Read The Dragon's Secret (The Fay Morgan Chronicles Book 2) for Free Online Page B

whipping all around us. Lila and Adam clung to the edges of the carpet at first, but before long they were holding their faces up to the weak morning sun and smiling. Nothing good was coming, yet it was a simple human joy to delight in flight and motion. I peered down on the city, lovely in its miniature form, and searched for any beacons pulsing with Merlin’s magic. We flew over downtown and then up to Capitol Hill.
    “Shouldn’t we stop by the store?” Lila asked, shouting over the wind.
    I shook my head. “There isn’t time. Merlin will try to act quickly as he knows we’ll be coming. I have some spells on me. They’ll have to do.”
    I catalogued my spells as I flew: a black leather bracelet that was a distraction spell, two silver rings that were truth spells, another ring that could transmogrify, three bobby pin protections, and the buttons sewn into the bottom hem of my shirt that were concussive spells. I didn’t fool myself that any of them would best men who controlled a dragon, owned a relic, and would potentially have turned Merlin to their cause by the time we got there. But no spells would. Wits would have to win the day, not magic.
    We circled above the city, moving across the Central District and Beacon Hill, until I saw the bright flash of Merlin’s silvery beacon to the south.
    We flew there in minutes, and the flying carpet touched down gently in the parking lot of a large warehouse at the southern industrial edge of the city. I bade the rug to hide out of sight, and then studied our surroundings. The warehouse was beige and tall with only a few small windows, high up. There was some kind of dampening spell wound around the place and I couldn’t sense magic within. The place had a small door at the front of it.
    I stood there a long moment. I needed information. “You two go in the door. Act confused and genial and leave within five minutes.”
    “Confused? We got this.” Lila said.
    I pulled out two of my bobby pins and whispered “ diogelwch ” as I gave one to Adam and one to Lila. “Be careful in there. Eat and drink nothing. If your gut tells you it is time to run, run.”
    Lila kissed my cheek and then marched toward the door, arm in arm with Adam. I wanted to hold them back, but there was no use wasting their diversion.
    I silently and swiftly rose up into the air as they knocked on the front door. I flew up to the nearest window, three stories up, and muttered a couple of words as I pressed my onyx ring against the glass. The window turned ephemeral at the same time I heard the door open below me and a man’s voice ask, “What do you want?”
    I stepped into the warehouse room and stood balanced on an exposed wood rafter. Waves of powerful magic hit me from all direction, and I swayed back and forth as I clenched my jaw and closed my eyes. Each magical strand carried a different scent and feeling, some of them reeking of Merlin’s magic, some of them the Red Dragon’s. I had no choice but to let them wash through me as I willed myself to acclimate. When my head finally cleared, I looked down, still dizzy, and saw that none of the five men below had noticed me.
    Perhaps because a very enthusiastic Lila stood laughing and explaining that she and Adam were on a geocaching expedition, and maybe they had made a wrong turn, but wow, cool warehouse, and this didn’t happen to be the place where there was a cache, was it? She giggled convincingly and touched the arm of the nearest man. Good girl, I thought. I’d been teaching her some of the tricks of feminine wiles, and she deployed them well. I looked away and focused on the room.
    The warehouse was divided in half by a large wall. On the side I stood on, it was mostly empty. There were a couple of orange couches and refrigerators, as well as half a dozen tables set up with monitors, whirring computers, and a tangled mess of cords. On the other side of the wall? I couldn’t see past it, but that was where the magic came from. Where