Trouble with Gargoyles: an Urban Fantasy (Moonlight Dragon Book 3)

Trouble

with

Gargoyles

Moonlight Dragon

Book 3

Tricia Owens

Copyright © 2016 Tricia Owens

All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof

may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

Cover art by Ravven

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

Thanks once again to eagle-eyed

Samantha Ashpaugh, who submits to my heartless demands.

Apologies to the City of Las Vegas for taking liberties with your landmarks.

And as always, I couldn't do this without the gatekeeper of quality, my lil' Mama.

Read more from Tricia Owens at http://www.triciaowensbooks.com

Moonlight Dragon
series

Descended from Dragons

Hunting Down Dragons

Trouble with Gargoyles

Forged in Fire

Rise of the Dragon

Trouble

with

Gargoyles

"This is no fair!" I yelled to the crowd. "I'm competing against a Mayan. Her mom's breast milk was probably spicy!"

That earned me some jeers and laughter. And comments from the peanut gallery:

"Watch out for the little ones! Their legs are short but they're hollow!"

"She does have a mean look about her, like she eats ghost peppers for breakfast!"

"Fifty bucks says neither of them makes it through the first bucket!"

That last comment prodded me to find the guy who'd said it and point at him threateningly. He threw up his hands and pretended to be scared.

I shook my head. They all thought this was fun and games, but this was serious. Deadly serious.

Well, okay, probably no one was going to die, but odds were at least one of us was going to be whimpering by the end. I faced off against my best friend Melanie, glaring at her from my side of the plastic covered table. Between us sat a humongous bucket of Adios Level chicken wings. It practically glowed, like a bucket of chicken shipped straight from Chernobyl.

Around us, most of the diners in the Wild & Wooly Wings restaurant were cheering, rooting either for Melanie or for the underdog, which was definitely me. We were competing for the title of Wild & Wooliest Wingwoman. For me, this was a major challenge. I hadn't grown up eating the kinds of foods that my Mexican-born friend had. I might spit fire as a dragon, but I sure as hell didn't ingest it for pleasure. This was going to be rough.

I adjusted my plastic bib nervously and rolled my head on my neck, trying to stay loose. I tried some positive visualization of chicken wings flying effortlessly down my throat then had to stop because just, ew.

"Anne, you are so going to regret this later!" Melanie warned me cheerfully. She had clipped her blue bangs off her forehead to make sure hot sauce didn't accidentally get on them while she plowed through the wings. "I'm gonna clean the floor with you, haha!"

I pretended I hadn't heard her, playing it cool. Whoever ate the most wings won the challenge, but in my mind this was a marathon, not a sprint. The true measure of whether I'd won or lost this competition would be how I felt hours from now. But probably only swallowing liquid Teflon was going to save me from agony.

The restaurant manager came up to our table and coaxed everyone to hoot and holler as he brought a whistle to his lips. He paused dramatically, one arm raised, looking Melanie and I each in the eye. Then he chopped his hand down and blasted the whistle to begin the competition. The restaurant erupted in cheers.

The first wing I grabbed was a slippery little bugger. It was covered in so much sauce it squirted through my fingers and over my shoulder, hitting some kid in the chest and making a big mess of his Adventure Time T-shirt. I shouted an apology but there was no time to pause for collateral damage. Though my fingers had already begun to burn just from that brief contact, I bravely dug another wing out of the bucket and shoved it at my mouth as though I were starving.

As a half-Chinese sorceress who commanded a dragon familiar, I was accustomed to temperatures that made most people flinch. My dragon's primary power was fire. I tended to burn things to cinders. Other sorcerers came to your house for a visit; maybe they turned your crappy box wine into Chateau Latour or made your houseplants sing. Me, I burned your couch. Pair that with being a Las Vegas native who poo-pooed triple digit summers and you'd think I had this in the bag. But, oh, man, when the sauce hit my lips and then my tongue… And then when it slid down my throat and fell into my belly like a lit charcoal briquette…Well, let's just say it took all my willpower not to shriek.

I wasn't a wimp. No way, no how. I'd been through a lot in my twenty-four years. My parents were murdered when I was four and my uncle disappeared without a trace two years ago. I deserved a medal for that alone, but that was just the beginning. Being descended from dragons meant that my sorcery was tied to my ancient Chinese blood. It didn't matter that I was only a half-breed with a Caucasian dad; my ancestral blood was strong enough that every time I used my sorcery I was tempted to give in to the lure of the dragon and
become
a dragon. That was super bad. Think Maleficent—in the Disney cartoon movie, not the one with Angelina Jolie.

Once you became a dragon you were usually lost to it and faced being hunted and killed. Sure, yes, twice I'd managed to return to my human self, but neither time had been easy. It had hurt, kind of like I was hurting now. I told myself I was used to pain. Nevertheless, hissing and wincing, with sweat beading on my upper lip and forehead, I tried to recall why I'd thought this outing was a good idea.

"Keep
eating
!" screamed a skinny guy in the crowd who was obviously a shareholder of Wild and Wooly Wings. I mentally flipped him off.

The hot wings were ruining my mood, which hadn't been so good to begin with. On the surface, my life had seemed mostly okay ever since Melanie and my boyfriend Vale helped me dispatch a creepy guy named Felix Dearborn. Dearborn had been an ex-professor turned golem-maker who had possessed a mummified finger that could raise the dead. Obviously that was bad and obviously I felt compelled to do something about him. It didn't hurt that he was responsible for killing my parents. He had a big ol' target on his back any way you looked at him.

Like the good guys you saw in movies, my friends and I didn't kill Dearborn. But considering the last time I'd seen him he'd been hog-tied in the desert and about to be overrun by his own undead army, I wasn't worried about a rematch.

Immediately following the confrontation with Dearborn I'd convinced myself that I was a badass sorceress who could control my magick. Because, hey, why wouldn't I think that? I'd resisted burning down Las Vegas while in my dragon form and I'd put a stop to the bad guy. I was Anne Moody, Queen of All She Surveys.

Right?

Wrong. The reality wasn't that rosy. Things, or maybe it was more accurate to call them
episodes
, had begun occurring in my shop which made me question just how badass I really was.

Ugh
. Just thinking about it made me want to two-fist a couple of pitchers of beer at the bar.

"You're going down, Anne!" Melanie cried out, her lips smeared with red sauce. She had a crazed look in her eye. Or maybe that was just the monkey in her, freaking out about all the chicken meat she was ingesting.

"You're supposed to be a vegetarian!" I yelled back because, you know, she was a monkey shifter.

Melanie laughed at the accusation and sucked another wing dry before dropping the cleaned bones onto the table in front of her. "You'd better hurry if you want to beat me!"

I was pretty sure I was only beating myself. I paused, grimacing and rubbing my burning stomach. In a twisted way I savored the pain. It reminded me that I was human and not a dragon.

But what are you going to do? Eat hot wings every time you use your sorcery? There's a reason it's called "inner strength", Anne. It's supposed to come from inside you.

I hated the voice, but the voice was right. I had all this downtime while Las Vegas seemed safe and quiet to get my act together, and yet I wasn't any stronger or braver than before. I was the same old me. Actually, I was a little bit worse, since now I'd failed
twice
to stop myself from giving in to the dragon. Didn't matter that I'd recovered both times; it was a slippery slope I was dancing on.

"Don't stop!" the people around us shouted at me. "You can do it!"

"Keep eating!"

"You're all sadists," I groaned as I reached for another death wing.

"Show us how tough you are, girl!"

I grimaced and gave a half-hearted wave to the woman who'd yelled that. Testing my toughness was no longer on my agenda these days. It was willpower and courage I was in short supply of.

Across the table from me, Melanie was cruising to an easy victory. Despite being a flat five feet tall, she was eating me under the table, her chubby cheeks pumping up and down with machine-like precision. I had a vision of her shifting into her monkey form and instantaneously exploding from the pressure in her stomach.

Laughing despite the pain I was in, I reached for one more wing that I could pretend to eat until the timer went off.

As I was lifting the wing to my mouth something strange rippled along my awareness, like someone had run a finger across the nape of my neck. I sat up straight and looked behind me. Only a grandmother and the kid that I'd thrown my first wing at were within reach. Doubtful that either of them had messed with me.

I nibbled absently on the wing as I tried to figure out what it was that I'd felt. Was I having an allergic reaction to something in the sauce? Had I reached my Scoville limit and my body was telling me I needed to call the Fire Department? Would the guys who showed up be the same firefighters who had posed in the calendar I had back home?

Magick was a funny thing. Las Vegas was loaded with chance magick that was generated by all the gambling activity. So much magick pooled here that the Oddsmakers had come in to oversee its usage, afraid that it would be abused (and they weren't wrong). All that power lured magickal beings to the city either because they wanted their magickal practices to be enhanced—a little extra sting in a curse, for example—or because they felt an inexplicable pull, sort of like people visiting the land of their ancestors and experiencing an instant connection.

Rarely did magickal beings stick out in a crowd. All of us knew never to flaunt our magick. Among those cheering me and Melanie on could very well be a witch who'd cursed me during her last visit to the women's restroom.

I looked over the crowd carefully, on the eye out for someone who didn't appear to be all that enthused to be watching a chicken wing-eating contest. Chances were better than keno odds that I had enemies, likely friends of Dearborn. The golem-maker himself wasn't much of a threat both because I was certain he was buried somewhere in Eldorado Canyon and because his condo, which had been packed with all sorts of dark magickal doodads, had been completely hollowed out by a fire that miraculously hadn't affected any other unit in the tower.

However, maybe all his creations hadn't died with him and were now after revenge.

"One minute!"

The restaurant manager's announcement pulled my attention back to the most urgent matter at hand. I looked at the table in front of me, which held the bones of less than a dozen wings, and then over at Melanie's side of the table. She was beating me by more than double, but I was gratified to see that she'd at least broken a sweat from all the hot sauce.

I tossed my half-eaten wing on the table in defeat even though there were still a few more seconds left. That strange shiver that I'd felt just a moment ago hadn't left me; it had morphed into something pretty unpleasant. Was it the pepper? If it were only a physical sensation I would have said yes and flipped the table. Or at least used it as an excuse for why I'd lost.

But this was a feeling that bordered on anxiety and paranoia, as though someone had just whispered in my ear that guys with guns might be waiting for me outside the restaurant. In fact it was a feeling I'd become all too familiar with lately, and I couldn't believe I was feeling it outside of the pawn shop. I'd come here to get away from it!

Disturbed, I tried to play it off as me just being super stressed. However, I couldn't shake it, not even when time was up and the restaurant manager yanked Melanie's sauce-covered hand above her head and declared her the winner while our audience cheered and whistled.

While the celebration continued, I pushed back from the table. People patted me on the shoulder and told me good job. I smiled absently at them but my eyes were for the door. Someone was about to come through and they would be coming for me. I knew this in a way I couldn't explain, just a quirk of being a magickal being.

Calling up Lucky, my dragon familiar, would be a big no-no in a crowded place like this. Ordinary people weren't permitted to know about the magick underbelly of this city. None of my kind wanted to be thrown into the back of a van and transported to a secret government lab for testing and torture. Defending myself with magick against whatever was coming for me wasn't an option. Well, it was an option only if I didn't care if my magick was stripped from me for good.

"Still need to learn kung fu," I muttered to myself as I wove through the crowd, heading for the front door and the hostess stand.

A young girl stood behind the podium. She was probably in her late teens, obnoxiously pretty in that sunny, Hollywood way that I could never be. Her attention wasn't captivated by the cheering mass behind me but by what she could see through the restaurant's glass doors, which were directly in front of her. My anxiety and paranoia took on a new tint of dread. What was she looking at?

The waiter's service station was to my left. I darted to it and grabbed a knife out of the utensils tray. It wasn't a great weapon and I'd be lucky if it was sharp enough to slice a tomato, but with enough force and aimed precisely it could buy me some time to run or create a distraction. With the metal resting cool along my forearm, I approached the front waiting area.