That was unexpected.
Cai apologized to the line all the way up. “Sorry. We were standing in line and had reached the roof, but royal audience. No one tells Llywelyn no when he wants to talk to you. Thank you, sorry. Arawn has an appointment somewhere, I’m sure. Dentist. Or proctologist. Something very important. Can’t be helped. So sorry. Don’t mean to inconvenience you. Sorry about that. Arawn! Dude! Are you okay?”
As they ran onto the roof, Arawn’s body unfurled into an enormous, black dragon, and he leaped into the air and flew away.
Cai yelled after him, “Dammit, Arawn! You always leave just when things are getting interesting!”
Well, Cai was on the roof, and everyone was glaring at him anyway.
Wyvern? Are you ready?
His dragon stretched and looked out of his eyes. I’m always ready.
Two Months
After the Dragon Scepter Ceremony
~~~
Ember, Hacking
ANONYMOUS
Ember Niamh
I have video of you.
K
I will release video of you.
Whatever.
No. I mean I have bad video of you.
Yeah. I know. Got it.
We can come to deal.
And then I will not release video.
Idngaf go ahead and post the video wherever.
It is bad video.
Bad pictures.
Everyone will see.
We can come to deal.
Not too much money.
Very bad pictures.
Are they as bad as this one?
A picture of a man appeared on the phone screen.
Behind him, a blue dresser stood against a sunny wall.
The man’s black hair was a dark splotch against the white ceiling.
How you get that?
How you get picture of me now?
ANSWER RIGHT NOW
Never pretend to hack a hacker, dorkfish.
Reporting and blocking you.
Ember Niamh performed a complex maneuver with her fingers, summoning a compounded silicon-earth/electric-fire elemental back out of her phone and sending it into small vial. “Thank you, Elsi.”
A lone, golden spark drifted up from the neck of the tiny vial.
“You doing okay in there?” she asked.
One more fiery mote escaped the bottle, ending in a tiny firework.
Ember waved her fingers over the bottle. Vibrant sparks sprinkled over the glass.
The bottle quivered, giggling.
Ember stoppered the bottle and smiled.
That blackmailer wouldn’t be so quick to try his dirty tricks again, and she’d make sure his account got zucc’d, too. That would stop him from trying to con anyone else.
Ladies of Magic, bad video of her. That was laughable.
Ember had never done anything that anyone could blackmail her for.
She should change that.
Roped
CAI glanced at the screen of his ringing phone as he stomped through the dark backstage area at a rock concert.
Walls hovered off the ground and sailed through the air, narrowly missing Cai.
Okay, technically, they were flats, scrims, and stage pieces, but when one is flying at your head, it’s a flying wall and you duck.
The band wouldn’t take the stage for an hour, but the audience was filing into the arena out front. The muttering and whooping thickened the air.
His phone buzzed and chimed in his hand again.
He stepped over an enormous lighting fixture lying on the floor like a dead fish and thumbed his phone. “Math? What the hell do you want?”
“I need you to go to Las Vegas—”
“It’s all taken care of!” A blast of red light blinded him, and he raised his hand to block the stage light shooting a beam straight at him. “I’ve got shows booking into the Dragon’s Den Casino’s arena for the gala opening in a month. I’m tracking down some huge acts for the first week. I don’t need to be in Vegas to do my job!”
“I need someone there in person,” Math said.
“I’m better on the road!” he yelled over the clattering and clanking of technicians moving equipment and speakers. The tech truck had arrived two hours late, and they were still raising the light battens with less than an hour until curtain. “When I meet with these artists in person, I can schmooze them. If I have to sit in Las Vegas on a damned phone, I won’t get half the acts that we need for the gala opening month!”
“You’re the Entertainment VP—”
“Yes, Dragon Obvious.”
“—and there’s a problem with one of the entertainment venues.”
“Oh, ye Dragon Gods! The arena? Is it not completed on time? I have acts booked in there during gala-opening week!”
Math said, “No, the fountain.”
“The fountain isn’t my jurisdiction.” Cai covered his phone and asked a passing stage technician, “What’s the estimate on curtain time?”
The tiny blonde, who appeared moderately pregnant, shrugged. “It’ll be done when it’s done. Don’t rush us unless you want the pyro effects to burn this place to the ground, though that would be fun.”
He waved her off just in time to hear Math say, “It is now.”
“What’s now?”
“The fountain. It’s yours,” Math told him.
“It’s my, what?”
“It’s your problem. Magical animals fall under the entertainment department’s purview.”
Cai shook his head and hopped over a metal thing on the floor. “It’s a fountain. It’s just water.”
“There are sea serpents in it.”
“How the hell did you get sea serpents in it?” Cai asked.
“They’re actually apparitions, but they are apparitions of sea serpents.”
“Well, shoo them away or something.”
“They’re twenty feet tall, and they don’t want to go.”
“Pack them up in a truck and ship them to Sea World.”
“The professor of magico-veterinary studies assured us that, if they view the fountain as their touchstone and they probably do, they’ll just disapparate and reapparate right back in there.”
“Oh, gods. Sea serpents?”
“Leviathan-class sea serpents, for all intents and purposes.”
“How many guests have they eaten?”
“None, so far. Which is why I need you there.”
“I am not a sea serpent vaquero!”
“We’re hiring a witch to do the feeding and vitamins and stuff, but they’re a little frisky.”
“Frisky? Like they’ll try to molest the witch?”
“Nope. They’ll try to kill her and eat her, and I need someone with a large, aggressive alpha dragon there to make sure they don’t.”
“We know hundreds of dragons. Get someone else to stand guard over your witchy serpent-feeder. Can’t Arawn do it?”
“Arawn did it for a month, and he needs to go on his honeymoon now.”
“What? Arawn has fallen?”
“Yep, it happened yesterday, as I heard. I think he’s planning to call you later to give you all the sordid details.”
Cai rubbed sweat off the side of his face. “After you succumbed to mating fever, I didn’t think Arawn would be infected so soon.”
“It’s not an infection,” Math chuckled. “You do know how it happens, don’t you?”
“Yes, I know how it happens, you jackass. I’m not an idiot.”
Math was still chortling. “Well, don’t knock it until you’ve tried it, but I absolutely need you down there to alpha-dragon those sea serpents into submission so they won’t eat the witch. While you’re down there, you can personally oversee the final preparations for the casino’s grand opening in a month. It’s win-win.”
Cai grumbled, “Fine. As long as the mating-fever bug isn’t in the water. I absolutely, positively will never fall victim to mating fever.”
Ina
ppropriate
CAI Wyvern trotted down the hallway of the Dragon’s Den Casino, squinting at his cell phone and swiping his thumbs across the screen to answer the texts that were coming through one after another. Texts and direct messages from four different social media platforms pinged his phone, jumping over each other as he answered them, dozens of them, within minutes.
Just a typical Tuesday afternoon.
Texts from celebrity talent who wanted to perform at one of Dragons Den, Inc.’s many venues, their lawyers and agents who wanted their cut or were trying to convince Cai to book them in different theaters, and venue managers who were complaining that all of the above were calling them, trying to get them to influence Cai’s decisions about who would perform what, where.
White walls rushed by him as he walked, stretching his long legs and trying to get there faster.
Everything needed to be faster. Cai was booked in meetings straight through until ten o’clock that night with no breaks for meals or even to take a piss. Maybe he could bribe an admin to slip him some protein bars to munch during the meeting with Rhee-Rhee at three.
Cai had a meeting scheduled in five minutes with one of the biggest rock bands in the world, Shifter Valentine, trying to convince them to play the DDC arena during the gala-opening week. They didn’t want to play the gala-opening week. They said they weren’t a Las Vegas band, they were an arena-touring band, but Cai needed to convince them to play the damn DDC arena for the gala opening because the casino needed to open big-big-huge, and the meeting with them was eight floors up and started in four minutes, now. Dammit.
The lead singer was a phoenix shifter, so maybe Cai could call on some mythical-shifter loyalty to convince him.
He held his arm straight out and barreled through the door to the Human Resources Division as he scrolled down on his phone, looking back through his messages. “Smedley! The new sea serpent wrangler is supposed to be here. Arawn told me that if those sea monsters don’t get fed every morning, they start picking pedestrians off the street. Are they here yet?”
The HR manager, Smedley O’Tentacle, a rare and unusual squid shifter, raised his lugubrious gaze to Cai. “I am currently in the hiring process, Mr. Wyvern. Again, I must protest these irregular hiring practices. We are a publicly traded company. We have equal opportunity guidelines and outreach programs for under-represented minorities. We should not just hire any witch off the street at the recommendation of previous employees who are no longer employed by Dragons Den, Inc. I must protest.”
“Yeah, yeah. Your request is noted. When are they getting here?”
Smedley sighed and turned back to his computer screen. “She’s right here. I’m typing her information into our system.”
“Oh, thank the Dragon Lords.” Cai began to turn while he texted Marti D back that she was going to perform in the much larger arena that seated thirty thousand during opening-week-plus-two, not the small and intimate Dragon’s Lair Bar, because they didn’t want a stampede and riot in the casino. Riots were bad for business. He was not going to allow goddamn riots on his watch.
Without looking up from his screen, he said, “There’s been a delivery of three hundred pounds of halibut on ice. When do you think you could—”
Cai glanced up from his phone.
A woman sat in the chair, holding her phone out to the side while she looked up at him from under her eyelashes. Her dark hair curled in luxurious, sumptuous spirals around her pointed face, and her eyes were deep pools of darkness that Cai fell into and kept falling.
The blue tube lights above the woman’s head showered her with glowing light, and the room was so bright that he blinked tears from his eyes.
Cai Wyvern landed on his knees.
His phone tumbled to the floor from his numb hand.
He was nearly eye-level with her bare thighs where her skirt had drifted up as she sat.
She smiled at him.
He reached out one shaking hand. “Hi.”
“Hello,” she said, her voice like a symphony in his heart.
She shook his hand.
A shiver of magic surged through Cai, a pulse of pure sex and instinctive covetousness that made him want to carry this woman off and dump her in his hoard. “—I’m Cai Wyvern,” he gasped.
She tilted her head. “You okay?”
“Never better.” He looked at his legs and realized he was standing on his knees and was still on the floor. “Uh, trick knee. I blew it out playing soccer for my college team.”
Cai had not played soccer in college.
He staggered to his feet. “And you are?”
“Ember Niamh,” she said, her voice swelling to a crescendo as she named herself. She pronounced her last name as Neeve, but as Cai’s family was originally from Wales, he could spell that Irish name easily.
“Hello, Ember Niamh. Let’s get out of here.”
Her nose wrinkled delicately between her eyebrows. “I beg your pardon?”
“Lunch!” Cai shouted and then realized that he needed to tone it down a lot. “Let’s eat lunch. The union mandates that you get a lunch break.”
Behind him, Smedley O’Tentacle sputtered, “Mr. Wyvern! This is highly irregular!”
Cai spun, his fist clenched and ready to deck the guy. “This is none of your business.”
O’Tentacle’s wide-set eyes bulged from his face, his pupils elongating and becoming bars. “Your eyes! By all the Mighty Many-Armed Ones, your eyes!” He was so disturbed that ink droplets sprayed over the papers on his desk. “Mr. Wyvern! I will not be responsible for this! This is highly inappropriate! Your eyes!”
Cai snatched his phone from the floor and hustled Ember Niamh out of the Human Resources office, telling her, “It’s customary when a new employee comes on board to take them on a tour of the casino and then to lunch.”
Ember turned to him, her eyes sparkling as she laughed and swung a huge purse from her shoulder. “Goddesses, I thought I would never get out of that HR office. All that paperwork was driving me nuts. Thanks!”
“A tour of the casino,” Cai said, plastering a wide grin on his face. “Let’s start downstairs in the ballrooms and casino and work our way up. The revolving restaurant on the roof isn’t open to the public for lunch yet, so we can have some privacy to talk over the, uh,” Cai’s brain was not braining, and he had the dumb, “job. Your job. Job.”
“Don’t you have somewhere to be?” she asked him.
Cai sighed, “I don’t remember.”
Ember Niamh smiled at him, and she had a lovely smile that reached her dark eyes and seemed to bloom in her kind and beautiful heart. “I’d like some lunch.”
“Yeah,” Cai said, his whole world falling apart and reforming around this vision who went by the name of Ember Niamh. “Lunch sounds great.”
The Sexual Harassment Philosophy
CAI led Ember through the casino, blathering on about public spaces, audience capacities, and proposed shows as if someone who was outside the industry would give a rat’s patoot about that sort of thing. He was trying not to name-drop and failing spectacularly.
The fact that she kept asking him questions made it worse.
Whenever she asked something simple that he normally would dodge for privacy concerns from anyone else, he sighed and made big goo-goo eyes as he told her, “Yes, Jim Mythic is playing at the DD arena on June twelfth, and he’s a great guy. I’ve worked with him on two other shows. Great guy. I can get you front row tickets or backstage passes if you want. There’s an after-party, too, that I can get you into. Then you could meet Jim Mythic. Would you like to meet Jim Mythic? He’s a great guy.”
Not that Cai wanted Ember to meet Jim Mythic or any other great guys.
Cai wanted to hide this luscious little witch away somewhere so that no other great guys could meet her or talk to her or even see her.
Maybe his ducal estate in New Wales, the dragon settlement just north of Los Angeles. It had a high, spiked fence.
No, the o
ther dragons might see her and want her for their own.
Because truly, Ember was shiny as gold and as glittery as rubies.
He tried to play it cool as he showed her the silent and dark casino, the clean and quiet commercial kitchens, and the unoccupied ballroom, where empty vases stood in the centers of bare tables.
“It’s nice,” she said, smiling like she was a little confused. “Isn’t the job to take care of some sea serpents?”
“Oh, yes,” Cai said. “The position mostly involves feeding them some fish that have been filled with vitamin potions and perhaps—” he thought quickly, “—assisting me in some of the entertainment areas.
“And we’re looking at the ballroom and keno rooms and casino because—?”
“Because all new hires get a tour of the establishment,” Cai said, “and lunch.”
She grinned at him, and it was the cutest little grin that Cai had seen in ages. Dragon ages. She shifted the strap of her enormous purse higher on her shoulder and asked, “Lunch, too?”
He nodded. “Lunch, too.”
Deep-fried Dragon Lords with biscuits and gravy, he sounded stupid.
She seemed to be struggling with that enormous, soft bag that seemed to be a purse because it kept slipping off her shoulder.
He stuck out a hand. “Would you like me to carry that?”
“Oh, no. They’re some witchcraft supplies, and they can be very particular about who carries them.”
“All right.” He tried again as he raised his arm to gesture at the entire, cavernous space, “The ballroom will seat up to five hundred guests, depending on the layout, so it’s suitable for weddings, bar mitzvahs, charity events, or other celebrations.”
Dragons and Fire Page 3
