Chapter 6
Desmon
It was already mid-morning, and my office was distressingly empty of a certain curvaceous vixen. I’d even left a message with Janice, telling her to send Carly up as soon as she got in, but still nothing.
I was beginning to wonder if Carly was trying to avoid me.
Not the type to wait around and be left wondering, I made my way to the front foyer. Janice was there talking to two new volunteers from the university. I was glad to see them. We really needed the extra help, and it would free Carly up to be with me.
My redheaded siren, however, was nowhere to be seen. I tried to settle the irrational sinking feeling in my belly as the dragon inside started to pace. She’d agreed to come to help me yesterday, and there was no indication then that she had been unhappy. In fact, she had agreed to come to lunch with me. Was she sick? There was that virus that had been going around, and humans were susceptible to things like that.
“Morning, Desmon,” Janice greeted me casually as the two university students gawked at me with open mouths. “Have you met the new volunteers?”
I don’t care about the new volunteers, my dragon huffed. Where’s my female?
Carly wasn’t my female. Not yet, anyway.
I put on my least scowly face and tried to do the proper human thing and pretend to care as I made the acquaintance of the young man and young woman I probably wouldn’t remember tomorrow. Then I immediately asked, “Where’s Carly?”
Janice’s face fell, and I saw a sign of worry in her eyes. “She never showed up this morning. I don’t think she’s the type to no-show without an explanation. I tried calling her, but some guys on the other end hung up while swearing, as if they’d picked up the call by accident. I was going to mention it to Mateo later when I saw him. I’m worried.”
That had me on high alert. My scales must have flashed through my glamour because the young woman whose name I’d already forgotten gasped and covered her mouth.
“Anyway, I’m glad these two came in early. I can cover Carly’s afternoon class while they take over here.”
“Anyone else missing today?” I asked.
“Yes, Leonard. But he called in. He has that virus that’s been going around.”
I glanced over to the student volunteers from the university. “Now that we have these two, do you mind if I take Carly whenever she’s not working with a tour group?”
“Of course! I’ve always said you should have an assistant. I’ve seen that office. It badly needs organizing.”
I grunted and turned to leave, heading toward the elevator to the underground parking lot instead of the grand staircase to my office. I got into my Bentley Continental, glad I’d driven in today instead of calling my driver. It was nice to be able to go anywhere I wanted on a whim without anyone knowing. I valued my privacy.
Accessing the museum’s HR files through my phone, I looked up Carly’s address before peeling out of the underground parking lot and speeding down the street. No law enforcement officer would dare pull me over. They recognized my vehicles, and I had carte blanche in this city.
I frowned as I entered her part of town. This sector was…problematic. No wonder I hadn’t recognized the address.
Compared to larger cities, Darlington was pretty clean and well-maintained. But it still wasn’t perfect. I had learned early on that it was impossible to keep poverty out of my town—yes, I did think of Darlington as mine, since there had been nothing here but gold deep underground when I first arrived—with so many shifters, witches, wizards, and magical beings relocating here from all over the world. It was even harder now that we were no longer hidden by The Wall. We’d gone from town to city seemingly overnight.
Luckily for the people of Darlington, I wasn’t a particularly controlling dragon. As long as my people didn’t actively get in my way, I let things be, unlike some dragons who terrorized their townfolk, demanding gifts and sacrifices. To date, I’d only set one village on fire. I shoved that memory back inside the box I’d so carefully crafted around it before it could fully materialize.
That was another life in another time, one I preferred not to remember. I was just glad the whole knight in shiny armor era was over. Stupid tin cans with hero complexes.
I parked in front of Carly’s building and made my way inside. There was no concierge at the front. Who was going to stop perfect strangers from getting into the building? I frowned at the note on the elevator saying that it was out of service. I made my way up the stairwell, which smelled faintly of her, along with a million other scents, most of them stomach-churning. Had she used these stairs earlier this morning?
By the time I was on her floor, my dragon was pacing in circles at the back of my mind, eager to breathe fire on anything that dared stand in our way.
A sense of unease spread through me as I walked down her hallway. Her door was wide open, and her apartment was a complete mess, as if someone had ransacked it looking for something. The scent of her blood was in the air. It was faint, but it was there.
I let out a stream of flames that singed the already peeling wallpaper lining the hallway.
Whoever did this will burn.
This time, I agreed wholeheartedly with my dragon. Heads would roll.
The perpetrator’s scent was strong in the apartment, and strangely familiar, though I couldn’t quite place it.
There were bloodstains on the carpet, but one whiff told me it wasn’t Carly’s. It belonged to one of her attackers. But I could smell her blood in the air. A scrap of fabric attached to a piece of broken glass from a picture frame caught my attention. I picked it up and sniffed but couldn’t figure out if it was Carly’s or the attacker’s blood.
The scents were all starting to meld together, and my dragon was too angry to do anything other than repeat the word burn, burn, burn , in my head. It wasn’t helping. Setting things on fire wouldn’t help me find Carly.
I found I was just as angry as my dragon. Someone had stolen my female.
I gave a quick shake of my head. Where had that thought come from? My dragon must be getting to me.
I dug my phone out and messaged Mateo and Seth.
Mateo, while technically employed as the head of security at the museum, did a lot more for me than just protecting my treasures. He also looked after my personal security needs, and Carly being attacked and kidnapped was definitely a personal matter.
I’d found Mateo shortly after he had been kicked out of a group home for monster orphans. He’d been going down the wrong path, one that would inevitably lead to prison or an early grave. I took him in, and gave him a home and a job. He’d only moved out of my estate recently, and still sometimes came back for dinner.
Seth, meanwhile, was my private wizard, and I trusted him implicitly. He wasn’t like other wizards, despite having once been part of the WEC. That life was behind him now, even though he was still young in human terms.
He’d come to me when he was barely more than a boy, begging me to hide his mother from his abusive wizard father. Elana was a witch in her own right, but she’d had her magic drained for decades by her husband. Elana still lived with me in my estate and kept my home running smoothly, though Seth, like Mateo, had now moved out on his own.
To avoid looking suspicious or drawing any attention, I closed the apartment door while I waited for them to arrive. It was only then that I really looked at Carly’s home. There was a fenced-off area that took up almost half the main living space. The fence was only about knee high, and the gate was standing open.
There was a round metal ball with hay stuffed into it, as well as loose hay all over one corner, along with a small drinking fountain with bubbling water and an empty food dish. There was a bright blue nylon tunnel, a wooden structure that looked like a miniature castle set against the wall, and a shin-high stuffed mushroom with a round opening in the stem.
I sniffed. Most definitely rabbit. My little human had a pet.
I did a quick search and found the little one hiding under her bed. I was still trying to get the cowering creature to come to me when Seth arrived via portal in the living room. He had better success getting the rabbit out from under the bed, probably because he, as a human wizard, didn’t exude a top predator aura.
Seth must not have handled Little Bit yet today. Little Bit was his ball python and his familiar of choice.
Unlike other wizards who tended to look down on witchcraft as an inferior woman’s skill, Seth augmented his wizard powers by dabbling in it, building both skill sets side by side. It was something I’d encouraged him in, knowing that the most powerful magic practitioners in history were neither witches nor wizards but rather those who trained in both.
Seth was cooing, “Who’s a widdle cutey-patootey,” at the little bunny when Mateo opened the apartment door.
At the arrival of yet another top predator, the widdle cutey-patootey freaked out, jumping out of Seth’s hands, running into the fenced-in area, and diving into the mushroom-shaped plush house in the corner.
Mateo had his glamour on. The only time he appeared in public without it was if I requested he stay in his manticore form to guard my more prized treasures, or on casual Fridays at the museum. Despite the common knowledge of magic and monsters these days, many still reacted to his natural form with horror and disgust. He took a cursory look around the apartment and the hallway outside before sniffing at the blood on the ground. “I recognize this scent from the museum.”
“You mean it’s someone who works there?” I asked.
“Most likely. But I don’t recall exactly who this scent belongs to. It’s not any of the guards; theirs I’m familiar with. But if we go back and smell the employee lockers, I’ll be able to pick them out.”
“Janice said Leonard wasn’t in today.”
“The day-time janitor? Yes, now that you mention it, I’m sure that’s his scent. But what would he want with Carly? They occasionally exchange a wave or a nod, maybe a few words, but that is all. There is another scent here as well. I don’t recognize it. Leonard had help.”
I showed Seth the tiny scrap of fabric I’d found on the broken picture frame. “Would you be able to use this to find her?” I asked. I was always amazed at what Seth could do with a little magic.
“I think there’s enough here for me to scry and perhaps see through the eyes of whoever this once belonged to.” He looked around the room and wrinkled his nose at the mess. “Not here, though. This place feels…wrong.”
“At my estate, then?”
Seth gave a curt nod, then with a wave of his hand, the portal opened up again in Carly’s much-too-cramped apartment. Beyond the opening to the portal was only a swirling black of nothingness, but that was because my home had a special ward that prevented portals from seeing inside. I knew this portal would lead to my library.
I went inside the fenced-in area and tried to scoop Carly’s bunny into my arms, but it grunted and bared its front teeth, refusing to leave the safety of its faux fungi shelter. I didn’t need to speak Bunny to realize this was a warning. But I also didn’t want to leave her animal companion behind in a trashed apartment, so I simply picked up the entire mushroom.
Mateo helped me gather up some of the rabbit’s supplies, and then we stepped into the swirling darkness.