The Dragon Conspiracy Read Online Free PDF Page A

their human features, enviable. The wings and bird-like lower halves were all feathers, scaled feet, and talons, sharp, sharp talons—all immortalized in a type of stone I couldn’t identify.
    “Exquisite, aren’t they?” purred an all-too-familiar voice from behind me.
    I was proud to say that I didn’t even turn around, but simply spooned a little wasabi on my plate. “The boobs or the harpies?”
    “Yes.” His voice was a low seductive purr, like a silvery cat rubbing around your bare legs.
    Rake Danescu was a goblin, which made him just about the sexiest creature presently in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and that included any and all statues or paintings of gods on the premises.
    That was saying a lot, but Rake was a lot of hot.
    He also knew it—and he wasn’t about to let me forget that he knew I knew it.
    Though it wasn’t like there was any chance of me forgetting the first time we’d met. In addition to owning a few art galleries—and several Manhattan buildings—Rake Danescu owned and ran Bacchanalia, an upscale and very exclusive club that billed itself as the “complete adult entertainment experience.”
    Yep, it was a sex club. One that catered to men
and
women—people who didn’t go to simply watch; they went to participate. During my first night on the job at SPI, I’d been part of a bodyguard detail for a leprechaun prince’s bachelor party. Fiasco was a nice way to describe how that evening had gone, and one comedy of errors after another had landed us at Rake’s club—and landed me in Rake’s arms in a backstage dressing room. He’d wanted me to work for him—and no, not as an adult entertainer—as a seer. Apparently goblin dark mage owners of sex clubs found themselves in situations where they needed the services of a seer. Go figure. I’d managed to inhale a lungful of a supernatural recreational drug in Bacchanalia’s ladies’ room, and as a result, parts of that evening were kinda fuzzy, but the part with Rake in that dressing room had remained crystal clear.
    Real goblins were everything you’d been told that they weren’t—tall, sleek, and sexy, with enough charisma to make you not only drink the Kool-Aid, but happily stand in line for it.
    Tonight, to every human at the Met, Rake looked human.
    But he wasn’t. No human male looked that perfect.
    My seer vision showed me what he really was.
    Lean and predatory looking, like a sleek, silvery cat. Combine that with darkly seductive and light-sensitive eyes and you had a race that took sunglasses to the heights of high fashion. Goblins were gorgeous all by their lonesome, but they took their wardrobes and accessories just as seriously as their tangled court politics. Goblin politics was a full-contact and often fatal sport chock-full of seduction, deception, and betrayal.
    Goblin hair was dark and often worn long. Their skin was pale gray with a silvery sheen, with human-sized ears that ended in a nibbleable point.
    And they sported a pair of fangs that weren’t for decorative use only.
    “Here to do a little window shopping?” I asked. Or casing the joint? I thought.
    Rake Danescu held a glass of champagne as he looked me up one side and down the other, taking his sweet time and seemingly enjoying the view. “There are many objects of interest and desire here tonight.”
    I didn’t take Rake seriously—at least I didn’t take him saying I was desirable seriously. Goblins were like politicians; they always wanted something, and if they wanted that something from you, they were relentless in getting it. On my first night at SPI he’d tried to hire me as his own personal seer—while his hands smoothly conducted their own job interview all over my body. We’d run into each other a few times since then, though it was more like he kept turning up in places where I was. I wouldn’t call it stalking, at least not yet, but it sure as heck wasn’t a coincidence. Goblins like Rake Danescu didn’t have coincidences;