Eileen Wilks - Night Season

"So I don't shop much. So sue me."

Lily patted her arm. "You will today."

That's what she was afraid of. Whatever had possessed her to ask Lily to help her pick out some new things?

She glanced down at the woman beside her and sighed.

Envy, that's what. Lily always looked right . But she was tiny and… well, not cute. You wouldn't call a bullet cute, no matter how small and shapely it was. Bullets were also notoriously hard to stop, and that was like Lily, too.

And now, because Cynna had opened her big mouth, all that deadly determination was focused on her wardrobe. She'd actually used that word when she talked to Lily about helping her shop. A new wardrobe, she'd said. For work.

Clearly she'd been insane. She didn't have a damned wardrobe. She had clothes.

They left through the side door. Cold sucked at Cynna's face and made inroads along her front, so she zipped her jacket. It was an unusually cold whiter for D.C., but she wasn't about to say so. It was too much fun needling Lily, who'd lived in San Diego all her life.

Lily grumbled under her breath and headed for her car—a plain white Ford exactly like Cynna's, only cleaner. The FBI must buy the things in droves.

The day was as sunny and still as it was cold, the sun a bright ball in a sky so blue and clear you'd think smog had never been invented. So when the shadow passed overhead, Cynna looked up.

The sinuous shape was growing familiar, though she still felt a chill of awe at the sight. Against the brightness of the sky it looked dark, but she'd seen the photographs. Who hadn't? Up close the scales would be red and shiny, the color of rubies or fresh blood.

"Is vanity a dragon thing?" she asked, one hand on the car door, her head tipped back to watch legend crawl lazily across the sky.

Lily opened her door. "What do you mean?"

"All the photos. Mika doesn't talk much, but he sure likes getting his picture taken." Technically, Mika didn't talk at all. Mindspeak wasn't the same as talking. But the ruby dragon seldom bothered to speak in any manner to the humans around him, much to the frustration of reporters. "Is Sam vain like that?"

Lily snorted. "Haven't seen a bunch of photos of him on the Internet, have you? I guess if you already know you're the biggest, baddest dude on two wings, you don't need a picture to prove it. Mika's young," she added as she got in.

Young was a relative term, but since Mika had probably been born before a passel of Pilgrims washed up on a big rock near Plymouth, Cynna thought Lily was stretching the limits of the word.

But dragons stretched a lot of limits.

For years people had believed they were myth, fairy tale, no more real than Odysseus' Cyclops. Even when twenty-two of them ended their long exile last November to return to Earth, it had been easy for people to dismiss the sighting since they'd vanished right away.

Probably some publicity stunt, right? It happened in California, and much of the country considered that explanation enough for any oddity. Since the government sat on its information—which included radar, both still and video images, and the reports of two of its own agents, namely Cynna and Lily—there had been no solid proof. Talk show hosts had had a field day with dragon-sighting jokes.

When they showed up again, no one was laughing. This time, the world needed them to be real.

The realms had done one hell of a bump-and-grind, knocking streams of magic loose from nodes all over the world. Loose magic has a randomizing effect on technology, especially anything run by computers… which was just about everything. It turned out that, in addition to being strong, beautiful, and deadly, dragons made dandy sponges. They soaked up all the excess magic in their vicinity.

Two days before Christmas, the black dragon had landed on the White House lawn. Sam—whose other call-name was Sun Mzao—had negotiated for the rest, assisted by Lily's grandmother. Much to Cynna's frustration, no one would tell her why Madam Yu had been involved. She had some guesses, though they were so preposterous… but so was Lily's grandmother.

Sooner or later, Cynna promised herself, she'd worm the truth out of Lily.

So far the Dragon Treaties were working. Computers operated normally in the nation's capital, on Wall Street, and in and around the twelve U.S cities and eight throughout the world that had a dragon. True, dragons ate a lot, and the animal protection people were not happy about their preferred presentation style. They insisted on catching the evening's cow or pigs themselves. But they'd stuck to their agreement to leave people and pets off the menu.

Problem was, there weren't enough dragons.

Cynna watched Washington's dragon bank and head down. Looked like he was heading for Rock Creek Park. He'd claimed the amphitheater there while governmental types argued over where to build his permanent lair.

"You coming?" Lily said.

Cynna slid in the car and buckled up. "Do you ever wish we'd gotten Sam instead of Mika?"

Lily shrugged and started the car. "Sam wanted to be near Grandmother. Or else Grandmother wanted him near. Or maybe he just wanted to be warm. It's never warm here."

"Bitch, bitch, bitch. If you're still around this summer, you'll be complaining about the heat. It's not a dry heat like you're used to."

"San Diego isn't as hot as you'd think. Hotter in the mountains, of course. As you move away from the coast, you don't get the cooling effects of the ocean."

"You miss it."

Lily sighed and pulled out. "More than I expected. This was supposed to be temporary."

Lily had originally been posted to Washington, DC, for two purposes: to assist the Secret Service in an investigation and to take an abbreviated version of the standard FBI training at Quantico. Like Cynna, she belonged to a special unit in the FBI's Magical Crimes Division, one that until recently very few knew existed. Lily had been recruited last November. She was a touch sensitive, able to feel magic tactilely yet impervious to its effects, but her background as a homicide cop was as valuable to the Unit as her Gift. A lot of the Unit's agents lacked that kind of law enforcement training and experience.

Lily had finished up the assist-the-Secret Service part of her assignment, but what with demon assassins and the Turning and all, her training still wasn't complete.

"There is an upside, I guess," Lily said. "Being parked at Headquarters puts twenty-six hundred miles between me and my mother."

"Yeah, but planes are flying again, cell phones are working—"

"Don't remind me."

Cynna smiled because she was supposed to, but she wondered… if her mother had lived, would she be as mom-averse as Lily? Some of her other friends were like that, too. A few seemed to be close to their mothers, but a lot of them had issues.

Not that she didn't have issues. You didn't have to have a living mother to find knots tangled all over your heart tagged "from Mom." Which was a damn good reason for never… not going there, she reminded herself. "How's Rule?"

"He's good. The mantles have settled into peaceful coexistence… which you'd know if you hadn't been avoiding us. I—oh, God."

"What? What is it?"

"I sound like my mother."

Cynna laughed. For the first time in hours—days—well, a long time, she felt like laughing. Maybe she'd been isolating.

You think ? whispered a snide inner voice.

"I'd better get over that," Lily added casually. "It looks like I'm going to be a mother myself soon. Of sorts."

Cynna jolted so hard she nearly gave herself whiplash. "You—you're going to have a baby?"

"No. Oh, no, though—well, I can't say what I'm thinking without making a forbidden allusion. I was talking about Toby."