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

by Lauren Esker

  "You must understand that my telling you this is a great show of trust. It's one of the only true weapons I have against Angel."

  "Which I appreciate greatly, don't get me wrong, but how out of it am I going to be, exactly? Giggling and seeing pink elephants, that kind of thing?" She wished now that she'd paid more attention to the part of the Dragon's Tears files involving the drug's effects.

  "It won't be too bad. You'll see." Lucia crooked a finger at her. "Come have some more coffee while you're waiting. No need to wander the halls while intoxicated. And it'll keep Angel in suspense a while longer about the success of his ploy."

  Jen followed her back to the living room, trying to catalog all her body's sensations as carefully as possible. She didn't feel too weird so far—a little lightheaded, with a slight ringing in her ears.

  She'd experimented with drugs in college, but nothing beyond the usual: a little pot, mushrooms one time. She hadn't tended to get as stoned as the people around her, just as it was harder for her to get drunk, or to feel much effect from caffeine; she seemed to burn them out of her system quickly. Shifter healing, gecko metabolism, or maybe just some twist of individual biology seemed to make her slightly drug-resistant for whatever reason.

  So maybe she wouldn't get too high off Dragon's Tears. She tried not to think about the "addictive" part. Maybe it wasn't addictive enough to have withdrawals from just one dose.

  Lucia refreshed their coffee and went to a window seat. The view through the smoked glass was smeared with rain. If she'd been out there just a few minutes longer, Jen thought, she'd have been caught in a cloudburst that would almost certainly have washed her off, into the ocean far below.

  And if not for this woman, you'd have been a smear on the ocean already, so let's not play what-ifs, shall we?

  "Thank you," Jen said. Her voice sounded unusually crisp. She'd expected the drug to have a deadening effect, but instead it seemed that everything was magnified. The coffee's sweetness startled her; the brush of her clothing on her skin was strangely pleasant. She curled her toes into the plush carpet, reveling in the sensation.

  "It's in my best interests as well."

  "Not to be shot in the back. Yeah, I'd want that too."

  Lucia didn't answer, but her gaze was evasive, going out to the clouds on the horizon rather than focusing on Jen. And something in that expression—the evasiveness combined with her stiff-lipped pride—made Jen think of other cases she'd dealt with before. Lucia's behavior wasn't textbook abuse victim, but Jen recognized the determination to present a front of normalcy, and the unwillingness to acknowledge that it was built on a shaky house of cards, made up of yesterday's mistakes, that could collapse at a careless word.

  Damn it, Lucky was right after all. She'd come up here expecting to find Lucia cool, collected, and in charge. And she'd been right about some of that.

  But Lucky wasn't wrong, either. Lucia was a calm and collected prisoner in a jeweled cage.

  "We can help you leave, you know," she burst out.

  "Sorry?"

  "Leave. Go out the window or whatever. C'mon, even if you can't make wings—can you make wings?"

  "I can."

  "Of course you can. Wow, that must be awesome, to fly. So free. I wonder if I can get Lucky to take me flying ...?" She trailed off. She had been saying something important. Right. "—but the point is, you can leave. Angel can't keep you here. Even if he locks you in, you can fly away." She leaned forward. "I can help. We can help, Lucky and I. If Angel tries to come after you and get you back, we'll help you hide. He's not omniscient. We'll protect you."

  Lucia shook her head slowly. "And leave everything behind? Start over?"

  Now it was Jen's turn to be confused. "Don't you want to leave?"

  "Why would I?" Lucia's gaze slid across the sumptuous gold-and-red furnishings. "Look at this place. Why would I want to leave it?"

  "From what Lucky says, the three-hundred-dollar coffee is new. Your childhood was more of a Maxwell House kind of life. So you built all of this from scratch. You could do it again. Isn't your freedom enough?"

  Lucia wrapped her hands around her coffee cup, inhaling without drinking. "No, Miss Cho. It's not enough. Some people grow up in trailer parks and are content to live that way forever. I don't understand them. I always wanted to have nice things and beautiful clothes, and have people call me ma'am instead of looking down on me like I was the dirt beneath their shoes. Even when I was a very small girl, I wanted that."

  "Huh. Lucky told me Angel abducted you."

  "Poor Ambrose. I imagine it's useful for him to think so. That way he can blame Angel and convince himself I didn't want to go." Her expression was wistful and a little sad, for all that she was gently glowing around the edges. "In all honesty, there is probably some truth to it. I was only a child. What we want, and what other people want for us, is uncertain at that age."

  Jen looked up from wiggling her fingers to watch the golden trails stream behind them. "Uh, just to get this straight, your cousin promised you pretty dresses, so you abandoned the brother who raised you and took off with a sociopath."

  "Such defensiveness for my brother. I don't know whether it's admirable or annoying. Tell me, Miss Cho—or Jennifer; may I call you that?"

  "Sure," Jen said, distracted. "No, wait. Call me Jen. Or Cho. Is the ceiling moving or is it me?"

  "We're on a ship, so yes, the ceiling is moving." Lucia relieved Jen of her coffee cup, which was in danger of falling off the arm of the chair. "Jen, you didn't grow up poor, did you?"

  "What, me? Uh, no. I guess." She'd grown up solidly middle-class, in a suburban house to parents who were a university professor and a real estate agent.

  "Then you can't understand, not unless you've been there," Lucia said. "Angel didn't promise me pretty dresses—or, at least, not just that. He also promised me that I'd never be cold and afraid, that I'd never have to shoplift to survive, that I'd never have people sneer at me and judge me for my clothes or my accent. He promised me that I'd be safe."

  "Are you? Safe from the world, maybe, but what about safe from Angel?"

  Lucia smiled tightly and put aside her untouched coffee. "Be careful. You're so sharp you might cut yourself."

  "Am I wrong, though? Tell me I'm wrong."

  "You're not wrong, but what you fail to understand is that it's my choice too. I don't need saving."

  Jen reached for her coffee cup; her hand closed on empty air. Outside the window, the rain fell golden, streaking the windows with shimmering light.

  "And if you could get out without losing everything? If we could find a way to defeat Angel somehow?"

  Lucia gave an indelicate snort of derisive laughter. "Is your memory really so short? Don't you remember climbing to my penthouse in the rain to shoot me, without having the slightest idea you were doing it? You think you can help me against that?"

  "I think Angel is as vulnerable to a bullet in the brain as anyone." The words came spilling out, and Jen cringed inwardly. Is this what I've come to? Arguing for vigilante justice?

  But she'd had a firsthand demonstration of what Angel could do. It might not be possible to arrest him or to safely keep him prisoner. We could keep him drugged all the time and dose anyone who has to go near him with Dragon's Tears. But if we're going to keep him in a drugged stupor, is that really better than just killing him?

  "If you think you can kill him, you're welcome to try," Lucia said. "Others have tried before."

  Right. Mind wandering. Need to plan. Jen tried to pull her scattered thoughts together.

  "Lucia, how does it work? Angel's mind-control thing, I mean. Is it pheromones, or subliminal suggestions, or what? Can a person block it somehow? If we tie him up and gag him, will it still work?"

  "It's outright telepathy, as far as I know. Walls don't stop it, and neither would gagging him. He doesn't have to speak."

  "Shit," Jen muttered. "How long is his range?"

  "I don't know exactly, but I've ne
ver seen him do it any farther than about thirty or forty feet away. About as far away as you can hear a person speak. It's not directly based on his voice, but a lot of the same principles apply. He can also do it over a phone, as long as the person on the other end is paying attention."

  "How does that work?"

  "I don't know!" Lucia said. "It's mental, that's all I know. He has to concentrate. Directly controlling more than one person at a time is hard for him. It's like juggling, where the more balls you put in the air, the harder it is not to drop one. Something simple, like making people in a room not notice him, he can do without breaking a sweat. Taking full control of someone and manipulating everything they do, or rearranging someone's memories ... that's harder. Breaking his concentration also breaks his control—Are you still listening?"

  "What? Oh, yes." Jen was, she definitely was, but she'd also been tracing patterns on the arm of the chair, because it was a very interesting chair. So vivid and red. She scrolled back through her recent memories. "Concentration, control, yeah. So help me think of a way. He's not invulnerable, and between the two of us—well, three counting Lucky—"

  Lucia held up a hand, stopping her. "Just a moment, please."

  A soft pinging noise invaded Jen's consciousness. It was hard to keep track of more than one thought at once. She leaned back in the chair, too comfortable to move, and watched Lucia rise from her chair and walk to an intercom on the wall, trailed by soft gold streamers.

  "Yes?" Lucia said.

  "Ma'am, we have a situation."

  The suppressed note of panic in the voice on the other end of the radio managed to penetrate Jen's state of drugged lassitude. She sat up, listening.

  "Explain," Lucia said tightly.

  "It's not—I can't—Ma'am, we need you downstairs. Now."

  Chapter Fourteen

  With Angel's threat hanging over them, the card players were all playing with excruciating caution. The room was quiet but for the whisper of cards and the click of poker chips. An occasional murmured conversation would break out at one of the tables, only to fall silent when Angel glanced that way.

  Out of the corner of his eye, Lucky watched his cousin leaning against the bar, sipping a drink and observing the game.

  He could already see where this was going.

  Angel was going to get bored. And when he got bored, the room would turn into a bloodbath.

  The motion of the ship added an extra dose of discomfort to an already miserable situation. They were definitely going through rough seas now. As if trying to figure a way out of this wasn't bad enough already, now he had to do it while getting increasingly seasick.

  Great.

  "Listen, all of you," Lucky murmured. "You too," he added to the dealer, who cut her eyes his way without pausing her deft manipulation of the cards. "He doesn't intend any of us to leave this room. If we work together, we have a shot at getting out."

  The sunglasses-wearing Russian gangster snarled, "How? You saw what he can do."

  "What did we see?" the woman with the flowered silk hijab asked quietly. "I don't know what I saw. What I saw was ... impossible."

  "It's real," Lucky said. "Real and possible. He controls people with his mind. But here's the good news: it takes a lot of concentration, and he can't do more than a few people at a time."

  "How do you know?" the African shifter asked, her dark eyes fixed on him.

  Onyeka was the name Angel had called her by. She knew what he was, he reminded himself ... or thought she did, anyway. "I've run into him in the past. His abilities don't affect me. But they will affect you. All of you," he added, with a pointed look at Onyeka. Jumping to the conclusion that her shifter nature made her immune would probably get her killed.

  "Having a nice chat over there?" Angel inquired, looking toward their table.

  There was an instant, guilty hush all over the room, and particularly at Lucky's table, where everyone froze in the act of whatever they were doing. This time he didn't think Angel was doing it. They were simply scared out of their wits.

  As Angel had pointed out, these people were hardened members of the criminal underworld. And he'd scared the shit out of them by doing something they couldn't understand. They were powerful people, used to being feared and obeyed. But now they were up against something none of them knew how to fight.

  "We're playing cards," Marius said sharply, drawing Angel's attention in his direction instead. "Isn't that what you wanted us to do?"

  He knows I'm up to something. He's keeping Angel's attention off me. Lucky's jaw clenched, but Angel didn't seem inclined to immediately kill anyone at Marius's table, although he looked faintly annoyed.

  "I'm Lucado," Lucky murmured, pushing a random handful of chips into the middle of the table. He was no longer paying much attention to the game. "What are your names? Onyeka, right?"

  Onyeka nodded. She shoved some of her chips into the pile without glancing at her cards.

  "Hansi," said the woman with the headscarf, adding a few of her own.

  "Tolya," the Russian said, with visible reluctance.

  "You can call me The Dragon." This from the gray-haired man.

  Lucky hoped he didn't mean it literally; the last thing they needed in this room was another dragon. There was no feeling of "shifter" about him at all, though, not even to the extent that Marius had it.

  "Feng," said the man with the scarred face.

  The only person who hadn't spoken was the dealer. Everyone was now looking at her. She swallowed and dropped her gaze to the cards. "Selene," she said, so softly it was barely audible. "Is it true that he can't ... do that ... to you?"

  "No, he can't."

  "Is there any way to stop him from doing it to us?" Onyeka asked, sharp interest burning in her eyes.

  "No," Lucky admitted. "But if you see him doing it to someone else, you can break his control by breaking his concentration."

  "By turning him on yourself instead," The Dragon said.

  "If we let him divide us, we're all going to die," Lucky retorted. He managed to keep it quiet, but only just.

  "Except you," Tolya said.

  "Including me! You think I'm not as vulnerable to a bullet to the head as the rest of you? It doesn't matter who's holding the gun."

  Silence. He could see them mulling it over. Selene remembered she was supposed to be dealing and flipped the next card up. No one was paying attention anyway.

  "Look," Lucky said, absently adding some more chips to the stack. "I know it's risky. I know we may not all make it out. But you get how he works, right? If we all rushed him right now, not that I'm saying to do it, he couldn't stop us all. If we distract him every time he tries to control someone, he can't maintain control."

  "Distract how?" Hansi asked. She folded, tossing her cards into the middle of the table without looking at them.

  "Any way you can. Throw something at his head, flip over a table, shoot out the lights. I assume you all have weapons, house rules or not."

  After a pause, during which Feng and The Dragon both tossed in their cards, Hansi's hand flicked under the table. A small ceramic knife slid into her palm.

  Onyeka pulled on a pair of gloves and flexed her hands. Tiny, glistening spines slid out of the knuckles, like artificial claws.

  From subtle movements of The Dragon's arms, he appeared to be readying some form of concealed sleeve weapon. Tolya reached down to his boot, picked open a tiny flap at the top, and slid out a thin ceramic blade nearly eight inches long.

  "Even if you make it out of this room, where do you expect to go?" Selene murmured, gathering in the cards. Lucky wasn't even sure who'd won the hand; he wondered if she knew either. "You're on a ship in the middle of the Pacific. A ship he controls."

  A ship full of potential hostages. And Jen. Lucky tried not to think about that. One thing at a time. "He can't control everyone on the ship at once, remember? And his range is limited. Forty or fifty feet at most."

  "You won't make it," Selene said
softly, dealing the new hand even though the blind bets hadn't been put in yet.

  "We," Lucky corrected her. "We're all in this together. Have you ever seen him do anything like this before?"

  She shook her head. "Not ... not exactly like this, no. But I haven't worked for him for very long."

  "Has anyone you know been with him for long, or are they all new hires?" It made an Angel-ish kind of sense. If you had money to burn, why bother keeping your employees around past the point when they figured out what kind of monster they were working for?

  "We're all pretty new. Except Duval. I know he's been here a while."

  Lucky glanced around the room until he located Duval at the bar. Duval, who looked just as petrified as everyone else, and seemed to be staying as far away from Angel as he could get. Not comforting ... but also hopeful, if getting the redcaps on their side would help.

  "Do you have a plan?" Tolya asked, sliding the knife up his sleeve. "Rush him, rush the door ...?"

  They were all looking at him now. Expecting him to save them. Well, he'd brought it on himself. Lucky let out a slow breath.

  "When I tell you—" he began, and then a commotion erupted at Marius's table.

  "No!" The person yelling was an American from his accent, with East Asian features, a dark leather jacket, and a look of horror on his face. Lurching to his feet, he pushed himself away from the table. "I had a good hand, you fucking cheaters—"

  The cards and scattered chips on the table told the tale. He'd gone bust. No one at the table made any move to rake in their chips; everyone was looking at him with expressions of frozen pity.

  "About damn time," Angel said. He set his drink carefully on the bar; the movement of the ship was growing rougher. "I was thinking I might need to give someone a push to get this show on the road. Which of you wants to do the honors?"

  The American stumbled backward, his face a rictus of horror.

  Marius stood up, the fingers of his right hand curled and the arm held out at a slight angle from his body; he, too, had a weapon up his sleeve. "How long do you think you can keep this going on?" he demanded, his voice carrying. "As soon as we refuse to play, your game ends."