by Lauren Esker
"It's under control," Lucia told her. "Take this—" She pressed the second tray into the woman's hands. "Give it to the bridge crew. Make sure everyone drinks some. Everyone."
As the redcap left, Lucia noticed Jen was still in the room. "What are you doing? I gave you an order."
"I don't work for you. If Angel's tearing stuff up on Deck A, I need to help." Lucky. Nguyet. And even Marius, the jerk. She couldn't abandon them.
"What could you possibly do to help?"
"Give me a gun and you'll find out." The words tumbled out before she could stop them. "I'm a federal agent." ... dammit.
Lucia froze.
"I'm not here for you!" Jen babbled on. "I mean, okay, in a way I am, but—I'm on this ship in the first place looking for the source of the Dragon's Tears drug. Now I know, but now I also think I'm in love with your brother, and—damn, I really didn't mean to say that. This is not an easy conversation to have—"
"You're telling me," Lucia said tartly. She was tense, one hand raised with the fingers curled like nascent claws. "What agency? DEA?"
Jen shook her head. "SCB. Special Crimes Bureau. We investigate anything having to do with shifters, or other weird stuff. I'm way outside my jurisdiction here. I don't have any authority to arrest you."
Lucia made a hissing sound that no human throat could have produced. "I should just kill you."
"I know," Jen said. "I mean, if I were you, I probably would. But Lucky will never forgive you if you do. And from what your lackey said, Angel's tearing up shit and killing people on Deck A, so we need to stop arguing and get down there. If you're gonna kill me, just do it. Or else give me a gun so I can help."
Lucia gazed at her with unreadable eyes, her face so like Lucky's that it hurt. Then she pointed to the tray. "Find someone out there to give that to, and meet me on the stairs."
***
Lucky and Angel crashed through the glass doors to the atrium and rammed headlong into the ornamental shrubbery. Branches shattered and small trees tore out of the soil as the weight of two thrashing behemoths hit them.
Lucky shifted on the move, going much smaller and spreading a new pair of wings.
"You think it's that easy to get away from me?" Angel roared.
Lucky dodged and rolled, gliding more than flying, darting between the trees and trying not to snag his delicate wing membranes on the branches. He was now about the size of an eagle, light-boned for flight, but correspondingly fragile. He'd forgotten how much effort it took to keep even this light of a body off the ground. Flying at full dragon size was an enormous pain in the ass; he'd only done it once or twice.
Angel had shifted himself smaller, but wasn't bothering with wings. Now roughly jaguar-sized, but with a much longer and narrower body, he sprang from tree to tree, snarling. He was shockingly fast. Even with wings, Lucky could barely stay ahead of him.
Thank God real-life dragons couldn't breathe fire.
Lucky threw all the probability-jinxing he had at his pursuer. He couldn't affect Angel as directly as he could a human—couldn't make him slip, say. But he could affect the trees. Angel let out a furious string of curses as branches broke under him and ornamental espalier tore away from the wall it was clinging to.
People in the atrium's various gardens fled for safety, screaming or cursing. So much for dragons being secret, Lucky thought, leaping out of the trees into the open. He soared past the stone obelisk and nearly smashed into the rain-streaked skylight, not because he didn't know it was there, but because he hadn't flown in so long that he'd forgotten how much faster reaction time in flight had to be. He managed to grab hold of a girder without braining himself and clung to it, looking down. The motion of the ship was even more noticeable up here; it was rolling so violently that he had trouble holding on. The obelisk itself was swaying back and forth, looking less stable with every roll of the deck.
If I can lure him off the ship ...
That might work, actually. Draw Angel away from the ship and then ... well ... he didn't have a plan beyond that, but just getting Angel away from the crowd of potential victims on board, and away from Jen in particular, seemed like a good idea.
Below him, Angel spread a pair of brand-new blue-and-white wings and kicked off the spreading branches of a sycamore tree. He'd miscalculated his wingspan-to-weight ratio and nearly hit the ground before he managed to adjust accordingly and soared upward.
—which was fucking terrifying, because Lucky knew full well how difficult it was to tweak his own body shape like that. He had trouble doing anything other than full shifts to get to a new version of his dragon body, often with an intermediate pass through his human form in the process. Angel could do it easily and effortlessly.
Maybe that was the difference between being only half dragon, and full-blooded. Angel was bigger, more powerful, able to shift more easily.
But Lucky was still smaller and faster. He folded his wings and dropped. Gravity took him down fast and hard. He spread his wings near the ground, caught the wind with a jarring shock, and swept toward the far end of the atrium.
He couldn't break the overhead skylight windows in his small, light flight form, so the front stairwell was probably the fastest way out. If he could keep Angel chasing him, and not preying on bystanders—
He suffered another badly timed near-collision with the far wall and dropped to the ground. Momentum was still carrying him forward as he shifted human-shaped, and he went to his knees, scraping the bare human skin. Stupid soft human body. He needed proper hands to open the door, though.
Angel dropped on him out of the sky. Lucky fended him off wildly on the first attack pass, salvaging the integrity of his upper body only because Angel didn't seem to be much better at aiming in his winged form than Lucky was.
Angel banked and came in for a fast landing, churning up the white shell gravel of the pathway, already growing fast as his wings collapsed inward. Lucky, meanwhile, had rediscovered something he'd forgotten: that the fucking door took a fucking key card.
He dived away, shifting as he went. On four legs rather than two, he spun around to confront his bigger cousin, who reared above him with wide jaws parted to reveal a jagged double row of teeth.
"You fool," Lucky snarled. "You've revealed yourself to all the humans on this ship. Revealed us. What do you think happens now?"
"It doesn't matter." Angel feinted at him, teeth snapping, and Lucky dodged aside, ripping out a whole row of blooming shrubs.
"What do you mean, it doesn't matter?"
"I mean none of them are leaving this ship alive. Who cares what they see?"
A growl rumbled up from Lucky's chest. "You haven't changed at all, have you? No one else ever mattered to you, except as your pawn or your toy. Not me, not Lucia—and she is here, isn't she? Are you going to kill Lucia too?"
They crashed through a wall of loosely cemented bricks, scattering brick chunks as their feet splashed in the koi pond on the other side.
"You always underestimated little Lucia, cousin. You never were willing to admit that she was quite a powerful little monster in her own right."
He was a little too slow, and Angel's wet claws raked a blazing trail of pain down his ribs. "She wasn't a monster! She was a child."
"She's no child now. Who do you think is really in charge around here?"
"What are you talking about?"
Pain and anger made him careless. The next attack scored his foreleg, swiping it out from under him. He went down hard on the tiled edge of the koi pond, smashing it under his scaly shoulder.
"Who do you think owns this ship, cousin?" Angel asked, his lips drawn back in a draconic grin of sadistic amusement. He planted his clawed foot on Lucky's neck.
The door to the stairwell slammed open.
Out of the corner of his eye, Lucky glimpsed someone in a red uniform, minus the hat, burst through the door. A gunshot barked, and Angel jerked. Lucky took advantage of his cousin's moment of distraction to wrench himself free and scr
amble out of reach.
Angel twisted his head completely around on his supple neck. "You shot me in the ass!" His tone was one of startled disbelief more than pain.
"Yeah, and that was the warning shot, fucker. Next one goes in your face."
It was Jen—somehow, it was Jen, in a redcap uniform with a gun in her hands, pointed between Angel's eyes.
"Jen, no!" Lucky yelled. "Jen, run!" Hadn't she believed what he'd told her about Angel's mind-control powers?
But Angel wasn't attacking. Angel was staring at her, the ruff around his head raised with startled interest. "What the hell?" he said.
"Shift and get on the ground," Jen snapped. "Spread 'em now."
She was like a mouse in front of a fox, standing in the face of that hulking white and blue predator. And yet she didn't seem afraid. She held the gun in a practiced, two-handed grip, legs spread apart. Lucky stared at her, not sure what was confusing him more: that Angel's powers didn't appear to be affecting her, or the air of confidence and authority that surrounded her. This wasn't the woman he'd spent the last few days in a hotel room with. Everything about her screamed cop.
Angel roared and lunged, bounding through the water and leaping the wall. Short wings he hadn't had a moment before spread to give him an extra boost.
Jen stood her ground and fired a staccato series of shots at the charging dragon.
Lucky piled into him from the side, bowling him over, like a small, aggressive dog attacking a big one. He snapped and slashed at Angel before leaping away.
And by then, he wasn't the only other dragon in the garden.
He hadn't seen Lucia's dragon form since they were children, but he knew her instantly. She was red and gold, of course—and why had he never related the ship's internal color scheme to his sister before? Her preferred shape was still the same, slender and long, with a graceful neck curved like a swan's and narrow, tapering gold horns.
Rather than attacking, Lucia snapped her jaws on the back of Jen's uniform and dragged her, struggling, toward the door. "Ambrose, get over here," she said out of the corner of her mouth.
Lucky lunged after her. The three of them piled through the door, both of the dragons shifting human-shaped as they went.
Angel crashed into the door just as it closed. It shuddered on its hinges, but the heavy steel held. This was followed by an ominous silence on the other side.
"He'll be through that in a minute," Lucky said, tensing for another shift. His side and shoulder throbbed where Angel's talons had hit home.
"All he has to do is find someone with a card anyway." Jen put her hand on his arm, tilting her head to look at his injuries. "That looks bad."
"It'll heal. What's the matter with you?"
Jen's face was flushed, her eyes dilated. She looked ill—or high.
"Something I'm really gonna regret in an hour or two. Come on!"
Lucia was already a flight of stairs below them. Lucky caught up on the next landing, staggering back and forth as the stairs pitched under him. "Lucia," he said breathlessly.
She turned to face him, her short hair swishing around her face. She'd grown up striking, not someone who captured the eye with beauty, but with force of personality. Everything he wanted to ask her died on his tongue. Too many years lay between them. Angel was right, she wasn't the child he'd known, or the woman he'd come looking for.
"Ambrose," she said, "can you still do—that thing you used to do?"
Lucky swallowed everything he was feeling. "Yes."
The landing tilted under them, and they stumbled against the wall. Lucky tried not to focus on any fixed point in particular.
"Can you do it to the ship?" Lucia asked. "Get us through the storm?"
"I ... don't know." He'd never tried to apply his ability in quite that way before. He had no idea what it was going to do to probability all over the ship. "I can try."
"You can't hurt yourself by overusing it, can you?" Jen asked.
"Not any more than you could hurt yourself by doing math. I might get a slight headache and that's about it."
"And are you doing it now?" Lucia asked impatiently.
"I am." God, it was weird, looking at this brisk, non-nonsense woman with the severe haircut, and still, with some part of him, seeing the little girl she'd been.
Jen cleared her throat. "So, guys, I don't know if you noticed, but Angel doesn't seem to be chasing us. Which means he's somewhere else, doing something else. Ideas?"
"If he's trying to kill us, there are two main areas of vulnerability on the ship." Lucia punched a code into the key pad on the door. It opened onto a long corridor that smelled of oil and bilge. The floor was vibrating steadily with more than just the movement of the waves. "The bridge and the engine room. The bridge is currently as secure as I can make it. Without the engines, we'll be at the mercy of the storm."
"If I can lure him off the ship—" Lucky began.
"Yeah," Jen snapped, "and then what? Drag him with you to the bottom of the Mariana Trench in some kind of heroic sacrifice? Fuck that, I don't go around letting people throw themselves on grenades. I'm more of the 'everybody survives' school of fighting."
Lucky looked at her, at this sudden stranger with the no-nonsense stride, in her borrowed uniform with a hand on the butt of her borrowed gun. "Since when is fighting something you do? Who are you really, Jen?"
"I'm a—a federal agent, Lucky," she said, meeting his eyes. "The rest will have to wait for another time."
He'd known something like that was coming, but it still hit him like an arrow in the chest. "Are you here to arrest me?"
Her face went still. He couldn't read it.
"Children," Lucia said. "Can we have this discussion at another time? When a rampaging dragon isn't destroying my ship, for example?"
In that instant, the lights and the vibration died at once, plunging them into darkness. An instant later, an emergency light lit up at the end of the hall.
Lucky clutched for a handrail; his hand touched the wall and he tried to hang onto it. The pitching of the ship was abruptly more pronounced, the long rolls of the deck changing to a sharp, wrenching corkscrew movement.
"Shit!" Lucia snapped. "He got the engines. Damn it, I can't be everywhere at once! Someone needs to get to the engine room, and someone needs to go up top and stop a mass panic from doing his work for him."
"I can't fight a dragon," Jen said. "I'll handle the top part—"
"No, my crew won't listen to you."
"Some of them will," Jen said, and she took off running, back the way they'd come.
"Jen!" Lucky called.
Lucia's hand, small but strong, grasped his arm. "Whatever she thinks she's doing, there's no time. Can you handle the engines, and Angel?"
"Yes," he said. She was right, there was no time. He hadn't realized how much the engines were doing to stabilize the ship in the water. He was barely able to keep from being thrown off his feet.
"The engine room is at the end of this corridor. I'm going upstairs."
She spun away, fleet and light-footed.
"Wait, the doors—!"
Lucia turned back. "With the power out, the locks have disengaged. Everything on the ship is unlocked. Go!"
Giving Angel full access as well. Nothing to be done about it, though. "Good luck."
"You too. Oh, and Ambrose?" For the first time, she smiled. "It's good to see you again."
Then she was off, shifting as she went into a long, low four-legged dragon shape, optimized for narrow passages and for speed. Lucky swallowed down his growing nausea—not just from the movement of the ship—and threw everything he had into making the ship catch the best side of every oncoming wave, while he went to find out how badly Angel had damaged the engines.
Chapter Sixteen
Jen ran up the stairs, her path lit by the dim glow of an emergency light on each landing. In retrospect, stopping to explain might have been a good idea, but it would have taken too long. Panic would be breaking ou
t all over the ship, and there was no telling where Angel had gone.
But she had a friend on Deck A—a friend who knew people.
First, though, she had a stop to make. She climbed the stairs as far as they went, clinging to the railing as the ship bucked under her like a bronco. No need for rock climbing this time, thank God; having come down with Lucia, all she had to do was retrace their route to the penthouse. She didn't need a key card; all the doors on the ship seemed to be unlocked. At least this meant no one would be trapped if the ship capsized.
Not trapped by locked doors, anyway. I don't like our chances for getting out of this floating deathtrap if it sinks ...
In Lucia's penthouse, the storm's movement was so bad she gave up on walking and crawled across the penthouse floor. She had to dodge flying items of furniture. The penthouse had no emergency lights; there was only the gray stormlight coming in through the windows, and occasional strobes of lightning. Some of the windows had shattered, probably from stray potted plants and chairs flying through them. The carpet was soaked with rainwater. On the level below, Jen could hear things crashing around and the loud splashing of water slopping out of the pool every time the ship tilted.
Hopefully the passengers had already had the sense to get back to their rooms. They'd have to be idiots not to realize the ship was in trouble.
Jen crawled into the bedroom. It was nearly pitch dark, and she found the fallen bedside table by feel. Yanked out a drawer. Small items went bouncing. Jen pawed through them as she and everything she'd just dumped out of the drawer started sliding across the carpeted floor.
"What are you doing?"
Jen arrested her slide on the wall and looked up. The large reptilian shape framed in the doorway could only be Lucia. "I need your drug. All of it that you have. Where's the rest?"
"Why?" Lucia demanded.
"Every person on this ship is a potential weapon of Angel's. Every last one of 'em could walk up to any of us and blow our brains out, like I tried to do to you. Or drill a hole in the hull, kill all the bridge crew, whatever. We need to take that weapon away from him."