Hard Times in Dragon City Read online

  Would Heidi have been too proud to turn to me for help? Might she have taken out a loan from someone else, someone who wanted to make an example of her and her family when they couldn’t work out a way to collect? Possibly, but unlikely.

  Maybe one of Heidi’s sons had brought the troubles to their door. Neither Carsten nor Guenter were particularly fond of work, preferring to rely on Heidi for three hot squares and a clean bed instead. If one of them had gotten too ambitious, he might have made a foe of the wrong person.

  I couldn’t imagine the same would be true of Dörthe. She was as hard-headed and sensible as her father, who was as true and faithful a friend as I’d ever had. Still, love could make people do strange things, as I could testify myself.

  By the same token, while I was sure that Johan wasn’t behind the murder of his wife and in-laws, that didn’t mean he might not be culpable. There were sure to have been others who wanted that prized promotion of his, and they might have been willing to mount an attack on him to eliminate him from their career path. Perhaps Johan had been meant to be the main victim and had only been saved from that fate by dedication to his career.

  Or it could have been someone who had a beef with the Brichts. As powerful as they were, they had made more foes than just about any family in the entire city. Hell, I didn’t like them much myself. That didn’t mean I’d hire someone to slaughter the family of one of their junior executives, but other people maybe had lower standards for such things.

  I considered passing right by my place and heading straight for the Quill for a bite and a beer, but I felt like I had the stench of death about me so I decided to get cleaned up first instead. My place isn’t much, mind you, but it suits me fine.

  When I came back into town after my last sojourn into the ancient ruins in the wild lands beyond Dragon City’s walls, my compatriots and I had celebrated at the Barrelrider, a halfling restaurant owned by Moira’s father, Nit Erdini. I’d had a bit too much to drink to want to stagger anywhere else, so they’d put me in the empty apartment above the place. When I woke up the next morning, I decided I liked it so much I would stay, and I’d been there ever since.

  It had two main rooms plus, like most halfling joints, lots of pantries, which I turned into closets. I’m not much of a cook, so the lack of a kitchen in the place didn’t bother me. I just ate my meals downstairs or at the Quill instead. I turned the front room — which had been a parlor with a large circular window overlooking the street — into an office of sorts, and I flopped in the back room, which had the advantage of being a bit more private.

  As I walked up to the Barrelrider, I noticed that someone had shut the window over my desk, which pivoted on a point near the center of the circle. I was sure that I had slept with it open, and as fuzzy-headed as I might have been from the rude awakening Yabair had delivered to me, I was pretty sure I hadn’t shut it on my way out the door. That meant someone had been in my place since I’d left it — and maybe still was.

  I sauntered up to the nondescript door to the right of the Barrelrider’s entrance like I hadn’t noticed a thing. Once inside the short entrance hallway that preceded the stairs that ran up to my place, I drew my wand from its shoulder holster and got it ready. I prepared a nasty little spell that was sure to give anyone in my place a good shock, and I left the last syllable for it sitting there on the tip of my tongue.

  Then I crept up the stairs with as much care as I could muster, trying to avoid the creakiest of the stairs, which Nit routinely forgot to fix. The door at the landing was closed. The words on the frosted glass set into the top half of it read:

  MAX GIBSON

  FREELANCE

  I never specified what I freelanced at. I figured that gave me the kind of flexibility I sometimes required.

  I stood there and considered my entry options. Should I just walk in like nothing was wrong? Should I kick down the door? Should I blast out the glass?

  Then someone inside called out to me in a voice I hadn’t heard in a decade and would have been content to never hear again. “Come on in, Max,” she said. “I can hear you breathing out there.”

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Bellezza Sanguigno had always had my number from the first moment I laid eyes on her. To this day, I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone more heartbreakingly beautiful, nor more willing to use that well-known asset to get whatever she wanted. She had smacked me around with it like I was a rented mule, and it had always — well, almost always — brought me back into line with her desires.

  You can only deal with someone like that for so long before you begin to despise yourself for giving in to her, though, and I’d reached my breaking point with her in a spectacular way. I’d avoided her like a plague-ridden rat from that point on, and up until that moment I’d done an impeccable job of it. Then she had to go and ruin it for me.

  I didn’t want to open the door. I knew she was behind it. I’d heard her call my name, and take it from me, the sound of that particular song was something I would never forget.

  On the other hand, there was nothing I wanted more than to see her again. I felt like a dragon essence junkie who’d just stumbled upon a chest full of the stuff. The temptation to indulge in it was so strong, no matter how bad — even lethal — I knew it might be for me.

  In the end, I turned around and left. I just didn’t want to deal with her, and not being in the same room with her had worked just fine for me for the past decade. I didn’t see a reason to fool with my winning plan.

  I didn’t get halfway down the stairs before she swung open my door and shouted down at me. “Max Gibson!” she said. “Are you such a coward that you still can’t bear to face me?”

  I opened my mouth to respond, but not a word came out. Nothing I could think of to say would make it better or get me what I wanted, which was her out of my place. I blushed, this time in complete embarrassment, and turned around to face her.

  “Hi, Belle,” I managed to say.

  She looked just as breathtaking as I remembered her. She hadn’t aged a day since the last time I’d seen her, although I’m sure she couldn’t have said the same about me. She was tall for an elf, with long, blonde hair, pouty red lips, and eyes the color of the distant sea when seen from the Dragon’s Spire. They sparkled in the same way as those waters on a sunny day.

  She scowled down at me, marring her perfect features and wrinkling her porcelain-smooth skin. She arched a questioning eyebrow at me, and there was nothing I wanted more at that moment than to make up for whatever wrong I’d done her. I started back up the stairs, fighting the urge to sweep her up in my arms with every step.

  Then, as I drew closer, I saw that old defensive look in her eyes, and I remembered how cold and calculating she could be. Because of her rare beauty, she attracted all sorts of people. She’d learned from a young age — long before my grandparents were born — not to trust the motives of anyone around her, which I could understand. My motives didn’t feel all that pure at the moment either.

  But that look reminded me of how she’d persuaded me to leave Gütmann behind as I dragged her to safety, and I didn’t feel a damn thing for her any more — just disgust for myself.

  “What are you doing here, Belle?” I pushed past her and strolled into my office.

  She followed me into the room and shut the door behind her. I considered asking her to leave it open, but I didn’t want to give her the satisfaction of making a request she was bound to ignore. She smirked at me.

  “Is it forbidden to pay a social call to an old friend?” She strove to come off as innocent as a straying schoolgirl, but I’d long ago grown immune to that angle.

  “It’s unexpected,” I said. “It’s been ten years.”

  She dismissed that with a wave of her hand. To an elf like her, a decade was beneath her notice, or so she seemed to claim. “You never call upon me.”

  “You knew where I was.” I glanced around to see if she’d done anything to my office other than close the window. I s
at down in my chair and waved at her to take a set on the couch next to the door. I could smell her perfume clinging to the leather.

  “Isn’t a gentleman supposed to call on a lady?”

  I snorted at that. “There’s nothing gentle about me, Belle. As for you…”

  I let that hang in the air as a test. If she took up the implied insult, she might have a genuine reason for being here. If she ignored it, she wanted something bad enough that she was willing to ignore such unspoken slights.

  “I’m sorry about that,” she said. “I should have come earlier. I got caught up in family matters instead.”

  With elves, family matters could mean anything. She might have had a spat with her elder sister Fiera again. Her father might have decided the time had come for her to marry. Her mother might have expressed some disapproval over something she’d done — like take up with me.

  It always made my head hurt to try to make sense of Bellezza’s family tree. When you had people in it living for centuries, such things tended to cross over and back and intertwine so much you couldn’t tell where the branches ended and the roots began. I’d long since given up trying.

  She gave explaining herself to me another shot. “I lost track of time.”

  “For a decade?”

  She gave me the cutest damn shrug that made her barely modest dress — which had been dyed to match her magnificent eyes — do things that threatened to imperil my resolve against her. In any case, she made her meaning clear. Time meant a lot more to me than it did to her.

  Of course, that’s because I could bet on having a lot less of it to spend. The life expectancy of a human living in Dragon City was measured in decades, while elves could hope to trod this battered earth for centuries. It was rare to find one of us make it to eighty years old, much less celebrate a centennial, but elves, they were never-changing immortals immune to the ravages of time, at least as far as short-timers like me were concerned.

  Dwarves came next on that longevity list, then gnomes, and together the members of those three races made up the most powerful dynasties in the entire city, surpassed only by the Dragon Emperor himself. The rest of us — the humans, the halflings, the goblins, the orcs, and whoever else — we were like fireflies flashing in the night to them. There for a season of our lives, sparkling bright and pretty, full of life for those who took the time to see us, and then gone before we could really be known at all.

  “What do you want, Belle?”

  “To see you,” she said with a hesitant smile. “Isn’t that enough?”

  I leaned forward in my chair and rested my forearms on my desk. “It would be if it was true.”

  “You would doubt my word?” She fanned herself in mock offense.

  “Every letter of it.”

  She gazed at me with those wide blue eyes of hers, long enough that I wondered if she was trying to get me to fall into them and drown. I considered giving into it. Just before I made that impossible leap, she made up her mind, nodded at me, and spoke.

  “I’m here to talk with you about a mutual friend, to whom I’m afraid something terrible may have happened,” she said.

  “Heidi Gütmann?” I knew that her being here when I got back from the Stronghold had been too much of a coincidence.

  “No.” She gave me an odd look. “Moira Erdini.”

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  “What happened to Heidi Gütmann?” Belle asked, concern puckering her flawless brow.

  “What happened to Moira?” I didn’t much want to talk about what had happened to the Gütmanns. I couldn’t get the images of their corpses out of my mind.

  “I sent her on an errand for me,” she said. “Last night. To the Gütmanns.”

  My heart sank. I’d known Moira for years, and she was always getting into one kind of trouble or another. Her parents loved her, but they’d spoiled her rotten by making her think the world owed her everything it had. If it wasn’t given to her, she didn’t see anything wrong with just going out and taking it.

  She was good at taking things, though, and that make her handy to have along on the sort of tomb-plundering expeditions I’d been part of during my younger days. All those zombies scratching at the Great Circle had been buried at one time, after all, and they’d left behind a lot of worldly goods they no longer had any use for. It seemed only fair that if they were going to make our lives miserable we take something of theirs to make up for it.

  Or so the argument went. I was never all that comfortable with it, but it beat working for a living.

  Moira never had any recriminations about that sort of thing. After Gütmann had died and the rest of us had retired, she still tried to convince us all to get back together to go after one last big score. She had a kind of fearlessness about her that the rest of us had seen beaten out of us, and I had to admire her tenacity if nothing else.

  But if Moira had been at the Gütmanns’ home last night, I couldn’t see what good might come out of that.

  “What happened to Heidi?” Belle said again, more insistent this time.

  “She’s dead,” I said. “Her and the entire family.”

  I scrutinized Belle as I said those words, trying to gauge her reaction. Like most elves, she could be a bit cool, but the news of such a tragedy befalling old friends should have provoked some kind of reaction from her.

  It did. Her eyes widened until I could see whites all around them, and she opened her mouth to speak, then thought better of it and swallowed hard instead. I could tell how upset she was because I noticed how the pointed tips of her tapered ears, behind which she’d tucked her hair, flushed pink. It wasn’t the kind of thing that someone who didn’t know her would have noticed at all, but I saw every bit of it.

  “You can’t think that Moira had anything to do with that,” she said.

  I shook my head but didn’t say a word. I just let that news hang in the air between us.

  She frowned at me. “You really can’t think that I had anything to do with that.”

  I sat back in my chair with a nonchalant shrug. “I don’t think anything,” I said. “All I know is what I saw there: a lot of good people murdered by a professional with a very sharp blade.”

  Belle lost her composure at that point. Color came to her cheeks as she blinked back the tears in her eyes. “I can’t imagine,” she said. “I don’t want to.”

  “I don’t have to imagine,” I said. “ I saw it myself this morning. Heidi, Carsten, Guenter, Dörthe, even little Gerte. All dead.”

  She stood then and made to leave. I got to my feet and beat her to the door. Under most circumstances, she’d have been quick enough to slip out before I got there, but she was too disturbed to put her feet in front of herself that fast.

  “You can’t just come in here and leave like that,” I said. “What happened to Moira?”

  She looked up at me, and for a moment I thought she might slump into my embrace and beg me to comfort her. I may have actually wished for it. Instead, a steely look returned to her eyes, and she took a step back.

  “I sent her to deliver a gift to the Gütmanns last night. I didn’t think there would be any trouble over it. I can’t believe —” She shuddered. “It just doesn’t make any sense. Why would someone want to kill them?”

  “I’m hoping to figure that out myself,” I said. “The Guard has Dörthe’s husband in custody for the killings right now.”

  “Did he do it?”

  I shook my head. “Not a chance, but that doesn’t mean they might not pin it on him anyhow.” I squinted at her. “What did you send Moira to deliver?”

  She squirmed in front of me. “If you must know, the Gütmanns had fallen on hard times, and I’d taken it on myself to give them a hand. After what happened to Anders, after all, I felt, well —”

  “Guilty?”

  She glared at me as if I’d slapped her face. “Compassion,” she said. “For the family of an old friend who sacrificed himself for us.”

  I don’t know who she thou
ght she was talking to. I’d been there. I’d seen what happened. Gütmann may have been sacrificed for the rest of us, but he didn’t do it to himself.

  “How kind of you.”

  She screwed up her face at me. “Don’t you dare judge me,” she said.

  “Just returning the favor.”

  Her nostrils flared, and she reached for the door. I didn’t get out of the way.

  “Where’s Moira?” I said.

  “That’s what I came here to ask you to find out. You know her as well as anyone. You live above her parents’ place. I figured you’d have the best chance of tracking her down.”

  A terrible thought struck me. Not that Moira killed the Gütmanns, no. She didn’t have that in her. But she did have a penchant for walking off with other peoples’ property.

  “Are you sure she made it to the Gütmanns last night?”

  Belle gave a hesitant shake of her head, and I knew the idea had occurred to her too. “She’s run errands for me before, though, and it’s always gone off without a hitch. It’s not like her to just disappear like this.” She furrowed her brow. “Is it?”

  I opened the door for her and stepped out of her way. “I’ll find her,” I said. “Not for your sake, but for hers.”

  She frowned and was still gorgeous every second she did it. “You don’t think she had anything to do with the Gütmanns being murdered, do you?”

  “No,” I said as she walked past me. “Not on purpose, but that’s too big a coincidence, don’t you think?”

  She looked back at me as she moved down the stairs and gave me a nervous nod. “You know where to find me?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “I always have.”

  CHAPTER NINE

  Moira had left home at an early age — for a halfling, at least — and she’d never gone back. As much as she claimed to love her parents and the rest of her family, she couldn’t stand to be around them for more than an hour or two at a time. Once we’d hung up our traveling cloaks, she’d used her share of the treasure to buy herself a sharp little apartment on the edge of Gnometown, a bit higher up the mountain.