AllFreeNovel
Share Us
And supposedly, they’d been around the whole time. I was now aware that there had been other dragons here, too, and somehow Caspian and I had missed them. We had come into this world completely devoid of information and had no idea where to go to achieve it. Therefore, we had just hung around humans and built a life and did that over and over again. The only thing we had to fear were demons—demons would definitely like to kill us. They thought our blood was delicious.
“Time to ask for a blood donation,” the cat remarked dryly to the witch after he was through complaining about the gummy bears that she’d put on top of her ice-cream. “Our supply is running abysmally low.”
She gave me an embarrassed look but then narrowed her eyes at the cat. “I’m not gonna forget, Silas. He just sat down.” She gave him another chiding glance before looking straight at me and saying, “Ça va, cher? Comment ça se plume?” How’s it pluckin’?, she asked me just like she was a sweet, grandmotherly Cajun matron and not a twenty-year-old Cajun witch.
I knew very little Cajun, so I didn’t quite know how to answer that. “Is your cat a cat?” I asked her instead. She never seemed to deny answering a direct question. The cat would, but not her.
“Nah. C’est un lutin,” she replied with a shrug of her dainty shoulders.
“He’s a pixie?” I said, trying to translate.
“Non, cher,” she giggled. “Goblin. Dat’s why he’s rude as all get out. Du monde tout would happily give him a big ol’ pass because he’s fluffy. They don’t know what he really look like.”
“I’m rude?” the cat chided airily. “Pot calling the kettle black, aren’t we?” He looked up at the ceiling theatrically. His accent was not Louisianan, but more like how aristocrats used to speak in the beginning of the last century back in England.
“Cher, I love you, but you could break a mirror,” she snorted in retort. “Aniway, he act like a cat most times, so he don’t get to be his wonderful self to just anyone. That being said, my memory ain’t so great on my own. His mind is a sieve.”
“You’ve got it backward; it’s a steel trap up here,” the cat corrected her with a smug tone. “If anyone’s mind is like a sieve, it’s your own.”
She smirked sheepishly and shrugged. “Il ment pas,” He ain’t lying, she said.
“And how do you already need more of my blood? Didn’t I give you a pint a few months ago?” I asked, almost with exasperation, scooping up ice cream on a salty potato chip and crunching it down.
“You did,” she assured. “And I thank you for it. I used it up all real good. Good n’ fast.”
“And well under market value, I might add,” the cat interjected with a hint of stubbornness. “She has a penchant for philanthropy that I find intolerable.”
“What do you even use it for?” I had to ask. Demons liked to extract power from eating it, but I had a feeling that wasn’t what she was after.
The cat laughed. Loudly. Too loudly for a public place really, and completely at the expense of my own naivety.
She pet down his back, settling him down. “I use it in everything but beignets, yeah. Dragon blood’s been and always will be a precious thing in a witch’s bag of tricks, cher. Especially since y’all dragons ain’t exactly thick on the ground no more. Scarcer than hen’s teeth. Next to y’all, pandas be breedin’ like bunnies in spring.”
Especially when I let the ones that I’m certain I can breed with just disappear. “Can’t argue with you, there. You know of any lady dragons?”
She rolled her eyes. “Lord, if they had somethin’ like a ‘Dragon Poontang’ app, wouldn’t do you no good, no sir. You even got one of dem cordless phones yet, huh? Technophobe?”
“I don’t need to subscribe to every fad technology that comes around,” I assured her, raising my nose slightly. I’d been on this planet too long to buy every bicycle, hula hoop, and cellular device that came into existence.
“Mm,” she hummed at me, then put up her finger and rummaged around in her bag, looking like she might ask for what she came to New Orleans for. “Alright, for dat blood o’ yours, I got me some o’ dat tea, you know, the kind dat makes dem scales o’ yers tingle in all dem right places,” she said, winking.
“Thank you,” I nodded appreciatively. That tea had been a game-changer. I’d almost sent some to Caspian, but then I didn’t, because I remembered that would make Caspian think that I wanted to see him anytime soon. His mansion was too close as it was; two hours was too short of a distance.
She plopped a shoe-sized box in front of me decorated with wallpaper with little roses on it. When she opened the box, it had all of the tea she’d promised packed neatly inside, with a piece of paper with poor handwriting scrawled on the top. She took that paper and handed it to me. “I also got this. This might be worth a pint by itself.”
I opened my eyes wider with interest as I eyed the note. “What would that be?”
“Dem instructions on how to get you back to ya world—” she began explaining, but I immediately snagged the paper from her hand and looked it over. “Although I can’t imagine ya world has dat many potato chips in it. Somethin’ to keep in mind,” she was saying as I scanned the list hungrily.
I’d been waiting a millennium for a list—or anything! Anything with any information on how to get the fuck back home.
My excitement quickly began to dive as I perused the contents.
“This is impossible!” I cried, showing her the list. “There’re gemstones that nobody’s seen in millennia!”
“Yeah, dat grocery list dere gonna keep ya busy for a good bit, cher,” she admitted, eyeballing the list in my hand. “Took a sweet while to get Big Daddy to spill what y’all need for dat. He knows I got me a dragon connection, mais he ain’t too thrilled ‘bout it, not one bit.”
“That, my dear, is an understatement of considerable proportions,” the cat interjected with a refined air. “There exists a rather compelling reason for the scarcity of Dragons,” he informed me, his yellow eyeballs reflecting the lights in the room. “Demons, you see, find themselves quite intimidated by your very existence. The benevolent ones are most concerned about you falling prey to undesirable elements, while the malevolent lot are rather keen on having you fall squarely into their own clutches.”
