by Tricia Owens
He had a good point. Most visitors to downtown made a photo stop at the cash display, pretending that they were going to win all million before they left the city. It was nice to have hope.
Orlaton snapped the book shut, which he immediately regretted, judging by the look that crossed his face when the odor of dried skin once again hit him. He slid the book back onto the shelf from which he'd pulled it.
"Here's a question for you," I said to him as he began leading us back the way we'd come. "What's required to break the seals and open the Rift? Do they all need to be broken? Only a majority? Will a blast of sorcery do it or does it require some kind of ritual?"
"There are no rituals. The seals are controlled by a capstone. Some type of sorcery needs to be applied to it, the nature of which remains unknown. That capstone is in a very public location and is actively guarded, though by what, I'm afraid I don't know."
"You don't know something? Amazing."
I got a kick out of Orlaton's glare, which was comprised of equal parts offense and annoyance.
"No one knows, Miss Moody. That's part of the defense. You cannot wage battle against an unknown enemy. Once the capstone is broken or opened, the nine seals will begin to fail over the course of days. Though that timeline can be accelerated if one is motivated."
"Do you at least know where the capstone is located?" Christian asked him respectfully, as if trying to soothe Orlaton's ego.
With a sneer on his lips, Orlaton said, "Mandalay Bay."
I laughed. "That's rich. It's the Shark Reef." Which suggested to me that the Keyhole and the art gallery, the other two locations marked on my uncle's list with asterisks, were definitely also connected to the Rift in some way. "We gotta boogie, guys."
"It's not sitting on a pile of cash like the seal at O'Malley's is," Orlaton warned as he followed us to the front door. "You won't find it while aimlessly wandering."
"Aimlessly wandering is what I do best, Orlaton. It'll be okay. Trust me."
I was being blasé about it, but he was right. How the heck was I going to find this capstone if no one was supposed to access it?
Well, sitting around here wasn't going to bring us any closer to finding it so we might as well do a reconnaissance of the place. Vale let himself out of the shop first, as if he couldn't wait to get away from Orlaton, which was probably the case. Christian lingered, though.
"Hey, thanks for all the help," he said to him while flashing a charming smile. "Nice to meet you, by the way. You've been a great help."
Orlaton sniffed at the hand Christian extended to him, turned on his heel and walked away.
"Yep," Christian said, watching him go, "Just like my cousin."
As he exited the shop, I jogged back to catch up with Orlaton.
"Hey." I lightly tapped his shoulder, because woe to the person who thought they were friendly enough to grab his arm or hand.
At least he stopped. He regarded me warily from down his long nose. "Your friends are leaving."
"Yeah, I know. I just wanted to say it's okay. You know, for what you said before. About me and the Oddsmakers."
He stilled. "It's okay?"
"It's a confusing time. I don't know what's going on most of the time, either, or who I can trust. So I get it. But you don't need to be afraid of me, Orlaton. I'm your friend."
I could see that he was about to say something cutting, because that was just his way. But at the last moment he caught himself. His internal struggle was visible on his face. "You're the only person I've told about the…chest."
I blinked, not expecting the change of subject. "Well, thanks."
"So I suppose in my way I do trust you, Miss Moody."
Well aware that that was the closest I was going to get to any sort of apology, I smiled. "Thank you. It's important to me that you do. Well, I gotta go."
"Miss Moody," he called after I'd nearly made it back to the front door.
I paused and looked back at him.
"Opening the Rift is akin to making the decision to step off a cliff. Vagasso and the Oddsmakers are motivated completely. There is no turning back for them. That means they will be dangerous beyond compare. Beyond comprehension." He straightened his bowtie and looked away. "Be careful."
I grinned. "Thanks. I will. I'll keep you upda—
The world turn upside down and all the air rush out of my lungs. From the distance I heard a monster roaring or a tidal wave or—
I found myself lying on concrete, staring up at images of angels, humans, and monsters, tearing each other apart in bloody slow-mo.
"Just what do you think you're doing, Anne?"
Uh oh.
chapter 7
It had been some time since I'd been dragged to this spook show. At least a couple of weeks, which made me feel as though I'd been paroled from a Super Max prison. This was one place that, once you left, you never wanted to step foot in again.
It was chilly and I wasn't dressed for it. The puffs of black clouds that the hanging curtains emitted only contributed to the sensation that I was being slowly frozen for the Oddsmakers enjoyment. It made me flashback to Darwin's Exotics and the way my breath had fogged in front of me. But I put that memory out of my head, hoping I never recalled it again.
"Long time, no see," I said to the ceiling.
"You are stirring up trouble, Anne Moody."
Movement had me spinning to face the figure that had stepped up beneath the black curtain to my right. Still with the wiggly things crawling over or coming out of its face. Still with the lack of legs.
"Funny you should say that," I said to the covered entity, "because trouble has this nasty habit of finding me. I was minding my own business, just trying to eat deep fried Oreos and drink beer and then all this happened."
"You are pursuing Vagasso."
I thought carefully about what to say. According to my theory, Vagasso was in league with the Oddsmakers. Together, they had murdered my parents. Together, they were working to open the Rift. Everything I was attempting to do now with my friends was to thwart their plans.
"I'm concerned about the safety of Las Vegas," I said eventually. "Vagasso is a madman or madthing that needs to be stopped. So I'm stopping him."
"We already told you that Vagasso is not your battle," the saccharine sweet voice told me. "Your refusal to obey us is troubling."
"No, no, you can't say something like that after what I've done for you," I argued, letting some genuine anger leak through. This was all a con, the world's most important acting gig. I had to act like the Anne Moody of old, full of brimstone and fire. "I killed Xaran for you. I've never killed anyone in my life, but I did that for you. Don't you dare say I'm going rogue on you."
"You obeyed us because we placed you under duress. Do you require more duress to behave again this time? Whom among your friends should we abduct?"
"No one," I gritted out. This was like swallowing nails, because deep down I felt confident that I could take the Oddsmakers all by myself. I'd come a long way since Christian brought Vale's gargoyle statue into my shop. I no longer feared my dragon nature. I wasn't in full command of it, but I was no longer terrified that I'd lose myself to it.
And my magickal dragon was powerful. I could raze all of Las Vegas to the ground faster than Godzilla could stomp down Tokyo. I felt sure I could take the Oddsmakers. There were only a few of them, right?
But that was the problem and the only thing staying my hand. How many were there truly? What type of magick did they possess? Could they be killed or would they continually regenerate? They were smart to keep hidden away in this haunted lair, never revealing themselves. There could be one guy behind the curtain or there could be, as they'd boasted, legion. When I rolled the dice on this, I needed to do so with more information than I currently possessed.
"If you wish to keep your loved ones safe, you will take the path of least resistance," the sweet, girly voice warned me. "The choice is easy: do as we say and all will be well."
; I took pride in the fact my mother hadn't swallowed that easily, either. She'd died for it, but at least she'd fought them.
"What are you going to do about Vagasso and the Rift?" I asked, pretending that I believed they would share my concern about this development. "A trillion demons spilling into Vegas will be broadcast around the world. So much for secrecy, not that it'll matter much once it's Hell on Earth."
"Vagasso will not open the Rift. That is impossible, which is why you needn't concern yourself with his activities."
Yeah, sure, lady. Sell me another one.
As if she'd read my mind: "He is a lesser being of limited concern, and not of your concern. You're wasting your time searching for something that doesn't exist."
That caught my attention. "What doesn't exist?"
"There is no capstone. It is a myth."
"Huh. So there's nothing at Mandalay Bay."
"Only poor odds."
My tongue nearly rolled across the floor. The Oddsmakers had told a joke? What the hell?
"Stay away and all will be well."
"I'll try," I said grudgingly, like the Anne Moody who thought the Oddsmakers were straight shooters would say.
The Anne Moody who knew better—me—wanted to kick them all in their sorcerous nuts.
"You will not try, you will do."
"Right. Sorry, Yoda." One more thing occurred to me. "You say you'll call upon me later. Why? Why do you need me when you're all-powerful?" I was proud of myself for keeping the sarcasm out of my voice.
"We are legion, but we choose to have limits. We trust the Song Family with our most delicate tasks. We trust you."
Except, I thought, when you don't, at which point you use my friends and loved ones against me.
"Surely there are others you can call upon?" I suggested, though I knew the chance of them admitting they worked with Vagasso to be worse than hitting a multi-million-dollar Megabucks jackpot.
"None are descended from dragons. But enough of this. You will assist us when the time comes and Las Vegas will remain safe. That's all that matters, isn't it?"
"I guess so," I said warily, for the voice's sweet tone had carried an unusual edge to it, as though the Oddsmakers had become ticked off with the discussion.
"Time to go."
They beaned me with a brick.
It wasn't a real brick, but it sure felt like one when I opened my eyes again. Cradling my head, I sat up. As I'd feared, the Oddsmakers had dumped me in the desert outside of Area 51.
"Damn you all."
This was a serious annoyance. I was one hundred and fifty miles or so from Las Vegas. If I tried walking the entire way I'd get there sometime tomorrow and be half-dead. The darkness assured me there was no traffic heading to the city. Not yet. When the sun came up, people would be driving to and from the base and through the town of Rachel, a little farther on. I just had to get there first.
Fortunately, the sun was rising rapidly. Had it been complete darkness I wouldn't be able to do what I was planning. A glowing dragon was pretty damn easy to spot against a wall of blackness. But with the sky turning orange and gold, he—or more accurately, I—wouldn't stand out so much. Because I wasn't going to use Lucky; I was going to become my dragon. I'd done it before and retuned to normalcy. I couldn't think of a more isolated place to attempt it again.
"None are descended from dragons…"
Was this why the Oddsmakers were fond of my family line? Because we had our own built-in transportation back to the city? It was fun to be flippant, but my mind chewed on that comment and how quickly the Oddsmakers had changed the subject. There was significance there. The Oddsmakers had recruited my mother and tried to recruit my uncle. Now me. And since my uncle had revealed that he had also been a dragon sorcerer—the only conclusion to draw was that the Oddsmakers desperately needed a dragon under their control. For what purpose, though?
At least I'd have plenty of time to work it out on the way home.
I called up Lucky and I gave him a full head of steam, just punched energy into him so quickly that bam! he was a fully fleshed Chinese dragon and I was in some crazy head space where I felt like I was floating.
I wasn't floating. I was flying. I was circling over the desert, dragon of doom! Dragon of destruction, dragon of—
Whoa, Nelly.
I put a lid on the dragon-thought, which was like sitting on an overstuffed suitcase and trying to zip it up; lots of things wanted to pop out. But I concentrated hard on separating the dragon-thought from my own thoughts, even though it was easier to fall into that primitive, uncomplicated way of thinking. Fire good, pain bad. It didn't get much easier than that. But those were the thoughts of a creature with a brain the size of a tennis ball. Or maybe a walnut. Dragons were much like dinosaurs, weren't they? Dinosaurs continually blurting out, "Squirrel!"
With my human mind trying to steer the ship, I flew a slow bank, looking over the desert until I saw the body of the woman—check that, the body of me, Anne Moody—lying like a corpse between the shrubs. Talk about eerie. This was what it felt like to have an out-of-body experience. I didn't like it. It made me feel like I'd lost control. It also showed me how long it had been since I'd last used a hot oil treatment on my hair.
Anxious, I dipped down and carefully scooped up my body in my tiger paw which, let me tell you, were absolute crap at holding things gently. The only way to keep my floppy human body from sliding out of my grip was to flex my claws and use them to pin me against my dragon body.
With my body in hand, so to speak, I could begin the flight toward the lights of Las Vegas. It was glorious to fly. This alone would be the reason I lost myself to the dragon if I ever did. To fly above the earth, to dip and weave, to spin and coil, to dive and attack and snatch and grab and tear and rend—
I jerked myself up out of a dive bomb attack on a jack rabbit, my heart pounding. Woops. Looks like I still needed some practice on controlling my dragon nature.
It would come, though. I had every confidence. Because if you didn't possess experience, confidence was what you had to rely on.
With the sun just beginning to peek over the mountains to the east, I zoomed my way to Rachel. Before I drew close enough to make out any vehicles or people, I landed in the desert and carefully set my human body down.
Then I said goodbye to the dragon. That would be the short version that I planned to tell people: "Oh, yeah, and at that point I just stopped being the dragon."
Nuh uh. It didn't work that way. Struggling to get out of the dragon and back into my human form was like trying to squirm out of the grip of a WWE wrestler. It felt like my internal organs were being rearranged and my brain, most of all, was caught in a freaky limbo between dragon and human thought. I ended up having to fling my dragon to the ground and thrash around for a while before I finally escaped back into my human form and sucked Lucky into me. Not the most dignified transfers, that was for sure.
Dusting myself off, feeling sore like I'd just suffered the consequences of eating bad clams, I stood up. Slowly, I began walking to Rachel, my thumb extended for a ride.
~~~~~
I got picked up by a trucker who, miracle of miracles, had no interest in having a conversation with me. She just hunkered down over her big wheel and drove, eyes squinting against the bright, rising sun.
As the cluster of Vegas buildings neared, I thought about the wolf shifters and the note I'd found, and I decided that the whole thing not only was a setup, it was a big middle finger from Vagasso. He didn't have to involve me in that wolfish takeover. But using me to achieve the end result had not only been a way to dig my hole deeper with the Rebellion and make them hate me even more, it had been Vagasso calling me out to play.
I could just picture him with his cornrows of curse tattoos on his head, rubbing his palms together in villain-like glee, believing that I had no idea he was in league with the Oddsmakers and eager to watch me crash and burn when I turned to the Oddsmakers for help in beating him. He thought
I was caught between a rock and a hard place, with enemies all around.
Well, screw you, buddy. This dragon sorceress isn't stupid.
The truck driver, though tight-lipped, was kind enough to drop me off downtown, so it was only a short walk back to Moonlight. With the sun fully up, I didn't expect to see Vale nor was I surprised to see the piece of paper jutting out from the mailbox on the fence surrounding my yard. It was a note from him.
Moody,
We held off on looking for the capstone until you're with us. We'll need your dragon and your smarts if we're going to achieve anything. We'll try again tonight after sunset.
p.s. Christian says he's sorry he didn't realize he was talking to your doppelganger for nearly ten minutes.
I barked out a laugh as I imagined Christian chatting with the weird body double that the Oddsmakers always left in place when they snatched me up. I pocketed the letter and let myself into Moonlight.
The place felt more like mine now that I'd weathered the storm of curses that Xaran had inflicted on the shop when he'd thought to "test" me. That didn't mean I felt like opening up for business more often than I had to, however. Bushed from my excursion out in the desert, I took a quick shower in my bathroom which kindly chose not to be bloody today, and then collapsed into bed. The footsteps of the spirit entity on the roof lulled me into a heavy sleep.
The wards twanged just after five-thirty in the evening.
Still groggy, I rolled out of bed and rubbed at my eyes while I stood in my studio, waiting to feel the wards again.
Another twang, like I was fishing and something had taken a nibble on my bait. Except I wasn't trying to hook anything. I just wanted to sleep.
I pulled on some clothes just in case this required going outside and then peeked through the bead curtain separating my studio from the shop floor. I could see through one of the front windows just fine this way. I could see all the way out to the sidewalk, in fact, where Vagasso stood just outside my yard.
