EMBER sashayed out the front doors of the casino and out into the hot, Las Vegas sun, her enormous purse filled with glass and metal vials swinging from her shoulder. Her bag dragged her shoulder down, but she was used to it.
Cai strolled beside her, seemingly unperturbed, as they crossed the wide, cement courtyard toward the silent pool with its supposed sea serpents. “Carry that?”
“No thanks.” Her elementals liked being close to her. Irritating them could be dangerous.
The bright desert sunlight touched Cai’s strong cheekbones and square jaw with glints of silver. His dark-green eyes caught the sun like gems. She thought she’d never met a dragon shifter before, because if she had, she certainly would have remembered the dark green diamond glitter in Cai’s eyes that flowed inward and sparkled in the sunlight. It was like emerald fire completely filled his irises.
His dark hair had gotten ruffled, maybe when she was dang-near giving him a lap dance and he had been staring into her eyes like she fascinated him. Watching his amazing eyes had entranced her, and she’d had to shake it off a little while she’d been staring at the napkins without really seeing them.
Maybe dragons could hypnotize their prey like cobras were rumored to be able to do.
That would certainly explain why sensible Bethany and wallflower Willow had married dragons practically right after meeting them.
Yeah, those dragon shifter guys had probably hypnotized Bethany and Willow into marrying them.
Well, Ember was forewarned, and forewarned is forearmed. Cai Wyvern wasn’t going to hypnotize her into marrying him.
Because she wasn’t interested in marrying him.
Even if his eyes were absolutely beautiful and when he looked at her, her legs wobbled.
She walked on, determined to get this job and prove she could do it, as she wasn’t quite sure whether or not she had been hired.
Beyond the switched-off fountain, a low construction barrier separated them from the crowd of people thronging the sidewalk as they made their way from casino to casino along the Strip. A few turned to glance at Ember and Cai, but most people hurried past, eager to reach another casino so they could lose their money sooner than if they had dawdled. The other casinos jangled with bells and the clink of tinkling slot machines as they vied for the marks’ cash. Even in the noontime sunlight, lights flashed on the other casinos, catching Ember’s eye as she ambled toward the fountain’s basin as if she actually belonged in a chaotic, worldly place such as Las Vegas.
Ember still didn’t feel comfortable in a dragon’s den of iniquity such as a casino or anywhere in Las Vegas. The whole place was brimming with dark magic, from the air elementals that had been forced into servitude and were pretending to be dust devils atop the King Solomon’s Mines Casino down the street to the charm spells that emanated from the sliding glass doors of every casino in the city. She didn’t even like to look at all that, especially the bound air elementals. They made her want to climb up there, ask them if they wanted to be there, and offer them a nice bottle to live in.
If Ember’s mother had seen the black magic and filth of this place, she would have first had a screaming panic attack and then dragged Ember home by her hair. There was no white magic at all in this vice-ridden city, let alone the “clear” magic Ember’s mother insisted on. Her mother had composed long lectures and diatribes that Ember had heard every day of her life, and even now over the phone every morning, about the temptations of shadowy magic that would rebound bad karma to plague Ember and damn her soul to the Dark Place for all eternity.
Ember shook her head as she walked, trying to shake loose the earworm of her mother’s voice describing the horrific effects of negative karmic rebound. She didn’t need to think about that. She wasn’t doing anything wrong.
Even if her mother thought she was.
When they reached the sea serpent-infested fountain, Ember settled her hands on the warm stone wall surrounding it and leaned over. “I don’t see any serpents.”
“Apparitional sea serpents,” a warm, male voice whispered near her ear.
Very near her ear.
When she turned, he was standing right beside her, also leaning over the pool. He was so close that he could have rested his chin on her shoulder. If she’d leaned toward him, she could have kissed him. Instead, she watched the molten emeralds sparkle in his amazing eyes. The sunlight made them even more startling, with the green fire flowing in his irises.
But he was right there.
Huh, she had begun to think that Cai Wyvern wasn’t interested in her at all.
She smiled at him. “Apparitional sea serpents, then.”
When Ember had crawled over Cai on her way to the napkin display, she had inhaled his cologne and his masculine scent drifting from the open collar of the white shirt he was wearing under his suit jacket. She’d barely been able to refrain from burying her face in his neck to get a better whiff of the subtle, rich scent. Every cell in her body had strained toward him, trying to breathe it in.
But then, standing in the warm sunshine by the serpent fountain, she could barely smell it because something else hung in the air.
Ember made a show of sniffing the air above the fountain. “What’s that weird smell?”
Cai said, “A friend of mine said that before he arrived, the interim staff had allowed algae to grow in the fountain to the point where he thought they were going to have to mow the pool. It might still have a whiff of that odor.” He sniffed. “It does seem a bit musty.”
Ember’s nose tingled inside. She leaned over the black water farther, sniffing. “It doesn’t smell like algae. It smells kind of like methane or something. And oil or something is floating on the surface.”
Cai had his phone out and was frowning at the screen. “Yeah, Arawn said something about the oil acted as a lid for something, but I don’t know why you’d want to put a lid on a fountain, anyway. That’s kind of not the point of a fountain.”
Ember leaned over the low retaining wall, peering at the iridescent colors floating on the surface of the pond.
A shimmer of magic—not dark magic but not clear magic either—drifted across the surface.
The weak waver didn’t quite look like a protection spell. The glimmer floating above the water almost looked like binding spell, one that was probably tied to a potion.
Willow was a potion witch. This spell must be hers.
But why would Willow float a protection-based binding spell on the surface of the fountain? That couldn’t be healthy for the sea serpents. Neither lizards nor amphibians would like it, and they would probably stay under the surface unless they absolutely had to breach it to breathe or feed.
The poor things.
Ember unzipped her purse—a long, ripping sound that seemed to go on for five seconds—and rummaged around inside: frosted-glass vial of an air elemental, black-metal bottle for an earthen one, bright pink wallet, a thick glass bottle for a fire guy, a couple of slightly crushed tampons with the wrappers beginning to rip, until she found what she was looking for.
In her palm, the crystal decanter sparkled in the sun.
Cai leaned over. “What’s that?”
Ember said, “I’m an elemental witch. It’s kind of like being an elemental whisperer, like a horse whisperer. I can commune with the spirits of the air, earth, fire, and water, plus some rare sub-species, and work with them. I’m just going to have this little guy take a lap around the pool and tell me what’s going on under the surface.”
She removed the stopper from the bottle and poured the water elemental into the pond.
The stream of water skipped over the surface, bouncing off the top of the potion-spell, and finally torqued itself into a little waterspout to drill through it.
The water elemental plunged into the water and zipped through it.
Ember could hear its shrill squeal as it leaped right back out of the water, made a beeline for its bottle, and dove inside. “Jumpy? You okay?”
The bottle shivered in her hand, and a splash of nasty-smelling water slopped out and over her knuckles. “Ew, Jumpy. What is it?”
A squeak from the bottle transformed in her ear and became words in a raspy, little voice, Nasty. Don’t like.
Ember tapped the plug back into the vial and looked up.
Bubbles boiled from under the water.
A whole lot of bubbles.
Bubbles filled the water in the entire basin of the fountain.
Bubbles like carbonation, bubbles like a jacuzzi, and more bubbles like a sudden chemical reaction that had just needed a little bit of energy of activation and was now surging to completion.
The bubbles broke the surface.
A foul stench leaped into the air, burning Ember’s eyes and nose.
“Holy Ladies of Magic!” She backpedaled from the stone wall, trying to get away from the noxious gas, and dropped Jumpy’s bottle back into her purse.
Beside her, Cai coughed and stumbled backward, too. “Dragon Lords, what is that smell?”
Ember was falling, her eyes streaming. She caught herself with one hand as her butt smacked the cement. With her other arm, she tried to hide the fact that her nose was running snot down her face. “Oh, Magical Forces. It smells like farts that someone put in Tupperware and forgot in the back of the refrigerator for a month!”
“Is that from the fountain?” he asked.
“When the water elemental drilled through the oil layer, I think it broke the seal. I think that’s what was containing the smell!”
A roar echoed off the casino and cement around them.
Ember looked up, far-oh-my-ladies up, at a sea serpent towering and wavering over her head. “What!”
The scarlet sea serpent—a long and snaky aquatic dragon in the genus of the Chinese dragons—loomed over them, snarled, and opened its fanged jaws to strike.
“Draco, Tiamat, and Wyvern!” Cai cursed and spread his arms wide.
Ember had the impression of blinding white light surrounding her, brighter even than the sun, and then a wall of diamond and crystal materialized in front of her.
The gigantic wall larger than her apartment building expanded like an umbrella opening, and she realized that enormous ribs stretched the crystalline skin as the beast inhaled.
Beast?
Toward the fountain, the glittering, alabaster wall narrowed and became the arrow-shaped head of a dragon. The dragon opened its mouth and roared, a blast of noise and fury and symphony that drove the sea serpent to dive back under the water.
Holy Ladies, Cai really was a dragon shifter.
Ember scrambled backward on her hands and heels, trying to get away in case Cai’s dragon stepped on her with his huge feet. His pure white dragon was enormous, with a long, whipping tail, four tree-trunk legs, and giant wings that sparkled in the sunlight.
The dragon blasted another trumpeting roar over the fountain, and his call reverberated off the glass and concrete around them.
Out on the Strip, the crowd swiveled and looked around for the noise.
The naturals looked up, checking for an airplane overhead breaking the sound barrier and creating a sonic boom.
The supernatural beings out there looked straight at the dragon and ran. A fae swept her child from the sidewalk and darted on gossamer wings through the crowd. A day-going vampire slunk back behind the security fence and then peeked around the edge.
The dragon snarled at the crowd, and the supernaturals cleared out, running, flying, or popping into the ether to leave the area.
The naturals, of course, were still scanning the sky for a supersonic jet.
The ice-white dragon swiveled his head and stared down at Ember.
She quailed. “Nice—dragon?”
The dragon tilted his head, examining her as she sat on the warm cement with his emerald eyes that rushed with fire like Cai’s did. Oh, she hoped that she was not about to become witch-flavored sushi.
The alabaster dragon leaned down, snuffling her with wood-smoke breath.
She reached up, slowly, her hand nearing his white nose.
The dragon watched her with his bright green, fiery eyes as her fingers neared his nose and touched him.
His skin wasn’t scaly or slimy at all, but pebbly, the stones almost sharp with crystalline facets. Sunlight sparked through the cut glass of his skin.
But that wasn’t cut glass, and they weren’t rhinestones.
She peered more closely at him.
Those glittering stones were diamonds, all of them, enormous to small, colorless, flawless diamonds.
She breathed, “You’re so beautiful.”
The dragon blinked, closed his green eyes, and sighed, and then Cai was crouching in front of her on the cement.
Naked.
“Oh my!” She used her witchy conjuring powers and threw clothes onto him.
But not before she’d gotten an eyeful of his powerful thighs, long legs, broad and strong shoulders, and the black dragon tattoo winding up his ribs where the bricks of his abdominals stacked under his light golden skin.
She almost snatched the conjured clothes back to get a better look, but Ember was a good girl, a nice girl. She would not magically strip a man naked just to ogle him, especially in public.
But she might think about it.
But in the end, she wouldn’t.
And speaking of ends, his naked ass had been strong, muscular, round, and thoroughly grabbable.
But Ember was a good girl.
So his magical clothes stayed on.
One of his pants’ hems frayed a little, but Ember wiggled a pinkie at it and sewed it back up.
Cai looked down at the white shirt and black slacks she’d thrown on him because it had seemed like a good choice at the time. “Hey, thanks! That’s one of the hazards of being a shifter: your clothes occasionally get shredded.”
“Yeah, you should walk around with a witch all the time, just to poof you up some clothes when you need them.”
His smile broadened into something gleeful and hungry. “I’d like that.”
“Oh, I didn’t mean—”
“I can’t believe my dragon let you touch him on the nose like that. He’s a jerk. He likes to scare people. That’s why he was bellowing at the crowd.”
“I think he’s beautiful.”
“He liked you, too. He liked you a lot. I’ve never seen him like someone so much. He didn’t even try for a little nibble, not even one arm or leg.” Cai grabbed her hand and dragged her to standing. “Come on, let’s get out of here.”
Sounded like a great plan to Ember.