Coda
1042 Words
CODA
Miri and Dark sat up talking through the night. Miri couldn’t help but tell him everything he wanted to know. It felt right.
Dark was furious to hear about Abstraction, and that dragons had given up their shares of the aquifer. He was sadly confused at how much things had changed.
Her phone rang. It was Laner. The files. She still had to review them.
She left Dark alone in his cage—he didn’t want to hear any more. She sat in the long, empty hallway, going through the reports.
She wished she had taken Earl up on his offer to stop for a few bottles of wine.
Then the door opened, and Earl entered at the far side of the hallway, a grocery bag in his hand. Wine bottles clinked inside. He tipped his hat to her, and she read with renewed energy.
Lucan and Celesse rolled over on his bed in his penthouse. They were naked, and they were panting.
Propping his head up on a pillow, he grinned at her. “Are we made up yet?”
She tucked herself into the bed’s white sheets; her long red hair spilled out on her pillow. She sighed, out of breath. “It’s a start.”
“Heh. Well, we’ve got a lot coming our way.”
“We do, don’t we?” Celesse agreed.
Outside, the city glittered.
“We’ll get through this okay,” she said, caressing his messy black hair. “I hope.”
Lucan sighed and rolled over as his phone rang.
It was Madelaide again.
“Go,” Celesse said.
He reached over and they shared a long, protracted kiss. Then he sat at the edge of the bed and began to dress. As he walked out of the penthouse, he called the local pretzel house and told them to whip up a fresh batch of magic pretzels.
Celesse lay in bed, looking out at the downtown skyline. She felt rosy and didn’t want to get out of bed, even though she had at least five phone calls to make to donors. She had to schedule meetings. And at least one speech had to be rescheduled.
What was her future with Lucan?
She liked to think she had made an honest man out of him, but in the back of her mind, she knew better.
The election was their horizon. Though it was weeks away, its weight bore down on her and she knew she couldn’t lose it.
She couldn’t lose him.
All her responsibilities as campaign manager raced across her mind again, and already she felt guilty for not being on her phone.
But she had been through hell these last few days.
She closed her eyes and told herself that she’d sleep for only a few minutes...
Bartholomew and Tony took the elevator from the restaurant. They rode from the top floor all the way down to the lower level of the high-rise, switching elevators twenty stories down.
Bartholomew was festering.
Tony was silent and stayed out of his way.
Their t-shirts were wet from washing dishes.
Normally in an establishment like this, the police would have just taken them to jail for not having the money to pay the restaurant bill. But Lucan had sway with the chef, and he had urged him to offer a deal. It only made the incident the more humiliating.
“He’s a bastard,” Bartholomew said. “He gives elves everywhere a bad name. I can’t understand why you thought you could trust him.”
Tony said nothing.
The elevator stopped in the parking garage.
They walked in silence through the garage, which was empty except for a few cars. It was dark and cold. The green walls gave the area a sickly glow.
“What do we do now?” Tony asked. “I told you we should’ve just left it alone.”
“Grimoire is going to pay,” Bartholomew said.
“Just because you don’t agree with him politically doesn’t mean—”
Bartholomew shushed him.
Ahead, a man was sitting on the hood of their van. He wore a suit and sunglasses, and he tapped his palm with a baseball bat.
The car’s windows were busted and the panels were dented in.
“You Bartholomew?” the man in the suit asked.
Bartholomew stood in front of Tony. “Who’s asking?”
The man jumped off the hood of the car. “We want to talk to you.”
Several men in suits stepped out of the shadows with baseball bats resting against their shoulders.
Ennius Grimoire stood on a platform in a park giving a powerful speech. He walked across the stage, talking about the future of Magic Hope City under his third term. A crowd of thousands applauded him, and as he railed on his nephew, Norwyn’s silhouette hovered around him, barely visible.
Miri and Laner met at the Ancestral Bogs, about a quarter of a mile from the site of Old Dark’s tomb.
Miri could see the felled trees from the mound she stood on. She had sprayed herself with bug spray and she was ready for the heat.
Laner wore a sun hat, t-shirt, and shorts. He carried the papers with him.
“You ready?” he asked.
“Ready as I’ll ever be,” Miri said.
They descended the mound to where a group of researchers waited for them.
As they approached, Miri felt the familiar pangs in her stomach and wondered if she was doing the right thing. She straightened her hat, smiled, and waved at her new team.
Dark screamed as Gus and Orion hit him with another paralysis spell. They fastened his muzzle on, and when they left the room, a janitor entered, making a quick sweep and mop of the cage.
Gus and Orion left and told the janitor, a short elven woman, to be quick.
She mopped the floor, never taking her eyes off Dark.
She began to polish the bars as Dark regained his strength. Seeing the dragon start to move, she ran out of the cage and locked it just as Dark moved his legs.
He roared and lunged towards her, banging his claws on the bars. She stumbled back, startled, and struck a pile of grimoires a few feet away from the cage. The stack toppled over and the spell cards flew everywhere.
Gus and Orion ran into the room, and Dark laughed at them. They cleaned up the grimoires and used a forklift to move the stack further back.
When they shut off the lights and left Dark alone, he lifted his claws and grinned at the small stack of grimoires that he’d stolen in the shuffle.
“Now this is interesting,” he said, holding up one of the grimoires to his eye.
TO BE CONTINUED…
- Writer
