I flew off to my home on French Market Place. The roof of my building was a garden. I landed by the door to the stairway, it was open, and I heard laughter. The shift hurt because of the burnt wing, but it would be healed when I shifted again. Grace tended bar in the paranormal club on the first floor. Designed to be a gentleman’s club. The clientele and entertainment changed every decade or two.
Right now there was a bar, meeting rooms, and a kitchen that served the tables lining the front windows on the first floor. The second floor housed Wretch’s and my offices. His was at the back of the building and mine looked over the street, the French Quarter Market, and the Mississippi river. Between the offices were two hallways that ran the sides of the building with the center glassed in. There was a courtyard on the first floor that opened to the sky.
I heard Grace's voice. She was a cat shifter born and raised in Mexico, like me. She ran from the drug cartels and walked into this place when it was a boys-only pool club. Then she demanded I let her run the place. I never regretted the decision. Her cat form was the most beautiful black jaguar I’d seen. Like me, she could partially shift any time she liked, and if a demon got too frisky, he would have to remember his healing spell for the claw marks on his face.
“I can smell you, dragon. Come down here.” Grace called up.
I passed by my primary living quarters on the third floor with bedroom, living room, and bathroom, to stop on the second floor and go into the office. It smelled like paper. The dust in the air let me know Grace had been shredding documents again. It smelled like printer ink.
“What are we destroying this time?” I asked.
“Someone brought in an old fashioned ‘Wanted’ poster from a tourist shop with your picture on it.” She came up the stairs.
“That's a new one.”
“In dragon form.”
“A very new one.”
“I figured you would want it destroyed. The rest of the work is done. Only a few stragglers in the bar, I’m kicking them out and heading home.” Grace, regal in shoulder length black hair and hazel eyes moved with a fluid motion born of lithe muscles, yoga flexibility, and predatory instincts. She was more formidable than she looked. Her best defense against demons was her intelligence. She outsmarted them without needing to shift.
My office was decorated in leather with red velvet couches, leather chairs, solid oak tables and desk. It ran along the wall for privacy. I could see the Mississippi River from my chair. The center of the room held a group of five chairs in a circle around a low coffee table. A fainting couch and settee lined the windowed wall. The furniture wasn’t vintage. It was original.
Grace entered the rarely lit room and waited.
“You want something else? I thought you are closing up.”
“I have demons in my bar telling me they chased you down the road naked. They’re new to the area so I didn’t scratch them. No one told them this is your place. Would you care to enlighten me?” She smiled.
“I thought a nude jog would do me good.” I tried to hide my smile.
“They got you with the anti-shifting spell.” She guessed immediately.
“Yes.”
She walked back down to the bar. I guessed from the screams that she’d decided to fillet their cheeks. I went down out of curiosity.
The floors were covered in plush carpeting to keep my talons from ruining hardwood floors. Wretch was specific with the decorators. The whimpering demons didn’t hear me walk up behind them. I tapped one on the shoulder, and they both turned to me. One of them was nice enough to faint.
“It's not supposed to be that easy.” I was disappointed.
The other shifted into roaches. Bugs piss me off. Wretch appeared at the end of the bar, in front of his favorite collection of whiskey, and took in the scene. He whispered a spell, and the demon popped back.
“Thanks Uncle Fester,” Grace chided him.
“He was from the group earlier?” Wretch reached for a bottle of whisky.
“Yes.” One of the demons from my poker game stood in front of me, terrified.
The demon tried to speak, but it sounded muffled. I looked closer, and his lips were sewn shut.
“Nice trick,” I said to Wretch.
“It comes in handy.” He turned the bottle up.
“You need to leave. I’m closing up,” Grace said to the room while staring at me.
A few guests at one of the front tables grumbled. I smiled for them, and they left. Dragon teeth could bite through demon bones.
I made my way back up to my office and faced the river. I could see the pier where Nitha and I'd just fought. Wretch and I met on a river four hundred years ago. He and Nitha had been fighting for days. His death seemed inevitable.
“Where are you?” He asked behind me.
“Better question, when am I,” I replied.
“Loch Ness, four hundred years ago. I saw the resemblance. Only then it was me at Nitha's feet dying and you walked up behind her.” He spoke softly as the memories returned.
“I should've beheaded her then. I've regretted it ever since.” Our lives would’ve been significantly easier if I had.
“She told you she was my Aunt, and I'd misbehaved. Both of which were true. You couldn't know my misbehaving was setting human women free from the basement where she used them for experiments.” He spat out the words. Disgusted by his family’s favorite past time.
“That's not misbehaving.”
“It is in my family.”
I shook my head hoping the regrets of that night would vanish with the memory. “Have I told you lately how fucked up your family tree is?”
Nitha was psychotic and reveled in it. Hers wasn't the only illness in his family. His mother had her share of delusional moments. If she'd had them in public today, she would be shot on sight. Back then, humans were too busy fighting tribal battles. They ran around Europe in body paint and little else. Nothing in their battle gear that would wound, much less kill, a demon.
“You don’t have to. It's why I won't have children. The odds of creepy psychotic teenagers make even me think twice about parenthood.”
“You might be able to control them, but you would be the only one.”
“I'd have to give up women.”
I laughed. He couldn't give up women. His life would turn upside down. The best part of catching someone and turning them over to the Court was the debauchery he thought it justified. Without that outlet, I'd been afraid he would lose it.
“You should do that anyway,” Laythe said from the hallway.
“Aunt Laythe. You know I'm a boy and can't control my urges.”
“Bullshit. That excuse is pathetic. You're full of it, nephew.”
Wretch vanished, and we soon heard bottles rattling in the bar.
“Please have a seat.” I gestured to the couch in front of the window. “She is secure?”
“For now, I have guards on her and enough security cameras to see when she blinks.” She stared out the window at the river.
“You don't sound confident.”
“Nitha is one of the most powerful demons alive, Cim. She's broken out of more jails than we know of.”
“Wretch wants her dead this time. No doubts about family ties. She pushed it ten years ago and, without intervention, he would have killed her the second her powers were taken away.” When she tried to remove my heart, something in Wretch snapped. Any family loyalty he’d reluctantly held onto disappeared. He was furious for months. At himself, as much as his aunt.
Nitha had taunted the two of us for the last four hundred years. Our positions with the Court gave us authority, but it comes with limits. She knew exactly what they were and played us. Her perversions took her around the world so we only saw her every decade or three. That gave us plenty of time to clean up the mess she left and wait for the next time.
“This time he'll have a chance.” She looked at the stairway, Wretch wasn't there. “How's Angie?”
I laughed. “Still human so he still says no.”
Laythe smiled. “She didn't throw up on him at his ugliest.”
“She shot him.” I reminded her.
“He deserved it. Scaring her like that.” She laughed.
The red hair did work much better against her pale skin. Laythe and I never spent a romantic moment together. In my dreams, however, we'd been intimate thousands of times. Wretch bugged me about it from time to time, and I brushed it off. With her, I could make love as a dragon and not have to shift into human form, or be careful about putting my full weight on her. I needed to stop my train of thought before I pulled her into me.
“She's a good shot. Right between the eyes,” I said.
“Are we reliving my orgasmic change, death, and rebirth?” He returned with a Manhattan for Laythe.
“She loves you,” Laythe said.
“Humans die, Laythe. Demons would have my psychotic children.” It was an old argument.
“How about dragons?” I asked.
He shrugged his shoulders. There were so few of us now the chances were unlikely, but it was something I stored away for later. My parents traveled the world for a living now. They would know if there are more dragons out there.
“You might consider that.” Laythe took a long drink. “You have enough in your DNA to have genetic dragon children and would pass on the ability to use demon magic naturally.”
“You would create your own species. Your ego loves that idea,” I said.
“I’ve considered it. For the good of the dragons, and the ego thing you so casually mention,” he said.
My mind went back to the immediate problem.
So did Laythe’s. “Nitha is more dangerous now than ever before, boys. She has support from someone on the Arcane Court, or her power would’ve been permanently removed the second they detected its use. Someone there shields her from the others.”
“Ooh. Conspiracy on the Court.” Wretch teased, but he looked worried.
“What would hurt her the most? If we can’t get to her?” I asked.
“Narran. She still loves him and their children.”
“They had kids.” Wretch growled.
“Just like them.” Laythe kissed us both on the cheek, downed her drink and vanished.
His gaze on the river, Wretch lounged on the couch with a tumbler of rum. “Nitha is now the biggest problem.”
“This is not news.” I answered in a grumble.
The appearance of those two particular demons downstairs couldn’t have been a coincidence, either.
“She and Narran rented a house together a few blocks from here. They signed a three-year lease. I looked it up before I came over.” His bottle was empty.
“The happy psychotics are together again. How long can Laythe hold her if Narran wants her out?”
“I don’t know. We should get together tomorrow with Adam. We need a plan and his reconnaissance.”
Adam was the largest werewolf in the states and the pack alpha here in New Orleans. Other than Wretch, and another pack member, the police chief, he’s the only one I’d trust to get my back in a fight. Wretch got me my position with the Arcane Court, and I’d done the same for Adam.
“Good night boss.” Grace called from downstairs, and I heard the front door lock click.
“You go through your surveillance stuff?”
He nodded. “Typical Mardi Gras pranks a week early. Most of it was demon play.”
“Anything we need to handle tonight?”
He shook his head and stared out the window. “No. We can get together tomorrow with Adam. Stop by the gym around lunch. We may need to group at the warehouse.” He gestured to the building across the street where we kept our unofficial offices.
When we needed to disappear without going anywhere, it came in handy. I had room to fly indoors if I needed to stretch my wings. Nobody asked questions if demons walked into a warehouse by the river and never came back out. We swept the floors right into the river, trash, dust, demons, and everything else.
I poured a snifter of brandy and inhaled. The scent mixed with the leather soothed me. “Lunch tomorrow.”
He vanished before the glass hit my lips. “I want that skill.”
I sat at the desk and reviewed the day’s paperwork. Grace ran this place efficiently so I skimmed the numbers and filed them.
The quiet enveloped me as I walked to the center of the room shifting. My wings spread from one wall to the other. I missed the days when I could stand outside on a hilltop or along a river as a dragon and fly. It was what I was doing the night I saved Wretch from Nitha.
Four hundred years ago, I took off from Inverness for a flight landing on a peak overlooking Loch Ness. I heard Wretch before I saw him. His obstinate taunting of Nitha echoed. I couldn't make out the words he used. I walked down for a closer look and saw her seething.
“Psychotic bitch,” he shouted. “You would kill your own nephew for fun? Tell me something demon reject, were you the one who killed my parents?”
He stumbled back on the crude pier and waited for her response. There were cuts on his face, hands, and chest. Then she growled and leapt at him. Mid-flight she turned into what the humans called a harpy and grabbed his head with a taloned foot. She flew over the loch squawking, and I couldn't tell at the time if he was still alive or if she was taking a victory lap. My parents had warned me about demons, although we ran across few of them in the jungles of Mexico. This trip to Europe, ordered by my parents, to learn the old history of dragons and demons, was my first exposure to their brutal culture.
“Put me down, you filthy excuse for a woman. No wonder the only thing that married you was a perverted demon that spends most of his time playing with human women. Like children do with dolls.” He should be dead. Yet, he didn’t even sound tired.
She stopped flying and hovered. His head was gripped in one claw, and she used the other one to gouge his face where it was exposed. That’s when he shifted into a dragon yanking her claw from his face. The flight path he took back to the pier wavered as his face was covered in blood.
That was the moment I decided to save him.
“Wretched Spawn, hated child of my dead sister and her dragon lover, today will be your last.” She landed on top of him in human form and grabbed his neck in her hands.
He pulled at her hands with his talons, but every cut healed immediately, and her grip didn't let up. His form changed to the normal human like demon shape, and I saw him gasping for air that wasn't going to get in. I scrambled a few yards farther up the cliff and took off. From where I was, neither of them could see me coming. I landed behind her, grabbed her neck in my talons pulling her off him.
“I don't know you, demon, but I'm not letting you kill a dragon.” I lowered my voice like my father had told me.
“You have made a mistake and an enemy for life, dragon. I will hunt you forever.”
“My name is Cimmerian. Your kind calls me Death Dealer.”
Her eyes showed she'd heard of me. In the last year, I'd learned to drink demon souls. One of my ancestors told me I had a special gift when it came to demon magic. Facing Nitha that first time, I hoped he'd been right.
Wretch stood behind her. “Let her go, I can finish this.”
I nodded at him to keep from showing the fear this demon raised in me and let go.
She vanished.
Wretch didn’t know if I was the next enemy, and he tried to possess my body. Our souls struggled and when he sensed I wouldn’t kill another dragon, he pulled away. The apology grumbled. That one influx of magic advanced my ability to hold demon power by years.
The demon council and dragon ancestors heard firsthand what we had done. Nitha went straight to the demon council to complain about my interference. The council called the eldest dragons. Wretch’s dual heritage created an unforeseen gap in demon law. They assigned us to the Arcane Court, whose rules would supersede all other paranormal law. Dragons and demons monitoring themselves and each other with agreed upon rules. It started with no harming innocent humans and no possession of human bodies, no matter how bad the soul was. Those were the two rules we enforced in New Orleans.
Wretch invited me to his other Aunts place that night, and I met Laythe. We had been best friends ever since. I got to see just how strong he was in battle soon after realizing I'd been lucky that night. Nitha obeyed the court laws, barely. We kept trying to piss her off enough to make a mistake. Maybe this time we would get her before any more died. Four hundred years of taunting a powerful demon, and we were both still alive. Our reputation was built on that and our brutality with other demons.
My sleep hours varied, but nighttime was the best for my dragon form. I could slip into shadows. Human brains preferred to forget the large scaled dragon in the corner of their eye barely caressing their consciousness. Too much happened tonight for me to chance flying. I made my way upstairs shifting back to human form. I fell asleep as I hit the blood red silk sheets.