Though we also need to find Mikkel and Lærke while we’re in Copenhagen, we’ve decided to try to connect Ström’s memories first to the Black Dragon. As we make it down the last ornately gilded staircase from our top-floor suite into the sprawling lobby, I see Emil Beck give us the eye from where he stands polished at the concierge station.
Something tells me Emil’s far more than just the concierge here,maybe even the hotel’s owner, with the watchful way he takes in everything. As Ström puts his Axel Larsen personality back into play, he hails Emil, giving him a bright wave across the lobby and a laugh.
Emil waves back, but is busy with another client, helping them secure something just the way my old friend Dusk once helped clients at the Red Letter Hotel Paris. It makes me miss the Paris Hotel, and all my friends there.
Even though Dusk has moved on as the King of the Crystal Dragons now.
We hop on our bikes, brought to us at the front of the hotel by the valets, and fire them up. Once again, we follow Ström’s lead as he zooms through the city, heading north, though a part of me is distracted now as I see the Twilight Realm’s Copenhagen by day.
It’s a blend of old and new buildings like in the human world’s Copenhagen, but the greenery here is just stunning. Copenhagen in the human world is pretty, with all its flowering trees and tulips in the spring. Here, it’s like a Spring Fae wonderland, as cherry trees blossom in a riot of pink flowers and bright red, orange, purple, and white tulips coat the byways.
Everywhere we ride, it’s ginormous beds of daffodils, cascading pots of tulips and creeping vines blossoming with little white flowers, plus more swaths of blooming trees. It’s like the Tivoli Gardens gone to a manicured riot everywhere I look. All of it, decorating lovely Renaissance, Baroque, and Rococo buildings that give this city its charm.
I make a mental note to ask Ström if the Spring Fae have a strong hold here in Danish Blood Dragon land; but we’re already arriving at our destination, a jutting cliff north of the city that overlooks the Øresund.
It’s an industrial area, though it looks like most of the warehouses here haven’t been used in decades. Covered in magical graffiti, windows blasted out and their sides covered in flowering vines, most of these buildings look like they’ve been abandoned, maybe for the site to be reclaimed by a developer.
As Ström focuses now, we walk to the cliffside. He juts his chin at one area, and we walk through a field of short grass and tiny spring flowers that cling stubbornly to the blustery cliff.
We make it to the overlook we saw in his memory; as I glance around the secluded spot, which dips down and is shaded by higher cliffs nearby, I recognize it. I turn to see the lighthouse, burning on its rounds ten times brighter than any human lighthouse, because it’s manned by magic. There’s nothing here, though. No scent or magical imprint of dragons.
Just a lonely cliff, used as a clandestine meeting spot decades ago.
“Nothing here.” Bjorn grunts as he scuffs his boot through some loose rock. “Check out the warehouse?”
“Yeah.” Ström is quiet now that we’ve found this spot. It’s as if he didn’t want those memories to be real. Now that he knows this place exists, he also understands everything he saw in his vision was true.
I take his hand and he looks down, twining his fingers in mine. I squeeze and he looks up.
“You okay?” I ask.
“I will be. Once we find the bastards who fucked with my memory and punish them.” He gives a hard smile, no mirth in it as he nods us back to the warehouse. “Let’s head back there and see what we can see.”
“Sure.” I squeeze his hand again, then we turn, heading away from the cliff.
We’re all on high alert now, however, in a way we weren’t while investigating the cliffs. This warehouse looks like a beat-up old piece of shit. Magical graffiti covers it in endless rainbows of Fae and other Lineage styles, though even I can tell at one glance some of those sigils are dragon-wards. It looks like a bomb went off inside it at some point. All the windows are blasted out, even some of the timbers and rusted corrugated metal of the doors bulging.
We approach with a weather eye on all the exits, the windows high above, and the roofline. Like all the other warehouses around here, itseems to be abandoned, no significant magical signature lingering except for a few minor things that will not harm a dragon.
As Bjorn hauls the rolling rear door of the warehouse open, we head inside. We’re still on guard, hands ready in case we have to use magic or grab a weapon—which all of us are wearing in rigs of carefully hidden knives right now.
But nothing stirs inside the warehouse. A single ginormous room, like a barn, it has a concrete floor with oil stains and dirt scuffed all over it. Mouse droppings are everywhere, and bigger ones that smell of barn goblins. Barn goblins like to infest old warehouses like these; Bjorn steps in a fresh poop and wrinkles his nose as it lets off a stink like rotten tomatoes.
Disgusting.
“Well, if there was anything here, it’s long been cleaned out.” Bjorn surveys the empty warehouse, hands on his hips. “Just mice and barn goblins. Your usual.”
As he speaks, something suddenly hurls down from the rafters at us. A gobbet of barn goblin shit, it lands with a thicksplatas Bjorn dodges it.
“HEY!” he roars up at the roof beams, tittering now with evil little growling voices. “I willfryyou little shits, and all the rest of your excrement, if you do that again! I don’t care if I bring this entire barn down!”
Goblins are no match for dragons, physically or metaphysically. The grunting tittering quiets.
Though I hear a raspberry now, as whoever is up there thumbs their nose at us.
“Fucking hate goblins. Little turds,” Bjorn says with a dark growl, as Ström and I both stifle laughs.
“Hey. At least you sidestepped that one little turd. If you hadn’t, you’d smell like rotten tomatoes for days, no matter what you did to get rid of it.” Ström is casual now, his mood lifted as he teases Bjorn. “When I was here last, those little fuckers were notorious for lobbing shit at?—”
