Hunting Down Dragons (Moonlight Dragon #2) Read Free Page A

do. I had to face this as plain old Anne Moody.
    Talk about terrible odds.

Chapter 2
     
     
     
     
     
    Wherever we were wasn't the Sistine Chapel in Vatican City, not that I had seriously considered that for longer than a few seconds. Though the ceiling, towering far above me, was painted with Michelangelo's finest as interpreted by a twisted fan of Harry Potter or Buffy, this wasn't a chapel. In fact, if I hadn't seen the ceiling I wouldn't have believed there were walls. Maybe there weren't. Magick made anything possible.
    Case in point, surrounding me on all sides were what looked like curtains of black silk that seemed to disappear into nothingness where they neared the ceiling. I knew they weren't curtains, however, because despite the lack of a breeze, they occasionally shivered and billowed and emitted puffs of a smoke-like material as though the curtains themselves were living tissue releasing spores.
    The room, or lair, was cold, which was another neon sign telling me that I was now in the world of the supernatural. I rubbed my bare arms and wished I'd worn jeans even if it was ninety degrees outside. I was dressed for the Fourth, not grandma's spooky basement.
    "Where are my friends?" I asked. My voice was instantly swallowed by the black curtains. I tried again, louder this time. "I want to know where my friends are."
    I heard the whisper of movement, a rustle of cloth over cloth. The curtains around me were mostly still, so I followed the sounds up, above my head. The figures I'd thought were painted were moving slowly, changing positions, interacting with other figures. I watched fanged creatures biting into the necks of winged angels, bringing looks of horror to their beautiful faces. Child-like cherubs tore the limbs off figures that howled in soundless agony. Snakes slithered through the spaces between the bodies. Malicious-eyed eagles dived at fallen figures and ripped their flesh off in stringy bits. The scene was vaguely reminiscent of a sadistic Greek myth, except that I knew that most myths were based on a magickal reality.
    Was I still in Vegas? Reluctant to pull my eyes away from the ceiling, half-afraid that some of the figures would come to life and fall on me, I tried to make sense of the rest of the room. I couldn't tell if it was rectangular or round, if the illumination that allowed me to see came from behind the curtains or emanated from the floor.
    "Why am I here?" I tried again, impatience leaking into my voice. Still nothing. "Why ignore me? Are you trying to bore me to death?"
    "Impatient to meet your death, Anne Moody?"
    Immediately I wished I'd kept my mouth shut. The voice was a woman's, soft and sweet and yet somehow bringing to mind the dripping, black-haired girl from The Ring. It was the kind of voice I expected to hear if I were trapped in a haunted house. Maybe I was.
    "I think I'm here to be yelled at and then released," I said hopefully. "And I'll have learned my lesson, believe me."
    I startled as a form materialized behind the curtains to my right. It stepped forward just enough for the gauzy material, if that was what it was, to settle into the nooks and crannies of the person's face and over its head and shoulders. It appeared to be an average-sized man, but everything else about the figure was far from average.
    "Who are you?" I whispered, because my throat had constricted and a whisper was all that would come out of me.
    The face behind that curtain made my knees tremble. There were hollows in that face which should not exist and angles in disconcerting places. Things moved beneath the cloth where there shouldn't have been any movement, as if the figure's face crawled with insects or tiny, alien appendages.
    The figure breathed, making the cloth go concave and convex over the hole that I assumed was its mouth. But that hole was far too large and that motion…it was somehow horrible. Signs of life, in this instance, were the last things I wanted to see.
    "Do you believe