The Dragon Keeper Read Online Free PDF Page A

for him to be here out of the goodness of his heart. Antonio didn’t do something for nothing.
    He swirled his cup again and sipped slowly, nodding. His hair curled down around his forehead, bouncing free from its slicked-back style.
    “I want to make sure the hatchling is healthy, Yancy. It’s the same thing I want for all the animals at this zoo.”
    “And microchips to match.” She snorted.
    He couldn’t dare deny it. As the first vet in the country to chip the animals—injecting little bits of plastic and metal called Sero-Adrenal Microchips, or SAMs, into every land-dwelling vertebrate over five pounds—he’d drawn international attention. The chips radioed in to a central server every ten minutes, sending readings on serotonin and adrenaline levels, heart rates, and GPS coordinates. While the rest of the world called them everything from “artificial keepers” to “brave new microchips,” management at the Zoo of America fell all over themselves congratulating one another as pioneers of the zoology field. SAMs allowed the animals to be managed with less human interaction, which meant lower overheads and reduced insurance rates. Antonio had become the overnight darling of management and had gotten his studies published in the most prestigious magazines. On paper, he was kind of hard not to hate.
    “We’ll only chip whichever dragon the zoo is keeping. The other two will go to less-advanced zoos.” He took another sip, ignoring her second snort. “And if it weren’t for the SAM data, we wouldn’t be able to know the next time Jata lays eggs. The sero-adrenal behavior is completely documented now.”
    “God forbid we just find the eggs like I did, without any help from I.T.”
    He leaned in and leveled her with a black-eyed stare that rivaled Jata’s for intensity. “We both know what happened when you found the eggs. Do you really want to go there?”
    She sucked in a breath, looking away, and, just like that, the anger was gone. Deserted her completely. The ghost of wet sand filled her head in its place, clumping in her ears and gritting between her teeth. It was frightening how easily he could send her back there.
    “The SAMs will help. That’s what I’ve been trying to say for years, and none of you want to hear it. You’re so scared for your jobs.”
    “I’m scared for the hatchlings.” It was easier to say it from under the sand he’d buried her in, from where everything was distorted and distant—the place that had haunted her since she’d discovered the eggs eight months ago.
    She stared sightlessly at the incubator. “Everyone wants a piece of them. They want their zoo space, or their marketing value, or their budget dollars. They want to bottle their fame and sell a miracle.”
    “Forget about that for a minute, okay? None of those people are here now. It’s just you and me and a bunch of dragons in here.”
    He poured her another cup of champagne.
    “Truce?” he asked.
    He tapped his cup to hers as if everything was fine again, as if the fight wasn’t just beginning. Maybe he didn’t understand yet, but to her it was absolutely clear. No more fuckups. From this day on, she had three more dragons to defend from Antonio, the zoo, and anyone else in the world who tried to claw his way between her and them.
    Still insulated against all that, the last egg sat motionless and intact in the incubator. Meg and Antonio settled in for the night and watched it, sipping to the bottom of the champagne around one in the morning. By two, they were both drowsing. At three, Meg felt a nasty crick in her neck and, rubbing the shooting pain out of her spine, scooted over between Antonio’s sprawled limbs and dropped her head onto his shoulder, hoping he wouldn’t wake up and notice. It was only a warm shoulder, after all, just a body waiting by another body, exhausted from the endless watching. A keeper could only watch for so long before something had to happen. Birth. Death. The mess in