I slumped in my seat, looking at the ceiling.
When I looked back, the car ahead of me was already four feet away.
The light was green.
For God’s sake!
I hit the gas and lurched forward.
The car ahead of me was going at a good clip, and I began to pick up speed. The next light loomed ahead of us, and it was green.
I held my breath, waiting for it to turn yellow.
But it didn’t, and I sailed through it.
I grinned. Okay, maybe everything was going to be okay now. Maybe I was going to make it through these lights and they’d all stay green from here on out.
I pushed the gas pedal down to get more speed. I needed to make it to Felicity now.
And then I saw the next light turn yellow. I was never going to make that.
I slowed down and pulled to a stop.
God damn these lights.
I glared at the light, willing it to turn back to green.
It stayed red, stubbornly.
I was worried about Felicity, and I couldn’t get to her, and so help me, if I got there, and she was badly hurt, I was going to take it out of the hide of whatever or whoever had hurt her. And I was going to get there in time. I was going to save her. Because a world without Felicity? Hell, no, that was a world that I couldn’t handle living in.
She was going to be fine.
I was going to make it in time.
I pleaded with the light to change.
It didn’t.
Was it me, or was this light taking even longer than all the other ones put together?
I shut my eyes. When I opened them, the light was going to be…
Still red. I glared at it.
Abruptly, it changed, turning green.
“About fucking time,” I muttered, applying my foot to the gas. Off I went again.
The good news was that I was only two blocks from Felicity’s place. I’d turn left just up ahead, at the next light.
I arrived there, pulling into the turning lane.
The light was green, but that meant that the cars going eastbound were whooshing past on three lanes of traffic. Unless there was a lull, I wasn’t going to be able to turn.
There was never a lull.
I waited.
Finally, the light turned red.
“Come on, green arrow,” I whispered. If that thing didn’t show up in two seconds, I was just going to go, traffic lights be damned. Felicity was waiting for me—
Green arrow.
I took off as fast as I could, making the turn and pulling into the parking lot in front of Felicity’s apartment. People who lived inside had spaces in the parking garage, but there were ten measly spaces outside for guests.
They were all full.
Screw it. I parked in a no-parking zone, leapt out of the car, and went running into the parking garage.
Inside, it was dark, the only light greenish-blue lamps along the walls. They gave everything a sickly sort of glow, making the whole place feel creepy.
The parking garage only had two levels, so it shouldn’t take too long to search.
I let my gaze sweep this one.
It was still and silent, cars parked in the green gloom around the perimeter.
No time to waste.
I started to run up the incline that would take me to the next level, scanning the cars on either side of me as I went.
My feet were loud as they slapped against the concrete floor.
Whoever was here was going to hear me coming, but let them. I was a dragon, and I wasn’t someone to be trifled with.
I rounded the bend, emerging onto the next level of the parking garage.
Felicity came running at me, appearing out of the darkness, her eyes wide, her arms outstretched. She was bleeding from a wound on her forehead. “Penny!” she gasped.
I caught her, wrapping my arms around her. “What’s going on?”
“They’re here somewhere,” she said, turning in my arms to look in the direction she’d been running from.
“Who are?”
“Vampires,” she said. “They have magic. My talisman helped a little, I think, but—”
“Get behind me,” I said.
She did.
“They must want your blood,” I said. “If they have magic, they must be stalking drakes.” Vampires needed blood to stay alive, and any blood would do for survival, but drinking dragon blood gave them magic. If they couldn’t find dragon blood, drake blood worked as well.
“Let’s just go,” she said. “Let’s run and leave and get away from them.”
I looked into the darkness of the parking garage. Where were they? “Yeah, okay,” I said, reaching behind me to grab her hand. I started to back up. “That’s not a terrible idea.”
Movement behind me.
I whirled.
Felicity screamed, and she was ripped away from me.
I pumped magic down my arms, ready to pour into the vampires who had Felicity.
But I was propelled backwards by strong magic.
I slammed into a car, and it hurt.
A fangy-grin in front of me. “Well, well, well, what have we here?”
I struggled against the magic.
But it held me fast.
CHAPTER THREE
The vampires looked green in the light. They were all sporting their fangs, and they looked like monsters, like something that crawled out of a nightmare.
There were six or eight of them, I couldn’t be sure how many.
The one talking to me seemed to be the leader. Four others stood behind him, all with their hands out, concentrating as they stared at me. It was their magic that was holding me in place.
Another vampire held Felicity, who was struggling.
So. Six, then. There were six.
“You’re that little lady who was helping the police with the Dragon Slasher,” said the leader. “You’re a dragon, aren’t you, sweetheart?”
I shut my eyes. I needed to find my magic, find my fire. These vampires might have magic, and they outnumbered me, but this was a fight I could win.
I had fire. They didn’t.
The bad thing was that I wasn’t sure exactly how much magic I had. I couldn’t remember the last time that I had shifted. I needed to shift into dragon form at least every two weeks or so to stay charged with magic. It wore off if I didn’t shift.
But I knew I had some magic. I could feel it.
I felt something touching my face.
My eyes snapped open.
The leader was stroking my cheek. “You’re going to taste so amazing, I can just tell.”
I spit in his face.
He recoiled and then he growled at me, fangs out like a predator.
I found the fire in my belly. I still couldn’t move. The magic held me in place. But I could breathe fire.
It burned up my body, through my chest, past my throat, and through my lips.
A huge ball of bright flame hit the leader directly in the chest.
He shrieked.
The other vampires were startled. Their magic faltered.
I took the opportunity to use magic to whack them all into the ground as hard as I could. I picked them up with magic and I whacked them down again.
They let out mewling sounds of pain.
The leader was screaming. His clothes were on fire. His hair was on fire. He was stumbling around.
The vampire holding Felicity let go of her to tackle the leader. They fell to the ground, and the other vampire used his body to try to smother the flames.
I grabbed Felicity’s hand.
We ran.
* * *
“Why didn’t you call me?” Jensen was saying.
“Well, I called Penny,” said Felicity.
I shot Jensen a smug look. “I’m a dragon.”
“But I could have helped,” he said.
“You were at work,” said Felicity.
“I would have left,”
he said.
The three of us were in the apartment that Felicity shared with Jensen, standing in the kitchen around the small round kitchen table. We probably would have been more comfortable on the couch in the living room or something, but this conversation was too tense for comfortable.
“Look,” I said, “she couldn’t call everyone. She was hiding from them. She was running from them. That’s not the important thing, anyway. The important thing is that she’s safe.”
“For now,” said Jensen. “But for all we know, now she’s being stalked by psychotic vampires.”
“Should we report it to the police?” said Felicity.
“What are the police going to do against vampires?” I said. I folded my arms over my chest. “I should have burned them all to death.”
“Well, it was more important for us to get away,” said Felicity. “And you’re not really a killer.”
“I killed Ace Gonzales,” I said, referring to the head of the vampire gang The Lost Breed.
“Yeah, but that was self-defense,” she said.
“This was self-defense too,” I said. “They were threatening us.”
“Okay,” she said, “but it still doesn’t mean you should just go around killing people.”
“I don’t know,” said Jensen. “If they were out of the way, I’d feel better about your safety.”
“Yeah,” I said. “What were you doing down in that parking garage alone, anyway?”
“Getting in my car to drive to the hotel for work,” she said.
“Well, you won’t do that anymore,” I said. “I’ll pick you up.”
“Or I’ll drive you,” said Jensen.
“What?” said Felicity, looking back and forth between the two of us. “Let’s not get crazy here.”
“Felicity, you could have been killed today,” I said.
“We don’t know that they wanted to kill me,” she said. “Maybe they just would have bitten me, taken some blood, and run off.”
“They would have drained you,” said Jensen. “They were crazed with magic. They were willing to attack you. They wouldn’t have left you alive to tell the tale.”
“He’s absolutely right,” I said.
Jensen shot me a look. “Well, I never thought I’d hear those words come out of your mouth.”
Felicity yanked out a chair and sat down at the table. “I’m not letting you two do this to me. I can’t have one of you babysitting me at every second. I won’t be able to breathe.”
“It’s better than your being dead,” I said.
“And letting you die is not on the table,” said Jensen. “If anything happened to you, Felicity, I’d lose my mind.”
She dragged both of her hands over her face. “Look, to be fair, this danger has already been around for all this time. There have been bad vampires running around in this city—”
“We’re not backing down,” I said. “Don’t go in the parking garage on your own.”
“And one of us will be taking you to and from work,” said Jensen.
Felicity shook her head. “Okay, let’s go out and find those vampires, and then Penny can burn them to a crisp, and then the problem is solved, yeah? Then I get my life back.”
I shook my head. “No, you’re right. There will always be more. The fact is that it’s dangerous for you to be on your own.”
“But vampires want your blood and you run around on your own,” she said to me.
“That’s because I can protect myself,” I said.
Felicity narrowed her eyes.
“You’re not going to win this fight,” said Jensen. “Come on, baby, it’s for your own good.”
* * *
“I don’t even know what kind of person they hired at the department,” Lachlan said ruefully, setting down the laptop on the counter in the lobby of the hotel. “It was one of those bureaucratic kinds of things, where they had to hire internally. This guy has some certification from Microsoft or something, so he’s supposedly qualified, but I swear he doesn’t know anything at all about computers.”
“Well, this is a Mac,” I said, gesturing to the laptop.
“Yeah, he doesn’t have an Apple certification,” Lachlan muttered. “And last week, there was this big presentation, and the captain had stuff he wanted to project on the screen.”
“Like a Powerpoint?” I asid.
“Yeah, I guess. Anyway, the projector wouldn’t hook up to the captain’s laptop, and this guy was completely useless. He couldn’t fix it. I had to point out that some laptops have a little button you hit that allows you to toggle between screens, and he had never heard of such a thing.”
“So, you fixed it?” I said.
“Well, no, that didn’t work,” said Lachlan. “But that’s not the point. The point is that I asked him if he could get past the password protection and he acted like I was asking him to slam a revolving door. So, I figured we could just work on it together, you and me. We’d have better luck than this guy.”
“I could look at it,” said a voice.
It was Connor coming into the lobby. He wasn’t working that night, which meant that he was barely dressed. He had on a pair of jeans, which were covered in rips and holes. No shirt. He looked Lachlan over. “Hello, there, Detective,” he said in a sultry voice.
Lachlan raised his eyebrows. “Is your gargoyle ever going to stop hitting on me?”
“That is just how I say hello,” said Connor, sounding offended.
I pressed my lips together, trying not to laugh.
“Besides,” said Connor. “I’m not Penny’s gargoyle. Gargoyles don’t belong to people. Not anymore.”
Lachlan winced. “I’m really sorry about that. I didn’t mean it to sound—”
“Whatever.” Connor picked up the laptop. “You want me to look at this or not?”
Gargoyles were a magic race created by mages hundreds of years ago. Mages had kept them as slaves to protect themselves from dragons, and gargoyles had only been officially freed from that servitude for less than a hundred years. It was a fresh wound.
“I really am sorry,” Lachlan said again.
Connor shrugged. He opened the laptop.
“I didn’t know you did stuff with computers,” I said to Connor.
“I don’t,” said Connor. “I mean, not really, anyway, but whenever my own computer breaks, I just use yours to Google the problem and someone else out there knows how to fix it and has left detailed instructions. So, I’m pretty sure it won’t be hard to get the computer to open in admin mode or something. I’ll try stuff.”
Lachlan shrugged. “Can’t hurt, I guess.”
“Cool,” said Connor, and disappeared back out of the room with the laptop.
Lachlan eyed the empty front desk. “Connor’s not working?”
“No, it’s Becky tonight, and she’s late,” I said. “I’m just covering for her until she shows—”
The front door swung open, and Becky bounced inside. “Ms. Caspian, I’m so sorry, but the traffic out there is horrendous, and I swear I hit every red light on Atlantic Avenue.”
I nodded gravely. “I know exactly what you’re talking about.”
She sighed. “I’ll leave earlier from now on.” She slid behind the front desk, smiling at Lachlan.
Lachlan ignored her.
Becky looked a little miffed but shrugged and signed into the computer at the desk.
“Come on,” I said to Lachlan. “Let’s go upstairs.”
“To, um, your apartment?” he said.
“Yes,” I said. “It’s not as if you haven’t been up there before.”
“Right,” he said. “It’s only that I came over for work, and if we’re going up there—”
“We’ll talk about the case up there,” I said.
He hesitated. Then he nodded. “Sure, fine.”
Once upstairs in my living room, I offered Lachlan something to drink, but he declined. I poured myself a tall glass of wine anyway. I’d had a hell of a day.
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He sat down on my couch.
I settled down in an easy chair opposite him. “So, you really think that the brother is a viable suspect?”
“That’s a lot of wine,” he said.
“Oh, God, after the day I’ve had…” I shook my head and took a drink. Ah. Bliss.
“What happened?”
I debated lying to him about it. After all, the last time I had burned a vampire, he’d been pretty pissed at me for taking the law into my own hands, as he called it. But I thought that if there was ever going to be anything besides a work relationship between us, I would need to be honest with him about this stuff.
So, I told him what had happened with Felicity earlier that day and how we’d dealt with it.
He rubbed his temples. “Vampires stalking drakes for magic? Really?”
“Unless they had some other reason for attacking her,” I said. “You’re a vampire. You have any idea why else they might want to hurt her?”
“I don’t go around biting people,” he muttered.
Without thinking, my hand went to my neck, where he’d done exactly that.
He got up off the couch. “Maybe I’ll have a drink after all.”
I started to get up.
He waved me down. “I can pour it myself.”
I watched as he filled a glass with wine. “I know you don’t do things like that,” I said. “I wasn’t trying to accuse you. I never even see you drink blood.”
He sat back down and had some wine. “I don’t like doing it in front of people. I try to drink as much as I need to survive as quickly as possible, and then not think about any of it anymore.”
“Yeah,” I said. “I guess I can see that.”
“Being around you makes that hard,” he said. “That’s why I haven’t…” He sighed. He set down his wine glass on my coffee table.
“Look,” I said. “Maybe it was all just a mistake between us. Maybe it would be better if we tried to put it behind us, forget it even happened.”
He raised his eyebrows. “Is that what you want?”
“Is it what you want?”
“I asked first.”
I drank more wine. I didn’t say anything.
“I could understand why,” he said. “I’m not any kind of prize these days. I work too much, and I’m depressed, and I don’t feel like I have anything together, and on top of all of that, you must be frightened of me.”
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