Page 21 of Kidnapped By The Messy Dragon

“I scoped the lobby for a way in later, and I bumped into her there. Straight into her, middle of the floor.” I run the scene back in my head, and this time I run it with the cameras in it. “I caught her lunch out of the air. We stood in frame together having a whole moment. And I got nothing off her at the time. Her scent was blanked. I didn’t know what she was to me until that night.”

Malachi straightens in his chair. “So the witch’s cameras have a dragon touching her employee the day before the woman disappears.”

“Worse than that.” I push off the desk. “Every soul in this valley knows my face. She doesn’t need to run a search. I’m the loudest man in Shadow Wolf Creek.”

He absorbs that without comment.

“Tell me Shadow Suds again,” he says. “Properly this time. Dates, product, people.”

So I walk him through it. Derrick’s crews clean with a solution that comes off a store shelf, and something in the formula blocks the fated scent. Tolin and Imani proved that without meaning to. Ronan warned Derrick afterward, Derrick quit ordering the stuff, and the leftover cases sat in his backroom until the ghouls broke in. They hauled off most of the stock and left a few busted cases behind. I spent a whole night nose-down in what they left, and that’s where I chased the label to a factory in Millbrook. The factory belongs to Stillwater.

Malachi writes something on a legal pad and boxes it.

I sneeze into my elbow again, and this time it comes with a mood. I’m sick of this, all the way down to my dragon.

“What does the witch want with your Zuri?” Malachi asks.

“That’s the hole in my notebook.” I drop onto the arm of his sofa. “I don’t know.”

“She does.” He taps his pen against the pad. “That woman shut her mouth in my garage like a vault door. Make her comfortable. Comfortable people talk.”

“Comfortable, I can do.” I rub my nose. “Medical center in the morning, for this and her cheek. Then I’ll walk her through town. The Creek can do the charming for me.”

He nods and goes back to his paperwork. I’m almost to the door when his pen stops.

“Oh. And Jay,” he says.

I stop and turn around.

“Congratulations, brother.” He says it without looking up from the page. “She’s beautiful.”

I smile all the way down to my floor.

I stop smiling when I reach her room. The double doors stand open, and the bed is empty. Her tote is gone.

“Zuri?” I step in and find the room empty.

“Shit.” I pull a long breath through my sore nose and find burnt caramel on the air. The trail leads down the hall to my own door.

I push it open and step in.

She turns around in the middle of my paper drifts with her face crumpled up. “Your room is a mess.”

I grin and pull the door shut behind me. “It’s not a mess to me. I know where everything is.”

Then I cross to my podcast table and straighten it anyway.

“Well, you’re a journalist for sure,” she says, turning in place to take in the full disaster. “There’s no doubting that.”

She bends down and reaches for the nearest stack.

I cross the room fast enough to make her gasp and catch her hand above the papers. “Don’t clean up after me.”

I walk her to my unmade bed and sit her down on it. She pulls her tote off her shoulder and sets it beside her, and I drop to my knees and gather the floor myself.

“You know the legends about dragons?” I stack Chronicles as I go. “How we hoard?”

“Yeah,” she says. “I heard that.”