Moonlight Dragon Collection: Urban Fantasy

by Tricia Owens

  His expression twisted with remorse and anger, directed at himself. "Moody, I should have been here to take that burden from you. This is my fault."

  "Don't be ridiculous. How could it be your fault?"

  "You were forced to take a life. That means I failed to take the action needed to prevent that. At the very least, I should have been the one to do it. It wouldn't be the first time that I have."

  Vale had killed. I took that admission and absorbed it. I couldn't say that I was surprised. Vale had lived a different life than I had. As a gargoyle prince he had enemies, some who had killed his previous girlfriend. I was in no position to judge him. It did, however, make me sad for the both of us.

  "I don't get the luxury of being above it all," I said with a tremulous sigh. "Self-righteousness isn't going to save Las Vegas."

  "Appreciating the value of life isn't being self-righteous," he insisted, staring deep into my eyes. "You were right to want to avoid this. But whatever the situation was, I know you couldn't avoid it. That's what I regret, that your back was against the wall and you had no choice. I always want you to have choices, Moody. When they're taken away from you, you become a slave."

  "I was a slave to Vagasso today, for sure." I still simmered inside. "First he taunted me and then he forced me to take a life, thinking it would break me. But I know why he's doing these things. He's afraid of me. And he has good reason to be."

  "That's my girl. And I mean that in the least condescending and most empowering way possible."

  I slapped his arm.

  He searched my face. "You will always be an amazing woman, Anne Moody. No matter what happens, no matter what you're forced to do to protect this city, I will believe that about you."

  "I'll believe that about myself once I take control of this situation. I hated feeling so helpless today. It won't happen again. I'm going to screw up all his plans for the Rift if it's the last thing I do."

  "I agree. But we have to step carefully. Before we go after the capstone, tell me what the Oddsmakers wanted from you. Did it have something to do with Vagasso showing up here?"

  My smile was bitter as I recalled the morning visit. "Maybe. As I'm sure you won't be surprised to hear, they want me to back off of him. They threatened to grab you or my friends if I don't obey them. They claimed Vagasso can't open the Rift and that the capstone doesn't exist."

  "Then we need to work quickly and quietly to find it before they can catch up to us."

  "You understand that you're probably the first one they'll grab," I warned him. "They'll go further than torturing you. They already believe they've killed your brother with no consequences."

  "The threat of death is no deterrent when we're facing the possibility of demons running loose across this city and eventually the world. If my death is what's required to see you succeed, then I welcome it."

  "Don't say that." I shivered as though icy fingers had stroked across my shoulders. Though I normally wasn't one for superstitions, I did believe in self-fulfilling prophecies. "I don't need your sacrifice and I don't want it. You said it yourself: your duty is to make sure I always have options. You can't do that if you're dead."

  His fathomless gaze, holding centuries' of secrets, was unreadable to me in that moment. "I'll do what I can, Moody."

  Whether he meant giving me options or staying alive, I wasn't sure. And that worried me.

  "We need to find that capstone," I said, desperate to change the subject to something that didn't squeeze my heart so painfully. "We can't wait any longer. Vagasso has nothing else to do but tear open the Rift."

  As if he could tell how badly I needed to get away from Moonlight, Vale didn't argue. He walked back to the sidewalk and called up Christian.

  I didn't want Christian coming along. That just put another person at risk, but Vale had good reason to include his friend so I didn't argue. Christian had lost his father to Vagasso. He wanted revenge, too.

  I rubbed my arms even though I wasn't cold. As Vale put away his phone and curled an arm around my shoulders, I stared down the street, though I didn't really see anything. "It was one of Dr. Morrow's creations," I finally murmured.

  I felt him startle. "Dr. Morrow?"

  I made sure to keep my eyes down the street rather than watch his expression change as I continued. "I'm glad you kept her alive, so don't blame yourself for that. You did the right thing. It was Vagasso who was wrong. He brought her to Moonlight and made her send one of her experiments inside the shop." My mouth was dry as I remembered the scene. I tried to swallow. It felt like I had a sock stuffed down there. "He was a monster, Vale. A mish-mash of everything awful. And I could tell...I could tell he felt that way, too. About himself, I mean. That's why I did it. He wasn't attacking me. He just...existed, because Dr. Morrow and Vagasso forced him to. So I—murdered him."

  I didn't realize I was crying again until Vale came around to face me and gently wiped a tear from my cheek with his thumb.

  "That wasn't murder. That was a kindness I'm sure he was grateful for. You had the strength to grant him what he needed. You saved him."

  "I hope you're right," I said as I wiped my eyes dry. "But I also hope I don't need to be strong like that again. Not that way. I'll fight hard and I'll do it for days. And I don't care if I get hurt. But to win like that...that's not winning."

  "Vagasso will do that again and worse." Vale slid a hand to the back of my neck and rested it there comfortingly. "We're dealing with evil here. We may not emerge from this as the same people we were going in, but that won't mean that we're worse, or tainted. Everything evolves, Moody. Even us. Even the person you had to send to another existence."

  Everything he said made sense and they were things I believed, but I couldn't help feeling trepidation over how much I would evolve by the time this thing was through. Would I still be recognizably Anne Moody? Or would I be some woman with a thousand yard stare who could no longer enjoy rom-coms? Someone who periodically shot upright in bed in the middle of the night and yelled, "I'll kill you, you bastard!"?

  "No matter what, Moody, I'll be rooting for you."

  That made me smile crookedly. "Rooting for me? Does that mean you'll wear a cute little cheerleader's outfit?"

  "If that motivates you, sure."

  I laughed, a real, genuine laugh. It felt good, like I'd expelled a lung full of toxic air. That was what Vagasso was to me: a poison that wanted to seep into my very being. But I could expel him if I kept my head on straight and focused on what I was fighting for.

  "I do hope you prefer me in jeans, though," Vale went on, his eyes twinkling mischievously. "Or maybe nothing at all."

  "Both, actually. You've got a great butt."

  "Yours isn't so bad, either."

  By the time Christian showed up in his Audi, Vale and I were better. The sorrow I'd draped around Moonlight had lifted, allowing the shop to breathe again. But it might only be a temporary reprieve. Vale was right: Vagasso was evil, which meant fresh horrors waited on the horizon.

  Maybe at the end of Las Vegas Boulevard, where we were heading.

  "I've been waiting for your call ever since the sun went down," Christian confessed as he burned rubber down the street, heading for the I-15 South onramp. "I think we should set a trap for Vagasso. We know he's coming for the capstone, so we should grab him."

  "What about the fact that there will be hundreds of non-magickals around?" I asked him from the backseat.

  "Back in Tomes, Orlaton warned us that Vagasso will have to go all in to break the capstone," Christian reminded us. "We won't need to worry about witnesses. The entire city will know about the existence of magick once he gets going."

  It was probably true, but I still didn't like it. The Oddsmakers had done one thing right, which was instilling in us a fear of revealing our community to the non-magickal population. Rivaling the Oddsmakers for the dread factor was the government, which would happily kidnap as many of us as they could get their hands on and begin experimenting on us.
That could be a fate as bad as the Rift opening.

  But setting a trap for Vagasso sounded appealing. Not only would we stop him, we'd be able to add a touch of humiliation. He deserved all the humiliation we could pile on him.

  "Let's check out the area first and see if we can figure out where the capstone might be," I said as we zoomed down the freeway. "The way Orlaton's described the situation, that might be a bigger challenge than capturing Vagasso."

  We drove south all the way to Russell Road, and then swung back around to the Mandalay Bay property. Mandalay Bay was a gorgeous property, sheeted in gold-tinted windows. Oddly enough, it had been built on sand, which meant it had needed to be shored up by pilings buried deep in the earth or risk sinking. That sounded like a lot of extra work to me, and it made me wonder if the Rift extended this far south and the owners of Mandalay had chosen this spot for that reason.

  "Park in the lot, don't use the garage," I instructed Christian. "We might need a quick getaway."

  I didn't say aloud that every structure on the property might collapse if things got hairy. I think we all assumed as much.

  Christian parked near an exit and on foot we crossed the huge lot and entered the casino. I liked the interior of the place and how spacious it felt, but I wasn't there to gamble or to enjoy the ambiance.

  I'd been to the Reef before. Most locals had, just to see if the aquarium could make up for living out in the middle of a desert. It was a decent enough exhibit—my favorite was the jellyfish tank—and there were two acrylic tunnels you could walk through so you could be surrounded by sharks, stingrays, and turtles. The largest living beings were the sharks; dolphins could be found at the Mirage, which was farther north up the Strip.

  When Orlaton had confirmed that the capstone was here, my first thought was that it must be located inside the tank with the sharks. That was the most logical place to hide something you didn't want people touching, right? So once we paid our entrance fee, a sense of urgency pushed me to lead Vale and Christian past the other exhibits to the final and largest one.

  Attached to the second acrylic tunnel was a large room decorated to look like a shipwreck. It featured giant windows overlooking the enormous shark exhibit. I pressed my fingers to the glass, straining to identify everything I saw on the fake coral system that had been built along the bottom and sides of the million-plus gallon tank.

  "We may have a problem," Vale murmured as he joined me at the window.

  I turned to him in alarm, but he was smirking. I followed his gaze to the opening of the see-through tunnel connected to the shipwreck room. Christian stood in the center of the tunnel, blocking the flow of traffic to the gift shop and clearly not caring in the slightest.

  Since I didn't have kids, I had to assume this was what parents felt when they took their young children to Disneyland for the first time. Christian had tilted his strawberry blond head back to watch a sea creature glide overhead. The humongous smile on his face reflected pure delight. He did indeed look like a little kid getting his first look at Mickey Mouse.

  "Surely he's been here before," I said to Vale.

  "He has. I've visited with him three times that I can recall." Vale grinned as he studied his friend. "He has the same reaction every time. It never grows old for him."

  Unexpectedly, I felt a sting in my eyes. Dammit, I hated feeling like a crybaby, but it had struck me like an arrow to the heart that this was what I was fighting for. I wasn't fighting to keep Moonlight running or even for revenge of my parents, for whom such measures were pointless. I was fighting to keep people like Christian alive so they could find rapture in the pure, silent glide of a tiger shark. This was why I would battle evil. This was why it was worth any sacrifice I might make. To keep a water fey and others alive.

  "He's beautiful," I sighed. It was more than how attractive he was, which was highlighted by the glowing water reflected off of his model-perfect features. I recalled the awe I'd felt when I'd watched him swimming in his pool after Vagasso had staked him out, and I remembered his tail, which was a gorgeous reddish gold, like the prettiest of goldfish. In that moment I appreciated every magickal being in the world which Vagasso and the Oddsmakers were determined to destroy. I would defend all of them through my last breath.

  "I want him to go home when we've saved this place," I told Vale. "I want him to be by the ocean where he belongs."

  "He will," Vale promised me softly.

  Blinking rapidly to clear my eyes, I turned my attention back to the shark exhibit. There were a gazillion sea creatures in constant motion beyond the glass. Fish of all shapes and sizes, numerous varieties of sharks, huge stingrays, turtles...it was a challenge to ignore them all and search the comparatively unexciting reef for something that looked like the seal I'd seen on the cash display at O'Malley's Casino.

  "I'm not seeing anything," I said, frustrated.

  Vale hummed agreement.

  We moved to another window for a different angle on the tank. It took all my willpower not to elbow some teenagers out of the way who were using their phones rather than looking out into the awesome tank. Eventually Vale and I squeezed our way against the glass, but even after ten minutes of careful scrutinizing, we didn't see anything suspicious or unusual in the surface of the reef.

  "So maybe it's not in this tank," I suggested to Vale, unable to hide my disappointment. It would have been nicely convenient to have been right.

  "We'll try the other exhibits. There are plenty of places to look."

  Leaving Christian to continue blocking traffic in the tunnel—though not many of the women appeared to have a problem with this once they got a look at how attractive he was—Vale and I headed back the way we'd come and entered the room that had been decorated to resemble an undersea temple. This room featured a touch pool in the center which Vale and I gravitated to because how could you not want to touch stingrays and anemone?

  Listening to little kids scream and squeal when they touched the living sea creatures, I had to ask myself how Vagasso would infiltrate the place. He wouldn't fit in. Though there were a lot of families here, there were couples and singles, too. None, however, looked like an occult skinhead. Not to mention he gave off a vibe that gave people the heebie jeebies. Ordinary people would make the cross sign with their fingers and shy away from him. When he appeared, it would be glaringly obvious.

  That was good, since I wouldn't have to worry about him sneaking up on us—we'd get plenty of warning from the other guests of the aquarium—but it suggested to me that the capstone might not be visible from this room either, since he wasn't here.

  But Vale and I looked anyway, checking out the various exhibits.

  At the jellyfish tank, I lingered. Vale's smirking face appeared in the glass beside me.

  "Something tells me you're a fan of jellyfish."

  "Are you kidding me? How can anyone not like jellyfish?"

  "They're soft and slimy, for one. Many varieties will sting you."

  "Sounds like someone's a big baby." Grinning, I pointed at an especially puffy variety that seemed filled with cotton candy. "Look at that thing. It's like a neon cloud. That's how the clouds around Las Vegas look. It should be our official State Sea Creature."

  "Do we need one?"

  I shrugged. "I think Christian feels underrepresented." I forced myself to turn away from the tank. "The capstone's not here. All that's left is the jungle to search, and I never thought I would say that while living in Vegas."

  "We haven't hit the reef area." Vale pointed to the second acrylic see-through tube in the facility.

  This tunnel was surrounded by reefs, which raised my hopes that we would find the capstone embedded somewhere within it. While I took one side, Vale took the other, and we slowly shuffled our way along the tunnel while streams of families and tourists passed between us.

  "There's a fundamental problem with what we're doing," Vale said after several minutes of this.

  I didn't tear my eyes away from my inspection
of the reef. I was like an archaeologist gridding out an excavation. "What's the problem?"

  "The capstone has existed for longer than Shark Reef has existed. Longer even than Mandalay Bay itself."

  It was a good point, and something I should have considered.

  "You're saying something as old as the capstone wouldn't be built into these plastic reefs." I gave up and turned my back on the section I'd been studying. Vale sensed me doing so and mimicked me so we faced each other across the tunnel. "Then why did my uncle and Orlaton both name this place?"

  Vale crossed his arms in consternation. The water made his hair glow in blue waves. "Their information is out of date? It's been moved?"

  "I don't think so," I said with growing realization. "This place was built on an unstable parcel of land. It's sand. They had to build huge pylons to brace the foundation. Why would anyone invest that much money and take the risk of the pylons not working when they could have moved up a half mile to firmer ground?"

  He smirked. "I have the feeling you're about to tell me."

  "Damn right, I am. It's because whoever had been involved with the choice must have been magickal. They influenced the build, encouraged the foundation to be poured here and only here because the capstone is beneath us." I laughed in amazement. "I'd assumed that a magickal being or some kind of sorcery was the capstone's protection, but it's being guarded by the casino property itself. Not even Vagasso can knock down a forty floor building."

  "Brilliant. But why are he and the Oddsmakers so determined to keep you away from here if no one can reach the capstone?"

  My smugness evaporated. "That I don't know."

  And it could be a problem.

  Vale opened his mouth to respond when the sound of screams tore through the facility. My blood turned to ice and my knees actually trembled with trepidation. Even though mentally I'd been prepared for another confrontation with Vagasso, emotionally I was apparently a limp noodle.

  "I guess we'll soon have our answer," I choked out. "Come on."