Hunting Down Dragons (Moonlight Dragon #2) (18 page)

He was still accepting my "apology" when Melanie drove up, tires skidding across the dirt.

"Anne, I kicked your guys' copycats out in the middle of the freeway!" she yelled, rolling down her window. "I could tell they weren't you because I mentioned pigging out on
tortas
and you just looked at me like you had no idea what I was talking about! So I said, ' No way, Fake Anne! You're outta here!' and I just pulled over and they got out and I just left them!"

Picturing it made me laugh. "You goofy monkey. That's so rude! They probably don't even know how to hitchhike."

She just shrugged carelessly. "They were super weird. Anyway, hop in! I'm starving!"

A monkey after my own heart.

We didn't talk about Dearborn or the Oddsmakers on the drive back to Vegas. I was grateful. I needed to distance myself from everything that had happened tonight. Instead, we talked about famous magickal beings in history. Famous to those of us in the community, anyway.

"One day you'll be someone people talk about," Melanie suggested to me with a huge grin, like she was my agent and couldn't wait for the commission checks to start rolling in.

"God, I hope not," I groaned, dropping my head back against the head rest. "I already can't stand it when people tag me en masse for memes on Facebook."

"Ooh, that's right! You'll need a fan page, for sure!"

"I'm blocking you," I told her. "Just telling you now so you know that it was deliberate and not a glitch."

She giggled and Vale chuckled. The sound of their laughter soothed me enough that I dozed for the last half hour of the drive home. I woke up when the car stopped.

"Maybe you should carry her," I heard Melanie whisper to Vale but so loudly it would have woken me up had I not already been awake. "And then you should stay with her, you know, in case she has nightmares and needs to cuddle."

"Mellyyy," I growled, sitting upright.

She didn't even have the grace to look embarrassed.

I managed to make it into the shop on my own two feet, though Melanie sorely tested my balance by launching herself at me for a tight hug.

"I'm glad you're safe, Anne," she murmured.

I squeezed her back just as hard. "Thanks for disobeying me, Melly. You did good."

I could tell she was on the verge of getting wibbly so I pushed her out the door and told her to get some rest.

"Swing by with the Tortas truck later," I told her as she climbed into her car. I closed the shop door on her squeal of happiness.

Vale, standing silently within the shop, smirked at me. "Disappointed I didn't carry you in?"

"You're a lame duck. You're in no condition to be carrying anyone."

He glanced dismissively at his arm, where the blood had crusted over. "I heal quickly. Benefit of being an ancient species."

"And I here I never thought I'd be sleeping with an old guy," I mumbled loudly enough for him to overhear. He arched a brow.

I pushed him backward toward the bead curtain, our gazes locked. I doubted we would do anything. I was bushed and still a little shaky emotionally. But I wanted him in my bed beside me. That would be my reward for defeating Dearborn and recovering the necromancy artifact. That would be my gift to myself for holding back my dragon.

As I passed the countertop I heard:

"Trouble is coming for you, Anne Moody!"

"Betrayed! Betrayed!"

"He's nothing but trouble, Anne Moody. Beware…"

All of the cameos that I'd thrown at Dearborn in the desert were magickally back in their tray within the jewelry case. And they were harping up a storm with malicious glee.

As I entered my studio with Vale, I recalled what Celestina had told me about the cameo pieces: they were harbingers of doom, spitting out accurate but pessimistic glimpses of the future.

Thus according to them, someone was going to betray me at some point. A male. It made me want to groan and hide beneath my bed. Enough was enough already. I just wanted a normal life.

Vale's hand, tugging me toward him, pulled me out of my morose thoughts.

"Focus," he whispered.

I tried. The future wasn't here yet. I would deal with it when it came. And when I did, the power of my dragon would be ready at my fingertips.

Fear flared, as expected, but I was encouraged to feel a tiny glimmer of anticipation. I mentally fanned it until it grew into a steady flame.

I am a dragon.

I am powerful.

But I am also Anne Moody.

Woe to my betrayers, whoever they prove to be.

Continue for a sneak peek of Trouble with Gargoyles, Moonlight Dragon Book 3…

"This is no fair!" I yelled to the crowd. "I'm competing against a Mayan. Her mom's breast milk was probably spicy!"

That earned me some jeers and laughter.

"Watch out for the little ones! Their legs are short but they're hollow!"

"She does have a mean look about her, like she eats ghost peppers for breakfast!"

"Fifty bucks says neither of them makes it through the first bucket!"

That last comment prodded me to find the guy who'd said it and point at him threateningly. He threw up his hands and pretended to be scared.

They all thought this was fun and games, but this was serious. Deadly serious.

Well, okay, probably no one was going to die, but odds were at least one of us was going to be whimpering by the end.

I faced off against my best friend Melanie, glaring at her from my side of the plastic covered table. Between us sat a humongous bucket of Adios Level chicken wings. It practically glowed, like a bucket of chicken from Chernobyl.

Around us, most of the diners in the Wild & Wooly Wings restaurant were cheering, rooting either for Melanie or for the underdog, which was definitely me. We were competing for the title of Wild & Wooliest Wingwoman. For me, this was a major challenge. I hadn't grown up eating the kinds of foods that my Mayan best friend had. I might spit fire as a dragon, but I sure as hell didn't ingest it for pleasure. This was going to be rough.

I adjusted my plastic bib nervously and rolled my head on my neck, trying to stay loose.

"Anne, you are so going to regret this later!" Melanie warned me cheerfully. She had clipped her blue bangs off her forehead to make sure hot sauce didn't accidentally get on them while she plowed through the wings. "I'm gonna clean the floor with you, haha!"

I pretended I hadn't heard her, playing it cool. Whoever ate the most number of wings won the challenge, but in my mind this was a marathon, not a sprint. The true measure of whether I'd won or lost this competition would be how I felt hours from now. But probably only swallowing liquid Teflon was going to save me.

The restaurant manager came up to our table and coaxed everyone to hoot and holler as he brought a whistle to his lips. He paused dramatically, one arm raised, looking Melanie and I each in the eye. Then he chopped his hand down and blasted the whistle to begin the competition. The restaurant erupted in cheers.

The first wing I grabbed was covered in so much sauce it squirted through my anxious fingers and over my shoulder, hitting some kid in the chest and making a big mess of his Adventure Time T-shirt. My fingers already began to burn just from that innocuous contact, but I bravely dug another wing out of the bucket and pressed it to my mouth as though I were starving.

As a half-Chinese sorceress who commanded a dragon familiar, I was accustomed to temperatures that most people flinched from. My dragon's primary power was fire. I tended to burn things to cinders. Couple that with being a Las Vegas native who poo-pooed triple digit summers and you'd think I had this in the bag. But when the sauce hit my lips and then my tongue, and when it slid down my throat and fell into my belly like a lit charcoal briquette…well, let's just say it took all my willpower not to shriek.

I wasn't a wimp. I'd been through a lot in my life, what with my parents being killed when I was four and my uncle disappearing two years ago. Being descended from dragons meant that my sorcery was tied to my ancient Chinese blood. It obviously didn't matter that I was only a half-breed; my ancestral blood was strong enough that every time I used my sorcery I was tempted to give in to the lure of the dragon and
become
a dragon. That was super bad. Once you became a dragon you were usually lost to it and faced being hunted and killed.

I was a rarity: twice I'd managed to return to my human self, though neither time had been easy. It had hurt, kind of like I was hurting now.

I told myself I was used to pain. Nevertheless, hissing and wincing, with sweat beading on my upper lip and forehead, I tried to recall why I'd thought this outing was a good idea.

On the surface, life had seemed mostly okay since Melanie and my boyfriend Vale helped me to dispatch Dearborn, the ex-professor turned golem-maker who had possessed a mummified finger that could raise the dead. We hadn't killed him, but considering the last time I'd seen him he'd been hog-tied in the desert and about to be overset by his own undead army I doubted we'd be seeing him again anytime soon.

Immediately following the confrontation with Dearborn I'd convinced myself that I was a badass sorcerer who could control her magick. I'd been riding high on a feeling of victory.

But the reality wasn't that rosy. Things, or maybe it was more accurate to call them
episodes
, began occurring in my shop. Each time one happened, it chipped away at my confidence. If I was so awesome, why couldn't I stop them from occurring?

More questions began to nag at me: had I really controlled my dragon, or had Vale's interference been the only reason I hadn't fully lost myself to my ancient blood? Each time I encountered a "surprise" in the shop and was freaked out by it, the doubts grew that I'd achieved anything at all. Surely a badass dragon sorceress would be more composed than I was?

The self-doubt had finally driven me to drink tonight. My mistake was agreeing to go to a restaurant that served nuclear hot chicken wings. Should've just went to a dive bar in Naked City, the lowest of the lows when it came to Las Vegas neighborhoods.

"You're going down, Anne!" Melanie cried out, her lips smeared with red sauce.

"You're supposed to be a vegetarian!" I yelled back, referring to the fact that she was a monkey shifter.

Melanie laughed at the accusation and sucked another wing dry before dropping the cleaned bones onto the table in front of her. Her graveyard of bones reminded me of when I'd crashed through a horde of undead Wild West miners out in the desert. Bones had gone flying everywhere.

Ugh
. Probably shouldn’t have thought of that at that moment. I paused, grimacing and rubbing my burning stomach. In a twisted way I savored the pain. It reminded me that I was human and not a dragon.

But what are you going to do? Eat hot wings every time you use your sorcery? There's a reason it's called "inner strength", Anne. It's supposed to come from inside you.

I hated the voice, but the voice was right. I had all this downtime while Las Vegas seemed safe and quiet to get my act together, and yet I wasn't any stronger or braver than before. I was the same old me. Actually, I was a little bit worse, since now I'd failed
twice
to stop myself from giving in to the dragon.

In misery, I stared at the tabletop tent card, which showed a young black boxer and a Filipino one, posing with their gloves up while graphics proudly exclaimed that Wild & Wooly's Wings were a knockout place to spend the upcoming Fight of the Century. Right now I wanted to punch whoever was in charge of mixing up the hot sauce recipe.

"Don't stop!" the people around us shouted at me. "You can do it!"

"Keep eating!"

"You're all sadists," I groaned as I reached for another death wing.

"Show us how tough you are, girl!"

I grimaced and gave a half-hearted wave to the woman who'd yelled that. Testing my toughness was no longer on my agenda these days. It was willpower and courage I was in short supply of.

Across the table from me, Melanie was cruising to an easy victory. Despite being a flat five feet tall, she was eating me under the table, her chubby cheeks pumping up and down with machine-like precision. I had a vision of her shifting into her monkey form and instantaneously exploding from the pressure in her stomach.

Laughing despite the pain I was in, I reached for one more wing that I could pretend to eat until the timer went off. This was turning out to be the longest seven minutes of my life.

As I was lifting the wing to my mouth something strange rippled along my awareness, like someone had run a finger across the nape of my neck. I sat up straight and looked behind me. Only a grandmother and the kid that I'd thrown my first wing at were within reach. Doubtful that either of them had messed with me.

I nibbled absently on the wing as I tried to figure out what it was that I'd felt. Was I having an allergic reaction? Had I reached my Scoville limit and my body was telling me I needed to call the Fire Department?

Magick was a funny thing. Las Vegas was loaded with chance magick that was generated by all the gambling activity. So much magick pooled here that the Oddsmakers had come in to oversee its usage, afraid that it would be abused (and they weren't wrong). All that power lured magickal beings to the city either because they wanted their magickal practices to be enhanced—a little extra sting in a curse, for example—or because they felt an inexplicable pull, sort of like people visiting the land of their ancestors and experiencing an instant connection.

Rarely did magickal beings stick out in a crowd. All of us knew never to flaunt our magick. Among those cheering me and Melanie on could very well be a witch who'd cursed me during her last visit to the women's restroom.

I looked over the crowd carefully, on the eye out for someone who didn't appear to be all that enthused to be watching a chicken wing-eating contest. Chances were better than keno odds that I had enemies, maybe even friends of Dearborn. The golem maker himself wasn't much of a threat both because I was certain he was buried somewhere in Eldorado Canyon and because his condo, which had been packed with all sorts of dark magickal doodads, had been completely hollowed out by a fire that miraculously hadn't affected any other unit in the tower.

However maybe all his creations hadn't died with him and were now after revenge.

"One minute!"

The restaurant manager's announcement pulled my attention back to the most urgent matter at hand. I looked at the table in front of me, which held the bones of less than a dozen wings, and then over at Melanie's side of the table. She was beating me by more than double, but I was gratified to see that she'd at least broken a sweat from all the hot sauce.

I tossed my half-eaten wing on the table in defeat even though there were still a few more seconds left. That strange shiver I'd felt just a moment ago hadn't left me and in fact had morphed into something pretty unpleasant. Was it the pepper? If it were only a physical sensation I would have said yes unreservedly.

But this was a feeling that bordered on anxiety and paranoia, as though someone had just whispered in my ear that guys with guns might be waiting for me outside the restaurant. In fact it was a feeling I'd become all too familiar with lately, and I couldn't believe I was feeling it outside of the pawn shop. I'd come here to get away from it!

Disturbed, I tried to play it off as hypochondria. However, I couldn't shake it, not even when time was up and the restaurant manager yanked Melanie's sauce-covered hand above her head and declared her the winner while our audience cheered and whistled.

While the celebration continued, I pushed back from the table. People patted me on the shoulder and told me good job. I smiled absently at them but my eyes were for the door. Someone was about to come through and they would be coming for me. I knew this in a way I couldn't explain, just a quirk of being a magickal being.

Calling up Lucky, my dragon familiar, would be a big no-no in a crowded place like this. Ordinary people weren't permitted to know about the magick underbelly of this city. None of my kind wanted to be thrown into the back of a van and transported to a secret government lab for testing and torture. Defending myself with magick against whatever was coming for me wasn't an option. Well, it was an option only if I didn't care that my magick was stripped from me for good.

"Still need to learn that kung fu," I muttered to myself as I wove through the crowd, heading for the front door and the hostess stand.

A young girl stood behind the podium. She was probably in her late teens. Her attention wasn't captivated by the cheering mass behind me but by what she could see through the restaurant's glass doors, which were directly in front of her. My anxiety and paranoia took on a new tint of dread. What was she looking at?

The waiter's service station was to my left. I darted to it and grabbed a knife out of the utensils tray. It wasn't a great weapon and I'd be lucky if it was sharp enough to slice a tomato, but with enough force and aimed precisely it could buy me some time to run or create a distraction. With the metal resting cool along my forearm, I approached the front waiting area.

The hostess still hadn't broken her obsessive fascination with whatever was beyond the front doors. It occurred to me that she might be mesmerized, spelled to put up no defense against whatever was heading for the door. Or worse, she was petrified by what she could see.

I could believe that. Magickal beings weren't always like me or Melanie, able to blend in with people and pass for normal. There were monsters in our community, both the traditional sort like trolls and vampires, and the ones that weren't born monsters but became them. My friend Orlaton, who ran an occult bookshop across the street from my pawn shop, probably dealt with those kinds of monsters all the time. They'd become twisted through too much interaction with black magick.