Descended from Dragons: an Urban Fantasy (Moonlight Dragon Book 1) Read Free Page B

again.
    "Anne Moody…today you'll meet the love of your life…"
    "…too bad he'll try to kill you."
    The cameos in the case were all looking up at me from their velvet beds with nasty little smiles on their pretty Victorian faces.
    Mean girls, each and every one of them. But were they only being catty, or were they foretelling the future?
    "Huh, that's weird."
    I looked to Melanie, who was staring at the gargoyle statue.
    "What's weird?" I asked.
    She pointed at the gargoyle. "I could've sworn that thing just blinked!"

Chapter 2
     
     
     
     
     
    Thirteen hours later, I was still thinking about what Melanie had said. The gargoyle wasn't alive, of course. She and I had stared at it for a solid thirty minutes and only succeeded in drying out our eyeballs. But the feeling that had risen in me when she'd said that it had blinked still clung to me hours later: the sense that my life had just taken a strange turn.
    Not that anything was obvious so far. Moonlight had so far fielded the usual mix of curious tourists looking for bargains and dead broke gamblers looking to sell. And then there were guys like the one who walked in the moment I yawned. He was an anomaly.
    "Give me something lucky," he demanded as he stopped on the other side of the counter.
    I didn't roll my eyes—even though I wanted to—because this was Vegas; superstition was woven thickly into the magickal fabric of the city. Good fortune could be as much about luck as it was the conscious aligning of magickal energies. With the Oddsmakers in control, Las Vegas was one of the most powerful magickal cities in the world. The Oddsmakers decided who won and who lost in gambling, sports, and, some claimed, the game of life.
    I smiled the vacant smile of retail. "A lucky charm, you mean?"
    The man nodded emphatically.  His eyes were bloodshot and he reeked of B.O. and cigarette smoke. It was a good guess that he'd just spent the previous ten hours gambling at a table or on a slot machine. He also possessed that faint but unmistakable aura of desperation that told me he was losing his ass and had no idea how to pull himself out of the tailspin. No idea except shopping for a lucky charm, anyway. That's when you knew you've really hit bottom.
    "Fucking dealers are taking all my money," he muttered. "Casinos cheat, I tell you."
    "Uh huh." I'd heard variations before and no amount of my insisting casinos wouldn't risk losing their gaming licenses could make a guy like this feel differently. "Luckily for you," I said, my smile now mischievous, "I happen to have quite a few lucky charms."
    There was one other person in the shop, an older woman with light red hair, but she seemed content to browse. I led Mr. Big Shot Gambler to a glass display case that held all the junk that people pawned en masse when they'd run out of anything more substantial to sell. I looked over the collection of fountain pens, money clips, gold nugget key chains and other gift items before opening the case and pulling out a black velvet tray.
    "The man who brought this in only wanted to pawn it, not sell it, so it might not be here for long," I said as I picked up a silver-plated pin depicting a pair of wings with a skull in the center. "The reason he wants it back, and the reason it's lucky, is because this survived both an airplane crash and a motorcycle accident."
    I turned it over.
    "You can see on the back where the metal melted. Right here. That's from the plane crash. The plane caught on fire. And this scratch here is from when the man was struck by a car while he was riding his motorcycle. He survived both incidents with only minor injuries."
    Mr. Big Shot Gambler looked skeptical. "If it saved his life, why the hell did he pawn it?"
    "I guess he figured life might not be worth living if you owe forty grand to bookies. He pawned just about everything he owned to pay off that debt."
    "So this piece of garbage will save my life but it's useless when it comes to gambling." Mr. Big Shot