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“I could grab him in an elevator,” Tee said. “And jump on top.”

  “That’s a little creepy.” Mei’s tone said she knew Tee was joking. “Besides, with all the cameras, you’d probably get charged with assault.”

  “That’s all I’ve got right now,” Tee said.

  Her cell phone chimed with a wind flute reminder to get her whale at the airport. “I gotta go. Jane, don’t forget Mr. C. is coming in Sunday night for the week. He wants to have dinner with you.”

  Jane nodded. Mr. C. was an eighty-year-old oilman from Houston, Texas, whose interest in Jane was platonic; he just “liked the way her mind worked.” Whatever. No guy Tee knew, whether he was eight or eighty, could look at Jane and not wonder what she was like when she let down her hair and took off her stay-away glasses. Jane said she enjoyed Mr. C.’s company, and even liked his crazy, slot-machine-obsessed wife when he brought her along.

  “Not a word about this, either of you, and no weirdo looks at Leo.” Tee scooted out of her chair and gave her friends a there-will-be-hell-to-pay stare. Mei and Jane nodded, solid on this. “See you Monday.”

  A few minutes later, Tee was waiting under the golden portico at the curb in front of the Crown Jewel, two bottles of chilled Asti Spumante Cristal in her hands.

  “You bitch.” Roy surprised her.

  Tee jumped, her heel slipped off the curb, and she banged her ankle. Pain shot up her leg, and she rounded on Roy with the neck of the champagne bottle in her hand. “Back off, Roy, or you’ll be drinking this off your chin.”

  Roy was of average height, on the lean side, and favored a retro, rat-pack look of overly gelled hair and loafers. “I just saw my whale, the one I brought here from the Flamingo. He said he’s on your account now.”

  “Yep.” Tee smiled and watched for the limo to arrive.

  “You think you and your twelve-dollar bottle of champagne are even in my league?”

  Tee fought to keep her features impassive and not show him that he’d scored a direct host hit. Spumante was cheap champagne, but her player loved it. “What goes around, comes around, LeRoy.” She used his real name, which she knew he hated. “You poach mine, I’ll poach yours.”

  “You’re as cheap and trashy as that shit your blue-collar players drink.”

  Another hit: Blue-collar. Her players did tend to have day jobs, but that just made Tee like them more. “What’s the matter, LeRoy? You don’t like it when someone steals your player like you stole mine?”

  “I’m going to make you pay.”

  “Grow up. This isn’t the sandbox.” The casino’s black stretch limo stopped beside Tee and the driver came around to open her door.

  “Oh, honey.” Roy sounded suspiciously like the Joan Rivers impersonator at the Riviera. “You and I aren’t even in the same school yard. You just don’t know it yet.” He said it casually without his previous heat. “Watch yourself. You won’t see it coming.” He sauntered back into the casino with a flat whistle.

  “You ready to go, Ms. Alameda?” the black-suited driver asked.

  “Yes.” Tee still watched Roy’s back, and his disconcertingly easy stride. “Did you remember the gold flutes and caviar?” she asked, refocusing on the job at hand.

  “Yes, ma’am,” the driver said.

  She folded herself into the back of the limo, shaking slightly from the encounter. Uncertainty about flipping Mr. M. filled her mind for the first time. Roy’s abrupt persona change was weird and weirder. She knew Roy was a scumbag, but what else was he capable of?

  Chapter Five

  The golden dragon’s strokes through the clouds above the reservation were blissful and relaxed. The occasional killing of a wild animal recharged his dragon and his human forms. After a couple of months, the super strong awareness from feeding would fade and he would want to hunt again.

  A dragon living in human skin had to live with one foot in the human world and one dragon wing out. One simply couldn’t indulge in the old ways at will anymore. It would attract too much attention in the ever more-crowded world. His bestial side had to be moderated by human reasoning.

  As in now.

  We have work to do, Leo’s human mind told his dragon, asserting control. He directed the dragon to a plateau on the east side of the reservation.

  The dragon flip-flopped his heavy wings through the air. He’d hunted well, eaten well, and visited his jewel lair. The humming of the jewels was seductive in the extreme. He wanted to curl up on top of his jewels and sleep surrounded by euphoria.

  No, Leo commanded again.

  The dragon huffed his displeasure but picked up speed.

  The bond between beast and human was never seamless. His human side had superior mental power, and the dragon side would always be physically stronger. Moments of discord like these just happened. It was a bit like a normal human wrestling with himself to go exercise, or not eat all the Halloween candy. It was a part of everyday life for the shape-shifting dragons.

  Leo took a firm mental grip on the dragon’s actions and increased his speed toward a plateau on the far eastern edge of the reservation across I-5. He circled a flat red rock, and saw that the Chief waited for him in the late afternoon shadows. The dragon scanned the area with his heightened dragon sight and smell, but only sensed the Chief and the heat-holding rocks.

  The dragon dove, landed on the plateau in a graceful thump, and stretched his wings wide before folding them close to his body. The ledge was big, about the size of half an American football field, with tall red cliffs on the southwest side. On the north side, there was a sweat lodge with a rain barrel to collect water for use in the sweat ceremonies.

  The Chief watched him from a cross-legged position on the ground, wearing loose thin pants and no shirt. His hair was long and black, with a few streaking ribbons of gray. He wore it in a long braid down his back. A small fire of pinion wood flared in front of him. The Chief stared at the flames, his eyes open and solemn as an apocalyptic night.

  Leo shifted to his human form. The zing of the transformation vibrated from the soles of his feet to his chest, as if the desert had sent a meridian shock upward through him. From his store of human clothing, he chose shorts and a tee shirt to wear. The carrying of clothes was the first skill a fledgling dragon learned upon gaining their dragon forms in their teen years.

  He walked to his seated friend and bowed. “Chief Alameda.” The late afternoon heat baked his human head.

  “Please sit, Winged Lion, I have been waiting for the ancestors to bring you.” The Chief spread his palm to his right, and Leo sat, cross-legged, mimicking the Chief’s stance.

  “Thank you for your hospitality,” Leo said. The pinion smoke blew between them and caught a breeze to the south. The sun was setting behind the rocks, hitting him full in the eyes.

  “Tee told me you two are dating?”

  “No, we aren’t.” Leo shook his head. “She’s my employee, I can’t date her.”

  “Hum,” the Chief said noncommittally. “How is she?”

  Sexy as hell, Leo’s mind answered, but he forced different words out of his mouth “She’s well.” Pictures of Tee filtered behind his eyes: striding across her office, arguing with him, underneath him in the casino wardrobe room. Her face had been lifted to his, her body open to him. He could have taken her there, but he’d done the damn, honorable thing.

  Waited to see if she was his mate.

  He kept his features still, even though the setting sun was a heated spotlight on his face.

  The Chief watched him, his eyes steady and unmoving. The silence stretched and Leo knew the Chief waited for more information about Tee.

  Across the valley, an eagle soared and screeched on the wind. The Chief broke his stare to watch the bird’s descent below their ledge to the desert floor. “A good omen, an eagle hunting.”

  “Kane tells me you have trouble in the tribe?”

  The Chief said nothing, his eyes following the eagle until he disappeared. “Tell me more about my daughter and
those rich fools she chases after.”

  Leo accepted the conversation detour. “None of them bother her, she just does her job.”

  “She makes a lot of money?”

  “Yes.”

  “Does she still give it to the school?”

  “You should ask her yourself.” Leo suspected that the Chief allowing their hunting on the reservation had more to do with his periodic updates on Tee than the tribe needing to manage the reservation’s animal populations. He wondered why the Chief pretended he didn’t know Tee gave away most of her salary, but then Tee and the Chief seemed to have many topics that were off limits for discussion. He wondered if Tee even realized how proud the Chief was of her success.

  “And you, Winged Lion, how’re you?”

  His old friend had seen too much, heard too much agitation in his terseness. Leo shifted, his tailbones dug into the hard packed earth, and sweat shone across his forehead.

  “I’m fine.”

  “And your dragon form?”

  “I’m showing the first signs of waning. I’ll need a dragon mate soon.” He said the word with little hope. The waning would be painful, and he had little doubt he would be one of those who had to take one last flight that would end with him falling out of the sky. His family in Australia would be devastated, but unless his second comb-through of all the dragon folds around the world produced his mate, he saw no hope of avoiding it.

  “How soon?”

  “No one knows these things. It’s different for each dragon.” His friend Alec had regressed slowly over many years and had been in the last stages of loss when Lucy had come into his life. Lucy was a human, and miraculously his true mate. Alec’s dragon form was now robust again, and he and Lucy were enjoying their honeymoon somewhere secret, away from the casino.

  “But your female dragons don’t suffer?”

  “No.” Leo thought of poor Darius, waiting for Mei to give in to him. Part of the problem was Mei had no motive to join with Darius, save bestial attraction, which she seemed determined to avoid.

  The Chief’s tanned face creased into smile lines around his mouth. “The Mother has a sense of humor.”

  “I suppose.”

  “Your hunt was good,” the Chief said rather than asked. “You took the ram from the eastern herd.”

  Leo didn’t bother asking how he knew. The Chief just knew things. He said Mother Earth spoke to him, and she probably did. “Yes. He was lame on his back leg, like you said. He wouldn’t have survived the next challenge from the young rams. He was still worthy of the hunt.”

  The Chief nodded. “Better to live a year as a lion than one hundred as a sheep.”

  “More ancestor’s wisdom?” Leo smiled.

  “Madonna.”

  “The Saint?” Leo couldn’t imagine the Chief quoting the Catholic Church.

  “The singer.” The Chief looked away as if watching for the return of the eagle. “Tee had it on a poster in her room when she was young.” He shook his head and a look of disgust pulled his features flat. “I should have burned it when it came into my house, but her mother said it was just a phase.”

  At the mention of his beloved wife, the Chief’s voice saddened. “I pray that you never know the loss of your mate, Winged Lion. The earth loses it color. Every day is the same, dull and flat, and it’s a struggle to see the spirits.”

  Leo knew of the Chief’s pain, but his friend seldom talked of his loss. “I’m sorry. She was a good woman.” He had known Tee’s mother, met her a few times through the Chief. “She wouldn’t want you to suffer.”

  The Chief nodded. “I still have work to do for the tribe and for Tee before I join her in the sky.”

  Leo leaned forward, the heat of the fire warming his already warm skin. “Kane says you have trouble in your tribe?” he asked again.

  “Yes.” The wrinkled face took on a gray cast in the shadows. “The ancestors have brought you to help me keep Noqoìlpi away.”

  “Who’s Noqoìlpi?”

  “He-who-wins-men-at-play. The god of gambling.” The words were quiet and solemn. “The young men of the tribe organize against me. They want a casino built on our sacred land. It isn’t enough that we have a smoke shop and fireworks. They want more.”

  Leo digested the information. The many Native American casinos in the area weren’t a threat to his business. They tended to draw a local crowd, who bet low money, more often. The Vegas casinos drew a tourist crowd, who bet bigger money, less often. There were more than enough gamblers to go around.

  “Why don’t you want a casino? Wouldn’t it provide jobs and revenue for the tribe?”

  “Gambling is a sickness of the mind that must be avoided. Noqoìlpi once drew men into slavery through gambling. When he came, he challenged the people to all sorts of games and contests. He won their property, then their women and children, and finally the souls of the men themselves. He even drew the animals of the night and day into betting, and they gambled each other for more day, or more night, until the Sun and the wind intervened and they had to compromise. Noqoìlpi was only vanquished by the Sun and the wind. There’s a price for such nonsense. There’s always a price.”

  “Why’re you worried about the young this time? They have no voice on the council.”

  “They’re questioning the validity of the original rolls.”

  “Can they do that?”

  “Yes.”

  “How much blood is enough blood to belong?”

  The Chief shrugged. “It should be one quarter or a grandparent, but it is just a trick to cast those who disagree with their agenda from the tribal rolls.”

  “And the Ancestors believe I can help?”

  “Yes.” The Chief smiled for the first time. “Would you care to spar?”

  Leo was still bothered over the information the Chief had shared and the implications to Tee. “I’m still sluggish after my hunt.”

  “I’ll be kind to you, Winged-Lion.” Despite his age, the Chief stood with quick grace and bowed. “Mother Earth has spoken in my ear of my victory.”

  Leo laughed and stood good-naturedly. “If you say so.” The two often sparred on Leo’s visits to the reservation.

  “When I win, I would ask a favor from you,” the Chief said. “A trade for your loss.”

  Trading was an honored Native American tradition. Leo knew from their past spars that to discuss the terms ahead of time would be an affront, which said he didn’t trust the Chief to make fair terms.

  “All right.” Leo walked to the edge of the plateau and stretched his arms wide.

  The desert wind answered his move with a strong gust of dry air. Evening was coming, and the hint of chill raked across his forearms. He shook off his dragon’s lethargy, put his left hand behind his back, and took the stick the Chief offered.

  The Chief lifted the stick to the sky and sang out a greeting to begin the exchange. He leveled his stick at Leo, and they crossed wood. The Chief jabbed first, hitting Leo’s stick with a shuddering blow.

  Leo blocked the strike and swung back with rapid left-right-left strikes, and touched the Chief on the chest.

  “One.” Leo called the point out. They always sparred in sets of three points. The Chief nodded, acknowledging the point.

  The Chief grunted and lunged, swinging the stick at Leo’s knees. Leo jumped over it and returned a light blow to the Chief’s calves. The Chief moved with the blow and rolled into a crouch on the ground.

  The Chief stood. “You’ve been practicing.”

  Leo smiled, but knew better than to be distracted by the compliment.

  The Chief jabbed the stick at him several times. Leo met the strikes in the air, deflecting them, and then swung wide for the Chief’s hip. The Chief feinted left, and Leo’s attack missed, leaving him open. The Chief planted the end of the stick and kicked both legs at Leo’s exposed chest. “One.”

  When Leo toppled, he spun the stick into the Chief’s shoulder. “Two,” Leo said.

  The blow shook
the Chief and his head snapped forward. He stood for a minute, exposed, looking stunned.

  “Three.” Leo rolled to his feet and took the final point.

  “Good job, Winged Lion.” The Chief leaned on his stick. “What’s your favor?”

  Leo knew what he wanted—a long roll in the sack with Tee. Somehow, he didn’t think Chief Alameda would agree to those terms. “I’ll reserve my favor for another day. What was your wish?”

  The Chief smiled. “I wish a session in the sweat lodge.”

  Leo fought back a groan. He hated the sweat lodge. It was hot and steamy, and he’d never grasped the whole specialness of the experience. “If you’ll tell me what you really wanted,” Leo followed the Chief around the corner to the lodge.

  The Chief eyed him appraisingly. “I don’t need your company.”

  Curiosity and concern prickled through Leo. “In all these years, you’ve never asked a favor of me. I want to know what’s so important. Remember, dragons aren’t so patient.”

  “It isn’t so awful, Winged-Lion,” the Chief said. “I just wished for you to attend the Black Earth Festival with Tee.”

  “What?” Leo stopped in his tracks and poked his stick in the ground.

  “I want you to come with Tee and safeguard her, as if she was your dragon sister.”

  “Chief.” Leo gathered his jumbled thoughts. “I’ve kissed Tee. She’s not my dragon mate or my sister. My feelings toward her aren’t brotherly.” The admission felt like he pushed it through gravel in the back of his throat. He looked away from his old friend and rubbed the back of his tight neck. “She’s a beautiful woman. I struggle with my dragon when I’m around her. It would be better for me to avoid that kind of contact with her.”

  “Tee will need you with her.”

  The strain in his voice jerked Leo’s eyes toward his. “What aren’t you telling me?”

  “Come inside the lodge. I would not have the wind carry this tale to my enemies.” The Chief turned toward the sweat lodge and stood silently in prayer before sliding behind the flap and entering.

  Leo followed. Why would Tee need him to protect her against her own tribe?