by Lauren Esker
"Oh, for ... No, it's just hard to switch tracks with my train of thought right now, you know? Because dragons."
Without further ado, she pulled her feet up onto the couch, climbed into his lap, and kissed him.
As he'd discovered the other night, she was an active and enthusiastic kisser. She licked and nibbled and nipped, never giving him a chance to catch his breath before diving back in, open-mouthed. The way she kissed, he couldn't help thinking with the part of his brain that could still think properly, was the same way she lived: wholehearted, uninhibited, nothing held back. All in, he thought. Every chip on the table. Jen went all in on life.
"How's that?" she asked, pulling away, bright-eyed and breathless. "Is our bet paid off yet?"
"Uh," Lucky managed intelligently. She was entirely in his lap, arms laced around his neck and legs pressed against the couch as she straddled his lap. "No, I think we need to do that some more."
Jen bit his ear, not hard. "Shush. So, you were going to tell me about dragons."
It was hard to think of anything with her warm, lithe weight pressing into his lap. His brain was definitely not receiving its full complement of blood right now. "Er, I will. I'm going to. But it's a long story. Are you up for that?"
"I am more than up for it, but if it's a really long story, maybe I should tell you about my day first."
"Sure," he said, happy to gain a temporary reprieve.
"And then you'll tell me everything."
"Everything there is to tell." Her expression was skeptical. "I mean it, Jen. I'll tell you things I've never told anyone. Just ... give me a minute to get my brain in order first. Tell me about your day."
"Do you want me to get out of your lap first?"
"Nope," he said, tightening his arms around her. "Please do stay."
So Jen sat in his lap, legs tucked around him, and told him about sneaking into Marius's room and the various things she'd found there. "That's why I went and got the Dragon's Tears when I found out you were poisoned. I hoped it'd help."
Lucky shook his head. "It couldn't have. Dragons' special abilities don't work on other dragons."
"Special abilities?" she repeated, frowning.
"That's part of what I haven't told you yet. Go on."
"Huh. Well, then Marius came in and surprised me. I guess he must have finished his game. Did he win or lose, by the way?"
"Won," Lucky said. "He'll be back in the next round."
"Wonderful. Anyway, he has some kind of little dart gun that fits up his sleeve. He shot at me. I shifted and ran out the window."
"And then you beat him up and stole his drugs."
"That was later. But listen, the next part is interesting. I came back to the room and there was someone here."
He tensed. "In our room?"
"Yes. It was a woman. Nobody I'd ever seen before. Short dark hair, kind of youngish. She looked rich."
"How does a person look rich?"
"Oh, you know, expensive clothes, and kind of a ... like, a confident kind of feeling. I don't know! That's just the impression I got off her. But that's not the most interesting thing. She was a shifter."
"What kind?"
"I don't know. I didn't see her shift. I could just tell, you know, the way you can, and then she ran out and I followed her, but not fast enough. She went into one of the other rooms on our floor, but I don't know which one."
"So she's a neighbor," Lucky said. "A player in the tournament, I wonder? Or somebody's mistress or daughter. She wasn't at breakfast, was she?"
"No. We'd both have noticed her." Jen shifted in his lap, settling her arms more securely around his neck. He thought she meant to kiss him again, but instead her expression was distracted. "The funny thing is, she reminded me of you, a little bit."
A sharp sensation went through him, like swallowing a bite of snow. "How so?"
"I don't know. It might just be because you're the only shifter I've spent much time around lately. But she had your coloring—or Marius's, come to think of it. You've both got that sort of Mediterranean look, the dark hair and dark eyelashes and the browny-gold undertones to the skin."
"I think they call it olive."
"I know they do. I always thought that was ridiculous. Olives are a very different color."
Lucky snorted. "Thank you for that. So Roxy had a reason for doing a fresh bug sweep."
"Yeah. She found a couple new ones. Not sure if they were planted by our mystery guest, or by the housekeeping staff, or what. Anyway, I've been in the room ever since, so we should be safe at this point. Which means ..." She gave his neck a brief, distracting nibble. "Your turn."
"Are you comfortable there?"
"I'm very comfortable, and you're stalling."
"I know," he admitted. "It's just very strange talking about this. I've spent my whole life hiding it. I don't even know where to begin."
"The beginning is always a good place to start."
"The beginning," Lucky said.
***
The beginning.
I'm not a full-blooded dragon. I'm only half. My mother was a dragon, and my father was human. My sister is also a half dragon.
... yes, sister. I'll get to that.
I think we're from somewhere in rural Louisiana, but I'm not entirely sure. We moved around constantly when I was a kid. My dad was a gambler, and from the time I was big enough to follow instructions and keep a secret, so I guess around four or five years old, I helped him gamble.
I did it by giving him good luck. You probably thought Lucky was just a nickname, but it's more than that. You pretended to be my good-luck gecko, but I really was my father's good-luck charm. The thing is, I can bend luck around me, and make people have a good day at the cards or a bad day.
I don't know how it works. It's not really magic—okay, I know it sounds like it, and maybe it is, but maybe it's some kind of quantum phenomenon or something, right? I can't change the face of a card that's already been dealt, or conjure a replacement card out of thin air. All I can do is influence the way the cards are shuffled in order to give myself, or someone else at the table, a good hand. The harder I try to be specific about it, the more difficult it is. Giving myself a good hand is pretty easy, especially since I've had so much practice by now. Picking out a specific hand for every person at the table—that's hard, and there's a real chance something's going to go wrong. I can get away with it maybe once in a game if I'm, pardon the expression, lucky enough.
Dice are easier, of course. Or roulette, slot machines, anything where random chance is the point of the game. I can easily keep myself in good money just by bumming around Nevada and hitting the small-time slots. They have slot machines everywhere in that state, in gas stations and bars and whatever. Of course you aren't going to win much, maybe ten bucks, maybe fifty, but nobody's going to pay much attention to a random guy coming in off the street, pulling the handle, getting his fifty bucks, and walking out again.
The tricky thing for me isn't making money. It's making money without being noticed. I mean, think about it. If I wanted to win the Powerball lottery, I could do it without breaking a sweat. And then the media would never leave me alone, which would be my ultimate nightmare. I'd pretty much have to fake my own death at that point. That's why I've always stayed away from Vegas—Nevada, yes; Vegas no—or anything that has a sufficiently high profile it might get televised or draw some other kind of media attention.
... and yeah, I know I could do something else for a living. Probably anything that involves luck and chance would work great for me. I could make a fortune in the stock market, possibly at the risk of accidentally destabilizing a market or two until I figured out what I was doing. I could have been big in Hollywood as a talent scout or made a killing as an entrepreneur or a real estate investor. I could've been a computer hacker who can always guess people's passwords. Hell, I probably would have been a kickass assassin. (It's a joke, Jen. Stop looking at me like that.)
But I don't want t
o do any of those things. Gambling's in my blood. Besides, with the things I can do, I don't have to work hard to make enough to live on. I tried to stop for about a decade, or I guess I should say, I've been doing it just enough to live comfortably—the Nevada slot machine thing I mentioned, or small-scale underground poker games, nothing that'd draw attention. You met me not too long after I decided to get back into it, and the reason why has to do with my sister, Lucia.
She's four years younger than I am. I barely knew Mom, and Lucia doesn't remember her at all. Since Dad died when I was twelve, and wasn't really a warm-fuzzy type even before that, I basically raised her. Lucia was everything to me. Since we moved around so much, I didn't have time to make friends, or the ability to stay in touch with the ones I did make. I was her parent, in a way, but she was my best friend and my companion. I last saw her when I was fifteen and she was eleven. I let someone take her away from me, and I never forgave myself for it, or stopped wanting to find her. I never had a way of doing that, though, until now.
Every dragon has something special they can do. I push luck. And Lucia cries healing tears.
That drug, Dragon's Tears ... like my nickname, I believe it's literally what it sounds like. It's Lucia's tears. I grew up with her. I know my sister's tears when I see them.
Ever since I found out about it, I've been hunting for its source. Wherever they are and whoever they are, someone is making that drug by hurting my sister and making her cry.
So that's me and Lucia, and that's why I'm in this game.
But that's not all. There is one other dragon I know, besides me and Lucia and our mom, and he's my cousin. His name is Angel.
Angel isn't a half dragon like me and Lucia. He's a full-blooded dragon, the only one I've ever met or even heard about besides my mother. There aren't very many anymore, I guess. For all I know, Mom and Angel were the last in the world.
Angel is also the most dangerous person I've ever met. He does something similar to what I do, except while I push luck, Angel pushes people. He can make them do whatever he wants. It doesn't work on me or Lucia, because of the dragon thing. Anyone else doesn't stand a chance.
I don't know what happened to his parents, or where he came from in the first place, except that he came along as a package deal with Mom. I think my dad was his legal guardian after Mom died. He had the same last name as us, anyway. We were sort of siblings, except not quite, because Angel was usually off doing his own thing, even when he was a child. I don't know if it's because I'm half human and he wasn't, or if it was just that there was something wrong with him in a way that has nothing to do with what we are. But I never felt like I understood him or that he understood or liked us. Even when he was a child, he would rather be alone. The only person who could control him was Mom, and after she died, Dad didn't stand a chance. Angel did whatever he wanted. I was about eight or nine, I guess, when he disappeared for good, and he didn't show up again until we were teenagers and living on our own after Dad's death.
At first I was glad to have someone older to take responsibility for us. I'd been responsible for our little household since I was twelve, and in a way even before that, since Dad wasn't good at it.
But I'd forgotten what being with Angel is like. Lucia and I, when we were kids, we always tried to keep him happy and not piss him off. It was like tiptoeing around ... well, around a sleeping monster, literally. When things don't go his way, Angel doesn't just get mad. He snaps. I've only seen him do it a couple of times, but just once was enough. Lucia and I would do anything at all to keep it from happening again. When Angel gets upset, people die.
So we went from being on our own to warping our whole lives around trying to keep Angel happy. What he wanted wasn't two younger siblings to take care of. He wanted a pack, or flock, or whatever you call a group of dragons, with himself at the head of it. In essence, he wanted flunkies. He'd gotten bored with humans because they were too easy to play with—and keep in mind, he was only about eighteen or nineteen at this point, so that gives you an idea of what he'd been up to since he was a kid. He couldn't control us directly, so we were interesting to him.
It's hard to explain now, but as much as we feared him, we admired him too. He was older and stronger and he'd come out of nowhere to save us. But he wasn't interested in us. We were just chips in a game he was playing, a new form of entertainment because humans were too boring to play with anymore.
Things eventually fell apart between us in a major way. Long story short, he took Lucia and left. I had no idea where they went or even if she was still alive, until I started hearing rumors about this drug. It has to be Lucia; it has to be. But even if it's not, and I don't know enough about our kind to know if our powers are unique or not, then following that trail should lead me to more dragons, who might be able to help me find her.
So here I am. And here you are. And ... here Angel is.
***
"What do you mean, 'here Angel is'? He's on the ship?"
"I saw him at the game yesterday. We talked."
They were stretched out on the couch now, with Jen lying on top of him. She was so small that he barely felt her slight weight.
"What did you talk about?" she asked, propping her chin in her hands with her elbows on his chest. "What does one discuss with a mind-controlling, hot-tempered megalomaniac?"
"You make him sound like some kind of supervillain."
"Isn't he?" she countered. "From what you say—and I'm still not sure how much of it I believe—"
"You saw me change!" Lucky protested, hurt. "Every word of what I've told you is true."
"I don't think you're lying. It's just a lot to take in. I grew up around people who could turn into animals. For me, that's normal. So a dragon isn't really that much of a stretch. But people who can control other people like puppets, or bend the laws of probability around them ... you have to admit, it's gonna take some getting used to."
"I could show you what I can do, if that would help."
"Sure," she said, sitting up.
Lucky reached for where his pocket should be, but touched his robe-covered hip instead. "Do you have a coin on you?"
"No, but I have this." She took the Anubis token out of her pocket.
"That'll work. Call it. Heads or tails?"
"Hmm. Tails."
"And I call heads."
She flipped, slapped it on the back of her hand, and showed him the Anubis head. "Could be you got lucky. In the usual way, I mean."
"Okay, try it again."
She flipped three heads in a row. "This thing could also be weighted."
"Sure, it could be," Lucky agreed. "So if you drop it on the coffee table, what are the odds it'll land on its edge? Pretty slim, I'd think. Go."
She let the disc fall, and as it fell, he pushed lightly. It struck, rolled, wobbled, and came to rest balanced on edge.
"Whoa," Jen said. She stared at it, tilting her head to the side. "That looks really wrong. So it's not, er ... telekinesis, or anything?"
"No, nothing that direct. Just probability. I do have to be thinking about it. I'm not inherently any luckier than your run-of-the-mill, non-draconic average Joe."
"Still." She looked back at him, her eyes bright and speculative. "Do you have any idea how useful that would be for an agen—for anyone in any profession, really! Forget the stock market. You could be ... wow, anything. An author who always writes bestselling novels, a cat burglar whose victims always leave their doors unlocked, a taxi driver who misses all the traffic jams—"
"It's not quite that simple." He wondered what she'd been about to say, before she caught herself. "But yeah, you've got the general idea."
"So ... don't take this the wrong way, but what's the difference between what you do, and what Angel does? If I understand you correctly, you got Marius to leave the window open just by wanting him to."
His initial reaction was a surge of indignant anger, but he swallowed it down. It was a fair question, and one he'd asked himself
in the past. "I don't know. For all I know, it isn't actually that different. But it does feel different. I can't make you do anything you don't want to do. About the most I can do is influence things around you, like make you a little more or less likely to take a wrong step when you're trying to hang onto the ceiling—"
"Wait, is this the Fair Lady we're talking about here? I fell into your drink because you wanted me to?"
Oops.
"Not ... as such?" he protested hastily. "I didn't know that's how it would work out. I just threw some bad luck your way, because I didn't know who or what you were, and I wanted to find out. And that's usually how it works for me. Even when I'm pushing really hard for a specific outcome, all I can do is improve its chances of happening. I threw some luck your way, with the window and Marius. And that's about the best way I can describe what it actually feels like when I do it. You, the window, Marius. Luck. And then it happens however it's going to happen."
"Huh." She gazed at him, and her expression softened into a warm look.
Lucky had no idea why she was looking at him like that; he only knew he didn't want her to stop.
"And you were never even tempted to do any of those other things?" she asked, her voice gentle. "To be a cat burglar, or to kill people for a living, or to insinuate yourself into high levels of politics or run the world from Wall Street ...?"
"Let's not forget, I cheat at cards for a living." Now he was squirming under her warm regard. "Don't make me out to be some kind of hero just because I'm not as bad as I could be. I could also have spent my life saving people as a search and rescue pilot, or finding missing kids on the police force."
"Have you thought about doing something like that?"
"I thought we were talking about my past, not my future."
Jen smiled and sprawled on his chest again. "The two are usually connected, aren't they?"
Her face was mere inches from his. He was also acutely aware that he was wearing nothing under the robe, which had gaped open so she was pressed against his bare chest.
"You know, as per the terms of our earlier deal, I thought it was a kiss for each piece of information," he pointed out. "I figure you owe me about forty kisses at this point."