Pia Does Hollywood (Elder Races, #8.6)

WWPD was not the only question Dragos asked himself. Sometimes he asked, What Would Pia Think? (WWPT?)

That question never failed to entertain him, because as smart as he was, and as good as he was at playing chess, he could never guess her thoughts with 100 percent accuracy. He imagined he could play the small mental game throughout the endless centuries like puzzling over an eternal Rubik’s Cube. He knew there had to be a magical combination that would unlock the entire puzzle, but he suspected he would always be doomed to failure.

Because they were polar opposites in so many ways. He was a predator; she was an herbivore. He was intensely male, and she was all woman. Often they didn’t laugh at the same jokes. Really, it was amazing they got along as well as they did. Sexual attraction helped, but it couldn’t be the entire glue for the relationship.

Somehow, magically, they clicked. She gave when he couldn’t—and he was honest enough to admit that she did it more often than he did. And when she couldn’t, he found a way to reach for her.

As he watched her walk away, he knew they had just experienced another point in time where their views divided, and he wasn’t even sure if she had been aware of it.

What he had said was true: too many lives were potentially at risk from this contagion. When she had agreed, he knew she had leaped to concern for all those who might be in danger, but he hadn’t.

People died all the time. They always had, and he cared about almost none of them. The dragon was not generous with squandering his emotions.

No, his concern about the increasing number of lives that might be endangered was strictly limited to two things. One was, how much danger did it mean for those few people the dragon did care about?

The second was, the more people who died from this, the worse the political fallout would be. Last month, the human world had put the Elder Races on notice—they were watching, and they were disturbed by what they saw.

In fifty short years, the spring massacre in the Nightkind demesne, along with all the other issues that had arisen over the last eighteen months, would become nothing more than minor footnotes in history. But right now, the massacre was too soon, too raw in people’s memories.

This problem in the Light Fae demesne might not be Tatiana’s fault, but the humans wouldn’t see it that way. Non-magical humans might not be susceptible to catching the contagion, but they could be caught and killed by hordes of those who had turned. This was everybody’s problem, and it appeared to have been caused by the Elder Races. It wouldn’t matter to the human government that the Elder Races demesne responsible lay in Great Britain. When reacting with racial bias, people tended to get very simplistic in their thinking.

So aside from the personal considerations, the calculator in Dragos’s head clicked on, and he looked at this whole fiasco as a numbers thing. The more people who died or were victimized, the larger the fallout would be, and right now, he couldn’t finish that equation, because they hadn’t succeeded in containing the hazard yet.

He needed to step up the preliminary work with the Dark Fae engineers he had hired from Niniane, just in case. The Other land under his control from upstate New York was a massive, protected place, but it was also almost completely pristine and undeveloped. The political and social tensions from the summit in Washington D.C. had shown that co-existence might not remain a safe option for the Wyr, and he was determined that they would have a safe place to retreat to, if it ever became necessary.

Retrieving his phone from one pocket, he sent a few texts. As he hit send on the last one, out of the corner of his eye, he watched Tatiana walk toward him.

It was a maneuver he did not appreciate, as the Light Fae guards with their guns perpetually trained on him grew tense.

Crossing his arms, he leaned back against the Hummer’s bumper and tried to appear relaxed. As Tatiana drew near, he said, “I’m still not thrilled with how trigger-happy your guards look, Tatiana. If you need to have a conversation, are you sure you wouldn’t rather call me on my cell?”

Tatiana did not look over her shoulder at her guards. “They won’t shoot unless you present a clear danger to me.”

Then they were stupid for not shooting him right away, because the dragon always presented some kind of danger.

But so often it didn’t do to educate people out of their stupid.

He crossed one booted foot over the other, basking in the hot sunlight, while he waited for the Light Fae Queen to get around to whatever it was she wanted to talk to him about.

“How are you holding up?” she asked.