Page 18 of Magpies & Mayhem
“You just wake up every day and choose violence.”
“Every day,” I agreed, heading for the door. I propped it open with one foot and then grabbed the cage to help back it in, since trying to get it through the door long-ways was a two-person job. We set it on the floor in front of the intake counter while the large ogre receptionist looked on with wide eyes.
“Can I help you?” she asked politely.
I took a deep breath and pasted a smile on my face. “Hi, I’m Sidney Anvindr, the one who took in the last of the eggs that were brought in from the Void.” Her eyes widened further, and before I could even state why I was there, she was giving me the stiffest little head shakes in the world.
“You don’t want to bring it here,” she whispered, leaning closer. Josh made a dismayed sound behind me.
“I don’t?” I asked, bewildered. She was right, I didn’t, but how did she know that?
The nice ogre lady, with light green skin and her hair pulled back into a ponytail of small braids, looked around like there might be someone else in the small lobby area, and then leaned back to look through a door into an adjoining office. Once satisfied, she turned to us and hunched closer to me to whisper some more. Her whispers were like an average person’s speaking volume. “The rest of the dragon eggs and the two that hatched from that clutch got stolen two nights ago.”
I nodded because I’d heard that from Jordan.
“And the owners still haven’t gotten our security straightened out,” she continued. “I’ll get in trouble for telling you this, but I wouldn’t leave any animal here until they get that fixed. You know what I mean? They’ve got no one watching this place at night and think they can leave rare, expensive animals behind a simple padlock?” She made a face. “Don’t do it. I’m telling you; he’ll get snatched up just like the others.”
My heart was beating a mile a minute, and I felt like I had ants crawling on my skin, because I’d figured they would have fixed thatimmediately. Time to get the hell out of dodge before the owners caught sight of us. I gave her a sloppy salute and said, “Message received, ma’am. Good day.”
Josh made a pained sound and hissed frantically at me about how we couldn’t take the ‘bonfire baby’ back to the apartment while I bent to haul the cage up off the floor again. He was right, this little guy had gained some weight. I gave my brother the ‘get your shit together and open that door or so help me…’ look, and he threw his head back to whine for a few more seconds before obeying. I cast a last frantic look at the receptionist before we heaved the cage back out the front door, and she nodded as if to reassure me that this was the right choice.
“Sidney, we can’t do this!” Josh continued to hiss at me as we made our way back toward the road.
“What do you want to do, Joshua? Let him get stolen by gangsters again?” I hissed back. I’d carry the cage all the way back by myself if I had to, even though I was half his size.
“Something that doesn’t involve us accidentally killing our neighbors!”
“Then we can move into a stone house with stone furniture and stone bedding that he can’t set on fire!”
“Oh, my god!” Josh threw his head back again and flailed his arms like a child.
I jerked the cage away from him and marched up the road in the direction of the train station. “I’m not allowing them to take him again.”
“I’m not fireproof, Sidney!”
“We’ll get you some leather clothes and stock up on fire extinguishers.”
He let out an obnoxious groan that sounded like a moose in heat and stomped up the road behind me. “Give me that,” he said, taking the cage back. We headed back to the train station in silence, and even Huck seemed to sense that things were tense because he kept the hissing and thrashing to a minimum.
We didn’t say a word to each other as we took our seats on the train back to Dry Gulch, and all I could think about was how terrible an idea this was.He’s gonna burn our frickin’ house down.
Chapter 12
Iwenttoworkand left my brother in charge of the dragon, which—in hindsight—was probably the worst of all my recent bad decisions. As soon as I entered the Boundlands after work, I had a frantic message waiting with a spectral messenger from my brother. It was completely unintelligible, but I hustled home as fast as I could to find the living room in even more disarray than usual. Huck had already made several large tears in the sofa, but now Josh’s potted plant was laying uprooted on the floor surrounded by an explosion of dirt. A disemboweled cushion was strewn about in the middle of it all. Josh was shouting something from his bedroom when suddenly Huck came bursting out of his room with a shoe in his mouth and galloped across the living room and into my bedroom.
Josh came thundering out of his bedroom with murder written on his face. “He’s got my shoe! I’ve just gotten those perfectly broken in!” he yelled as he blew past me into my bedroom. Claws scrabbling on the hardwood in my room preceded Huck sprinting back out and blasting past me into Josh’s room with his head thrown back and the stolen shoe on proud display. Even his little wings quivered with excitement as he ran.
“Uh, which part of the mess do you want me to tackle first?” I asked my brother as he turned around and doubled back across the living room.
“Get my shoe!” he answered angrily.Well, ok then.
“What happened in here?” I asked as I followed them into his room. “Look, dude, first step… shut the door,” I said, pushing the door shut. “It becomes a much smaller game of keep-away when he only has access to one room.”
“What do youthinkhappened in here?” Josh shouted as he wrestled on the floor with a small dragon who didnotwant to give up the shoe. His blankets were in a tangled mess all over the floor. The mattress was shoved off the bed and standing on one side. Every single item that had been stored in his closet was pulled out and strewn across the floor. One of his shelves had been emptied, all the contents laying broken or tossed about on the floor.
“Well, I’m assuming Huck happened, but I’m morbidly curious about the specifics.”
Josh pried his shoe out of Huck’s mouth with a crow of triumph. “Ha! Got it. He was making a little nest in my bed at first, which was cute, so I let him,” he panted as he collapsed onto the floor with the shoe clutched to his chest. “But then, he got tangled up in all the blankets and started to panic and was thrashing around, knocking stuff down, and shredding my sheets. So, I got him out, right? But then he was all scared and ran and hid in my closet.” I eyed the chaos of his room, wondering where this was going. “And he stayed holed up in there for a while, which was fine. I figured he was just enjoying some quiet time in a dark place.”
