by Rhys Ford
He looked up as if he’d heard me say his name, an impossibility since I was several floors above him and his window was up, but his rheumy eyes met mine, and a sardonic grimace curled his sun-leathered face.
The last time he’d been at the warehouse was right after I bought the place. I’d been there for years, and never once had he darkened my doorway. To find him sitting in my driveway on a crisp, crystalline morning was shocking.
But not nearly as shocking as the drawn grayness of his skin as he studied me from his truck’s cab. I held up my coffee cup and lifted my eyebrows, silently questioning him if he wanted one. A curt nod brought me up from my lean on the wall, but the truck’s door creaking open drove me downstairs.
There was only one reason Dempsey would be at my doorstep. Something bad had happened… and whatever it was, I sure as hell wasn’t going to like it.
DEMPSEY WAS silent while I got us some breakfast, and he slowly picked at the scrambled eggs and bacon burritos I’d tossed together. He’d always been one to eat, no matter if he’d just had a meal. Food was something to be consumed whenever it showed up in front of you, he used to say. Eat, because you never knew when food was going to be around again. I’d taken that lesson to heart, especially after the uncountable years where my only sustenance had been my own raw flesh being fed to me piece by piece.
Him not eating got me worried.
My worry turned to a cold gnaw of ice in my stomach when he eased himself into a folding metal chair next to me as I scrubbed the living shit out of the egg and Dempsey sighed.
“Listen close, son.”
Dempsey never called me son.
I was never his kid. Hell, I’d never been a kid. Sure, I’d been a bit smaller and shorter when he’d won me in that poker game, but I’d never ever been a child. My sick and twisted father’s magic took care of that shortly after I was born. I’d come to him a malfunctioning idiot, and he’d made me into a man.
But I’d never been his son.
“Doctors found some black spots in my guts, son.” His thick sausage fingers scrubbed over the tired in his grizzled, soulful face. “They said it’s going to kill me. Maybe not tomorrow. But soon. Real fucking soon.”
I’d taken knives to my stomach that hurt less than what Dempsey was telling me. I wasn’t sure what scared me more: him calling me son or the news of those dark blotches in his gut.
The water hose dropped from my hand, and I steadied myself on the egg, its curved bottom fitted into the ring of a bucket cabriolet I’d rigged to hold it while I washed it down. My knees gave, and I fumbled back for the other chair I’d brought out, my ass finding its hard edge with a heavy thump.
The warehouse’s single remaining bay-turned-garage echoed with my panicked, hissing breaths. Dempsey sat quiet and still while I fought to take control of my thoughts, swallowed up by the sudden reality of my whatever-the-fuck-he-was dying on me before I was ready for it.
It was funny how someone’s world changes in a second. Silly, stupid things turn life inside out, but everything else continues on as if nothing happened. Behind me, my Pendle-run-battered Mustang continued to sit on blocks, its partially restored body waiting for me to attach the new quarter panels I’d gotten in the day before. A bird sang out a trilling shriek from the jacaranda tree planted in the green space between my place and Dalia’s front door.
Water continued to bathe the slightly sloping driveway at my feet, curling around the tires of Dempsey’s truck, not quite reaching its battered rims, coated in a thin layer of milky brown dust he’d brought with him from Lakeside. The city continued to buzz, cars zipping along its streets, and the nearby ironworks churned and clanged its way through another bright, sunny San Diego morning.
But my own world had gone suddenly and irrevocably dark.
Dempsey seemed to grow smaller as he spoke, grumbling about Medical and the long lines of uncaring faces he’d been trotted past. It was more about complaining than actually telling me what was wrong, but I couldn’t wrap my mind around the why and what I needed to shout at him. Those words remained lodged in the back of my throat, trapped in an amber drop of fear and unknown I couldn’t shake loose. I only found my tongue when he pulled out one of his ratty hand-rolled stogies, bit off its end, then pressed a lit lucifer to its rough tip while he sucked it to a deep red glow.
Staring at the first puff of smoke curling up from his lumpy cigar, an unreasonable rage crept over my brain, and I did something I never in my right mind would have done before that moment.
“Don’t fucking put that in your mouth, asshole.” I slapped the cigar out of his hand, sending it flying into the growing pool of water forming under the egg. “Don’t you gods-be-damned….”
The insanity of what I’d just done took a little bit to creep into my consciousness, but I didn’t care. I didn’t give a shit if he beat me into the ground. I was angry. So damned angry at what he’d done to himself. What he was doing to me.
He remained so still in his chair, I began to wonder if he’d somehow died in the space between my smacking the lit skunkweed out of his hand and my brain freaking out. I don’t know what I expected. Probably his fist in my face or maybe in my stomach. Either way I was going to get my face rearranged, and I steeled myself for the first blow.
Instead, Dempsey began to laugh.
He was a big man, taller and broader than me by a long shot, and over the years, the lean tautness of his belly eased out, giving him a paunch he religiously kept up by regular applications of alcohol and fatty foods. I couldn’t remember a time when silver didn’t fleck the scruff on his face and neck, and he’d always smelled of tobacco with the faint hint of sour sweat. Dempsey raised me as he’d been raised—hard, swift, and with a slap or two to keep me in line.
Most people would say he was a sorry excuse for a father figure. They didn’t know what they were talking about.
I had—have—a father. He’d torn me apart from the inside out, shoving iron bars under my skin knowing the metal was toxic to our kind, and gleefully used his magic to peel the flesh from my bones to feed his Wild Hunt. I’d been passed around as a party favor for his friends and served as a chopping block for his enemies. I’d been bled to white, broken to the marrow, and starved before I could even speak.
Dempsey was a Pele-blessed angel compared to Tanic cuid Anbhas, and I thanked Life every day for the hand he’d been dealt to win me. I knew how to survive. Hell, I knew how to live. A Stalker’s existence was short and brutal, and Dempsey’d been one of the best. He’d made me one of the best.
His son humbled me. His laughter made me smile.
“You came to tell me you’re… dying, old man?” I asked when he stopped to take a breath.
“No, kid.” He stared me straight in the eye, sucking at his front teeth. “I came to ask you for money. You see, those damned doctors? They have a plan. But it’s an expensive one, and the way I figure it, you owe me.”
Three
“WHAT THE hell do you mean you can’t take it?” I couldn’t believe my ears—my goddamned pointed ears—so I took a step forward in case I’d somehow missed what the squirrel-faced museum director squeaked out of his thin lips. Stabbing his chest with my finger, I pushed him back a step. “You’re taking the gods-be-damned egg.”
It was early in the morning. Way too early for any nonsense from a scrawny human dressed in a rumpled suit. The exhibit director was slender, frail in a way reminiscent of praying mantis males when they danced in front of a hungry female, and his pale gray eyes slid around behind his oversized round glasses.
Mostly, he squirmed and refused to look me in the face while he told me I’d risked life and limb to fulfill his damned contract and he no longer wanted the fricking egg.
I really regretted leaving my shotgun outside in the truck. Hell, I regretted not leaving me in the truck. I had a Glock on me, strapped into a shoulder holster mostly so I felt comfortable, but they didn’t make as nice of a boom as a shotgun did when blowing someone�
�s head clean off their neck. And I badly wanted to blow this guy’s head so far off his body it would leave a smear on the museum’s shiny marble floors.
I still stunk of egg, despite the many showers I’d given myself at home, and the whiff of sulfur followed me through the parking structure near the museum’s back entrance. The guard who’d let me into the building did jack to help me wrest the egg inside, even grumbling about sidhe bitches when I toddled by. Since the job came with a tight deadline, I wanted to slide in with the best damned egg I could get my hands on before some other asshole waltzed through the door first.
Little did I know the asshole would turn out to be the guy who’d contracted the job to begin with.
“Explain to me, dickhead. How do you cancel a contract you’ve registered with the Post? One I agreed to.” My finger made another stab, and he shuffled back a step. “You owe me. And big.”
Morrìgan, I sounded just like the man who’d raised me.
The asshole under my finger didn’t care that I’d nearly bought it in a dragon battle just a few hours ago or that Dempsey’d shown up on my doorstop with a colon full of shadows and death. The director shuffled back as if I were diseased, and his eyes flicked about, probably looking for a fat security guard to come save him. There were none in sight. He was stuck with me, pinned to the ground by his own fear and my rage.
“The money,” I growled. “Now.”
Burbling nonsensically, he crept back another step. I followed, dropping my hand but remaining close enough to keep him on edge and uncomfortable.
There really wasn’t a whole lot I could do to make him cough up the cash he owed me. Even with the SoCalGov contract in place, the museum could default, and besides lodging a complaint, I was pretty much twisting in the wind. Even if the place got banned from further contracts by the Post and all other SoCalGov agencies, freelancers would snatch up the chance to secure anything the museum asked for. We all lived and died by the wants of the rich. My getting the director and his damned museum stricken from the rolls would only drive them to another market.
And I did my best damned work for that fricking museum. I’d brought in their largest dragon skeleton, scavenged from a death match one Asian red had with a particularly vicious rival. Hell, I’d even gotten them a nightmare’s skull, a bitch and a half to scrounge—I glanced up, finally noticing the gaping empty space above me.
“What the hell?” I choked out. “Where…?”
San Diego’s Natural History Museum was world famous for its collections. Having retained much of its pre-Merge displays, the museum was located in the heart of upper-level downtown, housed in an enormous metal and concrete architectural vomit of a building most people liked to call the Ink Blot. With their move from the now sidhe-owned Balboa Park area, the museum gained space and foot traffic, catering to locals and tourists alike.
And if there was one thing San Diego was known for, it was its dragons. So San Diego’s natural history museum went full throttle on anything draconian.
Pendle was as much a part of San Diego as its lower level warrens and the roaming pandas near the old 163 highway. The former military installation was now home to countless scores of dragon types, and the museum made a lot of its money from displays of entire dragon skeletons, scales, wings, and sometimes if they were lucky, a perfectly formed but inert egg.
I’d brought in its largest dragon skeleton, and it’d hung along the long hall’s ceiling, suspended on nearly invisible wires, caught in midswoop in all its glorious fifty feet of ivory bone and fang.
A dragon that was now missing.
In fact, most of their dragon-related exhibit was stripped clean, leaving only the plaster constructs done by local artists. There were a few artifacts, some castings, and a silly footprint display of different draconian types so visitors could compare their shoe size with something that would slurp them up like an udon noodle if they actually met face-to-face.
Sure, there were other dragons—plush, grinning things set along a shop’s glass walls to coax parents into coughing up a week’s wages to keep a smile on Junior’s face. The coffee kiosks on either side of the hall were squat round interpretations of ground slithers, boasting neon spines along their roofs and sides bright enough to blind anyone who stared at them too long. There were other dribbles and drabs, illusions of the massive and teeny beasts who lived and died in the wastelands above Carlsbad, but not a single damned piece of an actual dragon.
Delicate, fragile wings made of fabric and boning framed the ceiling nearly four stories above us. The museum’s exhibits wrapped around the space, tiers of floors branching off lifts and stairs, leaving the massive hall in the middle practically empty. My dragon—the museum’s massive red—once dominated the space, its serpentine spine set into waves high enough for a child to have walked under it when it’d been on the floor. The bone fixers canted the lizard’s wings back, curving its body into an attack stance, as if it were sweeping down to snatch its prey from Pendle’s rough black hills.
Since I’d found the dead dragon in a rotting, mangled heap, I’d secretly approved of its after-death ferocity.
I’d taken great fucking pride in that dragon.
“Let’s forget about the egg for a second. Where’s the red?” I asked, pointing upward.
“The red?” He blanched, literally lost all trace of color in his face, and scurried a step to the side, hovering near a large unsidhe ceremonial urn used to capture the blood of their kills. The museum’d marked it as a decorative example of early unsidhe worship. It was pretty much a giant punch bowl used for holiday parties, but I hadn’t wanted to burst their bubble at the time.
Now was a different story. It wasn’t just a bubble I wanted to burst.
“Yeah, the red I brought in when this piece of shit kiddie show first was scrambling for something to hang its hat on. That red. Where is it?”
“That’s what I was trying to tell you, Mr. Gracen,” he sputtered, wetting my face. “With the arrival of the Dawn Court, display dragon artifacts are offensive—”
I didn’t need to hear any more. Everything unfolded for me in my mind, and the demise of my contract and the skeletal glory of my red came down to one damned pointy-eared piece of shit who hounded my shadows.
To the humans, dragons were a source of wonder and nightmares. To the sidhe, the reptilian predators were as sacred as beetles to the dead talkers. I didn’t know what the unsidhe thought about the overgrown legged snakes infesting our skies and coast, but from everything I’d seen, they were pretty much in line with the sidhe. All things scaly and frightening were treasured and precious, even as they crunched through your skull to suck out your eyeballs.
“Ryder,” I ground out while the squirrelly human doing the two-step in front of me. “You’re telling me the damned Lord of the Pandas and Light has come in here and persuaded you wankers to stop displaying dragon bits? Is that what you’re telling me?”
“The museum can’t… that is, there’s been a policy change—” The man squeaked when I grabbed the front of his shirt and yanked him up to the tips of his toes. “Mr. Gracen!”
“Let me make this short and sweet for you, bucky.” I peeled my lips back from my canines, snarling into his face as it shook a few centimeters away from mine. There was a little primal tickle in most humans. When faced with fangs, they quivered. Luckily, my sidhe blood came with fangs, and while I’d spent years practicing to speak and smile without showing them, there were times when I had to remind someone they were far lower on the food chain than they remembered. “You’re going to go reach into those deep pockets the museum has and pay me for that damned egg. I don’t care what back-asswards agreement you got into with Ryder, but a deal’s a deal. You go get me my money, or your carcass is going to be taking the place of that dragon you took down. Comprende?”
And with that, I got my money.
I FUCKING hurt.
Profanity was necessary with the kind of pain screaming up my side. No excuses for i
t, but it felt really damned good to be peeling a searing curse off the back of my teeth as the pain dug in. With the richness and fluidity of human languages, there was something gut-clenching satisfying about the base coarseness of Singlish.
And of course, the singular taste of the word fuck on my tongue.
It was cool in my warehouse. The windows were darkened to mute the drooping sun hanging near the horizon, its lingering crawl to douse itself forestalled by the long summer day. Newt periodically lounged on the love seat, his straggly tail curled up over his tiny head, eyes shut against life in general and the rushing shush of the ocean coming through the open sliding glass doors leading to the back deck.
On a normal day, if I wasn’t doing a run, I’d either be spending the afternoon peeling off skin from knuckles as I worked on restoring my Mustang, Oketsu, or if I were feeling worn out or broken, I’d laze on the couch and read one of the books I’d scored from the swap meet’s bargain bin.
Instead I was wasting my wholly fucked-up day under the tender care of one of the most sadistic men I knew. And I was practically naked for the experience.
My skin burned, embers sliding along in lines and blotches across my hip and thigh. The area was already tender, having survived my jeans being scraped out along with about a pound of tiny black rocks. If I’d been smart, I’d have waited a few days before I put myself under Jason’s not-so-tender care, but he was on a tight schedule, and I had an even tighter budget.
It pretty much came down to I had an Edelbrock carburetor he needed to get back up to Old San Fran, and he had a set of needles and some ink I needed shoved under my skin.
“Almost done, man,” Jason reassured me for the fifteenth time. I was used to his lies. It was almost like we were married… or close enough. He’d whisper a sweet promise in my ear, and I’d believe him only long enough for the pain to begin again. “I’ve got one small piece of shading to do. Almost done.”