Dragon Awakened(18)

The man shivered and looked around. He closed his book and left. Several others were just as easily dispensed with. Some took the time to check out, while the more sensitive ones left their stacks of books behind.

Now, the workers. Sed made two of them violently ill by flooding them with negative energy. They staggered out, sure there must have been something toxic in the coffee they had shared. One became unaccountably angry and stormed out. Which left the man who appeared to be in charge, and who was accountably angry that his entire staff was gone. He did not respond to the demon’s emotional blasts because he already held anger and hopelessness.

He reached for the phone and looked at a list of names and numbers. Before he could call replacements, the demon reached into the man’s chest and squeezed his heart. He gasped, shock on his face.

The demon inhaled his pain. Die, Mundane. Die by my hand, and no one will know any better.

The man dropped to his knees and collapsed, claimed by the heart attack. Sed ran to the door and locked it just as someone approached with a stack of books. The woman tried the door, peered in, and then dropped the books into the metal bin. The demon thought about sliding his hand out of the rotating bin and grabbing her. How amusing it would be to see her expression of horror.

Alas, he had to follow the rules if he hoped to gain freedom. He flicked off the light switches at the front and made his way to his target. The one he could torment.



Ruby’s brain was literally buzzing. Hah, I knew he put some funky drug in the air.

Except that didn’t explain the killer orb. That was no hallucination, nor was Mon’s death. And she didn’t feel high or dizzy or otherwise altered. Her rash was flaring big-time though.

She’d barely taken time to enjoy the smell of the books, a scent she found oddly comforting, on her way to the bulky machines at the back of the building. Why had she never thought to look at the old newspaper stories dating back to the time of the boating accident?

She stopped at the headline: FAMILY PERISHES AT SEA.

This was it. To the side was a picture of all three of them, posing at what looked like a picnic. She plunged in. Her father was obviously doing well in whatever job he’d been working on—something to do with physics—as the boat was described as a yacht. The Yard certainly wouldn’t fund such a thing.

The press played it up as another mysterious Devil’s Triangle disappearance. Investigators speculated that it was either an accidental explosion, rogue wave, or pirates.

The family’s disappearance. It hit her then, that she was included in the missing. There was no mention of her rescue. At the time, she was Ruby Winston. Mon adopted her and, as Cyntag had pointed out, immediately changed her name for some legal reason she had never questioned.

Because he was hiding you?

She’d been a distraught nine-year-old and had just gone along: name change, Mon’s move into a new neighborhood, and his continuing touring, coming back to Miami every two weeks but leaving again soon after. The way he’d set up the Yard so it wasn’t in her name until she turned eighteen. It also explained why she couldn’t get her belongings or visit her friends. All those things she’d accepted and forgotten about. Until now.

It also explained why her grandfather kept his distance, something that had always hurt. But that would mean Cyntag was telling the truth. She flipped through the follow-up articles and was even more stunned: her father painted a villain, having sabotaged the physics work he had been doing at SUNLAB. One theory was that he’d stolen his research to sell to the highest bidder. Another was that he’d gone on a rampage before taking his family to sea to their deaths.

The man she remembered was kind and soft-spoken. Never once had she seen him lose his temper, and, God no, he wouldn’t have killed his family.

So the alternative was…someone had killed her parents. All these horrible allegations were a setup to cover the murders.

She sat back in the chair, feeling so cold she was shivering. How had she survived? She remembered being on the boat, the jarring thud that knocked her out. The next thing she knew, she was at Brom’s, about to get the worst news of her life.

As she absently rubbed her neck, she realized she was still feeling the weird warmth. She searched for nearby vents. Except it was summer and the heat wouldn’t be on. Something odd prickled through her. This library branch was a small building, but it was eerily quiet. Though sunlight came through the windows near her, the interior looked dim. The electricity hadn’t gone out, or the microfiche machine would have died.

Earlier she’d heard a couple of thumps and someone coughing violently, but now she heard nothing but a low-level hissing. She lurched to her feet. Danger bristled up the back of her neck. Her rash felt as though it was literally on fire.