How to Lose Your Dragon (The Immortality Curse Book 1) by Peter Glenn (beach read TXT) 📕

“It’s a fake, then. I guess it was pointless to come here after all.”

I patted Rick on the shoulder. “It’s all good, man. You did the best you could. No hard feelings.”

Rick let out a long sigh and shook his head. “I should have known they wouldn’t display a real priceless artifact out in the open like that,” he said. “Not even under all that glass. Too easy for someone to come by and steal it.”

“Someone like us?” I asked, grinning like a madman.

“Hey!” Rick said, smacking me. “Don’t say that so loud!”

I flinched a little. “Sorry,” I said in a hushed tone.

Another thought struck me. “Say, you don’t suppose they have the real thing locked away in a vault in the basement, do you?”

Rick looked thoughtful for a moment. “Why do you ask?”

I shrugged. “Well, I heard a while back that museums actually have like nine times more artifacts than they actually exhibit at any given time, and they store the rest away in a basement somewhere locked away in a vault that no one ever touches.”

“Tch.” Rick shook his head again. “It’s not quite like that in reality, Damian, but you’re not far off.”

He looked lost in thought again for a moment, then let out another sigh. “Still, I doubt it. This is a traveling exhibit. If they’d had the real thing, they wouldn’t have locked it away. They would have just hired extra guards for the exhibit instead. The real thing can draw a crowd like nothing else can.”

Rick paused for a moment before continuing. “No, more likely the piece never came over from the British Museum in the first place.” He patted me on the back and hung his head. “Guess our visit really was for nothing, like I said earlier.”

“Not necessarily,” Sheila said, interrupting our brooding moment. “Look here.”

She was holding out her phone. An article from the daily Vancouver newspaper was blaring across the screen. It was dated two days ago.

I skimmed the headline and started reading through the article as quickly as I could. “Celtic collection...” I said out loud. “Boudicca’s personal effects... bought at auction... winner is a local businessman...”

My voice trailed off and everyone went silent for a moment.

“Sheila, darling, do you know what this means?” I asked her.

She smiled back at me. Even Rick’s visage perked up a bit. “Yes, I do.”

“We’re digging in the wrong place!” We both said in unison.

Rick wrinkled his nose and shot me an icy glare. “Beg pardon?”

“Sorry,” I said, bowing my head a bit. “It’s a movie line. Kind of an inside joke between the two of us.”

Rick shook his head. “My parents didn’t let me watch many movies as a kid. Said it would give me too much imagination.”

I shrugged. “Well, tell you what; when this is all over, I’ll show it to you. What do you say?”

Rick nodded. “Sounds like a plan. But in the meantime, I still wouldn’t mind an explanation.”

My cheeks blushed. “Oh, of course! What we meant was we were looking at the wrong treasure trove. We spent all our time looking at the museum’s collection of artifacts when we should have been looking for a local art collector instead!”

Rick scowled. “Well then, why didn’t you just say that?”

I let out a small laugh. “I did. Well, sort of anyway. Sheila understood me.” I pointed at her and grinned.

Rick rolled his eyes at both of us. “Well, okay then, geniuses. Where are we going to next?”

I put my arm around Rick, totally ignoring the fact that he didn’t like touching, and started walking with him toward the exit.

“Well, Rick, buddy, I am so glad you asked.”

13

We arrived at the collector’s mansion a little after ten o’clock. The sky wasn’t really that dark yet, but it was starting to darken, which was a good thing, since we were trying to steal from them. The dark could hide a lot of our unseemly activities.

Plus, it usually meant fewer guards, which was kind of odd in a way, because a lot of burglaries happened at night, so you’d expect there to be more guards at night vs. in the morning, but it never seemed to work out that way. At least, not in my experience. And loathe as I was to admit it, I had way more experience breaking into places than I probably should have.

Go figure.

“All right, I’ll handle the locks, you two stand back,” I said to Rick and Sheila. Partly so that I could work in peace, but also partly in case there was a magical trap on the door.

I don’t see a lot of magical traps on normal houses, even with magic being known to the world in general. Not because they were hard to make or anything, but because they were expensive. The people who knew how to make them charged a premium for their services. But this was the mansion of an art collector, so it was much more likely that there’d be a trap. And if there was, I wanted it to spring on me and not them.

After all, I was still technically immortal. And stupid lucky. So I’d probably make it out just fine.

I sauntered up to the front door and peered inside the little window in the wood frame. Much to my surprise, I didn’t see anyone waiting on the other side. It appeared the collector’s mansion was a little lax on security.

Tch. They wouldn’t be after I was done with the place.

“Come here, Mr. Lock,” I said to the locking mechanism on the door. It was one of those keypad-type locks, where instead of a key there was a number pad, and you had to enter in the right sequence to unlock it. “Tell me your secrets.”

I’d come prepared for this. I sprayed a little powder on the buttons. It was a magical powder that stuck to organic material. Like the fingerprint residue left over from touching it. Sheila kept a few bottles of it at her place and she’d let