“Okay,” I told my unconscious father as I hauled the crate of liquor into the bedroom. “Let’s do this.”
As the DFZ had suggested, I put out the red plastic cups first. She hadn’t specified how they were to be arranged, so I just placed them around my dad in a circle, doing my best to keep the spacing as neat and even as possible. When the whole fifty-pack was down, I grabbed a bottle at random and started pouring, filling each cup to the brim in what I hoped would be interpreted as reverent silence.
By the time I was done, I understood why the DFZ had given me mid-shelf booze. Filling all those cups had taken thirteen bottles in total. By the time I finished, the smell of booze was so strong in the room that I was having trouble breathing. I couldn’t exactly open a window thanks to the whole floating-in-a-mind-destroying-nothingness situation, though, so I just tried to move quickly, stacking the empty bottles neatly along the wall in the hopes that the Spirit of Dragons enjoyed order as much as other dragons did. My father certainly loved for things to be extravagantly neat. He probably would have loved this as well if not for the insulting cheapness of the booze. Again, I really hoped the DFZ knew what she was doing. The setup I’d just made looked more appropriate to summoning the Spirit of College Binge Drinking than dragons. I just prayed she wasn’t insulted. If I got eaten over bad booze in plastic cups, I was going to be really pissed off.
Done was done though. The libations had certainly been poured. I would have offered prayers as well if I’d thought the Spirit of Dragons cared about the opinion of humans. The chance of accidentally insulting her was too high, though, so I just settled in to wait.
After ten minutes of nothing, I decided to try the prayer thing. Dragons always loved it when you got on your knees, right? So I got down on mine, bowing over my dad with my hands pressed together. Please, I thought, trying my best to broadcast the words through my supposed megaphone soul. Please, great spirit. Please, please, please.
As prayers went, it wasn’t the most poetic, but I was counting on sincerity to make up for what I lacked in eloquence. I wasn’t even sure what language the Spirit of Dragons spoke. I was contemplating trying again in Korean and Cantonese just to be sure I was covering my bases when I realized the room had gotten uncomfortably warm.
My eyes popped open in alarm only to instantly slam shut again as sweat poured down my face into them. I wasn’t sure when it had happened, but my bedroom was suddenly hot as a furnace. It also felt unusually crowded, and when I finally got my shirt up to wipe the stinging sweat out of my eyes, I saw why.
There was a dragon made of fire sitting practically on top of my dad, a red plastic cup pinched delicately between her burning claws. All the other cups I’d put out were already empty and scattered across the floor, their shiny plastic sides blistered and warped from the heat. She drained the final cup as I watched, tossing the cheap liquor back with a gulp of greedy satisfaction. When it, too, was empty, she tossed the melting cup away and sat back on her haunches to flash me a grin full of sharp, flaming teeth.
“Hello, mortal,” the god said in a sweet, deadly voice. “You libated?”
Chapter 2
I bowed so fast my forehead smacked into the floor. “Great dragon!” I gasped, not even realizing I’d said the words in Korean until they were out. I started to sweat harder. Panicking in front of a dragon was the worst thing you could do. Best-case scenario, the fiery god would find my fear amusing and try to scare me more. Worst case, she’d see it as a prey reaction and eat me.
In my defense, I hadn’t actually expected this to work. I mean, what kind of dragon—or spirit, for that matter—came down for offerings of strip-mall liquor-mart swill served in red plastic cups? I would have considered it beneath my dignity to reply to such an invitation, and I wasn’t even immortal. Or dignified. But while none of this made sense to me, the Spirit of Dragons was most definitely here, and from the way the tip of her fiery tail was twitching, she was starting to get annoyed.
“Would you get up?” the god snapped. “Not that I don’t appreciate a good grovel, but it’s impossible to hear what you’re saying when you’re talking to the floor like that.”
“Sorry, Great Dragon,” I whispered, pushing myself up so that I was sitting on my knees.
“Quite all right,” the fiery dragon said benevolently. “You’re only mortal, so I don’t hold it against you. Now let’s have a look.”
She lowered her flaming head, which was so tall I wasn’t entirely sure how it fit inside my bedroom. There was definitely some space bending going on, because now that I was looking straight at her, there was absolutely no way she could be contained by such a small room. We were inside a magical apartment floating in a void, though, so a dragon god cramming her fiery body into somewhere it shouldn’t technically fit was hardly the weirdest thing going on.
“My, my,” the dragon spirit purred. “You’re quite the package, aren’t you?” She breathed in deep through her nostrils. “Polite, off-the-charts magical potential, good facial symmetry, and you’re a Shaman! That’s a nice change. Haven’t seen one
