It was time to do the impossible.
L’zar Verdys felt it coursing through him—the rightness of the moment, the tug pulling at his core to rise to the call and finally put into motion everything the soothsayer had predicted. For two hundred years, he’d waited for this night.
“Lights out in five.” The night guard stalked down the walkway of cell block Alpha, his boots clicking on the metal mesh.
“Not even gonna give us a pass for the new year, huh?” L’zar’s neighbor Relaude let out a low whistle.
The guard’s rhythmic footsteps stopped at the cell on L’zar’s right, and the metallic ping of the man’s cattle prod for magicals echoed through the block. Just a light tap-tap tap against the bars. “You don’t get a pass for another fifty years, Relaude.”
“Forty-nine, actually—”
The weapon cracked against the cell bars, throwing up a sizzling flash of purple sparks when the buzzing, electrically charged nightstick struck the cell’s magic-dampening wards. “We can double that if you want, inmate. Or you can keep your fat Orc mouth shut.”
Relaude let out a low, rumbling chuckle but didn’t say another word.
L’zar stretched out on the thin mattress of his single bunk, slate-gray arms folded behind his head of white hair as the guard picked up his slow, rhythmic march down the cells lining Alpha block. It sounded like Richardson, and sure enough, there was Richardson’s bulbous nose lit up in perfect profile as the man passed L’zar’s cell. The guard didn’t pause as he swept a quick gaze over the Drow prisoner’s bare, tidy box of a room. Just one eyebrow lifted in contempt, then he continued down the row.
It’s the last thing these idiots expect. L’zar Verdys doesn’t make a sound, and it’s almost like he doesn’t even exist. They’ll notice when I’m gone, all right. And by the time they find out which direction I went, I’ll already have everything set in motion.
It was time to do the impossible, sure. The only problem with that was L’zar’s status as a convicted magical felon from the other side. But if the gateway couldn’t stop him from crossing over a dozen times to try his luck again and again with the soothsayer’s prophecy, a few dampening wards and human guards with low-tech tasers and fell darts didn’t stand a chance.
Let them think I’ve got my head down for the rest of it. L’zar sniffed, shifted his head more comfortably against his folded arms so his pointed ears could breathe a little, and crossed one booted foot over the other. Tonight, I’m getting out.
Richardson’s echoing footsteps receded down the block, then silence settled over Alpha until the guard in the tower pulled the huge lever that looked more like a breaker reset than the light switch on a max-security prison for non-human cons. “Happy New Year, inmates. Way to break in the twenty-first century.”
The lights cracked off with an echoing boom, plunging Alpha block into a half darkness punctured only by the red lights flaring to life above the guard tower.
Red for locked up tight. What a dangerously stupid human misconception.
For the first half hour, the block echoed with the rattling coughs, grunts, snores, and farts of Chateau D’rahl’s most dangerous magical prisoners as they settled in for the night in their single-inmate suites of concrete and metal frames and high-voltage dampening wards. L’zar waited patiently through all of it without a sound until the symphony of unrestricted bodily functions from at least four different races came to a standstill.
Then he pushed himself up on his bed, glanced through the bars of his cell door at that dauntless red light, and stood.
“Hey, Verdys,” Relaude whispered harshly from the next cell over. “Trying to stay up to watch the ball drop?”
L’zar ignored him and moved toward the steel toilet at the back of his cell.
“Man, what I wouldn’t give for some end-year grog and a good battle pit. Might be what I miss most about home.” The Orc’s low voice brought its usual muffled thickness through Relaude’s sawed-off tusks, the ends of which still protruded at broken angles from his thick lower jaw. L’zar saw those tusks in his mind’s eye every time his neighbor spoke. “Hell, I’d even fight you.”
“You’d lose,” L’zar muttered, working around his prison-issue sweatpants to relieve himself. Just another inmate hittin’ the John before hittin’ the sack. But the whole time, he was counting down to the perfect moment.
Relaude snorted. “You don’t think I could kick your Drow ass back to Ambar’ogúl?”
“Not if we were already in a ‘Ogúl battle pit, Greenskin.”
Another low chuckle came from the next cell over. “That how you got popped and dragged into this hellhole? Tried to mind-fuck the CDO into lettin’ you off clean by arguing semantics?”
“You even know what semantics means?” L’zar flushed the steel toilet and took two steps away from it along the back wall of his cell.
A quick thump rattled the cement wall beneath Relaude’s thick fist. “Hey, if you were as smart as you think you are, you wouldn’t be locked up right next to me, would ya?”
“Watch me,” L’zar whispered.
An irritated growl rose from the other side of the Orc’s cell. “Shut the hell up, Relaude.”
“You wanna count down to midnight with me, Troj?”
“When the doors open, I’ll be countin’ down to your last breath if you don’t shut your fat green face.”
Relaude chuckled again, and the cot beneath the massive Orc groaned when he flopped back onto the disturbingly thin mattress. “Y2K. Gotta give it to these human chumps, am I right? Makin’ such a big deal about the end of the world and all. They don’t even know the half of it.”
That might’ve been the only thing out of Relaude’s mouth with which L’zar agreed completely. Saying it out loud would’ve been an invitation for more attention than he wanted right now.
The sound of Relaude scratching his hairy green armpit sounded more like a blade scraping against a whetstone. “Dumb and tiny and weak.”
“Shut up!”
L’zar stood just a few inches from the back wall of his cell and waited for his neighbor’s laughter to fade. Alpha block settled into another round of half-enforced silence, and the Drow closed his eyes to listen for his next signal.
The door to the guard tower clicked open and shut behind whichever one of them had drawn straws to re-up on their coffee for the night shift. L’zar’s pointed ears twitched at the muffled thump of the other guard’s boots being propped up on the console in front of him. That was Jones, then, settling in for a night of reading whatever cheap book he’d grabbed off the library cart.
And no one was watching the Drow standing just beside his toilet, facing the wall like he’d lost his mind.
L’zar’s fingers worked quickly in a short, intricate pattern in front of his thigh, undetectable by the swiveling cameras set high on Alpha block’s walls. The air shimmered around him, and his illusion spell formed at the back of the cell. Any guard who checked the cameras or stepped past his cell for another round of patrol would only see the Drow’s back, standing there beside the toilet, looking half asleep. And L’zar would be long gone before anyone realized how odd it was that his projected image hadn’t moved since an hour after lights out.
He placed his other hand on the concrete wall and muttered the words he’d been waiting twenty-five years in this dump for a night like this to say. Just a whisper, but the spell phased his hand right through the wall, and the rest of him followed. No alarms, no flashing lights, no reaction whatsoever.
They couldn’t budget the money to pay a conjurer for wards on all four walls of every cell. Relaude was right. Dumb and puny and weak. L’zar glanced both ways down the narrow, abandoned corridor stretching behind the newer, smaller cells of Alpha block. Of course no one was here. There probably wasn’t a single guard in Chateau D’rahl these days who knew the original bones of the prison.
Smirking, L’zar closed his eyes and brought up the memory of the prison’s layout. Almost fifty years ago, he knew he’d be making his way through these walls from the inside out instead of the other way around. Before the renovations.
“Time to do the impossible,” he muttered and set off for the sealed-up staircase that would stop him just as much as warded bars and a ten-foot box he’d called home for a quarter of a century. For a Drow thief, impossible didn’t exist.
—
Fifteen minutes later, L’zar crouched beneath the grove of bare cherry trees just beyond the barbed-wire fence around Chateau D’rahl.
“Barbed wire.” He snorted and shook his head. “These humans have a lot to learn.”
His fingers moved again in a series of twisting gestures for one more illusion. Gray sweatpants and white t-shirt filtered away, replaced by a well-tailored pinstriped suit. The Drow’s long white hair pulled back in a knot behind his head shortened and darkened, followed by the erasure of the dark gray, nearly purple pigment of his race’s skin. He glanced down at much shorter fingers on pink-hued hands, his flesh now bright beneath the moonlight. And no one would see the pointed ears of his race beneath the light-brown curls he’d adopted. No one would know a thing.
The pull of his destiny tugged at him again, like a hook through his chest. L’zar turned from Chateau D’rahl beneath the bright lights spilling over so much stone and concrete and iron and followed the tingling trail of magic he could no longer ignore.
“Where is she?”
The night was cold enough by human standards, but the Drow didn’t feel the cold. L’zar used to wonder what that meant until he realized it didn’t matter. The dark elf dressed as a businessman in a slim-fitting suit from the 1920s instead of a man setting out on the last night of 1999 moved swiftly down the frontage road, away from Chateau D’rahl and toward the heart of Washington D.C. Even if he’d had a car, it couldn’t have taken him as quickly through the industrial district hiding a high-security magical prison as his own two feet. He moved as a blur in the moonlight until he crossed the river into Capitol Hill and hit the first overwhelming glimmer of lights and traffic and bars open for New Year’s.
He stormed down the sidewalk, fighting to keep his eyes open as he followed the trail of magic leading him on. Not her magic, no. My own. And the magic of our—
L’zar wouldn’t let himself finish that thought. He had to find the woman first, whoever she was, and putting the magical cart in front of the flying horse wouldn’t do him any favors.
Once he made it to 16th Street, the busy street echoed with the undertones of live bands blasting music from every bar, of laughter rising from open car windows and restaurant doors. A bellhop in a bright-red suit with gold buttons nodded at L’zar as the 1920s businessman stepped in front of the hotel entrance. Then the man continued pushing the luggage trolley across the sidewalk toward the car waiting on the curb.
The Drow in disguise froze at the sharp twinge of that tingling call yanking him sideways. Slowly, he looked up at the hotel’s entrance and saw the printed sign in silver and white, the half-dozen silver balloons buffeting against each other in the stiff breeze blowing down 16th Street.
I’ve seen those balloons before… This is it.
With another glance at the St. Regis Hotel’s brilliantly lit sign, L’zar made his way through the turning door, fighting not to phase himself through the glass partitions just to get inside that much faster. The lobby was bursting with D.C.’s finest socialites who’d come to bring in Y2K with a bang. That thought made him smirk, and he scanned the faces for any recognizable feature. Of course the soothsayer hadn’t given him a name or an image or even a specific year, but tonight felt drastically different than all the other nights. Tonight, that call blazed like a siren in his head.
“The right place at the right time. Now I just need the right…” As he moved through the laughing crowd in the lobby, a group of women in short, glittering dresses and beaded headbands passed him and headed toward the event room just off the bar. One of them glanced back and offered him a coy smile, which the Drow returned politely enough. That’s not her.
But the magic of prophecy in his veins pulled him after the women anyway.
L’zar watched them make superficial conversation with two men standing just inside the ballroom doors. He waited until they entered the room, then stepped up to follow only to be stopped by a man in a tux clearing his throat.
“Your invitation, sir.”
The Drow reached into the manufactured inside pocket of his pinstriped suit jacket and whipped out a five-by-eight piece of thick cardstock. Without looking at the overly dressed bouncer, he snapped the fingers of his other hand and let his illusion spell do the rest of the work for him.
“Thank you.” Seeing whatever it was he wanted to see on the perfectly fake invitation, the tuxedoed employee handed the card back. “Enjoy your evening, sir.”
L’zar snatched up the card and made a show of tossing it into the pristine silver trashcan just inside the doors. The fake invitation disappeared in a swirl of thin white smoke, and the Drow convict moved through the ballroom like a panther on the hunt.
A four-string quartet played in the far corner, accompanying a man in a suit very much like L’zar’s who stood in front of a microphone to cover Louis Armstrong. Silver tinsel hung from every surface, silver ornaments dangling from the ceiling. A massive banquet table lined the wall on his left, laden with caviar and finger sandwiches, cocktail shrimp, beef tartar, artisan cheese. Even after a quarter-century eating gruel that didn’t even meet state prison regulations—Chateau D’rahl wasn’t state regulated in the first place—L’zar almost made a stop at the table.
A warm golden light shimmered at the other end of the ballroom. The Drow’s entire body lit up with that tingling pull, buzzing through his veins now because he was so close, just a room of people away.
“Where are you?” he whispered, scanning the faces. “Show yourself—”
“Champagne?” A woman in a short cocktail dress passed in front of him with a tray of full, bubbling champagne flutes.
“Thank you.” L’zar didn’t look at her either as he pulled a glass off the tray by its delicate stem and took off across the ballroom. Drinking was the last thing on his mind. This thread tying him to a woman he hadn’t met yet was making him drunk enough.
“The elections turned out very much the way we expected…”
“…would be nice not to talk shop for one night, Senator, don’t you think?”
“…when the Democratic Whip knocks on your door and asks for a favor…”
L’zar moved through the crowd, weaving between milling bodies and searching for that golden glow again. Part of him wanted to shed the illusion and gain the extra foot his Drow form would have afforded, but this was definitely not the place. Especially when most people this side of the border didn’t even know what a Drow was.
Two men in suits and freshly lit cigars—one of them pointing to his monocle and chuckling—passed in front of the Drow thief. L’zar huffed out a breath and flicked his finger. The monocle leapt from the man’s eye and clattered to the ground. The man bent to retrieve it, and L’zar slipped through the opening in the crowd. With small, short bursts of magic, he moved the partygoers out of his way—a woman’s beaded necklace pulling her sideways before snapping and spilling beads all over the marble floors; a stiff-backed caterer tripping over his own shoe; two cabinet members, judging by their snippets of conversation, both feeling a tug on the back of their suit jackets before turning around.
“Out of my way,” L’zar muttered.
“I’m sorry?” The redhead in a dress of copper-colored fringe turned and flashed the pinstripe-suited man a surprised smile.
“I said hell of a day, huh?” The Drow met her gaze, hoping he’d found her.
“And the day will be over in half an hour.” She grinned. “I don’t think we’ve met. I’m—”
The pull reignited in L’zar’s chest, and he lurched away from the woman to follow it. “Excuse me.” That’s not her.
When he reached the other side of the ballroom and stood at the same place he’d seen that flash of golden light, he stopped, turned around, and studied the New Year’s Eve party from a completely different angle. None of these faces was remotely familiar. None of the bodies fit the mold of the woman he’d been trying to meet for centuries now.
Sighing, L’zar lifted the champagne flute slowly to his mouth and shook his head, scanning the faces and waiting for that tug of destiny to pull him again like a fishhook through the cheek. “If that soothsayer’s been playing me all this time…”
“Well you can’t believe everything you hear these days, can you?” The woman’s voice drew closer behind him, followed by a soft, subdued ring of laughter. “And if I were to have that conversation, Mr. Matthews, I’d like to see it written into my calendar first—”
A small weight bumped against L’zar’s back, and he leaned forward only to keep the champagne from spilling over the side of the flute.
“Oh, I am so sorry.”
He turned around, that tingling pull buzzing wildly now in his chest.
She laughed again. “I didn’t even see you there.”
L’zar Verdys froze and stared at the woman patting the back of her neck, dark curls piled atop her head. She wore a simple black cocktail dress and functional pumps, a string of pearls and matching earrings her only other adornment. But her blue eyes shone up at him above her hesitant, apologetic smile. I found her.
“You didn’t—I didn’t spill your drink all over you, did I?”
The Drow blinked and raised the champagne flute toward her in an un-sipped toast. “Not a drop.”
“Oh, good.” Her eyelashes fluttered a little faster than normal, and a small flush of color rose to her cheeks. “Have… we met before?”
Only in a future foretold. L’zar smiled. “I would definitely remember if we did. My name’s—”
“All right, Ms. Summerlin.” A man wearing a ridiculous-looking top hat stopped just beside them and dipped his head at the woman. “I’ll have my secretary call your office and set something up. You look a little busy.” He winked and turned away without acknowledging L’zar’s presence.
“I look a little—” She blinked rapidly and let out a startled giggle. “It’s a party. And I’m… I’m sorry.” When she looked up at L’zar again, her blush deepened. “You were about to tell me your name.”
“Leon Verdys.” L’zar offered his free hand, and he would have tossed the champagne flute behind him if that wasn’t sure to make them both the center of attention. That’s the last thing we need now.
“Leon. You know, I’m very good with names, but I don’t remember yours. And you still seem so…” The woman licked her lips and shook her head a little, trying to clear it of the strongest sense of déjà vu she’d ever had. “Bianca Summerlin, Mr. Verdys. It’s a pleasure to meet you.”
The minute she slid her hand into his, the world might as well have stopped turning. A jolt of centuries-old certainty coursed through L’zar’s entire being, and Bianca Summerlin gasped.
“Did you—” She stared at their clasped hands, then cleared her throat. “Did you feel that?”
“Feels like the end of the world.” He didn’t let go of her hand.
“I’m sorry?”
“Y2K and all that. Right?” The Drow let himself smile with a face that didn’t belong to him and finally, gently, released Bianca’s hand.
“Something like that.” She turned her head and studied him sidelong, then glanced at the champagne in his hand. “You’re not drinking?”
“I was about to. Then you found me.”
Bianca licked her lips, eyed him up and down, then lifted a hand toward the server coming by with another tray of champagne flutes. “I’ll join you.”
“I was hoping you would.” Before Bianca could pass him to grab another drink for herself, L’zar reached out with a curt nod and deftly plucked one more flute from the tray. The server kept walking, oblivious to the lightened weight of his carefully balanced tray. Bianca laughed when he handed her the drink and lifted his for another toast. “To new beginnings.”
“And hopefully not the end of the world.” They clinked their glasses lightly together, and before she raised hers all the way to her lips, L’zar took a brazen step toward her.
“You know, I’d almost given up hope tonight.”
“Oh, really?” Though she stared up at him without looking away, her breath still hitched in her throat. “Hope for what?”
“That I’d find the perfect person to bring in the new year with.”
Bianca laughed and lifted her champagne flute higher. “That’s an excellent pickup line.”
“Only if it’s working.” L’zar finally took his first sip without breaking her gaze. Even beneath his illusion spell, he was still a good six inches taller than Bianca Summerlin and had to peer at her over the rim of the glass.
Another breathless laugh escaped her. “I can’t believe I’m actually about to say this, Mr. Verdys—”
“Leon. Please.”
“Leon… It might actually be working. Your line, that is. But don’t let it go to your head.”
“I would never.”
“And I’ve had too much to drink.” Grinning, caught in the web of destiny ensnaring them both now, Bianca took a sip of champagne. She almost spilled it down the front of her dress when the announcer in the ballroom cut through the end of the song.
“Dear friends, honored guests, and gracious benefactors, we are nearing the last minute of the century.” A screen lit up over the doorway to the ballroom. “Please join us in counting down to the new year and the beginning of the 2000s!”
A cheer went up around the room, followed by laughter and a round of freshly poured champagne making its way through the crowd.
L’zar bent toward Bianca’s ear and muttered, “You look nervous.”
“Oh, I do, do I?” She offered a polite laugh, but the returning blush gave her away. They were both intensely aware of the fact that she didn’t lean away from his lips nearly brushing against her ear.
“I promise you don’t need to be nervous. Not tonight.”
She looked up at him and blinked. “And what—”
“Ten! Nine! Eight!”
When L’zar winked, she looked away only to down the entire glass of champagne in two gulps.
“Six! Five!”
“A night like this only happens once in a—”
“Century?” Bianca’s smile returned, this time fueled by the same unquestionable pull that had brought the Drow thief all the way to the St. Regis from Chateau D’rahl. “That’s hardly an excuse to throw all caution to the wind, Mr. Ver—Leon.”
L’zar leaned closer. “But you are.”
“Three! Two!”
She was trapped in his gaze. “I…”
“One! Happy New Year!”
Amid the tinkle of cutlery chiming against crystal glass stems, the cheers and hoots, the laughter and uncorking of a dozen more champagne bottles, L’zar placed a hand on the small of Bianca Summerlin’s back and bent to press his lips against hers.
What little willpower she’d still had after three hours of drinking with Washington’s political elite filtered away beneath that kiss. The empty champagne flute slipped from her fingers and shattered against the marble floor of the ballroom, unnoticed by everyone. No one noticed the tall man in the pinstriped business suit—perfectly fitted to the 1920s theme of a 1999 New Year’s Eve party—and the blushing, grinning research economist slowly making their way together to somewhere far more private, either.
Sneak Peek: Once Upon A Midnight Drow Chapter 2
Sneak Peek: Once Upon A Midnight Drow Chapter 3
Once Upon a Midnight Drow releases February 28 on Amazon and Kindle Unlimited!