Into the Dragon's Lair

This is one of my first stories here so comments are more than welcome.

Into The Dragon's Lair

    Adelia stepped carefully from the bus. As the machine pulled away from the stop, she couldn't help but feel that the last vestiges of civilization where abandoning her. She was a girl for crowds, through and through. Like any good pickpocket, the teeming streets where her true home. So what was she doing here? 

Barely six hours ago, her life had been normal. Or, at least, as normal as it ever was. She'd been standing discreetly out of the way when she saw the perfect mark hurrying towards her. He looked older, maybe late fifties, with a hook nose, thin lips and the kind of expression lines that you only got from long years of preoccupation. Most of all though, he had been in a big hurry. With perfect timing, Adelia had stepped from her doorway just in time to collide with the man. A quick slip of the hand and... she'd found her wrist trapped in an iron grip. Oops.

The guy hadn't immediately called to the officer across the road, and Adelia had jumped on his hesitation like a mountain lion. She'd fed him some spiel about how sorry she was, but things haven't been going so well for her little brother and her ever since Mom died, and  Dad left when they were little, and the money ran out a week ago, and weren't they so tragic and didn't your heart just ache for them?

 The guy hadn't bought it. 

Ok, well, fair enough. She'd taken a chance and it hadn't played out; that was how the game was played sometimes. Adelia knew better than anyone when to cut her losses and run. Only, the running bit was kind of hard with the old dude's hand like shackles on her arm. She'd been sure she was about to see some real handcuffs when the guy offered her a deal; he wanted her to steal something from him, in exchange for his not getting her locked away. She agreed, mostly out of curiosity. 

The old guy turned out to be crazy, or else really good at acting it. He kept going on about knights, libraries dragons, and all sorts of other cryptic bullshit. But he claimed to know the location of something pricelessly valuable, and though Adelia knew full well that all that glitters isn't gold, she'd figured she could sell it to someone less wise for a pretty penny. So she'd stayed and accepted an address and a description of the item, a scroll,  before hightailing it out of there with the full intention of getting the goods and never seeing the guy again.

It was noon, the sun was high, and there wasn't a soul around. Not that Adelia could blame them; the place was a dump, and dusty to boot. The address she'd been  given was an old, one story Italian restaurant with a flat roof and store window that had been boarded up a long time ago. On either side were weed-choked empty lots. Beyond them, old warehouses. 

Adelia couldn't think of a more depressing place. At least graveyards had flowers. Something about the site didn't feel right, something beyond the sheer dead emptiness. There was a very palpable vibe of wrongness. Like ground zero for a zombie apocalypse. Adelia shook her head at herself, intuition was all fine and good, but she was here to do a job and creepy premonitions were irrelevant. 

With a gathering of her will, and only a slight inner tremble, Adelia walked across from the bus stop and tapped tentatively on the plywood door. A second passed. Then another. Just as Adelia raised a fist to knock again though, the door swung open with a squeak, seemingly of its own volition. Inside, she saw only darkness. Adelia took one last deep breath of fresh air, checked  that her little black handgun was in its holder in the small of her back, and walked firmly down into the rabbit's hole.

As soon as she was in, the door slammed shut behind her and darkness swallowed everything. On reflex, Adelia spun and went for the exit. But it was gone. In its place, Adelia could feel only cold, damp stone against her palms. Her adrenaline spiked. Something weird was happening, something really, really weird. With her back to the wall, Adelia squinted into the ebony shadow that was the space in front of her. A smell wafted to her nose, like wet, dead things and ground water.