Page 6 of Dragon Kissed

Demetri looked at the bodies one last time.What a mess.

Within minutes he'd seared the ship's manifest and every document the fire hadn't taken into his memory — serial numbers, names, ports of call, passenger lists. And their faces. Sometimes his gift for memory was nothing but a curse.

"Forgive me," he said in ancient Cyrillic, the language he kept for moments when no one living was left to hear and only the dead could listen. "I did not know you. I did not bring you here. I'm sorry the sea is the only grave I can give you tonight."

He stepped back from the bodies and shifted, the change dragging half-healed flesh over broken bone until he bared his teeth against the pain. He set his claws into the deck, launched himself into the dark, and opened his throat. Fire poured out of him in a great red column — the deep-belly fire a dragon called up only when he meant to incinerate everything in his path — and set the entire length of the yacht afire. Teak caught. Steel glowed orange and collapsed. He swept his head slowly across the deck, bathing every inch with dragon fire, and did not stop until the yacht was a single roaring torch on the black water.

Then he climbed — forty meters, eighty, a hundred — turned and looked down. The wreck burned beneath him like a spark on black silk. The hull cracked, the yacht broke at the middle, and the sea rushed in. Steam rose in a white column the fog swallowed at once. The last flame guttered against the dark and went out, and the sea closed over the wreck until nothing of it remained.

Demetri turned toward the city. Toward home. Tonight he'd comb the internet for this woman Benedikte had warned him about — the human reading forbidden books aloud — and tomorrow he'd find her. He'd track her down and do what had to be done to protect his people.

CHAPTER 3

Margaret: Veronica. Did you post a video of the Crowe manuscript?

Nica: define "post"

Margaret: it has twenty-three thousand views

Nica: ...that’s good right?

Margaret: it’s a record

Tuesday morning at Whitfield,Marsh & Sampson smelled like coffee and old paper, and Nica climbed the rolling ladder into it with a clipboard under one arm and a pencil clamped in her teeth. The storage bay for the Crowe estate rose around her in three stories of industrial steel, every shelf crammed shoulder to shoulder with crates, furniture, and the occasional bronze none of the movers thought worth climate control. More than thirty feet up, a dirty skylight let in a narrow ray of light that fell through the dust in long soft columns and made everything look older than it was. The whole place smelled of cold concrete and machine oil and the sweet vanilla rot of old book-glue, and somewhere two aisles over the building’s ancient HVAC systemticked and groaned like an angry rhino. She loved every inch of it.

She’d been the only catalog assistant on the Crowe estate for six weeks, and she’d happily have stayed six more. The collection was vast and weird and badly inventoried — sixteenth-century manuscripts, ritual masks she couldn’t identify, a Russian icon that had made her stop breathing the first time she opened its crate. And, last week, the book.

It was upstairs at her workstation right now. She’d photographed three pages of it the day before — vellum, hand-illuminated with dragons coiling through the margins — and that night she’d posted a short video to her TikTok, reading the first page aloud in Russian— pre-revolutionary Cyrillic—to be more precise. Forty-seven hundred views before bed. Twenty-three thousand by morning. She’d never had more than two hundred views on anything in her life.Guess people really liked the dragon art.

She climbed another rung. The clipboard slid; she caught it with her elbow and bit down harder on the pencil. The tag on the top crate — CROWE 47, MIXED OTTOMAN — sat just out of reach. She stretched for it, the old ladder creaking under her socked feet. Below her, her boss, Margaret Lin, had been on the phone for twenty minutes, her tone moving through four stages in that time: polite professional, polite tense, polite alarmed, and now the register Nica had heard exactly twice in three years. The one that meant Margaret was managing a crisis.

“Yes, of course, Mr.Vasiliev. We can absolutely accommodate. The full Crowe lot is in active cataloging, but if you wish to acquire — yes. Yes, I understand. By all means. I’ll meet you at the bay door.” A pause. “Five minutes? Yes, that’s — that’s perfect. Of course.”

The phone clicked dead, and Margaret muttered a curse word the prim, proper curator never used in the office. Refusingto remove the pencil from its resting place in her mouth, Nica slurred, “Who was that?”

“Veronica?”

“Mhm.” Margaret never used her full name unless she was about to launch a very long lecture, or unless she was tipsy on champagne — and since it wasn’t yet ten in the morning, whoever had been on that phone had well and truly upset the apple cart.

“Get down from the ladder.”

“In a second. I just need this last —”

“Veronica. Now, please.”

Something in her voice had changed. Nica finally looked down, pencil still between her teeth. Margaret had gone pale — Margaret, who’d survived two divorces, an IRS audit, and the Cohn-Whitfield merger of ’19 without losing her color — and she was smoothing the front of her blouse with both hands like a woman who used clothing like armor, checking for chinks.

Nica took the pencil out of her mouth. “What’s happening?”

“Pacific Meridian Capital is sending someone.”

“Okay. And?”

“Right now. In five minutes.” Margaret looked at the bay door as though it might swing open on its own. “Demetri Vasiliev. The founder. He wants to acquire the entire Crowe lot, sight unseen, and he’s on his way over.”

Nica stared down at her. “The whole — the whole estate?”

“The whole estate.”