The Dragon's Secret (The Fay Morgan Chronicles Book 2) by Katherine Sparrow Read Free Book Online

the dragon and Merlin were.
    “So you were geo-caching?” A man’s nasally voice floated up from below me. “We know all about treasure hunting. Do you have any idea who we are?”
    Adam smiled easily and shrugged. “Important people?”
    The nasally-voiced man typed into a tablet he carried at his side and handed it to Adam and Lila. “We’re only the youngest billionaire titans of tech. See, it says so right there in the headline. This is a picture of when we all met, when we went to a photo shoot for this article in Valley Wag . Come on, let me tell you all about it.”
    He turned and headed for the couches.
    Lila and Adam hesitated, and then followed him, flanked on both sides by the other men.
    “There are twelve of you in the picture,” Lila said as she flopped down onto the couch. Adam sat beside her, alert and ready. “Where’s everyone else?”
    Good. She was seeking information that might be useful to me.
    “Not everyone made it to the end game.” The man grinned and shrugged. “It’s been a rough journey, but worth it. Wanna know what I asked everyone at this photo shoot?”
    Lila nodded and smiled. As I began to walk forward over the roof’s rafters, carefully moving toward the wall that divided the room, I admired Lila’s steady gaze and the way she leaned toward him, giving away none of the fear she must be feeling. “Sure, I mean we’ve got to bounce soon, but I guess so.”
    “I asked all the billionaires if they liked video games. Everyone did, of course. Then I asked them if they could go on an epic quest with real magic and adventure, would they do it? Leonard answered with something lame about that sounding like a good new startup. We could call it RealGames. Idiot.”
    A man, presumably Leonard, answered, “I didn’t know. You were being weird.”
    “A real adventure, neat. Kind of like geocaching,” Lila said. “Which reminds me, we should be going and … .”
    “Then I told them we could become a band of secret knights that hunted down the world’s best treasure, and someday we wouldn’t just be billionaires, but immortals. I told them there was a secret world they knew nothing about.”
    My lips curled into a scowl as I moved closer to the middle of the room, slowly, carefully. I had no noise deadening spells. If I could just get to that wall, I could slip through it and get to Merlin and Y Ddraig Goch. It was still a good fifteen feet away.
    “Wow, immortal?” Lila said.
    “Okay,” Adam added carefully.
    A different man spoke. “We told Jacob if that was true than he should prove it. He told us to come to his car.”
    “His car?” Lila said breathily and touched Jacob’s knee, almost as if by accident.
    The man sat up straighter. “I drive a Tesla, of course. I popped the trunk and showed them my cage.”
    “What was in it?” Adam asked.
    “A couple of Kikimuris I’d bought the last time I was in Moscow. They made squeaky noises and pushed their weird chicken hands through the metal bars. I let everyone play with them for a while before I killed them. They were stinking up the back of my car.”
    Kikimuris were gentle creatures who never harmed anyone.
    “I … don’t know what that is,” Lila said quietly. “I don’t understand what you all are saying about stuff that’s not real, but it’s cool that you are having fun with it.”
    I stared down at the five men below me. I’d known men like them. I’d always known men like them, and there they sat, a new form of monarchy but kings nonetheless. I held back a hissing breath and a stream of invectives. I would deal with them after I freed the dragon and the wizard.
    “So we banded together and became knights on a quest, modern style, and we made a list of all the steps we needed to become immortal. So that’s what we’ve been doing the last three years—Grail hunting.”
    With those words a sudden rage I didn’t entirely understand filled me. I will end them, here and now, I thought. I will end them