Dragon's Luck: Dragon Shifter Paranormal Romance (Shifter Agents Book 3)

by Lauren Esker

  "What would I do without these little pep talks?" Lucky inquired. "Anyway, I thought your personal philosophy was that fear is a terrible motivator."

  "I believe you get the best results with both carrot and stick."

  "Awesome. Well, consider the stick adequately applied." He met her steely gaze without flinching. "I'm not going to throw the game, Molina, and I'm not going to do anything that'll get me thrown out. I want to win as much as you do."

  Chapter Seven

  Finally! Jen thought. Free to sneak. No offense to Lucky, who seemed like a nice guy—for a criminal—but having him around 24/7 was really cramping her investigative style.

  It worked fine, for her purposes, to let Lucky believe that curiosity about Marius was her main motivation today. And she was curious about him. Whoever or whatever Marius was, she thought the SCB would like to know about him. At her earliest convenience once she got back to Seattle, she planned to spend a little quality time with the SCB's files and see if she could find references to anyone having encountered anything like Marius before, a sort of shifter-but-not.

  Right now, however, she had other priorities, namely searching the ship for clues about Lux and Dragon's Tears, as well as finding a change of clothes before she had to shed the ones she was wearing like a lizard skin. Along the way, she needed to find out whether Marius's window was open or not. Of course, she could just make something up, but now she was dying to know. She had a feeling she was going to enjoy the results of the bet whether she won or lost, but winning would be a lot nicer.

  She went out to the lounge, lagging briefly as she passed Marius's door. She could hear voices coming from inside, but when she pressed her ear to the door, she couldn't make out the words. From the staccato start and stop of conversation, she guessed he was on the phone.

  I'm gonna find out your deal, buddy. Just wait.

  In the lounge, the breakfast buffet had been cleared away, although a coffee decanter remained. A few people were still hanging around in small groups, drinking coffee and pretending that they weren't blatantly eavesdropping on each other. A few of the crew members, Lucky's "redcaps", hovered discreetly in the background, keeping the coffee things stocked and performing small cleaning tasks around the lounge.

  Jen selected a young female redcap, a girl with glasses and long hair pulled back in a tail. "Excuse me, miss, can you tell me if there's somewhere on board where I can pick up a few personal items?"

  "Oh," the young woman said, "you'll want the shopping arcade for that. It's on Deck A. I can take you there."

  They went to a bank of elevators at the far end of the lounge. Looking over the young woman's shoulder, Jen noted that a four-digit code had to be typed in to unlock the elevator, and memorized it.

  Jen also noted that, while the young woman looked like a fresh-faced college student on a weekend job, she carried herself with the confident bearing of someone who worked out. And that little bulge under her uniform jacket wasn't a wallet.

  "I'm Jennifer, by the way," Jen said as the doors closed. They went down, so apparently the decks were designated in ascending order, with C above A—the opposite of what Jen would have expected.

  There was no response to the question. Jen prompted, "And you are?"

  A slight hesitation followed, before the young woman said, "Breanna."

  "Nice to meet you. So ..." Jen twirled a hand to indicate their surroundings. Even the elevator was expensively appointed; it was paneled in dark wood, with a brass handrail and a potted plant. "What's it like working in a place like this?"

  Another slight pause. "It's a job," Breanna said.

  "Do you work for this Lux person?" Jen asked, keeping her demeanor friendly and open like the naive gambler's girlfriend she was pretending to be. "What's he like?"

  The elevator doors opened, and Breanna seemed faintly relieved. "This is Deck A. Please let a crew member know when you're ready to go back upstairs."

  So much for that source of information. "Thank you," Jen said. "Oh!" As if just remembering, she paused in the elevator doorway, stopping the doors with her hand. "They took my phone. Are there any public phones or Internet cafés here?"

  "You can call the operator from your room phone and have a call placed to the mainland. There is also an Internet kiosk on this deck."

  "Thank you," Jen said brightly, and hopped out of the elevator.

  The faux Egyptian decor continued on this level, as well as the ridiculous opulence. There was a large elevator lobby decorated in a similar style to the lounge, with doors opening onto the shopping arcade, and a big glass-paneled entrance to the garden atrium.

  So that's how you get in. At least how you're supposed to get in. There was a redcap standing guard in front of the atrium's glass doors (to keep people from stealing the trees?) so she marked it for later investigation and wandered off to see about replenishing her wardrobe.

  The shopping arcade was designed like an "outdoor" marketplace in some imaginary version of ancient Egypt where English-language signs and modern plastic-packaged consumer goods coexisted with geometrically decorated pillars lining a peristyle hall with fake sandstone walls. Bright lights shone down overhead. It was a strange combination of mall and amusement park, like a Disneyworld attraction, Jen thought.

  Aside from the faux-Egypt decor, the shopping area otherwise made her think of an airport in its offered array of goods and services. Duty-free shops sold designer handbags, perfumes, and the like; there were snack shops, a coffee bar, a few places offering services like hairdressing and massages, and the hoped-for clothing boutiques. Jen bought an enormous iced latte and wandered back and forth, picking up the items she needed as a cover for crowd-watching.

  Not that there was much of a crowd to watch. There were only a few other shoppers, who seemed to fall into one of two categories: women in expensive designer clothing, and large men with necks as wide as their heads. Gamblers' or mobsters' wives and/or mistresses, and off-duty bodyguards respectively, Jen guessed. Not that there weren't female gamblers in the tournament, but if what she'd seen at breakfast was any indication, they seemed to be a significant minority, as they had been on Roxy Molina's gambling boat—maybe one in every five or six. The bodyguards, or hired muscle, or whatever they were, seemed to be uniformly male.

  Jen bought toiletries and a change of clothing, although not as much of either as she'd intended, since she had only the cash she'd brought with her and the prices were appalling. Still, she enjoyed clothing shopping, a fact which would probably have surprised her colleagues at the SCB. She might also look at the items she bought with an eye toward hiding weapons in them, but it was fun to pick up beautiful things for the pleasure of it.

  "So what's it like working here?" she asked the sales clerk ringing up the handful of clothing items she'd picked out. "I mean, are you, like, working for the mob, or does corporate headquarters call you up and tell you you're going to be selling Vuitton bags on a cruise ship, or what?"

  "More the latter, really." Unlike Breanna, the sales clerk, whose name tag read Nguyet, seemed happy to chat. "I know this place is ..." She shrugged. "It is what it is. But it's a nice job, and it pays well. Competition was pretty stiff to work here. Though I had imagined working on a cruise ship would be more glamorous. Lying beside the pool and working on my tan, you know?" She laughed. "I don't even think this ship has a pool. Or, if it does, us plebes aren't allowed in it. Mostly I just work all day every day and then go back to my room. I've been here a week and I'll be here another week, and that's it."

  "Two weeks, really? Not longer?"

  "Everybody here's a new hire. Actually, I think all of this is new. I don't think this ship normally has anything like this many people on it. Of course, you'd have to ask the regular crew about that."

  "Regular crew?"

  Nguyet explained that the ship was divided into three separate social strata. The red-clad crew members lived and ate and socialized separately from the workers on the shopping arcade level, mos
t of whom had come on board within the last couple of weeks from Vietnam, Thailand, and Hong Kong. The third group was the passengers, who had their own separate eating and living space.

  "And you guys have the same deal we do, right?" Jen asked. "You're not allowed to go anywhere without a guide."

  "We're not allowed off Deck A at all." At Jen's horrified look, Nguyet laughed. "Oh, I don't mean it like that. We aren't slaves or anything. But it was one of the conditions in the paperwork we signed when we were hired. We don't get paid 'til we leave, and if we're caught wandering around the rest of the ship, we'll forfeit our position and all our pay. And this job pays really well. The only ones who are allowed to go upstairs are the housekeeping staff, the lucky bastards."

  "So you guys live here on Deck A too?"

  "We do. Our living space is behind the arcade area. Hey, I'm due for a break anyway. I'll show you." She winked. "I don't think passengers are supposed to be back there, but they didn't make us sign any paperwork about that."

  She took Jen through a door in the back of the shop. It opened into a long storage area that seemed to service several of the shops, and from there, they exited into a corridor considerably more utilitarian than any other part of the ship Jen had seen so far except the docking bay. This area looked more like a ship and less like a hotel, although a passing attempt had been made to decorate the naked bulkheads with a stripe of geometric patterning, an interlocking series of squares that matched the motif marching along the lintels and columns in the arcade. Instead of widely spaced doors with brass numbers, the doors here were closely spaced and probably opened onto rooms similar to the one where Jen had first met Lucky face to face, back on the Fair Lady.

  "One of these is your room?"

  Nguyet bobbed her head in agreement. "Yeah, I share with another girl, Duanphen. She'll be sleeping right now. She's in Housekeeping, so she's on a super-early shift. C'mon, let's go down to the galley. I want to grab a bite."

  The workers' galley, in stark contrast to the breakfast lounge upstairs, was built along the mold of industrial breakrooms everywhere. An open diner-style window provided a view of a cramped kitchen area, where a couple of people were cooking; it looked like the kitchen was open-access, for the use of the workers. Vending machines and long tables with benches, occupied by a dozen or so workers taking their lunch breaks, took up most of the space. There were no redcaps running about keeping things restocked, and the coffee came from a standard commercial machine, not a silver decanter. Jen obtained a cup anyway, her iced latte having long since run out.

  Nguyet swapped friendly greetings with the others, mainly in English, on her way to the vending machines.

  "Do you all speak English?" Jen asked, joining her there. The vending machines did not seem to require payment. Nguyet pushed buttons for what she wanted.

  "It was one of the conditions for employment," Nguyet explained. "English fluency. English is the common language on the ship, although the crew comes from all over. I actually went to school in Toronto. A lot of the other girls have an international education too, or worked on cruise ships before. My roommate's been all over. Her last job was working at a hotel in Djibouti." She laughed. "Duanphen says if you think the sphinx is ridiculous, you should see some of the architecture there. This is hardly the craziest thing some rich mofo dreamed up."

  "I don't suppose you've actually met the rich mofo himself."

  "Lux? Oh no. I don't think anybody has. I just dealt with the employment agency that got me the job."

  As Nguyet sat down to eat, Jen checked the clock on the wall. It was a little after one, which meant that within an hour, all the Deck C passengers would be out of their rooms and busy with gambling for the rest of the afternoon. She didn't know which group Marius was in, so it would be safest to wait until after two before searching his room. Of course, he might wash out early and come back to the room, which meant she didn't want to wait too long.

  "Nguyet, you said your roommate's on the housekeeping staff, right? Do they have special keys to get them into the passengers' rooms?"

  Nguyet looked puzzled. Jen sat down across from her and tried to look guilty and embarrassed.

  "My boyfriend is one of the gamblers, and he has our room key. I didn't think about that before I went and bought a bunch of stuff. And they don't let guests into the gambling rooms. I was thinking maybe if Duanphen has a skeleton key, I could drop off my stuff in my room so I don't have to carry it all afternoon."

  "She's asleep—"

  "Oh, I know, and I don't want to wake her up. I'll just run upstairs and put my stuff in my room, then bring it back."

  "I'd help if I could, but I don't think I can. There is some sort of special pass card the housekeepers get, but they pick it up when they start their shift and give it back at the end. You should ask one of the crew to let you in. They can get into any of the rooms, I think."

  "I'll do that then," Jen said cheerily. "Thank you so much for all your help!"

  "Oh, come back anytime, please," Nguyet begged. "It's great to have someone new to talk to. You're welcome to come down here and hang out with us anytime the rarified air upstairs gets too thin for you."

  Jen laughed. "Thank you! I'll try to."

  She promised Nguyet that she remembered how to get back to the arcade. Outside the galley, however, she turned in the opposite direction.

  She quickly discovered that Nguyet hadn't been exaggerating about the Deck A workers' inability to leave. The only ways to get in or out were a handful of doors that opened into employees-only spaces behind the arcade. Any other doors that looked like they might lead to stairs or elevators were locked and accessible only by key card or punch code.

  Jen really would not want to be down here in the event of a malfunction with the ship.

  Those doors had better unlock automatically if the ship starts to sink. Still, someone needs to slap Lux's ass with a worker safety lawsuit.

  She thought about trying the elevator pass code back here, but decided not to risk it, in case it triggered an alarm if used anywhere but the elevators. Instead she went back out to the arcade, and, as she still had a little time to kill before all the passengers would be out of their rooms on Deck C, took a detour by the Internet kiosk. She paid for fifteen minutes of very expensive (and very slow, as it turned out) Internet access, and image-searched "small white flowers".

  She was no flower expert, but the one she found that looked the most like Marius's little bouquet was valerian. Which ... helped not at all. As per Wikipedia, valerian was a mild sedative, common in alternative medicine, but it didn't seem to have any significance other than that. It wasn't poisonous—she'd been a trifle worried about that, especially after Onyeka's warning—and wasn't used as part of a flower-based social signaling protocol, as a rose or carnation might have been. It was just a small white flower.

  Maybe it really was merely a good-luck charm utilized by a superstitious gambler.

  She hovered over the keyboard, fingers poised. Having the entire Internet at her fingertips made it difficult not to try to send another message to Avery. But their email drop boxes and codes were as limited as the phone ones. The SCB was no CIA. She'd already given them the most important information by phone. Reluctantly, she shut the browser down and left the kiosk.

  It was almost two, anyway. She needed to get a move on.

  She strolled as nonchalantly as possible to the elevators and casually punched in the code. The doors opened. Yes! She was in.

  The buttons went from A all the way up to G. Apparently there was a lot more of the ship than what she'd seen so far. There were also L1 and L2 beneath the A button. Basement levels. That sounded promising. She pushed L1.

  The doors opened on a chilly, cavernous space, lit with florescent panels and decorated in no way whatsoever. Lashed-down crates were everywhere, along with a couple of small, parked forklifts. There was a low vibration underfoot, a rhythmic thumping.

  Engines. Naturally. And probably generat
ors as well. Good to know where they were, and how to get there. Slightly less useful for her current purpose, which was to steal a redcap skeleton key, and preferably a uniform as well.

  She tried L2, but that was even more industrial, and looked half finished as well. Most of the lights were unlit. The thumping was much stronger here.

  Well, she thought, let's see what's upstairs. She pushed G.

  The doors opened onto a lobby similar to the one on A Deck. The main difference, however, was that the glassed-in walls extended most of the way around.

  She'd reached the top of the ship.

  There was no one here at all. She hadn't really thought about it, but exploring the ship during the tournament would keep the redcaps out of her way as well—most of them were probably busy passenger-wrangling right now. Jen placed her shopping bags between the elevator doors to keep them from closing all the way, not wanting to find out the hard way whether her pass code worked on every level, and went to the windows to look out.

  The elevator bank was near the back of the ship, looking forward. In front of her, the top of the ship, a no man's land of bristling antennas, maintenance catwalks, and glass skylight panels, stretched toward the rearing hilltop of the sphinx's elaborate headdress—a head the size of a building, looking serenely forward across the glistening wavetops. All she could see of it was the back, of course.

  The garden atrium was below her. Leaning against the windows, she looked down at the green tops of the trees, an indoor forest stretching nearly a quarter mile in front of her. She hadn't realized the atrium received natural daylight; she'd thought it was overhead lights only, not the actual sun. But she had explored it during the evening, when they must have closed the overhead doors—from up here, she could see the edges of the giant doors that must be able to roll over the glass—and turned on the lights.

  Today there was no need for it. Brilliant sun shone down from a nearly cloudless sky, and the ocean was vivid, eye-searing blue in all directions. From the angle of the sun, the ship appeared to be headed southwest. Toward warmer waters, Jen thought—and into the vast expanse of the Pacific. The sphinx couldn't possibly move very fast, but they'd been traveling nonstop for the last twenty-four hours, so they had already come a significant way from the mainland.