Page 24
“A dragon, a vampire, and a demon,” one of the others added.
“You wouldn’t happen to be traveling with anyone like that?” Chatty asked.
“Oh uh, me? Nope.”
“You see anyone else here? Know any other dragons?” Chatty pushed away from the counter and sauntered toward me. “Mr. Skrinde wants a word . . . about his dead son.” His smiled thinned, making his face serious. “You know anything about that?”
“Oh, that’s sad, but uhm . . . it’s not me, no . . . I’m just going to the restroom—”
The TV piped up again with that interview. This time the beginning part, which I’d missed earlier.
“Everyone’s interested in the most popular man around town right now, and that’s Adam Vex. Here with us today on SFNA’s morning news. Adam . . . Can I call you Adam? . . . How do you feel about these accusations of murder—”
“Wow,” I chuckled. “That guy sure looks a lot like me. But I’m here and he’s there, so he can’t be me. Anyway. Really gotta pee . . . so . . . I’ll be right back.” I dashed for the back door.
“Stop that dragon!”
I charged through the door, shot down a corridor, and plowed into the restroom. No windows. No way out. My alarmed face looked back at me from the mirrors above the basins.
“Okay, I guess we’re doing this the dragon way.” I balled my fingers into a fist and hoped the wall was thin.
CHAPTER 9
Breaking the wall turned out to be less of an issue than the trolls chasing after me. After scrambling over the rubble I’d made, I sprinted across the lot and yanked open the pickup truck’s rear cab door. “Uh guys? We have a problem.”
“Is it an Adam Vex and the seven dwarves chasing him kinda problem?” Zee said, spotting the problem through the windshield, charging fast toward us.
“Uh, there’s nine,” I panted from the back seat. “And they’re trolls, Zee, not dwarves.”
“Fuck, right. Wow, they look angry. Like cute angry yard ornaments.”
“With guns,” Victor added.
“Uh, guys, actually, that’s not our problem.”
“It looks rather like a problem,” Victor said, eyeing the incoming trolls.
The lead troll pulled a gun and fired at the truck. A neat little hole appeared in the windshield.
“Yikes!” Zee squeaked. “Drive, vampire! Like your fangs depend on it.”
Victor gunned the truck’s rattling engine and lurched us out onto the road. But the mafia trolls changed direction, heading for their much faster and shinier trucks.
“Can’t you eat them?” Zee asked me. He glanced behind me, through the back window.
“Not near the gas station, unless you enjoy out of control explosions?”
“Okay, so . . . we lure them away,” he thought aloud. “Back out into the leech-infested neverglades and you can eat ’em there? They look crunchy.”
“I would suggest that eating every problem we encounter is not going to help when we plead our innocence to Agent Leomaris regarding the unfortunate trail of murders we’ve already left behind.”
“Alleged murders,” I added for clarity.
“Some folks were definitely murdered,” Zee also added, for even more clarity.
I eyed the string of trucks in the side mirror. Their high beams latched on and lit us up. “This Skrinde guy really wants our attention. Maybe we should trying talking to him?”
Victor’s side-eye suggested he perhaps wasn’t too keen on that idea. “Talk to the drug lord whose son I killed?”
