Page 2 of Connor and the Dragons

I hung up, settled the last two tabs, closed out the register, and locked the bar in record time.

The streets were mostly empty at two in the morning, and I took them faster than I should have, both phones face up on the passenger seat, my heart going too hard for a man sitting still. Had something happened to Sky? There had to be a logical explanation. Sure, he hadn’t come home last night, but that wasn’t unusual. He stayed over with his nightclub friends half the time, and he couldn’t have called to say so even if he’d wanted to, because his phone had spent the whole evening in my pocket.

That was the explanation. He was asleep on somebody’s couch, and tomorrow I’d get the whole story.

I held on to that thought the entire drive.

Club Vortex took up the basement of an old strip mall near downtown that had recently been renovated, and at a quarter past two its sign was still on, purple and buzzing. Wade met me at the door before I finished knocking. He was in his early thirties, wiry and energetic, even after a long night at the club. He started managing me before I was all the way inside.

“Look, I know how this sounds,” he said, walking backward across the empty dance floor, “but dancers flake. It happens. We’ve been open two days. He found an afterparty, he’ll roll in tomorrow hungover, I’ll dock him, we’ll all move on.”

“Sky isn’t like that, and you know it. You’ve known him for years. When has he ever just ghosted?”

Wade stopped walking and tugged at his own hair, and that answered the question before he did. “I have enough problems tonight without the family showing up talking like it’s an episode of Dateline.”

“I’m not talking like anything.” I kept my voice level and friendly. “But he’s my brother, and I need to figure out where he could be.”

Wade held my eyes for a second, then blew out a breath and quit selling. He waved a hand toward the back hallway. “Okay, I guess we’ll start where he was last seen. He was in the restroom. The back one. The dancers have been using it as a dressing room while the electrician finishes the locker room. He ducked in to change after his set yesterday. No one saw him come out, but that doesn’t mean anything, the club is crowded.”

The back men’s room had a costume rack shoved against one wall, all sequins and mesh with one enormous feather boa hung at the end, and a long counter with a bank of sinks. It smelled like hairspray over bleach. I stood in the doorway and swept it the slow way I’d sweep the bar at close, not hunting for anything, letting the room tell me what was out of place.

I caught a glimpse of someone’s keys on the floor, under the sinks. Sky’s keys, I realized, stomach dropping as I spotted that stupid rainbow sparkle boba keychain he’d won from a claw machine. I tried to reach for it, but it was too far back. I left them, needing a moment to work up the courage to kneel on the sticky floor of a nightclub bathroom.

I turned, frowning as my eyes landed on a strange mirror on the wall beside the sinks. It was, no way around it, hideous. It was huge, heavy, and gilt-framed. Someone had recently painted it with pink glitter, but that didn’t hide the fact that it most definitely did not fit. I stepped closer, frowning at the craftsmanship of the mirror. Everything in the bathroom was gaudy, but in a cheap, showy way. This mirror was hand-crafted and older than any permanent fixture in a strip mall from the early 1970s had any right to be.

“Stop touching the damn mirror. It’s original to the building,” Wade said.

“Why would a mirror like this be original to a strip mall basement?” I ran my thumb along a carved leaf gone smooth from a hundred years of other thumbs. “This frame has a century on your building. Maybe two.”

“Fuck if I know. It was bolted up there before the renovation started, when this room was just storage. The shop above us used to sell furniture or some shit.”

“Why would a furniture shop bolt a mirror to the wall?”

“I’m not saying it makes sense, but the contractors quoted me eight hundred bucks to pull it down and then couldn’t do it. So as far as I’m concerned it’s original to the damn building.” He scrubbed at his hair again and glared at the smeared glass instead of me. “I’ll get some Windex. You’re smudging it.”

He stomped off down the hallway, muttering about dancers and inspectors, and left me alone with it.

I ran a hand down the frame, tugging a little on it. It was solid, and well-attached, and it still made zero sense, though I wasn’t sure what that had to do with Sky’s disappearance. I pushed on the glass, then looked around the room again. I took inventory: a costume rack, a counter, a ceiling vent screwed shut, a frosted window you couldn’t fit a toddler through. Had he left with someone? My eyes drifted back to Sky’s keys under the sink.

The glass went soft beneath my fingers and gave, and my hand sank in to the wrist. My stomach dropped as I looked back at the mirror and saw my hand inside it. Sky’s keys were on the floor three feet from a mirror that ate hands.

I should have yelled for help. Instead, some calm, stupid part of me pushed my hand deeper. I was elbow-deep in a solid mirror and the glass had gone soft around me. It gave when I moved and closed back in behind the movement, cool and dry, like Play-Doh without the stick. I flexed my fingers. Air moved over them, on the far side of a bathroom wall that should have backed onto thirty feet of dirt.

Sky was on the other side of this mirror, alone somewhere and scared. So I stepped forward instead.

CHAPTER 2: OALLIAN

My mission wasn’t going well. Shifting into my dragon form always carried a risk. The dragon spirit inside me was fighting for control, and he had a better chance of winning the fight when we were dragon-shaped. If he got out, he’d have us abandoning our mission and flying off to double check our hoard, or something even more unsavory.

But I had a job to do, and that job required the dragon’s body. So I was holding him off. Valiantly, I would say.

Of course, there was nobody in the skies above Clovermere but me to notice my bravery. Unless you counted the birds, who tended to go skittering off in some other direction the moment they noticed me.

The boredom didn’t help. If I wanted to be there the instant someone popped through from Sky’s world, I needed to maintain the same routine circular flight path, again and again, for days on end. My eyes darted to a cluster of sheep chewing on grass in a pasture, and I was almost overwhelmed by an intense urge to crunch on one of them. I kept my inner voice firm as I ordered Vyranthos to stand down.

I was on a mission, and for once, I was in charge. Vyranthos was hungry, always hungry, but there was a nice cooked stew waiting for us back at the palace. No need to eat a raw sheep.

The sheep did look crunchy.