{You must not let her bite you. She will try, and the young of our kind are fast. Be very careful.}
Some kind of poison in the bite. He'd never thought about how a small dragon could kill prey. With the big ones, the answer was obvious. But he'd never visualized baby dragons. They always showed up in the fairytale full-grown.
Gritting his teeth, he stepped into the kitchen and started checking cupboards, opening each door as if it had one of those coiled up spring snakes inside, ready to pop out at him and bite. And he kept finding just what you'd expect to find in any kitchen, a lot of pots and pans and flour bins and china and glassware. Even cornflakes in an incongruous supermarket box.
No traps, no dragons. Khe'sha had told him Shen would be about as long as one of David's legs, a fair-sized black iguana with razor teeth, so she could be hidden almost anywhere. Smells teased his nose, garlic and onions and ginger and the herbs, and something else. Something chemical, like hospital disinfectant. It was faint and diffuse, as if it permeated the space rather than centered on a single leaking bottle.
He shook his head, and moved on. Dining room, a table and chairs and sideboard full of silver and crystal, the kind of high-rent stuff Maureen had inherited with her castle. Oriental rug, probably worth more than Jo's whole apartment, on a polished oak floor. Fireplace, with two graceful silver bud vases holding red roses on the mantel, and a cracked hearthstone.
Still no traps or dragons, though. The normalcy of it all felt doubly creepy.
A stair led up from beside the dining room, and he put that off for later. The last room was a study, old oak roll-top desk and a couple of matching four-drawer files, an oak table with a laptop computer and stacked manila folders waiting. The file drawers weren't even locked. And they didn't hold any poisonous iguanas.
This lady doesn't expect random visitors, that's for sure. Either that, or her twisty little mind leaves obvious stuff lying around as camouflage for what she's really hiding.
He paused and shuffled through the files lying on the table. The first held a stapled sheaf of something typed in Cyrillic, he couldn't tell if it was Russian or Serbian or whatever, with a big red rubber stamp across the top. Another, in hand-written dancing calligraphy that might be Arabic, with stamps and marginal notes in the same script. Another in Chinese or Japanese or Korean, all those ideograms looked the same to him. The constant feature seemed to be bold rubber stamps across the heads.
He tried a fourth and finally struck English. And the stamp said "Most Secret."
He was reading the first page, the "executive summary," but there wasn't any letterhead or organization given, not even an author's name. And words jumped out at him, scattered in the text, words like "anthrax" and "smallpox" and "influenza" and "plague." Discussions of vectors and virulence, morbidity and mortality, incubation periods and projected course of infection.
He shuddered. He wasn't sure why, but some kinds of mass-produced death seemed uglier than others. Why was poison gas a worse way to die than napalm? What made anthrax worse than land mines? Each could kill the unwary for generations after. Still, he wanted to wash his hands after touching the papers.
But he was looking for a baby dragon. He crossed the study off his list and climbed a twisting stair to the cottage loft. Bedroom, still prosaic, just a bed and dresser under sloping ceilings and a large mirror, mirror on the wall that offered no advice and a couple of walk-in closets with a prevailing theme of gray. Gray slacks, gray stylish suits, gray sweaters and blouses folded neatly on the shelves. The labels were worth their weight in gold, but Fiona didn't seem to give her designers much leeway on the colors. Even the damned underwear in her dresser was gray silk.
A smaller bedroom sat on the other side of the stairway, air stale, bed stripped down to mattress cover, obviously unused. He checked it anyway. No dragon. And that was that, the whole cottage.
No lab, either. Maureen said Fiona had bragged about her lab, about having Brian's sperm frozen in liquid nitrogen in her lab. Part of her kinky Arthurian bit of having her brother's baby. She did genetics research and biochemistry as a sideline to her trade in poisoned apples.
David froze, staring out the bedroom's dormer window at nothing. Genetics research. Lab. Those creepy papers on the study table. Stealing a baby dragon, with a bite that wasn't really poison, the way Khe'sha described it. More like infectious, if it took days to kill.
And the fox had warned of an evil that was dangerous to all that suckled young. To all mammals.
He twisted his way back down the winding stairs, eyes unfocused, thinking, running his fingers along the cold rough plaster to steer his body back to the kitchen. A microwave oven, a refrigerator, a freezer out in the pantry, all of them shiny new Energy Star high-efficiency models. A few compact fluorescent lights, that laptop computer.
He found his way out the back door, by the pantry, and studied the scene. Three long bays of photocells soaked up power from the sun. He'd been to a Show-and-Tell at the electric company's "Energy House." They ran a whole suburban family's electric toys off a single bank of cells that size. Fiona's shed held racks full of clear-sided lead-acid batteries, deep-cycle stuff, with an inverter that probably cost as much as a new Mercedes.
This woman uses a lot of electricity.
Where?
He pulled the main switch, and an alarm started to ring in the cottage. Apparently Fiona wanted to know if the power went out. Something out of sight needed continuous power.
"My friend, how good are you at digging?"
* * *
Dragons were very good at digging. David had watched a woodchuck remodeling its burrow, once. Dirt
