Chapter 24

Zazie

This was so not my jam. I was holding the knife in my hand, looking at a Russian mobster slowly slither towards me like the snake he was, and I thought about how much I just wanted to drink a coffee and watch some Netflix in my sweatpants. Why couldn’t I have that?

Why did I have to be the half-djinn kid? Why couldn’t my parents have been normal? Why did I only get turned on by dragons? Why did I prefer pet rocks to dogs and cats? Like, how bad was my luck?

All of that raced through my head before I charged him, knife out like I was some sort of berserker.

Gregor had not expected me to charge at him. There was a round-eyed look on the man’s face which I read as, ‘Oh, fuck.’ I mean, I wasn’t even wearing a bra; I surely couldn’t have struck anyone with the idea that this came naturally to me. Yet there I was, coming at him with a knife.

And I hit something on his skin as I raced by, propelling myself away from his grasping arms as I struck out with my knife. I had no idea what I hit until I skated by and looked back, and then I noticed him grab his side and fall back on the ground, screaming.

I couldn’t smell that the guy tasted like meat, or bacon, like the guys could. He probably did, but all I felt was a gnawing sense of regret as I looked at him, looked at the knife in my hand that was dripping with blood, and then I hauled ass.

My grandmother was probably screaming in her grave as I ran with that knife. I found stairs, and I was booking it, tearing up the stairs and through doors, looking for dragons and diamonds.

Mostly diamonds.

I stopped at the top of the stairs, hearing the sound of dragons screeching, but then I stood still and calmed my breath, trying to feel out for the diamond.

I forced my feet forward and towards it. I wasn’t going fast anymore; honestly, I was breathing so hard my stomach hurt, I had a side-stitch, my face was bruised, I had a migraine, and my hip hurt for some reason; probably I got jostled when I was knocked out and carried down the stairs.

“Come on, you little dick. Where are you?” I asked the diamond under my breath like I was a babysitter who was long worn out from a game of hide-and-seek with a kid that took the game far too seriously.

I was back in Gregor’s office. My blood was on the floor where I’d been standing before; a big puddle of it. Probably from my nose. There was probably blood on my shirt, too, but I had not realized it. I spun around until I found a display case near the window, the diamond inside.

At first, I looked around for the keys, and then I found myself saying ‘Fuck it!’ and picked up a nearby statue, one that easily weighted seventy-five pounds, and brought it down on the glass.

And again. And again.

And then the wall came down.

The glass display case still didn’t break because Gregor might have been a mob boss, but he believed in keeping his artifacts from getting stolen easily.

There was now smoke, and broken brick, and I was on my ass.

I looked up and could see Caspian’s dragon gazing down at me, looking relieved. I was relieved that my knife hadn’t gone up my ass when the wall came down.

I pointed at the display case. “Get that fucking thing and let’s go,” I yelled at the dragon, stepping to the top of the rubble.

The dragon picked me up in its pointy talons in a way that I can only call ‘ham-fisted’. He wasn’t gentle or comfortable as he hoisted me out of the rubble that it had created and onto the lawn, which was covered with blood, many guns, but very few guards.

The gold dragon picked up the display case in its jaws and closed down, and I could see it explode as it shattered. He then carefully picked up the diamond and put it at my feet before he turned into Caspian. He looked completely ruffled, even worse than he’d looked after coming out of the crypt the day before.

“Where’s Murtagh?” I asked Caspian, putting the diamond into my pocket and trying to ignore how good it felt against me. Hell, honestly it even felt good in my pocket.

He waved his hand dismissively as he doubled over, wheezing. “He still has room in his stomach, he’s going for it.” He groaned and said, “So many of them were wearing gold… Shit, so much indigestion. My stomach feels torn up.”

“Gross,” I said decisively after watching him look like he’d just had too much turkey on Thanksgiving.

Murtagh suddenly was running towards us.

“Are you okay?” he asked as he approached. He looked over my body with his hands, which I didn’t like, because I was in a lot of pain.

“Oh, I feel fucking dandy. I have the diamond. Let’s go. I want to shower for the next ten years.”

He narrowed his eyes at me. “You went off alone. Again.”

“And you ate an army. I feel like we all had a day. Let’s go.” I was so far away from listening to bullshit.

“Zazie—” he continued, sounding like he was going to give me more. “You could have gotten?—”

A shot fired out, and my leg went backwards as the bullet sliced across my calf. It barely hit me, but somehow, I landed three feet away on my back.

Murtagh and Caspian rushed to my side before they looked towards the direction of the shot.

There were then a lot of shots in the air—an entire clip from a semi-automatic rifle to be exact. They hunched their large bodies over me as they got pummeled by bullet after bullet, each one coming less than a second from the next.

Then we heard an emptying click and Caspian, gritting his teeth, pulled his body away from mine and stood up.

He looked at Gregor, standing from the wreckage of his now-ruined office, bleeding from the hip.

He was going through some existential changes right now. I could see it on his face when I wasn’t distracted by the pain shooting from my leg to all over my body. Gregor was just a normal bratva-boss, and now he was facing a man who couldn’t be shot. One who was slowly morphing into a dragon.

Murtagh, although supposedly as full as Caspian, had just enough room for Gregor.

He pushed his snout into the room and pulled out a screaming man who was trying futilely to hit the dragon in the nose. Murtagh tilted back, adjusted his bite, and let him fall into his mouth, screaming before a deep, guttural sound of crunching bones silenced the screams.

Caspian, while rushing to my side, had pulled out his new cellphone from his front coat pocket and called Miles for a pickup, like this was quite the day at the beach and we were ready to go home now. He pulled off his belt and tied it around my bleeding leg.

“Let’s get you to Miles,” he told me, then picked me up in his arms. “You’ve had a rough day, poor girl.”

Rough day didn’t begin to cover it.