I wondered what a Tajikistani accent sounded like. This man had a Celtic lilt to his voice. Irish, maybe? Scottish? I roused myself at last and rounded the landing, slowly making my way up the flight of stairs, one leaden foot in front of the other. By the time I emerged at the top, I could see Teresita with a man who quite accurately fit the description of “tall, dark, and handsome.” Only maybe not so handsome as more…imposing.
“If you need a hand, I’m just one floor above you in three-F. Give me a shout any time, and I’ll be happy to— Sainted Mary, Veronica, what happened to you?”
By the time she finished speaking, Teresita had caught sight of me. She stared in openmouthed disbelief. The man with her cast a quick glance my way and edged behind her, clearly intending on using my arrival as the distraction he needed to get away from what was obviously an unwelcome welcome wagon.
“Oh, you know.” I lifted a wan hand, noticed it was the one with a bit of my shirt wrapped around the bite, and lowered it to lift the other one. Unfortunately, that had the vomit hoodie. “Just out and about.”
Her expression of disbelief deepened into horror as her gaze shifted over to the bundle. “What in the name of all the little scarabs in Egypt is that?”
“It’s a vomit hoodie.”
“A what?”
“A vomit hoodie. A hoodie that has vomit on it.”
“It’s…bloody.”
“And blood. A hoodie with vomit and blood. I was…er…not feeling good. Food poisoning.”
“What?” The look she gave me told me clearly she didn’t believe a word.
“The kind that makes you bleed.”
She cocked an eyebrow at my arm.
“From your wrist. It’s a rare food poisoning, thankfully. And speaking of that, I need to use up approximately half of the town’s water supply in the longest shower ever taken, so I’ll talk to you later.”
“What on earth— Oh, Ian! You must meet your other upstairs neighbor. She’s right over your apartment, so if her yoga gets to be too noisy, you’ll know who to complain to. This is Veronica James.”
The man named Ian had almost made his escape, but froze in the act of hurrying down the hall and paused to give me a murmured hello and polite bob of the head.
I lifted the vomit hoodie in a friendly, if exhausted, wave. “You have to forgive Ronnie,” Teresita continued, her gaze roaming over me as if she couldn’t believe what she was seeing. “She’s not normally covered in dirt and blood.” She sniffed delicately, her nose wrinkling in reaction. “Nor does she usually smell like…What is that smell?” The ashy black smoke that Helen’s body had dissolved into was quite pungent, faint whiffs of it clinging to my disgusting hoodie. “Er…”
“Were you at a bonfire?”
“No. Another time—”
“What is that horrible stench?”
Ian, who had turned away in preparation for making a second stab at freedom, froze for a moment and shot me a questioning look. His nostrils flared a little, as if he was trying to catch the scent.
I backed up to the bottom of the next flight of stairs.
“Damn, girl, what have you been up to?”
“I’ll tell you later,” I said tiredly, and gave Tajikistan Ian a weak smile. “Sorry to meet and dash, but I really have to…” I lifted my vomit hoodie again, too tired to continue speaking.
“Take the longest shower ever taken, yes, I heard,” he said, and with a curt nod to the still-distracted Teresita, he finally made his escape into his apartment.
I looked at Teresita, thought about how insane any explanation I could make would sound, and turned to the stairs, trudging my slow, painful way up each step. Teresita wasn’t my closest friend for nothing, and she took advantage of that status by pelting me with questions all the way up the stairs, following me into my apartment, even going so far as to crowd into the bathroom when I staggered in and began to unwind the bit of shirt from my wrist. “I don’t understand what happened to you. Where did you get food poisoning? Why are you so filthy? Your OCD freaks out at even the tiniest bit of dirt, and you never have so much as a hair out of place, and now you look like a bag lady who’s lived out of a trash bin for the last six months.”
“The term ‘bag lady’ is politically incorrect and demeaning to transient peoples,” I said with dignity, wincing when the impromptu bandage revealed the bite on my wrist to the air.
“I will apologize to any transients I meet, but until then, what happened to you? Is that a bite mark? What bit you?”
“My sister Helen.”
She gawked at me, then opened her mouth to ask me what would probably be about a hundred questions.
“No,” I told her, shaking my head. “Not now. I’m too tired and my wrist hurts—here’s a pro tip: do not put hand sanitizer on a bite unless you want to feel like your flesh is made up of molten lava—and I need to burn my hoodie, and possibly shower with a bottle of bleach, then brush my teeth and mouth with mouthwash at least six times. Go home, please. I’ll talk to you later.”
“But—”
“Please,” I said, and willed her to just this once do as I asked.
To my amazement, she did. “All right, but bang on the wall if you need me. And put some ointment on that bite. You don’t want to get rabies or whatever weird thing you get when people bite you…”
I sagged with relief when the door closed behind her, and spent the next twenty minutes sighing over and over while I stood under the hottest water I could bear, scrubbing my hair three times, my body four times, and my wrist—painful as it was—a record twelve times.
By the time I was dry, dressed, and had applied antiseptic ointment to my wrist, I was more than ready to crawl into bed and pretend the evening had never happened, but alas, Teresita had other ideas.
“Dan said I should check on you to make sure you didn’t hit your head on the toilet while vomiting up your guts,” she said, letting herself into my apartment with the spare key I’d given her for emergencies. “He’s so thoughtful, isn’t he?”
I lifted my head to look at her from where I’d poured myself onto the couch. “Normally, yes, but I haven’t vomited anymore, so my head is safe from toilet dangers. And I’m really tired.”
She lifted a bottle. “I brought wine.”
“All right, but don’t grill me. I’ve been through a hell of an evening and don’t want to go over it again. Is that a zinfandel? You know how I feel about them.”
“Gewürztraminer,” she said, fetching two glasses from my minuscule kitchen. She sat next to me on the couch, extricated the cork, and poured out two generous glasses of a fruity wine. “Now, spill, girlfriend.”
I glared at her over the rim of the wineglass, took a sip, and closed my eyes for a moment while the warmth of the wine made its way down into my stomach. “I just got done telling you that I didn’t want to talk about it.”
“I know.” She waved a dismissive hand and took a big sip of wine. “But that was just for show. Mmm, this is a good one. Let’s start with your sister. I take it this is the sister you said you hadn’t seen in, like, forever?”
It took me until I’d finished the first glass of wine before I decided that what the hell, I might as well tell her, because there was no way she’d accept any cover story I could manufacture. Teresita was as persistent as a terrier when it came to people. That triggered a thought, and before I could vet it for appropriateness, it was out into the open. “Why were you hitting on that poor new guy? I thought Dan was the be-all and end-all of your life.”
She looked surprised. “He is, and I wasn’t hitting on Ian.”
“It sure looked like you were.” I changed my voice to mimic her sexy purr. “Ian Iskandar. What an interesting name.”
She smacked me on the foot, which was resting on her legs. “Silly! I was checking him out for you.”
“Uh-huh.” I drank a little more wine, relishing the heat it gave to my insides. For some reason, despite the warmth of the early summer days, and
the heat of the long shower I’d just taken, I felt chilled, as if there was a nugget of ice inside me that was radiating cold to my limbs. “Sure you were.”
“I was!” She sat upright and pushed my feet off her legs. “You know I’ve done everything I can to find you a man.”
“Yes, and I’ve asked you more than once to please stop matchmaking for me. I’ll find a man when I find a man.”
“That sentence made no sense.”
“It’s the wine talking. But seriously, I am fine. I don’t need a man to complete my life or some such bullshit.”
She looked like she wanted to have that old, familiar argument about why I should trust her judgment in matching me up since she’d found husbands for two of her sisters, but let that go for the more tempting morsel. “Why did your sister bite you?”
I sighed and held out my glass for more wine. “I’ll tell you what happened, but I want your solemn promise now that you are not going to run straight to Dan and tell him I’m bonkers, because, trust me, this is going to sound like I am. But I’m not.”
“Oooh,” she said, settling back against the couch. “Give it all to me.”
I did, and by the time I was finished, she was speechless for a good three minutes. She sat considering everything I’d told her, her hands idly rotating the now-empty bottle of wine as if she was seeking understanding in its depths. Finally, she looked up. “Okay. So how are we going to find this woman?”
I shook my head at her and managed a little laugh. “You can’t possibly tell me you’re going to accept the whole ridiculous story without even one protestation.”
“Sure I am. You don’t lie, so I know you’re not pulling a fast one on me. You wouldn’t bite your own wrist, and even if you did, you couldn’t get your mouth at that angle,” she said, nodding toward my wrist. “But most of all, you’d never willingly mess yourself up and be as filthy and disheveled as you were a half hour ago. Therefore, it must be true. Do you feel any different?”
“How so?” I asked.
“Like…” She shrugged and set the empty bottle on the coffee table. “Like a superhero.”
“I’m not a superhero, despite being the possessor of an invisible sword.”
“I dunno. Your sister vanished in a puff of smoke, and her last words were ‘I’ll be back.’ That sounds awfully superhero to me.”
“She was not the Terminator, and she said that dragon hunters come back.” I paused and considered her words. “I just wish I knew when. And how. Will I recognize her? Will she be a new person but with the same mind? Or will she have a new mind, one that doesn’t know me?”
“I don’t know the answer to any of that.” Teresita tipped her head to the side to consider me. “You don’t look any different now that you’re cleaned up. Although I think…yeah, I think there is something different.”
“What?” I asked, suddenly panicking. I didn’t feel like I had changed at all, other than being tired and cold. “Do I have scales? Spiky wings? No, wait, Helen said dragons don’t have wings. They look like normal people, evidently. How do I look different?”
“It’s your eyes. There’s just more there,” she said slowly, her gaze moving over my face. “There are little flecks of silver light that show every now and again.”
“My eyes are gray,” I said, relaxing back into the couch.
“But they didn’t silver-light-sparkle at me before, so I’m calling this a new effect. Can you…you know…do anything?”
I stared at her in dumbfounded surprise. “Like what?”
She spread her hands in a gesture of ignorance. “I don’t know! You’re the expert on dragons.”
“I’m hardly that.”
“Well, you are one now, so you’d better figure some of it out.” She looked me over nose to toes. “What are dragon people supposed to do?”
“The only thing that Helen mentioned was that her dad could breathe fire when he was mad. And before you ask, no, I don’t think I can do that.”
“Oh.” She slumped back, clearly unimpressed at my transformation. To be honest, I was as well. I just didn’t feel any different. Although there was the fact that my anxiety wasn’t pinging nearly as much as was usual, and normally, just the idea of the vomit hoodie being in the same building as me would make my mental animal go nuts.
If it helped calm the animal, maybe being part dragon wasn’t going to be so bad after all. I sighed. “There are so many questions, and I don’t know the answer to any of them.”
“Like who is the lady you’re supposed to find? Did your sister tell you her name?”
“No, just that she was coming here and needed help, and something about her renting a house because this was a safe town.” I rubbed my arms, my flesh goose bumpy. “The biggest thing I want to know is who punched that hole through Helen. She said it didn’t matter, but seriously, she was dying and not in her right mind. Of course it matters who did that to her. Was it a demon? Another dragon? Something I don’t know about, because evidently, there’s a whole world out there that I had no idea existed?”
“I always suspected there was a lot more going on than we knew about,” Teresita said darkly.
“That’s just common paranoia.”
“Possibly. I think we need to do some research on dragons and demons and the ghouls your late sister mentioned.”
I lifted a wan hand. “I should, but I can’t even summon up the energy to crawl into bed.”
“That’s why you have me here to help you. I can do oodles of research while the kids are at day camp,” she said, patting my leg before getting to her feet. She wobbled a little, then giggled. “Shouldn’t have had that last glass, maybe. Go to sleep, chica. I’m your trusty sidekick, and I say we’ll brainstorm finding your lady in the morning, and who killed your sister, and how we can send him to kingdom come for that act.”
“Maybe we shouldn’t,” I said, pulling a soft blanket around me. “It might be dangerous. I wouldn’t want you getting hurt. Dan and the kids would never forgive me.”
“Pfft,” she said at the door, waving one hand in an expansive gesture. “What could be dangerous about a superhero half-blooded dragon woman and her fabulous Latina bestie saving people?”
Despite feeling she was dead wrong, I couldn’t make my brain work enough to pull together an objection, and so dragged myself off to bed shivering and idly wondering if it was possible to simultaneously have a fever and be ice cold.
A buzzing woke me just as I drifted off to sleep, and it took me a few minutes before I realized that it was Helen’s cell phone ringing, not mine. I propped myself up on an elbow and looked at the phone. The number showed, but there was no name attached to it. I answered it, regardless, desperate for some answers to the questions Helen had left behind her. “Hello?”
“I don’t know who you are, or why the half-breed trusted you with her phone, but don’t get too comfortable,” a man’s voice said into my ear. I shivered, almost able to feel his breath on my cheek. “Your life isn’t worth a brass farthing.”
“Alexander?” I asked, the word coming out a whisper filled with horror.
He laughed, his voice chilling me even more than I already was. “If you want to live, forget whatever she told you.”
“She said you were dangerous,” my mouth said before my addled brain could approve the words.
“And she was right. Learn from her mistakes. I may not know who you are, or where you live, or what you love, but I will find out all three, and when I do, I will destroy you just as easily as I destroyed her. Save yourself and flee before that happens.”
Bile rose in my throat so swiftly, I barely had time to fling the phone away before I bolted for the bathroom. As I clung to the toilet and retched up the wine I’d drunk, the sound of Alexander’s mocking laughter followed.
What on earth had I gotten into? And how was I going to fulfill my promise to Helen and not end up like her? I flushed away the rejected wine, reached for antibacterial wipes, and after making sure the
seat was suitably sanitized, rested my arm on it, staring into the water.
How was I going to get out of this in one piece?
Chapter Four
“OKAY, THIS IS THE LAST OF IT: TWO GUINEA PIGS, A litter of newborn hamsters, and a massive amount of kitty litter. Where do you want the— Oh, sorry, didn’t know you were on the phone.”
Ian shot an annoyed look at the woman who appeared at the bathroom door, awkwardly trying to hold the towel around his waist while at the same time listening to the voice pelting him with questions.
“I have a little job for you,” the voice purred into his ear.
Ian gestured with his elbow for Sasha to leave the bathroom, but she just grinned and leaned against the door looking interested. He turned his back and said, “Let me guess: you want more of your rival’s demons destroyed.”
“Always, darling, and don’t pretend you don’t enjoy it.”
Ian made a face to his reflection. “I’m a dragon hunter. Killing demons is my reason for being.”
“Is that the boss?” Sasha whispered loudly. He sent her a warning look over his shoulder, but she just perched herself on the counter and watched him with bright eyes.
“And that is so exactly why I was thrilled when you joined me,” Anzo said with sickening sweetness. “You want to kill demons. I want Asmodeus’s legions thinned…It’s a win-win situation. But this time, I have something a little different in mind.”
Ian’s stomach tightened. “I assume it’s something heinous.”
“No, of course not, darling.” The voice on the phone grew silky smooth, but with an edge that felt like a razor blade against his flesh. “I’m told by one of my minions who actually reports to me from the mortal world—unlike you—that there’s a courier I might use. I want you to find her for me.”
Ian swore to himself. He had a bad feeling he knew who Anzo was talking about.
“I can’t be everywhere to hear everything. And evidently you don’t need me to spy if you have demons running around gathering intel.”
“Darling,” Anzo said in a drawl that made him sick to his stomach. “You are my most trusted servant. Well, one of them. Of course I need you to be everything, so you had best step up your game, lest I summon you to my side, hmm?”