An acre of pewter scales was broken by a ridge of gleaming amethyst down its back. Two horns the color of molten glass sat on its head, framing a tuft of absurd lavender hair. It matched the creature’s eyes, which were creepy as hell, but had irises the color of pansy petals.
A nictitating membrane slid first across one great eye and then the other as the dragon regarded its wounded foot. After a moment, it transferred that alien gaze to me, and the whorl of scales across its cheeks took on a vaguely purple tint. “You stabbed me!”
“You broke in,” I said slowly, in complete disbelief. Because I’d seen a lot of strange things in Brooklyn, but a dragon wasn’t one of them.
“I did no such thing!” The huge snout grimaced, showing an awful lot of teeth. But the voice was melodious, almost hypnotic, sliding like a drug into my veins. It soothed my racing pulse back to normal in spite of everything I could do to stop it. I needed the energy of anger to fight, but all of a sudden my body was contemplating having a snooze, and my muscles were going limp and noodle-y.
“I don’t usually argue with anyone capable of crushing the life out of me,” I said, fighting back a yawn. “But yeah, you did.”
“It’s my house!” A fold of skin that had been held flat against the creature’s back suddenly opened, spreading upward like translucent fan to frame its long snout. “What are you waiting for?” it demanded. “Get it out!”
I assumed “it” meant the knife, so I resumed tugging on it. “It would help if you’d let me up,” I said after a minute.
“Are you going to throw anything else at me?”
“Are you going to eat me?”
The eyes did the creepy sideways blink again. I was starting to wonder if that was the dragon equivalent of an eye roll. “Don’t be ridiculous, Dory! You know damn well I’m vegan.”
The foot rose and I slid out from between the gigantic toenails. They were black at the roots, shading to gray and then clear at the ends like the horns. Except for a few spots where flakes of bright red appeared. They looked suspiciously like nail polish, which was when I decided to stop thinking at all.
The knife finally slipped free, and the second it cleared the tough hide, a cold blue-white light swelled out from between the scales as if the huge body was cracking down fault lines. And then an explosion of light hit me like a fist, throwing me back a yard. I landed hard against the faded wallpaper, jarring a hanging mirror loose. It crashed against the floor, and the screeching from upstairs started up again.
“God, do I need a drink,” a voice said fervently.
My thoughts exactly.
I sat up as someone pushed through the kitchen door and headed for the liquor cabinet. I got to my hands and knees and peered around the jamb, only to see a tall, naked redhead standing in the lantern light. She was glaring at the empty liquor cabinet. “Don’t tell me you’ve gone teetotaler!”
“No,” I said cautiously, sizing this new shape up.
It looked like Claire, my old roommate. The illusion was perfect, down to the little details that spells usually overlook. The creature’s hair was a red fuzz ball, the way Claire’s always got in rainy weather; there was a familiar pattern of freckles over the nose; and the arms were crossed under the breasts in an often-used expression of annoyance.
But there were discordant notes, too. This Claire had bruise-dark circles under her eyes, which kept darting nervously around the kitchen, and a sickly pallor beneath her freckles. Her lips were white and pressed tightly together, and she looked like she hadn’t slept in a while, like she was running on nerves.
But the real clincher was that Claire wouldn’t show up in the middle of the night, unescorted, barefoot and wild-eyed. When I met her, she’d been working a bad-paying job at a magical auction house and had needed a roommate for the extra cash. But that was before a real-life fey prince turned up at one of the sales and swept her off her feet—and all the way to Faerie. She’d been there ever since, presumably living the happily-ever-after that the rest of us just dream about.
“It’s a damn good glamourie,” I said, wondering exactly how one evicted a dragon, even in human form, from one’s kitchen. “But for future reference, Claire didn’t make a habit of running around naked. Not even in her own house.”
“I was wearing clothes!” the creature said, snatching an apron from a drawer. It was the old-fashioned type that was more like a dress, leaving her decent as long as she didn’t turn around. “I burst out of them whenever I change now. My dragon self has hit adolescence and it’s growing like a weed.”
I stared from the drawer with the aprons—I hadn’t known we had any—to the woman shrugging one on. “Dragon self?”
She pushed limp red strands off her forehead with the back of her hand. “I’m half Dark Fey, Dory. You know that!”