Free Drag Hunt by Pat Kelleher Page A

fists, his face contorted with panic.
    What the fuck? Richard jumped at the sound. He could almost feel the yell in his chest and he felt briefly nauseous. “What the hell?” said Richard.
    “Help!”
    Coyote carried on pounding as if his life depended on it. Richard looked around nervously at the neighbours. Net curtains twitched.
    “I’m coming!” said an irritable voice from inside. “Hold your horses!”
    The door opened.
    That was all Coyote needed. He shoved Richard, who stumbled forward in through the door, his boots scuffing over chalk sigil marks on the bare floorboards beyond.
    Ooops.
    Coyote smiled and followed, slamming the front door behind them.
    “You!” Nataero backed away from the door, his eyes wide with alarm. He was no longer snappily dressed. His white hair was unkempt. “You shouldn’t be here. You can’t be here!”
    “We should be dead, you mean?” asked Richard, peering past the man. No, not man. God. He didn’t look like a god, with his silver stubble and unkempt hair and the baked bean juice on his dressing gown. But he knew how appearances could be deceptive.
    “You, I care not about, but the trickster here? No, not dead. Just out of action.”
    “In the belly of a wyrm?”
    Coyote wheeled round, grabbed Nataero by the lapels of his grubby dressing gown, and hauled him onto his toes until they were nose to nose.
    “Yes. Why aren’t you there? How... how did you find me?” Nataero said.
    Coyote shrugged. He jerked his chin toward Richard. “He wouldn’t stop and ask for directions, we got lost—and here we are.”
    Coyote took in the bare hallway with an appreciative nod.
    “Nice place you’ve got here. Very homely.”
    The wallpaper was old and peeling. The hallway floorboards were bare, as were the stairs. A single unshaded light bulb hung from the ceiling.
    The rest of the house was a museum, a hoarder’s paradise. Mounds of papers and books teetered over their heads, their geologies shifting with each creak and movement of the floorboards, their summits swaying precariously. They formed narrow dusty canyons which wound through the rooms, their exposed faces stratified with seams of ancient leather tomes. Elsewhere, there were piles of pens and pen drives, a jumbled heap of government laptops, there were bin liners of stuff, and some things that looked like the mummified bodies of children.
    How had he come to have all this here? Richard wouldn’t have been surprised to come across the Holy Grail or Excalibur. This man wasn’t a god. He was a kleptomaniac.
    Coyote sized up the Roman. “Nataero. God of lost things. People pray to you to find belongings and get them back.”
    Nataero watched them suspiciously. “Sometimes. They used to.”
    Coyote was dismayed. “Only because you took them in the first place, right? A small god who needed to be noticed, wanted to be noticed, who felt they deserved better.”
    “They said if I helped them it would be different,” said Nataero, his voice weak, but becoming strong and arrogant. “They said that a new future was dawning, and I would be there to see it. And I deserve it. I’m fed up of people treating me as small change. I’m not. I’ve earned my place.”
    Coyote shook his head in despair. “So what did you have to do? Steal my younger brother? Find long forgotten gods?”
    “Barbarian genius loci. Nobody would miss them.”
    “And the godsblood? They sacrificed the gods. Gods . For what? What would require the sacrifice of gods? Did you try to sacrifice me, too?”
    Nataero snorted. “No, they don’t want you dead, no. Just out of the way. They need you alive. They’re afraid that if you die, your... manhood will die with you.”
    “What do they want it for?”
    “I don’t know,” he shrugged. “They don’t tell me everything. They just engaged me to steal it from you. I don’t know why they want it.”
    Coyote leaned in close. “I’ll bet you overheard something. I know how you think. You don’t