Never Deal with Dragons (19 page)

It was Richard’s turn to sigh. “Would you stop doing that? It’s been less than a minute since you last checked the time.”

I sighed, exasperated. “I know that! That’s why I asked you to distract me!”

Richard was silent as his eyes returned to the last of the wine swirling in his glass. His easygoing expression disappeared. “Did you know my dad was one of the first DRACIM agents?”

That got my attention. Richard was famously reticent about speaking with others about his father. “Yeah, Joseph Green. The first dragonspeaker.”

Richard ran a fingertip along the base of his glass. “We actually moved to Tulsa when I was three to open the DRACIM branch. I was too young to remember much before that, just bits and pieces of my mom packing up boxes. We’d only been in our new house a year before my dad was hurt.”

I remembered seeing the news the day Joseph had stepped down from DRACIM, due to an injury. I nodded, urging Richard to continue.

“A group of dragons who protested the comingling of human and dragon attacked my father outside the grocery store. Word had spread that he’d be the head of the new office, and the dragons had decided to take him out. My dad’s spinal cord was damaged. He never walked again.”

Richard drained his glass in one large swallow and set it deliberately on the table before meeting my eyes. “So how’s that for something to take your mind off the wait?”

“Richard, I...” I didn’t know what to say. I knew from personal experience that “I’m sorry” was useless, and “I know what you’re feeling” was even worse. I may have lost my parents, but their deaths had been by accident or by their own hand, not deliberately orchestrated by a group of antihuman terrorists.

So I told him the truth. “Richard, I don’t know what to say.”

He poured more wine from the bottle. “There’s nothing to say. It’s in the past, life goes on, and we make the best of it we can.”

I pondered his words. He was right. At some point, a person had to pick up the pieces and move on. I’d done it once with Trian, and Richard and his father had both dealt with much worse.

I glanced again at my watch. We’d killed ten minutes. Scanning the crowd for any newcomers who looked like super-capable antiterrorist machines, I decided we still had some time to wait.

I took a sip of wine. “Does your dad live in Tulsa?”

“Yeah, with me and my mom. He’s paralyzed from the waist down, and requires near-constant care.” Richard sighed and ran a hand through his hair.

“It’s hard for him, you know. Not only does he feel useless because of his legs, but financially dependent on me too. If you knew my dad, you’d know just how much it eats his pride that his child has to take care of him instead of the other way around.”

His words surprised me. For all Richard’s talk about picking up pieces and moving on, it sounded like his dad hadn’t got the message. I’d met one of the guys in Carol’s team at the magazine offices who was bound to a wheelchair; he was fully active, and from everything Carol had told me, one of the more efficient and cheerful coworkers she knew.

“Well, maybe it would help if he found new interests. DRACIM has a lot of programs for family involvement, and since he’s former staff, he’d probably get everything paid for.”

I stopped and frowned. “Wait a sec. You said your dad was financially dependent on you. He was DRACIM’s founder. Where’s his income from his sale of the company? Even if the money is gone, didn’t DRACIM cover him under standard insurance?” No matter how tame, interacting with dragons came with significant risk. Every DRACIM employee was covered under the mother of all workers compensation policies. If an employee was injured by a dragon while on duty, DRACIM footed the medical bills for life—in addition to a generous lump sum payment. Which is why I had to sign a boatload of paperwork before Allan let me come on this trip. I didn’t understand how his dad could wind up penniless.

“At the time, the company wasn’t worth much. He sold while DRACIM was still in the early stages of figuring out how to overcharge for everything. He’d structured the company to focus its earnings on the employee insurance coverages. Except DRACIM ruled that my dad wasn’t technically injured on the job, so he wasn’t covered under the very policy he’d worked so hard to protect.”

“Ouch. That sucks.”

“Yes it does.” Richard looked over my shoulder and tensed. “Enough small talk. I think our weapon just showed up.”

“Oh crap.”

Chapter Fifteen

Richard and I watched as two men walked through the gate of the restaurant, one of them carrying a small plastic canister. They spoke briefly to the hostess and were quickly ushered toward the kitchen. There was nothing suspicious about their behavior; deliveries to a place of business fell firmly into the humdrum category.

I leaned over to Richard and, feeling ridiculous, whispered in his ear. “Why do you think that’s our weapon?” True, it was the only package we’d seen during the time frame supplied by Hian-puo’s general, but I wasn’t quite willing to hold anyone at gunpoint over what could easily be a container full of spices.

Especially as I had no gun.

“Because very few delivery men run their routes with a 9mm strapped to their waists. And they move like they’re pretty good at killing.”

I watched as they wove through the tables toward the back of the store. Richard was right: they walked like soldiers, each footfall deliberate and precise. Even the one carrying the canister was careful to keep his gun hand free.

The other had a definite bump under the back of his jacket. He surveyed the restaurant with a practiced eye, scanning for trouble. I tensed when his gaze landed on our table, but my disheveled ponytail and wrinkled outfit must have screamed tourist instead of potential assassin, because his eyes flicked to the next table with no perceptible pause.

“Any chance that’s our backup?” I kept hoping a miracle would happen and the bomb squad would show up as promised.

Richard’s mouth was set in a grim line. “No. Our backup has more estrogen. Three women, only one man.”

I ran a hand over the bio-detector hidden under my shirt. Dr. Renault, our airsick scientist, had hastily shoved the gadget into my hands before my flight. He’d told me the necklace—whose appearance closely resembled a set of old-fashioned dog tags—would light up if I got within five feet or so of the biomaterial suspected to be in the weapon. Personally, I thought it was a total crock, but it had been flickering steadily since the men had walked through the gate.

I’d have to let Dr. Renault know the range on the thing was more like fifty feet. I was glad of it. If we had to follow these guys, and the weapon, I’d take any advantage we had, reliable or not.

“So what do we do? We can’t just let them walk out of here.” The two men chatted briefly with a woman just inside the building. Money changed hands, and they disappeared inside for a moment. Then the two men started back the way they came, only this time the canister was taped firmly closed, and based on the strain of muscle in the guy’s arm, it was substantially heavier.

“We’ll have to follow them. Come on.” Richard grabbed my elbow and pulled me toward the exit.

“This isn’t a good idea. Oh crap, oh crap.” But really, what else could we do? I grabbed my purse off the back of my chair and hurried to follow.

Outside the courtyard, the two men slid into a late model car. Richard motioned for me to get in his rental, parked at a curb a block or so away.

Richard drove in tense silence. Luckily, we didn’t have far to go. The men stopped less than a mile from the restaurant, outside what appeared to be an office building. The man with the canister hopped out and walked briskly through the revolving door. Richard crossed the road and parked at the curb closest to the building.

While Richard and I were still arguing over whether we should go in after him, confront the guy in the car (and get ourselves killed, in my opinion), or keep pressing redial on Richard’s phone and pray someone answered, I saw our guy stroll back out of the building empty-handed.

I whacked Richard on the shoulder to make him shut up. “Look, he left the box. The box is in the office.”

We both held our breath as the man slid back into his car and continued down the street. As soon as the vehicle was out of sight, I popped my seat belt and opened the door. Richard was two steps ahead of me as we raced to the door. Cursing the fact that the weird European system of driving put the driver’s side closer to the building, I rushed across the road to catch up.

By the time I made it to the entrance, Richard was already in one of the revolving door’s compartments. Without a thought, I shoved my way into the same small space.

Big mistake.

“You know that revolving doors have more than one compartment for people, right?” He grunted as he tried to shift position.

“We fit in here just fine.” Richard moved and my nose squished against the glass.

Maybe not so much.

“Sure we do.” I heard Richard give the door a push to get it moving. Nothing happened.

“Um, Myrna?”

“What?”

“It’s locked.”

My face was once again smashed into the glass as Richard adjusted position and tried to shoulder his way in. I heard him grunt as the door shook with his weight. But it didn’t budge.

“It’s locked.”

He couldn’t see me, but I rolled my eyes anyway. “I heard you the first time.”

As I really didn’t appreciate small spaces, I slipped through the door’s opening and back onto the sidewalk. Richard followed a few seconds later.

“So now what?” In all my frenzied worrying, it had honestly never occurred to me that the safety of the world would be toppled by a stupid revolving door.

“DRACIM has an office somewhere nearby. They could get us a locksmith here within the hour, no questions asked.”

Richard thought about it, then shook his head.

“No. I have some contacts already in the area. Lord Relobu has been granted full access to Lady Adelaida’s human staff. I’m sure she’s got at least one person capable of picking a lock for us.”

I bit my lip. “Sounds good. They’d get here faster anyway.” Hian-puo’s men had added a timer to the machine after it left Shui-Tech, so the scientist couldn’t tell me how long we had until the bio-bomb went off. All he could say was that dragons would start dropping, fast, if even a little of the bacteria made it into the air.

I listened as Richard spoke briefly in German with a woman on the other end of the phone. He must have been able to locate someone who could help, because there was only a slight pause before he rattled off the address. He closed the phone with a snap and faced me.

Just then, the display lit up, and after a brief pause while the person on the other line spoke, Richard’s face became considerably more animated. He snapped the phone closed and looked at me with a grin.

“That’s the team—they’ll be here within the hour. And they said not to worry—the weapon is safe for another day.”

“How’d they figure that out?”

“The device is on a timer.”

To be honest, I didn’t care. My body slumped as relief hit. “We did it. We stopped the bomb.”

Richard looked me over, then nodded in the direction of his car. “Go get some sleep. It’ll be at least forty-five minutes before anyone gets here.”

I nodded. Sleep, even in a car, sounded like heaven. Richard popped the trunk and pulled out a small pillow, sheet and a thermos.

I raised an eyebrow. “Full-service establishment.”

He wiggled the thermos. “Tea. I grabbed it all off the plane. I’ve been known to catch a few minutes of shut-eye on the side of the road myself. Never hurts to be prepared.”

I laughed. “Yeah, too bad we didn’t think of that before we let those guys lock our weapon in a building in the middle of the day.”

“Next time I’ll pack my crowbar.”

He opened the car door and I slid inside. My head barely hit the pillow before I vaulted into dreamland.

* * *

When I finally woke, it was dark, and my bed was now moving down the road at a steady clip, bouncing slightly along the bumpy asphalt. I jerked into a sitting position.

“Richard! Where are we? I have to disable the bomb.” My sleep-muddled brain was having a hard time keeping up, and despite the fact that the car was in motion, my fingers groped for the latch.

“Myrna. Don’t open the door.” I felt Richard’s hand on my arm. He chuckled. “The weapon was disarmed. One of Lady Adelaida’s employees took care of it. I’m taking you to a hotel so you can rest.”

He met my eyes in the rearview mirror and grinned. “It’s over. They got it. It was sitting right next to the coffeepot in the first floor break room.”

“But, my papers, there was a special way it had to be...” I trailed off when Richard raised his free hand to show me my folder of notes. “Oh.” My shoulders slumped. I was glad the danger was over, but I felt like an idiot for sleeping through the entire thing. “Why didn’t you wake me up?”

Richard laughed. “I tried, and you almost hit me. One of the bomb experts Lady Adelaida sent had some experience in biomechanics. She used your notes. Piece of cake.”

Richard was smiling like a loon, obviously elated at the team’s success. He was no doubt looking forward to telling Lord Relobu how the crisis had been averted. All while I snored in the backseat of his car.

Delightful.

I couldn’t help it: I was stiff, groggy, and more than a little bummed that I’d missed the action. “Piece of cake, huh? Easy for you to say. I wish someone would’ve told me the biomechanics chick would make it before I stayed up almost forty-eight hours straight to learn the stuff.”

“I did tell you.”

“Yes, well, they cut it a little too close for my comfort. I’m not made for these spy games.”

I sat up and tried in vain to straighten my clothes. “So why’d they hide it in an office?”

“The building was rented in the name of Puo Enterprises.”

“Ah. Convenience.” It didn’t take a genius to figure out Hian-puo leased the office so he’d have somewhere safe to drop the weapon.

The streetlights were blindingly bright to my still sleepy eyes. I raised my hand in an attempt to rub away the discomfort and banged my knuckles against the necklace. It was blinking a furious red. I stared at it stupidly for several moments. Why was it lighting up now?

“Richard? My necklace. It’s lighting up.”

He glanced back. “So?”

“It’s not supposed to do that unless it comes within five feet of the machine. Maybe a little more.”

Richard had returned his attention to the road, so I couldn’t see his face. “Maybe it’s broken.”

I looked at it doubtfully. “Maybe. But it’s weird that it only started up now. Was it doing this while I was asleep?”

“Not that I remember, but you had a blanket over your head for most of the time. I went in the building with the rest of the guys. It’s possible it’s just reacting to traces on my clothes.”

“I guess.” It didn’t make much sense. From what I gathered from Dr. Renault, the biomaterial was completely sealed off from the outside world until its canister was damaged or released. But then again, I wasn’t too sure how it worked. Dr. Renault was too busy vomiting to do much more than shove the notes in my hand with a few words of explanation.

“Weird.” I tucked it back under my shirt.

“Well, the good news is, you can trash it once we reach the hotel. I should probably mention, Carol sent Jia and Cai to Tulsa with Dan and Henry. She flew here on dragonback a few hours ago so she could spend the day getting you something to wear to tomorrow’s trial.”

“Wow. Dragonback?” I was both impressed and jealous that Carol had managed to finagle a dragon ride before I did. Then the rest of Richard’s statement sunk in. I groaned. I never thought I’d actually say it, but I’d never been so sick of new clothes in my entire life.

“Just get me to the hotel. I need a shower. And chocolate. Lots of chocolate.”

* * *

Richard escorted me to my hotel room, then promptly disappeared in favor of the gathering dragon hoard. This trial, even though—or especially because—it had been thrown together on the spur of the moment, was unofficially the party of the year. Based on Richard’s quick retreat, he didn’t want to miss even a minute of it.

But it was after ten in the evening, and despite the nap in the car, I still felt groggy and jet-lagged. I almost cried when I saw the large suitcase on the bed. My new clothes. I was sick of trying to figure out these outfits all by myself.

I stepped closer and laughed.

A pair of soft flannel pajamas, decorated with fuzzy unicorns, had been folded neatly on top. These I could handle. God Bless Carol. She’d come through again.

I walked to the bathroom and twisted the shower nozzle, inching the temperature a few degrees warmer than I usually preferred. I glanced longingly at the tub, because a good long soak sounded heavenly. But the fear of falling asleep and drowning butt-naked where just anybody might find me was more than I could handle. I chose the shower instead.

Even the water couldn’t help me shake the feeling of lethargy. My bones were so heavy and liquid it was a struggle to make it to the bed. If I didn’t know any better, I’d think I was drugged. My eyes were closing of their own volition, so I nixed the idea of wrestling into the pajamas and simply crawled between the sheets.

I’d managed to pound the pillow into a shape my head decided was comfortable when someone knocked on my door. Grumbling only a little, I dug through the suitcase until I found a silk robe Carol had included in my “courtroom wardrobe.” I shrugged into it before squinting into the peephole. Trian stood in the hall, looking clean and refreshed and well-healed from his injuries. And human. I cautiously flipped the bolt and opened the door.

He made no move to come inside. Instead his eyes took in my damp and ratted hair, red eyes and bare toes. His voice was hesitant. “Hi.”

“Hi.” Even through my exhaustion, the awkwardness was a living, breathing creature between us. For several moments we both stared at our feet, until I couldn’t take it anymore. “Would you like to come in?”

Trian cleared his throat. “Um, yeah. Thanks.”

I opened the door wider and stepped aside as he entered. As usual, he scanned the room quickly and efficiently, no doubt absorbing the fact that I’d managed to litter it with clothing and wet footprints in the thirty or so minutes I’d been present. Attempting casual, I toed under the bed a pair of red lace panties that must have fallen out of the suitcase. I changed my mind on the type of thank you Carol deserved.