The Dragon Heir

Page 14

“Maybe we're not the last.” Jack looked uncomfortable at the idea of being the last of a dying breed. “Maybe there are others we don't know about.”
“If there are,” Ellen said, strapping on the scabbard and cinching it around her hips, “they can find their own swords.”
“Wait till you see the rest of this,” Jason said, lifting his backpack onto the front pew and unzipping it. He dumped the contents onto the weathered wood seat and stood back, allowing the others to crowd in. Only Ellen stood aside, caressing Waymaker's hilt, a distant expression on her face.
Madison picked through the jewelry. She'd always loved shiny things. There were gold and silver medieval pieces, set with precious and semiprecious stones: brooches and necklaces and bracelets and hair adornments. Her fingers itched to sketch the designs. She gathered her mass of hair into a gold net and set a jewel-encrusted tiara on her head, stuck three rings on each hand, and admired the result. “I always wanted to be a queen,” she said wistfully.
Queens never had to worry about finding money for tuition and books.
Her eyes kept straying to the backpack. Jason had set it aside in one of the pews. Something glittered in the back of her mind, a light in the darkness, like a painting she'd not yet splashed onto the canvas.
Seph had collected a pile of objects in front of him. Some were dull black rocks, totally unimpressive, others were crafted in precious metals, engraved with mysterious designs. Some were mounted on chains or set into jewelry. He sorted through them with his long fingers, turning them to catch the light so he could read the inscriptions on them, murmuring magical words under his breath.
Jack tried on a pair of gauntlets in a lightweight silver metal, extending his arms to check out the effect.
“And these all came from the same cave, I assume?” Snowbeard said.
Jason nodded. “This wasn't even half of it, but I tried to take the best, as far as I could choose. Hastings told me to bring all this stuff back here and hide it, and not to let anyone know it's here. That's why I'm back.” He half-mumbled the last part, like he didn't want to say it out loud.
Madison sat down in the pew next to the backpack. It was illuminated, pulsing with magic, and she realized that the power that had seemed to emanate from Jason was really coming from it. Before she knew what she was doing, she'd lifted it onto her lap, cradling it in her arms.
“Hey!” Jason jerked the backpack out of her hands. “Careful.”
Madison was mortified. She wasn't usually a grabby person. “I—I'm sorry. But, you know what? Something's still in there,” she said. “It's like … I don't know…important!”
Suddenly, it was like everybody in the church had stopped talking and focused on them.
“Is there something else, Jason?” Nick asked into the silence.
Jason's face hardened, and his eyes narrowed, like he might refuse to answer. He looked from Nick to Madison, then sighed and groped in the front pocket of his backpack. He brought out a velvet bag embroidered over with symbols in a darker thread. “It's some kind of sefa,” he said, shrugging. “I … ah … picked it out for myself.” He handed it to Nick.
The old man weighed the parcel in his two hands, as if he could discern its essence by touch alone. “This is very old,” he said thoughtfully. “And yet, somehow new. Familiar, yet strange. It has a potential for power that is truly amazing, yet not quite manifest. Something I've never encountered before.”
He opened the bag and drew out a large, slightly ovoid stone. They all gathered around it, like planets around a new sun.
“Mere de Dieu,” Seph muttered. He always lapsed into French when he got excited. “What is it?”
“I think it's called the Dragonheart,” Jason replied, his eyes on the stone." Then he shut his mouth, as if he'd said too much.
Nick's head came up. “The Dragonheart? Really? What makes you think so?”
“There was a book in the cave. I read some of it. It talked about a stone like this. Called the Dragonheart.”
“Do you have the book?” Nick asked, his black eyes glittering with interest.
Jason shook his head. “No, I—ah—lost it on the way out.”
“What else did it say about the stone?” Nick's voice had sharpened considerably.
“I don't remember exactly,” Jason said sullenly. “Something about taking control of the magical guilds or destroying them. Like it was a weapon or something. I was kind of in a hurry.”
“That's a pity.” Nick stroked the surface of the stone with a wrinkled finger. “Even here in church, you can feel it.” The glow from the stone lit the wizard's face, accentuating the lines of age so that he looked like the oldest of prophets. “Madison is right. This is important.”
“I don't know about important,” Jason said, clearly worried that his prize might be confiscated. “But I thought it looked cool.” He pulled out a dangerous-looking metal stand, all sharp edges and sinuous monsters. “This came with it.”
Madison was fascinated by the stone in Nick's hands. Broad flashes of blue and green surfaced as he turned it, like the scales of some brilliantly colored fish surfacing in an exotic tropical sea.
Not that she'd ever seen an exotic tropical sea.
It was more than her usual fascination with shiny things. She was always conscious of the presence of power, drawn to it, in fact, but this beat against her senses and clamored in her ears, impossible to ignore.
Ambushed by a rush of desire, Madison reached out a finger toward the stone. The stone kindled, illuminating the entire church, and a small tongue of flame erupted from the center to lick the surface, as if seeking a connection. She jerked back her hand without making contact and retreated a step, gripping the side of the pew to steady herself.
No. No more. She was done with that. She drew a shaky breath and looked up to see Jason watching her.
“You okay?” he asked, laying a proprietary hand on the stone. Madison nodded mutely.
“I would like to study these objects,” Nick said, frowning. “It would help if Mercedes Foster could take a look at them, as well, since they're the work of sorcerers, for the most part. Though the more people who know about this, the more difficult it will be to keep it a secret.”
Jason nodded. “Hastings said to hide this stuff somewhere secure. So I thought of the church, because—you know— churches suppress magic. Maybe these things wouldn't be so obvious to someone who's looking for them. Seph belongs here, and has a key, so he could go in and out pretty easy.”
“Why? Is someone after you?” Madison asked, trying to shake off the influence of the stone. “Does anyone know about this?”
Jason looked away from her. “As far as I know, I got away clean.” Something told Madison he was lying.
“But there are people in here all the time,” Ellen objected. “What if we need to get to … get to these things, and a Mass is going on? Besides, where would we hide it? We can't just shove it under a pew.”
“There's the mourner's chapel,” Seph suggested. “People don't go in there unless there's a funeral, and not a lot for that, since it's tiny. It's downstairs, next to the crypt. And there's a secret entrance.”
“There's dead people in this church?” Madison shivered. She preferred that bodies be buried out in the churchyard, so their spirits could roam free if they liked.
Seph nodded. “It was built by the Presbyterians, but it was taken over by European Catholics more than a hundred and fifty years ago. They liked to be buried out of the weather, I guess. Come on. Bring the stuff. I'll show you.”
Seph led them through a doorway at the front of the sanctuary and down a narrow, dimly lit flight of stairs.
The crypt lay on one side of the stairs, the chapel on the other. The chapel was just big enough for a family to gather privately. At one end a stone was set into the wall, engraved with the name and dates for one JAMES MCALISTER 1795 TO 1860.
“Seems like a strange resting place for a Presbyterian, but McAlister was also one of the region's leading abolitionists,” Seph said. “Watch.”
He pushed the stone and it pivoted silently on an invisible hinge, revealing a rough opening the width of a man's shoulders. Air whistled through, bringing with it the scent of water and stone.
“This was a station on the Underground Railway. There's a tunnel that runs all the way to the lake. Escaped slaves would hide in the church basement, then meet boats on the shore and travel across to Canada. Not fun to crawl through, these days. If ever.”
The crypt housed several rooms lined with vaults, most of them occupied for more than a century. Jack walked down the row, scanning the names on the vaults in a businesslike fashion until he came to the one he was looking for. “Here we go,” he murmured, pointing at an inscription. “Perfect.”
Madison peered around him to read, J. THOMAS SWIFT, ESQ. There were no dates.
“Who's that?” she asked.
“That's my dad,” Jack replied. “Or, it will be. This was my dad's church, on Christmas and Easter, anyway. He bought this vault when he lived in Trinity. Before the divorce.”
Madison eyed it doubtfully. “You're saying it's empty?”
Jack nodded. “Yeah. I mean, he's still alive, right? So, unless you think it's too obvious because he's related to me, we can stash the stuff in there.”
“And we can get at it pretty much whenever we want, without going through the main church,” Seph added. “People never come down here. Most of the people buried here died a hundred years ago.”
“I'll keep the Dragonheart with me,” Jason suggested. “Seph's house is totally warded, so it should be safe.”
He wants the stone, Madison thought jealously, recognizing the same strange lust in herself. Was this like one of those magical objects in stories that people fought and died over?