"Would it be crass of me to suggest you are ready to negotiate?" Eskal asked, his voice a purr.
My fists clenched. "Yes, it would."
"Then perhaps I suggest that you come to me with a problem only I may solve for you. Strange, isn't it, how fate mirrors a pairing together."
"Fuck you."
"The whelp is easily managed by those who understand him. Though I must admit, I doubt he would be willing to take food from any of us. He seems to have imprinted on you; a common issue when whelps hatch."
I glared up at him. "That's what Nariti said. That I'm probably stuck with the tiny jerk. If you can just tell me what to do with him, I would-" God, the next part was like chewing glass. "-appreciate what you can do for me."
Eskal sat back in his seat, peering down at me. So far down his nose that I expected that it felt not too unlike what knights of old must have encountered when a dragon appeared in their path. Was I the damsel in distress? Or the witch who trapped her there? Either way, everything was trash. But if I was going to end up helping them anyway, they could at least relieve some of the debt that kept me in a 1-bedroom studio with two other people.
"You want us to help you."
"I'm kind of stuck with that, yes."
The dragon tilted his head at me. "Help for help. You assist us in gathering our eggs, hatching them, and we find a way to add this whelp to the hatch. You're free from him. Is it a deal?"
"No."
He twitched as if I'd slapped him. "No?"
"No," I repeated. "You were willing to give me money to help you hatch your nest before. I could always sell the whelp to some kind of sideshow after I break his neck and shove him in some formaldehyde for a while. I want money enough to pay off my debts and I want my powers gone. If anyone can do that, you can. And you take the whelp."
He tented his hands over his stomach and watched me, silent still. He was a businessman through and through. I didn't know anything about business, but I recognized the motion from all those goofy cartoons I used to watch when I was a kid. Finally, he spoke. "If you maintain a good will status with our flight throughout the capture and hatching of our eggs, we will pay your debts. We will take the whelp. And we will remove your powers. But only if you keep your mouth shut about us."
"Why would I try to convince anyone in my professional life that dragons exist?" I said, baffled.
Those fingers tapped together one right after another, like he needed to boot up enough energy to answer my question. "If you were to find out that dragons existed with absolute fact, the scientific world would fall to your feet. You would have anything you wanted from them, with them."
"The only dragons I care about are the ones people mistook dinosaurs for hundreds of years ago," I said. "I don't want to be anybody special. I just want to work a nice 9-to-5 in the dirt, have enough cash to take care of my mom's hospital bills and school, and retire when I'm 65. It's not a lot."
"Your mother's hospital bills?"
His hands dropped. I caught the whelp before it decided to make its way out of the towel again. "My mom died a few years back. She was sick as a dog before she went because she tried a bunch of bullshit spell work to try to fix herself instead of just letting the doctors work on her."
"Did she make any deals?" Eskal asked.
The nerve of that big son of a bitch. I bristled. "She made all kinds of deals with all sorts of shit that didn't exist. And none of it saved her in the end. She still died in the fucking hospital without any of you giving a damn about her."
I choked back tears as the hated words came out of me. Mom had been across the country when she went downhill. I'd talked to her every night on the phone, but she'd already been unconscious when I'd gotten there. Because the fairies couldn't save someone who was real when they weren't, I never got to say goodbye. I never got to tell her that I loved her one last time; even though she was wrong, even though she'd bought in to all of the witchy bullshit-
Even as I held a dragon whelp tight in his bundle, I rejected the idea of magic. I had tripped. I'd put my hands on that egg and hatched it. I'd been the one who did that; me. And I was still denying that any of that world existed as I sat there talking to a dragon about repeating the gesture.
I tried to get a hold of myself, but I couldn't. A tear dripped free, then another. I bowed my head, sad and guilty and angry all at once. Maybe it was because of the lack of sleep, but my shoulders trembled as I tried to silence anything that could be misconstrued as a weakness by the monster in front of me.
"They enjoy raw meat and something sparkly to keep their attention, when you have other things to do."
Eskal was on the ground with me when I looked up. "What?"
"The whelp. Raw meat, primarily red. Buy the cubed stew meat from the grocery store to begin with. He may decide to char it, but it is unlikely he will. Let him eat his fill. Give him a litter box, much like you would a cat," Eskal instructed, offering me a handkerchief. "He
