Gamble on a Gargoyle (Possessive Monsters #11)

Chapter 1

Meera

The thing about watching your fiancé murder someone is that it really puts the relationship into perspective.

The original plan had been to get in, install a few mini cameras, and get out.

I wanted to find proof that Karim had been cheating on me with his secretary, because things just hadn’t been adding up lately.

But it hadn’t gone as planned, and I’d been hiding in the broom closet of his office for the past half an hour, praying that he wouldn’t find me.

Karim was supposed to be out with his secretary right now.

And while I was pretty sure Michelle was indeed at the café spot down the street, I found Karim very much not out and made a split-second choice between confrontation and concealment.

I’d chosen the closet. It seemed reasonable at the time.

It was much less reasonable now I was standing stock-still between a stick vacuum and a tower of cardboard boxes, listening to the very specific sounds of a man I’d agreed to marry doing something I couldn’t unhear.

The worst part was that I wasn’t even surprised. Horrified, yes. Nauseous, absolutely. But surprised? Not really. And that told me everything I needed to know about the last three years of my life.

Currently, Karim was on a call with someone. I couldn’t actually hear what he was saying though, because of the blood rushing in my ears. I did hear him say something about meeting up at the other person’s place, pronto. And that was my cue to get the hell out of Dodge.

I waited until I heard the front door close, then counted to a hundred before I moved.

Not wanting to see anything I’d need eye bleach to unsee, I kept my eyes deliberately up and forward.

I was still hyperaware that there was a dead body on the floor just feet from me, and it was everything I could do not to hyperventilate, especially when I saw the pair of brand-spanking-new sneakers on his feet.

At least there was no blood. Blunt force trauma followed by strangling had ensured that. Karim had always been a clean freak. So this tracked.

Keep it together, Meera.

I totally wasn’t keeping it together. Grabbing my gym bag from beside the desk where I’d dropped it when I’d first come in—it was a miracle Karim hadn’t noticed it the whole time he was here—I hurried out of the suffocating office.

The hallway was empty, and so was the stairwell.

The hollow stomp of my feet as I flew down four flights of stairs sounded like thunder chasing me down.

How the fuck did I get myself into this? And why me?

I started out eager to prove that Karim was an asshole, and I did, just not the way I’d thought he was.

Either way, I was leaving him for good. The relationship had been dying in slow motion for the better part of a year anyway; the body in the office had just given it a hard and very immediate deadline. No pun intended.

And I couldn’t even go to the police because Karim’s best friend was on the force.

Not all cops were crooked, but Owen was one of them.

I bet he was in on it too. And even if he wasn’t, he hated my guts and would probably do everything in his power to make me the guilty party.

I was also certain that Karim would have no trouble blaming me for everything.

I was relying on autopilot so much that I hadn’t realized I’d called a ride until I was stepping into a vehicle and on my way back home.

I hadn’t been happy when Karim had insisted we keep our respective apartments until we were officially married.

But now I was glad I had my own space, even though the lock wouldn’t be much protection if he really wanted to get to me. Still.

The ride up to the sixteenth floor felt like an eternity, and my gym bag grew heavier and heavier with each passing second. I locked the door with the deadbolt the second I got in, then slumped onto the kitchen floor, my back against the cupboard door with the duffel hugged to my chest.

It was only now that I noticed the bag was wrong. My gym bag was a beat-up pink duffel with a broken zipper pull, the faded print logo having survived no fewer than six wash cycles. This bag was black.

There was no change of clothes, no sneakers, no deodorant. What it had, when I unzipped it, hands shaking, was a single object wrapped carefully in cloth, roughly the size of a cantaloupe, and faintly, unmistakably warm.

Was this the artifact that Karim and the mysterious man, who now lay dead in his office, had been arguing over?

I’d heard the whole thing while I’d hid in the closet. I’d even recorded part of it. At first I’d thought it was Karim and Michelle, and I thought maybe I’d get some honest-to-goodness evidence of his infidelity. But I’d never been more wrong.

At least that meant my phone was in my pocket and not stuck in my gym bag in his office. And I didn’t bring my wallet to the gym, preferring to rely on the payment methods I had on my phone.

They’d called the artifact an “egg.” But what the hell kind of egg was the size of a melon? Maybe it was a code word?

I didn’t know what it was, but the guy wanted a shit ton of money for it.

Way more than I made in a year. And while Karim’s accounting firm—which consisted of only him, his secretary, and one other accountant who conveniently was never in—outearned my real-estate gig by quite a lot, it was still a fair chunk of change for him.

He’d just killed a man over it. And now it was in my freaking kitchen. What the fuck was I supposed to do now? I zipped the bag back up, panic and bile rising simultaneously in my chest.

I looked down at the bag. Maybe I’d imagined it and there was no egg at all. Yeah, that must be it. I’d witnessed a murder, and in my shock, I’d imagined an egg because that was what they’d been fighting over right before the deed.

My blood rushed in my ears as I unzipped the bag again, hoping I’d see Karim’s dirty gym clothes. What was inside was, without question, an egg. There was no other word for it.

It was heavier than it looked. Ovoid, slightly larger than a cantaloupe, with a softly pebbled surface.

The color shifted when I tilted it under my kitchen light: a deep, rich forest green, then a shimmering gorgeous bronze, and at certain angles a brilliant gold, before shifting right back to green again.

It was beautiful, mesmerizing. And even if I hadn’t already heard the high-six-figure price, I would’ve guessed just by looking at it that it would cost a pretty penny.

And it was warm too. Not room-temperature warm either, but warm like a living thing. It generated its own heat, radiating like pavement that had spent a full afternoon holding onto the sun. I grabbed a medium-sized pot, lined it with several thick layers of dish towels, and set it carefully inside.

Wasn’t it bad to rotate eggs when they were incubating? Or was it the opposite, and you had to turn it? I was pretty sure I’d read somewhere that certain animals drowned if turned upside down, and others had to be turned to prevent sticking. Which type of animal was this?

And there was, without a doubt, something alive in there. I could feel it.

But what?

A decade ago, the largest animal egg known to science was that of an ostrich. But that was before the fall of The Wall. The Wall had been a magical barrier hiding monsters and magic from human eyes for millennia. The day it fell had changed the course of history forever.

I still remember standing in the hallway, gawking at the little horns sticking out of my neighbor’s kid’s head.

I tried to tell myself that it was for a school play or something, especially since Luca just waved at me like usual as we took the elevator down to the lobby.

It wasn’t until we’d both stepped out onto the street that we realized something was up.

People were freaking out, and there was a centaur, yes, a freaking centaur, standing right there at the corner. By the way it moved, it hadn’t been a costume. Then I started noticing the little things, like the fact that Luca had hooves.

I remember Luca’s panicked eyes looking back at me as he asked, “Do you see my horns?”

I’d nodded, because what the fuck else was I supposed to do?

And the poor kid started hiding behind me so no one else could see him.

Smart thing too, because some idiot had already started throwing rocks at the centaur.

Luca begged me to go back upstairs with him, so I did, because he was a kid, and again, what else was I supposed to do?

We’d been back in our hallway when I received the text from work telling me not to go in.

I ended up in my neighbor’s living room as we watched the news report together.

His parents burst in about five minutes later.

Apparently, Mr. Oak was a faun. Mrs. Oak was plain ole human, but their kid had come out with his daddy’s good looks.

I’d been in such shock that I’d just nodded as they told me how glad they were that I’d been there to protect their boy.

For some reason, they’d told Luca to “thank the nice witch from next door,” but I was so shocked by everything that I hadn’t protested or asked why they’d referred to me as a witch.

That had also been the day my mother broke the news that we’d come from a family with magic.

Each woman had a magical talent, though many never figured out what their talents were.

Hers was rather garden-variety and harmless: she could make the room she was in smell nice.

I’d always thought it was the air freshener.

She’d never encouraged me to find mine because she’d wanted to keep me safe, and in her experience, women with magic who weren’t well protected were often exploited, and she couldn’t do much to protect me.

I’d been upset at her for weeks for hiding something like this from me. And I’d even tried finding my talent using the spaghetti on the wall method, but never had any luck.

The first few weeks after the fall of The Wall had been rough.

There were a lot of scared and angry people, and they took it out on all the strange beings who’d hidden amongst us, even though they’d never caused trouble before.

The Oak family eventually moved away to Darlington, a now world-famous magic and monster town.

I looked down at the egg again. “What am I supposed to do with you?” I asked as I picked up my phone and typed: egg large warm iridescent. Expensive.

I scrolled past two pages about exotic poultry breeding, a Reddit thread I closed immediately on instinct, and an Etsy listing for hand-painted decorative gourds before I hit something that made me stop.

A forum. It had the aesthetic of a site built in 2007 by someone who cared deeply and had kept caring ever since.

There was a thread on dragon eggs. Not just dragons, but drakes, and wyverns too.

I looked at the egg.

I looked at my phone. The egg sat there on my dish towel, warm and green and absolutely unconcerned with my internal crisis.

“Right,” I said out loud, to nobody. “Okay. That’s… Yeah.”

It was a different color from the one on the screen, but apparently, that didn’t matter because dragon eggs came in every color imaginable. It was the scale-like texture of the shell that gave it away. Nothing else in this world was quite like it, according to the posts on the forum.

I got up off the floor, taking my phone with me, and started reading.

According to the thread, pure dragons were extinct, and the only ones still in existence were those that could shift into human form. They reproduced with eggs as well, and just as I’d already guessed, a warm egg meant that there was life inside.

Didn’t the “Dragon of Darlington” get married a few years ago? It was the first time the world had actual confirmation that dragon shifters existed. But wasn’t his wife human? The media had made a big fuss about it. Maybe this was their surrogate egg?

I eyed the egg suspiciously. “You’re not their kidnapped egg, are you?” It better not be! Or else I was in big trouble. Hell! I already was.

My phone buzzed. A picture of Karim’s face stared back at me, taken from the time we’d gone on that trip to London. I ignored it. Because I was really shit at lying, and what would picking it up accomplish anyway?

Hey, I have the dragon egg you murdered someone for?

Want to switch duffel bags?

Did I even trust Karim with something so precious, especially now that I knew something was living inside? This was someone’s child! Did that make this trafficking?

My phone lit up again, this time with a message demanding I call him. Now.

I kept looking at the egg. I didn’t know what Karim had planned to do with it, and I didn’t trust myself to imagine it charitably, mainly because I didn’t trust him, period.

And I was done pretending that instinct was something to argue myself out of or ignore.

He’d killed someone over this. Whatever he’d intended to do, it had not been to return it safely to its owner, because people who intended to return things didn’t bludgeon and strangle people for them.

I was already screwed either way, and I knew I couldn’t stay here.

I’d known it in a low-grade, background way since I’d come through the door.

But now, it sharpened into something clear and non-negotiable.

Karim knew where I lived. He’d been to this apartment a hundred times.

If I stayed, he’d find me by sundown, possibly well before.

I searched my closet for a backpack that would fit the egg. The duffel was too big for me to carry comfortably for any length of time.

With the egg neatly wrapped up and stowed away, I packed everything I’d need on the run.

As I did, I ran through the plan in my head.

Living in New York, I hadn’t actually used my driver’s license for years.

But I had one. And I remembered how to drive, I think.

I could rent a car and drive to Darlington.

Make a few calls along the way, and keep moving until I got the egg safely to Desmon in Darlington.

And suddenly my plan became very clear. I put my hand on the egg, absorbing its warmth through my palms.

“I’m gonna get you home, buddy,” I promised.