No one has it.
For me, that was magic. I wasn't about to eat the girl, but I was sorely tempted to keep her for as long as I could. Human right and decency required that I, eventually, let her go. Yet I wondered if it would be possible to keep her a little longer than she wished.
"Did you enjoy the flight?"
She blinked at me. "It's not something I have a lot of experience with. You don't exactly spend every day on the back of a dragon."
"You missed the question. Did you enjoy it? And would you want to fly again at some point?"
Her eyes lit up and I knew I had her. She held the future of the eggs in her hands, yet I could bribe her with this. It was something she could get nowhere else.
Well.
The other dragons could offer her the same. Yet, I somehow doubted that they would. I looked out at the dawning morning and sighed. "You've gotten no rest. You should skip work today and come with us. We can try the eggs again once you've slept, though I believe I'm the one missing some crucial ingredient."
"What, you think you forgot something in your own ritual?" she asked.
Her tone was light, gentle. Most would have been cruel. "It is possible. As I've said; eggs are rare enough that I am no expert in the hatching of them. In truth, this would be the first nest I have hatched in a very long time."
It wasn't entirely a lie, I excused myself. I had been present when Mother had hatched the nest before this one, though I had been too young to do much to help. I strained to remember the words the wizard said, the way that he mimicked my mother's movements. I knew there was fire involved. I remembered the smoke from the candles.
The rest was lost to time.
"Could you ask someone about it?"
"Not without endangering the nest. The only female dragon I trusted was my mother-"
"Why not ask her?"
I couldn't yell at her, but I wanted to recoil. I wanted to leave the room, go to my bedroom, and lock the door. There is a silly thing that humans do when they are upset. They close their eyes and count to ten. I counted to fifty in short order and still tore a new hole in the armrest of my chair. "You cannot ask the dead favors, Olivia. That is beyond even my capability."
"I'm so sorry," she said, but it sounded as if she meant it.
She was not the first human who had questioned me about my family. I typically told them it was none of their business or I explained that my family had died in a tragic accident. Few of those who did business with me came to realize that my nestmates were employed by me.
The company, thankfully, was very good at running itself. They knew I was distracted attaining the opals that had been found on the property. No calls, no curiosities, had come through for us throughout the past few days. All the better that the company maintain a certain distance for the moment. If we were somehow identified by the security guards, we may require a short sale of the company for the betterment of it. Of course, we had plans and procedures for that sort of thing.
There was a reason Vadriq had stayed home to watch over a sleeping child.
"My mother died a while back, too," Olivia said.
I frowned. "What happened?" Humans were often short-lived but Olivia was too young to have lost a mother through natural means, by my measure.
"It's the reason I distanced myself from this whole community. She tried spells instead of actual medicine. It didn't work out for her in the end and I abandoned my spell craft," she looked up at me and sighed. "It's hard to practice something that you don't believe in, when belief is one the major factors that makes it work."
My frown deepened. "But you believe in your magic now?"
"I don't know. Everything that's happened in the past few days; it's crazy. One day I'm busy digging up whatever we can find at the new Fontaine factory, next thing I know I'm swept up by a bunch of dragons, stealing from the only people who would give me a job-"
"No one else cared to hire you?"
Olivia got up and began to pace the room. I watched her curiously as she spoke. "Others were willing to hire me. With my ass and my legs? Yeah, sure, I could've found work anywhere that needed a stripper. But I didn't want to work like that. Mom did, when I was little. I wanted something more..."
"Safe?" I suggested. There were hazards in her work, surely, but few that involved drunken men following her to her car after work hours.
She paused and looked back at me. "Oh, fuck."
"Indeed."
"But I'm a human."
I shrugged. "You certainly seem to believe you are. I would assume it. You did hatch an egg, which requires your humanity be intact. Simply wanting to be safe doesn't make you an omega, though the more I get to know you the more I see omega tendencies in you. The way you move, the lack of a desire for something flashy-"
"I'm not the most motherly person I know," Olivia said, wrapping an arm around herself.
"Not all omegas become parents," I said, which drew a shocked expression from her. The arm dropped and I continued. "The vast majority do.
