Page 48 of Skulk of Foxes
‘Isn’t it dangerous having all this around when you’re a fire-breathing dragon?’ I asked when we finally arrived in a small study. I arched an eyebrow. ‘If you’re a fire breathing dragon?’
Liung settled himself in a cracked leather armchair and regarded us imperiously. The rest of us grabbed seats from the motley collection in the room. I ended up on a child’s rocking chair. My arse barely fit inside it but I wasn’t about to pass up the chance to swing myself up and down if I could help it.
‘I am a dragon but I don’t breathe fire,’ Liung snapped. Then a shadow crossed his face. ‘Well, not until recently, anyway.’
I sat up straighter, hoping for a demonstration. Unfortunately, Morgan didn’t waste any time getting down to business. ‘We’re here because we need—’
‘You need Chen’s magical sphere to be destroyed,’ Liung interrupted. ‘Yes, yes. You should have come here the moment the sphere passed into your possession. I warned Chen that creating the damned thing in the first place would cause problems but he wouldn’t listen to me.’ He shook his head disdainfully. ‘He never did.’
‘You knew him?’
‘Of course.’
‘And you know about the sphere?’
‘Naturally.’
I threw my up hands in frustration. ‘Then why didn’t you come to us?’
‘I was waiting for you to come to me.’ Liung didn’t seem in the slightest bit bothered about the trouble he’d caused by not getting in contact. He leaned forward conspiratorially. ‘Chen was quite the hoarder, you know.’
I looked around Liung’s shelves; they had so much stuff crammed onto them that they were bending and warping. In this room the floor was relatively clear but there were seven or eight tables and a similar number of bureaux and bookshelves. Each piece of furniture was covered in stuff.
I glanced at the old dragon, who seemed to be taking satisfaction in revealing this supposed nasty secret about his compatriot. Pot. Kettle.
‘Can you destroy the sphere?’ Timmons asked. His body was hunched even though his chair, some sort of straight-backed, elaborately carved Chippendale affair, afforded him much more space than I had.
Liung nodded his head. ‘I can.’
Morgan moved forward in his seat, a hard glint in his eyes. ‘More to the point, will you?’
Liung didn’t answer immediately. He knitted his fingers under his chin and regarded us all with mild amusement. ‘Will I save this demesne from an impending apocalypse? Or will I let crazed faeries use the sphere and subject us all to the ensuing chaos and the end of the world, you mean?’
‘Yeah,’ Jodie said, finding her voice. ‘That’s exactly what we mean.’
Liung turned his head and examined her. She held her ground, refusing to shrink back. ‘You are pretty,’ he said finally. ‘Ifyouwant to come and visit me wearing fishnet tights, you are very welcome to do so.’
There was no accounting for taste.
‘If you put on fishnet tights first,’ Jodie shot back, ‘I’ll consider it.’
Liung smirked. ‘That can be arranged.’
From somewhere in the distance there was a rumble of sound, like a giant clearing his throat. We all tensed, even Liung. When the noise drifted away, I breathed out again.
‘This is all your doing,’ the dragon snapped, looking genuinely irritated for the first time and pointing a bony finger at us. ‘You faeries, waving your magic around without thinking of the consequences. You’ve always been the same. Why don’t you stay in your demesne where you belong? Goodness only knows what will happen next. I’m not abandoning my home just because you’ve fucked up. But if you make my favourite pizza delivery company shut up shop, I will seek you out and make you pay.’
‘We’re working on a solution,’ Morgan said smoothly.
‘Well, work harder! I’ve been around for five hundred years and the only time matters have been this bad was during the Black Plague. If you don’t sort out things soon, there will be nothing left of this city to save.’
Liung was obviously getting worked up and his voice rose with every word until he began to choke and splutter. A hacking cough started up deep in his chest. He groaned as a puff of smoke and a single flame shot out from his mouth, almost singeing Opulus’s eyebrows.
Rather than apologising, Liung glared again. ‘See what you made me do?’
‘That is seriously cool,’ I breathed.
Opulus waved his hand in front of his face as if to ward off any lingering dragon germs. ‘Can we destroy the sphere ourselves?’
