by Mell Eight
"Wait a second!" Valerie snapped, interrupting Mercury before he could voice his sympathy. "Don't you dare contaminate the crime scene! Mercury, you know better than to invite someone arbitrarily into a case like this!"
"Ah," Mercury said, turning to look at Valerie. "May I introduce Dane, from the Supernatural Consulting Firm. The FBSI uses his services regularly."
"And you think we have the budget to hire him?" Valerie steamed, her face growing red as her eyes narrowed in fury.
Dane grinned over his shoulder at Mercury. "He'll pay me in sex tonight. Don't worry about your budget."
"What?" Valerie hissed, her face growing even redder. "I'll have your badge for this, Mercury!"
"He's my mate," Mercury said with a happy shrug. Valerie couldn't take his badge and Mercury seriously doubted she had the pull to get someone higher up to do it. Besides, it was such a cliché thing to say to an officer, Mercury knew she was just venting anger without actually thinking first. "We've been together for five years, so he'd come running if I called even if I didn't promise sex afterwards."
She gaped at them both for a brief second before storming off towards the basement. She was probably going to see if there was any truth to Mercury's claim that the building had been used for dogfighting. He also hoped she took a few minutes to calm down.
"Okay, bored now," Lumie rumbled. He threw his arms around Mercury's legs. "You won't forget, right?" he asked Mercury's knees.
Mercury glanced at his watch and was astonished to realize that it was already eleven o'clock. Where had all the time gone? "In two hours, I'll come home so Dane and I can go on your picnic," Mercury promised. He would drag Valerie kicking and screaming back to the office for lunch if he needed to.
"You'd better," Lumie sighed. He squeezed Mercury's legs one last time before letting go and running after Dane. He slammed into Dane's legs, causing Dane to swear and catch himself on a large piece of rubble so he didn't hit the ground. "Time to go," Lumie said with a wide grin up at Dane, who lost his responding scowl quickly under Lumie's cheerful onslaught.
"See you in a bit," Dane called over to Mercury, who smiled and nodded. Dane and Lumie vanished, leaving Mercury to return to work.
CHAPTER THREE
Mercury arrived home at exactly one o'clock looking harried, yet also exhilarated. He didn't mind his desk job, Dane knew that, but there was nothing quite like tracking down the enemy on foot. It got the adrenaline pumping and it was why Dane had chosen to open his consulting firm in the first place. He didn't need the money, and while he enjoyed helping people, Dane didn't need to be so open about it, but he loved the job and he had a feeling Mercury now did too.
Although, that angry partner of his would need to even out her temper and attitude first. Dane knew he shouldn't interfere, but he did want to pull her aside and read her the riot act, something Mercury would kill Dane for if he ever found out.
"Any luck?" Dane asked. There had been murmurs about the enemy over the past five years. Dragons like the mother and kits Dane was searching for who were running from the enemy were the most frequent. The trap Mercury had triggered was the most overt the enemy had been since the warehouse earthquake trap they had engineered five years ago. Dane and Mercury couldn't find them, which infuriated Dane to no end. The enemy had at least one dragon held prisoner that Dane knew of, an air kit named Platinum, but Mercury and Dane were very worried that the enemy had gotten more and was torturing them too while Dane and Mercury essentially twiddled their thumbs.
Mercury sighed. "I think Valerie finally browbeat Captain O'Simmons into at least looking into the possibility that someone was holding illegal dogfights in that building's basement. He's still insisting that there's no way his quiet town would have something as terrible as that, but when he said that he used the same amount of derision as when he happily told us there weren't any witches in his town either. Which means that Valerie is also sending a request to the FBI to have O'Simmons' unit investigated for racist hiring practices and racist policing. She's hoping a more open-minded and progressive person will take O'Simmons' place in time for us to make some progress on the case, but I'm not holding my breath."
"So no one is looking into the magic imbedded in the paint?" Dane asked, wondering if he could cut lunch short and go do some more digging on his own. He hadn't wanted to step on Mercury's toes by butting into his investigation and Dane had needed to get back to the kits and their long-suffering tutor anyway, so he had left before he was able to get more than a cursory look at the spell.
To Dane's relief, Mercury grinned conspiratorially. "I put a ward over the paint so O'Simmons' bumbling wouldn't destroy the evidence and contacted the SupFeds' in-house witch. She's agreed to be at the scene this afternoon whether O'Simmons likes it or not."
Dane shared Mercury's grin, glad that Mercury was happy, and a little aroused by it, but turned around when Dane heard Lumie grunting behind him. Lumie was dragging a wicker picnic basket as long as he was tall. It was huge and it looked heavy. What had the little scamp actually made? It looked like there was enough food in there to feed an army.
The basket was heavy, Dane realized as he hurried forward to take it from Lumie before he hurt himself. Daisy was in the kitchen feeding the rest of the kits. Lumie waved goodbye and scurried back so he wouldn't miss his own lunch.
"Shall we?" Dane asked, gallantly holding out his arm—the one not dragged down by the heavy basket—out for Mercury to take. He wrapped his arm around Dane's.
"Let's go."
Dane let his magic pull them away, reappearing in a familiar enough location. The clearing was a little more overgrown than it had been five years ago when five kits had been trying to nurse their sick father back to health. The three trees that had fallen still made a nice little cave off to one side, but they also let in a lot of sun and new trees were slowly growing to take their place. Still, Dane was able to find a flat enough bit of grass and scrub to lay out the blanket Lumie had helpfully included.
Mercury grinned at Dane, no doubt recognizing the location and Dane's attempt to be sentimental, but then he looked at the basket Dane had set down next to the blanket and remembered why they were actually here. "How bad do you think it is?" Mercury asked, his face set in a worried frown.
"Knowing Lumie?" Dane joked before pulling open the two halves of the top of the basket. A wave of heavy cinnamon scent practically exploded from inside. "Knowing Lumie, it probably has cinnamon in it," Dane sighed.
Mercury and Dane slowly unpacked the basket. First was a bowl of what appeared to be potato salad, except the potatoes had been turned a funny shade of reddish orange by the sheer multitude of cinnamon Lumie had added. Next was a plastic-wrap-covered plate of sandwiches. Dane was pretty sure they were chicken-salad sandwiches, but the mayo Lumie had doctored for the salad had the same off-color tinge as the potatoes. There was a bowl of leafy greens mixed with other chopped vegetables coated with… Dane sniffed it expectantly to double check his worst fears and found them confirmed. There was cinnamon-flavored salad dressing completely coating every inch of lettuce, carrot, and tomato.
"He included dessert," Mercury groaned. His hands were rubbing his face tiredly, but he peeked between his fingers just in time for Dane to pull out a covered pitcher of cinnamon iced tea. Dessert was, predictably, cinnamon cheesecake.
"Lumie isn't allowed to cook for other people ever again," Dane grumped, staring incredulously at the food Lumie expected them to choke down.
"You still have the number for the pizza place?" Mercury asked. He was looking at the food as if he might be sick.
Dane immediately pulled out his phone and, predictably, there wasn't any signal in the middle of the forest. "Let me see if I can get a few bars. If not, I'll pop into town and order one there." Dane bent over to press his lips against Mercury's, loving the way Mercury groaned and pushed closer to Dane immediately, but he pulled away a few moments later with a grimace.
"Everything reeks of cinnamon. I can't
even enjoy you with that stench in my nose," Mercury whined.
Dane couldn't help laughing at Mercury, and Mercury grinned along with Dane because it was hilarious. Dane pecked Mercury on the end of his sensitive nose before getting back to his feet and heading across the clearing. Dane's phone resolutely told him there were zero towers nearby as he walked around in an awkward shuffle with his phone held out in the air, desperately hoping the little bar would appear in the corner. He made it all the way to the far tree line before he found even one bar of signal, but it flickered out before Dane could pull his phone to his ear to make a call.
A touch of magic to augment the signal would solve the problem. Dane much preferred to do that and spend the twenty minutes it would take for the pizza to cook sitting with Mercury than standing around in the store. He called on his magic, letting it form slowly between his fingers, and jumped about a foot in the air when his magic informed him that it had found dragons.
Dane hadn't ended the spell he had been using when Daisy called to let him know she was taking a few hours off. It gleefully told Dane that there were three dragon kits tucked under a bush just three feet to his left.
"Damn it, Lumie," Dane grumbled under his breath. He must have known there would be dragon kits here. Couldn't he have just told Dane that instead of sending Mercury and Dane on an excuse of a picnic? Then again, it was Lumie, and he probably thought that was exactly what he had done.
Dane tucked his phone back into his pocket and waved to Mercury to let him know something was up. Mercury immediately straightened up on the picnic blanket instead of lounging indolently and making Dane want to jump him and start pulling clothes off. His magic flared briefly as he called it to his fingers in readiness.
It wasn't hard for Dane to keep his feet from making any noise while he crept over the heavy autumn-leaf debris covering the three feet of ground to where the dragon kits were hiding. The bush was big enough that a casual observer might miss them, but it was starting to lose its leaves too and Dane could make out the occasional flash of red scales as he got closer.
"But it smells so good!" one of the kits whined.
"Mama said to stay hiding until she comes and gets us," another admonished in reply.
"But I'm hungry!" the first replied, his whine grating and high pitched. After wincing through that noise, Dane knew that even had Mercury and Dane remained on the blanket with an edible picnic they would have noticed the kits eventually.
Dane peeked under the bush behind them. All three kits were in dragon form, their oversized and currently flightless wings tucked close to their backs so they could fit underneath the bush. Two of them were staring at Mercury and the picnic basket avidly. The third was looking at Dane with dawning fear in his widening eyes.
"Hello," Dane said amicably, hoping this would go well. Except he was dealing with dragon kits, and there was no way this would go well.
The two kits that hadn't noticed Dane yet screeched in surprise and accidentally lit the bush on fire. The one who had seen Dane jumped to his feet and dashed into the clearing to get away. He forgot about Mercury, though, and was caught a brief moment later.
Dane doused the bush with a touch of magic and used his larger size to herd the other two kits after their brother.
Mercury rumbled at them, his human throat making the soothing dragon noise without trouble. "We've been looking for you," he explained gently. "Come have some lunch."
"You're not the bad guys?" the second kit Dane had heard speak asked sharply. He tried to be as menacing as Dane knew Nickel could be, but he lacked the serial-killer aura Nickel had learned during his time trapped and experimented on in a lab before killing the scientists in order to escape. Dane reached out and smoothed the scales on his head.
"We're not the bad guys. Your father told us where to find you," Dane explained, stretching the truth just slightly. Their father had asked for Dane's help finding them, but he hadn't known where his mate had fled.
"We have a lot of food that I'm sure you'll love," Mercury said as he gently steered the kit he was still holding on to towards the blanket. "It was made by a fire dragon kit just like you in the hopes that we would have something for you when we did find you."
"Once you've eaten, we'll take you to your dad," Dane added with a smile. "Do you know how far away you left your mom behind?"
One of the kits was sniffing the potato salad and another was clawing off the plastic wrap around the sandwiches.
"Human form, please," Mercury instructed firmly. "This is food you eat with hands, not claws."
The kits grumbled, but one by one they shifted forms. They were naked and unconcerned about that fact, of course. Wild kits often didn't know anything about clothing or the social mores that dictated what people wore. The fact that Chrome reliably wore clothing, as ripped and dirty as it was, was the result of a lot of hard work on Daisy and Mercury's part. Dane didn't say anything, but made a mental note to wash the picnic blanket before it ended up back in the hall closet.
It only took a few minutes for all of the food Lumie had made to vanish. The kits ate voraciously, as if they hadn't had a proper meal in days. Dane honestly doubted they had any clue what they were actually putting in their mouths—potato salad and cheesecake didn't occur naturally in the wild—but they enjoyed it all the same. Lumie was apparently an excellent cook, as long as he was feeding fellow fire dragons.
Had their mother been anywhere nearby, she would have come rumbling out of the forest to protect her kits from strangers. Either her kits had wandered off a long way while she was fighting the enemy, or she had been captured and the enemy hadn't had the resources to keep her subdued and track down the kits at the same time. The enemy would be back in these woods soon enough to search for the kits, and Dane would be waiting. He suppressed an evil grin and shared a sidelong look with Mercury, whose eyebrows were drawn. He looked tense as he watched the kits and the forest surrounding the clearing. Mercury was on the same page as Dane.
They needed to get the kits out of this forest and safe with their dad as soon as possible, but they also had to do it without alarming them. The kits would fight back if they were rushed or made to feel wary. Lumie's trick with the food had helped a lot and now all Mercury and Dane had to do was to get the kits to trust them enough to transport them somewhere.
Before Dane could come up with a plan, one of the kits yawned. He was immediately echoed by both of his siblings.
"We've been running all morning," the first kit to yawn explained tiredly. "We're gonna take a nap now."
All three kits curled up amid the remains of the picnic lunch and dropped off to sleep without a care in the world. It was no wonder the enemy had been able to gather as many kits as they had, given how trusting and innocent they were.
Mercury and Dane waited a few minutes to let the kits fall fully to sleep. They quietly repacked the picnic basket so none of the local wildlife got accidentally poisoned. Once Dane was certain the kits were dead to the world, Mercury put one hand on Dane's shoulder and Dane bent over so he could touch all three kits at the same time. His magic pulled them all away.
They reappeared in the middle of a burgeoning village. The kits were lying in the middle of a wide dirt road. Six two-story houses stood on each side of the road. The houses were almost identical in design: each had different-colored siding and shutters and they had porches of different sizes, but the basic blueprint was the same. Two more houses were in various stages of construction further down the street. A young man with bright red hair was sitting awkwardly in a chair in front of the house that was little more than foundation and framing.
Mercury and Dane both straightened up. Yelling for attention and waking the kits would be a bad idea, so Mercury headed over to the sitting man. A breeze rustled the leaves overhead and one of the kits rolled over so he could snuggle close with his siblings. Of course he also managed to plant his elbow into his brother's face with the unerring accuracy of siblings across the world.
"Daddy?" the kit asked softly. The man stood awkwardly when he caught sight of the kits, one of his legs encased in a thick cast to help the severely broken bone heal correctly, but he grinned and held out one of his hands. "Daddy!" the kit shrieked, waking his siblings as he dashed down the road. The other two kits echoed their brother, screaming and running at their father, who had to collapse into his chair to hold them all.
There was a lot of babbling and some loud crying. Pretty soon, Mercury and Dane weren't the only ones standing in the middle of the dirt road. Three-dozen dragons and kits lived in the tiny town and it felt like more than half of them came outside to investigate the noise. An air dragon that inexplicably called herself Martha, even though that wasn't her real name, walked over to Mercury and Dane.
"The construction crew just left for their lunch break," she said softly. "The house will be ready to go before winter sets in. It's nice to see it will be a full house. Some of us were getting worried you wouldn't find the rest of the family. I'm happy to add all three kits to the school roster." Martha was the unofficial mayor and the official schoolteacher of the town. She had been one of Dane's first finds when she and two kits she had rescued from the wild had come to him directly for aid.
