A Mate Worse Than Death (16 page)

“Shouldn’t we let sleeping dragons lie?” Tony muttered, watching Hoot as he walked gingerly across the straw to the backside of Old Nick’s head.

“Not if you are intent on getting to New Jersey quickly.”

Tony turned to Phil and gave him a onceover. “And you’re up here because?”

“I am going with you.”

She kept looking.

“I thought you might benefit from having access to magic.”

“But I have got some magic,” Tony said as she patted the Louis Vuitton tote that she still had slung over her left shoulder. She hadn’t had time to get it back to Glinda yet, and besides, she really didn’t want to see the witch again any time soon if she was going to be so bitchy over a demon who Tony wasn’t even interested in. Not really.

“You can’t fully operate most of those here without help,” he reminded her, since Nattys, for the most part, had too little juice to get magical items to work unless the items were enhanced, like f-lights or other standard issue equipment. In Fairie, she could manage it because any magical ability increased there. But not in Mundania.

She continued to look at him for another full minute. He didn’t break, so she finally sighed and said, “I take it the Lieutenant knows that you’re coming with me?”

“I was ready to persuade him that two would be better than one with a Being like Adonis. Happily, he needed no persuasion. He asked me to go with you again. He remembers Adonis from Fairie.” He frowned. “Besides, I do have a vested interest in having this matter settled soon.” Then he turned his most charming smile on her, “I hope that you won’t mind the company? I can sit in front if you like, in case Nick is snappish.”

Both of them glanced over at Hoot, who had woken Nick and then gone about settling a two-person harness on the dragon, just behind the back of his skull and snugged up against the first line of spikes, so that the harness itself used the line of spikes to stay gripped tightly to dragon’s back. The harnesses were copyrighted Dwarf creations, 99.9% likely to work every time, or your money back.

Tony stared at Phil a little longer, shook her head, then pointed to the dragon now waiting for its passengers. “Get your ass on and belted before I change my mind.”

“My ass is at your command. Always.” His eyes flicked up and down her, taking in her tailored navy suit and white lycra top as he added, “For any purpose you might need.”

“Just. Get. On.”

He pulled a hairholder out of the inner pocket of his tailored jacket and smoothed his hair back as Tony stared at him. “Do you need one?” he murmured, as he finished securing his hair.

She shook her head, then turned and walked over to Hoot and Nick. Not just a demon--a high maintenance demon. Glinda could have him.

“Introduce yourself, sis,” Hoot pulled her back to the task at hand, reminding her of the etiquette for approaching a working dragon.

She walked over to Nick’s head and put out a hand. The dragons communicated by touch, for the most part, so she put her hand up to his cheek and laid a palm flat against it. Out loud she spoke what she was thinking, “I am Detective Newman. I need to go to Lock Up in New Jersey. Is this agreeable to you, Dragon Nick?”

The dragon lowered its large head in a kind of nod, and then Phil came over and placed his hand near Tony’s, a little too near in her opinion. Out loud he said, “I am Mephistopheles. Know you me?” The dragon nodded. “I wish to go to Lock Up with this woman.” The dragon nodded, then, in a move neither of them expected, it blew out a puff of smoke, like a laugh.

Hoot, who’d been watching, grinned. “Dragons read folks better’n any critter I’ve ever worked with. Reckon he’s found something in this that tickles his funny bone.” He gave them a look before he walked away. “I wonder what that is?”

Tony looked at Phil and then climbed up into the front seat in the harness, “Remind me, why are you going with me?”

He had climbed up behind her, and though he didn’t need to do so, he had his hands placed on her waist.

“You will need me there when you confront Adonis. Trust me on this.” Phil leaned in closely enough for his breath to move the hair she had refused to put up in one of his holders. “Are you sure you do not want something with which to tie up your hair?”

“No, I don’t. And quit messing with my hair!” she added when she felt him gathering the weight of it in his hands, its length several inches longer than his. She jerked the ponytail he’d made out of his hands.

He was quiet for just a moment, then added mournfully, “It will hit me in the face and sting when we get up to speed. I shall probably ingest large amounts of it by accident.”

After a minute, she dropped her head in defeat and then sat up straight. “Okay, okay already.” She waited, left hand out, expecting him to hand her the holder, but then she felt him gathering up her hair again, smoothing its length from scalp to end with both hands. It was all she could do not to start purring. It felt like he was giving her scalp massage, and, hello, she really didn’t need him doing something so totally inappropriate. “What are you doing?”

“Taking care of your hair for you.” He leaned in closer to her face and breathed, “Such lovely touches of red throughout the length of it when the light hits it.” Her head pulled a couple of times as he secured it.

She had meant t
o pull away and do it herself, but by then, she felt him let go of the ponytail, which hung down behind her now. It annoyed her less up than it did down, as long she didn’t think about having Phil back there messing with it. She really, really needed a time out if it took this little to distract her from a case. Maybe she just needed more sleep. Or less demon.

When Hoot indicated that his passengers were settled, Nick brought his wings up and took the short run on the rooftop flight deck, jumping at the end to grab air which his wings.
They headed north, to the Lock Up facility, which existed in an area between Martinton and the Wharton State Park in southern New Jersey. The facility itself moved through magical means and had moved frequently since it first materialized in 1989. In fact, it could have simply continued to travel across country, never staying anywhere for long, had that been necessary. However, that would have meant that the Mundanes working there would have had to uproot their families for each move, which limited the length of employment for most potential guards. So when the town of Martinton, New Jersey offered the facility a permanent spot in 1992, it had stopped moving, the Supernatural Warden, Medusa herself in gorgeous flowing robes and headscarves, thanking the council live on FaeV in front of a gaggle of news crews. Fae-Vision had played that scene repeatedly in the months after Lock Up settled near the state forest, and the local station in Martinton used it as part of their Mageline web site.

The ride itself would take comparatively little time, just over an hour, and in the harness, though moving very fast and very high, the magical wards cut the white noise down to almost nothing and allowed those riding to carry on a conversation.
Most dragon crashes occurred in the first ten minutes of a flight since take-off was the most dangerous part of dragonback rides. Nick had thousands of hours of air time, but no one risked distracting a dragon taking flight. However, as soon as they reached altitude and leveled out, Phil started talking. For the first time, Tony found the convenience of magical interference with Natural laws annoying.

“What is your plan for questioning Adonis?” he asked her, his mouth almost on her ear, and his body leaned in as close to her as the harness would allow.

“Plan?” she asked him.

“You don’t have a plan of attack?” he asked her.

“Has someone been watching too many old TV shows?”

“What do you mean?”

“Some of them raise really unrealistic expectations.”

There was a long moment of silence behind her.

“You know, Phil, I’ve always found that the best way to go into an interview is to go in wide open and play the situation for all it’s worth. I have no idea what Adonis is going to say, so it’s hard to have too many questions planned in advance.” She had a brainstorm at that moment. “Hey, I’ve got my earbugs with me. Why don’t we listen to some road music? I’ll share.”

She reached into her pocket and pulled out her f-light and two earbugs, both of which woke and stretched, protected in the palm of her hand. The wind around them made transferring one to her ear and one to Phil’s hand and then his ear a bit dicey. But the bugs were super sticky for use during physical activity, so they both managed to get a bug in an ear.

The bugs were linked to Tony’s f-light, so she turned up her playlist selections and concentrated on enjoying the music, assuming this, at least, might shut Phil up. However, a few minutes later she realized that he was humming along to a Death Cab for Cutie song right in her ear. After a moment spent listening to him pick up the words of “I Will Possess Your Heart” she flipped to the next song.

“I was enjoying that,” Phil whispered in her ear.

“I wasn’t,” she replied.

“It is your playlist,” he reminded her. “I must get that song. I found it... inspirational.”

She flipped the f-light again to a song by Puddle of Mud, “I think this one should be your guide.” And she grinned as the lyrics of “She Hates Me” bounced with them through the air to New Jersey.

Lock Up had its own dragonhold, a hanger outside the gates and down the road from the facility. Keeping the dragons away from the main facility was less about the worry of a prison break and more about keeping them from treating the general population of the prison like their own personal food larder. Dragons’ natural food favorite, sheep, often got supplemented with the occasional Super in Fairie. In Mundania, before the Geas was invoked, dragons had nabbed the occasional Super or Natty, also. The Geas kept the dragon community reigned in, but that didn’t mean that they couldn’t be tempted. And since dragons’ self-awareness ranked more on the level of dolphin or monkey than Natty or Super, the Geas tended towards leniency with them. So their handlers tried to remove temptation to cut down on any bad publicity.

When Tony and Phil arrived, the DragonMaster checked Nick into a visitor’s hold and then gave them a little Mini-Cooper loaner to drive the five miles up to the prison itself. The road to the Lock Up facility, like much of Lock Up itself, exists both in Mundania and in Fairie. It wasn’t good for the average Natty who had to work there or visit it to think about it too much--it was one of those conundrums that caused university physics professors violent headaches and sleepless nights trying to describe it in scientific terms. It didn’t help that one of the leading magicians of the GOOEN squad had told Hawking once, “Of course, it can be explained mathematically. Magic is mathematics.” That was like throwing chum in shark-infested waters. Every respectable university in the country which aspired to be known for its math or physics department now had a Center for the Explanation of Magic (CEM). They hadn’t gotten far yet, but they weren’t well funded either. Any Super in a position to fund a CEM tended to treat it like a kindergarten, “Here you go, kiddies, a nice crayola box for you. Make some pretty pictures.” What the Supers didn’t seem to get was that a Natty kid with a crayon could come up with some pretty spectacular pictures, so the CEM directors took what they could get and worked together toward trying to come up with an answer without the usual academic bickering and infighting. Nattys could rise to a magical challenge given the right provocation. The smug certainty on the part of many Supers that the Naturals of Mundania weren’t quite up to the intellectual level of magic-wielding or magic-holding Supers proved to be the right motivation. No one was giving up yet.

When Tony first started down the road, it looked like a British B road out on the moors of Devon, the kind actually meant for two lane traffic but providing only one lane of driving space, and turn outs, lots of turn outs. Tony assumed the road took its cues from the type of car. They passed an F-250, obviously a prison guard on patrol and for a second, the road in front of them shimmered, and suddenly they saw the Pine Barrens around them. After the truck passed, another shimmer and they were winding through the moors again, with Lock Up off in the distance.

Tony downshifted going into a curve at the bottom of a steep hill that really shouldn’t exist in this part of the country, and there was Phil’s leg in her way. She looked over at him and realized that he had fallen asleep. He was leaning into the door and his legs had strayed into the shifting radius.

“Phil?” He didn’t move, so she tried again. “Mephistopheles?”

Phil twitched and sat up, scrubbing at his face, mussing up his beard and hair, which was still pulled back, but looked lopsided now. It was sweet, in a puppies and kittens way that didn’t go with a guy bad enough to get stuck with running Monster-Mate.
But he looked so sleepy and out of it that she made herself look away. No sense in getting soft about the guy. The old guy. The really old guy. Nothing was going to happen if she could just get this case finished and get him out of her daily life. Man, three days, and it felt like she’d know him forever.

“Just stop it,” she muttered to herself.

“Stop what?” Phil said, looking around for the problem.

“The road keeps changing,” Tony told him, appalled and equally impressed at her ability to lie around him. Unfortunatel
y, it had become quite a habit.