Dragon Blood: A Heartblaze Novel (Tyler's Saga Book 1) Read online

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  DRAGON BLOOD

  A Heartblaze Novel

  Book One of Tyler's Saga

  By Shay Roberts

  Snowfire Press

  Please email [email protected] if you discover an error or experience any readability issues with this book.

  Dragon Blood: A Heartblaze® Novel

  Published by:

  Snowfire Press

  114 W Magnolia St, Suite 400-152

  Bellingham, WA 98225

  Email: [email protected]

  Copyright © 2017 by Shay Roberts

  http://heartblaze.com

  Cover design by Ravven: www.ravven.com

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, organizations, or persons, whether living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems—except in the case of brief quotations included in critical articles or reviews—without permission in writing from Snowfire Press.

  Trademark: Heartblaze is a registered trademark of Shay Roberts, and may not be used without written permission.

  ISBN 978-1-946994-05-9 (eBook)

  ISBN 978-1-946994-06-6 (paperback)

  2nd Edition

  Dedicated to the

  curious and the bold.

  Lonely Traveler

  TYLER BUCK

  Once again, I find myself in the back room of an airport under the eyes of a suspicious screener. This time it's the Addis Ababa Bole International Airport in Ethiopia.

  I speak in a calm voice as the screener pokes at my survey equipment. "It's nothing dangerous. I'm a beachcomber. This gear is for finding coins in the sand."

  Lies. I'm no beachcomber, and I'm not searching for coins.

  He looks up sharply, a pleased look in his tiny eyes. "Our land does not meet the sea. We have no beaches here for lying young men to find coins."

  Oops, forgot they were landlocked. "Yes, but you have that big lake, I forget what it's called."

  "Lake Tana?"

  Never heard of it. "Yes, I'm very excited about going there."

  He waves his finger at me. "What you find in the dirt there belongs to my country. You must surrender it before you go."

  I nod sincerely. "Yes sir, I understand."

  I wish I could tell him the truth, just to see his face. Hey, security bro, I'm a relic hunter who's here to steal some dragon bones for my insanely high-paying boss, Lord Beasley.

  Security bro decides to examine my passport. "Tyler Buck? I have never heard of such a name."

  "Imagine the teasing I got in school."

  He looks confused.

  I try to help. "Because it rhymes with fuck."

  He frowns, unamused. "It says you are twenty-five years old. But you look younger."

  "I'm one-eighth Native American. Ute tribe. Master horsemen, the Utes. Never did learn to ride, though. Anyway, that's where I get my perfect teeth, year-round tan, and shiny hair."

  His lips curl in disapproval as he eyes my hair. "Your hair is darker than in your passport picture."

  "Yeah, I used to color it, back when I was doing the metrosexual thing."

  His eyes narrow. "Are you a homosexual?"

  I'm getting tired of this shit. "Yes, I'm super gay. Can I go now? There's a cosmo waiting for me in the airport lounge."

  His face hardens and he reaches for a clipboard. This is going south fast. Mom always said I had a big mouth. Big enough to get me in trouble, and big enough to get me out of it.

  I slip a five-hundred-birr Sitota from a hidden pocket in my sturdy brown travel shirt. The Sitota is a gift card that looks like a debit card. Wherever I travel, I use Beasley's money to grease the palms of the locals. I do it with gift cards, because carrying around a lot of cash is a bad idea.

  I drop the card on the table between us. "Hey, I found this five-hundred-birr gift card on the plane. I should probably turn it in. I don't know how much a birr is, but five hundred of them seems like a lot."

  He looks insulted. "No. It is not a lot, Mr. Buck."

  Hardball, huh? Time to pull out the big guns. "Good thing I also found this five-thousand-birr card, redeemable at any Shoa shopping center or supermarket."

  I pull out the second card and set it gently on the table.

  He promptly sets down his clipboard and waves me away. "Go. I will return these cards to their rightful owners."

  I smile. Of course you will.

  I gather up my imaging gear and see myself out.

  I'm actually tempted to find the lounge. A cosmo sounds pretty good about now, but I need to stick to the schedule. Beasley gives me a long leash and I don't want him shortening it.

  I met my patron when I first started out as a treasure hunter. After every hurricane passed through Florida, I rushed to the beaches with the other coin shooters, using my cheap rig in a hopeless attempt to find a gold doubloon washed up from one of the old Spanish wrecks offshore. Then one day, I actually found one.

  Lord Beasley, a Brit living in a Highland Beach mansion, was walking on the beach and saw the crowd gathered around me. He paid me twice what the doubloon was worth, and I've been working for him ever since.

  Beasley is an armchair archeologist from old money. He has a large, very illegal collection of relics stashed in his private vault somewhere in the Caymans. Each month he flies there to fondle them.

  I'm just one cog in the Beasley relic machine. He has some big academic network gathering intel for him. About one in four of his leads pans out. That's an amazingly high percentage in this business.

  When I saw Beasley last week, he gave me my choice of three gigs to pursue. The first was a long shot, finding the tomb of one of Alexander's generals, supposedly buried in Lebanon. The second was finding a Roman payroll stash near some ruins in Turkey. And the third was this dragon gig, which immediately captured my attention.

  Dragon lore has been around since forever. It goes all the way back to the Bible, where dragons are portrayed as creatures of evil. There's a church in Atessa, Italy, that claims to have the rib bone of a dragon slain by one of their saints. There could be a similar situation here in Ethiopia. Beasley told me to check for dragon bones hidden in a lost Coptic shrine in the Omo River Valley. The Copts are old-school Egyptian Christians, and they love their relics.

  I'm not sure why I chose the dragon gig. The payroll stash was probably more of a sure thing, but I can always get to that later. There's just something about dragons. I've always thought they were cool. A year ago, after a drunken night in Cardiff, I got a dragon tattoo on my ass. It's hard for me to see it without a mirror. It's got a tail that curls into a series of Celtic knots. I remember getting the tattoo, but I'm still fuzzy about why. It had something to do with the dragon on the label of the beers that plastered me.

  I feel excited as I walk through this airport, its ceiling covered with a network of thin steel girders. It's time to find the charter company with the Cessna that will fly me to Arba Minch, a small city just east of the Omo Valley. Ethiopian Airlines actually has a daily flight to Arba Minch, but I've already missed it, and flying a charter is better anyway because security won't pick through my gear.

  From Arba Minch, it's a day's ride by Jeep to one of the most remote areas on the planet, where I intend to find a relic that'll make Beasley squeal like a schoolgi
rl.

  The weather in Arba Minch is perfect. Dry and sunny, with the temperature around seventy. This is supposed to be typical for December. I'm tempted to sit outside for dinner, but I don't want to share my meal with the flies. I'll soon be roughing it, and I want one more night of civilization before heading out into the unknown. After that, I'll be coated in a thick layer of bug repellent for the rest of the trip. I did my research and found that the tsetse flies here can give you sleeping sickness, causing anything from fever to death. Africa is an unforgiving place.

  I'm eating dinner at my hotel, the Paradise Lodge. The place has a lot of rough-hewn wood furniture and a great view of a huge lake. A bone-thin waiter brings me a meal I've been looking forward to since I started reading about Ethiopia. I'm an adventurous eater, and kitfo is as adventurous as it gets. It's basically raw hamburger soaked in butter and spices, with some cheese on the side. It's not recommended for Western stomachs, but I can eat anything short of wet dog hair.

  There's a spoon on the plate to help get the cheese and raw meat onto the flatbread, but if you want to be cool, you don't use the spoon. I try to use the bread as a scoop to load up some meat and cheese, but half of it goes tumbling off the plate.

  I hear laughter and see a beautiful Ethiopian girl, maybe in her late twenties, at the bar on the other side of the room. When our eyes meet she quickly turns away. She was laughing at my lame eating skills, but I don't mind. Mom always says that making a woman laugh is the way to her heart.

  I feel a little guilty when I think about Mom. She doesn't know what I do. I lied and told her I won the lottery. She thinks I'm living the life of a world-traveling playboy. The truth is, I've used most of my Beasley money to get Mom out of her shitty apartment in Pueblo and into a nice house in Colorado Springs. She deserved it after everything she's gone through. Dad left us when I was four years old, and the struggling steel mill laid her off six times. For weeks on end we'd eat ramen noodles cooked on a hot plate. Sometimes, to fancy it up, we'd add cheese and sunflower seeds.

  The waiter interrupts my sad reminiscing with a carafe of tej, Ethiopia's famous honey wine. It looks like peach juice. I'm actually not sure you'd call the container a carafe. It's more like a science beaker with a fat bottom and a long neck.

  I take a drink from the bottle and the wine shoots down the long glass neck, splashing my face. Shit, I probably should have poured it into the empty glass sitting near the bottle.

  The girl laughs again as I wipe my face with a napkin. I call out to her. "I could use some help here. Stranger in a strange land."

  Still smiling, she slides off her barstool and approaches my table. I see she has a nose ring with a thin gold chain connecting to an earring. God, that's hot!

  I hold out my hand. "I'm Tyler."

  She clucks her tongue. "First lesson, the man never offers his hand. Only the woman can invite a handshake."

  I drop my hand. "See, that's why I need you."

  She extends her hand. "I am Ayana."

  I shake her hand. "Pretty name, what does it mean?"

  She looks suddenly shy. "Beautiful flower."

  I gesture for her to take a seat at the table. "I'd say your parents were very observant."

  Is she blushing? I can't tell with her beautiful caramel skin. She refuses my offer to sit. "And what does Tyler mean? Clever flatterer?"

  "It means lonely traveler."

  "I don't believe you, Tyler."

  "It's true, Ayana. Can you stay for a bit, show me how to drink tej?"

  "I cannot, I'm afraid."

  "But I have all these gift cards. Can I pay with them? How much is a birr?"

  Her face hardens. "You think I am a prostitute?"

  "What? No! I'm talking about paying for the meal."

  She laughs. "I know what you mean, Tyler. Forgive my humor."

  "Oh man, you totally had me going there."

  She leans in close. She's wearing a spicy perfume that makes me want to grab her. An erection threatens as I see the cleavage down her drooping silk top.

  She whispers into my ear. "Sorry, we do not accept gift cards."

  Ayana turns and leaves. She's wearing a long red skirt with some sort of geometric pattern. I can't stop watching her ass as she walks out of the restaurant.

  After she leaves, I find my hand in the kitfo, my fingers coated with butter and beef blood.

  I'm five years old and my fingers are covered with bloody cuts. I couldn't get the stopper out of my piggy bank, so I broke it on the concrete stairs outside of our apartment. Now I'm counting my coins as fast as I can.

  Behind me, Mom is crying and pleading with the marshals as people carry out our furniture and drop it on the sidewalk. I don't know how much money we owe, but I might have enough to pay the rent for a couple more days.

  My tears blur the coins and I keep losing count. Some guy notices my hands and picks me up.

  "Careful, that glass is sharp."

  I kick him in the balls and he drops me.

  I scream as I fall onto the broken shards of my piggy bank.

  My eyes snap open and I take a deep breath. It was a dream. The same dream that's haunted me for years. I still have scars on my hand and back from that damn piggy bank.

  I'm in my hotel room in the Paradise Lodge. After dinner, I was exhausted and went straight to bed. Moonlight pours through the window and lights up the white mosquito gauze hanging over the bed.

  Why does it smell like sex in here?

  I hear soft breathing and realize there's someone in the bed with me!

  Saint George’s Day

  ALEXANDER ARGYROS

  How long has it been since I've prepared for a black op? Too long, I'd say.

  I wipe the steam from the bathroom mirror, trim my gray mustache, and apply the oil-free matte that keeps my scalp from shining. Betty, in Cultural Services, thinks I look like Sir Ben Kingsley. Perhaps a younger version. He and I share the same problem, baldness caused by hypervirility.

  I gently lift my reliquary from its peg beside the mirror and hang it around my neck. The small golden tube dangling from the chain contains a bit of finger bone from Georgios of Lydda, Saint George himself, my direct ancestor. The relic protects me from dragons, but that's not why I wear it. I wear it as a constant reminder of my duty to eradicate dragons.

  I enter the bedroom of my modest apartment and select a weapon from the gun safe. I can't take my standard-issue .50-caliber handgun because of the Knights of Rome logo on the bottom of the magazine. If something goes awry on this mission, it's imperative that no one discovers I'm a Knight working for the world's most effective hunters of paranormals. So instead, I opt to wield an unregistered Glock 22.

  In my mind, I hear the call of the chronomichani. If I want to avoid dripping blood on my clothes, I should feed it before I dress.

  I open my second safe, this one well hidden behind a sliding panel in the back of my closet.

  The chronomichani, a clockwork mechanism from Greek antiquity, sits inside the safe. Its wooden container, about twice the size of a cigar box, holds a set of complex brass gears that drive pointers around several dials marking dates and zodiac symbols. To my knowledge, there was only one other like it, and it was destroyed millennia ago in a shipwreck off the island of Antikythera.

  I slide my finger into the chronomichani's feeding slot and feel a jab as the ravenous device pierces my skin. It doesn't speak to me as it drains my blood. It never speaks, but I can tell it's pleased.

  My father gave me the device on his deathbed, and it soon bound itself to my soul. Father called it the infernal device, but I prefer its Greek name, chronomichani. I feel its anger as I withdraw my finger, but if I didn't, it would drink me dry.

  After I stop bleeding, I peruse my clothing options, selecting a simple black suit, a shoulder holster, and a forged FBI badge. This should be adequate for the task ahead.

  My squire, Snedeker, handcuffs a trembling professor to a stair railing. I shake my head in disgus
t. Snedeker has handcuffed the professor to the end of the railing, where the cuffs can simply slip off. Snedeker curses and reattaches the handcuffs, lined with soft foam so they won't leave a mark on the professor's wrists.

  How have I become tethered to this incompetent, monkey-faced boy? I want a real squire, like Cobo has. That Hildebrand kid is all the officers are talking about.

  The captive's home is extravagant, well beyond what he can afford on his salary. Upstairs, Spero and Kaplan, the other two misfit rookies on my team, conduct a search for anything relevant. They're making enough noise to wake the dead. HQ is always assigning me these lackwits because no one else can whip them into shape.

  I glare at the sniveling professor. He reminds me of the haughty academic that maligned my master's thesis in military history. My paper was an examination of Saint George and provided well-researched evidence that dragons existed during his time. The professor savaged me publicly and tried to block my path to a PhD. But I left the school anyway when my thesis caught the attention of the Knights of Rome, and I was recruited into KoR's elite ranks.

  The professor stares down the barrel of my gun, struggling to speak. "Is … is this a robbery? Take whatever you like. There's no need to hurt anyone."

  "I'll decide who gets hurt, thank you very much."

  Spero and Kaplan descend the stairs, looking sheepish. How irritating, they've found nothing of use. Spero, I can forgive, due to her delightful figure, but I make a point of frowning at Kaplan, who turns his ruddy, pockmarked face away.

  I lean over the handcuffed professor, barely raising my voice above a whisper. "Where is your computer?"