Page 2 of The Dragon, the Bear, and Their Sugar Glider Omega

I felt bad because I hadn’t had time to shift for months. I’d ignored our need to stretch our wings. My shifter life had gotten buried under other more pressing needs. Like paying rent and eating. Come Friday, I totally owed my dragon that whole baked chicken.

I arrived at my night job right on time.

Three hours into my shift, as luck would have it, the bar cook had made an order of hot wings when the customer had ordered plain. Instead of throwing them away, he gave them to me on my break. So my dragon had a few bites of spicy chicken. We weren’t all that keen on spicy food, but we didn’t complain for one second. Plus, dousing them in ranch dressing helped curb the burn.

I sat on a milk crate in the back room enjoying my food. That sort of boon didn’t happen every day. We busboys weren’t supposed to eat kitchen food. But sometimes the cooks pushed leftovers at us and looked the other way. They knew the wage we made per hour.

When my break was over, I went back to work cleaning tables and putting glassware in the dishwasher.

As I cleared the last table for the night, another boon happened. Someone had left behind an amazingly beautiful, thick green pen with a metal base. It even wrote in green ink. I looked around to see if the customers at the table were actually gone. There was no sign of them.

I pocketed the pen. My dragon made a happy little rarroar deep inside me.

It wasn’t stealing. The bar had a box behind the counter for lost phones and wallets—no one who didn’t work here would believe how many people left behind those expensive items. But for pens, well, if I’d thrown one in the box, I would’ve been laughed at. Plus, as beautiful as this pen was, I’d seen it before and knew its price. It retailed for five bucks, less if you could find it on sale.

Anyway, nobody at the bar thought about pens being worth anything. Not unless they were dragon shifters who added them to their hoard as if they were made of pure gold. So no, it wasn’t stealing.

I went home full of chicken wings and happy about the pretty green pen. In my life, you had to take your wins as they came. This was a win.

For now.

Chapter Two

Clayborne

“Are you sure it’s not stolen?” It was the fifth time the car lot manager asked me the same question, and I had to give him credit; he had the decency to whisper it.

And, once again, I told him it wasn’t. “It’s not stolen. You can look up the VIN. I have my ID. If you’re not interested, I can go to the next block.”

I didn’t blame him for being suspicious though. I would be too if someone was trading in a six-digit car for what most people would consider a junker. Fine, it wasn’t exactly a junker, but it was over a decade old and had a few dents. It was hardly the pick of the lot. Only for me, it was. I needed a vehicle to get me all the way to the desert but not be flashy like my other cars. If I wanted to blend in, I needed a car that didn’t shout wealth, and this was that.

“You just want to trade this for a fifteen-year-old Honda and walk away with no cash. Am I getting that correct?”

“You are.”

“And you don’t see why I think this is weird?”

“Listen, I’m gonna be frank with you. This is between us, but I need to go undercover for a little while.”

I didn’t. I was just starting over in a new place where no one knew me, but he didn’t need to know that. From the vibe I was getting from him and the show playing in the background of the waiting room, he was into secrets, crime, and adventures.

My excuse would be just up his alley and maybe help facilitate this process. The last two lots I went to took one look at my car and told me to go to a specialty dealer. And if I had been looking for a fancy car, that would’ve worked. But I wasn’t, and I suspected this might be my last chance at swapping out.

Could I just buy a car? Sure. But then I would still need to deal with what to do with this one. I’d already cleared out the rest of my cars, and the faster I could get this done, the better.

“Undercover?” His eyes lit up.

“Yeah. Have you ever seen that show where the bosses go to work at their own businesses?”

He nodded. “Gotcha.”

He didn’t because that had been my segue into a more complicated excuse. This was better. Easier.

“Let’s get this paperwork taken care of. An even trade…you’re sure? I don’t want you coming back later all pissy at me.”

“I won’t, and I’m absolutely sure.” I didn’t want to deal with finding someone who had the money to pay for this vehicle or deal with the red tape of selling to a high-end place. I just wanted out of this town.

An hour and a half later, I was driving out of the lot in my brand-new-to-me Honda and to my parking garage. And when I said my parking garage, I meant, I owned it. I owned the entire building.

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