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been on the floor. The bone fixers canted the lizard’s wings back, curving its body into an attack stance, as if it were sweeping down to snatch its prey from Pendle’s rough black hills.
    Since I’d found the dead dragon in a rotting, mangled heap, I’d secretly approved of its after-death ferocity.
    I’d taken great fucking pride in that dragon.
    “Let’s forget about the egg for a second. Where’s the red?” I asked, pointing upward.
    “The red?” He blanched, literally lost all trace of color in his face, and scurried a step to the side, hovering near a large unsidhe ceremonial urn used to capture the blood of their kills. The museum’d marked it as a decorative example of early unsidhe worship. It was pretty much a giant punch bowl used for holiday parties, but I hadn’t wanted to burst their bubble at the time.
    Now was a different story. It wasn’t just a bubble I wanted to burst.
    “Yeah, the red I brought in when this piece of shit kiddie show first was scrambling for something to hang its hat on. That red. Where is it?”
    “That’s what I was trying to tell you, Mr. Gracen,” he sputtered, wetting my face. “With the arrival of the Dawn Court, display dragon artifacts are offensive—”
    I didn’t need to hear any more. Everything unfolded for me in my mind, and the demise of my contract and the skeletal glory of my red came down to one damned pointy-eared piece of shit who hounded my shadows.
    To the humans, dragons were a source of wonder and nightmares. To the sidhe, the reptilian predators were as sacred as beetles to the dead talkers. I didn’t know what the unsidhe thought about the overgrown legged snakes infesting our skies and coast, but from everything I’d seen, they were pretty much in line with the sidhe. All things scaly and frightening were treasured and precious, even as they crunched through your skull to suck out your eyeballs.
    “ Ryder ,” I ground out while the squirrelly human doing the two-step in front of me. “You’re telling me the damned Lord of the Pandas and Light has come in here and persuaded you wankers to stop displaying dragon bits? Is that what you’re telling me?”
    “The museum can’t… that is, there’s been a policy change—” The man squeaked when I grabbed the front of his shirt and yanked him up to the tips of his toes. “ Mr. Gracen !”
    “Let me make this short and sweet for you, bucky.” I peeled my lips back from my canines, snarling into his face as it shook a few centimeters away from mine. There was a little primal tickle in most humans. When faced with fangs, they quivered. Luckily, my sidhe blood came with fangs, and while I’d spent years practicing to speak and smile without showing them, there were times when I had to remind someone they were far lower on the food chain than they remembered. “You’re going to go reach into those deep pockets the museum has and pay me for that damned egg. I don’t care what back-asswards agreement you got into with Ryder, but a deal’s a deal. You go get me my money, or your carcass is going to be taking the place of that dragon you took down. Comprende ?”
    And with that, I got my money.
     
     
    I FUCKING hurt.
    Profanity was necessary with the kind of pain screaming up my side. No excuses for it, but it felt really damned good to be peeling a searing curse off the back of my teeth as the pain dug in. With the richness and fluidity of human languages, there was something gut-clenching satisfying about the base coarseness of Singlish.
    And of course, the singular taste of the word fuck on my tongue.
    It was cool in my warehouse. The windows were darkened to mute the drooping sun hanging near the horizon, its lingering crawl to douse itself forestalled by the long summer day. Newt periodically lounged on the love seat, his straggly tail curled up over his tiny head, eyes shut against life in general and the rushing shush of the ocean coming through the open sliding glass doors leading