“Found something.”
I jumped into the air. He’d been so quiet and hard to see in his smoke form, I’d actually forgotten he was there. Being reminded now brought my anger rushing back hot and sharp, but I was sick of feeling that way, so I pushed it aside, focusing instead on the small lump he was staring at by his feet, its rounded surface glittering dully in the glare of my headlamp.
“What’s that?”
“A silver sugar dish,” he said, scooting around to point at the tipped bowl’s heavily tarnished bottom. “Looks like a Lamerie.”
“No way.” Paul de Lamerie was one of the greatest English silversmiths who’d ever lived. His work was still prized all over the world. My expectations for this place might have been high, but there was no way my dad had just found a priceless silver treasure lying on the ground.
“Let me see that.”
“I’m not wrong,” Yong said confidently as I snatched the little footed bowl off the dusty floor. “His mark on the bottom can be forged, but there’s no counterfeiting Lamerie’s exquisite attention to detail. Just look at the tiny swirls of oak leaves on the handles. Who else in the medium could create movement like that?”
I didn’t know. I wasn’t an expert on silver, but my dad was. When it came to treasure, Yong was an expert on everything, and as deeply as I resented his company, I hadn’t spotted that bowl.
“Nice catch,” I admitted grudgingly, placing the maybe-priceless piece of silver into my bag. Then, after a long, resistant pause, I added, “See anything else?”
I shouldn’t have asked. I should have known better than to give him so much as a toe into my life again. But like I said, I’d gotten pretty lonely these last two months, especially when it came to work. The DFZ didn’t understand or appreciate any of the stuff I brought her, and Dr. Kowalski never wanted to talk about anything that wasn’t gardening or magic. But while we argued over literally everything else, my dad and I had always been able to talk treasure. Even in my current grumpiness, I wasn’t going to pass up my first chance in weeks at a real conversation on the topic that interested me most. I’d also be a fool to give up the opportunity to go treasure hunting with a dragon. Forget quotas and jobs and the fact that no one was ever going to see this stuff. My dad could sniff out valuables better than anyone alive. If there was something truly amazing hidden down here, he would find it. Surely that was worth a little suffering, especially since I was stuck with him anyway.
That greedy mindset made tolerating my father much more bearable, particularly since I was right. Between his encyclopedic knowledge of everything valuable, his supernatural ability to see in the dark, and the fact that being made of smoke meant he could pass right through obstacles that would normally be too dangerous for me to cross, Yong was a treasure-finding machine. All he had to do was look at a building to know if it had valuables and where they would be. Plus, he pointed out tons of stuff I hadn’t even known to look for, things like vintage toasters and an ugly tangle of colored glass tubes that I’d thought was a bong but was actually an epergne. I knew what an epergne was, of course, but the giant Victorian centerpieces had always been so kitschy and ridiculous, I’d never bothered to study up on them.
My dad didn’t have that blindness. This stuff wasn’t history to him. He’d lived through the periods when the things we saw as antiques had been popular, and he remembered all of it—what was good, what was bad, what was worth buying, and what wasn’t. His reptilian brain was a catalog of art and fashion trends going back thousands of years, and while his taste had always been a bit stuffy for my liking, there was no denying his eye. He could recognize a Monet even if another lesser artist had painted over it, and for someone currently employed as a treasure finder, that was gold.
I was so busy freaking out over the never-ending parade of amazing stuff he was turning up, I actually forgot that I was mad at him. For a few blissful hours, it was like we’d gone back a dozen years to the time when we’d done stuff like this for fun. It felt incredible, as if a dragon-sized weight had been lifted off my chest. So, naturally, my father had to go and send it crashing back down.
“Why do you serve her so faithfully?”
“Huh?” I asked, looking up from my pile. We’d finished our house quota thirty minutes ago and moved on to the shipping containers, the huge open bins where the DFZ threw all the little things that fell down storm drains or were tossed out of cars or otherwise didn’t filter down to her inside buildings. This was exciting in and of itself—I normally never made it to the containers!—but my good mood soured when I looked up to see my father’s scowling face.
“The DFZ,” he clarified, his voice grudging and heavy, as if the words had been building up inside him for a while. “She works you like a dog, keeping you tied up with quotas and time sheets, and yet you haven’t said a word against her. Why? Are you afraid of making her angry?”
“If that was the case, I couldn’t admit it out loud to you, could I?” I quipped. “But seriously, no. She can be pretty terrifying, but I’m not doing this out of fear. I work for the DFZ because I owe her, because she keeps me safe, and because it’s not so bad. I get free food and a roof over my head, and treasure hunting is pretty awesome even with
