Secrets of the Sword 2 (Death Before Dragons Book 8) Read online

  Copyright © 2020 by Lindsay Buroker

  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, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  Acknowledgments

  Thank you for following along with Val and Zav’s adventure. If you’re eager to learn more about Chopper, and to see how humans and dragons plan differently for weddings, this is the book you’ve been waiting for. I hope you enjoy it.

  Before you start, please let me thank my beta readers—Cindy Wilkinson, Rue Silver, and Sarah Engelke—and my editor Shelley Holloway. Also thank you to Luisa Pressler for the illustrations for this trilogy and Deranged Doctor Design for turning them into covers. Last, but definitely not least, thank you to Vivienne Leheny for narrating the audiobooks.

  1

  The boxing glove pounded toward my face like a jackhammer.

  I dodged, the whisper of its passing whooshing in my ear, then slid in to throw two punches at Colonel Willard’s side. She sprang back, my gloves only brushing her gi top, and turned her failed punch into an elbow strike. I dropped under it, rolled away, and sprang to my feet to face her again before she could rush in.

  “That move gets Corporal Clarke every time,” she grumbled her disappointment as we squared off again. “He claims to have the speed and agility of Baryshnikov.”

  “Baryshnikov fifty years ago or Baryshnikov now?” I asked.

  “He didn’t specify.”

  “Convenient.”

  Willard waved a glove to signal a break and headed to the benches and punching bags for her towel and water bottle. I followed, glad for a breather, though I would never admit it. Willard was a couple of years older than I and didn’t have any elven blood to give her an advantage, so it battered my ego every time she outlasted me at some athletic endeavor. Never mind that she competed in triathlons and power lifting events in her free time.

  “Are you ready for your trip to Dun Kroth?” Willard tossed me an ugly olive-green army towel.

  We were training in the small gym in her unit’s office in Seattle, where army decor and accoutrements seemed a requirement, despite the civilian setting. From the outside, the building claimed to be occupied by the IRS and appeared distinctly unmilitary. One had to step inside to notice the lack of beleaguered government clerks and stacks of tax forms. Not that many people bothered.

  “Almost.” I wiped sweat from my face. “I have to go shopping for a few more supplies.”

  “We’ve got MREs you can buy at cost.”

  “I was thinking more like chocolate and salami.” Since I’d used my stash of apple-cider caramels to bribe the powerful fae queen to fix the magic tainting my sword, I was out of delicious rations.

  “I see you stick to your health-food diet when you travel.”

  “Don’t try to tell me MREs are health food. I well remember pounding people with the pound cake when I was in the army. They weren’t just calorically dense. They were dense.”

  “True. I used to take my own food to the field.”

  “Organic wheatgrass smoothies travel well, do they?”

  “You can get organic wheatgrass juice powder.”

  “How can you powder juice? Or make juice from grass?”

  “The miracle of science.”

  I imagined Zoltan in the basement with fistfuls of grass and a mortar and pestle, then shook my head. Health food was scary. “In addition to shopping for snacks, I have to wait for Zav to get back to Earth. He’s my ride, but he’s off telling his family about the wedding.”

  “They care? I thought he’d claimed you as his mate—” Willard’s dark eyes always twinkled when she used Zav’s word for our relationship, “—months ago and that most dragons wouldn’t recognize a human wedding as having any significance.”

  “Oh, they don’t think it’s significant, but he believes it will be a fun and festive event that they might want to attend.”

  “Uh huh. I’ve been meaning to talk to you about that.” Willard propped a fist on her hip and gave me a frank expression. “When you asked me to help plan your wedding, I didn’t think it would be… atypical.”

  “You didn’t?” I touched my chest.

  Even if she didn’t agree with my daughter’s assessment that I was weird, surely, she thought Zav was weird. He wasn’t even from Earth.

  “I knew you two were atypical, but I assumed you wanted a normal wedding. Church, priest, reception, rice, flower bouquets, etc.”

  “I was thinking outdoors instead of in a church, but the rest sounds fine.” My first wedding had been when I was in the military, so it was very brief and very inexpensive. Thad and I hadn’t been near our families and hadn’t had much money. Even if I wasn’t a girlie girl, I wouldn’t mind a few frills this time around.

  “An outdoor wedding in winter in Seattle. Sounds reasonable.”

  “Maybe under a pavilion. You know the ogres and goblins from the coffee shop think they’re coming, right? Zav promised them meat carcasses from some animal that’s a delicacy on another planet.”

  “That’s not the only thing he’s promising people,” Willard said, her eyebrows drawing together. “Since he learned that I agreed to help you—don’t forget you’re supposed to catch that thief for me in exchange for this—he’s been bringing me some odd requests. You need to talk to him. We’re not going to have a hunt in the middle of the ceremony, nor will there be flying races. As fun as that sounds, your non-winged competitors would be at a disadvantage. He also seems to have attended a carnival at some point, because he believes there should be rides.”

  “Rides are fun,” came a familiar voice from the doorway. Gondo, Willard’s goblin assistant, walked in carrying a toolbox. “And goblins are resourceful, so don’t think we can’t compete. I could build a gyrocopter to race against a dragon.”

  “No rides and no races,” Willard said firmly. “Thorvald’s wedding will be right and proper. Or at least not embarrassing to her mother.”

  “Does that mean I can’t have the DJ play Right Said Fred’s ‘I’m Too Sexy’ when Zav walks down the aisle?” I asked.

  “A DJ?” Willard looked scandalized, more at that than at the song choice. “I was thinking you’d want to hire musicians. A pianist at least.”

  “Can you play ‘I’m Too Sexy’ on the piano?”

  “Why do I have a feeling that Zav’s vision of a wedding might be in line with yours?”

  “It’s a mystery.”

  “I may have to sit you both down to watch wedding videos so you can see what’s expected. My niece just got married and sent me a few hours of the footage.”

  “If you want to torture me, just punch me with your gloves.”

  “I would if you didn’t skitter around so much. You’re hard to hit.”

  “To the vexation of my many enemies.”

  Gondo waved a wrench. “I’m supposed to tell you that Captain Brisco wants to see you, boss. Something about the artifacts storage room.”

  Willard frowned. “We’ll continue this discussion later, Thorvald.” She headed for the door but paused to point at Gondo’s wrench. “You’re not planning to use that on something in my gym, are you?” She looked back at the racks of weights, kettlebells, punching bags, and mats.

  Gondo looked thoughtfully toward one of the punching bags but smiled and shook his head. “Nope. Lieutenant Reed asked me to use my goblin ingenuity to fix a toilet that keeps running in the male locker room. Goblins don’t use toilets, but I have downloade
d schematics from the internet.” He nodded, confident of his skills.

  “Remind me to pick up an out-of-order sign from the supply room on the way,” Willard muttered and headed out.

  “Oh, the captain also asked to see the Ruin Bringer,” Gondo called after her.

  Willard paused and frowned back. “Why? Is one of the artifacts she brought in smoking ominously or throbbing with magical power?” Something about the look she gave me suggested this had happened before.

  I held my hands up innocently. “I only kill the bad guys and bring their stuff for your people to examine. It’s not my fault if you put it in the basement and strange things happen.”

  Gondo shrugged. “He didn’t give me the details. He said I don’t have a top-secret security clearance.”

  “That doesn’t keep you from knowing about everything that happens.” Willard waved for me to follow her.

  “Goblins are resourceful.”

  “Goblins are snoops.” Willard strode off down the hallway.

  I grabbed my duster, weapons, and gym bag, though I wouldn’t need the latter. It wouldn’t be safe to take a shower in the women’s locker room, not when it was located adjacent to the men’s locker room Gondo would be working in.

  “If goblins don’t use toilets,” I asked, jogging to catch up with Willard, “where does he go when he’s working here? I’ve seen how much coffee he drinks. There’s no way he holds it all day.”

  “I see you haven’t come in the back way lately.”

  “I don’t have a key for that door.”

  “There are two bushes that are dying by the steps. I suspect the soil grew too acidic.”

  “Ew.”

  Willard knocked and entered an office I hadn’t been in before. Chunky, glasses-wearing Captain Brisco looked like someone who had to slide a five-dollar bribe to whoever ran the PT tests for the unit to ensure passing marks. But with three monitors competing for space on his desk and two wall-mounted televisions running news behind him, I trusted he made up for any physical lack with his intelligence-gathering abilities.

  “Colonel.” Brisco grabbed a remote and flicked one of the TVs from CNN to the view from a security camera. It displayed a couple of the wide aisles in the basement artifacts room, a place that reminded me of a cross between a library and a Costco, except that instead of giant tubs of pickles and mayo, the shelves held magical doohickeys, weapons, and massive handwritten tomes in other languages. “We have a problem.”

  “We heard about your toilet,” I offered, “and that your repairman lacks experience with them. My condolences.”

  They both shot me humorless looks.

  “One of the alarms went off in the artifacts room, and I got to the camera in time to see this.” Brisco clicked his remote to rewind until the display showed a stocky woman in a dark-blue parka with the hood pulled up, a cheek and a hint of short black hair just visible in the profile shot.

  “Is that the thief we’ve been trying to catch for two weeks?” Willard demanded. “And that Thorvald is supposed to hunt down for us?”

  “I believe so, ma’am.”

  “I thought I’d be hunting her down on the dwarven home world,” I said. “Didn’t you say she’s got a portal generator and was last seen disappearing through it?”

  “Apparently, she’s back,” Willard said.

  Our intruder reached for a shelf full of books but paused and glanced toward the camera long enough for me to make out dark almond-shaped eyes in a face broader than typical of Asian ancestry. Willard had mentioned that the thief might be part dwarf. She appeared to be in her twenties, but if she was part dwarf, she might be like me and older than she looked. Dwarves, like elves, lived longer than humans.

  The woman threw powder toward the camera, and a yellowish cloud filled the air for a couple of seconds before the monitor went dark.

  “It came back online five minutes later,” the captain said, “but she was gone by then.”

  “It was annoying enough when she was stealing from other people,” Willard said. “What did she take? And how did she get in? We have locks on the doors in addition to the alarms, magical and mundane, that should have gone off before she could get in. Did this just happen? I assume she didn’t waltz in the front door.”

  “Maybe she came in the back,” I said, “undeterred by the forbidding dead bushes.”

  “Will you be serious?”

  “Is that a requirement of the job?”

  “It should be.” Willard turned her glower from me to the captain.

  “We don’t yet know how she got in or what she took.” Brisco waved at the monitor, which was back to showing the artifacts room, the aisle now empty of visitors. “From the camera, it looks like the books were moved around, but I can’t tell if she removed one or more.”

  “Have you got someone running an inventory to check?”

  “Not yet. We can’t get in. The door is locked and won’t unlock. The keypad is working—it thunks, as if the deadbolt is turning—but the door won’t budge. I thought someone with special blood could detect if something magical had been done to the door.” Brisco looked at me.

  “Special blood. I guess that’s me.”

  “You’re all kinds of special,” Willard muttered.

  “Maybe she just braced a chair against the doorknob.”

  “There aren’t any chairs in there.”

  “Maybe she braced a sword against it.”

  “How would she have gotten out if she did that?” Brisco asked.

  I shrugged. “How did she get in? Her portal generator?”

  “Maybe. We don’t know how to track her down and ask her.” Willard’s lips twisted in a sour expression. “That’s why I’m putting you on the job. You have a dragon who can make portals and chase people to other worlds.” Her lips shifted into a slightly different sour expression. “Assuming you can call him home, and he’s done telling people about the races and hunts he thinks will happen at your wedding.”

  Captain Brisco raised his eyebrows at that.

  “I can’t call him home, but I’m sure he’ll be back soon. We’re mates, after all.”

  “Yes, I’ve heard how he enjoys spending time in the nest with you.”

  Brisco’s eyebrows climbed even higher.

  “Naturally. I’m amazing.”

  “Uh huh. Go take your special blood and check the door.” Willard pointed at the video of the artifacts room.

  Despite giving the order, she led the way out into the hallway, pausing to grab her pistol and holster from her office. I let her lead the way, but I would go first if we went inside. Fezzik, the magical, compact submachine pistol in my thigh holster, and Chopper, the even more magical sword in my back scabbard, were much better for dealing with otherworldly intruders than typical weapons.

  Brisco joined us at the top of the stairs. He’d also armed himself.

  When we descended to the basement and walked down the windowless cement-block hallway toward the artifacts room, the sturdy metal door started glowing a sickly green.

  Willard swore, halted, and took several steps back, her hand dropping to her firearm.

  “You needed me to let you know if there’s something magic here, Captain?” I asked dryly.

  “It wasn’t doing that before.” Brisco also took several steps back. “It looks radioactive.”

  “Don’t worry. Thorvald will check it.” Willard thumped me on the back. “She’s already got a kid, and I don’t think her dragon cares if she’s fertile.”

  “Hilarious.” It was my turn to shoot dirty looks. “He might object if I glow in the dark in bed.”

  “His eyes glow. He can’t possibly be against photoluminescence.”

  Sighing, I walked forward, reminding myself that Willard was calling florists, ordering invitations, arranging seating charts, and essentially taking care of all the wedding minutiae that sounded like torture to me. I could check her glowing door for her.

  I drew Chopper and, with the magic I’
d been learning to use, formed a protective barrier around myself. Maybe it was overkill, but better safe than self-luminous.

  I was three steps from the door when a female voice emanated from it.

  “The Ruin Bringer carries the stolen sword of the Orehammer Clan. As a rightful descendant of the original crafter of the blade, I have come to reclaim it.”

  2

  “Hell.” I stared at the door, though the voice didn’t speak again.

  A feeling of dread clunked into the bottom of my gut like a bowling ball. It was probably a scam—what were the odds that some Earth-born half-dwarf, or whatever that woman was, could be the descendant of the dwarven master enchanter, Dondethor, who’d made Chopper thousands of years ago? But I had claimed the sword after defeating its last owner in battle, not purchased it legitimately from some dwarf weapons dealer, so it was very possible—even likely—that my enemy had stolen it. As Zav himself had pointed out, that meant it wasn’t rightfully mine.

  Captain Brisco cleared his throat diffidently. “The door also didn’t speak before.”

  “No shit,” Willard said without diffidence. “Go poke it, Thorvald. See what happens.”

  “The last time I poked something magical, I ended up with a cut that wouldn’t heal and a beacon on my sword that drew magical beings from a thousand miles.”

  “Your report said you struck the artifact with the intent of breaking it. That’s not the same as poking it.”

  “I’m positive I didn’t put that much detail in my report.”

  “I know you, and I read between the lines. Am I wrong?”

  “I refuse to answer that question.”

  “I’m not wrong,” Willard told Brisco.

  Even as I argued, I walked forward with Chopper extended, not sure what else to do. The sword should protect me rather than acting as a conduit. It had before.

  When its point touched the door, the blade flared a brighter blue, but nothing else happened. I didn’t sense an increase in the amount of magic or any change from the door itself. The keypad on the wall wasn’t glowing, so I risked stepping close enough to touch my finger to it. I didn’t get zapped, but the door did radiate heat that was noticeable now that I was closer.