Jen stared back. Was she expected to be intimidated? She was! All of them were clearly waiting for a reaction.
So she broke her silence. “Who?”
She felt Zedi and Howard shift slightly at either side, Zedi pulling the knife away from Jen’s throat, though she still held it at the ready. Long Cang tipped his head the other way, the triumphant smile fading to wary assessment.
Jen went on, “I’m a member of the Baker Street Writers’ Group. Which you seem to know about, though none of you are writers, I take it, or I’d have seen you at meetings. I was taking the trash out before it was my turn to read. If you don’t mind, I’d like to go back now.”
Long Cang frowned, then turned his head. “Peke?”
“That’s her,” the driver whined. “I’m tellin’ ya the truth. Partnered with the foreign dude. Rafe would back me up, but he’s flat on his back. Charlie can tell ya—her footprint is right there on his ribs.”
“Ah, yes,” Long Cang said, and the smile was back. “Nikos Demitros. Even better—Keraunos will be very glad to see him.”
Jen’s stomach lurched. They knew Nikos, somehow. Even worse, these jerks intended to hostage her against Mikhail and Nikos.
Not if she could help it.
Peke, who’d kept snuffling, gave a long sniff, then said, “He’s coming. The raiju.”
All four heads turned, and Jen grabbed her moment. A kick to Zedi’s hand, sending the knife flying. Then she pivoted in a whirl. Howard might be built like a
rhino, but every human had certain weak points in common, one being the mastoid bone behind the ear. She snapped a perfect roundhouse to the back of his head, and he dropped like a rock.
Using her momentum, she brought a palm-heel strike to Zedi’s collarbone, and heard the snap. Then started to run—
And made it ten feet before the world changed forever.
Between one heartbeat and the next, a huge, serpentine shape coiled through the air, at least two hundred feet long, scales gleaming scarlet in the moonlight. She managed two steps before the gigantic thing whipped into a coil around her, its body almost as thick as she was tall, as an enormous dragon’s head curved down from above, eyes glowing like the pits of hell.
The coils tightened around her. Shivering with shock, she stilled, fighting for breath.
Then the thing vanished, and Long Cang was back, duster billowing in the wind. She swayed as she gasped for breath. She would have fallen if Long Cang hadn’t held her in an iron grip. He laughed—no, he gloated. Though he no longer had yard-long dragon teeth, that white-toothed, gloating smile was just as dragon-y. “Nice try,” he said. “I’m beginning to believe what Peke said about your skills. Who are you exactly?”
When she didn’t answer, he whirled her around, bending her right arm up agonizingly behind her. He was incredibly strong; she stopped fighting, knowing that a half-inch more pressure and her arm would break.
Dragon.
Next thing she knew, he’d zip-tied her wrists behind her. She gasped, her mind reeling as he gave a last, vicious tug, tightening the plastic ties unmercifully. What kind of a scumbag carries zip-ties around, she thought angrily—aching to get just one kick at that smirking face.
That smirking face that had been a dragon moments ago.
She was scarcely aware of the throbbing of her arms, or the new pain in her wrists: her mind kept tripping and returning to that impossible sight, like a skip in the long-play vinyl records of her youth. Red dragon. No, couldn’t be. Red dragon. But . . . Red dragon.
That was when a newcomer sauntered up, medium height and slender. He was dressed in black, with long platinum-blond hair blowing around a Greek face. At first glance he didn’t look like a threat, but Peke and Zedi stepped away, Zedi holding one hand up to her cracked collarbone as she muttered curses. Howard groaned, then lay still.
“Keraunos,” Long Cang said. “Is this woman one of those your gorgon is after?”
Long Cang forced Jen around to face Keraunos. Jen stared back as blue-white lightning flickered over his face, vanishing into that long, nearly-white hair. More lightning writhed slowly along his body, crackling over the metal belt buckle at his narrow waist.
She was already at maximum shock. I must have fallen on my head, she thought numbly. I must be in a coma. That’s the only thing that makes sense. Except are comas supposed to hurt?
“No,” Keraunos said. His accent was also heavy, but not Chinese. It was the same Greek accent that Nikos, Petra, and Cleo spoke in. “This one, I have never seen.”
“Well, you can have her as an appetizer as we wait for your target to show up with Mikhail—”
A voice shouted from the right, “We are here.”
Nikos appeared at the top of the broken-apart parking lot, Mikhail and Joey with him. “Let her go. You deal with me.”