by Willa Hart
Lazlo arched a brow and looked up to Kellum, cocking a thumb toward me. “Doesn’t miss a thing, this one. Careful with her.”
Kellum smirked, but Lazlo looked back down to me and nodded. “You’re right about that.”
“Let’s hear it then,” I said, standing up and crossing my arms.
Lazlo sighed and opened his mouth to speak, but Niles hurried in with a change of clothes for his dragon. Lazlo spoke as he brushed off soot as best he could, then dressed in a pair of khakis and a white button-down.
“Titus did visit me as a courtesy, as I said before. He’s a known jadokari, and they’re required to notify weir leaders of their presence.”
“Jado-what?” I asked.
“Jadokari. That’s what he and his ilk call themselves.”
I snickered. “Sounds like a Vegas act. Are they serious?”
“Deadly, as you can see,” he replied, waving his hand around the room. Of course, that damage had been caused when Kellum shifted, but the air was hazy with smoke and I took his point.
“Their leader was the mage Vazha, who died a couple hundred years ago.”
My gaze bounced between them, not quite following. “What’s a mage?”
“An asshole,” seethed Danic, seeming to grow a tiny bit bigger with his answer.
“Basically, they’re wizards,” Kellum explained more thoroughly. “Some are good, some…not so much. Vazha was the worst of the worst.”
“Okay, let me get this straight,” I said, pacing around the bits and pieces of former furniture that used to decorate Lazlo’s office. “Not only do dragons exist and merrily live among us humans, but now you’re telling me wizards are a thing too? What’s next, rainbow-farting unicorns?”
“Sadly, for my granddaughter’s sake, no,” Lazlo said as he rolled up the sleeves of his shirt. “Unicorns, rainbow-farting or otherwise, don’t actually exist.”
“Fine, I guess if I can buy the existence of dragons, I can accept there are a bunch of wizards running around. Or flying. Or whatever it is they do.”
Kellum chuckled and draped an arm over my shoulders. “After all the powers you’ve been developing lately, are you really that surprised?”
He had me there.
“Anyway,” Lazlo said pointedly, though he gave me a curious look before continuing. “We’d thought the jadokari had disbanded after Vazha’s death, but we’ve heard rumors recently of an upswing in their activity.”
“What do they want?” I asked. “Why attack Drakonis?”
Lazlo’s lips drew into a thin line as he stood and paced the office with a pronounced limp. He didn’t speak for far too long, leaving Kellum, Danic and I exchanging worried looks. Niles remained expressionless by the chair Lazlo had vacated.
“I’m afraid they want to settle a score” —his gaze bounced between us, finally landing on me— “with Maximus.”
That protective part of me kicked into overdrive and I bristled at this news. “Uncle Max? Why? Why would anyone want to kill Uncle Max? He’s harmless!”
Their expressions told me they thought exactly the opposite. Lazlo was the first to speak.
“Probably because he killed Vazha.”
I gaped up at the man, unable to believe what I’d just heard. Max might have been a grumpy old fart, but he was sweet deep down, past his crusty exterior. I couldn’t imagine him swatting a fly, much less murdering someone.
“Maximums killed Vazha in the Great Battle long ago,” Lazlo explained, “and in doing so, he saved dragonkind. Beyond that, he saved my life directly. I lay at the mercy of a jadokari, who was ready to perform the coup de gras, when Max…intervened. As such, I owe him everything, and I would do anything for him.”
This didn’t make any sense. Even so, a memory tickled the back of my brain. Max had told me something about this battle, but the details had been vague enough that I’d thought it was simply a bit of dragon lore, not something he’d actually experienced.
“But you two hate each other,” I said, though it was really a question.
“He hates me,” Lazlo clarified, emotion thickening his voice. “And I can’t really blame him. That’s something I live with every day. Dragon relationships are not simple things. We do not think on the same time scales as you humans do. But we have our ways, and that particular burden is mine to bear.”
The guys had explained their reasoning for leaving Maximus Investigations to go to work for Drakonis, and I’d come to accept them, but it had never dawned on me Lazlo might have felt guilty over how it all had gone down.
“Ms. Fiske, Maximus will always be my casique and my savior. Despite what he may think, I will remain loyal to him until my dying day. I will also be loyal to those who are loyal to him. That means you, Favor.”
I narrowed my eyes at him to show him I wasn’t a total pushover. “Okay, so what was all this nonsense for? Why grill me like that yesterday? Why not plainly answer my questions today?”
“I had to make sure that you were an ally I could trust, because you’re still a relative stranger to me,” he said calmly, and in that moment, I could sense he was being perfectly honest.
A calm settled over me again, knowing Lazlo wasn’t lying. Dammit, just when I’d decided he was a villain, he turned out to be a good guy!
“We’re on the same side, Favor,” he said quietly. “And I, for one, think it’s time we start acting like it.”
I met Danic and Kellum’s eyes, silently weighing my options, then returned my attention to Lazlo. Everything he’d said rang with truth. Every single thing. And as much as I’d wanted to hate him, for Max’s sake, I couldn’t deny his feelings about his casique were true and pure.
“Sounds good to me,” I said with a curt nod, not quite ready to hug the guy. “What’s the next step?”
“Next, we find Maximus,” he said, stepping over to the ruins of his desk and taking out a tablet “Before the jadokari get to him first.”
Chapter Eleven
“Are you sure it’s okay to leave him?” I asked the boys as we drove away from Drakonis Security Systems, craning my neck to look at the top floor, where we’d left Niles to tend to his dragon.
We’d piled into two vehicles and were racing over to Maximus Investigations so we could track down Titus and his gang. Drakonis, along with much of the rest of the building, had been damaged heavily during the fight. By the time we’d left, Niles had already been on the phone with the authorities, reporting a gas leak. That’s when I’d learned that many explosions and fires that were blamed on gas leaks were often caused by dragons.
“Lazlo’s tougher than you think,” Ryen said, twining his fingers with mine across the back seat of Kellum’s SUV. “He’s one of the old guard, from a time when it was considered a point of honor to be a bad ass. But he’s also got a good heart, like we told you.”
“And he can battle with the best of them, as you witnessed,” Danic said from the passenger seat. He glanced at my hand laced with Ryen’s but didn’t react other than to turn back around in his seat. “I sure as hell wouldn’t want to be on the receiving end of his fury. He can keep it bottled up better than me, but you haven’t seen scary until you’ve seen Lazlo pissed. Bet a dollar Titus is hurting right now and will be for a while.”
“He can definitely give as good as he gets,” Kellum said, checking the rearview mirror to make sure Ash and Hale were still behind us. Ash’s bright yellow truck would make it hard to miss.
“Don’t worry, Favor,” Ryen said. “He’s suffered far worse injuries, not that he likes to talk about it.”
“He keeps secrets, like everyone,” Kellum added. “The elders have survived countless battles, and they keep their old scores locked away.”
“I guess that makes sense,” I said with a sigh. “How old is he anyway? Doesn’t look a day over fifty.”
Ryen chuckled. “I’m sure he’d appreciate that. Kellum, what’s Lazlo exact age? Six hundred?”
I gasped loud enough I almost didn’t hear Kell
um’s correction. “Six hundred and thirty-two.”
I’d never be able to accept that dragons lived such impossibly long lives. Uncle Max was over a thousand years old, which seemed…well, impossible.
A wave of emotion broke over me, flooding me with worry. Where was he? More importantly, how was he? Generally speaking, dragons grew stronger with age, but there had to be a point where they went downhill, just like humans. After living on this planet for a millennium, he had to be slowing down. In fact, I’d seen signs of it with my own eyes. Not recently, but when I’d first moved in with him and Aunt Shirley, he’d been suffering from the after-effects of some kind of fight. How many more fights could he possibly win? Wisdom only took you so far with dragons like Titus.
“Favor? You okay?”
Danic was turned in his seat again, watching me carefully, with a touch of concern.
“You mean other than still being in shock over almost getting torched to death? Yeah, I’m dandy.”
Kellum’s eyes locked onto mine through the mirror and Ryen turned to stare at me. They were worried, which warmed my heart, in a perverse kind of way.
“What were you just thinking about?” Ryen asked. “Besides my hotness.”
I poked his side and smiled at them all. “Really, I’m fine. I was thinking about Max, worrying. Naturally. Nothing to be alarmed by.”
“I beg to differ,” Kellum said. “Your feelings are important.”
“Especially because they appear to be contagious,” added Danic, surprising me.
“Really?”
Ryen shrugged. “I can’t speak for the others, but it’s not like I could read your mind. I did get a vague sense of anxiety though.”
I winced. It was bad enough dealing with my own heightened sense of anxiety but passing my negative emotions on to the boys made it worse. Five times worse, to be exact.
At that moment, Danic’s phone binged. “All okay up there?” he read, obviously a text from one of the twins. Hale, hopefully, since Ash was driving.
“I’m sorry, guys. I’ll try harder to keep my emotions in check. Everything that happened today has me on edge, especially since we don’t know where Max is or if he’s okay. Plus, there’s the thing with—”
I stopped short, not ready to admit Zoe had discovered our not-so-little secret. Mostly because I had no idea how to handle it.
“What thing?” Danic asked.
From the corner of my eye, I caught Ryen giving him an almost imperceptible shake of the head to stop him from questioning me further. He knew I wasn’t ready to talk about it, and I loved that. I loved it even more when Danic turned back in his seat without another question.
Traffic was surprisingly light for a weekday afternoon and we made it to the office in record time. The tension in my shoulders melted away on the drive, a minor miracle considering what had happened an hour or two earlier. It constantly surprised me how light and free I felt when the boys were around me, like I was in perfect equilibrium.
The parking lot was pretty full, but Kellum found a big enough spot for his rig at the far end. Ryen leaped out, then turned and lifted me down to the ground like I was a little girl.
“I can get out of a car on my own,” I laughed, not wanting to admit his touch sent bolts of lightning straight to one very sensitive spot between my thighs.
“I’m sure you can,” he replied, wrapping an arm around my waist, while Kellum and Danic took up positions in front of and behind us. “But I like helping you.”
I smiled up into his brown eyes, warmth suffusing my skin. A sudden chill drew goosebumps as every hair on my body stood on end. I stopped dead in my tracks and Danic almost bumped into me.
“Sorry,” he started, then must have sensed the intense feeling of foreboding that had come over me. “What’s wrong?”
By this time, Ash and Hale had caught up to us. “Hey, what’s the hold up?” Hale asked.
They watched me closely as I tried to make sense of my emotions. “S-something’s wrong.”
Kellum bent low and took my face in his hands, tilting it up to meet his gaze. “What’s wrong, Favor?”
I blinked in confusion. “I don’t know.”
“Are we in danger?” Danic asked, his eyes already flashing dragon red as they darted around the parking lot, then to the sky.
I closed my eyes and focused on what was happening inside me. “No, not now. But danger was here recently.”
The blare of a car horn jerked me back to the present and we all turned in unison to find a car stopped a few feet away. The man behind the wheel scowled at us as he pressed on his horn again.
Danic’s body tensed, and I could tell he wanted to go show the guy who was boss. When I laid a hand on his shoulder and he whipped around to look at me, all fire fled his eyes and they returned to their normal, very intoxicating gray.
Ash waved at the guy and we hurried to the sidewalk, every step building the sensation of pain and fear inside me. Something was wrong inside the office, even though everything looked fine from outside. No lights were on inside, but that wasn’t a surprise, though it made it tough to see what the problem might be.
My hands shook as I tried to fit the key into the lock, but it finally slid home and turned freely. Danic pushed ahead of me as Ryen pulled me back, and they went in first, fanning out so the rest of us could enter behind them. As soon as I stepped foot inside, I cried out in alarm.
Pure destruction.
The desks had been smashed to splinters, the cute secondhand mid-century furniture I’d found at a thrift store no longer resembled anything better than kindling. One of our new, push-button phones — which was, of course, older than me — sat embedded in one of the walls. Typewriter keys littered the floor, with the dead hulks of their owners scattered here and there. File folders and papers were strewn everywhere, pulled from the file cabinet and discarded when whatever information the perps had been seeking wasn’t tucked neatly inside. It reminded me of the interior of Drakonis as we’d walked through on our way to our cars, only fewer scorch marks scarred the walls and all of the windows were still intact.
“Oh my god,” I breathed, gasping for air. The wind had been knocked out of me. My home…my home away from home had been brutally violated.
“Titus,” Danic growled.
“Whose blood is that?” Ash pointed to a trail of rusty red leading down the short hallway and stopping at Max’s office door.
A muted groan of pain reached us, and before anyone could stop me, I sprinted for Max’s office. Terror gripped me at the thought of Max lying half-dead — or almost-dead — inside. Yanking open the door, I found a naked man slumped against the far wall. It wasn’t Max, that much I was sure of, but the pulverized state of the man’s face would have made it tough to identify him — if it hadn’t been for his shock of short, dark red hair.
“Rufus!” I cried, rushing to him.
I crouched on the floor next to Max's only other employee and lifted his brutalized face in my hands. His eyes were almost swollen shut, and the purple was already spreading down his cheeks. Blood dribbled from a gash at his hairline and cuts on his cheekbone, and his nose sat at a cockeyed angle.
None of those injuries could have caused the blood trail down the hallway. Rufus was breathing heavy and grasping his side. When he pulled his hands away, I found the source. A river of blood poured out of a gash on his left side. It didn’t look deep, but what the hell did I know?
“Hale, there’s a first aid kit in the bathroom cupboard,” I said, never taking my eyes from Rufus’s broken form.
Within seconds, the kit appeared before my eyes and I rummaged around until I found some sterile gauze pads. As I tended to Rufus’s wounds, the boys crammed inside, leaving barely enough room for me to work.
“What the hell happened, man?” Danic demanded, fire in his eyes again.
Hale reappeared again before Rufus could answer, this time with a big t-shirt and a pair of sweats for the big man. Or maybe it was for my b
enefit, though seeing all the injured and naked dragons at Drakonis had completely hardened me against the sight of nudity. When Ash and Hale moved to help Rufus dress, all I had to do was shake my head and they backed off.
The poor guy had lost a good amount of blood from his large wound, though I doubted it was enough to worry about. Scratches and gouges and cuts covered most of his body, but the gash in his side appeared to be the worst of them.
Only when I was satisfied he wasn’t about to die did I let the twins help him dress, pointing out not to disrupt his bandages. They helped him into Max’s office chair, where he slumped as he snuffled to breathe through his broken nose.
“Titus,” he finally muttered, the sound nasally and muted. He winced when I dabbed a small cut on his forehead with antiseptic.
“How long?” Kellum asked crisply.
“Coupla hours.”
I held back the tears that sprang to my eyes, horrified that one of the sweetest men on the planet — dragon or otherwise — had been lying here suffering for who knew how long.
“I’m sorry, Rufus,” I whimpered, squeezing his shoulder, more for my own support than to comfort him. “I should have been here.”
Kellum stepped forward, his gaze fierce. “No, you should not have been! Favor, you’re a strong, smart, capable woman, but you couldn’t have done anything to help a dragon as strong as Rufus. Nothing. If you’d been here…”
His voice cut off, as if the words would be too painful to utter. I got the point anyway.
“If I’d been here, I probably wouldn’t be here anymore.”
I hated that he was right. I hated being so physically weak, so incapable of protecting those who mattered to me. I hated being such a fragile human girl. I couldn’t transform into some magnificent beast with wings and claws and gnashing teeth. I couldn’t breathe fire. I couldn’t do anything. Not to protect my family, not even to protect myself.
The most I could manage was tending to the wounds of those who got injured on my behalf, so I shut down the pity party inside my head and returned my attention to Rufus. The boys had confirmed none of his wounds were fatal, but it would take him a while to get back into fighting form. Over the years, I’d learned dragons heal much more quickly than humans — because of magic, I guess — but broken noses and deep gashes could take as long as a couple of weeks.
