“Also acceptable. I’m going to find my shoes.” I waved and headed for the door.
“Wait.” Zav spoke in a normal tone, but power laced the word.
I froze, my body unwilling to disobey him. As I knew from past experience, it wouldn’t have mattered if I’d had Chopper with me.
As he strolled up with the boxes, walking around my unmoving form to face me again, I gritted my teeth. I wanted to curse at him and his presumptuousness, but my lips and tongue weren’t working either.
“You know how to research the locations of magical beings in this world. Can you locate Dobsaurin for me?” Zav flicked a finger and muscle control returned to me.
“Maybe,” I said slowly, realizing someone from another world and without a phone and a cell plan would have a hard time using the internet on the fly, “but—”
“This would be more efficient than if I flew all over the mountains, hoping to unmask the camouflage he has placed on himself. Yes, this is a good plan. You will do this for me.”
“Pardon you, but I’m on my own quest right now.” I glowered at him.
If he said I owed him because he’d healed me, I would aim a kick right at his groin and find out if he was as anatomically correct as he promised.
“I understand this. Once we have found Dobsaurin and dealt with him, I will assist you in negotiating with these panther shifters who are an obstacle to you.”
“I don’t want to negotiate with them; I want to blow up their house and drown them in the river.”
He gave me that judgy look again. “I am impassive in regard to them. This will make me a superior negotiator.”
I wanted to argue, mostly because he was trying to make all the decisions, but I’d already admitted I couldn’t rightfully kill the Pardus brothers unless they did something worse than attacking me and painting graffiti on a food truck. If they had killed people with that grenade, it would have been different, but I couldn’t feel anything but relief that they’d failed.
“The fact that you can breathe fire and melt people probably helps with negotiations too.”
“People do not melt. They char and incinerate.”
“Good to know.” I rubbed my face and tried to set my ego aside to agree to his deal. Negotiating on Nin’s behalf was what I’d had in mind, and it would be a lot easier to cow the brothers—convince them to comply—with a dragon standing at my side. “All right, I agree to your proposal, but if we’re going to work together for even a moment, we have to establish some rules.”
“I agree. I am bound by the laws and regulations of the Dragon Justice Court. You will swear an oath to uphold the same laws.”
“That’s definitely not what I had in mind. I’m talking rules—boundaries—between me and you.” I imagined Mary talking about the distance I created between myself and others and almost laughed. “You promise to stay out of my head. None of that magical compulsion bullshit. No freezing me in place while you stalk around me and touch my stuff. No using me for bait to get this silver dragon to come calling. And finally, no making me want to obey and please you.” I still wasn’t positive the compulsion he’d put on me weeks earlier had faded. Maybe I was only here talking to him because he’d made me want to be nice to him.
Zav gazed at me. I couldn’t tell if it was a thoughtful and considering gaze or if he was ignoring my speech while making a mental to-do list. Whatever that looked like. Clean the cave, pick up fresh sheep to eat for dinner, compel innocent maidens to service him.
“I find you a surly mongrel,” he said, “and do not care for this manipulation.”
“Tough. You want me to research your silver nemesis, you agree to my stipulations, or forget it.”
His eyes narrowed. They were glowing a soft violet, and I remembered what he’d told the kid. It occurred to me that he might be able to magically compel me to go do that research for him, while massaging his feet and pumicing his corns. Especially since Chopper was in the Jeep instead of in my hand.
“Listen.” I lifted my hands in a placating gesture that probably worked better on humans than dragons. “I’m my own person, and I’ll do my best work if I’m a willing participant. If you were in my shoes, you wouldn’t want someone with superior power manipulating you, would you?”
“It is the way of the Realms that those with superior power use it to maintain their dominant positions.”
“Yeah, yeah, survival of the fittest. But you wouldn’t like it if someone more fit than you manipulated you, right?”
“It happens. That is the way.”
“It’s happened to you?”
Zav lifted his chin without answering. Great, did that mean that some other more powerful dragon could come along and compel him to do things? Like Dobsaurin?
“I will agree to your terms for the duration of this time that we are working together,” Zav said, “but you may wish to rescind your rules if we encounter Dobsaurin. If you are under a compulsion from me and under my control, it will be more difficult for him to put a compulsion on you.”
“I’ll risk it. Besides, I’m researching where he is, not going with you.”
“You will come with me to make certain we can find his lair and deal with him.”
“No, I won’t.”
Zav tilted his head. “You already agreed to this.”
I reviewed the moments of our conversation, wishing I’d thought to record it. Already, it looked like he was treating this as a binding agreement. As I thought about it, I realized that, yes, he’d said he would help me with the Pardus brothers after we found Dob and dealt with him. Damn it.
“Why do you want me along? Won’t I just be in your way?”
His eyes went from a faint violet glow to full-on beaming. “You will be in his way.”
12
When I walked up to Nin’s food truck, the graffiti had been removed—or painted over—and she was outside on a ladder installing security cameras while men in the lunch line offered suggestions. There weren’t as many customers as on a weekday, but they all had opinions about installing cameras. Nin thanked them politely, smiled, nodded her head, and ignored them in favor of carefully following the instructions.
“Hello, Nin.” I wished I had better news for her. “I visited your competition, found them unpleasant, handsy, and with unexpected allies. I’m in the process of researching and regrouping and coming up with a Plan B. I can’t openly go back to their house, since they had their lawyer complain to my boss, the whiny gits.”
I didn’t mention the new dragon duties I had to fulfill before I could finish Nin’s assignment. Since Zav’s departure, I’d started researching the social-media sites for news on the silver dragon, and I’d found a few videos of him that had been posted the day before, when he’d been spotted flying around the Woodinville and Redmond areas. Unfortunately, a dragon could fly hundreds of miles a day, so there was no telling where he was now.
Nin climbed down from the ladder and regarded me solemnly. “I am sorry that your yoga studio was attacked.”
“Oh, you heard about that?”
“There are many rumors going around—my customers share them with me. A new dragon threat has arrived, pedestrians are being plucked off the Burke Gilman Trail, and a yoga studio with the Ruin Bringer in it was assaulted.”
“Pedestrians are disappearing?” I grimaced. I hadn’t stumbled across that yet, but I’d been searching specifically for news of the dragon. Any number of people, magical and mundane, could be responsible for missing persons. Still, I’d seen the silver dragon soaring toward the Sammamish River Trail, a trail that turned into the Burke Gilman Trail once it hit Lake Washington. Coincidence?
“Three that I have heard of so far. The demand for dragon-slaying weapons is increasing. I have fielded many inquiries but have been forced to admit I cannot make anything that powerful. I worry that people will believe the Parduses’ claims and go to them.”
“I’m afraid of that too.”
Nin hesitated. “Do you think they are the ones who attacked your yoga studio?”
I also hesitated, since I didn’t want her to feel bad about getting me involved with this. “It’s not my yoga studio. That was my first class there. We were only halfway through, and I hadn’t even figured out what ocean breathing was yet.”
“Val…”
“Yes.” I sighed. “It was probably them. Like the manly men they are, they had a boy deliver a message for them.” I fished it out of my pocket and showed it to her.
She shook her head as she read it, her pink pigtails flopping sadly forward.
“Don’t worry about it.” I rested a hand on her forearm. “I get threatened all the time. It’s part of the job. And nobody was hurt.” I shuddered to think what might have happened if I hadn’t reacted quickly enough to throw that grenade back out. “I’ll just avoid being barefoot and without my weapons in enclosed spaces full of people until I get this resolved. And I plan to. Zoltan pointed me toward the person who’s supplying their magical bullets, and I’m going to visit tomorrow and find out what I can. Maybe see if I can convince the person to take a nice vacation for a while. I’m also thinking about going back to the brothers’ house tonight and sneaking around—not going in, mind you, since I have orders not to do that—to see if I can figure out who they’ve got working in the basement. I don’t think either of those two lumps of coal has enchanting skills of their own.”
“I wish you would let me pay you, Val. This is dangerous work.”
“I’ll take some ammo. A lot. I have a feeling I may need it.”
“To fight the Pardus brothers?”
“Maybe.” I decided not to mention how Zav thought I should go with him to vanquish his dragon nemesis. “Why don’t you take a break? Let’s get some lunch.”