Robert Asprin - Dragons Luck

But Griffen hadn’t once thought to connect her to Slim, and now wasn’t sure why.

He looked around the damage of the room. The broken furniture. The wounded guests. Lizzy’s own trashed and bloodied body. The loup garou she had dragged in.

“What do you mean? Of course she’s a murderer!”

“Probably…” Griffen said distractedly.

He was still running on adrenaline, but now he wasn’t consumed with his fear and anger. He was thinking clearly, thinking fast. The loup garou…

“A murderer probably. But what makes you think she’s your murderer?” Griffen asked.

“Look, McCandles, if you are jerking me around again…” Griffen tuned out the detective for a moment. A body. The search parties. Lizzy.

A wooden stake.

“Tammy,” Griffen said quietly.

“What?” Val asked, still standing over Lizzy, still on guard.

“Tammy isn’t here… She was hunting with the garou. Why wouldn’t she be with them?”

“Maybe Lizzy killed…” Val said.

The doors to the ballroom burst open for the second time tonight. Déjà vu washed over most of those sensitive to such things. This time the shifters dragged in a woman, instead of the other way around. The lesser shifters, dragging an enraged Tammy.

“Ifone more person pops out of nowhere, I’m testing whether this gun does any good or not,” Harrison growled.

Griffen was too busy watching the young shifters drag a struggling Tammy into the ballroom. Someone toward the back of the crowd had the intelligence to shut the doors behind them, but Griffen was too focused to quite notice who. Tammy’s otherwise-pretty face was twisted ugly with fury, tears of frustration on her cheeks. She cursed with shocking skill as her captors pulled her toward Griffen.

Her eyes locked onto Griffen’s, and she spat at him. It didn’t have the distance to score.

“Tell your scum-sucking lackeys to let me go!” she shrieked.

Griffen ignored her, not bothering even to argue the term “lackeys.” He turned back to Harrison, whose eyes were a little too wide, and jaw a little too clenched.

“You were saying, Detective. Why do you think Lizzy here killed Slim?”

“Are you kidding me, McCandles? I don’t know who this is or what is going on now, but I just watched ‘Lizzy’ there stake a guy!”

Griffen’s heart sank and twisted, stomach turning. In the middle of action, he had been so concerned for his sister that he had tucked Lowell’s death into the back of his mind. Now it all hit him in a rush, Lizzy slamming a piece of table into his chest. Griffen turned to look for the body, bracing himself and holding as firmly as possible to his outwardly calm face.

And lost it completely when he heard Lowell’s voice from the crowd.

“But Slim was not a vampire,” Lowell said.

Griffen, and most of the crowd, stared in shock at Lowell. He was lounging at one of the still-standing tables, sipping a drink, and with a good six inches of wood protruding from his chest. The other vampires sat with him, looking relaxed. There was a certain gleam in their eyes, a lazy smile on their faces that one gets after a very good meal or a good time in bed.

Once he had the room’s attention, Lowell put down his drink and drew the impromptu stake out of his heart. He winced slightly, and laid it on the table. Oddly, no blood flowed from the wound, but the stake was covered in it.

“You people and your analogies and superstitions,” he said, taking another sip from his drink. “Sure the shock of impact can break a deep feed, but shove a half a foot of anything into me anywhere, and you’ll get the same reaction. It would take a hell of a lot more than a bit of wood to do in a vampire, especially after a meal like that!”

Griffen couldn’t help but smile, relief filling him. All this time he had heard that a vampire fed off emotion and energy, and hadn’t once bothered to think of what benefits they got in return. He looked back at Harrison, and the smile faded as quickly as it had formed.

Harrison had his piece back in his hand, though pointing safely at the floor. His left eye had begun to tick.

“Vampire?” Harrison asked softly.

“Yes,” Griffen said, as plainly and as gently as possible. Like a man talking to someone standing on a window ledge and wearing very slippery shoes.

“He is a…”

“Yes.”

“And are you?”

“No.”

“Then what…”

Harrison’s eyes clouded over for a moment. Griffen suspected he was thinking back to one of their early conversations. And, of course, Griffen had shifted at least once in the fight, maybe more. He was always a little hazy on just how much he shifted, and not once had he had a convenient mirror to tell him exactly what he looked like.

Hopefully nothing like Lizzy.

“Dragon.”

Harrison shook his head hard, yanking himself back to the present. His eyes were back in focus. Cop eyes, cold, acute, guarded. The left one still twitched a bit around the edges, but he was picking up steam again.

“Right, dragon. Got it,” Harrison said. “I can deal with that… later. What I can’t quite get my head around is that you are trying to tell me that, despite having a violent lunatic knocked out practically at my feet, I’m looking for another psycho running around my goddamned town, shoving stakes into people’s hearts!?”

Griffen nodded, the adrenaline rush fading fully now. A wave of sadness filled him, followed by an almost crushing press of exhaustion. Griffen turned toward Tammy, who had gone still in the shifters’ grips.

“One who didn’t leave a murder weapon. Or throw it in the river, because it wasn’t a weapon exactly. She did it by hand… or at least limb,” Griffen said.

“And it took the big bad dragon this long to figure it out,” Tammy said.

The arrogance and smugness in her voice was just as ugly as her fury. Griffen took a step forward, and took a tight hold on himself. It wasn’t his way to hit a woman, much less one someone else was holding. But the temptation was there.

“Why, Tammy? What did Slim ever do to you?” Griffen said.

“Nothing, nothing at all. It wasn’t about him. It was about you! Making you hurt because you hurt me, and making you look like the shit you are in front of these idiots who worship you because you are a dragon.”

Tink stepped out of the crowd and up to Tammy. The changeling spokesman had been gentle, coolheaded, serene throughout the entire conclave. One of the biggest helps, in many small ways, to Griffen in his role of moderator.

When he struck the back of his hand across Tammy’s jaw, it was a cold, calculated gesture. The sound of it reverberated through the ballroom, and when he spoke, his anger was as cold and harsh as a blizzard.

“You little hypocrite! If he wasn’t a dragon, you wouldn’t have given him a second glance. You killed a man who had given you no cause, out of spite?” Tink said.

“Tail or the other shifters would have been too hard, they might have healed. Slim was… vulnerable. Human. And one of the scale bag’s biggest supporters,” Tammy said.

She shrugged as best she could with two other men holding her arms.

“It sounded like a good idea at the time,” she added. She looked at Harrison, then at Griffen. “The human police will never prove anything. And Griffen won’t do anything, not to me. Will you?”

She pursed her lips and took a half step, hips cocked and small breasts pressed against her shirt. Her voice dropped several registers, still sounding girlish but also husky and wanton. The whole act disgusted Griffen.

“I would never have imagined you so cruel, so manipulative, Tammy. Your bubbly, enthusiastic self is one hell of an act,” Griffen said.