AllFreeNovel
Share Us
I told them the plan, and they didn’t like it.
“You can make all these problems just go away,” Rocky was telling me. “How big are their egos that they think they can fight off a djinn king? They’re not kings. They’ve been living in this hostile world for a thousand years. They’re weak, spent too much time in their human forms. It’s not natural.”
They weren’t in their human forms right now. They were in their dragon forms, in a rented airplane hangar in Northern Louisiana.
They were huge.
I mean, I knew they were big, I’d seen them turn into dragons before, but to see it in the light was something else.
If I was a dragon, I had no doubt that I’d be a dragon all of the time. They were gorgeous, ferocious, and shimmery. Like so many gems, sparkling in the light of the room. Their scales were smooth, like stone, and just as a strong.
“Getting blood out of dragons is like getting water out of a rock,” Miles grumbled to himself as he was filling up another bag from Caspian.
After seven hours, he had only drained one liter from either of them.
“Their plan,” I was reminding Lully, “is to try to poison Seraphus by tapping into the sprinkler system in the building they’re holed up in, putting a bunch of dragon’s blood in there, and then making it rain on him. Supposedly it’ll get into his mouth or eyes, and he’ll be dead fast.”
“There’s a lot of doubt in your voice,” Rocky mentioned, because he didn’t know how sprinkler systems worked, and didn’t try. He’d been sitting in a treasure crypt for the last fifteen hundred years, and most things had to be explained to him, but my intonation was not one of them.
“Because I don’t think it’s gonna work. I think they’re wasting their time.”
“Zazie, can you try to be nice?” Miles asked me, annoyed. He couldn’t hear the diamonds speak, so I had probably been coming off as a psycho, but I cared very little. I was really beginning to have two-sided conversations with my little pets, and I was loving it.
They were exactly the pets I’d always wanted—intelligent, funny, beautiful, and extremely low-maintenance.
“I am playing nice,” I assured Miles, who was only scolding me because my dragons could not.
Dragons did not do well with getting their blood taken.
“Blood-letting dragons weakens them considerably,” Rocky informed me. “It’s just going to weaken them.”
“And make them stupid,” Lully added. She was more blunt because she had spent the last three hundred years getting passed around to royal families before landing in the hands of a mob boss for the last twenty years. “Animals, in fact.”
I had to agree. I’d just stopped petting Caspian to sleep. His larger-than-life dragon-tummy wanted to be rubbed like he was a golden retriever. Not to mention that they were still sluggish from the gold which, my diamonds informed me, had caused them to get sick.
“This is not a good time to be fighting an important battle,” said Rocky.
“This is a dumb-fuck idea,” added Lully, voice musical and lulling despite the obvious spite in her word choice. “You should tell them that.”
“Oh, I’ve told them. I’ve told them all,” I assured them. “Nobody’s listening to me.”
“Let them fail, then,” Rocky grunted. “They’ll come around eventually. Good plans stay good. Bad plans stay bad.”
“True story,” I agreed, and then was picked up suddenly. So suddenly that I accidentally dropped my diamonds on the carpet, and before I knew it, I was sitting on Murtagh’s large scaley stomach.
It was hard, but strangely warm. It was tricky to keep my balance as his breathing shook the place I was sitting on, so I sunk quickly down to my knees.\
“My stubborn girl,” he told me, petting a long claw through my hair soothingly, his expression tender.
“My stubborn dragon,” I returned.
He sighed; a loud yawn seemed to tremble under me. It was definitely amazing that despite their size, Seraphus could make both of these dragons tremble. How was it possible? They were the size of jets! They could eat up any human I’d ever met in one gobble, and most without even chewing them first.
“You need to stop worrying about this. You won’t even do the work—Miles will. Miles will put it into the system, Miles will trip the alarm, Miles will do the poisoning. All we have to do is give blood, then take a nap.”
I looked over at Caspian, who was snoring. Loud. It sounded like a windstorm.
“How long will this nap be?” I asked, scrawling my finger across his shiny scales.
