In the meantime, Willow brewed an even dozen stomach remedies for the flatulent sea serpents in the fountain, none of which seemed to work quite as intended.
The sea monsters appeared to be in less distress, though.
Willow had given them several more meals of spiked halibut, which they gobbled down as if their tummies weren’t upset. Afterward, they appeared to be in even higher spirits and were using the gas jets emerging from their butts as a means of propulsion around the fountain.
With their tongues lolling out of their mouths and their tails whipping the water, they didn’t look like they had stomach cramps.
Just gas.
The green one and black one appeared to be racing across the basin via their butt-fart engines.
If anything, the sea monsters appeared to be laughing.
Great, sea monsters had the sense of humor of nine-year-old boys. If Willow messed up another potion and made them belch, they’d probably think that was hilarious, too.
Or boogers.
The fountain still smelled like it was overflowing with bubbling rotten-egg stew.
She needed to do something about that smell before the casino’s soft opening in a week.
For the love potion, Willow worked on buying what she could from Hecate’s Magickal Pantry and AmaPotion and gathering the other things. She perched on a barstool in the still-unused commercial kitchen of the restaurant with one of the casino’s loaner laptops open, shopping.
The herbs and semi-precious stones were expensive, but Arawn told her to put it on his credit card.
“But it takes a pound of saffron!” she said. “That’s like, five thousand dollars. If we get the good stuff, it could be ten thousand.”
He poked around in his wallet and handed her a plastic square. “Get the good stuff, and definitely put it on my card. I need the airline miles.”
She squinted her eyes at the guy who could fly. “For what?”
He laughed. “I’ll think of something. Just get the high-quality saffron. What else do you need?”
“Some personal items from us. It has to be something that represents pure, uncomplicated love.”
Arawn bit his lip. “Okay.”
“I’m going to call my mother and stepfather,” dread, “and have them print out a picture of my first cat, Greymalkin.”
Arawn lowered one eyebrow. “Will it hurt the personal item?”
“It has to be burned, so that’s why I’m using a print of a picture from the computer. Something like that is fine. It’s the subject that’s important, not the item.”
“Pure, uncomplicated love,” Arawn repeated, frowning.
“Yes.”
“I need to think about that.”
“I also need some traditional magic items from us, hair and blood.”
Arawn raised one blond eyebrow at her. “Was your great-grandmother into the dark arts?”
Of course, he’d known what that meant. His mother had been a witch. “That’s the rumor. Her grimoire is a little shadowy around the edges. Any spell that requires black candles to be read is a little suspect.”
“My mother was interested in the ‘less-than-snowy-white’ aspects of magic, as she put it.”
“Wow, so your mom had some darkness in her witch soul.”
He nodded. “That’s what they say. What do you need from me?”
“Some hair. I can snip a few strands.”
“Surely there are some kitchen shears around here.” He poked in drawers. “Here. What else?”
He bent over, and she clipped a few silky, gold threads of his hair and sprinkled them on a piece of white paper. “And the potion needs blood.”
“We’re in a kitchen. There should be knives. I can open a vein for you.”
“Or—” Willow thought about it. “Or it has to be a bodily fluid with a significant genetic component, I would think.”
“I want to do this correctly with the most appropriate ingredients to increase the likelihood that we get a perfect potion. Just get a vial and hand me a knife.”
Willow grabbed a magical vial and his hand, wheeling him around with his back to the counter. “It doesn’t have to be blood.”
“What are you—”
She unhooked the waistband of his pants and unzipped his fly.
“—oh.”
He leaned back against the counter, his knuckles already white where he was holding onto the edge.
Which Willow could see because she was on her knees and eye-level with the edge of the counter.
Inside his underwear, he was already hard. She moved the elastic of his boxer-briefs and sucked on him a few times, driving him deep into her throat. Clean, masculine musk and the faint whiff of cologne from inside his shirt filled her nose, and she breathed deeply as she went down on him. He was so big around that her fingers didn’t come close to reaching, and his thickness was rough on her tongue.
His groan rumbled through his body and her throat. “I wish you’d told me a year ago that you were a witch and needed potion ingredients.”
She tried to laugh, but his huge hands curled around her head and forced her farther down.
“Get the vial ready,” he growled.
He pumped her head over him, shoving himself down her throat, and then yanked her hair to get her off of him.
Willow grabbed his shaft and pumped with her hand, collecting the spurt in the vial.
Arawn’s eyes were closed, his fingers still clenching her hair, and his thighs shook under her arm.
When she licked the last little bit off, he closed his eyes again. “God, woman, what you do to me.”
Yeah, watching him shiver in ecstasy was a pretty fun thing to do to him. Looked like witches had some sex magic, too.
Willow stood, and Arawn arranged his clothes, his bright blue eyes still hazy. “Okay, I’ll admit that was better than a knife across my palm. What else do you need?”
“This spell is actually for naturals, but I’ve been looking up information about bewitching shifters.”
Arawn shook his head, and he was still holding onto the countertop for balance. “There’s a source for that?”
“Oh, yes. There’s a whole field of magical study about bewitching supernaturals. Fae are resistant. All the data on them boils down to ‘don’t even try.’ But dragons—there’s a lot of information about bewitching dragons.”
“It kind of freaks me out that you could find that.”
“It was a pretty important field of study for a few centuries, what with the burning of the villages and the carrying off of the maidens, and all.”
He bobbled his head. “Yeah, okay. We may have scorched a few castles and decimated a few armies, but only when we were bound by treaties. War was an important part of dragon culture.”
Willow allowed, “Yeah, and when dragons were burning a swath through a village, suddenly everybody wanted to talk to the witch and was like, ‘Oh, witch, please cast a spell to drive away the enormous lizard firebombing our homes, and then maybe we won’t burn you at the stake next week because Bob caught a cold.’ So, witches were ambivalent about the whole village thing, anyway.”
“Things are better now.”
“Yeah, they are.”
“So, what do you think we need to do to bewitch the Dark Other?”
Willow paused. “That’s his name?”
“It doesn’t have a name. None of them do. Most shifters think of their beasts as their other selves, the other side of their coin, so you can think of it as having the same name as they do.”
“I’m going to have to call your dragon by name during the spell. Should I call him Arawn?”
He closed his eyes, actually squeezing them closed. “No. Don’t do that.”
“Did something happen with him?”
“No, it’s just not as controllable as other dragons. As soon as I blasted out my blue fire for the first time, I might as well have had a big ‘P’ for Psycho stamped on my forehead.”
“You’re
the least psycho person I’ve ever met. I’ll bet you haven’t burned even one medieval village to the ground.”
A small smile peeked at the corners of his mouth. “Well, there was that one time, but I should get a mulligan on that one. Hardly anyone died.”
“See? Practically doesn’t count.”
“Right.”
“So, what should I call your dragon when I charge the potion ingredients and write the scroll?”
His smile vanished. “I call it the Dark Other. That’s how I’ve thought of it since I first sensed the dragon soul when I was very young, younger than most kids. It was like I had a black hole that sucks all my anger inside.”
“Maybe,” Willow had a stupid idea, “maybe I could ask him.”
“Oh, no. I don’t want it around you. The dragon has no redeeming characteristics. He’s nothing but rage and blue-hot fire.”
“He tried to protect me from the sea serpents that very first day, the day you got barfed on.”
“I managed to control it that day. It is usually uncontrollable and violent.”
“I’m going to need something from him for the potion.”
“You’ve got something from me. I can slice open a vein if you want blood instead.”
“According to the shifter bewitchment protocols that I’ve seen, the other soul must also be engaged with the potion.”
“I could shift somewhere and then shift back, and then we could look to see if it dropped a scale or something.”
“It’s got to be harvested, and you don’t have scales. More like beaded skin.”
“I can’t always control it, Willow. It might decide to eat you, and I would not be able to stop it. I’d stand behind its eyes and watch it burn you alive and eat your body.”
His dragon wouldn’t do that. He had curved around her when the sea serpent had been going to fry her. “I’ll risk it.”
“I won’t. This is over. We don’t need this potion. We’ll stay together until we can’t anymore, and then I’ll crawl into a cave somewhere to wait out the senescence.”
“I thought you needed someone to take care of you.”
He sighed. “If you crawl into a cave for your senescence, you’ve given up. You’ve given yourself over to it. Most dragons who do that die.”
“I think I can handle your dragon. Witches have been gentling dragons for centuries. It’s the rock-paper-scissors of supernaturals. ‘Dragons fry Fae. Fae banish witches. Witches gentle dragons.’ Everyone knows that.”
“Dragons don’t fry Fae. Fae are a fair fight for a dragon. And I don’t think fae banish witches very well at all.”
“It’s still conventional wisdom. Come on. We’re going outside right now, and you’re going to turn into your dragon, and I’m going to collect something biological from him.”
“If you stab it to obtain blood, it will kill you.”
“Well then, I won’t stab him. Just change, already.”
“I won’t do it.”
“You get out there right now or lose me forever. I’m not going to wait around for you to fall apart when some half-fae chica walks by. I’m not going to wait for you to get sick and die because you won’t do the perfectly obvious thing and end this. We’re going to try this potion because it’s the only thing that’s going to give us a chance to be together. Get outside, right now, and change into your mother-frickin’ dragon!”
Willow was as surprised as Arawn appeared to be, as he was blinking and not saying anything after her tirade. Her hand shook as she held it in the air and pointed to the delivery door to the alley out back. Her breath rasped in her raw throat.
Arawn blinked one last time. “Well, when you put it that way—”
He started unbuttoning his shirt as he walked toward the kitchen’s rear delivery doors.
Willow stomped after him, still panting. She shouted, “Sorry about that, but I’m so wound up!”
He looked over his shoulder as he shrugged off his shirt. “Evidently, it needed to be said. I was willing to risk death for you, and I’ll do everything in my power to control this dragon jerk so that you don’t risk the same. I don’t like it, and you’d better grab a scale scraping or talon clipping quickly because I’m going to take control and change back as soon as it gives me one damn inch to take back over.”
They barged out of the back doors into the bright afternoon sunlight. Heat showered down from the sun directly above their heads. A stiff wind whipped through the brick alleyway where trucks were unloading goods farther down for the soft open in a few days.
Arawn used his toes to pry his shoes off and flung them by her feet.
“Don’t worry about the shoes! I’ll poof you up some clothes when you change back!” she yelled over the wind and trucks’ engines.
“I hate shopping!” he called, hopping as he pulled off his dark slacks and tossed them to her.
“We went shopping last week for new shoes after the serpent ralphed on my witch boots!” Actually, she’d stepped in it, but same difference.
“Yeah, I just wanted to be with you. Stand back, and if this jerk turns on you, run inside, slam that door, and keep running. Blue dragonfire can burn through steel.”
Arawn flung his arms out to his sides, his hands clenched into fists, and shouted to the sun.
And disintegrated.
Scale of Dragon, Eye of Newt
BLACK smoke billowed where Arawn had been standing, and it took the shape of a snarling black dragon with sapphire eyes. The dragon towered over the five-story buildings and blotted out the sun, swaying until he crashed to all four of his powerful legs. Even crouching, his dark back rose above the roofs, and his tail sliced through the air. Black, sparkling wings folded tightly against its back.
Water filled Willow’s legs, and her feet were so heavy that she couldn’t move. She plastered herself against the brick wall by the door—the brick abrading her back—pretending that if he inhaled for a blast of dragonfire, that she could run inside the building and far enough away to be safe.
She swallowed hard. “Arawn?”
The dragon turned toward her, his lip lifting from his spiked teeth. Blue fire spilled over his jaw like fog. The heat washed over Willow’s legs.
She licked her lips. “Nice dragon. Be a good dragon. No frying the nice lady who just wants to pet you.”
The blue flame in his eyes roared, and his voice was an evil hiss in his throat.
Willow nearly crumbled from fear. Her soul shrank down to a shivering lump. “Nice dragon. Good dragon. Arawn? Are you in there?”
Nothing.
No flicker of recognition or intelligence from the deadly, enormous monster.
“Dark Other?” she ventured.
Still nothing. The dragon looked around the alleyway, perhaps angling for escape or to fly away.
Willow was glad for that. Dark Other wasn’t a good name for anyone.
She tried, “Arawn, Duke of Tiamat?”
With her last word, the dragon turned his head, and his gaze fell upon her.
Recognition fluttered in his eyes.
“Tiamat? Is your name Tiamat?”
The dragon snaked his neck, still growling and hissing like a thousand untuned violins, but he stared at her with his fiery blue, unblinking eyes. Though his head was long and slender, his eyes faced forward like the predator he was.
“Tiamat?” Willow repeated, leaving the brick wall and inching closer.
The dragon lowered his head, his nostrils flaring near her.
Dammit, she should have brought a box full of halibut. “Yeah, I’m the nice lady who fed you the fish. I like feeding fish to dragons. Next time I see you, I will bring you lots and lots of fish if you don’t flambé me to a crispy critter.”
The dragon rested his chin on the ground, still watching her with his gorgeous, blue eyes. If she held her arm straight out, her fingers would rest on his nose.
When he breathed, the warmth of a summer wind ruffling over wildflowers blew her clothes against
her body.
“Tiamat? If you can understand me, I’m not going to hurt you.”
No understanding lit the dragon’s flaming eyes, but he had stopped growling.
She wanted to reach out and touch his nose in a moment of tender understanding between woman and dragon, but she was pretty sure Tiamat wasn’t the nose-booping type. At the most, he might tolerate a caress down his neck, but later. Maybe years later.
Also, jeez. How was she going to get a sample off of this guy? He didn’t have fur that she could clip. And she knew from when she had been pressed against his back that his skin was smooth and dry.
Arawn had jokingly said talon clippings. That might work.
Tiamat’s talons were smooth and sharp as polished stone with not an edge nor a peeling that she could grab and run.
His wings were taut skin over enormous splays of bone.
His glossy skin was soft and shone in the sun, as supple as a beaded dress.
Except for a dry ruffle around the tip of his tail.
Wait, what?
Willow looked harder, bending to see around the redwood trunks of his legs.
A pale yellow bit of dried skin was clinging to the very tip of his tail.
She looked back at him. “Do you shed your skin like a snake?”
Tiamat didn’t answer her, but he watched her closely as she sidled along the wall, beside the great bellows of his ribs and flanks, down toward his tail.
His head rose to look over his back at her.
Willow reached his tail and tried to grab it, but it whipped in the air, even banging the building and knocking a spray of brick shrapnel off the wall.
“Tiamat!” she called back at his head. “Down!”
The dragon’s flaming eyes narrowed, but he lay his tail on the ground.
Willow stooped and grabbed the dried skin. What had looked like a flake of skin from the doorway was longer than her arm. It crackled like aged cellophane in her hand.
Willow rolled the dead skin like a scroll and trudged back up the length of the dragon, his head swiveling and watching her as she walked.
Back at the front end, she regarded the amazing creature, and he lowered his head again. She threw the husk of skin inside the casino door and approached the dragon’s head.
Dragons and Mayhem Page 15