Fire Song (City of Dragons) (2 page)

I had been raised in a wealthy family, and everyone I knew was wealthy, and no one that I knew was anyone’s employee. Not in the world that I came from. So, I guessed that I had purchased the hotel because I didn’t know how else to make my way in the world.

Now I had it, and I loved it here.

Or I had, until recently, when everything had been going to hell. It wasn’t just the body on the beach.

I kept hearing rumors that Alastair was here.

I had come here specifically because he hated it here. He hated the ocean. Why had he changed his mind? And why was he here so early in the season? It wasn’t even officially spring.

But the body was the reason that I couldn’t sleep.

Every time I closed my eyes, I saw that girl’s dead, washed-out eyes.

She had been so young.

She wasn’t even mated yet. And I knew that time in a dragon’s life was heady and free. The young and unmated refused to take anything seriously. They drank and gambled and snorted cocaine and slept around and threw their family money where they could. Life for a girl like Elena Watson was a big party, and she had been intent on living it to the fullest.

I didn’t know who had killed her.

Maybe it had nothing to do with her being a dragon.

But death stalked dragons. Well. Slayers stalked dragons. Drakes stalked dragons. Even vampires, though they could get their magic from the blood of drakes, came for us.

Perhaps this had been the work of a vampire. Unlike the other creatures, vampires could use dragon’s blood even if it came from a dragon in human form. For anyone else to extract a dragon’s magic, they needed a dragon in dragon form.

And that was something that Elena Watson would never feel again. She would never shift into her dragon form. She would never spread her wings, soar on a current, breathe fire—

Hell, she’d never breathed fire at all. A dragon couldn’t achieve that feat until he or she had mated.

Finally, I stopped fighting it. It was after midnight when I crawled out of bed and made my way down to the shore. I walked over the sand barefoot. I threw my nightshirt over my head, the cold air against my naked skin.

I stepped into the surf.

The water was freezing, but I pushed past the waves, going out far enough that the water would submerge my body.

I dove under the waves, and the icy water enveloped me.

Here, in the water, I opened myself to the change. It had to be done here, under water, because the shift from one form to another was far too much. Being weightless helped. If I tried it out of water, my dragon form would destroy my human form coming out, and I would never be able to shift back. The human part of me would die.

I couldn’t be sure, but I often thought that the dragons of legend, the ones who razed cities to the ground, breathing fire and killing everything in their path, were dragons who had lost their human form in such a way. They had been trapped as dragons, frustrated and angry. No wonder they had been so vicious.

Under the water, my wings unfurled.

I surfaced, the sea dripping off of my scales. I rose from the water, flapping my wings, gaining altitude.

I aimed for the moon, the air rushing around me, the freedom—the euphoria—of flight making everything feel okay again.

Nothing could touch me here. Not Alastair, not a dead girl whose life had never been lived, not all the death I’d experienced in my life.

I liked it here, soaring and swooping, going higher and higher.

I climbed above the clouds. I wanted to fly away from all my troubles.

But wasn’t that what I’d tried to do when I’d come here? Hadn’t I thought that being far away from the life I used to live would mean I’d be free? And here I was. No matter how far I flew, how far I ran, trouble found me anyway.

Maybe it was a curse.

But I was alive. I wasn’t gone, like Elena Watson, cut up and washed up, dead and destroyed.

I thought of Elena’s family, getting the news. Like most dragon couples, her parents had only managed to produce one offspring. It wasn’t for lack of trying, of course, but pregnancy was difficult for dragons to achieve. Elena was the only hope of carrying on their line. She was their only precious little girl. They had lavished all their love on her. She had been the center of their universe. Now, she was gone.

The agony they must be feeling.

Yes, at least I was alive.

Even if I felt as if I had lost the center of my own universe a long time ago.

Sometimes, I wasn’t even sure how it was that I got up and kept moving.

Maybe it was only for this. The wind in my wings, the moonlight reflecting on the ocean beneath me. Night flight. It was joy, even when I couldn’t find anything else to be glad about.

I walked back up the beach after the flight, pulling my nightshirt on over my wet, naked body. I was now back in human form.

The dawn was starting to streak through the sky. Soon, the sun would rise over the water, staining everything pink and orange. But for now it was only a bone-colored sky on a gray horizon.

There was someone in the lobby of my hotel.

I took off at a run, which wasn’t an easy thing to do in the sand. It slowed me down, and I missed the ease of flight, nothing in my way but the breeze.

I hurried up the set of wooden steps that led to the patio of the hotel.

I ran past tables topped with closed umbrellas, past the empty pool, which wouldn’t be filled until at least May.

I threw open the door to the lobby.

The vampires in there all turned to look at me.

They were in the middle of trashing the place, yanking things off shelves, emptying drawers, overturning a big rack of brochures by the door.

“Get out,” I growled. “I told you never to come back here.”

“You pay and you never see us again,” said one of the vampires. They were all wearing leather jackets with skulls on the back, emblazoned with the name of their gang, The Lost Breed.

The vampire motorcycle gang ran this part of the beach. They demanded that every business owner pay them off each month. They called themselves a security team. Said they’d protect us from robbers and vandals. But the only robbers and vandals were the gang themselves.

The deal really worked out to this: pay us, and we’ll stop trashing your place of business twice a month.

I wasn’t the kind of person who took well to being pushed around.

Not anymore.

The vampires were bullies.

“Bite me,” I said, grinning widely at them.

One of them had a baseball bat slung over his shoulder. He swung it down to his feet and leaned on it. “Listen, lady, we’re here under orders. You know how this works. Just pay us.”

“Never,” I said.

He picked up the bat. He swung into the window in the front door.

Glass shattered with a crash.

“Your funeral,” he said, hauling back to swing again.

I lifted my hands. Before, I hadn’t resorted to this, because I hadn’t wanted anyone to know what I was. But now it hardly seemed to matter. And fresh from a flight over the ocean, I was brimming with magic. I felt it crackling from my core, racing down my arms, over my fingertips.

I pointed, and the vamp and the baseball bat both lifted off the ground.

I separated the bat from the vampire, sent it hurtling to the ground, where it landed with a loud metal clank.

The vampire let out a hoarse cry. He was scared, even though vampires could do this kind of magic too—well, they could if they’d had a nice meal of dragon blood.

But most vampires seemed to just drink blood to survive, and that meant from animals. They got pints of it at their local butcher shop, and all that blood did for them was keep them alive, help them heal quickly, keep them strong.

These vampires weren’t going to be a problem.

“Hank?” said one of the other vamps. All of them had stopped whatever destruction they were in the middle of to stare at their floating friend.

I slammed Hank into the wall, pinned him there like a bug on a card.

“Hank, what are you doing up there?” said one of the other vamps.

“I’m not doing it,” said Hank, gaping at me. “She is.”

I pointed at another vampire, one who hadn’t spoken. He lifted from the ground as well.

He shrieked. “Hey, lady, let me down.”

“What is she? Some kind of mage?” said another one.

“She’s not doing a spell,” said Hank. “Her lips ain’t moving.”

“Talisman,” said another. “I’ll find it. I’ll get it off her.”

I nodded at him. He fell flat on the ground. He struggled, but I used my magic to keep him down.

“I can’t move!” he said, his voice full of fear.

Abruptly, I dropped Hank.

He crashed down to the ground and landed with a crunch.

Ooh. I thought his leg was broken.

He howled.

“Get him out of here,” I said. “Get him out of here and don’t come back or I will do much worse than this to all of you.”

I set down the other vampire. I let the third guy get up.

They gathered up Hank and scampered out of the lobby right quick.

I watched them go.

Then I stared at the broken glass that littered the floor and felt a sob welling up in my throat. The lobby was trashed. I had customers checking in today. How was I supposed to do that when this place had been destroyed?

“Thought you were keeping a low profile, Penny,” said the voice of my best friend Felicity Richardson.

I turned to see her in the doorway to the lobby. “Hey.” I felt exhausted.

“I saw you flying around out there. Other people probably saw too.”

“There are dragons flying around all the time,” I said. “It’s not a big deal.”

“Not down here in the south part of the city,” she said. She was right. Dragons tended to stay in the north. Safer there, amongst their own.

I walked over to her, gingerly stepping around the broken glass. My feet were bare. “I had a bad night. I saw a dead body.”

“I heard about that on the news,” she said. “When I was coming home, it was on the radio in my car. Some girl’s body washed up? She was a dragon?”

I nodded.

“They said she was a minor, so they didn’t release the name.”

“Elena Watson,” I said.

“Oh, she’s so young,” said Felicity.

“I know.”

My best friend Felicity was a drake, but she wasn’t like all the other drakes. She had fallen in with a bad crowd in college and gotten dosed with what she thought was an innocent brownie. Turns out the thing was laced with dragon flesh. When the high came on, she was terrified. She hadn’t been expecting it. She got in her car and tried to drive. Wrapped her car around a tree. When she woke up, she looked the way she does now.

Felicity didn’t have hair anymore, just rows of green-blue scales that started around her ears. She was lucky to be one of the drakes whose face had remained mostly human, and she still had human-looking hands, not claws. But her feet were reptilian, and the scales ran from the top of her head all the way down over her back and legs.

Drakes were dragon-human hybrids. They got that way by eating dragon meat and dying with it still in their system.

Thing was, after the transformation, most of them were crazy for more. They were addicted to dragon and most of them got themselves killed trying to get more.

Felicity kept her lust for flesh under control by eating a lot of meat, preferably rare and bloody. She’d never attempted to hurt me, not even once.

Thing was, drakes didn’t often get second chances. Vampires could still pass for human. No one knew what had happened to them. But drakes were marked as monsters, and more often than not, they were. They were controlled by their addiction.

Felicity was different, though.

“Was,” said Felicity. “She
was
so young.” Her voice was quiet.

“I blew my cover,” I said. “I said Elena’s name. I identified her. I tried to lie to the police detective who questioned me about it, tell him that I only knew her because I used to clean houses for dragons—”

“Hey, that’s my life story,” said Felicity.

“Well, I needed to think of something believable,” I said. That was how Felicity and I had met. She used to clean the beach house for my family when we came to Sea City. Before my parents were killed by a slayer. Before Felicity got turned into a drake. Before I ran away from everything that I ever knew.

“He didn’t buy it?” Felicity asked.

I shook my head. “Not really. He knows. He didn’t come right out and say it, but he knows I’m a dragon.”

“So, that’s it? One detective figures out your secret and you’re flying around and using telekinetic magic on vampires?”

There were three kinds of magic and all three came from dragons. Telekinesis, pyrokinesis, and compulsion. Any magic that any other half-breed or mage possessed, they got from taking parts of dragons and using them to create magic. Since I was a dragon, I could do all of it on my own. But I usually didn’t.