Mad Lizard Mambo Read Online Free PDF

Dempsey’d shown up on my doorstop with a colon full of shadows and death. The director shuffled back as if I were diseased, and his eyes flicked about, probably looking for a fat security guard to come save him. There were none in sight. He was stuck with me, pinned to the ground by his own fear and my rage.
    “The money,” I growled. “Now.”
    Burbling nonsensically, he crept back another step. I followed, dropping my hand but remaining close enough to keep him on edge and uncomfortable.
    There really wasn’t a whole lot I could do to make him cough up the cash he owed me. Even with the SoCalGov contract in place, the museum could default, and besides lodging a complaint, I was pretty much twisting in the wind. Even if the place got banned from further contracts by the Post and all other SoCalGov agencies, freelancers would snatch up the chance to secure anything the museum asked for. We all lived and died by the wants of the rich. My getting the director and his damned museum stricken from the rolls would only drive them to another market.
    And I did my best damned work for that fricking museum. I’d brought in their largest dragon skeleton, scavenged from a death match one Asian red had with a particularly vicious rival. Hell, I’d even gotten them a nightmare’s skull, a bitch and a half to scrounge—I glanced up, finally noticing the gaping empty space above me.
    “What the hell?” I choked out. “Where…?”
    San Diego’s Natural History Museum was world famous for its collections. Having retained much of its pre-Merge displays, the museum was located in the heart of upper-level downtown, housed in an enormous metal and concrete architectural vomit of a building most people liked to call the Ink Blot. With their move from the now sidhe-owned Balboa Park area, the museum gained space and foot traffic, catering to locals and tourists alike.
    And if there was one thing San Diego was known for, it was its dragons. So San Diego’s natural history museum went full throttle on anything draconian.
    Pendle was as much a part of San Diego as its lower level warrens and the roaming pandas near the old 163 highway. The former military installation was now home to countless scores of dragon types, and the museum made a lot of its money from displays of entire dragon skeletons, scales, wings, and sometimes if they were lucky, a perfectly formed but inert egg.
    I’d brought in its largest dragon skeleton, and it’d hung along the long hall’s ceiling, suspended on nearly invisible wires, caught in midswoop in all its glorious fifty feet of ivory bone and fang.
    A dragon that was now missing.
    In fact, most of their dragon-related exhibit was stripped clean, leaving only the plaster constructs done by local artists. There were a few artifacts, some castings, and a silly footprint display of different draconian types so visitors could compare their shoe size with something that would slurp them up like an udon noodle if they actually met face-to-face.
    Sure, there were other dragons—plush, grinning things set along a shop’s glass walls to coax parents into coughing up a week’s wages to keep a smile on Junior’s face. The coffee kiosks on either side of the hall were squat round interpretations of ground slithers, boasting neon spines along their roofs and sides bright enough to blind anyone who stared at them too long. There were other dribbles and drabs, illusions of the massive and teeny beasts who lived and died in the wastelands above Carlsbad, but not a single damned piece of an actual dragon.
    Delicate, fragile wings made of fabric and boning framed the ceiling nearly four stories above us. The museum’s exhibits wrapped around the space, tiers of floors branching off lifts and stairs, leaving the massive hall in the middle practically empty. My dragon—the museum’s massive red—once dominated the space, its serpentine spine set into waves high enough for a child to have walked under it when it’d