Page 5 of Forked Tongues Are Fun
My body jostled closer to the invisible sensors/lasers, but didn’t trip them. Somehow, I held my position. I gritted my teeth as I leaned and stretched myself the rest of the way through. My heel cleared, and I was finally in. I allowed myself one breath of relief before I took in my surroundings.
Thick wooden shelves lined the room, both around the edges and in the middle, much like a library. Various gold, silver, gemstones, and other expensive-looking items sat on the shelves with little white cards in front with specific details written on them in a precise hand:Haunted Ming Dynasty Vase – fifteenth century, Honus Wagner baseball card, signed – 1911.It was so organized, alphabetized by the looks of it, that it took me aback a little. I’d been expecting skiing over mountains of gold to find the key. It would be so much simpler than that. I almost promised myself a victory shot of alcohol after this—a Red-Headed Slut if I was feeling dirty—but then I remembered I wasn’t anywhere near the finish line.
I stood, my palms clammy with anticipation, and followed the faint, graying line of dragon fire toward the nearest aisle of shelves.
A roar sounded from just behind the back wall. Loud, too close, and terrifying. They were coming.
Fuck.
My heart tripped into my throat. I stumbled down the aisle, throwing glances over my shoulder at the wide-open door. They’d come any second. Even if they didn’t right away, I still had to contort my way out again and then leave this house without them seeing I had the key. If it even was an actual key.
The location for the full-moon ritual changed every month so the shifters could schmooze in different ritzy places before their power surge given to them by their goddess, Léas. To keep the location secret, the exact coordinates were supposedly broadcast to every dragon shifter tattoo, which I guessed worked like a sort of map. The problem, at least to dragon shifters, was that the message also broadcast to tattoos of shifters who’d died, leaving a potential security risk. To solve that problem, they separated the location magic seconds after it had been broadcast into sixteen random objects across the dragon shifter kingdom—a book, a rug, whatever was in this treasure trove—with part of the full-moon ritual’s exact coordinates etched into them.
Magic could only be changed, not destroyed, so the only way to find the objects was with dragon fire. It was like an epic treasure hunt, but not so epic if you were anyone but a dragon shifter. According to Bad Mama January, no one out of the dragon shifter species had ever found and crashed the full-moon ritual and lived to tell about it.
But despite the staggeringly awful odds, I had to try. Asa was my little brother, my partner in the life we’d made for ourselves without parents who cared, the only person who had ever acted like he enjoyed being around me, the sole reason anything mattered. Even if I died, I would never forgive myself if I didn’t at leasttry.
Another shriek far above my head. More trembles rocked the floor. What the hell was happening outside?
The line of fading dragon fire smoke wafted up toward a middle shelf and ended. Not a key but a pocket watch, bouncing to the edge of the shelf like all the other items with each vibration that shook the house. The white card in front of it readPatek Philippe Henry Graves Supercomplication – 1933.
I snatched it up, the last of the sixteen objects I needed to find Asa, then shoved the items that had been next to it closer together to make it look like nothing was gone. My fingers rubbed over the number etched into the back of the pocket watch, the magic that put it there tingling into my skin, but I didn’t have time to examine it. Like most everything else I owned, I taped it to the inside of my thigh, out of sight and secure enough that I wouldn’t lose it.
Then, I flew toward the door. A horrific crash sounded above my head. I ducked as parts of the ceiling rained down on top of me. An alarm sounded, maybe from the debris triggering the sensors. Flames burst past the doorway five feet in front of me, torching the walls to flaky black. I leaped back, my skin searing, and crashed into...something. Something powerful enough to lift me into the air, something white and...scaled. A dragon wing.
With a great screech, it picked me up in its wing and hurled me into the treasure trove’s wall. I screamed, but it was lost in the sound of an explosion. Bits of drywall zipped past, and then I dropped with a loudcrack. Blinking hard, I stayed still for a second, too stunned to move for fear I would break into two after a sound like that. Had I split my head open? Broken a bone? I hurt but my mind was still trying to catch up to narrow in on exactlywhereI hurt.
A milky blue haze seeped across my vision, but I blinked my way through it. It took several moments to realize that was the sky I was looking at, not the threat of unconsciousness. Dragons roared above, at least ten of them, most of them pissed enough to hurl fire at the others.
Wait, how was I seeing this from the treasure trove? I flailed my arm out to help me stand and hit something that triggered a rush of water. A faucet. I was sitting in the bathroom sink, picked up and dropped off here by a white dragon. I searched the sky, zeroing in on the white one hovering just overhead near a black and a vivid blue one. Calhoun and Tavis. Was the white one the shifter who had lurked in the living room shadows? Why had he moved me into the bathroom after I’d just stolen from him?
No time to ponder that while playing in their sink. I felt too woozy, hurt too much. I fought to unpretzel myself, but something wet leaked between my legs. I gasped, thinking I’d lost all control of my bladder which couldnotbe good, but then sharp edges stabbed into my inner thighs. Sharp like glass.
Though the tape was smeared with blood, the pocket watch was still there, intact. So was the vial of fairy corpse. But not the vial of dragon fire. It was currently snaking a bright orange trail up to the V between my legs. Oh,fuck.
I cried out, madly swiping at the very literal death sentence to get it off. But it was too late. The fiery orange was already seeping into my skin. It scorched me, touching every nerve until it coiled deep into a pulsing ache. I moaned as the feeling rushed to every part of me, liquefying and tightening everything along the way until my whole body hummed. My skin flushed. My fingers twitched with the need to touch myselfeverywhere, but I yanked my skirt down and hauled balls out of there.
I had no idea what I’d find in the rest of the house, but the hallway was torched black, thick smoke curling toward the sky. Most of the roof had been torn free. The kitchen blazed, the flames blocking the exit to the front door.
My eyes watered. My lungs burned. I threw myself into another room across the hallway and stumbled past a bed toward a large window covered in blinds. Seconds later, I was spilling headfirst into the backyard.
Dragons roared and lunged at each other overhead as I ran. There were no trees to hide under for cover if they saw me, not that it would matter anyway since theybreathed fire. I could only hope that all of them were too distracted to notice the thief sprinting from the house.
Just before the wooden fence that led to the alley, a loud bang ricocheted through the air. Heat blasted into my back, and I went down. My hands and knees scraped the ground, taking the brunt of my fall. A loud ringing zipped between my ears as I checked to see if the pocket watch was still taped to my inner thigh. Hallelujah, it was.
My whole body shaking, I willed my noodle-like limbs to help shove me to my feet. I caught a flash of movement out of the corner of my eye. Three figures stood between me and the blazing inferno house, their large bodies blocking me from the circling, roaring dragons overhead. Three human bodies. Threenakedhuman bodies. Calhoun, Tavis, and a third shifter with short white-blond hair and pale, almost translucent eyes.
I should’ve panicked that they were so close, close enough to stop me from taking the watch and finding my brother. Instead, the hot pulse between my legs unfurled and beckoned. Slick desire stormed across my nerves as I imagined rubbing myself on one of them after the other. Flesh against flesh. Scale against scale. For an eternity.
Wait, what? I didn’t have scales.
Intense hunger flashed in their eyes as they stared at me. Tavis flicked his tongue across his wicked smile, his shock of blue hair blowing in the breeze. Calhoun fisted his hands, as if planting himself there instead of closer to me, and the pale one ticked his gaze back to the sky, which currently appeared empty save for one large streak. Coming closer.
Calhoun and Tavis shifted, a blur of black and blue scales, and swept into the sky with the power of their enormous dragon wings. The pale one turned back toward me.
“Run,” he said.
Copy that. I sprinted toward the gate in the fence, and as I pulled it open, a familiar piece of plastic lay to my left. My vacuum. Part of it, anyway. The part with its name—Isbon. And underneath, in somewhat charred, warped letters—Mack.
