The Queen's Wings Read online

  Kristoff roared. He was completely shifted. He looked like a Komodo dragon on steroids. Green scales bristled and shimmered as the sprinkler doused his flanks. His teeth were hard and flat—made for crushing—and his nails clenched on the carpet, shredding it as he advanced on me. Drakes were wingless, but made up for it in foot-long talons. I had a really good look at them as he stalked me.

  “Shit.” I jabbed the elevator button as fast as I could. Maybe it would sense the urgency of the situation. Maybe I was going to get pulverized. “Sorry about your hand.” Not really. But if I stalled, Zhang’s wounds might regenerate enough that he could step in and rescue me. “I’m not sure what happened.”

  The drake’s breath blew hot over me before he spoke. “And here I thought the greatest treasure we would find is Zhang’s hoard. But we have a little Queen.”

  “A Queen,” Markus said, exiting the stairwell. “That’s impossible.”

  I put my back to the elevator when Kristoff smashed out the doorway to Zhang’s office with his tail. “She spit at me.”

  “We can train her not to spit,” Markus said. “A Queen of our very own.”

  “First we’ll have to train her to obey. Tie her up. We’re taking her with us.”

  “No,” I screamed as Markus grabbed my arm and started dragging me away.

  The elevator doors opened, and two dragons dressed like commandoes burst out. A swarthy, dark-haired one brandished a crackling baton. The other, a redhead, cracked his knuckles and took in the scene.

  “She’s a Queen,” Markus said to them. “Let us go, and we’ll share her.”

  “Bullshit,” Red said. He tackled Markus and all three of us went down.

  “Zhang’s been shot,” I said, wrestling away from them.

  Markus head-butted the other dragon in the nose, but Red drove his fist into his face three times, fast as a jackhammer. Markus’s neck lolled back.

  “Reed, Zhang’s still alive,” Red said and went back to beating Markus until he was broken, bleeding, and unconscious.

  I sidled into the elevator, but the doors wouldn’t shut. The building shuddered like there was an earthquake going on. Stepping out quickly, because I didn’t really want to be trapped in the large metal box ten floors up when the building came down, I stumbled over to the stairwell again.

  Reed fought Kristoff, without changing into his dragon form. I stopped and gaped. It was stupid and breathtaking, but Reed was winning. Kristoff was twice as big and had the weight advantage, not to mention his snapping mouth and swiping claws. Yet Reed was never at the receiving end of them. The baton pulsed energy whenever it struck Kristoff.

  Part of me would have loved to stay and watch. Reed was fascinating—wide shoulders, a noble profile with an aristocratic nose, all muscles and deadly skill. The other part of me—the I-can’t-believe-you’re-drooling-instead-of-running part—was whispering, Get out. Get out. Get out.

  I whirled and ran back down the stairs. Twelve floors of stairs are a killer, even if you are going down. Four murderous dragons above you, however, are a great motivator. I hit the lobby and wanted to throw up, but I was afraid of what I’d do to the marble floor. I sank over Jane’s desk and breathed in and out. I think I’d just manifested a breath weapon. And the only one to have seen it was about to be killed.

  The building groaned and bits of ceiling started to fall down. I sprinted for the doors and hit them, exiting as sirens, red trucks, and firefighters greeted me.

  “Are you all right?” Jane asked, giving me a hug. She pulled me to safety behind the police barriers. Up in the sky the battle raged on as dragon fought dragon. People were standing on the tops of their cars to get footage of it with their phones.

  “I think I’m going to take the rest of the day off,” I said.

  Jane looked at the embassy and the dragon battle above it. “Sounds like a plan to me.”

  Chapter Two

  Second Rule of Dragons: Guard your Queen and your hoard

  The wind caressed my scales as I banked toward the dawn. The chilly morning air woke up my tummy, even though the flock of sheep I had nibbled on at midnight had been really tasty and filled me up. I had covered miles and miles, just flying for the sheer freedom of it.

  As the sun rose, my eyes blinked. They were wind burned and sleepy. I wheeled and headed for home. Swirling my long green-and-gold tail around the chimney helped me steady my bulk on the roof. I let out a large yawn that shook the leaves from the nearby trees. Curling my forelegs underneath me, I rested my massive head on the shale of the roof and faded off into sleep.

  Much later, an icy blast of rain shocked me awake, and I nearly fell off the roof before scrabbling to get a hold on the wet bricks. I was on top of the house without any clothes on…again. Blinking tears and raindrops out of my eyes, I stared at my human hands. No talons appeared. I closed my eyes and grunted, trying to grow back the wings that I never saw while I was awake. Running my hands over my body, I checked for scales or horns but no such luck. I tilted my head back to let out an acid-breathing blast of air, but only collapsed into hacking coughs.

  Finishing with a tremendous sneeze, I sniffled and scurried down the roof and into my open bedroom window. I hoped the rain would keep Mr. Myers and Biffi the cockapoo inside today. I didn’t think he’d buy the new yoga technique story twice in one week.

  My bedroom floor was slightly soggy, and I closed the window before I had a major puddle. While pulling myself into a ratty, but warm, Turkish robe, I plodded over to the mirror.

  “I am a dragon,” I told my reflection. It seemed to be convinced, but the fever-bright eyes could have been a consequence of being on the roof all night without any clothes on. It would have been easier if I was crazy. Then I wouldn’t second-guess myself all the time. I would put on my tin-foil hat—or in this case my homemade wire hanger dragon wings, and skip merrily through life.

  “Shift,” I gritted out and pushed outward with all my might. All I had to show for it was a few burst blood vessels on my face and a doozy of a headache.

  Of course, the reflection didn’t remind me there were only five Queens in the world. The only one in North America was Esmeralda. I read up on her on the Internet before I went to bed last night. She was a violet Cuélebre—more snakelike than lizard, with massive wings. They called her the Brood Mother, and she lived in a rebuilt Mayan temple in Mexico, on sixty acres of rainforest. No humans allowed.

  A few male dragons who weren’t sequestered away into her harem were allowed to take pictures and do long articles on her power and beauty. Eighty percent of all the modern dragons on this continent were her sons. The other twenty percent were wild born, shifting into their new shape in their late adolescence. None were female.

  I was born to Bob and Mary Sue Donovan from Orange Grove, Florida. The most exciting thing my family ever did was go on Family Feud. We lost to the Santiagos when my brother botched a question. Name something you find in a gym. Sweat socks. Seriously?

  And that ended the Donovans’ fifteen minutes of fame.

  Maybe Zhang was right, maybe I was just seeing things that weren’t there.

  I went to call Jane to see how everything worked out at her office, but my cell phone was in my purse, wherever the heck that was. I hoped Zhang was all right and that none of the embassy’s dragons were injured, except those two assholes that tried to kidnap me.

  I remembered the pitying glance Jane had given me. It was possible she thought I was a loon. It was days like this, I almost agreed with her. But then my stomach roiled and I let out a loud belch that melted the wallpaper.

  “Who does stuff like this?”

  It had to be real. First damaging that drake’s hand and now this. I touched the burned part of the wall, which wasn’t hot, but it stunk like skunks on corned beef-and-cabbage night. Wrinkling my nose, I headed into the bathroom to jaw down twenty or so antacids, then turned up the heat on the shower and gave myself the luxury of a good long soak.

  Losing my p
urse was a real pain, but aside from my house keys (for which I had a duplicate under a fake rock in the back) and my cell phone (that I kept reaching for compulsively), I wasn’t inconvenienced too much. I had zero cash in my wallet anyway and my credit card was maxed. I had left my car at the office and taken the train to the embassy so I didn’t have to worry about parking. Since I didn’t have wheels in the immediate vicinity, I scrounged for bus change.

  When I pulled a backup purse out of my closet I was almost brained by a falling encyclopedia of tantric dragon sex. Seriously, what was I thinking putting that on the shelf? Tucking the research material in my bedroom drawer next to my “neck massager,” I went back to scavenging inside the purse. I was hoping for a serendipity fiver, but no luck. It smelled like spearmint chewing gum, although what really made my day was it had an old copy of Hellspark by Janet Kagan inside it. I rubbed the paperback against my cheek and dropped it back into the bag. Confirming there was a handful of change in the zippered part, I was ready.

  I managed to make it to work on time and headed into my boss’s office. It was an old airport hangar that had been gutted and set up so a full-grown Western dragon had room to work. It had crap Internet speed, but made up for it with wide-open spaces.

  “The embassy was attacked yesterday afternoon,” I told Niall, but he didn’t raise his head from the manuscript he was reading. He was in dragon form, reading an ancient tablet in his native language. It’s possible he didn’t even hear me. Most of my escapades I told him about usually didn’t meet with more than a grunt, even if he was in his human form.

  “Zhang got the Dirty Harry special,” I said, pointing my finger like a gun and squinting my eyes like Clint Eastwood. But Niall wasn’t listening. Or he didn’t care. He didn’t have much use for the embassy.

  Niall was a Celtic dragon. He was called the “All Knowing” and was rumored to be the Brood Mother’s first lover. His scales were the brown and fiery golds of autumn leaves and were magnificent in the fluorescent light. I could only imagine what he looked like in sunlight because he never ventured out of the hangar in anything but his human form. He taught ancient history at Yale and in gratitude, the university let him use the hangar for his research.

  “I spit up on a drake and melted his arm.”

  “That’s nice,” Niall said, without looking up. I smiled at him, watching his long whiskers dip over the stone carvings he perused. They danced over writing, like he was reading Braille. He was deep in the zone.

  “Then I jumped naked into the Long Island Sound and had mad sex with a polar bear.”

  “Can you get me a pot of coffee, dear?”

  Some said Niall had mental powers that allowed him to translate all known languages, but I just think he knew a lot. And in an absentminded-professor way, he tended to forget the little things, like eating and sleeping. And that this was the twenty-first century and you shouldn’t expect your “office girl” to bring you coffee. Still, I’d rather get him coffee than work anywhere else. I pulled the privacy curtain across the room, which was more for my sake than Niall’s. I’d never get a thing done if I had unlimited gazing time on the beautiful creature.

  After partitioning off the room, I glanced around my miniscule area of the hangar. I was going for a Masters degree in parazoology and Niall was amused enough by my tenacity in getting into his five hundred-level class to let me be his office assistant.

  Niall didn’t know or care it wasn’t normal human behavior to say whatever was on your mind no matter the situation. I had no filters, so this job was perfect for me. He didn’t even kick me out when I confessed I thought I was going to shift into a dragon soon. He just blinked at me and said in his deep rumbling voice, “That would be interesting.” Then he set me to filing. The pay was marginal, but it was never dull. I was learning a lot about the behaviors of the Great Wyrm. Most importantly, not to talk to one before coffee.

  My mom called me book smart. My brother called me an airhead and stopped speaking to me when I wouldn’t “get off the dragon kick.” His last words to me were over Christmas. “You need therapy.” Or maybe it was “Get a life.”

  I had both, thank you. One was really expensive and the other contained lots of books. But no cats, even if they were tasty. I blinked at the thought and added a mental tally in my head. I thought cats were tasty. I bet so did dragons. I’d have to ask Niall.

  After filling up the two thirty-cup coffeemakers and setting them to perk, I went to my own desk and fired up the computer. While I waited for the servers to connect and start the day’s download, I called in a lunch order that would have fed fifty people—a typical dragon meal—and a tuna salad for myself, also pretty typical for a Monday.

  I checked my class schedule while waiting for the printer to finish doing its dance of love, or whatever it did that took twenty friggin’ minutes to do before it printed.

  I called Jane’s cell and the embassy, but didn’t get through on either. I left a message to have her call me at the office.

  As I typed in the notes Niall put on mp4 for me, I started the cataloging program so he could cross-reference items easily. He was studying Stonehenge today. Niall was sure there was treasured buried under there, but the English government forbade him to go digging unless he could get three unrefuted sources of proof. So far he had only one and since it was his own shoddy memory, I didn’t think they were going to get the other two sources.

  “Here’s your coffee,” I said, struggling to keep the hot pot from splashing coffee all over me. “Lunch is on order.”

  Niall grunted.

  I set it down next to him and resisted the urge to run my hands over his sparkling scales. He wouldn’t appreciate it, and I might lose a hand. When I was a little girl in pigtails, I had been dragon crazy. Obsession took over in my teens and I plastered my wall with all the heartthrobs. When I didn’t shift, it helped me get over the dragons-poop-rainbows stage. But they still fascinated me, even after the pigtails gave way to a ponytail and my wall now held my bachelor’s degree instead of Casimiro in a rainstorm singing about his broken heart and hard dick.

  I hurried back to my side of the partition to catch the ringing phone before it could tick off Niall.

  “Yeah?”

  The printer beeped it was ready, and I pushed print. The massive rolls of paper began to whir and the data Niall had requested poured out. He hated to read on a computer screen. When you had a head as big as a Volkswagen, squinting into a laptop isn’t really your first choice.

  “This is the Yale Tribune. We were wondering if we could schedule an interview with the All Knowing?”

  “About?” I asked, checking the caller ID. It was legit. Sometimes fans tried to lie their way in to see Niall.

  “We’re doing an op-ed piece about dragon reactions to human government. What are his feelings about the Senate, the House, and of course the President of the United States?”

  “His website should have all the updated opinions he cares to share,” I said, wondering if the webmaster let “useless as tits on a bull” go up unedited.

  “Is he really that sarcastic in person?”

  “I think it safer to say that he has removed himself from the mundane concerns of humans.” I quoted Niall directly and tried not to mimic his voice.

  “Does he have a theory about what happened at the dragon embassy yesterday?”

  I snapped to attention. “Why, what happened?” I wanted to hear how the local news was spinning it.

  “Could be anything. A dragon coup?”

  “If it doesn’t involve Stonehenge, Niall’s not interested.”

  “Can I quote you on that?”

  “No.” I hung up the phone.

  “Excuse me,” a masculine rumble pulled me from my thoughts, “I need to see Niall.”

  The pencil slid from my mouth. The baton-toting dragon from yesterday was standing there dressed in a gorgeous silk suit. So unless he was a really well paid—I glanced at his identification he held out for me—go
vernment agent, then he had a hoard of his own. And probably a harem, I decided when he took off his mirrored sunglasses and assessed me with dark brown eyes. His name was Reed, I remembered.

  “Nice to see you again,” I said and then winced. That was a fantastic first impression. I had been soaked and shrieking like a little girl.

  I stuck my chin up when he eyeballed me up and down. I had always imagined myself as a heavier Angelina Jolie—with smaller lips. And without any tattoos. And shorter hair. Okay, maybe I really didn’t resemble Angelina Jolie at all. But I wanted to. So while I was doing the creative visualization my therapist suggested I try, I figured I’d start at the top. In truth, aside from the dark hair and dark eyes, I didn’t resemble a movie star at all. I looked like the secretary who sat near you on the bus and knitted while listening to an iPod.

  The dragon’s glare made me shiver in reaction. The air between us quivered, like the wind before a thunderstorm. Ozone prickled at my skin and the hair on the back of my neck started to dance. I wasn’t much for suits that cost more than I made in a month. It was what was inside that counted, and I wanted very much to see inside this particular suit. His scent coiled around me and my eyes half closed as I inhaled deeply. He smelled like a leather hardbound book and cinnamon. My grin stretched across my face until my cheeks hurt.

  Reed, however, didn’t seem as impressed with me, though. When it was apparent those lovely masculine lips of his were going to stay in a surly twist, I pretended to search for the calendar.

  “Do you have an appointment?” I knew damn well he didn’t. Get a grip, I told myself. Don’t burp. Don’t blurt out you fly naked.

  “I’m afraid I don’t have time for this.” Reed moved past my desk, and I sprang up to block him.

  “Niall gets really upset when he’s disturbed,” I said. “You don’t want to interfere when he’s translating. I don’t care how tough you are. He’s older and trickier.”

  “She means age and treachery always beats out youth and skill.” Red walked in carrying my purse.