I threw open the door to the lobby.
The vampires in there all turned to look at me.
They were in the middle of trashing the place, yanking things off shelves, emptying drawers, overturning a big rack of brochures by the door.
“Get out,” I growled. “I told you never to come back here.”
“You pay and you never see us again,” said one of the vampires. They were all wearing leather jackets with skulls on the back, emblazoned with the name of their gang, The Lost Breed.
The vampire motorcycle gang ran this part of the beach. They demanded that every business owner pay them off each month. They called themselves a security team. Said they’d protect us from robbers and vandals. But the only robbers and vandals were the gang themselves.
The deal really worked out to this: pay us, and we’ll stop trashing your place of business twice a month.
I wasn’t the kind of person who took well to being pushed around.
Not anymore.
The vampires were bullies.
“Bite me,” I said, grinning widely at them.
One of them had a baseball bat slung over his shoulder. He swung it down to his feet and leaned on it. “Listen, lady, we’re here under orders. You know how this works. Just pay us.”
“Never,” I said.
He picked up the bat. He swung into the window in the front door.
Glass shattered with a crash.
“Your funeral,” he said, hauling back to swing again.
I lifted my hands. Before, I hadn’t resorted to this, because I hadn’t wanted anyone to know what I was. But now it hardly seemed to matter. And fresh from a flight over the ocean, I was brimming with magic. I felt it crackling from my core, racing down my arms, over my fingertips.
I pointed, and the vamp and the baseball bat both lifted off the ground.
I separated the bat from the vampire, sent it hurtling to the ground, where it landed with a loud metal clank.
The vampire let out a hoarse cry. He was scared, even though vampires could do this kind of magic too—well, they could if they’d had a nice meal of dragon blood.
But most vampires seemed to just drink blood to survive, and that meant from animals. They got pints of it at their local butcher shop, and all that blood did for them was keep them alive, help them heal quickly, keep them strong.
These vampires weren’t going to be a problem.
“Hank?” said one of the other vamps. All of them had stopped whatever destruction they were in the middle of to stare at their floating friend.
I slammed Hank into the wall, pinned him there like a bug on a card.
“Hank, what are you doing up there?” said one of the other vamps.
“I’m not doing it,” said Hank, gaping at me. “She is.”
I pointed at another vampire, one who hadn’t spoken. He lifted from the ground as well.
He shrieked. “Hey, lady, let me down.”
“What is she? Some kind of mage?” said another one.
“She’s not doing a spell,” said Hank. “Her lips ain’t moving.”
“Talisman,” said another. “I’ll find it. I’ll get it off her.”
I nodded at him. He fell flat on the ground. He struggled, but I used my magic to keep him down.
“I can’t move!” he said, his voice full of fear.
Abruptly, I dropped Hank.
He crashed down to the ground and landed with a crunch.
Ooh. I thought his leg was broken.
He howled.
“Get him out of here,” I said. “Get him out of here and don’t come back or I will do much worse than this to all of you.”
I set down the other vampire. I let the third guy get up.
They gathered up Hank and scampered out of the lobby right quick.
I watched them go.
Then I stared at the broken glass that littered the floor and felt a sob welling up in my throat. The lobby was trashed. I had customers checking in today. How was I supposed to do that when this place had been destroyed?
“Thought you were keeping a low profile, Penny,” said the voice of my best friend Felicity Richardson.
I turned to see her in the doorway to the lobby. “Hey.” I felt exhausted.
“I saw you flying around out there. Other people probably saw too.”
“There are dragons flying around all the time,” I said. “It’s not a big deal.”
“Not down here in the south part of the city,” she said. She was right. Dragons tended to stay in the north. Safer there, amongst their own.
I walked over to her, gingerly stepping around the broken glass. My feet were bare. “I had a bad night. I saw a dead body.”
“I heard about that on the news,” she said. “When I was coming home, it was on the radio in my car. Some girl’s body washed up? She was a dragon?”
I nodded.
“They said she was a minor, so they didn’t release the name.”
“Elena Watson,” I said.
“Oh, she’s so young,” said Felicity.
“I know.”
My best friend Felicity was a drake, but she wasn’t like all the other drakes. She had fallen in with a bad crowd in college and gotten dosed with what she thought was an innocent brownie. Turns out the thing was laced with dragon flesh. When the high came on, she was terrified. She hadn’t been expecting it. She got in her car and tried to drive. Wrapped her car around a tree. When she woke up, she looked the way she does now.
Felicity didn’t have hair anymore, just rows of green-blue scales that started around her ears. She was lucky to be one of the drakes whose face had remained mostly human, and she still had human-looking hands, not claws. But her feet were reptilian, and the scales ran from the top of her head all the way down over her back and legs.
Drakes were dragon-human hybrids. They got that way by eating dragon meat and dying with it still in their system.
Thing was, after the transformation, most of them were crazy for more. They were addicted to dragon and most of them got themselves killed trying to get more.
Felicity kept her lust for flesh under control by eating a lot of meat, preferably rare and bloody. She’d never attempted to hurt me, not even once.
Thing was, drakes didn’t often get second chances. Vampires could still pass for human. No one knew what had happened to them. But drakes were marked as monsters, and more often than not, they were. They were controlled by their addiction.
Felicity was different, though.
“Was,” said Felicity. “She was so young.” Her voice was quiet.
“I blew my cover,” I said. “I said Elena’s name. I identified her. I tried to lie to the police detective who questioned me about it, tell him that I only knew her because I used to clean houses for dragons—”
“Hey, that’s my life story,” said Felicity.
“Well, I needed to think of something believable,” I said. That was how Felicity and I had met. She used to clean the beach house for my family when we came to Sea City. Before my parents were killed by a slayer. Before Felicity got turned into a drake. Before I ran away from everything that I ever knew.
“He didn’t buy it?” Felicity asked.
I shook my head. “Not really. He knows. He didn’t come right out and say it, but he knows I’m a dragon.”
“So, that’s it? One detective figures out your secret and you’re flying around and using telekinetic magic on vampires?”
There were three kinds of magic and all three came from dragons. Telekinesis, pyrokinesis, and compulsion. Any magic that any other half-breed or mage possessed, they got from taking parts of dragons and using them to create magic. Since I was a dragon, I could do all of it on my own. But I usually didn’t.
“Look,” I said. “They thought I had a talisman. They thought I was a mage. Anyway, it’s not important. It’s only a matter of time before Alastair finds me.” I pushed past Felicity and into the hallway. I started up the steps to my apartm
ent.
She followed me. She lived up here with me too. We’d been attached at the hip for a long time. Even when she was the cleaning girl, I used to follow her around and ask her questions about what it was like to be outside of dragon culture. Back then, humans had seemed exotic to me, and I’d been curious.
I’d cultivated the friendship because I was being a rebellious kid, but that didn’t mean that it hadn’t become more than that. Especially after Felicity had become a drake. She’d had no one to turn to, but she’d come to me. And I’d protected her ever since.
We were devoted to each other. Always would be.
“You don’t even know for sure that he’s in town,” she said as we emerged in our living room. She threw herself down on a couch. “Argh. I’m starving.”
“We’ve heard rumors,” I said.
“But he hates the ocean,” she said.
“Apparently not anymore,” I said. “You want me to try to cook something?” I veered into the kitchen and opened the refrigerator.
It was bare, as usual.
We didn’t eat much here. We had most of our meals at the adjoining restaurant, the Pink Flamingo Cafe. Our friend Ophelia Diaz owned it. We’d worked out a deal with her to offer a continental breakfast for our hotel patrons in her back room. More often than not, that was where Felicity and I ate breakfast too.
“No, that’s okay,” she called. “Don’t worry about it. The Flamingo will be open in twenty minutes.”
I came back into the living room. “I can cook, you know. I took that class in the fall. I’m good at it.”
She smiled. “I know you are.”
I sat down opposite her. “You’re patronizing me.”
“No, I’m not,” she said.
I eyed her. It wasn’t worth fighting over, and besides, I was noticing she was still in last night’s clothes. “Where have you been all night?”
Her face broke out into a wide grin. “I am officially part of a couple!”
My lips parted. “You… you are?”
“Oh, Penny, don’t be like that.”
“I’m not being like anything.” I got up and began fluffing pillows on the couch. For some reason, I didn’t want to look at her. “So, you have a boyfriend. Congratulations.” What kind of boyfriend could she have? What man was attracted to drakes? Sure, Felicity was still lovely in her own adorable way, but most people would see her as a monster. I didn’t want her to get hurt. I didn’t want her to get used.
“You sound so completely sincere.”
“I am sincere.” I fluffed another pillow.
“Stop doing that and look at me.”
I paused. Sighed. Sat back down and faced her. “You never mentioned that you were dating.”
“I don’t bring this stuff up to you.”
“Why not? We’re best friends. We share everything.”
“It’s just because of how you are.”
“How I am?”
“About men, you know?”
“How am I about men?”
“Well, you’re wary.”
“Wary?”
“Understandably,” she said, smiling. “Of course you’re wary.”
I studied my fingernails.
“I want you to meet him,” Felicity said. “Will you have dinner with us?”
“Sure,” I said. “I’m sure he’s great.” I forced myself to smile. When I met that guy, I was going to make sure that he never hurt my friend. If he did, he’d have me to contend with.
CHAPTER THREE
“So, I said to him, I said, ‘What have you got against gargoyles?’” said Connor Beckett, leaning on the counter in the lobby.
“Do you think it looks okay in here?” I said, leaning on a broom. I’d been sweeping up all day, it felt like. I’d had my staff checking people in by walking them directly from their cars to their rooms, avoiding the lobby entirely.
But now it was night, and I wasn’t going to ask the people I employed to go roaming around after dark in the parking lot, asking anyone who parked if they were checking in.
“He says, ‘It’s not about the fact you’re a gargoyle, it’s about the fact I’m straight,’” Connor said.
“I mean, there’s no window, but it’s the beach,” I said. “So, who needs windows at the beach?” I stuck my arm through the place where the window should be.
“But you tell me,” said Connor. “Anything that I said, did it sound like I was coming onto him?”
“Someone will come and fix the window in the morning. And if anyone says anything, say it was an accident.” I turned to look at Connor.
He furrowed his brow. “You aren’t even listening to me.” Connor was six feet four inches tall. He was moving and talking now, but his skin still had the grayish hue of stone. He sported small wings at his back. He was a gargoyle, which meant that he could only work at night, on account of the fact that he turned to stone all day and everything.
“I’m listening,” I said. “Guy sounds like a homophobe.”
“Exactly,” he said. “Thank you.” Connor was a gay gargoyle. He’d come out to his family and been disowned. They weren’t very open to alternative lifestyles. Anyway, now he lived at the hotel here with me and Felicity. When he’d told me what happened, I hadn’t had it in me to let him live on the street. “That’s what I said. But he didn’t like that very much.”
“You called him a homophobe to his face?”
“I’m just sick of these fugly men getting all hot under the collar because I happen to be polite to people. I would never have hit on him, not in a zillion years. And I could tell he was straight.”
I waited. Maybe there was a point to this story?
Connor folded his arms over his chest. “Anyway. Just saying.”
“So, you’re okay in here? Even without the window? Is it too cold for you?”
“Girl, please. I’m a gargoyle.”
“Right,” I said. I started back out of the lobby. “Well, if you need anything, call me.” I paused in the doorway. “So, you don’t feel cold?”
“I feel it,” he said. “Just doesn’t bother me.”
“Interesting.” I thought about that for a second. “Because you’re made of stone.”
“Yeah, I guess so,” he said, shrugging.
I guessed this was why I had to insist on keeping Connor clothed. If it were up to him, he’d run around in a pair of cut-off jean shorts and nothing else. When he was working, though, he had to be dressed.
“You leaving me here alone?” he said.
“I’ve got some things to work on,” I said.
Connor snatched the remote control up off the counter and switched on a television set that hung over the door. Miraculously, the vampires hadn’t gotten to it last night. However, it was the third TV I’d purchased. Vamps had smashed its predecessors. Felicity said I was an idiot for continuing to put it back up in the lobby. She might have been right. It was the principle of the thing, though. If I didn’t put the TV back up, the vamps won.
“… another body washed up on the shore late this afternoon, similar to the first body that was found last night,” said the TV. “This may be the work of a serial killer.”
I whirled to face the screen.
A newswoman was standing out on the dark beach. She was smiling. “Police are hesitant to say if there is any connection to the previous body, but the victim was another young female, just like the body found last night. Back to you, Jim.”
I wanted to wipe her smile off her face.
But Jim was already back on the screen, babbling on about the weather over the weekend.
Another girl. Was she also a dragon, like Elena? Was this a pattern? Was someone out there targeting young, dragon girls?
*
“Oh, you’re here to see Flint?” said the woman at the desk in the police department. “You his sister or something?”
“No,” I said. “It’s about the dead girls. The ones that have been washing up from the ocean?”
<
br /> “Oh.” The woman nodded. She had red hair, which was actually more a shade of mahogany. An obvious dye job. “Shoulda figured. He ain’t got any family. I knew right off you weren’t his girlfriend or nothing. No way could a woman put up with that man. Easy on the eyes, sure, but once he opens his mouth, you wish he wouldn’t.”
“Really,” I said. This was bizarre. “Can I see him, please?”
“I’ll call him. Let him know you’re here. What did you say your name was?”
“Penny Caspian,” I said.
She picked up her phone, hit some buttons.
I waited and listened as she relayed the information into the phone’s receiver. Then she hung up. “You can go on back. Just through that door.”
“Thanks,” I said, and went through the door.
I entered a big room that was filled with a bunch of desks. There was one long middle row, all facing forward, almost like in a classroom, except the desks were all the size of teachers’ desks and covered in computers and knick knacks and filled with men and women in uniforms and suits. The other desks flanked the walls, but they faced inward. There were aisles between the middle row and the inward facing desks.
I saw Detective Flint right away. He was wading through the left-hand aisle toward me. Then he spotted me. He stopped. Motioned me over.
I crossed the distance between us.
“Ms. Caspian,” he said. “I was under the impression you were a very busy woman.”
“Was she a dragon? The other body?”
He gestured to the back corner of the room, where a bare-looking desk sat all by itself. “You want to join me at my desk? We can have a little chat if you’d like.”
Sure, fine. Whatever. I strode over to the desk and sat down at the seat beside it.
He sat down across from me. He leaned forward, gazing at me intently. “Why are you here?”
“I just… I need to know. If the other body that was found, if it was a dragon girl as well.”
“Why?”
“I do, that’s all.”
He leaned back in his chair. “I can’t quite get a handle on you, Ms. Caspian.” He turned back to his desk. “Right now, I’d say you’re my top suspect.”
“What?” I got to my feet. “How could you say that?”
He shrugged. “Well, you’re not a perfect match. You’re a woman, and near as I know, women don’t do crimes like this. Women kill, sure, but it’s not for sexual dominance. Men have the market cornered on that. And everything about these murders seems to point to the idea that the murderer is doing it for pleasure, for kicks.”
Fire Song (City of Dragons) Page 2
