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

by Lauren Esker

  "You want to drug everyone on the ship?"

  "I was thinking the water supply," Jen said.

  Lucia stared at her, then shook her horned head. "You won't find anything useful there. Come on."

  "Where's Lucky?" Jen asked, following as fast as she could while hanging onto the wall. Lucia's four-legged shape, with her long claws, was much better suited to walking under the circumstances.

  "Downstairs, dealing with the engine situation. As it happens, I had a similar thought to yours, although my primary intent is to deliver the drug to anyone in key positions on the ship."

  "It has to be everyone, or there's no point."

  "Yes, I get that." Lucia's voice came from somewhere ahead.

  Jen found her in the suite-sized closet. She was human-shaped again, a small flashlight clenched in her teeth, hauling armfuls of silk dresses off their hooks and flinging them aside. Behind them, gold-patterned wallpaper glinted in the flashlight's beam. Lucia ripped it down, tearing with abnormally elongated fingernails, and strip by strip a large wall safe emerged. Jen peered over her shoulder as she opened it.

  The jumbled plastic cases inside, each one filled with small vials of the drug, would have all fit in a medium-sized suitcase. Between them, Jen could only guess they held an unthinkable fortune in the form of the world's rarest drug.

  "Bring me something to carry them in," Lucia ordered.

  The floor was a scattered mess of shoes, purses, hats, and other accessories. Jen picked up two of the biggest handbags she could find, one encrusted with diamonds and the other made of stamped leather, and held them one at a time while Lucia swiped the contents of the safe into them.

  "Does it need to be ingested, or can it be absorbed through the skin?"

  "Skin works slowly. Swallowing it is more of a sure thing." Lucia snapped the diamond handbag shut, and handed the leather one to Jen. "Your water idea isn't bad, but complimentary drinks are probably the way to go. When this is gone, it's gone."

  "I'll take Deck A. I have friends down there."

  "You can have it. You can have the passenger decks too. My biggest concern right now is getting the engines online and making sure key personnel are proof against Angel's manipulations."

  "Fair enough," Jen said. "Know a fast way down to Deck A?"

  "I'll show you a shortcut."

  ***

  The door at the end of the corridor admitted Lucky to a room with banks of dark screens and unlit control panels. The metallic smell of blood hit him hard. In the dim emergency lighting, the blood sprayed on the floor and on the consoles looked black as motor oil.

  Angel hadn't bothered with finesse. There was no point in checking for pulses. The three men and two women in the room were very dead.

  Lucky tried to push down the guilt. Angel must have come straight here from the atrium. Even if they'd spent less time arguing on the stairs, even if they'd moved faster, they probably couldn't have beaten him here.

  The consoles were as incomprehensible to him as the controls of a jet liner. He didn't want to start pushing buttons without knowing what he was doing. Lucia needed to send someone with technician skills down to help, but if she did it with Angel still at large, they'd just be sending more people into the lion's mouth and losing more of the talent that was needed to get the ship through the storm.

  Carefully he stepped around the bodies to a window looking out onto a catwalk and, beyond it, the engines themselves. There seemed to be two main engine arrays, each consisting of a row of smaller units—although "smaller" was relative; each individual unit in the array was as big as a bus. Massive exhaust manifolds and fuel lines snaked over and around them.

  A door to his left, between the window and a bank of instrument panels, was labeled DANGER: EMPLOYEES ONLY, and in smaller letters HARDHAT AREA. Lucky started to push it open, waited out a roll of the ship that nearly slammed it on him, and stepped onto the catwalk.

  The air was close, and heavy with the diesel-and-hot-metal smell of the engines. It wasn't quiet; with the ship rolling around this violently, things banged and clattered—small unsecured items rolling free, loose elements rattling against each other. The engine room was full of shadows.

  "Angel," Lucky called.

  The smell of diesel seemed strong. Too strong. His already queasy stomach did a slow pitch and roll. He'd expect a place like this, with brand new, recently installed engines, would have all its volatile fuels neatly contained.

  How much diesel did a ship this size carry? Diesel wasn't as explosive as gasoline, but it would burn. Enough to make a fire visible for miles, even in a storm.

  "Angel!"

  He shifted, without really meaning to, going into his default dragon shape. He wasn't adapted for any specific function, just a basic dragon, with the long low body and sneaking-around build that was his favorite. He dug his claws into the catwalk to keep from slithering over the edge.

  Something clattered abruptly, quite near. "Ah, cousin," Angel's voice said. "We can't ever seem to get along, can we?"

  Lucky timed his leap so he was going with the movement of the ship instead of against it, and sprang to the top of the nearest bank of engine units. "Only because you're an asshole."

  Angel looked up from the far end of the engine array. He was systematically tearing components out of the backs of the engines with his claws. Liquid glistened on the floor. It looked like water, but Lucky knew from the petrochemical stink that it wasn't.

  Lucky scrambled along the top of the engine array toward him. Angel retreated into the darkness beyond the engines.

  "What do you want from me?" Lucky demanded. "All this death, all this destruction—what's the point?"

  "Aren't you the one who likes games?" Angel's voice came from the shadows, his glittering eyes the only visible part of him. Something clanked in the dark as the ship tilted. "Or do you only like them if you're winning? Game over, cousin. You've lost."

  "There are thousands of people on this ship, including my girlfriend and my sister, and you don't give a damn, do you?"

  "Why should I?"

  All this time, even knowing what he knew about Angel, Lucky had been thinking of his cousin as bigger, stronger, smarter, better. But that was only a holdover from childhood, a smaller child's hero worship for a larger one. Now he saw what he was really up against: not a mastermind, but a petty bully with powers that turned him into a tyrant.

  "If you want to go, just go! The water won't hurt you and neither will the storm. Swim away, Angel. Let us be."

  Laughter, low and deep from an inhuman throat. "Why would I do that?"

  Lucky raised the ruff around the base of his skull in an involuntary threat display. "Because I'll kill you before I'll let you kill anyone else on this ship."

  "You. Will kill me."

  In the darkness, light popped and sparked.

  "Have fun," Angel said, and he erupted out of the glimmering dark, going for Lucky's throat.

  Lucky flung up his claws in defense. Angel's attack knocked him flat, and then his cousin was over him and away, springing to the catwalk with a flare of briefly transient wings, and shrinking small enough to fit through the door without losing his dragon shape.

  Lucky raised a shaking paw to touch his throat. It felt bruised, but Angel's attack had glanced off his scales, where it could have torn his head off. He smelled diesel on his claws.

  The thing Angel had been messing with toppled out of the darkness with the next roll of the deck. It was a big marine battery, shorted with a wrench wired across the poles. It hit the diesel pooling on the floor, and Lucky thought to throw probability its way an instant too late, as a blue flash of fire rolled across the floor and flames shot toward the ceiling.

  ***

  Lucia's "shortcut" put Jen in a maze of unfamiliar, dimly lit hallways on Deck A. It took her a few minutes to locate the shopping arcade, and when she did, she found herself in an eerie, apocalyptic wasteland. Books, DVD, candy, and clothes were strewn haphazardly in t
he cold glow of a single emergency light over the main exit. There wasn't a person in sight.

  A fresh lurch of the deck sent her to her knees, and all along the arcade items crashed and shattered as the ship tilted. The mess was from the storm, she realized, not from Angel massacring everyone. Still, they'd fled without bothering to stop and secure anything. As any sensible person would, she supposed, when confronted by a rampaging dragon.

  The SCB was going to have its hands full with PR damage control on this one.

  Fortunately that wasn't her job. All she had to do was stay alive that long.

  "Nguyet!" she shouted, stumbling into the boutique and clutching at anything handy to keep herself from being knocked over by the ever-steeper pitching of the deck. It wasn't quite as bad down here as in the penthouse, but it was getting there.

  There was no one around, but the door at the back opened readily. She staggered into a hallway filled with panicked employees and voices raised in fear, speaking half a dozen languages.

  "I'm looking for Nguyet!" she shouted. "Does anyone know her?"

  "Which one?" someone else demanded.

  "Jen?" said a familiar voice. Nguyet pushed through the crowd and fell against her, the pitching deck pushing the two women into an involuntary and yet somehow sincere half-hug.

  "Career change?" Nguyet asked, gripping the red sleeve of Jen's jacket.

  "Long story. Right now, the important thing is to get everyone into their rooms so they aren't hurt with the ship tossing around." Jen patted the bag and leaned close. "I've got something here to help everyone with seasickness. Can you help me?"

  She hated lying to Nguyet, especially when the point was to give them all a drug that might have some pretty unpleasant side effects; she still wasn't sure exactly how addictive it was, or what it was going to feel like when she crashed. Being turned into a homicidal dragon's puppets would be worse, though.

  With Nguyet's help, and a few of Nguyet's friends, they got everyone rounded up and herded into their rooms. Most of them were young people, college kids and the like, completely out of their depth; some of them were crying with fear. It made Jen feel a little less guilty about handing out small cups of orange juice doctored with the drug. They'd have a pleasant, mellow drug trip for a couple of hours and, hopefully, would sleep it off and wake up to a brand new day, free of rampaging dragons and storms. Heck, from what Jen understood of the drug's side effects, if any of them were suffering from colds or other ailments, they might wake up healthier. It probably would help with seasickness too, come to think of it.

  "Do you know anything?" Nguyet asked, helping her fill covered cups from boxes of juice. "About the ship, or any of it. I've been hearing so many weird rumors."

  "The engines are down. That's all I know. They're trying to get them restarted," she added, half-lying. It was probably true by now. Hopefully.

  "Tranh said he saw a dinosaur in the elevator lobby, attacking people. I asked him if he was smoking something, and he said, all right, it could have been an elephant, maybe. An elephant! Can you believe someone brought an elephant on a cruise ship? One-percenters, right?"

  "They're not like the rest of us," Jen said absently. She held out one of the cups. "Here, you should have some too."

  Nguyet shook her head and pushed it away. "No, thanks. I'm doing all right. I'd rather have my head clear."

  "You really should. It's not going to drug you much," she lied shamelessly. "It's just some kind of Dramamine-like thing."

  "No, I don't even like taking painkillers. Besides, are you sure they gave you the right stuff? The last time I saw my roommate, she was staring at the wall and kept talking about pretty colors. In fact, you're kind of weird too."

  "Weird?" Jen said, desperately trying to put her face in a neutral expression but unable to figure out what one was supposed to look like.

  "Yeah, like you've had about twelve cups of coffee."

  Oh thank God, was that all. "No, that's just my normal—"

  The door to the employee galley slammed open and a flashlight beam stabbed them. "You two need to be in your rooms," the person on the other side of the light ordered. "It's not safe to be out right now."

  "Marius?" Jen squinted past the light. "Get that thing out of my eyes."

  Marius lowered the flashlight. "Jen?"

  "Wow, shit," Nguyet said when she got a look at him.

  Jen couldn't help staring too. "Good God, don't you look like five miles of bad road." He was in a T-shirt, with a jacket thrown around his shoulders that didn't manage to hide the bulky bandage around his shoulder. Bruises stood out lividly on his throat, and his normally tidy hair flopped in his eyes.

  "It's been a day," he said wryly. "Thanks in part to your boyfriend. Have you seen him?"

  "Nguyet," Jen said, "could you take the rest of these to the laundry staff, please? We need to hurry up; the sicker people get, the less effective the remedy will be, right?"

  "I guess so, yeah." She edged around Marius, giving him plenty of space even after he moved aside politely to let her pass, and made her staggering, side-to-side way down the hall. Marius stumbled in and fell onto one of the benches, gripping the edge of the table to keep from sliding off.

  "So what really happened to you?" Jen asked.

  "What do you think? I fought a dragon. Sort of. And if that's something to help with seasickness you've got there," Marius said hopefully, "I wouldn't mind. I don't normally have trouble with it, but I'm not normally on a ship in a storm, either—"

  "No, it's doctored with Dragon's Tears. I just didn't want to tell her that, for obvious reasons." Jen handed him the cup she'd been trying to fob off on Nguyet. "And you need to drink this."

  "Wait, there's Dragon's Tears in here? You're kidding, right?"

  "I'm dead serious. This stuff stops Angel from being able to control people. I know it works because I had a chance to test it." She shivered; she'd been trying not to think about that. In the atrium, she had been able to feel Angel trying to wedge himself into the cracks in her mind, a strange invasive skittering. It felt like someone touching her kidneys. He must have done that to her before, at the meeting she couldn't remember. But this time, he hadn't been able to get a grip.

  Marius stared at the cup nervously. "What else is it going to do?"

  "Probably heal you up a bit, if the rumors about it are true."

  He shuddered, and knocked back the orange juice in a few quick swallows.

  "And you're going to be high," Jen added helpfully.

  Marius made a face. "Thanks a lot for waiting to mention that part 'til after I drank it."

  "It's a street drug, what did you expect? For what it's worth, I'm not that high. Actually, I might ought to take another dose, because things are a lot less floaty than they were earlier."

  "That sounds like a terrible idea."

  "I can't tell anymore! That's the biggest problem I'm having, really. I can't tell which of my ideas are just usual Jen Cho-caliber unwise, and actually, like, 'I am on a drug trip and should not be doing this' bad."

  Marius laughed.

  "What?" Jen demanded.

  "Nothing. Just ... you. Me. All of this." He chuckled and pressed his knuckles against his forehead, then looked up at her, still smiling. "Until this cruise, I'd never come face to face with any of your, uh ... your people. You're not at all what I expected."

  Jen grinned back. "And look at you now. Fighting dragons."

  "Pretty sure that's actually what I'm supposed to be doing. The questionable part is where I'm teaming up with dragons. Speaking of ... do you know if Lucky's all right? The last time I saw him, his cousin was trying to take him apart."

  "He got out of that. He's in the engine room now, dealing with Angel down there." She'd been doing a good job of not thinking about it. Now all her worry came rushing back.

  "Hey." Marius nudged her. "He can do it. He's got that luck thing on his side, doesn't he? Let's see about getting that cure of yours upstairs. Roxy can probably
help too."

  He started to stand up, but sat abruptly back down, nearly missing the bench.

  "You're feeling it now, right?"

  "I cannot believe," Marius said, heartfelt, "that the only way to thwart Angel is for all of us to—to—"

  "Get stoned off our asses? Yeah, agreed." She hauled him to his feet, and then steadied herself on him when the deck didn't quite tilt the expected way. Their feet skidded on the wet floor.

  ... wait, wet?

  "Marius," she said, hanging onto him and staring at the glossy half-inch or so of water sloshing back and forth across the floor, carrying empty juice cartons and other bits of trash with it. "Where is that coming from?"

  ***

  Lucky scrambled for a fire extinguisher. The engine room's fire suppression system kicked in automatically an instant later with a hiss, and a sharp chemical smell seared his sinuses and the back of his tongue. He leaped to the catwalk and retreated into the control room, the fire extinguisher still clutched in his claws.

  The gas flooding the engine room seemed to be doing its job, the fire retreating like a film run in reverse. Lucky held his breath and darted sinuously back into the engine room to hit errant flames with the fire extinguisher. He had no idea how long the suppressant gas would hold out, but he could guess that if the fire wasn't completely out once the gas stopped coming, it would flare back up again and they'd be thoroughly screwed.

  He wobbled back into the control room for another breath of uncontaminated air and found Lucia in the doorway, dragon-shaped. A purse dangled incongruously from a strap around her sinuous neck.

  "You weren't answering the radio," she snapped, and then the bodies on the floor caught her attention.

  "I was a little busy. Angel's a real nice guy, isn't he?" He was angry, suddenly—no, furious. All this time he'd been worried about her, all this time he'd hoped to find her, and she'd been ... what? Living a life of luxury with his homicidal cousin? "I hope you've had fun running your drug empire with that bastard," he snapped, throwing down the fire extinguisher; it rolled across the tilting floor. "If he hurts Jen, I just might kill you too."