Never Deal with Dragons

by Christensen, Lorenda

  I sighed, consciously shaking off the emotions churning just under the surface. “All this vomit. I’m beginning to think it’s me. Dragons, humans—everyone vomits in front of me.”

  Trian smiled a toothy grin, but it was short-lived. “Do me a favor? When you go in there, let me set one of my dragons outside the door. He doesn’t have to be visible. I’m not comfortable abandoning you to a barn full of vicious monsters. Most of those dragons willingly followed Hian-puo. Very few of them will be willing to help like Rime.”

  I smiled faintly. He wasn’t going to argue about my involvement. “That would be great—thanks.”

  “I’ll go brief Relobu.” Trian paused. “And if you’d feel more comfortable, I can ask Richard to assist you in any way that you need.” Meaning Trian would step back and allow me some space. In his mind, the job came first. Always.

  “I think that would be for the best.” I couldn’t meet his eyes, afraid that if I did, I’d never be able to let him go.

  Before I could say something truly stupid, I headed for the barn.

  *

  I sat across the table from an incredibly handsome man in an outdoor cafe in Budapest. And I’d never been more miserable. I sighed and took another sip of my wine. The stupid sunshine was getting on my nerves. I was jet-lagged and achy. And to top it all off, my nerves were shot.

  The general I’d singled out—the brown goat-swallowing dragon from dinner—had been only too willing to spill the beans when I mentioned his help would go a long way toward saving his life during the dragon council trials. He’d told me when, where and how the machine was supposed to make its way to Budapest.

  After Lord Relobu thanked me for my help in retrieving the information, he’d gently informed me that I’d be required to provide testimony in Hian-puo’s trial at the dragon council meeting. In typical, fearless dragon fashion, they’d decided to hold the council meeting in the very city where the bomb had been sent. When I’d asked Lord Relobu why, he’d simply given me a confused look, and told me—quite matter-of-factly—that the council wanted to make it clear to their subjects that they would never allow threats to dictate their actions.

  Which didn’t make any sense to me at all. Circular reasoning, much?

  Richard insisted I make the trip with him in the jet.

  The genetics expert was supposed to join us on the flight. But no one—least of all the scientist—had expected he’d experience the world’s worst case of airsickness. Apparently some people didn’t handle open-air dragon flight well, and by the time he’d reached China, it was all the man could do to slide from the dragon’s back to the ground.

  It was decided Richard and I would deliver the scientist’s schematics upon our arrival at the airport. Lady Adelaida had promised the team, well-versed in weapons neutralization, would be waiting for us when we hit the ground.

  Unfortunately, she’d been wrong. It seemed there’d been a slight delay in the team’s flight schedule. The computer system in their plane had gone out—I guess Lady Adelaida’s maintenance schedule wasn’t as meticulous as Relobu’s—and they’d had to wait on a replacement to be readied before they could make the trip from Paris.

  I’d spent the entire flight pouring over the sheaf of papers the scientist had shoved in my hand before we left, trying to interpret his instructions on how to deactivate the device without accidentally arming the weapon.

  Just in case.

  Richard hadn’t been particularly worried; he didn’t expect it would take more than a half hour before the team was shuffled onto a new plane. But now, after several hours of silence, he’d decided to drive to the drop point to “make sure we have eyeballs on the situation.”

  I didn’t tell him our eyeballs were as useless as a screen on a submarine. If it made him feel better, then so be it.

  We only had one shot to find this machine. If not, Hian-puo would succeed in sending earth on a collision course with total destruction. If this machine was activated in Adelaida’s territory, she’d have no choice but to declare war against Hian-puo. And despite the Chinese dragon lord’s obvious insanity, he had a lot of dragons who’d be more than willing to meet Adelaida’s reaction with some attacks of their own.

  It would be a full-scale dragon war.

  My mind conjured an image of the planet hurtling through space toward a massive fire-breathing dragon. Thank you very much for that mental picture.

  As the minutes ticked by with no word from the team, I mentally kicked myself for turning down Trian’s help. Who did I think I was? I had no experience chasing down nefarious criminals with world destruction on their agendas. Trian had promised me he would fly to Budapest as soon as he was able, but with his wing in such bad shape, he’d be forced to stay in dragon form until it healed and I wasn’t sure how long that would be.

  And we still hadn’t been able to get information on the exact location of this hastily assembled group of specialists.

  My nerves must have been showing, because I glanced up to find Richard watching me with worried eyes.

  “Myrna, what is it? Did you see something?”

  “No. It’s nothing. Just my imagination running wild.” I glanced at my watch for the thousandth time. When people said stakeouts seemed to last forever, they hadn’t been joking. It was even worse trying to sit still with worry eating a hole in the lining of my stomach.

  I recrossed my legs and shifted in my chair. If there were Hian-puo agents nearby, my motions were screaming “spy.” Either that, or they were screaming overactive bladder.

  “Here. Have a bit more wine.” Richard handed me a glass he must have refilled while I was rubbing a hole through my chair.

  I accepted the drink gratefully, raising the red liquid to my mouth for a sip. I studied the other restaurant guests suspiciously. I hadn’t decided whether the eighty-year-old woman or the three-year-old girl were more likely to be involved in a plot to kill a quarter of the world’s dragon population.

  The little girl pouted when her mother took the spoon she’d been banging against a plate.

  Yes. Definitely the girl. Anger management issues were always the first sign of a life of crime.

  “Hmph. The waiting is driving me crazy.” I looked at Richard. “Still no word from Relobu or Trian?”

  I wasn’t the only one worried. Richard’s face was lined with the same signs of fatigue. “Nothing.”

  “Well then. Talk to me. How are you and Carol? You guys seem to be getting along really well.”

  It was terribly obvious that they were getting along just fine, but I figured the disgust I’d feel hearing him gush over my best friend would take my mind off the waiting.

  He smiled. “I don’t kiss and tell.”

  “Ha. But you don’t mind publicly comparing Carol’s boobs to enormous dragon heads.”

  “No comment.” He grinned and tipped his wineglass in my direction. “You’re one to talk. Ever since DRACIM, you and Trian have been walking pheromone clouds. How’s that working out?”

  I scowled, because only an idiot could have missed the way Trian and I had been tiptoeing around each other since our “discussion,” and Richard was no idiot. “No comment.” I looked at my watch again.

  It was Richard’s turn to sigh. “Would you stop doing that? It’s been less than a minute since you last checked the time.”

  I sighed, exasperated. “I know that! That’s why I asked you to distract me!”

  Richard was silent as his eyes returned to the last of the wine swirling in his glass. His easygoing expression disappeared. “Did you know my dad was one of the first DRACIM agents?”

  That got my attention. Richard was famously reticent about speaking with others about his father. “Yeah, Joseph Green. The first dragonspeaker.”

  Richard ran a fingertip along the base of his glass. “We actually moved to Tulsa when I was three to open the DRACIM branch. I was too young to remember much before that, just bits and pieces of my mom packing up boxes. We’d only been in our
new house a year before my dad was hurt.”

  I remembered seeing the news the day Joseph had stepped down from DRACIM, due to an injury. I nodded, urging Richard to continue.

  “A group of dragons who protested the comingling of human and dragon attacked my father outside the grocery store. Word had spread that he’d be the head of the new office, and the dragons had decided to take him out. My dad’s spinal cord was damaged. He never walked again.”

  Richard drained his glass in one large swallow and set it deliberately on the table before meeting my eyes. “So how’s that for something to take your mind off the wait?”

  “Richard, I…” I didn’t know what to say. I knew from personal experience that “I’m sorry” was useless, and “I know what you’re feeling” was even worse. I may have lost my parents, but their deaths had been by accident or by their own hand, not deliberately orchestrated by a group of antihuman terrorists.

  So I told him the truth. “Richard, I don’t know what to say.”

  He poured more wine from the bottle. “There’s nothing to say. It’s in the past, life goes on, and we make the best of it we can.”

  I pondered his words. He was right. At some point, a person had to pick up the pieces and move on. I’d done it once with Trian, and Richard and his father had both dealt with much worse.

  I glanced again at my watch. We’d killed ten minutes. Scanning the crowd for any newcomers who looked like super-capable antiterrorist machines, I decided we still had some time to wait.

  I took a sip of wine. “Does your dad live in Tulsa?”

  “Yeah, with me and my mom. He’s paralyzed from the waist down, and requires near-constant care.” Richard sighed and ran a hand through his hair.

  “It’s hard for him, you know. Not only does he feel useless because of his legs, but financially dependent on me too. If you knew my dad, you’d know just how much it eats his pride that his child has to take care of him instead of the other way around.”

  His words surprised me. For all Richard’s talk about picking up pieces and moving on, it sounded like his dad hadn’t got the message. I’d met one of the guys in Carol’s team at the magazine offices who was bound to a wheelchair; he was fully active, and from everything Carol had told me, one of the more efficient and cheerful coworkers she knew.

  “Well, maybe it would help if he found new interests. DRACIM has a lot of programs for family involvement, and since he’s former staff, he’d probably get everything paid for.”

  I stopped and frowned. “Wait a sec. You said your dad was financially dependent on you. He was DRACIM’s founder. Where’s his income from his sale of the company? Even if the money is gone, didn’t DRACIM cover him under standard insurance?” No matter how tame, interacting with dragons came with significant risk. Every DRACIM employee was covered under the mother of all workers compensation policies. If an employee was injured by a dragon while on duty, DRACIM footed the medical bills for life—in addition to a generous lump sum payment. Which is why I had to sign a boatload of paperwork before Allan let me come on this trip. I didn’t understand how his dad could wind up penniless.

  “At the time, the company wasn’t worth much. He sold while DRACIM was still in the early stages of figuring out how to overcharge for everything. He’d structured the company to focus its earnings on the employee insurance coverages. Except DRACIM ruled that my dad wasn’t technically injured on the job, so he wasn’t covered under the very policy he’d worked so hard to protect.”

  “Ouch. That sucks.”

  “Yes it does.” Richard looked over my shoulder and tensed. “Enough small talk. I think our weapon just showed up.”

  “Oh crap.”

  Chapter Fifteen

  Richard and I watched as two men walked through the gate of the restaurant, one of them carrying a small plastic canister. They spoke briefly to the hostess and were quickly ushered toward the kitchen. There was nothing suspicious about their behavior; deliveries to a place of business fell firmly into the humdrum category.

  I leaned over to Richard and, feeling ridiculous, whispered in his ear. “Why do you think that’s our weapon?” True, it was the only package we’d seen during the time frame supplied by Hian-puo’s general, but I wasn’t quite willing to hold anyone at gunpoint over what could easily be a container full of spices.

  Especially as I had no gun.

  “Because very few delivery men run their routes with a 9mm strapped to their waists. And they move like they’re pretty good at killing.”

  I watched as they wove through the tables toward the back of the store. Richard was right: they walked like soldiers, each footfall deliberate and precise. Even the one carrying the canister was careful to keep his gun hand free.

  The other had a definite bump under the back of his jacket. He surveyed the restaurant with a practiced eye, scanning for trouble. I tensed when his gaze landed on our table, but my disheveled ponytail and wrinkled outfit must have screamed tourist instead of potential assassin, because his eyes flicked to the next table with no perceptible pause.

  “Any chance that’s our backup?” I kept hoping a miracle would happen and the bomb squad would show up as promised.

  Richard’s mouth was set in a grim line. “No. Our backup has more estrogen. Three women, only one man.”

  I ran a hand over the bio-detector hidden under my shirt. Dr. Renault, our airsick scientist, had hastily shoved the gadget into my hands before my flight. He’d told me the necklace—whose appearance closely resembled a set of old-fashioned dog tags—would light up if I got within five feet or so of the biomaterial suspected to be in the weapon. Personally, I thought it was a total crock, but it had been flickering steadily since the men had walked through the gate.

  I’d have to let Dr. Renault know the range on the thing was more like fifty feet. I was glad of it. If we had to follow these guys, and the weapon, I’d take any advantage we had, reliable or not.

  “So what do we do? We can’t just let them walk out of here.” The two men chatted briefly with a woman just inside the building. Money changed hands, and they disappeared inside for a moment. Then the two men started back the way they came, only this time the canister was taped firmly closed, and based on the strain of muscle in the guy’s arm, it was substantially heavier.

  “We’ll have to follow them. Come on.” Richard grabbed my elbow and pulled me toward the exit.

  “This isn’t a good idea. Oh crap, oh crap.” But really, what else could we do? I grabbed my purse off the back of my chair and hurried to follow.

  Outside the courtyard, the two men slid into a late model car. Richard motioned for me to get in his rental, parked at a curb a block or so away.

  Richard drove in tense silence. Luckily, we didn’t have far to go. The men stopped less than a mile from the restaurant, outside what appeared to be an office building. The man with the canister hopped out and walked briskly through the revolving door. Richard crossed the road and parked at the curb closest to the building.

  While Richard and I were still arguing over whether we should go in after him, confront the guy in the car (and get ourselves killed, in my opinion), or keep pressing redial on Richard’s phone and pray someone answered, I saw our guy stroll back out of the building empty-handed.

  I whacked Richard on the shoulder to make him shut up. “Look, he left the box. The box is in the office.”

  We both held our breath as the man slid back into his car and continued down the street. As soon as the vehicle was out of sight, I popped my seat belt and opened the door. Richard was two steps ahead of me as we raced to the door. Cursing the fact that the weird European system of driving put the driver’s side closer to the building, I rushed across the road to catch up.

  By the time I made it to the entrance, Richard was already in one of the revolving door’s compartments. Without a thought, I shoved my way into the same small space.

  Big mistake.

  “You know that revolving doors have more than
one compartment for people, right?” He grunted as he tried to shift position.

  “We fit in here just fine.” Richard moved and my nose squished against the glass.

  Maybe not so much.

  “Sure we do.” I heard Richard give the door a push to get it moving. Nothing happened.

  “Um, Myrna?”

  “What?”

  “It’s locked.”

  My face was once again smashed into the glass as Richard adjusted position and tried to shoulder his way in. I heard him grunt as the door shook with his weight. But it didn’t budge.

  “It’s locked.”

  He couldn’t see me, but I rolled my eyes anyway. “I heard you the first time.”

  As I really didn’t appreciate small spaces, I slipped through the door’s opening and back onto the sidewalk. Richard followed a few seconds later.

  “So now what?” In all my frenzied worrying, it had honestly never occurred to me that the safety of the world would be toppled by a stupid revolving door.

  “DRACIM has an office somewhere nearby. They could get us a locksmith here within the hour, no questions asked.”

  Richard thought about it, then shook his head.

  “No. I have some contacts already in the area. Lord Relobu has been granted full access to Lady Adelaida’s human staff. I’m sure she’s got at least one person capable of picking a lock for us.”

  I bit my lip. “Sounds good. They’d get here faster anyway.” Hian-puo’s men had added a timer to the machine after it left Shui-Tech, so the scientist couldn’t tell me how long we had until the bio-bomb went off. All he could say was that dragons would start dropping, fast, if even a little of the bacteria made it into the air.

  I listened as Richard spoke briefly in German with a woman on the other end of the phone. He must have been able to locate someone who could help, because there was only a slight pause before he rattled off the address. He closed the phone with a snap and faced me.

  Just then, the display lit up, and after a brief pause while the person on the other line spoke, Richard’s face became considerably more animated. He snapped the phone closed and looked at me with a grin.