'I thank you for your time and your attention and your courtesy,' he said, bowing to the room. The movement made the jacket bob up and down; Draycos bobbed right along with it. 'Unfortunately,' he continued in a sterner voice, 'I can't say as much for my amazing electromechanical assistant Draycos. Draycos, you have been decidedly disrespectful to me tonight.'
Draycos leaned his head straight back so that his face was upside down to Jack's. 'I?' he asked.
'Yes, you,' Jack said firmly. 'And that last trick was the final straw. I'm afraid I'm going to have to fire you.'
There were yips of protest from the whelps. 'No, no, I've made up my mind,' Jack told them. 'Draycos can no longer be my assistant. And when a magician fires an assistant, where do you suppose that assistant goes?'
He let the whelps shout a few possibilities. As they did so, Draycos slid his right front paw along the top of the jacket to rest on Jack's hand. He was onto the plan, all right. 'Nope,' Jack said shaking his head at the whelps. 'As a matter of fact, when a magician fires his assistant, he goes into thin air!'
With a twist of his wrist, he flipped the coat over the top of Draycos's head. There was a brief surge of weight on his right forearm—
He let go of the jacket, letting it drop empty to the floor.
The whelps gasped. For another second there was stunned silence; and then, to Jack's relief, came the loudest burst of Wistawki applause yet. 'Once again, my friends, I thank you,' Jack said over the finger-snapping, bowing low three times. On his third bow, he retrieved the jacket from the floor.
Preenoffneoff was waiting for him at the door leading from the room. 'An impressive show,' the Wistawk said quietly. 'Fully as impressive as if you had been invited.'
'What do you mean?' Jack asked, trying to sound puzzled, his heart starting to speed up. After knocking himself out for an hour up there, surely Preenoffneoff wasn't going to make trouble for him. Was he?
'You came to our balcony to hide,' Preenoffneoff said. 'Don't deny it. Randorneoff told me.'
Jack felt his heart sink. He'd seen the drunk Wistawk come in from the balcony half an hour ago, but he hadn't realized he'd talked to anyone. He was in trouble, all right. 'Well...' he stalled, searching frantically for something to say.
'I trust you are safe now?'
It took Jack a moment to change mental gears. 'I hope so, yes. And I apologize for breaking into your home.'
The Wistawk waved the words away. 'An impressive show,' he said again, pressing a small velvet pouch into Jack's hand. 'Go in peace and merriment.'
'Thank you,' Jack said, bowing again as he fingered the pouch. It was heavy, and the contents clinked slightly as he shifted them. High-value coins, he hoped. 'May your family rest in joy and contentment.'
The evening mealtime had passed while they were inside entertaining the Wistawki, and more pedestrians had now appeared strolling the streets. Not surprisingly, most of them were Wistawki, chattering together as they enjoyed the night air. Picking a direction leading away from the spaceport, Jack headed out, keeping to the shadows as much as he could without looking obvious about it.
'Where are we going?' Draycos asked softly from his shoulder.
'There's a small airfield south of the city,' Jack said. 'Hopefully, we now have enough money to hire a plane.'
'Where will the Essenay will be waiting?'
'At a regional spaceport about half a continent away,' Jack told him. 'If Uncle Virge wasn't able to sneak back in under a different ID, he'll have gone on to a planet called Aldershot. In that case, I'll have to find a job somewhere until I can make enough money to get us there.'
'Perhaps you should continue as a performer,' Draycos suggested. 'I was quite impressed by your skill.'
'Thanks, but I'll stick with something simpler,' Jack said dryly. 'Like maybe heavy load lifting. Keeping an audience on the hook that way is a little too much like what I used to do.'
He glanced down at his shoulder. 'Speaking of which, you did pretty good yourself. Especially the juggling. When did you learn to do that?'
'When I was young,' Draycos said. 'It was a skill my older brother had, and which I very much wanted to master.
'No kidding,' Jack said, feeling a twinge of the emptiness he'd always felt when someone mentioned brothers or sisters. 'How many brothers do you have?'
'I had just the one brother,' Draycos said. 'I also have three sisters.'
'Big family,' Jack said. 'Me, I was an only child. So he taught you how to juggle, huh?'
'He assisted, but I mainly taught myself,' the dragon said. 'I wished to surprise and impress him.'
'I'll bet you did,' Jack said. 'You're darn good at it.'
'Thank you,' Draycos said. 'It is odd, though, for I have always thought of it merely as a private amusement. I would never have expected it to prove a useful skill.'
'Sort of backwards from me,' Jack said. 'Everything I did back there I learned for scamming or stealing or conning. I never thought it would be a way to just amuse people.'
They walked in silence for another block. 'It does not seem to me that your people have much of a childhood,' Draycos said at last.
Jack sighed. 'My people do all right,' he said. 'It's me who hasn't had much of a childhood. My parents died when I was three. Some sort of mining accident, I guess.'
