I stumbled back with a squawk. When I’d recovered my footing, I flicked him off and stomped back up the hallway-turned-homeless-shelter, hating this place more than ever. Seriously, why did the Gameskeeper—of all people!—have unbribable guards? We were at the bottom of the Underground. Everything was for sale down here!
“That’s probably your answer,” my father said when I tried to complain to him. “If you live in a place where no one is trustworthy, you can’t afford to take on people you don’t fully control through means stronger than money. Also, if the Gameskeeper truly is as well-connected as Mr. Kos suggests, he’s undoubtedly bribed every security guard, doorman, and shift manager in this city already. Why would he risk the same weakness in his own people?”
“I hate it when you’re right,” I groaned, pausing at the door that led back into the tourist area to figure out what I was going to do next. Bribing a guard had been my best option. I was good at breaking into abandoned apartments, but well-guarded facilities were a whole other animal. If Nik were here, I was sure he’d have a solution, but he wasn’t, and I didn’t know what to do.
“It isn’t fair!” I cried, kicking the filthy wall. “I finally have money to throw around, and it’s not good for anything!”
“It’s not a huge loss,” my father said. “Even if you did get in to see him, you saw how many darts he took. He probably won’t even wake up until tomorrow, so you’re not out anything.”
“Just because he can’t see me doesn’t mean I don’t want to see him! If Mom got knocked out, wouldn’t you still want to go to her?”
“I would never allow your mother to be harmed,” Yong said reflexively. Then he sighed, reaching up to pinch the bridge of his smoky nose. “If it’s really that important to you, I can go and see.”
I gaped at him. “How?”
My father gave me a flat look. “I’m a ghost, remember?” he said, waving his transparent hand through my face. “And unless there’s another dragon hidden in there, you’re the only one who can see me. I don’t think it’s boasting to say I can walk through a door and check on an unconscious human.”
I totally hadn’t even considered that. “Thank you!” I cried, jumping up to hug him.
My arms passed right through him, but my father looked touched just the same. So much so that it took him a frustratingly long time to get moving, but I wasn’t about to push. My dad had just offered to walk into the lion’s den for me. I wasn’t going to be an actual ungrateful daughter by complaining about his speed.
Once he finally did leave, it took him forever to get back. To avoid suspicion, I waited for him in the tourist wing, sitting impatiently at a bar where I could watch the door to the back area while pretending to drink an overpriced, watered-down beer. It got so bad that the bartender eventually asked me point-blank if I’d been stood up. When I told her I was just waiting for someone, she gave me a pitying look and offered me a free refill, which was really nice of her.
I probably did look horribly pathetic. It was now an hour after the fight. Most everyone was gone, and the raging magic was finally starting to drop back to where it had been when I’d first come in, robbing me of my legitimate work-excuse to be here. Even so, I hung on as long as I could. When the cleaning staff had turned up every chair but mine, I finally gave in and left, tipping the nice bartender a fifty as I shuffled out to the deserted ticketing area to keep waiting. I’d just sat down on a bench next to an overflowing trash can when my father suddenly appeared beside me.
“Finally!” I said, hopping back to my feet. “How is he?”
“Exactly as I said he would be,” Yong replied irritably. “Out cold. There was a metal woman tending to him.”
I nodded rapidly. “That must be Rena. She’s his cyber doc.”
“She was doctoring a lot more than his cyberwear.” My father’s face grew dour. “Mr. Kos’s status is…not good. Apparently, whatever they did to force him into his ‘Mad Dog’ state took an enormous toll on his body. Not surprising considering he was performing inhuman feats of strength, but there’s a lot of tissue damage. His doctor did not seem optimistic.”
I sat back down on the bench. That was worse than I’d been expecting. I knew I needed to thank my father for investigating, but it was hard to speak. Of all my worries, the idea that Nik had been actually, physically hurt hadn’t even entered my head. Why should it? He hadn’t taken a single blow, which made all of this even worse in hindsight. Nik hadn’t gotten hurt because of any lack of skill on his part. They’d hurt him deliberately as part of the show. He was suffering for no reason at all.
“There’s more,” my father said, making my head snap back up. “When I was inside, I smelled another dragon.”
“Which one?”
“I couldn’t tell,” he growled, frustrated. “It was too faint, and my senses aren’t what they should be yet. But there is definitely a dragon somewhere in that arena.”
That was news to me, but I couldn’t be totally surprised. The arena was a horrible place, and dragons and horrible tended to go hand in claw. “I bet it’s the Gameskeeper.”
“That was my thought as well,” Yong said. “But we both saw him, and he didn’t look like a dragon. No dragon has a human form that old and plain looking.”
“It has to be him, though,” I said. “Can you imagine a dragon taking orders from a human?”
From the look on his face, Yong could not. “Dragon or no, there’s little point in pushing further,”
