Arawn sank into the dark, and his dragon beat his wings against the sky.
One Month after the Dragon Scepter Ceremony
~~~
Willow Needs A Job
WILLOW Sage drew herself up straighter, gathering up all her courage, and sucked in a deep breath before she opened her front door.
Outside, her two best friends, Bethany and Ember, stretched out their arms toward her, hands grasping in the air.
“Willow! Girl! How are you doing?”
“Let us in!”
“I can hardly wait to see what you’ve done with your new place.”
“I can’t believe it’s been a month since you got back!”
Yes, Willow had been back in Las Vegas for an entire month after she’d shipped herself off to Paris for a remedial potions class for hopeless witches at the Sorcière Université there, a magical college for supernatural people such as herself.
Well, herself and her friends. All three girls were witches.
Very bad witches.
Truly pathetic witches.
But they were friends, and that was what mattered.
Ember and Bethany tumbled into Willow’s apartment, their purses swinging from their shoulders and paper bags clutched in their hands.
Willow mumbled, “I could have come over to Bethany’s place. You didn’t have to trouble yourselves and come over here.” Explanations for her apartment’s bare floors and windows spun in her head, each stupider than the last.
Ember said, “Oh, but we haven’t been over here since we helped you move in, right after you got back from that potions course in France! You still haven’t talked about that much.”
Willow winced and hoped it was mostly inwardly. “Well, there wasn’t a lot to tell. It was mostly them showing us how to be more precise in our measurements and read all the directions before starting a potion. They didn’t offer much advice about malfunctioning magic.”
Which all three girls had a problem with.
The three little witches—Willow, Bethany, and Ember—had met first in their kindergarten class and then again three days later in Saturday Witching School. The trio had been best friends ever since, especially when it became clear that they were all magical basket cases. They defended each other from mage bullies casting surreptitious farting spells and catty witch girls making up mean rumors about why they were so hopeless.
Their parents were all disappointed in them, too. They were the kids who frittered their time away doing natural things because they couldn’t deal with magic, no matter how much their parents sat with them at night, reciting spells out loud while clapping for rhythm and flipping through potion ingredient flashcards.
Bethany’s parents were nice about it. They understood that something had kind of gone wrong in there, and it wasn’t her fault.
Ember’s parents had believed that the deficit could be overcome with rigor, if she really wanted to.
And Willow’s parents?
It had been different before her dad had died when she was nine.
Bethany asked her, “Did you get everything out of storage?”
Ember chimed in, “Did you set up your potion-making equipment yet?”
“Do you have any of that French chocolate left?” Ember asked.
“Or the wine? Do you have any of that Chardonnay left, either?”
Then, silence as they looked around her apartment, at the one large pillow beside the coffee table, at the coffee table that had been dragged over to stand beside the mattress lying directly on the floor and covered with just sheets, at Willow’s clothes stacked neatly on towels laid on the carpeting instead of in a dresser.
“I love it!” Bethany said, her voice wavering.
“You’ve really been taking this KonMari thing to heart, haven’t you?” Ember said. “You know, if it doesn’t bring you joy, ditch it?”
Bethany asked gently, “You know you can go too far with this de-cluttering stuff, right? I’m worried you’re turning into an anti-hoarder. Don’t go all Buddhist monk on us, owning only one bowl and one set of saffron-colored robes, okay?”
Willow laughed. “Oh, no. Ember’s right. Just some A-Level decluttering. After I got back from that potions course in France, everything just looked wrong and overdone. People have a lot less stuff in Europe, you know, and everything means something. So, I just got rid of the stuff that didn’t mean anything.”
If Willow didn’t get a job soon, she might end up begging for scraps on the street with her bowl, her last remaining possession after pawning all her stuff to get just enough money for food that day.
But not enough for rent.
If she didn’t get some rent money in a few days, the property manager said he was going to have to start eviction proceedings. Once started, those couldn’t be withdrawn, according to the holding company that owned the slummy apartment building.
Lying to her friends sucked, but there was a lot she hadn’t told them the past few years.
Maybe she shouldn’t have kept so many secrets from them, but spilling it all now felt even weirder. Where could she even start?
I had a non-supernatural boyfriend whom I was in love with, just a guy, just a smart-sweet-natural-nonwitch-nonanything guy, but he was so secretive about us. You would have told me something was wrong with him. You would have warned me to look out. I moved in with him, and one day, he moved out.
My heart hurt so much that I borrowed money from my step-dad, despite how ill-advised you would have told me that was, and ran away to a three-month potions class in Paris that I totally couldn’t afford.
And now I have no money at all, and I’m going to be thrown out of my apartment, and I really want whatever is in that bag because I haven’t eaten since yesterday.
Ember said, “You certainly succeeded in decluttering. You’re a genius at it. We can sit on the pillows on the floor to eat. We brought lunch. It’s Chinese. Hope you don’t mind?”
Willow said, “You didn’t have to bring lunch. I could have whipped something up.” Even though she only had one take out container half-full of egg drop soup in her refrigerator that she was saving for her supper. She’d even stopped buying milk for her tea because it was too expensive.
The three girls settled on pillows on the floor, setting the big paper bag on the coffee table between them.
Bethany shoved some chopsticks and a couple of paper containers in Willow’s hands. “I am famished. Let’s eat.”
Willow unlocked the tabs on the top of her Chinese food container, her fingers shaking a little. The aroma of sautéed chicken and vegetables rising from the container made her mouth water and her empty stomach grumble. Loudly.
Willow and Ember laughed.
“I guess you’re ready for lunch,” Ember said, digging into her own container with chopsticks.
Willow laughed along with them. Yeah, that water she’d had for breakfast hadn’t lasted very long. She asked, “So, what was so important, Bethany, that it couldn’t wait for me to get over to your place?”
Bethany looked bashful. “So, I told you guys that we mated—”
Yes, her friend Bethany had met a dragon shifter while she was working at one of the Las Vegas casinos, and they had hit it off. They had hit it off so hard that within a month, she’d dragon-married the guy. They’d dragon-married so fast that Willow and Ember hadn’t even gotten a chance to meet him before it was all over.
That was how love was supposed to work, Willow thought. Love sure as heck wasn’t hanging around a guy for months, then moving in with him, and him never once talking about the future or even very much about himself.
She stopped right there. Willow did not need to feel sorry for herself. It was over. She was getting her life back together.
And Willow didn’t need a man. She needed a darn job.
Ember grimaced at Bethany. “Girl, I do not need details about your sex life. If you guys are getting freaky—”
Bethany slapped Ember upside the arm with the bac
k of her hand. “That’s not what I’m talking about. Because Math is a dragon shifter—”
“Dragon shifters,” Ember said. “That’s so weird. I can’t believe you met a mythical-class shifter right here in Nevada.”
Willow had never met any dragon shifters or any mythical-class shifters in her life. The three of them had grown up in a very small witching community about an hour outside of town, called Desert Star. Only a few dozen supernatural families lived in and around Desert Star, mostly witches with a few wolf and bear shifters thrown in.
In Paris, at the remedial portions course, Willow had met more supernaturals than she ever had before in her life. She hadn’t known there were so many kinds of supernaturals in the world: day-going vampires, night-restricted vampires, shifters in all flavors and varieties, powerful and capricious fae, plus the otherworldly and fearsome angels and demons.
But she’d still never met a dragon shifter, or a phoenix or a unicorn, for that matter. She’d heard that mythical-class shifters tended to stay within their own communities, which made sense.
Bethany continued, glaring at Ember, “Anyway, as I was saying, he’s a dragon shifter. Evidently, they don’t have regular wedding ceremonies like our handfasting rituals.”
“What?” Ember hollered. “Are you telling me you’re not going to have a handfasting? Your mother will blow a gasket. It’s not going to be pretty, either. Witch gaskets are notoriously hard to find on the spare-parts market.”
Bethany laughed. “Oh, don’t worry. I already heard this spiel. My mother went up one side of me and down the other when she thought I wasn’t going to have a handfasting ceremony. I had to shout over her four times and send a gorilla apparition to shake her around before I could get a word in edgewise over the phone. We’re going to take a honeymoon to Europe first, but we’ll have a handfasting ceremony in two months in Desert Star.”
“Two months?” Ember whined. “Your pre-wedding honeymoon is so long.”
“It is a long trip. I’m not even a hundred percent sure we can go. My major problem is that the casino I was working at, the Dragon’s Den Casino, has some sea serpents in the fountain out front that I was responsible for.”
Willow swallowed a huge bite of chicken and noodles. “I thought you said you and your apparitions were cleaning up the casino and penthouses, not taking care of sea serpents.”
Bethany grimaced. “Well, one thing led to another, and then there were sea monsters in the fountain. They have to be looked after while we’re gone.”
Willow shoved another huge forkful of chow mein in her mouth and sucked it right down. “You should get a magico-veterinarian to take care of them. I’ll bet my stepfather knows one he can recommend.”
Bethany turned to Willow, her eyes bright and innocent. “We tried to find a magico-veterinarian, but specialty witches like that are all too busy. Nevertheless, the sea serpents have eaten all the algae and other crud in their tank and just need someone to take care of them. Kind of like a glorified fish feeder. Just get a fifty-five-gallon drum of fish flakes and shake it over their pool once a day. Maybe throw a few vitamin potions in there.”
Willow stared at Bethany. “Are you asking me to pet-sit your sea serpents while you’re on your honeymoon?”
“Exactly! I want you to pet-sit the sea serpents. They should be no trouble at all. They just swim around the pool and nibble any of the leftover algae. I think they are going to need some supplemental food soon, though.”
“But I don’t know anything about sea serpents!” Willow insisted.
“But you’re the best with animals out of all of us. You took all those classes in mythical herpetology and legendary animal husbandry in high school.”
“They’ll die or something. There’s no way I can do it. Something terrible will happen.”
“You just have to be positive!” Ember told Willow, pointing at Willow’s nose with her chopsticks. “You need enthuse-usi-usi-asm! You have to say I will instead of I wish!”
I will I had enough money to pay my rent, Willow thought.
“I’ve been trying Ember’s idea of having a positive mental mindset,” Bethany said, “and my spells have been going pretty well for me lately. I haven’t had a major slip-up since the glitterbomb incident.”
All three witches shuddered. Gallons and gallons and gallons of glitter in every color had saturated the carpeting, the furniture, and the bed of the penthouse that Bethany had nearly destroyed.
But they had managed to clean it up. Ember’s wind elementals had a central vortex that could suck a golf ball through a garden hose.
“Animals respond so well to you,” Bethany pleaded with Willow. “I was surprised that, out of the three of us, you didn’t get a familiar to settle your powers when we volunteered that summer at the animal shelter.”
“I still don’t think I am qualified to pet-sit your serpents,” Willow fretted.
Bethany said, “The pay is astronomical.”
Willow shook her head. “Oh, you don’t have to pay me for pet-sitting. What are friends for?”
“No, Willow. You don’t understand. This is an official position with the casino for the next two months and maybe longer. Those dragons pay really well.”
Shock slapped Willow like cold water. “Holy mermaids, you’re offering me a job?”
“Heck, yeah. What did you think, that I was asking you to feed deadly sea monsters as a favor?”
“I’ll do it!” Willow stuffed another bite of chow mein into her mouth.
The conversation replayed in her head.
She squinted at Bethany. “Wait, what do you mean ‘deadly sea monsters?’”
Arawn at the Casino
THE conversation went something like this:
Arawn was sitting in his office when he answered his ringing cell phone. “Math? Hey, I can’t talk right now. I’m in the middle of the plan to secure the requisitions process for the Dragon’s Den Casino. When you discovered that embezzlement scheme, it caused us a lot of extra work.”
A bunch of static like rushing wind made Math’s voice hard to understand. “Yeah, about the Dragon’s Den Casino. We received the infusion of capital from the angel investors at the end of Phase One, but there’s still a lot of work to do there. The problem is that my dragonmate has decided that she wants a honeymoon, and she wants it right now.”
“Oh, no. I am not going to Las Vegas to clean up your mess.”
“It’s not a mess. Bethany’s cleaning apparitions have made that place sparkle. All the penthouses are ready. The lobby areas are ready. All the regular hotel rooms are clean as a whistle and open for occupancy. She saved my scaly butt and the whole casino project from certain disaster, and she did it on time and under budget.”
“That’s important to you, huh, Math?”
“But now I have to go to Europe for a month, and this casino project is my baby. I don’t want to leave it in anyone else’s hands.”
“I hear you complaining about going to Europe for a month on your honeymoon, but I don’t believe a word you’re saying.”
“Shut up and listen. I’m worried that embezzlement scheme was more far-reaching than I suspected. I need somebody there who understands security and operations, and that means you.”
“Oh, no. I am not going to Las Vegas.”
“Come on, Arawn. You did your Master’s in Vegas. You love Vegas.”
“I do not want to talk about this, but I am not going back to Las Vegas.”
“You sure slunk around a lot while you lived there. Suddenly, Cai and I weren’t welcome at your apartment. Suddenly, we had to stay in a hotel instead of crashing on your floor like we always had. Suddenly, you clammed up and wouldn’t talk about anything, and then you moved back to New Wales the day after you defended your thesis and wouldn’t talk about a damn thing. Something was going on there.”
“Nothing to speak of.”
“Which means that something did, but you don’t want to talk about it.”
; “Like I said.”
“Arawn, I need you to go back to Las Vegas and take over the security arrangements at the Dragon’s Den Casino while I’m in Europe. I can’t trust anyone else with this.”
“You’re going to have to find someone else.”
“The soft open is in one month. If the casino isn’t ready to open to all those high-roller guests, journalists, and social media influencers we invited, the den could lose the whole investment. This is a lot of gold we are talking about, Arawn.”
“If we lose it, I’ll extend a low-interest loan to the den to cover the costs for ten years.”
“The Tiamat family trust may be one of the wealthiest hoards in the den, but it would be better for everyone if this casino investment pays off. I need you to go to Las Vegas.”
“I’d rather give you the money.”
“I don’t want your money. I want this investment to work. Whatever it is that you don’t want to deal with in Las Vegas—”
“There is nothing left for me in Las Vegas.”
“—Whatever it is, just dodge it, deal with it, or pay it to go away.”
“It’s not that simple, Mathonwy.”
“I need you there, and I need you there before lunch for an eleven o’clock meeting today.”
“No.”
“Please, Arawn.”
“I’m too busy here.”
“Begging didn’t work. Time to try blackmail.”
Horror dawned. “You wouldn’t—”
“I still have the video, buddy. I have saved that video on cloud servers and USB drives that you will never find.”
“Two can play at that game.”
“But you can’t play as well as I can because I can hold my liquor well enough to take video footage while I’m wasted. I’ll expect you in Las Vegas for the eleven o’clock meeting that I have set up with the casino’s department heads. I will need you to stay there for at least a month until the soft open.”
Dragons and Mayhem Page 3