'Til Dragons Do Us Part (Never Deal with Dragons) (11 page)

I’d hated calculus ever since. And from then on, I’d made a point to take “the itchies” seriously.

Telling myself that getting a quick bird’s-eye view of the city would be better than sitting around worrying about something out of my control, I waddled out to the center of the yard and pushed off, careful to use my legs more than usual to compensate for my half-healed wings.

The feel of nothing but air under my claws was always calming. Ignoring the slight pull of still-sore muscles around my wings, I gained altitude until I hovered about thirty or so feet above the tallest trees. I wasn’t surprised to see that the neighborhood was quiet at this hour of the evening. It occurred to me that even without the balcony, Jeanie had once again done a fantastic job of finding the perfect home for their family. Abandoned tricycles, T-ball stands and playground equipment made it clear that the surrounding houses were filled with playmates for Emma. The thought made me smile.

Deciding that taking a slow and leisurely journey would do me more good than a panicked flitter through the air, I took an easy left turn and headed toward the downtown police station. From what Simon had told me, the local police were so friendly with Relobu they might as well be in his pocket, so I figured it was as good a place as any to start my search for my friends. The odds that Cameron and his staff had uncovered Simon’s real identity but hadn’t objected to me posing right under the dragon lord’s snout were slim but that didn’t mean it was impossible.

After visiting the police station, which was reassuringly quiet and Simon free, I didn’t have any other ideas on where to look. I’d flown over Jeanie’s parents’ house, hoping that Simon had simply forgotten to tell me they’d headed over for a visit. But it was ten at night, and all the lights were off. Jeanie’s parents weren’t in on my secret, so showing up on their doorstep was out of the question.

An hour later, my muscles were telling me it was time for a rest. After making a sweep to ensure there were no cattle in residence—farmers in these parts had been known to fight back against dragons attempting to poach on their land—I found an open expanse of acreage and glided toward the ground. I hit the dirt with both feet, and groaned when I realized my left foot had found evidence that even if there weren’t cows on the property right now, they hadn’t been gone long.

And they’d definitely been here long enough to give me something to remember them by. Cursing under my breath as I crow-hopped my way toward the bank of a small creek, I prayed there was at least a little running water to wash with. While I did enjoy the freedom of having my own place, the bad part about living alone was that I was the person who had to clean my floors when I inadvertently tracked in excrement after a night flight.

And I really wasn’t in the mood for a midnight mopping session.

Simon gave me perpetual grief about the weird physiology that allowed me to see perfectly well while flying through a night sky, but a horrible near-sightedness when on the ground. When in dragon form, my eyes lost some of their range of motion, due to the relocation of my orbital sockets from the front of my skull —great views of the sides of my body, but a loss of vision of things directly before or below me. I could see the ground at my feet, but it was more of a corner-of-the-eye glance than a real view.

Unfortunately for my filthy claw, it was late summer in Tulsa, and the city hadn’t seen rain for quite some time. The creek was so small it was almost non-existent. There was no way my massive arches, not to mention my dragon-sized ankles, were going to fit into the tiny trickle of water. And, as usual, my T-Rex arms were useless.

I was going to have to morph. Again.

I scoped out a decent spot on the bank where the grass was somewhat short, and hunkered down in preparation. I closed my eyes and had just started to feel the burn along my fore-claws and another space on my back when my heart simply stopped in my chest. A voice. Right behind me.

“You know, it doesn’t hurt as much if you pick a single body part at a time.”

Chapter Eleven

My girlish shriek came out in a dragon’s roar of surprise. Without even thinking about it, I took a swing in the direction of the voice, my human fingers looking ridiculously stupid wiggling out from a scale-covered dragon wrist. The stranger smoothly avoided my strike, his calm reassurance telling me more than anything that he’d been watching me for a while. And that he wasn’t afraid of dragons. Even dragons with grubby pink fingers for claws.

And human knees. There was never any rhyme or reason to the parts of my body that changed first, and I cursed the fact that this time my right thigh had been affected. As my massive dragon-sized muscles tried to gain support from my much weaker human bones and joints, I’d been forced to sink the rest of the way to the ground until the weight of my upper body was more in proportion with the legs that had to carry it.

So there I was, lame and weaponless without my claws. And probably flightless as well. Though my wings were still on my body, they were still weak from my tussle with Oyen’s guard, and I wasn’t sure I’d be able to get off the ground without a good heave-ho from the vicinity of my thighs. One of which was useless due to the whole knee thing.

The man hadn’t made any attempt to come closer, and I, unwilling to take another swing at the guy for having done nothing more than startle me, hopped awkwardly backwards to get a better view. Dark eyes, dark hair and a face I’d seen in newspapers for months. Recognition hit me like a sledgehammer to the chest.

“Trian Chobardan.”

He nodded, but didn’t step forward to shake my hand. Instead he simply smiled, his eyes full of a gleeful humor as he spoke to me in perfect dragonspeak. “I hope you believe me when I say that I am truly delighted to meet you.”

“I ah...” I didn’t know what to say, and the words came out in a dragonish rumble. I’d never run into a dragon morph celebrity in the middle of a deserted field before. Speaking of which...

“What are you doing here?” The question came out ruder than I’d intended, but I was totally freaked out. I was only a half-inch away from reconsidering that attack. I must have made some sort of movement in his direction, or Trian just happened to be the observant sort, because he slowly raised his hands, leaving them stretched out in front of him in a placating gesture.

“Calm down. It wasn’t my intention to startle you.”

Had Relobu discovered our plan and sent his assassin to take care of me? My mind was spinning with possibilities, each one a little crazier than the last. But I couldn’t help but find it odd that I’d managed to stumble across the man who was whispered to be Relobu’s number one enforcer, on top of his other duties.

“Where are Simon and Jeanie? So help me, if you’ve harmed a single hair on little Emma’s head, I’ll kill you.” The burn in my fingers was back, signaling that this time if I took a swipe at Trian’s head, it would be a dragon claw splitting his skin open and not a harmless human fingernail.

His soothing expression gone, Trian never took his eyes from mine as he smoothly transformed one of his own arms into a scaled weapon.

“I asked you to calm down. I don’t know these people you’re talking about, but I can guarantee that I’ve done nothing to harm them. So why don’t you tell me why you’re out here on DRACIM land?”

“DRACIM?” The unexpected pronouncement had me looking around, as if the empty pasture would suddenly sprout a sign announcing DRACIM’s ownership. “This belongs to Dragon Relations?” I’d seen the DRACIM offices as I flew over, their ranch-style buildings eerily similar to old world military camps, each structure separated from the next by a neatly manicured lawn. I’d identified one of the larger buildings as their feeding pens, based off the intermittent sounds—not to mention the smells—of cattle and pigs emanating from the darkened interior.

But I’d deliberately avoided their property, unwilling to draw attention to myself. And now it appeared I’d done exactly the opposite.

In answer to my question, Trian nodded. “It’s their grazing land. This section is mostly used as an overflow area when they order large amounts of stock and the main pasture can’t support everyone.”

Well that would explain the lack of cattle. Still not completely convinced this wasn’t some elaborate scheme to see me in chains at a Lord Relobu-led execution party, I lowered my front claws, but kept my wings up and ready to get me out of there at a moment’s notice.

Trian caught the movement, and morphed his own claws back into a set of perfectly normal human hands at a speed that was almost too fast for me to follow.

We stood there for several seconds, each of us silently sizing up the other, until Trian shook his head and grinned. “Well this is awkward. I honestly didn’t mean to scare you. I’m just getting back into town, and my fiancée asked if I wouldn’t mind checking the fence on my way through. DRACIM has offered to stable most of the livestock until just before our wedding, when they’ll be moved to Relobu’s. She wanted to make sure the land was ready before she had them delivered. I noticed you here, and was just about to be on my way when I saw you start to morph. It surprised me.”

I’ll bet it did. Considering I’d lived a good ten years not realizing there were others like me, I was comfortable saying that dragon morphs were incredibly rare. Add that to the fact that I’d inadvertently picked DRACIM land to rest on, and I could see how that might draw his attention. The last of my suspicion drained away. I nodded toward his hand. “How did you do that?” He’d shifted faster than I’d dreamed was possible, and managed at the same time to contain the transformation to only his arm. And better still, he hadn’t seemed to be in any pain whatsoever.

He lifted his hand, once again morphing his human fingers into a scaled arm that looked almost cartoonish in size compared to the rest of his body. His claws were as black as his scales—deadly sharp and perfectly formed. No embarrassing reveal of a stray knee or buttocks in sight. It was, in short, amazing.

To have that kind of control would be life changing. There had been so many times on a job that I’d needed desperately to access my human side for the relative dexterity of a five-fingered hand, while at the same time keeping the wings that held me in the air. Or to have the ability to shrink my body small enough to fit in tight spaces, but keep the claws that could cut through glass. And to be able to achieve the transformation in seconds instead of minutes? The possibilities were endless.

“It took me a long time to figure it out,” he admitted. His scales crawled up his arm another couple of inches, until the sleeve of the cotton shirt started to strain. Then, as if it were no more difficult than slipping something into the back pocket of a pair of jeans, Trian forced his scales to soften and wiggle like jelly until they melted into the form of a tattooed dragon on tanned skin.

“One of my trainers—a dragon—suggested that I try concentrating on a single body part as I morphed. I’d laughed, thinking that I’d tried that approach before with no success.”

I huffed out a snort, knowing exactly what he meant. Once or twice, Simon and I had considered the same approach. But I’d close my eyes, focus hard on the claw where my big toe should be, and the burning would start up along my back, nowhere near the foot I’d “willed” to change first. “It just seems to make my toe or finger fall asleep and fire sprout up somewhere else.”

Trian nodded. “That’s what I told him. But he cuffed me on the side of the head and told me to think about a dragon’s physiology. Our claws, our scales, everything on the outside of a dragon is basically dead flesh. Similar to hair and fingernails, unless you get up near the root, it’s all lifeless keratin. He suggested that instead of focusing on an extremity that had no life in it, that perhaps I should attempt to ‘rebuild’ myself from the inside out. Focus on the blood and muscle, and see where that took me. It worked.”

It sounded completely crazy, and I was just about to say so. Until I thought back to those tests with Simon and realized that when I’d tried to focus on a single body part, I’d never once focused on the
inside
of that body part. I was suddenly curious to see whether, like those old brain-teasers, the trick was simply emptying my mind of preconceived notions, and viewing something from a different angle.

I looked at him, and he moved back. Far out of striking distance, just in case something went wrong. “Go ahead. Try it.”

I had an idea. Trian’s appearance and my earlier freak-out had ensured that my knees were once again the proper size and shape of normal dragon haunches, so I cautiously approached the small ribbon of running water in the creek-bed.

Giving Trian one more measuring look, I closed my eyes and did what he had described. I focused on my foot, but instead of just imagining it as a series of toes covered in human skin, I drew from my rather limited memory of my ninth-grade anatomy class and pictured the phalanges, along with the muscles and tendons that held them together. I felt a small tingle where the arch of my foot would have been if I were in human form and stole a peek from behind lowered eyelids. Human toes—still covered in the yuck that I’d stepped in—protruded from the end of my foot while the heel sported the barbed toe of my dragon form.

I lifted my leg for a better look, wiggling my toes to convince myself what I was seeing was real.

“Super creepy. But very very cool.” I inspected the rest of my body, as much as I was able to without a mirror. Nothing seemed to be out of place, the familiar dark scales of my body glinting slightly under the light of the moon.

I looked up to find Trian standing on the other side of the water, now in his full dragon form. “Can I ask your name?” The words came from his throat in a growling rumble of dragonspeak.

I opened my mouth to respond, then paused. While I still held hopes that I could smuggle the Tofegaard from Relobu’s without resorting to morphing, there were no guarantees in this business. And a guy like Trian, no matter how rare his abilities, wouldn’t have been named Relobu’s second in command if he wasn’t up to the job. I had no doubt that if word got out that a dragon found its way into Relobu’s and back out with a priceless painting in tow without anyone noticing, Trian would immediately suspect me of the theft. No, I couldn’t risk sharing my real name.

“It’s fine. I totally understand,” he said before I’d had a chance to come up with a name that didn’t sound blatantly fake. “In the years before the world found out what I could do, I was just another human dragonspeaker, one of the many that dance around Relobu’s mansion on any given day, ready to jump in with their translation skills should Relobu meet with humans. But I can say without a doubt that my job description changed drastically the minute word got out that I was a dragon morph.”

“How so?” Based on the chatter I’d heard from Relobu’s staff, Trian was still an integral part of the dragon lord’s operations, and most talked as if Relobu thought of Trian as his own son. According to Simon, Trian had been Relobu’s chief of security long before the news hit that he was a dragon morph. And as Cameron had referred to Trian as his boss, I had no reason to believe the dragon before me had been removed from his position.

It didn’t seem like his duties had changed at all.

“Before China? My primary job was behind the scenes work. Before, it was much easier for me to slip in and out of crowds, with no one the wiser on who I was, or what I knew. Now, with my faces splashed all over the newspapers, I find I can no longer pass as just another human grunt. It’s made undercover operations an impossibility, and me completely worthless as a bodyguard.” He gave me a wry smile. “In fact, Relobu’s new manager just assigned me a bodyguard of my very own. Now that the world knows there are people like you and me, they’re a lot more careful about where and when they share information.”

“Now you’re the celebrity.” It was the kiss of death in my line of work. If you couldn’t blend, you couldn’t borrow. Or steal.

Trian nodded. “It took everything I’d learned—the camouflage, the shadows, the ability to become the person I needed to be to gain someone’s trust—and tossed it all out the window. I went from being a master spy to a flaming beacon of curiosity. Overnight. It was enough to give me whiplash. I’m still feeling my way through the new landscape, but going public will definitely change your life. There are a lot of good reasons to keep your secret hidden, and I respect that.”

I shifted uncomfortably. I wasn’t sure Trian would consider art theft one of those good reasons.

He flashed his razor-sharp teeth in a smile. “For me, I had one very good reason to open my life up to public scrutiny. And that reason is currently waiting for me at home. But I want you to know that you’re the first dragon morph I’ve met since Hian Puo, and I’d be interested in chatting with you if you ever have the time. You’re not alone out there.”

He waved one of his wings at the expanse of pasture. “I come here a lot, so odds are you’ll be able to find me if you’re in the neighborhood. And you’re always welcome to ask for me at Relobu’s. Or DRACIM.” He leaned in to mock whisper. “Just between you and me, there’s a super-hot girl who runs the show down there.”

With one last nod in my direction, Trian jumped and spread his wings, rising into the air until he was only a black spot against the creamy white of the moon.

I kept my eyes on the sky until he disappeared, then turned with a growly laugh to wash my feet.

* * *

In consideration of Myrna and Trian’s hectic schedules, the wedding rehearsal had been scheduled a weekend in advance of the ceremony and, in light of the security concerns, had also been moved from its previously reserved venue to Lord Relobu’s backyard.

I wondered whether the dragon lord had begun to feel as if he were running a full-time public park with all the people coming and going.

As I’d discovered that night in the field—and learned again the following morning from Amanda—Trian was back in the country, along with Carol’s boyfriend Daniel.

A former newspaper reporter for the
Tulsa Times Chronicle
, Daniel was now happily employed by Lord Relobu, and with Trian’s help, had spent the last few weeks tracking down a group of scientists believed to have helped develop a dragon-killing bio-weapon.