“And?” I prodded.

“And, I swear to God, man. There was this big, scaly thing looking back at us.”

My stomach dropped, but I fixed a grimace of contempt on my face and leaned back in the booth. “This is the info Griffin promised was reliable?” I sneered. “Some user’s drugged-out hallucination?”

“Man, it wasn’t no hallucination!” Flecks of saliva spattered the table between us at the outburst. “I swear there was this fucking huge lizard in that room. Or maybe not a lizard, but something, okay? It was big, and black, and made this hissing sound when it saw us. I even think smoke came out of its nose.”

“What did you do?”

“What do you think we did? We pissed our pants and ran. Haven’t gone back since.”

“Huh.” I quirked a brow at him, though my heart was racing. “Sure you didn’t see a big scary bat and think it was a monster?”

“Whatever, man.” The human scratched his arm, glaring mulishly. “I know what I saw.”

I slid to the edge of the booth, my thoughts whirling. Two new hatchlings in the city. Were they mine? Wes hadn’t gotten any messages from our safe houses; could these two have escaped the recent Order strikes sweeping the country like the plague? I’d have to find them, and quickly, before St. George did.

Glancing at the human, who watched me with a greedy, hopeful expression, I held up a couple bills. “This was worth about twenty bucks, if that,” I said, watching his face fall. “But I’ll bump it to fifty if you can do two things. Stay away from that hotel, and don’t tell anyone about this, ever. Think you can do that?”

“Sure, man.” The junkie shrugged. “Whatever you want. No one else believed me, anyway.”

Alarm flickered, and I narrowed my eyes. “No one else? How many did you already tell?”

He cringed and scratched his neck. “No one, man,” he mumbled, not looking at me. “I didn’t tell no one.”

He was lying, but I couldn’t dwell on that now. Throwing the cash on the table, I rushed out and looked around for a taxi. If there were hatchlings in this city, rogues or runaways, I had to find them. Especially with St. George on the move, looking for me. They could easily get caught in the cross fire, and then it would be on my head if more innocent kids were murdered by the Order.

I had to get to them first. But as I stood there on the corner, cursing the taxis that cruised blissfully by, my phone buzzed, making me wince. The only people who had this number were Ember and Wes, and I’d told them to call only in emergencies.

Bracing myself, I pulled the phone out of my jeans and held it to my ear. “Ember?”

“Not quite, mate.” Wes’s voice was taut with anger and disgust. My gut churned, and I closed my eyes.

“What happened?”

“Your bloody hatchling,” was the peevish reply, “is what happened. I can’t find her, or the soldier, anywhere. You’d better get back here, Riley. Before something else blows up in our faces.”

Ember

You’re not supposed to be doing this.

I shoved the little voice aside as I descended the final escalator to the casino floor. It was truly another world down here: colored lights, ringing bells, an air of chaos and excitement that was lacking in my empty hotel room. Just what I needed to take my mind off…everything. I didn’t want to think about Talon or St. George. I didn’t want to remember Lilith’s training, or Dante’s betrayal. I didn’t want to think about Riley, or this sudden, crazy longing for the human standing beside me. I didn’t want to feel any of that. For a few hours, I wanted to turn off my mind and forget everything.

Garret, looking even less enthused as we stepped off the escalator onto the carpeted floor, did his normal crowd-scanning thing while talking to me. “Where to first?”

Good question. I’d never been to Vegas before, though I’d seen plenty of commercials and several movies that featured the famed City of Sin. They all showed Las Vegas in the same light: an almost mythical city where you could make your fortune in a few hours, or lose everything just as quickly. To our kind, that concept of instant wealth was intriguing, almost intoxicating. I might’ve been a hatchling, on the run from the organization and St. George, but I was still a dragon.

Spotting a row of bright slot machines along the wall, I smiled and tugged Garret’s sleeve. “This way,” I told him and started toward the twinkling lights. “That looks easy enough. Let’s see how fast you can lose a dollar to penny slots.”

* * *

Answer: about thirty seconds, the first ten spent figuring out how to make the machine work. Modern-day slot machines, I discovered, didn’t require you to pull the “arm” on their side down. In fact, the arm was just for decoration now. Everything was automatic, which meant you pressed a button and watched the pictures of apples and bells and sevens spin around for a few seconds before they came to a stop—always unmatched—and the screen announced that you had lost.

“Dammit,” I muttered, after I’d fed a third dollar into the side of the machine and lost it almost as quickly. “That was my last single.” I looked to the soldier, standing vigilant at my side like an alert guard dog. I didn’t think he’d taken his eyes off the crowds once. “Hey, Garret, you don’t happen to have any loose change weighing you down, do you?”

He gave me a split-second glance, the corner of his lip curling up as he went back to surveying the floor. “I thought dragons liked to hoard their wealth,” he said in a low voice. “Not throw it away at slot machines.”