Mad Lizard Mambo Read online

  I didn’t see the other dragon, but I heard its enraged cries and then felt the heat of its raging fire. A rush of air from its passing body blew my hair into my face, whipping the ends into my skin. The prismatic tried to scream back a challenge, but having an elfin hooked over her lower teeth by a thick leather strap tended to muzzle any rage. Instead, a gurgling rush of noises bubbled out, and she turned to face her attacker, landing on her feet and lifting me up high enough off the ground I could see a peek of the ocean glittering in the silvery moonlight, barely visible beyond the surrounding hillocks.

  The other dragon was huge, and from the little I could make out, a crimson deep enough to make me think of an ainmhi dubh’s glowing eyes. Evil lived in that red, in both the ainmhi dubh and the serpentine worm. I’d struggled to fight off an irrational fear of bright crimson against black, but in the lava fields, where death was served up daily with a side of bitter and no regrets, that glittering bright red meant certain death. The ainmhi dubh, the black dogs of the unsidhe, and the enormous crimson dragons of Pendle’s storm-laden skies were predators of the highest order, often killing purely for the sheer glee of it.

  I had no expectation this particular flying red lizard was only dropping by to borrow a cup of sugar and maybe a nip of tea.

  Crimson filled my vision, the metallic glint of scales penetrated even my overworked goggle lenses, and the leathery, rotten stench of dragon swaddled my senses. I could taste the thing on my tongue, the popped-tick scent of old blood, decaying flesh caught in its teeth, and the sick yellow-green aroma of its bilious breath.

  The lava field was draped in the crimson’s massive shadow, its bulky form blocking out much of the moon and the stars. More screams and shapes flying outside of my peripheral vision, then a sudden jolt when the prismatic buckled under a slashing rain of crimson claws.

  As much as I didn’t like dangling from the prismatic’s teeth like a tree-hugging daisy-humper’s beard bead, I sure as shit didn’t want the crimson to kill her. Mostly because where the ribbon-winged dragon went, I did too. And if the crimson took it into its tiny brain to bite her head off, I’d pretty much be a pat of herbed butter on a slab of dragon steak.

  The prismatic’s head popped, crackling with the heat of the hit. Another shot splattered nitrate and potassium over her snout and burst into bright flames. Overloaded, the goggles whined, and my vision went dim, shadowy swirls blurring away as the electrodes in the lenses began to shut down, leaving me staring through a cloudy milk membrane.

  Her jaw fell clear from her head, the mandible cracking away from its torn socket, and the air above my head caught on fire as an undulating shadow made another pass over us. Another flare of sparks and the prismatic splintered apart, savaged by the larger dragon attacking her. My feet skimmed an outcropping and the leather on my boots’ toes scraped nearly down to my socks.

  Then I fell. Hard.

  On the plus side, I was now free of the prismatic lizard’s fierce bite. On the down side, I now had nothing holding me up in the air, and I was sent tumbling down to the treacherous lava field a few feet below.

  I let go of the egg. Not like I had a choice. Gravity always wins, and I needed my arms to flail about and panic.

  Much like the age-old question on what would fall to the ground faster—a pound of feathers or a pound of stone—the egg and I were pretty evenly matched as far as falling went. It had a head start, being under me when I let go, but I was heavier, so catching up wasn’t a problem.

  Not that I’d wanted to catch up with the egg. No, my main focus was tucking myself up into a ball and praying I wouldn’t be sliced to ribbons by the ropy lava. Fate, however, had other plans.

  The egg bounced. Odd thing for an egg to do, but bounce it did. Even through the filmy sheer panes of the goggles and my obscured view from under my arms, I watched the egg bounce off of the stony field and arc up, then slam right into me.

  While the egg was impervious to glass-sharp rocks, apparently a falling elfin body was its weakness, because the moment its curved shell hit my shoulder, it broke, enveloping me in its rancid, curdled yolk and stringy, rotten white. It was a cushion of sorts. The yolk was nearly as long as I was. I didn’t have time to measure, but it definitely coated me up one side and wrapped around my curled-in body.

  “Fuck m—” The ground came up on me quickly, and I yelped when I hit, snagging my tongue between my front teeth. “Ouch. Shit.”

  It hurt. Hells, did it hurt, and there were stretches of my skin burning up beneath the remains of my shredded jeans. I tumbled, unable to stop myself from rolling, and much like the egg, I bounced about a bit. Covered in the egg’s sulfurous remains, I couldn’t see anything, and my lungs didn’t seem to work. It took a second to register the impact, my bones rattling about under my skin and in my meat, but screaming didn’t seem to be happening.

  Mostly because I had no wind, and my mouth and nose were clogged with thick, gelatinous egg.

  I might have passed out. Or maybe my senses were too overwhelmed with my impromptu flight, because as I tried to blink away the rancid eggy mess clotting my lashes, Cari appeared above me. Since I was lying down, it was hard to be startled, but I gave it my best effort, pretty much reduced to a jiggling of my muscles and a creaking groan from my parched lips.

  “Dios, are you dead, Kai?” Her hands were warm, probably fired up with the thin healer talent she had in her blood. They felt good. More than good. “Lie still. I need to—”

  “Dragon….” I ground out. “Red.”

  “It’s gone.”

  Oddly enough, I could see her clearly, because her face flushed green. A multigenerational Stalker from a Mexican-German-Irish family, Cari pretty much had seen it all. Or so I’d thought. She lurched, gulping in air.

  “Oh God, you smell so bad. I think you drove the dragon away. You stink that much.”

  Sitting up was an exercise in counting stars and pain. I managed to stay up for about three seconds before I toppled back. Thankfully, Cari caught me. Reluctantly from the gagging noises she made in her throat, but still, she caught me.

  “Ouch,” I gasped. “Okay, hurting. Definitely hurting.”

  My head felt in one piece, but my body was on fire. My limbs took most of the beating, but thankfully the fall wasn’t as bad as it could have been. The prismatic’s head was low to the ground when it came off her body, saving me from ending up a grated mess of flesh on the lava.

  “Man, you flew, though.” Cari rubbed her hands together. “Okay, pretty boy. Let’s see how much juice I’ve got in me, because if I know you, once I get you up onto your feet, you’re going to go back after one of those eggs.”

  Two

  COFFEE IS a gift from the gods. It doesn’t matter which god. Just any god. Every single last one of them must have sat down and said Yes, this is the mana of life. Or at least that’s what I felt like a few hours after Cari dropped me and the egg off at the converted warehouse I called home.

  My body was one long road rash from the lava, and my sidhe blood was kicking in, stretching my ravaged skin back together. There’d been a hard knot in my stomach when I had to peel my clothes off after I stumbled home, hoping none of the torn edges were caught beneath my scabbed-over wounds. I’d had that happen before, and nothing made my teeth hurt more than peeling myself open. I’d washed off as much of the pumice and egg snot as I could with the water Cari had in the Nova’s trunk, but we hadn’t come close to getting it all off, and I’d been pretty sure I’d also be picking out small shards of glassy black rock as well as denim once I got home.

  Lucky for me, I hadn’t disappointed myself.

  The agony of reopening my wounds was taken care of with a few shots of rotgut whiskey and a few sharp yanks to pull the embedded fabric out from under my skin. Healing faster than a human is only fun and games when I’m in the middle of a fight. Other than that, it’s a pain in the ass if I let my wounds seal up before I get my clothes off.

  I’d nearly drained the bottle
by the time I worked the remains of my jeans free.

  There’d been a long hot shower where I stood in a puddle of blood-pinked water. Then I fell over onto my bed. I must have still reeked, because Newt, the mangled cat I’d pulled off of a dead giant salamander and taken home, decided he wasn’t going to come near me. He took one whiff of me and got that gnarly scowl face he usually only made when the cat food had tilapia in it. For a hardscrabble thug of a feline, Newt still had standards, and they sure as hell didn’t stretch to his elfin roommate smelling like overcooked sulfur.

  Since I couldn’t shake the reek out of my nose, I took another long shower when I woke up, using up every ounce of vinegar and lemon juice I had in the pantry. From the look on the cat’s face when I stepped out of the bathroom, I gathered I’d only succeeded in now smelling like pickled eggs.

  “Screw you, flea ball,” I muttered while making coffee. He risked contamination long enough to hook his needle claws into my ankle to demand breakfast. I left the snarky bastard to chew on a chunk of packed tuna and headed to the roof with a cup of hot black coffee.

  The best thing about living in my old warehouse was the view. Well, that and the lack of neighbors. Other than the one owned by Dalia, who lived next door and spent her hours away from Medical trying to mother me, most of the others were still used for storage and the occasional art gallery. Perched on one of the low mesas at the lip of San Diego’s downtown, I had a great view of both the city and the Pacific from my rooftop.

  San Diego extended out along the coast, glittering under the rising sun. When the Underhill shoved its way into Earth—or maybe even the other way around, no one’s really sure—the world violently changed. Forests emerged where cities or prairies once stood, and entire oceans emptied only to form elsewhere, reworking familiar shapes into a patchwork of jumbled terrain. Some areas, like Orange County, disappeared entirely, replaced by the sprawling forests and floating towers of Elfhaime, while others were expanded, fanning out in ripples of torn land. Pendle was a prime example of that. It’d gone from a ten-mile stretch on the old maps to nearly one hundred miles, a craggy landscape of broken roads, lava, and dragons.

  Most of the big human and elfin cities fell, their skyscrapers shattered and tumbled when the elfin world merged with ours—or rather, the humans’. It was hard to remember I wasn’t human. But San Diego was my city. My home. My world. My people. I was going to live, eat, fuck, and die here. And I was good with that.

  Instead of folding back into the ground, San Diego grew, building on top of its fractured bones until it stood firm on the Pacific shore. The old city’s corpse existed somewhere deep below the under level, with its scrabble of squatters, low-rent flops, and dog-eat-dog living. San Diego’s upper level was sleek and shining, but its bowels held the foulest of existences, a blue shadow to the yellow-bright of the city above. Grime and filth found its way into everything, and the constant chatter of the city’s rich could barely be heard over the rumble-mutter of the lower classes below. I lived where the two levels merged at the edge of the shoreline, having converted an old warehouse into someplace to call home, its location accessible to both levels but really not a part of either.

  I couldn’t be a part of anything. I was elfin. And not even a real one.

  The world I lived in alongside smooth-eared and blunt-teethed people was human all the way through, and I’d fit into the cracks and crevices as best I could. There was no escaping my race… my species, really. As much as I tried to, I couldn’t outrun my elfin features or the aging of the people around me while I remained firmly in what will be centuries of youth. Dempsey, the man who’d taught me to be a Stalker, was getting old, wearing out in front of my eyes, and there was nothing I could do to stop it.

  “Things change, you cat-bastard,” he often growled at me. “I’m going to die before you ever get a damned hair on that pointed chin of yours. Best get used to it.”

  I didn’t have the heart to tell him I’d never get hair on my chin. For all the humans liked to equate elfin with cats, we just didn’t get facial hair. Although from how Dempsey told it, I bit like a wild cat he’d found under his engine for the first few months of my freedom.

  I still bite. Sometimes that’s the best way to win a fight. I wasn’t ashamed of that either. You get into a fight to win, not earn courtesy points in an etiquette book.

  After years of roaming about, I called San Diego home, and I was thankful to get back to its multileveled mess. It was a complicated life at times, one made more difficult because I was elfin living among humans who had no reason to love anyone with pointed ears. After the Merge, the Wars came when the two species fought to establish dominance. Humans with their tech were no match for the elfin with magic and an uncanny knack for strategy. In the end, no one won, and now we were all living cheek-to-ass with one another, pretending the guy at the other side of the dinner table wasn’t someone we’d tried to kill a few years ago.

  I just ignored the elfin. Pretended they didn’t exist. Pretended I wasn’t one of them. Acted like I hadn’t been cooked up in a crucible by an evil Wild Hunt Master with a fondness for pain and blood. I’d been doing fine with it all until Ryder decided he wanted to establish a damned Dawn Court smack dab in the middle of the city I called home.

  “Damned sidhe lord.” The coffee brewed strong, and I’d added enough sugar to it to cut its bitter edge. It was late enough for the sky to have grabbed at the blues in its palette, smearing its face with a rich robins-egg blue. Lacy clouds played at the city’s back, draped over the soft rise of mountains in the east. “Thinks he owns me, he does.”

  I didn’t want to think about Ryder. I hadn’t talked to the self-proclaimed San Diego sidhe lord about shit in a hell of a long time, and I hadn’t planned on starting, but I knew it was only a matter of time before he reared his golden head up. The leash he’d put on me was a long one, but SoCalGov made sure it was tied on tight. Give the Dawn Court what he asked for and I’d get to keep my Stalker license. If that didn’t make me a whore, I didn’t know what did.

  “Less I see of His Lordship, the better.” I toasted the rising sun. I didn’t sound convincing. Even to myself.

  We’d parted on sticky terms. There were complications between us, dips in the road we couldn’t seem to navigate. I thought he felt betrayed because I hadn’t confessed to being an abomination, even if he said he wasn’t, and I was still more than a little pissed off that he’d finagled me onto the end of a tightly held rope. Getting me permanently assigned to his court by SoCalGov’s administration was a shitty thing to do, even if it was only a way for him to keep tabs on me.

  We’d survived a Pendle run and the birth of our nieces—an odd, complicated tangle neither one of us planned for. I’d made friends with his cousin, Alexa, who’d become Cari’s apprentice. She’d have been on the job with us the night before, if not for the fact a sidhe warrior was not exactly the person to be on a run to steal a dragon egg from its nest. The sidhe were particular about dragons, believing the damned things were sacred. Ryder was never going to forgive me for killing one during a Pendle run, but it was either us or the dragon. Ryder, Clan Sebac, Third in the House of Devon, High Lord of the Southern Rise Court, thought it should be the dragon.

  Since, at the time, I was driving and apparently more interested in living than he was, I chose us.

  There are times I regret that decision. Not so much for me but for him, because Ryder is a pain in my ass. He kept after me to join his Court, even though I’m a chimera, an unholy, arcane soup of sidhe and unsidhe. Since I was already bound to him by SoCalGov’s threat to suspend my Stalker license if I didn’t ask how high when Ryder orders me to jump, I not so politely told him to fuck off and get out of my life.

  I just hadn’t expected him to actually do exactly that—get out of my life.

  “I should leave you there, Ryder,” I said to the sky, as if it would somehow carry my words to His Lordship’s ears, “in that forest of yours with the pandas and the towers
. Damn you for not staying where I’d put you.”

  The coffee went bitter in my mouth. I was turning maudlin, probably a result of bathing in a rancid dragon egg. Off in the distance, San Diego was waking up, its lower levels kicking in for the morning rush hour. The upper level still slumbered, its streets lean of traffic, but there seemed to be movement on the sidewalks, herds of dog walkers and joggers spending their morning hours chasing their own tails. Below, tik-tiks were diving and swooping, tiny blue metal birds clipped to overhead rails while picking up fares, then sweeping off into the shadowy streets built under San Diego’s towering skyscrapers. Medical’s white towers bristled at the levels’ meeting, a dash of mercury running silver on the city’s lips where it kissed the broad shoreline.

  Leaning over the short wall running around the top of the warehouse, I sipped my coffee and stared at the city. The museum wouldn’t be open for a few hours yet, and I still needed to clean the dirt and pumice off of the egg’s exterior. There would be enough time for another cup of hot brew. Then I’d be elbow deep in soapsuds and filth.

  “I’ll be needing yet another bath after that job,” I muttered at San Diego’s belly. My coffee was gone, and I was debating smoking a kretek before I started the laborious egg cleaning ahead of me when I spotted movement in my driveway.

  More importantly, there was a very familiar old Chevy truck in said driveway and a way-too-familiar old human sitting behind its steering wheel.

  “Dempsey,” I whispered under my breath.