by Willa Hart
“They were relentless, as if they were trying to continue their master’s mission. Not long before you were born, Franklin was instrumental in foiling another one of their plots to kill us off.”
If he’d mentioned anyone else, I would have teased him about using the word foil, but at the mention of my father, I was all ears.
“The jadokari responsible for the plot apparently took your father’s interference personally and swore vengeance. To protect him and Lyssa, I sent them to Oregon to hide out. Franklin eventually became keeper to another dragon and we all thought the ruse had worked.”
Stan. It was the name my mother mentioned in my nightmare. My dad’s boss. My dad’s dragon. Goosebumps peppered my arms and the hairs on the back of my neck stood on end.
“But it didn’t, did it?” I asked quietly, already knowing the answer.
Max grimaced and gave me a sympathetic look. “Stan did his best to keep the story quiet. As far as the good people of Oregon knew, a family of three had died in a tragic, single-car accident on a lonely country road. I don’t want to go into detail, but the destruction was so thorough, only a few bones survived the inferno. We assumed you died along with your parents, and mourned you all for months.”
I felt weirdly numb, hearing about why my parents had died. After a lifetime of dreaming of their deaths, I’d never stopped to wonder why. Mostly because I never thought my dream of a flying lizard engulfing our car in flames was real.
“When Stan flew down to meet with me in private several months later, I thought it was about weir business. Imagine my surprise when he told me only Franklin and Lyssa had perished, and that you had wandered to a nearby farmhouse the next morning. Back then, different law enforcement departments didn’t communicate as efficiently as they do now. Social services had no idea you belonged to the people killed in the car accident. By the time Stan discovered the truth, you’d already been placed with a foster family.”
My brain felt as if it was melting out of my ears. It was like one of those computers in old movies that says, “Does not compute!” I blinked a few times, then asked the only question that came to mind. It also happened to be the only question that mattered.
“You knew? All this time, you knew?”
Grief and guilt washed over his face. “Yes, Favor, I knew. I’m sorry we didn’t come to claim you sooner — you have no idea how sorry — but I couldn’t risk anyone else learning you were actually alive. If the jadokari who killed your parents had found out, I have no doubt he would have come back to finish the job, just to prove what an asshole he really was.”
“Was?” I asked feebly, not yet sure how to feel about the fact my uncle had known I was alive and alone, living in a system that saw me as little more than a number.
Max nodded with a grimace. “Let’s just say he’s no longer a threat to you.”
I let my gaze drift to the ceiling. I counted the holes in the soundproofing panels and tried to make sense of all the new information. I got to one hundred thirty-three before it all finally clicked into place.
“That’s who hurt you, isn’t it?” I asked. “This judo-whatever twerp. You guys fought. Once you got him out of the picture, you figured it was finally safe to bring me back into the open. Right?”
Max snorted and gave me a look of admiration. “You really are a bright spark, aren’t you? That’s exactly what happened. Stan had kept tabs on you and reported back to me regularly. Once I’d finally dealt with the jadokari, I told Shirley you were still alive and the die was cast. My wife is…tenacious. She moved heaven and hell to get you sent to us, and as sorry as I am that we couldn’t claim you sooner, I’m so happy you’re here now. I hope you believe that.”
I did. He didn’t even need to ask, because I knew it was true as soon as he said it. That didn’t stop the pouty feeling inside me whining about how damn long it took. Still, I couldn’t blame him. He’d only been trying to protect me.
“Max, how old are you?” I asked bluntly.
I’d been under the assumption Max was in his sixties, but he continually hedged on giving me an actual number. As I thought on it, so had Shirley.
“In for a penny,” he mumbled, before catching my eye. “I lost track a couple hundred years ago, but somewhere about a thousand years old, give or take a decade or two.”
I choked on his answer. “You must be the oldest dragon alive!”
“One of them,” he admitted, “but not the oldest.”
My mind boggled that such long-lived creatures wandered our sorry planet. What had he seen over the course of ten centuries? How many women had he loved? The thought sent a jolt to my heart.
“So…Aunt Shirley?”
“As I said, she’s human. Your father’s aunt.” He looked out the window and sniffled. “Falling in love with a human is a blessing and a curse, all wrapped up in one. As a human living in proximity to a dragon, she’ll survive longer than most humans — she’s over a hundred now — but I’ll count myself lucky if she lives for another hundred years. That probably seems like an eternity to you, but for a dragon, it’s the blink of an eye.”
I did some quick and easy math, then cocked a quizzical eye up at him. “Were there others?”
Max allowed his eyes to fall closed, then he sighed. It sounded mournful to me, and my heart broke for him.
“Shirley is my second mate. My first died about two hundred years ago, in the battle that destroyed Vazha. I mourned her for a very long time. Then your Aunt Shirley brought a bit of light back into my life.”
Just as she’d done mine. My heart warmed with love for the old woman — who was apparently much older than I ever imagined.
“Why no kids?”
Max swallowed hard and took a long time to answer. “Human women are unable to bear fledglings.”
“What?”
“Fledglings are baby dragons. It’s impossible for a human to carry a dragon — even a half-dragon — to term.”
He was telling the complete truth, but I also sensed he was holding something back. I decided to not press the issue, but I was curious about this human-dragon relationship thing.
“So why would a dragon marry a human? Isn’t it our biological imperative to continue our species?”
“Someone paid attention in biology class,” Max said. “For reasons that are too complex to go into right now, there aren’t a lot of female dragons to choose from. But the bottom line is that it boils down to love, and I was tired of living without it.”
“Fair enough. But why are there so few female dragons? And why would the mage keep pet dragons if he wanted to destroy dragons? More importantly, why would those dragons do his bidding? And how the hell did this Vazha asshole even become a mage?”
Uncle Max laughed and patted me on the head. “Slow down, Favor. You have a lot to learn, but it’s better to take these lessons in pieces rather than all at once. It shouldn’t take more than a few years to get you up to speed. Yes, yes, that probably seems like forever, but remember that as long as you are around me, it will be a much smaller fraction of your life than it would be under normal circumstances.”
The realization hit me full in the face. If what he said was true — and I knew it was — then my closeness to him would extend my lifespan, maybe as much as double or triple, as long as I stayed near the dragon world.
As far as I was concerned, nothing could tear me away.
Chapter Eight
After a week of working in Max’s office after school, the place still looked like a tornado from 1972 had blown through it. So much paper! While everyone else in the world had sought ways to reduce their carbon footprint, Max’s big ol’ dragon paw had picked up the slack.
Of course, he’d been the dragon equivalent of a teenager when paper made its way from China to Europe — which he was ever so delighted to tell me about in great, boring detail — so maybe it was a nostalgia thing. Whatever the deal was, I secretly vowed to bring him into the late twentieth century, at the very least. May
be an old Dell and dial-up internet wouldn’t be too much of a shock to his system, but it would be a huge improvement to the office.
The door to the outer office opened and I smiled as the man himself walked through the door, carrying two steaming cups of coffee. It was about time! He’d promised that if I worked over the weekend, he’d keep me fully caffeinated any time I needed a boost. And sorting through all of his dusty paperwork was just such an occasion.
“Order for Party Favor,” he boomed as he made his way through the freshly redecorated outer office.
After school, Shirley and I had come to the office and cleaned top to bottom. Rufus and Max had hauled three of the five desks in the outer office to the dump, while we girls decorated with potted plants and stunning prints of the city at night. It wasn’t much, but it was enough so clients wouldn’t think they’d stepped back in time.
When Max burst into his office with a beaming smile, I gave him a mock scowl.
“Did you just call me ‘Party Favor’?” I threw my shoulders back and tossed my blonde hair over my shoulder with a huff. “Dude, I might have been a chump in the foster care system, but now I’m a motherfucking dragon keeper!”
Max laughed as he handed me my coffee. The dash of cayenne pepper that topped my favorite coffee drink, a Mexican Mocha, tickled my nose just a touch. As soon as he had a free hand, Max ruffled my hair, knowing full well how much I hated it.
“Don’t let your Aunt Shirley hear you talking like that. And don’t get ahead of yourself, Favor. You’re not there quite yet. Someday.”
He settled back in his chair as he watched me sip my coffee in utter bliss.
“And just so you know,” he added, “I actually called you Par’tia Favor. It’s a title of honor for dragon keepers. You see, around the time that fellow you call Charlemagne was being named King of the Franks, the dragons of northern Europe were moving toward a similarly centralized society that required a more thorough system of societal categorization for our human friends than we had at the time. One of my great-uncles had a certain fondness for Latin manuscripts and linguistics at the time, and he—”
At my exaggerated snore, he scowled at me, then sighed heavily.
“Fine, the history lesson can wait. Regardless, I think I like Party Favor, so you might want to get used to that.”
I snickered and turned back to the open filing cabinet. Before I could pull out yet another dusty file, the phone rang on the desk. Max grumbled, just as he did every time the thing jangled loudly, so I reached past him and snatched up the receiver.
“Maximus Investigations,” I said, so practiced by now that it sounded natural.
Max appeared mildly impressed as I listened to the potential client asking about an appointment.
“Yes, we can help you find out if your husband is cheating on you, no problem. Can you come in Wednesday at 2 p.m. to meet with Mr. Novak? Okay, see you then!”
“Sounds like you’ve got that down pat, at least,” Max said as I hung the phone up and finished penciling his latest appointment into a hardbound scheduling notebook.
“Yeah, real rocket science,” I snorted.
“Hey, don’t downplay it, Party Favor. There’s never a reason to be ashamed for doing honest work. Besides, I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t have been able to handle phones that well in my first week.”
“No doubt because Alexander Graham Bell hadn’t even been born yet,” I said with a snarky wink.
“Well, if you’d met that reprobate in person, you’d know why I have my reservations, thank you very much,” he said, and I genuinely couldn’t tell if he was joking or not. He then paused and frowned. “Wait, did I hear you say Wednesday? Are we really booked that far out?”
“Yep!”
“Where on earth are all these new clients coming from?”
I’d been waiting for this moment all week. I pulled my phone out of the back pocket of my jeans and waggled it in his face. “From my newfangled technology you hate so much.”
Max’s eyes widened as I flicked the screen through his shiny new website, Facebook page, Instagram account, Twitter feed, and even his LinkedIn profile. Every night, after we’d finished at the office, I’d head to my room and set up a new account somewhere for the business. Whether Max liked it or not, I was determined to drag Maximus Investigations into the modern age.
“I took the liberty of setting up some social media accounts for the business, so you can actually get some visibility for clients under the age of eighty.”
“Bah,” he grumbled, watching me scroll through the Instagram feed. “Wait, is that a picture of me? When did you take this?”
In the selfie I’d snapped a couple days earlier, I was grinning and flashing the camera a peace sign, while Uncle Max stood in the background, his mouth open as he told me to put the “glow box” away. There were a lot of likes on it, too — more than you’d expect for an old man’s P.I. company. There were definitely some benefits to having a tech-savvy young person in charge of social media marketing — and by tech-savvy, I meant that I understood the basics of how to use a hashtag.
“When I was carefully building this company’s new image, thank you very much,” I said, clicking off the screen and putting the phone back in my pocket.
“No wonder all the new clients have been humans.”
“Hey, it’s better than no clients at all, right? We were just collecting dust over here. No wonder Rufus was upset. Besides, humans aren’t all that bad, right? Right?”
Max sniffed. “Well, if it brings in clients, you can keep fiddling with that gadget all you want. But a computer will not enter this place of business, as long as I have anything to say about it. Those things are a fad, not something to base a business on.”
“They sure helped us go to the moon,” I said mildly.
“Bah! And what good was that? I always said there was no reason to go up to that dusty old rock, but nobody listened to me. All that excitement over a little photo op.”
“I think you’re just a Luddite.” To prove my point, I showed him a file so old someone had used a dip pen to write on it. No joke!
Max narrowed his eyes at me. “You say that as an insult, but you might change your tune if you’d actually taken the time to get to know some of the Luddites. You humans have developed so many strange misconceptions about them. In fact, the original Luddites understood the machines they were rebelling against perfectly well. You see, in the wake of that Corsican fellow’s little adventure trying to make an empire out of Europe, a number of textile workers in England saw their livelihoods getting taken away from them by automated machinery that needed less skill and fewer workers. It wasn’t really about the machines so much as wanting higher wages, which is exactly what that mob in Nottingham was demanding when they destroyed the textile factories. Those German fellows, Marx and Engels, had a lot of interesting things to say about the—”
I was saved from the history lecture by the outside door swinging open. The bright morning sun silhouetted five tall men filing inside, one after the other. Max tensed up next to me, his anger radiating off him like an aura. If that wasn’t enough, fists clenched so tight his knuckles turned white were a pretty clear sign.
When the men moved far enough into the newly spacious lobby that the overhead lights beat out the sunny backlighting, I got a better look at them and hot damn! They all looked to be in their twenties — much too old for a high-schooler like me, but that didn’t stop me from admiring their hotness.
The first through the door appeared to be the oldest, to my eye, and he was every teenager’s dream — tall, with dark hair and blue eyes that pierced through the gloominess of the lobby and made my knees go all wobbly. With the light scruff on his chiseled chin and the bespoke suit that fit him so perfectly he could have easily been a model for Hugo Boss.
Oh God! Maybe he is a model for Hugo Boss!
The next guy was just a titch shorter than Handsome Hugo, but a little more filled out in the muscles departmen
t. Not bulging like the scowling guy who followed him, but he definitely spent a fair amount of time at the gym. His brown eyes stared right at me, even though he couldn’t possibly see me through the two-way glass. I knew it was impossible, but it felt as if he were seeing the deepest secrets of my soul. Then he broke into a wide grin and waggled his fingers at the mirror. Obviously he was waving at Max, not me, which didn’t break my heart at all.
Not even a tiny bit.
The handsome, if surly, man behind the jokester looked as if he could bench press Uncle Max — with one hand. His keen gray eyes surveyed the office, and I had to wonder if he was casing the place or simply checking for threats. He could have easily been the other men’s bodyguard, but despite the fact he was shorter than them by a couple of inches and much brawnier, he bore a resemblance to them. Not the first man's staid polish or the second's relaxed joviality, but their chiseled features had to be hereditary. It didn’t seem fair that one family could produce so many hunks.
Trailing behind was a set of identical twins who looked almost young enough for me to date. My heart rate ramped up when their vibrant green eyes peered into the mirror and I grew a little dizzy. My fingers twitched as I thought about running my fingers through their blond hair — one high and tight, the other a little flopsy, like a surfer’s. They were taller than the other three, but leaner, which didn’t make them any less interesting to look at.
They were all interesting to look at, but something about them gave me a giddy, bubbly feeling, almost as if I’d just downed a generous shot of tequila. Of course I couldn’t tell Max that. First of all, he wouldn’t like the fact I’d drunk tequila as a minor, but secondly, it didn’t take a mind reader to know he didn’t like the men, not in the slightest.
Only…they weren’t men. I couldn’t pinpoint how I knew, but I sensed these men were dragons. I made a mental note to ask Max later how I could instinctively tell the difference between humans and dragons. Now that I knew dragons were real.
