Dragon Consultant

by Mell Eight

  CHAPTER TWO

  Mercury woke slowly, awareness returning to him in stages. Feeling came first: the softness of the bed underneath him and the warmth of the blankets covering him. Then a touch of mystery surfaced. Why wasn't he lying on the ground in the middle of a forest in his dragon form? Worry came afterwards. Where was he, to be in a bed, and where were his kits?

  It was the worry that propelled Mercury's eyes open. He was met with the sight of a well-appointed room. The walls were a generic off-white color, complimented by light blue curtains closed over large windows. There was furniture along the walls too, but Mercury was more interested in the kit snoring lightly where he was curled on the end of the bed.

  Chrome was in human form, strangely enough. He preferred his dragon shape because it made it easier for him to bite things, yet someone had convinced Chrome to stay in his more defenseless shape. Chrome was even dressed in loose sleeping pants and a T-shirt, another thing Mercury hadn't thought possible. Chrome snuffled in his sleep and rolled over. Sleepy brown eyes blinked slowly open, but they eventually focused firmly on Mercury's own bronze-colored ones.

  It took a second for comprehension to kick in and then Chrome's eyes widened comically.

  "Daddy's awake!" Chrome yelled at the top of his lungs, making Mercury jump in surprise. Chrome clumsily fell off the bed with a thump and then ran to the door. He yanked it open and yelled out into the hallway Mercury could see through the open door. "Daddy's awake!"

  More thumps and bangs could be heard further down the hall and then a stampede of small feet pounded closer. Nickel was in the lead. His short blue hair was flattened slightly on one side from sleep, but his eyes were sharp as they took in Mercury's open eyes and the way he was awkwardly propped up on his pillows. 'Ron was just behind Nickel. She giggled happily and bounced onto the bed to give Mercury a clutching hug around his middle. Copper strolled in, saw that Mercury was okay, and turned back around. Mercury hadn't missed the fleeting look of relief that crossed Copper's face, but the most aloof of his kits wasn't about to openly declare that fact. He would probably tell the egg Mercury had little doubt he was heading back to curl up with all about it.

  All of his kits looked clean and cared for. Someone had taken the time to give them baths and to get them into clothes, a feat Mercury didn't envy. All of his kits except one. Mercury looked around, half expecting Lumie to have snuck in somehow, but he didn't see his baby red.

  "Where's Lumie?" Mercury asked. He untangled one hand from the covers so he could stroke 'Ron's hair. She was still hugging him tight and it didn't seem like she was going to let him go any time soon.

  "He's gotten attached and I can't get him off," a new voice said from the doorway. Nickel didn't tense, so this stranger wasn't a danger, but he still looked wary. Mercury let a little magic flare between his fingers, the warmth fizzing welcomingly against his skin as he sat up a little straighter and turned to face the stranger.

  Mercury recognized the look on the stranger's face even if Mercury didn't actually recognize him. The perplexed twist to his lips as he looked down at Lumie sleeping in his arms was one Mercury had seen on his own face in the mirror plenty of times. There was nothing quite like going to bed alone and waking up to find Lumie had somehow managed to sneak past his considerable defenses and latch on without waking him. Lumie had his hands fisted in the stranger's nightshirt and Mercury knew that if the man removed his arms where he was gently holding Lumie in place, Lumie wouldn't drop an inch.

  The stranger looked bemused, but also resigned. He had apparently spent enough time with Lumie to get used to his quirks. Mercury wished he knew how much time had passed since he had fallen asleep in the woods. What exactly had happened to his kits that they had managed to find hospitality?

  "You wouldn't know how to get him to let go?" the man asking pleadingly.

  Mercury shrugged. "Not a clue. When he wakes up, he'll wander off somewhere." Now that he could see that Lumie was safe, Mercury refocused on the stranger. He was a gloriously beautiful man, almost too beautiful to be human. His nose was a thin blade between prominent cheekbones and wide blue eyes. His blond hair trailed in messy waves past his shoulders, emphasizing how broad and muscled they were. The tips of pointed ears poked through his hair, the ends pierced with silver rings that jingled as he shifted in place. He looked like a man from an age where hair was long as a fashion statement and cravats had more lace than sense, except he was wearing comfortable and functional looking cotton sleepwear instead of formalwear. Mercury knew he looked like a man who had spent years in the woods: unkempt and ragged. His hair was long because he needed a haircut, not because of any fashion. Although, Mercury didn't think he would look as good in pajamas as the stranger did even if he were properly groomed.

  'Ron finally released Mercury and found a comfortable spot in his lap to curl up. "You don't look the same?" she asked, tilting her head slightly to the side as she studied the stranger curiously.

  The stranger flushed, his cheeks turning slightly red as if he were embarrassed. "Ah, my apologies, 'Ron." All of a sudden an inner light vanished, as if a light bulb inside the stranger's body had been abruptly switched off. His skin and hair lost the ethereal glow that had mesmerized Mercury and his pointed ears shrank until they were hidden behind his hair. The stranger looked ordinary—still far too beautiful for a mere human—but he could pass as one now.

  Seeing a glamour tossed about like it only took a thought to utilize such advanced magic told Mercury exactly whose house his kits had invaded. There was only one person in the area purported to have that much strength.

  "You're the Genie of the East?" Mercury asked, although it was more of a statement of fact than a question.

  A slight frown flittered across the stranger's face. "I have been called that," he said grumpily, "but since I'm not a genie, that's hardly accurate."

  Not a genie? Then how could he have the power the rumors suggested he did? "You are the Supernatural Consultant, though?"

  "I am," the stranger replied. "Please call me Dane."

  "He found us in the woods and brought you to a doctor!" 'Ron explained eagerly. Her eyes were shining with hero worship as she gazed eagerly at Dane before looking up at Mercury as if she needed assurance that her awe wasn't misplaced.

  Mercury couldn't help smiling at 'Ron despite his misgivings. Doctors were… the simplest way to put it was bad. He didn't think the Genie of the East would be working for the enemy—at least, he hoped not. It was why he had been traveling through the mountains towards Dane in the first place.

  "He gave us lollies and then the green lady helped us get clean," Chrome added, eager to be included in the conversation.

  A fleeting look of frustration crossed Dane's face as Chrome and 'Ron both began explaining Dane's appearance and how they had magically gotten to his house. There wasn't any room for Dane to interject, which he clearly wanted to do. Mercury could easily guess why too, given the strange gathering of dragons he had taken in. The entire situation was against normal dragon behavior, but then their reasoning for banding together was drastic enough to warrant it.

  Dane wanted to know that reason, but he also appeared to know that interrupting the kits would be a bad idea.

  Mercury was fighting off a wide yawn by the time the awkward and twisting story arrived at the present. The kits had been in the forest without his protection for an entire week. They knew how to survive, particularly Nickel, but they shouldn't have had to. They were still kits, and dragon fever or not, he had failed them.

  Despite his guilt, the flu still had its horrible claws dug deep. Mercury's eyes were sliding closed involuntarily and he felt too weak to fight against it. Even the magic he had gathered in defense fizzled away.

  "Back to bed, everyone." Dane insisted. 'Ron whined something Mercury was too tired to interpret, but he felt the bed shift as she climbed down and Chrome followed.

  "I'll keep an eye on Dane," Nickel's voice whispered softly into Mercury's ear b
efore his footsteps followed the other kits out of the room. Nickel was certainly capable of that. It was a relief to know that someone wasn't blindly trusting Dane not to be in league with the enemy. Given Dane's excellent reputation, Mercury and the kits believed it was very likely Dane could be trusted, but it still didn't hurt to be cautious. Mercury slipped back to sleep hoping nothing would go wrong while he was unconscious.

  *~*~*

  Sunlight was shining through the windows when Mercury blinked his eyes open again. Hours had passed, but without a clock Mercury didn't know how many. He was alone in the room, but 'Ron's distinctive laughter could be heard somewhere outside.

  It took a lot more effort than Mercury expected to throw the covers back and turn so his feet were planted on the floor. He had to pause to let the room stop spinning before he let his leg muscles propel him into a standing position. He wobbled his way to the bathroom, holding onto furniture in order to stay upright. By the time he had finished using the facilities, his legs were shaking and he wasn't entirely certain he would make it back to the bed without crawling.

  It wasn't a dignified position to be in, especially when he had kits to be taking care of. He wrestled the bathroom door open and hung in the jamb as he looked hopelessly at the distance between him and the bed.

  "There ya are!" a woman's voice said chidingly. "Thought you'd run off for a sec." She hurried over and slipped her shoulder under his arm, forcing him to lean on her as she guided him back to the bed. Her skin was very green, which could only mean she was Daisy, the woman that had been taking care of the kits.

  Daisy got him sitting up in bed with the covers pulled comfortably up to his waist. Only once he was set did she turn away, but she only grabbed a tray from the bedside table. Soft-poached eggs on toast with a large glass of orange juice filled the tray. Daisy carefully situated the tray on his lap.

  "I'll let Dane and the kits know yer up," she said. "Eat up." She swiftly left the room, giving Mercury a glance at the green tail that 'Ron had so eagerly told him about poking out from the bottom of her skirt.

  Mercury found silverware and started eating. He was starving. All three eggs and the slices of toast were long gone by the time anyone stopped by to interrupt. Mercury was working on his orange juice when Dane's knock came.

  Mercury would have liked to assume that the gorgeous man from the night before had been a figment of his fevered imagination. That wasn't the case at all. Dane's glamour was still in place, but that didn't diminish his good looks in the least bit. He was walking funny, almost stilted, as he moved across the floor towards the bed. A glance downward revealed Lumie standing on Dane's foot, thumb in his mouth. Lumie squealed, his words too garbled to understand, and threw himself at the bed. It took a couple of tries, but he somehow managed to climb onto the mattress. He copied 'Ron's move from the previous night, clamping his arms around Mercury's middle with no intention of letting go. Mercury moved the empty tray out of the way and pulled Lumie close. His youngest kit was the most needy, but Mercury loved that about Lumie.

  "I'm sure you have some questions," Mercury asked when Dane continued to stand awkwardly next to the bed.

  "A few," Dane said with a small smile that twisted his lips to emphasize the understatement in his tone. "I should probably ask for your name first. I can't keep calling you 'the kits' dad' in my head."

  That was easy enough to answer. "Mercury."

  "You were traveling to see me?" Dane continued.

  Mercury nodded. "I was hoping you would be able to help us."

  One eyebrow lifted in curiosity. "You needed supernatural help?" he asked. "You're a precious dragon. Your magic is one of the strongest of all supernatural creatures. What would you need my help with?"

  "To save the dragons," Mercury stated, his voice dark and serious.

  That clearly wasn't what Dane was expecting; Mercury could see that when Dane took a step back in surprise and shock filled his face. "What's wrong with the dragons?"

  That wasn't a question that was easy to answer. It required going back three years to when Mercury had first been yanked into the middle of the fracas.

  "I was walking home from work one evening," he began slowly, the memory far too fresh in his mind, "but I never made it. I don't know what happened. My magic didn't alert me that I was under attack and I didn't see or feel anything, but one moment I was walking past the pizza place and the next I was waking up strapped down on a gurney. Four humans were wheeling me down a white hallway and all I could smell was dragon's bane."

  Dane winced. He obviously knew just how debilitating the herb dragon's bane could be to dragons. In the most minor cases it set off sneezing and coughing attacks, but it quickly became more debilitating the longer the exposure. Some dragons ended up with severe asthma attacks, while others became paralyzed to the point that they couldn't move to escape the affected area. 'Ron, for example, got both the asthma and paralysis, which made it potentially deadly should she be exposed, but Mercury just got a nasty case of the sniffles.

  "I'm not as allergic as most, so I started gathering my magic. I don't think the humans knew what type of dragon I am. I was in human form and bronze dragons are mistaken for brown very often. They didn't notice when the straps holding me down unhooked, but they did notice when I knocked two of them out. I got free just in time for a section of wall to blow out of a nearby room. This tiny blue dragon kit flew through the opening, killed the six guards who were responding, and then turned on me. He couldn't have been more than four or five years old, but the second he realized I was also a dragon and was handling the guards in the hallway, he turned around and went back into the room. I eventually followed."

  Mercury had to catch his breath and swallow bile as the memories from that night played like a movie in his head. The blood staining the walls and the tiny claws of the blue kit. The screams of humans and of dragons. By the time he had been able to follow the kit into the room, four other blue dragon kits were dead. A fifth was on her way to death as she bled helplessly on the floor and a sixth was so disfigured that it was a mercy for him to die. Two eggs were smashed open, their innocent contents dead on the floor too.

  "They were experimenting on blue dragons," Mercury tried to explain. "Injecting something into their eggs before they hatched and performing experiments on the kits. It was horrible. Nickel showed me everything that night and I destroyed that building and all the research inside. They were going to send me somewhere where they were researching brown dragons. I found that out from a chart hung on the end of my gurney. Nickel and I teamed up to find and save the other dragons."

  "And then Daddy came and got me!" Lumie insisted eagerly.

  Mercury couldn't stop a gentle smile from forming on his lips as he looked down at Lumie's earnest red eyes. Even his worst memories couldn't overcome that good one. He and Nickel had been dismantling the research station at the red dragon compound so Mercury could destroy it properly when behind them came a scream. A guard had been trying to sneak up on them, and the tiniest dragon kit Mercury had ever seen had latched his teeth into the guard's ankle.

  Copper had killed the guard and scooped Lumie safely into his arms. They were the only two surviving kits, along with an egg that Mercury wasn't sure would ever hatch.

  "I went and got 'Ron and Chrome first, but yes, then I got you." Lumie beamed at his answer.

  Dane looked outraged at Mercury's story. His lips were pinched and his eyes hard and he was losing a little control over his glamour as he glowed slightly with fury.

  "I will figure out who's doing this and put a stop to it," he snarled.

  "We have to find the air dragon research lab first." Mercury insisted. "I know it's somewhere in the east."

  Dane frowned. "In my territory?" He sounded even angrier at the idea. "I'll take care of it."

  He spun around and stomped out of the room.

  Lumie sighed and snuggled closer. "I like him." Lumie insisted, "even if Chrome really wants to bite him."


  "Is there anything Chrome doesn't want to bite?" Mercury replied.

  Lumie giggled. "No." His eyes slid closed as a yawn split his face. Mercury liked the idea of a nap. He couldn't chase after Dane, not with his legs still feeling like wet noodles, and there wasn't much he could do from inside a bed except nap. Mercury rearranged Lumie so he was under the covers too, then curled around his baby kit and slowly fell back to sleep.

  CHAPTER THREE

  It was all there, right under Dane's fricking nose. Three years ago he'd heard of a government science lab getting bombed, but that event had gotten lost between the pearl-snatching from a naiad, the fight to save a dryad family's forest from a greedy developer, and dozens of other cases Dane had been involved with at the time. Besides, there hadn't been any indication that the bombing had any supernatural connections, which meant he wouldn't have had any interest in it. At the time, he had chalked it up to human terrorism and went on with his life.

  The bomber called himself Quicksilver, Dane found as he read through old news reports of all three bombings. The bomber would write the very biblical Let My People Go statement on one of the few walls still standing when he was finished destroying the building, sign it with his pseudonym, and vanish until the next attack.

  There had only been a total of three attacks, and they were spread out enough that the multitude of news articles was a little odd. None of the articles had any information on what the labs were researching, just that someone had the gall to bomb them. Dane clicked to another webpage with an article detailing the most recent attack that had occurred just over three months ago. The article was only a week old. Three months was a very long time for the news stations to actually still be interested in the story—their viewers had a shorter attention span then that—which meant someone from higher up the food chain was pressuring the news agencies to keep the story fresh in the citizen's minds. Someone in a position of power wanted the unequivocal support of viewers who had been bombarded with the media-released version of the truth for too long. Should Quicksilver be caught, any jury would already be biased against him. Dane had seen it happen before and it was a damned effective tool used far too often—and usually by the government—for nefarious means.