Tales from Dargo Island: The Complete Trilogy Read online

  And then I dropped to one knee, barely holding on to Astrid’s hands.

  “It’s okay,” she said to me, barely a whisper.

  Everything went dark.

  Chapter 30: Rebuilding Dargo

  Aneela looked on from her palace as the surviving islanders rebuilt the plaza. The sea had washed most of it away, but not all. When she had returned from Nalke’s realm, she had been devastated by the destruction the island had suffered. Before Rockne arrived, Dargo suffered occasionally rough weather, and the waves had battered the coasts. Her father told her the weather seemed to get worse after Rockne put up his magical barriers.

  Once they went down after Rockne’s death, Dargo was nearly washed away entirely. If not for Nalke’s help, the island would be gone.

  She smiled when she thought of the nature demon. She had tried to stay neutral during his and Rockne’s war, the same way her father had. She was glad she’d taken a side.

  Nearly half of her people died in the battle with Nalke’s vampire army. Though she was saddened by this, she understood; they had been protecting Nalke. They weren’t to blame, Rockne was. Nalke had lost his entire army in the battle.

  So much loss, but some good had come from it. Astrid had been reunited with her father, and Rockne was gone.

  Aneela grew sad as she thought of Astrid. Josh’s intentions to help Astrid had been noble. Unfortunately, his plan failed. Astrid was still cursed, and Nalke was still weak. He would never be at his strongest while his daughter lived. He was perfectly fine with that, however. With his brother gone, he had nothing to fear.

  And poor Josh….

  Aneela tried not to dwell on him right now. She had work to do. She walked through the courtyard, approving construction and designs. Her people smiled at her, and she smiled back.

  Later, she visited the Village. The gatehouse had been torn down and the neighborhood was now open to anyone who wanted to visit. Aneela went to Rockne’s house, where Shae now lived with Astrid. Shae offered Aneela tea, and they sat and talked in the dining room. Astrid joined them, once again an old woman with blue hair.

  Another person joined them: an old man.

  His hair was also blue.

  Victor and Champagne came over, and the group of friends shared laughter and food. Once it got late, Champagne excused herself and made to return home. Before she got to the front door, she turned to the old man and said, “Have a nice night, Sugar Bee.”

  He smiled and waved at her.

  As Aneela made her way to her car, she heard laughter behind her. When she turned she saw the young Astrid holding hands with a young man. It was Josh.

  “I’m sorry about what happened to you,” Aneela said to him for the twentieth time. She didn’t know if she’d ever stop apologizing, even though she had nothing to do with his condition.

  “Not every story can have a perfect ending,” he replied. “But I am happy. It could have been much worse. Maybe some day we’ll find a way.”

  “I agree.” Aneela sighed. “Dargo will always be your home, for as long as you wish.”

  He hugged and thanked her. Then he took Astrid’s hand again, and they danced in the street under the large, bright moon. A gentle, sweet-smelling breeze blew through the Village, and Aneela laughed.

  “They’ll be fine, Nalke,” she said. “They’ll be just fine.”

  Author’s Note

  I hope you enjoyed my novella Dargo Island. I would greatly appreciate an honest review. If you liked it, say so. If you hated it, say that as well. I’m always looking for constructive criticism.

  Book 2: Dargo’s Dark Dream (The Second Tale)

  Part One: Josh

  Chapter 1: Something Unleashed

  “Josh, take a look at this strange bird.”

  I turned to Astrid, who was looking up at something in a tree in front of her. I tried to walk as fast as I could, but I was still getting used to my old body. Though I looked—and felt—seventy years old, I was actually nineteen. Astrid Albright, who is the same age as me, had her whole life to adjust to the curse that affected us. She was born with it.

  I looked up at the hot sun, which felt horrible on my skin. I’d been cursed two weeks ago, when I tried ridding Astrid of it. It had been a dumb plan, but I’d been so sure I could do it. Now I know better.

  Astrid wore her old age well. She stood up straighter than me, and her blue curly hair looked beautiful. Her yellow dress blew in a slight wind, and I wondered if her father Nalke was with us. He is a “nature demon,” so he controlled almost everything, including the weather.

  I stopped next to Astrid and looked up at the tree. There were so many in the jungle in front of us, so it took me a few moments to find hers. I saw a dark-red bird staring right at us and figured that was the one.

  “What’s so strange about it?” I asked.

  “I’ve lived on Dargo my whole life and I’ve never seen this bird before.”

  “Have you ever been to this part of the island before?”

  She looked behind us, at the grassy hill and cliff, and shook her head. “But, still, I would have seen this bird before. I know all about the other creatures, like floxin and bethels. Victor and I went on a quest once, to catch a floxin.”

  We were on the opposite side of Dargo Island from where we lived. I’d seen a lot of the island during my time here, but for some reason we’d avoided this part until now. I wasn’t sure why; it was beautiful, though the hill on which we stood was steep and if we weren’t careful, we could fall right off the cliff and into the ocean.

  “It’s a beautiful bird, except for that sharp beak,” Astrid said next. “I wonder if Aneela knows what kind it is.”

  “That’s Queen Aneela to you,” I joked.

  “She told me to just call her Aneela.” She stuck her tongue out at me.

  “Her people have been on the island longer than us. They should know.”

  “Do you have your cell phone on you?” she asked.

  I felt in my pocket and found it there. “I don’t know why I still have it. It’s not like I can call anyone in the real world.”

  “Just take a picture,” she said, jabbing me with her elbow.

  I took one of the bird, which suddenly took flight and soared out of the jungle, over our heads. I was glad it made us turn around to watch it, because the waves had picked up. On Dargo, the waves got up to a hundred feet tall, maybe more.

  “We should get out of here,” I said, though Astrid was already walking toward the trail we’d taken to get up here. I followed as quickly as I could.

  * * *

  I drove away from the hill. We headed for the closest town, called Cocoa, to grab lunch. We’d passed it on the way to the hill and thought it looked like a nice place to visit. I parked in front of a building that was made out of tree trunks, with a roof made from grass.

  “I’m starving,” Astrid said as we walked inside. There was no door.

  The inside was barely lit, and I saw the place was empty. There was a man behind a bar to our right, wiping the bar down with a rag. We walked up to him.

  “Hi,” I said to the bartender. “Are you open?”

  He looked at us with yellow eyes. “Sure are. Just slow today. What can I get ya?”

  He was sweating and looked very sick. I wasn’t sure I wanted to eat anything he prepared. “Do you have menus?”

  He handed us two of them. I browsed the options, looking at him every now and then. He was breathing heavily. “Are you okay?” I asked.

  He turned his head to the right, showing us his neck. “I got pecked by a bird last week. Haven’t felt good ever since.”

  There was a large purple bump on his neck the size of a golf ball, with dark veins shooting away from it. They looked like lightning bolts.

  “A bird?” Astrid asked. “What did it look like?”

  “Red. I’d never seen a bird like it before.”

  Astrid and I looked at each other. “We just saw a bird like that up on the hill,” she to
ld him.

  “It didn’t peck you, did it?”

  “No.”

  “That’s good. I think it—”

  Before he could finish his sentence, he threw up on the bar. Astrid and I backed away as vomit shot from his mouth. I was horrified to see it was mostly blood. The bartender then fell to the floor. I ran around to the other side of the bar as fast as I could and saw the man lying there.

  He was dead.

  Chapter 2: Bad Things

  The café was swarming with soldiers nearly thirty minutes later. They were the closest things to cops Dargo Island had. We’d called the palace and they had come as fast as they could, their faces painted yellow and blue—the island’s custom. They studied the body behind the bar. There was a waiter and a cook nearby, but they weren’t sick.

  Astrid and I sat at a table, watching. A young woman the same age as me walked into the café, wearing a red gown and a crown of gold. I jumped to my feet and said, “Queen Aneela.”

  She turned to me, her face painted blue and yellow like the soldiers. “Josh. How many times have I told you to call me Aneela?”

  “Sorry. What are you doing here?”

  “I heard about what happened and wanted to know more. There has never been an illness like this on the island.” She looked around, noticing the activity behind the bar. “Did you talk to the victim?”

  “Yes,” Astrid said, joining us. “He said he was pecked by a red bird a week ago. We saw the same bird before we came here.”

  “A red bird?” Aneela tapped her chin. “I’ve never seen red birds on the island.”

  “Neither have I,” Astrid said.

  “Is it possible this bird is carrying some kind of disease?” I asked.

  “It’s unheard of on Dargo, but it’s possible,” Aneela replied. “Take me to the place you found the bird.”

  She gathered a few soldiers and they followed us back up the hill in a car. The cars on Dargo weren’t like regular cars: They didn’t run on gasoline or a battery. They just ran—a gift from Rockne the wizard. Well, before I killed him.

  We parked and then walked the short distance up the hill. The waves had died down again, luckily. Astrid led the way, pointing at the tree where she’d first seen the bird. Aneela studied the tree.

  “I’ve lived here all my life and have never been in this forest,” she said.

  “Me neither,” Astrid said.

  “Me neither,” I added, grinning.

  They looked at me, and then to each other. “How do you stand him?” Aneela asked.

  “One day at a time.”

  Aneela looked to her three soldiers. “Spread out and search the jungle. You’re looking for a red bird. If you see one, don’t approach it. Search for only thirty minutes and then head back here. It’s getting dark and I don’t want any of us in there once the sun is gone.”

  The three nodded and headed in. I grinned at Aneela; she’d just become queen a month ago but she’d taken up the role without hesitation or fear. She showed no fear now, either, despite this new threat.

  “What should we do?” Astrid asked.

  “You should head back to the Village,” she replied, referring to our neighborhood.

  As soon as the sun went down, Astrid and I would return to our nineteen-year-old selves. I didn’t want to leave, not without knowing more.

  “Can we help?”

  Aneela looked at me, narrowing her eyes. “Your day has been pretty crazy. Do you want to stick around?”

  I looked at Astrid, who nodded. “Sure. We’re the ones who found the bird. We might be able to help.”

  We followed her into the jungle, heading in a direction the three soldiers hadn’t. I wanted Aneela to stay close to us; if she died, the island would fall into disarray. She had no successor, an issue she’d been working on since becoming queen.

  We searched the jungle for fifteen minutes before I saw something interesting. I called Astrid and Aneela, who both had wandered a few feet away. When they joined me, I pointed to a well surrounded by tall trees. The trees perfectly circled this well.

  “What’s that?” I asked Aneela.

  “What does it look like?”

  “I mean, have you ever seen or heard of it before?”

  We looked down into the well but saw nothing but total darkness. I thought I heard something down there but wasn’t sure.

  “Maybe there’s a nest down there?” Astrid said.

  I heard a flutter of wings. Aneela and Astrid heard it too.

  I looked around at the surrounding jungle. “We should board it up or something, just in case.”

  Aneela nodded, but before any of us could move, a bunch of red birds shot out of the well. They disappeared into the sky, past the canopy of trees.

  “We have a serious problem,” I said unnecessarily.

  Chapter 3: Research

  Astrid and I followed Aneela into her red-and-white palace. The place reminded me of a red-velvet cake with frosting. The palace was crawling with soldiers and servants, all of whom had the paint on their faces. One soldier, a young, tall guy, walked up to Aneela and said, “The horses just arrived from the mainland, My Lady.”

  “Thank you, Commander Rhys.” She smiled at him, maybe even blushed a little.

  “Horses?” I asked the queen.

  “Ever since Rockne’s death two weeks ago, his vehicles have been shutting down. He’s not around to do whatever he did to power them.”

  “Oh. So we’ll have to ride horses?”

  “Probably. We’re bringing them in on the train before that fails too.”

  “The train?” I got nervous. That was my only transportation to Dallas—to my friends and family. If it failed…

  I looked at my wrinkled hands as we walked. I’d been visiting my parents at night, so they wouldn’t see me as an old man. My best friend, Estevan, knew of my condition. He’d been on the island and was there the night I failed to lift Astrid’s curse.

  Astrid took one of my hands. “Where are we going?” she asked Aneela.

  “The Archives. There may be information about those red birds.”

  We went down a staircase and into a round room. It was full of books. None of them were on shelves and instead sat in piles on the floor. Some piles were waist-high, others even taller.

  We navigated the maze of books until we reached a pile in a far corner. Aneela started browsing the titles on the spines.

  “Why did you come straight to this pile?” I asked.

  She looked at me over her shoulder. “It’s the section for the wildlife on the island.”

  “Oh.”

  She grinned and turned back, searching. She found one she liked and pulled it from the middle of the pile, causing the other books to fall. She ignored them. She browsed the pages quickly but sighed a minute later. “Nothing about red birds.”

  A book fell somewhere behind me. I walked over to it while Aneela returned to the pile she’d browsed earlier. The book was open, and I gasped when I saw what was on the page. “I found it!”

  Astrid and Aneela joined me as I picked up the book and showed them. It was the exact same bird, with red wings and a very sharp, blade-like beak. The words on the page were written in a language I couldn’t understand, but Aneela could and she didn’t like what she read.

  “Oh, no.”

  “What?” Astrid and I said together.

  “The birds belong to Dargonius.”

  * * *

  “Who’s Dargonius?” I asked.

  “He’s the one who hid the island from the rest of the world.”

  “Why is it bad the birds are his?” Astrid asked.

  Aneela took a deep breath, flipping the book around for us. “Dargonius fled the known world because he believed it to be corrupt and dangerous. He hated the world because of its blind hatred toward his kind. He was a wizard.”

  “Like Rockne?” I asked.

  “Rockne wasn’t a real wizard. At least, that’s what he told us. He was a cast-off n
ature demon who inhabited a human body. He had powers, but he wasn’t a true wizard. Dargonius was.”

  “And the real world drove him off?” Astrid asked.

  “Yes. He fled to this island.”

  “How did he get here with the waterfall that separates us from the mainland?” I asked, thinking of the Edge of the World. It was the biggest waterfall I’d ever seen.

  “That wasn’t there before. He put it there, and the outside world can’t see it. It does manage to keep people away, though. Whenever they get close, they get the urge to turn away.”

  “How did the natives react?” I asked.

  “Not well. They tried to kill him, but he fought back with magic. Then they feared him. Then they accepted him.”

  “They pretty much had to.”

  Aneela grinned at me. “In time, they worked together to hide the island from the rest of the world. Everything seemed fine at first. For hundreds of years, Dargonius lived on this island, hatching a plan to get revenge on those who drove him away.”

  “Hundreds of years?” Astrid said. “The ones who drove him off had to have been dead by then.”

  “Yes, but Dargonius’s anger was geared toward the whole world, not just those people. He wanted to hurt everyone who didn’t live on the island. That’s when he came up with the Dark Dream.”

  “What’s that?” I asked after she paused dramatically. Aneela had a flair for the dramatic.

  “A disease,” she said, reading from the book. “He planned to inflict his Dark Dream upon the known world, sparing the island. This was his paradise, his home. Nothing else mattered.”

  “Did you know about this before?” Astrid asked.

  “I knew about Dargonius—we’re all taught about him in school—but I didn’t know about the plague he’d invented. I just read it here. This book was compiled after his reign.”