Robert Asprin's Dragons Run (5 page)

The
bleached blond male assistant straightened the flowers in the tiny crystal vase on the little table under the window. He pulled out the chair and set it at an angle, so it would be easy to get into. The curtains that covered the lower part of the window cut the glare coming off the enormous swimming pool outside.

“Will there be anything else, dear?” he asked.

Valerie McCandles set her magazine down on the wide arm of the padded chair under the reading lamp and stretched her feet on the damask-covered ottoman. Dishes of saffron chicken with rice, sectioned oranges, a green salad with perfect tomato slices on top, and a small cheese selection had been arranged on the tablecloth. A tall, pale blue china pot emitting the succulent smell of fresh, hot coffee steamed on a coaster beside its matching cream pitcher and sugar bowl.

“No, thanks, Henry. That looks great.”

“Well, eat it before it goes cold,” Henry said. “It’s just not the same after that. And cover your feet! You don’t want to catch the flu.” He shook out a woven pink cashmere throw and flung it over her bare toes. “The troops are massing for your afternoon inspection.”

“Are they ready?” Val asked with a wry grin.

“Are they ever?” Henry asked, with an impatient roll of his eyes. “I’ll send Roxanne in in forty-five minutes to do your hair.”

“I can do my own hair,” Val said defensively. Her long blond tresses were still slightly damp from the shower after her morning swim.

Henry let out a pained sigh. Val relented. It was no good arguing with him. He had an ironclad opinion on how she ought to look in public.

“Okay,” she said.

“Good. Your day clothes are laid out in your dressing room. See you later!”

With a quick glance around to see if anything else was out of place, he bustled out.

Val waited until the door closed behind him, then kicked off the throw. Henry was a mother hen. If she had let him, he would have fussed over her every minute of the day.

She heaved herself out of the armchair and sat down at the luncheon table. Her belly threw her off-balance even though it was still small enough that people usually missed the bulge under her customary baggy tops. The doctor who had examined her the previous morning declared that it was on schedule for a five-month fetus, and that the six months still to go on her pregnancy should be no problem.

Eleven months!

Sometimes, it sucked to be a dragon.

“How are you doing, kid?” she asked, patting her tummy affectionately. Her unborn child shifted inside her as if answering her question. She smiled contentedly.

When she had first discovered that a passionate night with a handsome man had resulted in pregnancy, Valerie was conflicted. She was then only twenty years old, with no career, no degree, and hardly any money. She hadn’t finished college before her brother Griffen had swept her up and hustled her away from campus to live in New Orleans, where it was—safer. Since then, she had had a birthday, sandwiched in between a host of revelations. The first of those was that she was a dragon. There was no denying she and Griffen were different than anyone else she knew. The college infirmary had broken two needles on her arm before suggesting she take the flu vaccine by nasal inhaler. Her roommate had teased her about being too tense. Yet Val distinctly recalled getting inoculations as a child. The dragon characteristics must have been forming gradually. She couldn’t yet breathe fire or transform shape, as she now knew she probably would one day, but she was immune to stab wounds or cuts.

That made shaving her legs a lot easier. No more nicks in the shower.

Apart from that, she saw little practical use for the trait.

A much-less-welcome piece of knowledge was that Griffen had held back on telling her about most of these cool things. Why? It wasn’t like ignorance would prevent their happening. His mentor, Mose, had talked with him for days on end, teaching him how to be an effective dragon. Why hadn’t he passed those lessons along to her? She wasn’t that much younger than he was. Not even two years separated them. If he could handle it, so could she.

Val tried to shut out the nagging in her head, delivered in Melinda’s voice, that they wanted to leave Val helpless and dependent on them. She doubted it. The one person she could rely upon to drop everything for her was Griffen. Had he not come to her college to get her away from the assassins who were stalking them? Didn’t he help her get her own apartment, so she didn’t have to share with him and could keep her privacy? Didn’t he hire people to follow her around New Orleans to prevent her from being bothered by Melinda? Well, Melinda had gotten past them eventually. Only Griffen himself could have kept an experienced and determined lady like her away from Val. The baby in her womb was Melinda’s grandchild.

Val found it a curious dichotomy that she had come to terms with Melinda, would happily die for the sake of her future child, and yet looked forward to killing the bastard who had impregnated her when she saw him next. Melinda was carefully keeping her son out of Val’s way. It wasn’t the fact that she was going to have a baby; it was that he had used another dragon skill, a kind of magical hypnosis, to get in bed with her. For robbing her of free will, she was going to beat him to death the first opportunity she could. Sometimes, when she had an odd moment, she fantasized about what heavy objects she was going to use on him.

As for the baby itself—Val carefully kept from trying to guess its gender—she had never loved anything so much in her life. She’d been of two minds when she first found out. She was glad she hadn’t jumped at her first impulse, to get rid of it. Now Val wanted to be a mother. She was eager for the day in late September when her baby would be born and she could hold it in her arms for the first time. The joy she felt every so often when she thought about it made her feel good all over. Sure, there were going to be problems ahead. Handling a newborn and the rest of her future at the same time would need a lot of planning and plenty of help. She was luckier than many single mothers who had fewer resources to count on. The Quarter was not only her neighborhood, it had become her extended family. Hers and Griffen’s.

She had few clear memories of their parents. Griffen and Val had been small when their mother and father left home for the last time. Still, Val recalled being held in strong arms and rocked. There had been a blue teddy bear with a yellow ribbon around its neck and amber plastic eyes. A mellow soprano voice and a deep baritone voice sang nonsense songs with her tiny treble. She had a mental image of a small blond woman and a very tall man. To her childish memory, they had been perfect. Now she realized how little she knew about them. Her uncle had never really sat down with her and Griffen to tell them what had happened to take their parents away, or to answer any questions they had had over the years.

How easily she had accepted the status quo. Immediately, she felt a pang of distrust. Had Malcolm done something like Nathaniel and compelled them not to be curious? No, how could he? He was never home, or hardly ever. She and Griffen didn’t miss him when he was away during their childhoods. Val was grateful that he had taken them in, but she had no strong feelings for him. He hadn’t called them in over a year since they had moved to the South. Maybe he was glad to be rid of them, like Melinda said.

Val tore off a piece of bread and played with it moodily. She really shouldn’t trust Melinda. The older dragon was far more concerned about the well-being of Val’s baby than about Val herself. Still, she treated Val like a real adult.

Maybe too much of one.

A rap on the door drew her out of her reverie.

“Come in!” she called.

A timid face peered around the doorway.

“Are you ready for me, Miss Valerie?” Roxanne was a petite woman with shining blond hair pulled back and folded against the back of her head. At six feet tall, Val felt like a giant next to her. That reminded her of her friend Mai, one of Griffen’s girlfriends, petite with delicate bones. She missed Mai.

“Sure,” she said. “Come in.”

“Thank you.”

Roxanne dragged in her rolling cart of hairdressing tools. Without another word, she went to work on Val’s hair, gently combing out the tangles and drying it with a cylindrical brush and a blow-dryer with a huge diffuser attached to the mouth.

“How’s it going?” Val asked, staring out at the dancing lights on the pool.

“Fine, fine,” Roxanne said, clipping her words off hastily. Like everyone in this house—if you could call this sprawling resort complex a house—except Henry, she was terrified of Val.

“Do you have anything special going on this weekend?” Val asked in an encouraging voice.

“Oh, no. I don’t, I mean.”

Wow,
Val thought.

She subsided in the chair and let Roxanne work on her. When the roaring of the blow-dryer stopped and the pulling at various tresses of her hair ceased, a hand mirror peeped shyly around the edge of her vision. Val took it and looked at her reflection. Behind her, the beautician was almost trembling as she held up a large, rectangular mirror so Val could see the back of her own head. Her long blond hair was parted on the side and combed out in waves like Cameron Diaz’s.

“It looks beautiful,” she assured Roxanne.

“Thank you. Shall I do your makeup now?”

Val opened her mouth to protest, then thought of facing Henry again. “Sure. Thanks.”

At least she didn’t look like a drag queen when Roxanne was through with her. In fact, she looked like the pages in the fashion magazines that touted “The Natural Look,” finished and smooth without seeming to be made up at all.

“That’s fabulous! Will you show me how you do that?” Val asked, turning her face from side to side to admire the effect. “I mean, tomorrow?”

“I . . . uh,” Roxanne stammered.

“You have to get permission?”

“Yes. Um. Shall I help you dress?”

“No, thanks,” Val said firmly, rising from the chair. “I’d rather dress myself. Tell Henry I’ll be ready in five minutes.”

Roxanne gathered her tools and shoved the cart hastily out the door. Val shrugged out of her robe and dropped it on the bed. The room was so tidy that the single rumpled garment stood out like a neon sign. Val grinned a little naughtily. She could make her own mark.

Before the promised five minutes were up, Val marched out into the broad hallway toward the grand staircase. The thick blue carpet swallowed the sound of her high-heeled sandals. The wrap dress that was tied just above her bulge almost matched the shade of blue. Not that the décor had been chosen to complement her looks, of course, but she could pretend that it had. All those programs on the Discovery Channel about royal palaces and mansions around the world that zoomed around to show those pilastered columns and frescoed ceilings didn’t really tell how it felt to live in one. She could have told those fulsome voice-over announcers that it was daunting but comfortable.

When she reached the head of the stairs, Henry appeared out of nowhere and took her arm.

“Very nice,” he said, looking her over critically. “Very understated. Come on. Everyone needs to get back to work.”

“I don’t have to do this,” Val said. “They can work without having me check on them every day.”

“Melinda always checks on the staff. She left you in charge, so you need to keep everything moving. Here’s the day’s itinerary.” He opened up a little palmtop computer and handed it to her. The little gray screen displayed several columns, each headed by a single word:
MAINTENANCE, SUPPLY, COMMUNICATIONS, DISBURSEMENTS, DELIVERIES
, and so on. Val absorbed as many of the items as she could before Henry whisked it out of her hand and nodded toward the banister. She took hold of it, wary of her heels.

Normally, at that time of day, she would be wearing jeans and a T-shirt, cleaning up from the lunch crowd in the bar where she worked, and looking forward to reading a book while a few people wandered in for a Coke or a Bloody Mary. Her greatest intellectual exercise was figuring out if young-looking patrons were as old as the birth date on their driver’s licenses said they were. In forty-eight hours, she had turned into Junior Miss CEO.

She wasn’t sure yet if she liked it.

At the bottom of the stairs, nearly fifty people were waiting for her. Val was dismayed at the annoyed looks they shot her, expressions that vanished immediately when Henry frowned. Her, they feared. Him, they respected.

“Everyone!” Henry snapped. “Please give Miss Valerie a quick progress report, then you can get back to work. Vilus, kitchens, please.”

A tall, thin black man in chef’s whites with a gold kerchief tied around his neck cleared his throat.

“Got some nice pompano in this morning. Had to compost about twenty pounds of potatoes because they were going green. That’s okay. I’ve got dehydrated potatoes in the pantry, and I gave Marcella the order for fresh spuds for Friday’s dinner party. The menu’s on a disk if you want to check it over.”

What dinner party?
Val wondered, but Marcella, a sharp-eyed, round-faced woman in a tight suit-dress, took up the narrative without expanding on Vilus’s statement.

“The two Spode plates are back from the china restorer, so the set’s complete again,” she said. “Nothing else to report.”

“Good,” Val said, since that seemed to be what the staff was waiting for. One after another, they gave their brief statements in noncommittal voices, the import of which went right over her head. She smiled and nodded, trying to sound encouraging. As soon as the last person, a Hispanic-looking gardener named Juan Pablo, named off the tulips that were sending up shoots along the front drive, the crowd seemed to explode outward. Val didn’t have time to say “Thank you,” or “Dismissed,” before the room was empty. A vacuum cleaner started up in the hallway next door, and she heard distant clattering and the murmur of voices.

Henry stepped up alongside her, touching a key on the small computer’s pad. “That went well,” he said. “You should have asked about Agnetta’s baby, but you can do that tomorrow.”

“What about him?” Val asked, trying to remember who Agnetta was.