Minimum Wage Magic (DFZ Book 1)

by Rachel Aaron

  “Then don’t,” he said coldly, jerking his head back toward the glowing net, which was now filled with cheeping, hopping cockatrices. “You can take your forty percent and do whatever you want. Start a petting zoo, I don’t care. But sixty percent of that lot is mine, and you can’t stop me from selling them to anyone I want.”

  A lump formed in my throat as he spoke. A sad, hard lump no words seemed to be able to get by.

  “He’s right, you know,” Kauffman said behind me. “You’re wasting your breath. Nik’s a stone-cold killer who’d sell his mother if the price was right. He keeps saying he’s getting out of the business, that he’s a Cleaner now, but I hired him just a few months ago to break a man’s knees. I didn’t even have to up my rates.”

  Nik closed his eyes. “Shut up.”

  “But Nik understands the power of money better than anyone,” Kauffman went on. “There’s nothing in this world he loves more, because money is the only thing keeping him alive.”

  “What does he mean by that?” I asked.

  Nik turned away. “Nothing a rich girl would understand.”

  “Of course I can’t understand if you won’t tell me,” I said angrily, smacking my hand against his metal chest. “But you keep saying ‘rich girl’ like it means ignorant, and that’s as stupid as it is wrong. It’s because I’ve been rich that I understand what money can’t do. I’ve lived the luxury of never having to worry about food or clothes or if I could pay a bill, and I threw it away because the price of having all that wealth was giving up something I was worthless without. That doesn’t mean I don’t like money. I want to be rich just as much as you do! That’s why I bust my butt as a Cleaner, but I also know that money isn’t everything. I know this, because I tried to buy freedom and integrity and love, and I couldn’t. But while you can’t buy them, you can absolutely sell them. That’s why I’m fighting you so hard on this. You’re about to sell something that money can’t buy. That’s a bad deal, Nik, and I’d be a worthless business partner if I let you take it.”

  By the time I finished, Nik’s fists were clenched so tight that his metal hand was creaking. I wasn’t sure if that meant I’d gotten through to him or if he was barely holding himself back from punching me. The reality was probably a little of both, but if there was one thing of value I’d learned from my father, it was that once you’d drawn a line in the sand, you could never step back. So I didn’t. I stayed stubbornly put, meeting Nik glare for glare until he turned away with a curse.

  “She’s an idiot, Nikola,” Kauffman warned. “Don’t listen to her.”

  Nik said nothing. He just stood there, steadfastly looking at anything that wasn’t Kauffman or me. Since the cockatrice chicks were the only other thing in the room, this meant he ended up watching them as they tussled and nipped and snoozed together in blissful ignorance of what was going on above their hideous little heads.

  “Kauffman,” he said at last, after the silence had stretched on for way too long. “Who are you working for?”

  Kauffman rolled his bloodshot eyes. “He’s spending millions of dollars to corner the market on rare animals for the purposes of fighting them in arenas. Who do you think I’m working for?”

  I had no idea. Nik must have, though, because that tidbit of information seemed to push him over the edge.

  “No deal,” he said.

  “Really?” I said excitedly.

  “Have you lost your mind?” Kauffman yelled at the same time. “We’re talking seven million—”

  “I know exactly how much we’re talking about,” Nik said, putting his face in his hands. “And the answer is no.”

  “You can’t possibly—” Kauffman cut off with a sputter. “Do you really think you’re not for sale? You?”

  “I’m always for sale,” Nik snapped back. “But not to him.”

  The way he said that shut Kauffman down cold. It made me cower, too. There was a lifetime of hate buried under those words, but I didn’t dare ask him about it. From the look on his face, Nik was going to kill someone in the next five minutes, and if I didn’t want it to be me, I’d better make myself scarce. I did so by walking to the far edge of the cistern and bringing up my AR to see if there was such a thing as a cockatrice rescue.

  “You should tell him he made the right choice,” Sibyl whispered.

  “I don’t think he wants to hear that,” I whispered back.

  “Probably not,” she agreed. “His body temperature and pulse rate are way up. Better let him cool down, figuratively and literally.”

  I nodded slowly, reading the mission statement of the Cockatrice Council of Canada to see if they were legit.

  “You know,” Sibyl said. “You don’t have to give them to a rescue. Pet store isn’t a bad fate, and unlike charities, they pay. Maybe not millions, but anything’s better than nothing.”

  “Not in this case,” I said, opening a new window to bring up the list of entities protected by the Peacemaker Edict. Sure enough, cockatrices were right at the top, which meant Kauffman had been telling the truth, the bastard. “Anyone who’ll buy an animal protected by the Edict is either insane or a criminal. Either way, they’re going to turn around and resell to the highest bidder, and unless cockatrices become the hot must-have celebrity pet in the next few hours, that means the arena. There’s simply too much money on the table not to go there. The only people we can trust are the ones who already have cockatrices, because they’re the ones who’ve already been offered millions and turned them down.”

  Unfortunately for me, all of those people seemed to live in secret locations. That was understandable when you were protecting animals that were worth gobs of money, but it made them really difficult to contact. That said, there was one group I knew would be interested that would be very easy to call. I actually already had their number stored in my phone, in case of emergencies. I wasn’t sure if this counted, but if there was anyone who was interested in enforcing the Peacemaker’s Edict, it was his office at the DFZ Dragon Consulate.

  “Hoo boy,” Sibyl said as I selected the number from my contacts list. “Your dad is not going to like this.”

  “Since when has that stopped me?” I muttered, holding the phone up to my ear. “Hi,” I said when the operator picked up. “I think I’ve got something you want.”

  There was no faster way to get a dragon’s—or a mortal who worked for a dragon’s—attention. The moment the word “want” left my mouth, I heard her click on a recorder, all but guaranteeing the circus I knew I was about to bring down on our heads.

  ***

  Two hours later, the cistern was swarming with men and women wearing the serpentine badge of the Peacemaker. We even got a legit dragon to oversee the transfer. To be fair, she was very young. She didn’t have a fraction of the predatory menace my father could put out and she was a member of the Heartstriker clan, which is basically the bottom-shelf generic brand of dragon. But while she wasn’t up to my dad’s level, her human form was still unspeakably beautiful, and her burning magic was razor sharp, holding the ever-twisting Gnarls in place through sheer brute force so the retrieval team could work.

  My father had always sneered at the Peacemaker for being weak, but so far, I was beyond impressed with his organization. They’d even persuaded the DFZ to open a special doorway between the Gnarls and the Dragon Consulate, which I hadn’t known was possible. Clearly, the rumors about the city owing her local dragon big time were no joke. Then again, you didn’t get to be the dragon of the most magical city in the world if you weren’t something special.

  “Thank you so much for this,” I said, bowing low before the Heartstriker dragoness when the portal stabilized and she could finally release her magic. “And for coming so quickly.”

  “You have to be quick for these things,” the dragoness said distractedly, her electric-green eyes locked on the virtual clipboard she’d brought up in her AR. “Cockatrice smuggling has been a major problem all year. If we don’t move fast, we lose them, and we can’t
afford any more of that. The species is close enough to extinction as it is, though if it were up to me, I’d let them die. A species that unwilling to breed deserves to go extinct. But the Peacemaker’s wife is friends with the Spirit of Cockatrices, so they go on the list and I do my job.” She glanced back at the ritual circle in the cistern, where armored mages were carefully lifting cat-sized cockatrices into padded transport cages. “At least they’re babies this time. The last one I had to save was the size of a horse. Nearly bit my arm off.”

  She shook her head with a sigh and flipped her floating clipboard around. “Sign,” she ordered. “You put in the call, so that makes you legal guardian. Just sign here to surrender your rights, and we’ll be out of your hair.”

  “Actually,” I said quickly. “They’re not all mine. I only own forty percent. My partner owns the rest.”

  She shrugged. “I don’t care who signs.”

  “I do,” I said, meeting the dragon’s eyes. Never a smart move, but a vital one if you wanted them to actually listen to what you said. Some dragons would eat you on the spot for such insolence, but most respected mortals who didn’t cower. Since she worked for the Peacemaker, I was betting this dragoness was one of the latter. Sure enough, after a good thirty seconds of dominance-staring contest, she waved me away.

  “Do what you want.”

  I bowed again and scrambled up the manhole’s metal rung ladder. Just like the cistern below it, the burned-out hunk of floating city was now full of people. There were DFZ cops, SWAT units, a Merlin Council mage team, city clerks, the works. It was the biggest show of civic authority I’d ever seen in this city, and I liked it. The huge response made me feel as if I’d done the right thing, and I knew Dr. Lyle was happy. After much prodding from the freezing wind, I’d given all his research notes about creating cockatrices to the mages, making very sure that they knew it was the work of Dr. Theodore Lyle, brilliant historical Thaumaturge and steadfast defender of the breed. I still had to return Dr. Lyle’s hand to Peter, along with my apologies, but the Empty Wind must have thought I was good for it by that point, because the grave-cold wind let me be, finally letting me warm up again as I wandered the ruins in search of Nik.

  I found him at the edge of the island, standing in the middle of a collapsed building that hadn’t been collapsed when we’d gotten here. From the fist-sized holes in the blackened cement, I could guess what had happened, but I didn’t say a word. Nik had given up more tonight than I had, and not just because he’d had the sixty-percent share. He deserved to be mad, though I did say a quick, silent prayer pleading to the DFZ not to punish him for taking it out on her buildings.

  “Hey,” I said when he finally noticed me standing behind him. “They’re ready for us to sign off.”

  Nik took a breath so deep it moved his entire body. Then he dusted off his hands and walked over to grab his jacket, his bag, and Kauffman, who was still trussed up with rope and now sported a bloody gag.

  “Um,” I said as Nik threw the man over his shoulder. “Do I want to know what you’re going to do?”

  “No,” Nik said in a monotone.

  I swallowed my next question, leading him back to the dragon as quickly as I could go.

  We signed the form without incident. I used my real name, but Nik put down a crypto ID, the blockchain-based anonymous identifier that anyone could use in place of their name in the DFZ. Add in the bloody man he was carrying on his shoulder, and I knew we had to look shady as hell, but the electronic form accepted his ID no problem, so the dragon didn’t say a word.

  “That’s that,” she said when all the authentications turned green. “Good work, everyone. Let’s pack it in.”

  The crowd nodded and began collecting their things. Nik was already carrying Kauffman toward the portal, which, since it let out at the Dragon Consulate downtown, wasn’t that far from where we’d parked his car. I was about to run after him when the dragon caught my arm.

  “Wait,” she said, squinting at the form we’d just signed. “Your name is Opal Yong-ae? That means you belong to the Dragon of Korea, right?”

  I winced at the word “belong.” “I’m part of his household, yes.”

  “Oh, well, that explains it.”

  “Explains what?” I asked nervously.

  “The curse,” she said, waving her hand in the general vicinity of my face. “You’ve got a dragon curse on you. I wasn’t going to tell you since I didn’t want to mess up anyone’s plans, but the Dragon of Korea still hasn’t joined the Peacemaker’s Alliance, so he can choke on his tail for all I—”

  “What does it do?”

  She closed her mouth slowly, electric-green eyes narrowing, and I shrank in my boots. Interrupting a dragon was never good, but I couldn’t help it. “Please, great dragon,” I said, bowing my head in a flagrant display of deference. “I apologize for my rudeness, but I have to know. What curse am I under?”

  “Nice groveling,” she said, patting me on the head. “And it’s a bad-luck curse. Not one of those cheap jobs that makes you stub your toes all the time, either. This is the real deal, the kind that hits you where it hurts the most.” She grinned at me. “I bet you’ve had a really rotten year, haven’t you?”

  She had no idea. “Thank you, great dragon,” I said through clenched teeth. “I can’t tell you how much I appreciate your insight.”

  The dragoness cooed at me for being such a polite little mortal and sent me away, yelling at her team to hurry it up. Almost too angry to see, I turned and walked with the rest of the people flowing toward the portal to the Dragon Consulate.

  Despite my upbringing, I’d never been inside the Consulate. Other dragons brought their mortals here all the time. It was one of the safest places in the world for them since the Dragon of Detroit did not tolerate violence between clans on his turf. But between his low respect for the Peacemaker and outright hatred of the dirt and savagery of the DFZ, my father had never brought any of us along the few times a year he was forced to come here. I got lost immediately and ended up walking up three floors when I should have gone down two. Finally, after much consulting with Sibyl and three stops to ask for directions, I walked out the front door of the massive Consulate’s Underground entrance to find Nik waiting.

  I hadn’t realized how braced I’d been to never see him again until I spotted him. Even better, he was waiting in his car, which was another miracle, because I was seven miles from home and had no money for a cab. I still walked down the steps with trepidation, bending down to look at him through the window.

  “Can I get in?”

  “Only if you take off that damn spy camera,” he muttered, keeping his eyes on the mirrors like he expected someone in the crowded pickup zone to start breathing fire. Which, to be fair, was a distinct possibility here.

  I didn’t wait to be asked twice. I ripped my goggles off my head and jumped in, turning off both of my devices and shoving them deep into my bag before putting it in the back seat.

  “Where’s Kauffman?”

  “In the trunk,” Nik said casually. “I’m saving him for later.”

  Twenty-four hours ago, hearing that would have terrified me. Now, though, I just nodded. “Give him one for me, please.”

  “He’s already had several for you,” Nik said as he pulled us out. “But there’s always room for more.”

  We drove the next few minutes in silence. This was partially because I didn’t want to distract Nik while he was navigating the swarms of tourists that always invaded this part of downtown, but mostly because I had no idea what to say. I felt as if I’d done him great wrong tonight, which sucked, because I’d been trying to do right. I didn’t want to apologize for that, but I needed to say something. I wasn’t sure when it had happened exactly, but at some point during the last day and a half, I’d come to think of Nik and me as being on the same side. Now, though, it felt like we were enemies again, and I hated that.

  “Listen,” I said when I couldn’t take it anymore. “About what happe
ned—”

  “Don’t.”

  I flinched like the word was a blow, and Nik sighed. “I don’t want to talk about what happened down there,” he said, keeping his eyes steadfastly on the road. “It is what it is. End of story.”

  “It’s not the end,” I said determinedly. “I still have to tell you that I think you did the right thing.”

  “I know you think that,” he said, leaning his head hard against the driver’s seat’s padded headrest. “But all I can think about is the fact that I threw away sixty percent of seven million dollars.”

  A lot of replies ran through my head at that. I wanted to tell him he’d saved so much more, that I was proud of him, that he’d proven my faith in him. Those were my sincere feelings, but they all sounded too saccharine and sentimental when I imagined saying them out loud, so I kept my mouth shut, staring at my hands as the orange street lamps flashed past. Then, when we stopped for a traffic light, Nik spoke again.

  “I’m glad I didn’t do it.”

  My head shot up. “Really?”

  “I still hate that I lost the money,” he warned. “I’m going to be mad about that for a very long time. But that’s the nature of opportunity cost. Sometimes you have to give up one thing to get something else.”

  The light changed, and he started us forward again, hands clenched tight on the wheel. “I’ve given up a lot of things I shouldn’t for money,” he said, his voice quiet, as if he was talking to himself. “What happened in that cistern has happened before. Never for that much, of course, but same basic situation. All the other times, I chose the money, and every single time, I regretted it. Not right away. Sometimes not for years. But sooner or later, I always missed what I’d sold, and I couldn’t get it back.”

  I twisted my hands in my lap. “I—”

  “But this time was different,” he went on. “This time, you were there. And while I’m regretting the hell out of my choice right now, I think I’ll feel different in the long run, which is the run that matters.”