The Dragon Conspiracy

by Lisa Shearin

  “May I sit down?”

  She searched my face, concerned. “Do you feel that you need to?”

  “I wasn’t sitting down either time before.” I gave her a tired little smile. “But it’s been a long night, ma’am.”

  “That it has, Agent Fraser. Please, do be seated.”

  Ian spoke for the first time in about five minutes. “May I stay, ma’am?”

  “Of course.” She glanced at me. “If you do not mind?”

  “Mind?” I turned to Ian. “Why wouldn’t I want you here?”

  My partner looked uncharacteristically uncomfortable. It was kinda cute. “It isn’t . . . personal?”

  I coughed back a chortle. Ian was serious, and I didn’t want to laugh at him. “No more personal than the two of us having a chat. Me and Ms. Sagadraco will just be looking at each other. You won’t hear a thing. We will. That is, if it works.” I looked back at our boss. “Are you ready, ma’am?”

  I felt a push behind my eyes.

  “Always.”

  I froze and my eyes went wide.

  “I take it that means you can hear me?” my dragon boss asked.

  I managed a series of tiny nods.

  “Is it working?” Ian whispered.

  “Oh yeah,” I whispered right back, not taking my eyes off of Ms. Sagadraco. “So, how am I able to do this?”

  “I’ve never heard of it manifesting in a seer. However, there are not many dragons left, and it is a rare gift, so perhaps you are merely the first.”

  “Oh wonderful. I’m a trailblazer.”

  “Actually, it is wonderful. Especially if we can also communicate over distance. Do I have your permission to try later?”

  “Could you give me a call on my phone first? It might not be quite so . . . startling that way.”

  “Of course.”

  She glanced over my shoulder at Ian. “That went exceptionally well,” she told him out loud.

  He looked from me to the boss and back again. “It worked?”

  “Perfectly,” she said.

  I went with more nods and what I hoped wasn’t a freaked-out rictus of a smile.

  There was a soft tap on the door. It opened a crack and Caera Filarion stuck her head in.

  “I’m sorry to interrupt, ma’am. Mr. Moreau wasn’t at his desk, and I knew you’d want to hear this.”

  I went still. “Ben?”

  “Oh yeah. But don’t worry, he’s fine. He simply has more horsepower under his hood than we thought possible.”

  Vivienne Sagadraco beckoned with a bejeweled hand. “Come in, Agent Filarion.”

  Caera did and closed the door behind her.

  “It’s rather too soon for your team to have a full report,” the boss noted.

  “We’re still testing Mr. Sadler, but I knew you’d want to know that our preliminary results indicate that Ben Sadler is at least a level ten gem mage.”

  That was confusing. “I thought the scale only goes to ten.”

  “It does. Tall, blond, and beautiful you brought home with you is testing off the charts—all of them.”

  “So he’s not a newbie?”

  “Oh, we’re pretty sure he’s just coming into his power.” Caera bit back a snicker. “He has absolutely zero control. We had a test gem that’s been especially responsive to mage stimuli in the past. He blew out every light and electrical outlet in the infirmary, and that was from simply looking at the thing. Bob from Research was observing the test. Unfortunately he was standing in front of an outlet; now he’s sporting a bad perm.”

  Ian chortled. “So Ben Sadler was telling the truth.”

  “In my opinion, yes. He was open to our questioning and forthright in his responses. Mac, you saving him from that harpy made our job infinitely easier,” she told me. “He trusts you. Ian? Uh, not so much. Ben sees his talent as more of an incurable medical condition, and we’re the only available specialists. Unfortunate that he perceives it that way, but it’s a normal human reaction.”

  Ian turned to the boss. “Ma’am, you said that Viktor Kain is a gem mage. Do you think he could sense a like talent?”

  “Definitely.”

  “If he really thinks we’re behind the robbery, you ordering us to get Ben Sadler out of the museum would play right up his paranoid alley.”

  “Because he would believe that I would be using Mr. Sadler to activate the diamonds to do whatever it is they can do.”

  Ian nodded.

  “So what’s next?” I asked. “We can’t keep him locked up.”

  “We could,” Caera said. “But we won’t, at least not if he continues to be cooperative. He’s been honest with us; we’ll be honest with him. It’s not safe for him anywhere in the city right now. Aside from Viktor Kain, those harpies are a concern, but so are the police and the media.”

  “I’d almost rather face a harpy than a swarm of folks sticking cameras and mikes in my face,” I said.

  “It’s also not in our best interests for Ben to be picked up by the police,” Caera said. “Open and honest to our questions is good; it wouldn’t be good at all if the FBI got hold of him.”

  Ian nodded. “There were plenty of high-profile internationals at the Met tonight. The diamonds belonged to the head of a known Russian criminal organization. Every alphabet agency out there will want a piece of the action.”

  Vivienne reached for her slender phone. “Perhaps I should call Bastian now.”

  8

  IT was after midnight. There was too much happening too fast to even think about getting any sleep.

  What had happened at the Met and to us on the way back to headquarters had activated SPI’s version of DEFCON 2. Supernatural creatures had been seen by hundreds of people. Enemy combatants were on the ground in the city—that would be Viktor Kain, and whoever had masterminded the robbery and was pulling those harpies’ strings. And last, but certainly not least, possible weapons of mass destruction had been stolen and were in the hands of a powerful, but as yet unknown, adversary. The only thing needed to bump it to a DEFCON 1 would be one of the enemy combatants taking open action in the city.

  SPI’s media and PR team, on the other hand, had gone into DEFCON 1 mode the instant photos and videos of those harpies had started popping up online, and then in network news coverage of the incident, and pop up they had. The Media department was on the second floor of our headquarters’ complex, which was located right under Washington Square Park, and was nearly as big as the park itself. The complex was centered around what we called the bull pen, which was where most of the field agents had their offices. Above were five stories of steel catwalks connecting labs, more offices, and conference rooms.

  Our media team was in full crisis management mode. They were used to having to deal with the occasional urban legend, but this was exactly what they trained for. This situation may have been SPI’s worst nightmare, but these people were living the dream. I’d never seen them happier.

  Overseeing the gleeful, perfectly orchestrated chaos that the second floor had become was a petite powerhouse of a woman who was the greatest irony of all.

  Kylie O’Hara—SPI Media department director, world-renowned debunker of the supernatural, and the ultimate mistress of misinformation—wasn’t even human herself.

  She was a dryad.

  Her real name was something unpronounceable with way too many apostrophes. You know the ones; the kind of names you see in fantasy novels, but have no idea how to say. You’d be surprised at the amount of stuff those authors got right. Unfortunately, rampant use of apostrophes was one of them. The extremely shortened form of her first name was similar enough to Kylie, and she used O’Hara because it was the name of the state forest near the shore of Lake Ontario in upstate New York where she was born.

  And people thought her green eyes and last name meant she was Ir
ish.

  At five foot and a handful of change tall, Kylie O’Hara didn’t do her hoax busting from the shadows. Far from it. She put herself front and center on TV and radio talk shows, and was accepted by respected journalists as an expert on the exposé. I’d heard last week that Syfy had offered Kylie her own series where she would reveal and demonstrate how hoaxes were perpetrated, and how paranormal frauds pulled the wool over the eyes of the masses. Heck, even if I didn’t know and like her, I’d watch that. Whenever we’d gone out to lunch together, we never had to wait for a table. It didn’t matter how crowded the restaurant was; we always got a table—a good one.

  Kylie and I had more than a few things in common. One was our jobs. I exposed supernatural criminals by seeing through their glamours. Kylie exposed paranormal hoaxes, either by revealing a fake, or by debunking the real thing to cover it up. We both had journalism degrees, though Kylie had gone to Columbia, and I, well, hadn’t. Last, but not least, we were both country girls. I was from a small town in the North Carolina mountains; Kylie was from a large tree in a New York state forest.

  Her website, hoaxbusters.com, had become a daily entertainment stop for millions; she’d recently passed two million followers on Twitter; and just because she hadn’t yet displaced cat videos from its YouTube throne didn’t mean she wasn’t working on it. In her downtime—what there was of it—she loved World of Warcraft, which was the one place other than SPI where she could be herself.

  The door to the Media department’s version of their bull pen opened and Kylie stepped out onto the catwalk leading to the elevators. Her dark hair was swept up into a twist, and she was wearing what’d become her standard TV interview look. I called it “business funky.” Her bright blue suit was classic cut, but Kylie knew how to have fun with accessories. It told viewers, “I take my job seriously, not myself.” Her most famous accessory was her collection of eyeglasses. She changed them to suit her outfit and her mood. Like most supernaturals, Kylie’s vision was perfect, better than human perfect; but she thought glasses were fun. Combine all of the above with a voracious love of the latest technology, and Kylie O’Hara had earned a place among geek royalty.

  Right now, she was geek royalty with a job to do. I’d seen the video that’d been released in the last hour from a witness at the Met, someone who’d been close enough and had the skill to get some damned good—and damning—footage. Footage that’d been liberally smeared all over the Internet and networks. The chance of making this go away quietly was gone for good. Kylie had an impossible task ahead of her.

  From the impish grin on her face, gleam in her eyes, and determined stride, you’d think that video and those that were sure to follow were a lifetime of birthday presents given to her on one night. I had no clue how she was going to pull it off, but Kylie apparently felt armed for battle and was confident of victory.

  “Go get ’em, tiger!” yelled one of the field agents in our bull pen.

  Kylie rewarded him with a megawatt smile and a thumbs-up.

  The bull pens on both floors erupted in applause, whistles, and cheers. I joined in.

  Then I saw a sight I’d never beheld—my partner standing next to the stairs with a big, goofy grin on his face. The instant he sensed me watching him, the grin vanished.

  “Hey, don’t stop on my account,” I teased. “Kylie isn’t the only one putting on an enjoyable show.”

  Kylie had started at SPI a few months before I had. Ian dated, but it was no one serious, and it definitely wasn’t anyone from the office. I’d surmised that my partner was one of those “no workplace romance” kind of guys. Which, when you thought about it, was pretty smart. If a relationship went sour, you’d be biting that lemon every day at work.

  But from what I’d just witnessed and sensed before that, that didn’t mean he didn’t want to. I’d told him more than once to just ask the girl out already.

  * * *

  Kylie O’Hara was beautiful, brilliant, fun, and could turn the most adamant witness of a supernatural event into a doubting Thomas in under five minutes flat. She’d have made one hell of a lawyer. I was glad she’d picked us instead.

  As far as I was concerned, there came a time when some rules were meant to be broken—or at least bent to be more accommodating. If anyone had learned the lesson the hard way that life was too uncertain not to bend a few rules, it would be Ian.

  Before joining SPI, he’d been a homicide detective with the NYPD. All that came to an end the night he and his partner were ambushed by a gang of ghouls. Three of them had used their claws on Ian like switchblades—while their leader had eaten his partner.

  As a result of that attack, Ian had spent a month in the hospital. One night, Vivienne Sagadraco had paid him a visit and made him an offer he didn’t want to refuse. He’d sworn to get the thing that’d butchered his partner. The boss offered him a job that would take “to protect and serve” to a whole new level. When he’d been released from the hospital, he turned in his resignation with the NYPD and came to work for SPI.

  I was glad Ian had picked SPI, too. I was alive because Ian had been there for me, determined that he would not lose another partner. He’d taken good care of me, and I’d done all that I was able to do the same for him.

  I’d decided several months ago that it was best if Ian and I kept to being partners of the professional kind. Ian was teaching me how to stay alive until I could fend for myself better. I’d decided that my real life was more important than my love life. I could get a love life elsewhere. Eventually. Maybe. Starting a romantic relationship with Ian and having it go bad would make our time at work awkward. In our line of work, awkward would be a distraction, and distractions could and would get you killed.

  As far as I was concerned, Ian’s rule about no workplace romance should be more of a guideline than a rule. Rules could bend, but could he? For his sake, I hope he learned.

  I glanced over to the stairs. Ian was gone. I turned back to my computer.

  I didn’t worry about missing whatever news program or show Kylie was scheduled for. Every monitor in the bull pen would be playing it as soon as her segment started. Until Kylie went live for the opening move in her game of smoke and mirrors, I thought about trying to grab a power nap, but almost immediately nixed that idea.

  SPI had dorm-style accommodations here for when we went “all hands” so that folks could get some shut-eye in shifts. I could have grabbed a couple of hours. Call me overly sensitive, but two harpy attacks and a chewing-out by a Russian dragon in one hour was doing a better job keeping me awake than a whole six-pack of Mountain Dew.

  I didn’t think I was ever gonna sleep again.

  Bob and Rob in Research—or “the Roberts,” as the boss called them—would be giving her a full report on the Dragon Eggs, but had I decided to do a little digging on my own.

  If I couldn’t afford to own world-class diamonds, at least I could look at them. Google gave me almost more information than I knew what to do with. Though the more I read, the less enthused I was about having any one of the Dragon Eggs hanging around my neck, let alone having the entire clutch in my possession. Whoever had stolen the things just moved up in my estimation from jewel thief to certifiable psycho.

  I already knew that two of the diamonds weren’t of this world. The pink Queen of Dreams had been stolen from the goblin crown jewels, and the pale blue Eye of Destiny had been taken from the elven royal treasury. SPI employed elves and a few goblins who were the living equivalent of the Internet when it came to the races: culture, politics, and history. All of which we needed on a daily and occasionally hourly basis, since trouble could be brewing at any time in any place in the world. When our people had to step in and mediate a situation between the two races that on a friendly day merely despised each other, it was critical to know not only who you were dealing with, but also how to deal with them, and this meant having access to knowledgeable people.

>   Unlike elf and goblin nobles, our elven and goblin agents got along just fine. Some of them even socialized together after work. It must have something to do with the atmosphere of New York. It was a worldwide melting pot; so it wasn’t that big of a step to make it an inter-dimensional melting pot. Maybe all elven and goblin nobles should have to live in New York for a month. Maybe if they didn’t kill one another, they’d learn to get along.

  The Queen of Dreams and Eye of Destiny were important to goblin and elven royalty; therefore the pink and pale blue diamonds—and their whereabouts—were important to us.

  Both stones had been stolen from their respective royal treasuries around the time that they joined the five diamonds from our world and came into the possession of the supremely unlucky Alexandra, matriarch of the soon-to-be-murdered-and-buried-in-a-pit Russian imperial family.

  It said a lot about elven and goblin life spans that a hundred years wasn’t all that long for the diamonds to be stolen and still missing. The same elven royal was still on the throne, and just recently the youngest son of the goblin queen who’d had the diamond stolen from her had become king of the goblins.

  The five diamonds from our world had left quite a bloody trail to follow. The Star of Asia was the red one in the cursed clutch. Legend had it that there had originally been a pair of red diamonds that were the eyes of a god in a temple—now in ruins—in a Thai jungle. The first documented owner, an Englishman, died with his entire family in a carriage crash. Subsequent owners had experienced overwhelming desires to take long walks on short skyscraper ledges.

  The Green Ghost, which had also been known as Le Fantomê Vert by one of its French owners, had also been stolen from the eye of a statue. You had to wonder if any of these guys robbing temples ever seriously asked themselves: “Is this a good idea?” Apparently not. Though you also had to wonder what’d happened to the greedy, stupid schmucks. The oracle that was Google did not reveal their fates. The Green Ghost was one of the eyes belonging to a statue of Buddha. His peace-loving followers notwithstanding, this particular representation of the serene one appeared to take grave offense at having one of his eyeballs popped out with some temple raider’s knife, and proceeded to take it out on every human who crossed its glittery path for the next four hundred years.