Page 41 of Rejected By Dragons

The way Rhiannon's looking at me... I have the strong sense that she means me no harm. She wants to see the best in me. But the ghosts in her eyes are all too familiar. Her reservations echo my own. Her trust is something I have to earn.

And maybe it's just the part of me that loves a challenge that's egging me on, but I'm possessed by a sudden, driving desire to prove myself to her. To show her that I'm worthy.

I exhale, long and hard.

Apparently, I'm going to be both her temporary lodger and her employee. If I'm looking to prove myself, I'm going to have plenty of opportunities.

Chapter Twelve

EMBER

A few hours later, freshly showered, her long gray hair up in an elegant twist, and dressed in a flowing black dress, Rhiannon stands in front of the doors connecting the residence to the shop. "I did warn you that this wasn't your typical retail establishment..."

I nod, sucking in a breath and mentally preparing myself for this place to be seriously weird.

She plucks a key from a hidden pocket in her dress and fits it to the lock. It glows purple, and she turns the handle and pushes open the door.

Lights flicker on as she strides inside. I follow her, craning my neck to look around, and forget 'weird.'

This place is awesome.

It's enormous, for one thing. I search back in my memory to my arrival in town. Amy led me away from the center square and down an alleyway, and I guess I remember the brick buildings we were skirting behind being big enough. I'm still taken aback by the cavernous space I find myself in now.

"This is the back room," Rhiannon explains, leading me past shelf after shelf piled high with scrolls and books and jars and urns and boxes in every size, shape and color. "We deal in magical objects, obscure ingredients, artifacts. Special items in high demand by collectors all over the globe." She glances back at me. "Everything is magically secured, of course. Only once it's been properly processed through the register can it be removed from the premises."

I swallow. That's a very polite way of telling me she'll know if I get a case of sticky fingers--which obviously, I would never do. "Understood."

She gives me a brief tour as we walk, rattling off a loose classification system for the vast amount of inventory collected back here.

A set of gray, leather-bound volumes catches my eye at the end of one of the rows of shelves. They have an aura to them that I can feel in my bones. The air around them ripples with power. I squint at the symbols stamped into the spine, casting back in my memory for their meaning. "'Transmutation of Precious Stones,'" I read.

Rhiannon stops, her head tilting to the side in surprise. She follows my gaze to the old, dusty tomes. "You understand those runes?"

I hesitate, unsure if I've messed up the translation. "I'm a little rusty," I admit. "Stone Dragon magic was forbidden in the Air Kingdom."

"Breathing is forbidden in the Air Kingdom," she mutters. Louder, she asks, "Can you read the rest?"

I do my best to decipher the titles on the other spines. Her brows rise with each one I fumble my way through translating.

When I'm finished, she shakes her head and takes off her glasses to rub the lenses on her skirt. "If that's your idea of being 'rusty', you must have been quite the expert before you ended up in the Air Kingdom."

She says it matter-of-factly, but I hear it as the compliment it is. I warm inside at having impressed her. "My parents traveled a lot when I was a kid."

"And they taught you the Fire Kingdom sigils, as well, I suppose," she says, evoking my efforts to replicate the gestures Jett made the day before.

"It was actually a shaman's son who I met in the Fire Kingdom." While my parents were parlaying with his father, the two of us were left to our own devices. We mostly taught each other swear words from different dragon clans, but we shared a few other secrets, too.

Rhiannon blinks a couple of times. "Well, you're just full of surprises, aren't you?"

There's no real answer to that, so I keep my mouth shut and follow her as she continues along the aisle.

"No one is allowed into the back room without staff present," she tells me as we arrive at another door, which she unlocks with the same key. She gestures at an old, corded phone hung on the wall just inside the door. "If you ever get locked in, you can always use that to get a hold of either me or Amy for help."

"Good to know."

When I first arrived, Amy made it sound like her mother was paranoid for employing such strong security around their home, but now that I've seen the kinds of magical items she deals in, I wonder if she's being paranoid enough. Those Stone Dragon books alone must be worth a small fortune, not to mention the other texts and artifacts Rhiannon's collected.

The front section of the shop is no less impressive, for all that it's less cluttered. The space is dim but inviting, the windows covered with velvet curtains, while amber flames glow in sconces on the walls. Arm chairs flank a slate fireplace. Shelves display artifacts of modest power, and little jars are artfully arranged behind glass. Neatly typed labels proclaim the names of different spell ingredients, and I can see Amy's hand in the design and curation of the place.

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