mispronounced. Therefore, those dragons who regularly interacted with humans had adopted human-sounding second names.

  “How may I serve you?” I asked.

  It was the expected polite phrase, even if the notion of having to do a dragon any favors gave me the cold shudders.

  "My mother-queen offers your male-queen an item of great value," Kishar replied.

  By male-queen, she meant Calvos.

  Dragons don’t have the concept of kings, or of any kind of male rulers. In the Before Time, I’d written several articles about the social structure within a dragon colony.

  Each colony was founded by a dragon queen. She hatched a staff of infertile daughters who helped her administer the colony and care for hatchlings. Smaller male dragons arrived from other colonies and were adopted to serve as guards and warriors, and to compete amongst themselves for the privilege of mating the queen and fathering a clutch of her eggs.

  Only when a dragon queen died would her daughters become fertile. They then either struck out on their own to found new colonies, or, more commonly, fought to the death amongst themselves for the right to become the successor-queen of their late mother’s colony.

  In the wake of the Great Victory, monitoring the establishment of new dragon colonies kept the feds on their toes. The dragons had nearly been wiped out in the closing months of the war, but in the quarter-century since then, their numbers had rebounded.

  Nowadays, there were frequent opinion pieces in the news media and heated online debates around whether humanity should’ve exterminated dragons completely after their defeat.

  Most people hated dragons, having lost family members both before and during the Great War. Not to mention the long history of humans living in fear of the giant predators, and the centuries of open conflict spurring people and governments to invent new ways to protect themselves.

  “Your queen is generous,” I responded, forcing myself to follow dragon etiquette. “What does she offer my male-queen?”

  My boss would be pissed if the special package turned out to be a bait-and-switch and the dragons had decided to change the regular deal on him. Calvos and his squad relied on regular shipments of dragon’s blood.

  And when Calvos was pissed, he tended to take it out on anyone within reach. Crap.

  "A dragon of his very own," said Kishar.

  Chapter Two - Runt of the Litter

  "What?" The words exploded from my mouth before I had a chance to formulate a more polite question.

  Had I heard Kishar right? Or was this some kind of joke? With dragons, you couldn’t ever tell.

  “We wish to sell your male-queen one of our fledglings,” Kishar said, raising her crest to indicate sincerity.

  Why the hell would the dragons want to do that? I wondered but didn’t say.

  There were days when I wondered how I’d become the guy crazy enough to ask dragons to bleed themselves for the vampires.

  Not that I had a choice.

  Right after the coup, l thought that Calvos and his vamps would kill me, just like they’d killed Caroline and Izzy. But Calvos wanted…needed…someone who could communicate with the dragons directly. That made me too valuable to treat like my wife and daughter had been treated, drained and left to die.

  I always wanted to be special. Guess I got what I wanted. The thought tasted nearly as bitter as my next dose of Thrall.

  “Your queen’s offer is most generous,” I began, the gears in my head spinning furiously. “But unfortunately, there’s no way I can safely bring a dragon back to La Reina with me. Even if I manage to get her away from the reservation without being caught, your fledgling would be shot on sight, and I’d be severely punished for breaking human law."

  Not to mention that I had no way in hell to transport a dragon back to La Reina in my pickup truck. Dragon fledglings were dragons that had lost their baby down and grown adult plumage. They were big, even if they hadn’t yet attained their full size.

  If I’d had known what the dragons had planned, I would’ve brought a crate or a cage or something.

  Yeah, right.

  I eyed Kishar’s enormous, sinuous form, which occupied most of the plaza, and wondered how big this young dragon might be. Dragon hatchlings started out about the size of a pet cat, then grew rapidly from there.

  Lady Kishar's glossy feathers rippled, and her jaws parted in a grin, displaying far too many gleaming, saber-like teeth for my comfort. "Ah, but this one is special. It resembles your kind, not ours. The other softskins never need to know that dragon’s blood flows in her veins."

  A dragon that looks human? And the queen wants to sell her to Calvos? My stomach churned.

  I hated surprises. Especially ones that sounded too good to be true…for the vampires, anyway.

  As far as me and my fellow humans were concerned, a human-looking dragon sounded like really bad news.

  “Why would your queen want to part with this special fledgling?” I asked.

  There had to be a catch here, something I could use to refuse this crazy offer without insulting Kishar. My heart sank as I realized the fledgling must be the “special package.”

  The one Calvos eagerly awaited. I wondered whether there was any way to convince him that he was better off refusing it.

  Kishar gave the draconic equivalent of a shrug by ruffling her feathers. Her long muzzle dipped, and nictitating membranes veiled her large golden eyes in a long, slow blink.

  “We have fed and cared for this fledgling for long past the time when it should have grown properly. At long last, our queen has determined that this one will never be able to assume its duties as a sister-dragon in our colony. Since your male-queen pays us generously for those tiny shells filled with our blood—" She tapped the waiting crate with the tip of a curving black claw. "Our queen decided to offer him this cull instead of disposing of it in the usual way. You are to take the fledgling with you and deliver it. Your male-queen has already agreed to pay for it.”

  That information set off alarm bells in my head.

  Exactly when had Calvos agreed to pay for his own pet dragon? Had my boss somehow found another broker willing and able to deal with Kishar and her queen?

  I tried and failed to imagine what amount Calvos wouldn’t be willing to pay for this “special package,” which promised a never-ending supply of fresh dragon blood.

  He and his vampire gang would be able to walk in sunlight whenever they liked, instead of having to ration out their daytime expeditions like they did now.

  And they sure as hell wouldn’t need me anymore. Call me cynical, but I doubted they’d just let me walk free with a lifetime supply of Thrall to feed my addiction.

  “What price do you wish for this fledgling?” I asked, since Kishar had not yet specified the payment terms.

  “Twenty ‘guns.’ And the ‘ammunition’ to feed them.” Kishar used the English words for the weapons, since there weren’t equivalent words in dragon-tongue.

  My blood ran cold at her words.

  The development of ranged weapons—specifically artillery—had been the turning point in humanity’s long struggle against the dragons. The sale of them to dragons was strictly prohibited, because no one in their right mind wanted to see mankind’s ancient enemies armed.

  Of course, people being people—which meant greedy as hell-- there was a thriving black market in crossbows, guns and other weapons super-sized and customized to fit dragons’ clawed forefeet.

  Up until now, the dragons had mostly used these illegally-modified weapons against each other, during power struggles that resulted when a colony’s queen died or became too old or too ill to rule. Ten years ago, there had been one armed attempt to break out of the Blackhawk Mountain Reservation, but the feds had deployed the military and summarily wiped out the rebellious colony.

  Not surprisingly, it was a capital crime if you were caught running guns to dragons. Shit.

  Because there was no way Calvos would refuse this offer of a pet dragon. And since I was his dragon liaison, guess who’d be responsible for ferrying a truckload of Grade-A contraband weapons to the reservation on his next trading run?

  Shit. Shit. Shit.

  “I’ll present your terms to my male-queen when I return to the city,” I told her, deliberately not promising anything.

  “He will pay.” Kishar sounded confident.

  She raised one magnificent scarlet-and-blue feathered wing and swept it forward.

  Something that most definitely did not look like a dragon stumbled out from under her sheltering wing. It was tiny in comparison to Kishar’s vast bulk.

  It had long tangled silver hair, and a face that looked mostly human.

  The rest of the fledgling was hidden under a huge, makeshift cloak made from discarded dragon feathers crudely tied together with vegetable fibers. The feathers’ brilliant colors were dulled by dust and dirt and the feathers themselves showed the signs of hard wear.

  A pair of dirty, human-looking feet tipped with curving black dragon claws stuck out beneath the trailing edge of the cloak.

 

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