Chapter Five
CHAPTER FIVE
Damien sat at his laptop, doing his best not to become distracted by the enticing emails from car dealers offering new inventory. For him, a glossy coat of paint, a powerful engine, and a convertible top were better than sex.
Fine. Not better. But a close second . After all, an immortal man needed vices, especially him. For most of his life, he’d believed that his love, attraction, and even his innocent admiration of a woman were a death sentence.
For the woman, not him.
Mostly because any female he had gotten close to died. Anyone he cared for kicked the bucket, too. His entire family and village included. Wiped out by a plague.
For this reason, he’d deprived himself of love, friendship, and the simplest of joys in life, such as having a favorite TV show, out of fear the cast would keel over. All because he’d been told by his ex, Willa, that he’d been cursed. Lying witch. The only curse I had was her love spell.
So where did that leave him now that he knew the truth? He wasn’t cursed. He was free to live a long happy life, if he chose.
Maybe that was why this setback with Sky felt like more than a simple breakup. She’d somehow managed to conjure a spark from his cold dead heart. A miracle thrown away without a thought.
Now, he was sure the flames of passion in his heart were extinguished forever, and he would never love again. Sky’s actions had validated a lifelong conviction: he was meant to walk this earth alone. Not due to a curse, but because it was his fate.
Fuck it. I’m buying the Austin-Healy. It was a 1960 red convertible with a white racing stripe. A classic. It would give him the thrill of feeling free, the wind in his hair, and the satisfaction of knowing he looked insanely handsome driving it while wearing his tux. Tailored to perfection, of course.
“Done.” The car was his. “Now on to finding Cimil.” To catch a deranged goddess, he had to think like her, be illogical like her, and…
Search for circus-themed sex parties involving mystical creatures.
He typed several phrases into his search window, on the lookout for recent news articles involving missing clowns, mass clown arrests, raining clowns, or pop-up clown orgies.
Nope. Nothing.
He mulled for a moment. Maybe he should try a different angle. He typed in: Probed by a unicorn. Seduced by a mafia unicorn. Kidnapped and enslaved by a horny unicorn.
Dammit. The only things that kept coming up were reviews for kinky romance novels. Maybe he should try something other than clowns or unicorns.
Damien spent the next two hours entering in every combination of non-clown or unicorn-related sex stuff, only to come up empty-handed.
One last place to look. He emailed an old associate and paid him a hundred bucks to hack into the Smucker’s site and pull their Twinkie sales.
An hour later, Damien received a file.
“Hmmm…” Just as he’d feared. There were no spikes in the consumption of Twinkies anywhere. Hold on…
He clicked the numbers for Kansas. A ten percent increase. He did a quick search only to find they apparently had a Twinkie festival each year, which Cimil likely attended, but it had already passed.
Damien sighed, shut down the laptop, and poured himself a tall glass of scotch even though the sun was just coming up. When one was immortal, it was incredibly difficult to get drunk, but scotch did relax him.
After many years of tracking creatures, he knew that half the time, his successes had come down to plain luck. The other half came from ideas that hit him out of the blue. In short, sometimes not looking for someone was the best way to find them.
Damien sat on the couch and began clicking through the TV channels, searching for something mindless to watch until his subconscious produced possible ways to locate Cimil.
Hold the xylophone. What is that? He turned up the volume on the news report. Mysterious globs falling from the sky in Texas?
Damien could only think of one other occasion in his very long life when he’d heard of such a phenomenon. It was Canada in the early 1900s, and an entire town had reported strange gelatinous rain with an odor so foul it made people sick. No one knew what it was except for the few individuals like himself who’d spent time hunting the responsible creatures. Damien had never been lucky enough to catch one, as he’d been hired to do on occasion, but he had learned a few things.
In short, the potent goop was likened to a mating call, meant to draw females from around the world with a promise of fertilization. If this incident is the same event, then the globs must be…
“Dragon cum,” he muttered to himself.
Dragons were very rare, mystical creatures that had mastered the stealthy art of camouflage. In fact, very little was actually known about the species—how they hid from humans, where they lived, and their life cycle—making them difficult to track. Most of what he’d learned had not come from the misdirected legends found in books or old sailor songs, but from ancient cave drawings in China.
One such drawing depicted a giant winged creature soaring through the clouds, appearing to have a bowel movement on human stick figures below. But Damien had noticed one small detail many scholars overlooked: the dragon had been smiling. Not in a shitting sort of way, but contentedly, like any man might after an orgasmic release.
Though Damien had never completed the job of capturing the dragon for his client, nor had he ever seen one of the beasts with his own eyes, he knew one thing: if any dragons had survived the blast, Cimil would attempt to pair them up.
An army of dragons would be the perfect weapon against humans. Undetectable. Deadly. Hungry. Very big balls. He meant it both literally and metaphorically. Dragons feared nothing. And they had to possess tank-sized testicles to produce all that jizz.
Damien’s eyes narrowed in on the TV as the reporter held up a giant, pumpkin-sized glob in her hands.
Impressive. Must be a big dragon. And it was just the sort of mass ejaculatory event that would attract a serial pervert like Cimil.
“I guess I’m going dragon hunting in Dallas to find Cimil.” On the way to the airport, he would stop at the store to buy wading boots and an umbrella.
“Without us?” chirped a tiny voice.
Damien looked down to find Pet sitting naked inside the glass of scotch resting in his hand.
“Why are you here?” he growled.
“Because Sky went to do reconnaissance for her sister and nephew’s rescue.”
“And?” he prompted.
“ And she says she hates your sexy guts, but you were right. SBP knew that Sky was trying to take them down. They knew everything about her plans. But more importantly, we figured out why they took Miguel and Amelia.”