Page 28 of Queens Ride Horny Dragons
Vance narrowed his eyes at her. "Yet your sign on your shop very clearly states that you'll do readings for anyone, regardless of species."
She cut her glare to him. "Ever heard of a capitalist society? That's how it works. You pay me money, and I tell you to go fuck yourselves."
Tavis's jaw muscles clenched as he moved away from Calhoun, and he pushed back his blue hair to better reveal a face full of questions. "You told us about Mack. Mack would come on the day of that full-moon ritual, and she would be our queen." He pointed at me, and a slight tremble gripped his hand. "Her vacuum very clearly said Mack."
"If I would've told you to look for the number three, then you would've seen it everywhere too,” Bad Mama said in a low voice. “That's called a coincidence. You saw what you wanted to see. Just how dumb are you, boy?"
Sweet, laid-back Tavis lunged for her, but Calhoun leaped forward to hold him back. Vance stalked toward her and stopped, his glare like a scalpel.
This was getting out of hand, and fast. I surged from my throne and started down the steps. Tempers were wild, and I hated to see my harem learn they'd been duped for twenty years.
Only I wasn't so sure they had been duped.
"Bad Mama," I said, the room throwing my voice to impressive lengths. I stopped a little in front of her, between her and my harem. "You were the one who gave me that vacuum. The one that said Mack."
"You're welcome," she hissed.
"You helped me every step of the way to get Asa back because you wanted me at the ritual.Why?"
Something flickered behind her eyes, something much stronger than her anger, but I'd never seen it before to place what it was.
She was hiding something from me.
"You want to know what happened at the full-moon ritual?" I asked.
The air behind my back tensed into a brick wall, and I could tell I was about to cross a line with my harem. The rituals were secret, protected by powerful dragon shifter magic, and here I was about to give the scoop to an outsider.
Bad Mama sneered at me. "You turned traitor? I figured that one out on my own, but thanks."
"The dragon goddess vanished, and a shifter died who wasn't supposed to."
She held up her hands. "I wish I could say sorry for your loss."
"It's kind of convenient that I should be chosen queen on that exact chaotic night, isn't it? The night that you foresaw all those years ago?"
"The foresight was a lie, Booklet. How many times do I have to say that?" She shifted in her wheelchair and adjusted her legs in the footplates.
"It's almost as if the whole thing was planned to create division among the dragon shifters, to cause a distract...ion..." Something in my periphery froze me to the bone. My gaze dipped down, down to her boots. Black with gold-striped laces. The same boots I'd seen leave the security room in the Evenza building after yet another murder. And before smoothing the crumpled flyer for Madame.
Oh god. It was her. The realization shocked the air from my lungs and slid a slimy shiver down my back. My gaze flicked back up to Bad Mama's face, seeing her in a new and terrible light. The same flicker reappeared behind her eyes, a dark and monstrous thing that made me take a step back.
Vance touched my elbow. "Are you all right, Yara?"
"Bad Mama." I forced down the burn in my throat, the urge to take my harem and run. "What did you do?"
Her eyes went midnight black. She surged to her feet and dodged away from me, too fast and spry for someone who’d been in a wheelchair for as long as I’d known her. Before I could react, the wheelchair itself erupted in blinding white light. I threw my arm across my face to block it, but stabs of it had already pierced my skull. Tiny bright orbs floated behind my eyes while a bolt of pure panic ripped down my spine.
“Asa!” I shouted, already moving in the direction I thought the door was in. I crashed into the wheelchair which was still intact, ignoring the flashes of pain where the metal had hit bone.
Tavis, Vance, and Calhoun were shouting, too, and running.
Chaos. I couldn’t see shit and had no idea what was happening. Couldn’t hear over the rush of my heartbeat. Blinking hard, I shoved away from the wheelchair and zombie-walked toward the door with my arms out, repeatedly crashing into the heavy stone pillars with thousand-pound books on top.
“Guys!” I screamed, but their voices faded some, like they were chasing after Big Mama.
Where had she gone? She wasn’t who I thought she was. Hell, I didn’t even think she was human anymore. Or maybe never had been. Because a human couldn’t have done what I’d seen of the shifter pretzeled underneath the desk in the security office.
Fae. The word beat like a drum at the back of my mind as I scrambled for the door. I couldn’t let her—it—get anywhere near Asa.
