Page 67 of Connor and the Dragons

“He is shy. It is in his submissive nature.”

“May I speak with him?”

“You may do more than that,” I said, “if he likes you.”

I felt bile rise in my throat, and swallowed it down, telling myself that it was exactly the way a wealthy young wizard would offer his consort to a man he respected. It was the correct thing to say.

My hand tightened in Oallian’s hair as I fought the urge to drag both of them outside and away from here. We were so close to the mirror. I just needed to discover where it was, then we’d formulate a plan. That was all.

I glanced towards Kess, who lifted his eyes and gave Harrowgate a small smile. “Perhaps,” he said, in a voice quiet enough that Harrowgate leaned in. “If I was given more time to feel comfortable.”

“Of course, my dear boy,” Harrowgate said, looking triumphant.

Under my hand, Oallian felt hotter than usual, and I gave his hair a subtle tug, hoping it would remind him of our mission.

I shifted in my seat, trying to look uncomfortable. “I’m afraid the liquor has gone right through me. Would it be impolite to ask for the water closet?”

Harrowgate’s eyes lit up, darting back to Kessrin and Oallian. “Of course. It’s just down the hall.” He gestured to a side door, then called for a maid to lead me out. “I’ll take good care of your boys while you are away.”

My stomach churned as I locked the door of the water closet, hoping like hell the maid had wandered off to attend to other duties. I’d left them alone in that room with a man who quite clearly wanted them. I paced, trying to remind myself that he surely didn’t mean them any harm. He just wanted to fuck my dragons. My dragons.

It was a good thing Harrowgate didn’t have any idea what they were. I peeked out into the hall and found the maid gone, and quickly slipped down, checking doors as I went. In houses like this one, the kitchens and laundry were often in the basement, and there were usually multiple staircases down to the cellars, so that servants could move through the house as needed, carrying food or laundry.

It didn’t take long to find the service stair, conveniently located at the intersection of two corridors.

“Thank you, architectural history classes!” I whispered, as I took it down two at a time. The first door was a linen room. The second door was a pantry the size of my apartment. The third door had a lock on it and the fourth did not, and opened to another stair, which took me down into cold air that smelled like stone and dust.

The cellar ran the length of the house. There were crates, and there was furniture under sheets, and there were shelves of things nobody had touched in a century. I sprinted through it, checking under dust blankets and lifting the lids off of chests, until I found the exact thing he’d described. A long row of mirrors leaning against a wall, a bit haphazardly, as if occasionally someone did think to fulfill his ancestor’s promise of testing portals.

Fuck. Fuck, what had the mirror in the club looked like? It had been pink. But no, the pink had been the club’s doing; I remembered noticing the gold filigree beneath the paint, there had been a specific leafing pattern… I ran my hand over mirror after mirror, rapidly losing hope.

But this was just a recon mission. If we knew where the mirrors were, we could figure out which mirror was our mirror later, during the burglary that I had no idea how to execute, because I was a fucking academic, a PhD student, and not a criminal or a spy.

As I rushed back toward the stairs, telling myself the mission was accomplished, I spotted it, out of the corner of my eye. That was it, down to the slight wear around the edges and the overly ornate frame, gold leaf with no pink in sight. It was the only one in the room that was quite this ugly or quite this obvious. And it weighed a fucking metric shit ton.

I looked around. Harrowgate said they brought them out to test the marked portal locations. There must be something they use. A dumbwaiter? A dolly?

I was taking too damn long. I’d left Kess and Oallian alone with that wretched man for over fifteen minutes, and I was supposed to be in the bathroom. I’d have to fake some kind of gastrointestinal distress or even Harrowgate wouldn’t believe me at this point.

I was turning back towards the stairs when the world exploded. It started with a roar that shook the whole building, otherworldly and wild and far too loud. Vyranthos was awake.

“Fuck,” I whispered, then I turned back towards the assorted items around me and I had it. “Hoard,” I shouted, hoping his dragon ears could hear me, and I began to gather things, moving them, drawing Vyranthos in with the clink of a crystal chandelier and the thunk of a chest of jewels, as I piled a hoard around the mirror.

It would be okay. I could reach him, I just needed to get a hand on the face of a fire-breathing rage machine. No problem at all.

Yeah, I had no idea what the fuck I was doing.

Fire burst from somewhere above, a flash of it bright enough to spill down the stairwell followed by screaming and the thunder of feet on the wood planks above me. People were shouting and the word I kept hearing was dragons.

Dragons plural. So they were both transformed? What the fuck had Harrowgate done.

A red claw punched through the floor above my head. The planks blew apart and the splinters showered down over my head and shoulders and I did not move, because the mirror stopped existing, and the mission stopped existing, and Delsy’s search party and Sky’s ride home and every reason I had for being in that house drained out of me between one breath and the next.

A bolt of light shot from somewhere, and Vyranthos reared back, screaming.

I ran for the stairs, shouting their names.

A voice in the back of my head told me there was nothing I could do. All the kung fu training in the world wasn’t going to do shit when the battle was between two-ton fire-breathing monsters and wizards who could shoot bolts of magic from their hands.