Dragon's Luck: Dragon Shifter Paranormal Romance (Shifter Agents Book 3) Read online

  Dragon’s Luck

  Shifter Agents #3

  Lauren Esker

  Dragon’s Luck

  Published by Icefall Press, May 2016

  Copyright ©Layla Lawlor/Lauren Esker 2016

  All Rights Reserved

  Table of Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Epilogue: Seattle

  Also by Lauren Esker

  Keep reading for a special preview

  Chapter One

  Fifty miles off the coast of Washington State, Special Agent Jennifer Cho clung upside-down to the ceiling of a card room on a floating casino boat. As cigarette smoke curled up into her eyes, she wondered if geckos could get lung cancer.

  The answer, she thought, was probably no. Fast shifter healing should be able to deal with it. Actually ... could shifters get cancer at all? She'd known a few shifters with chronic health issues—diabetes, for one. But cancer had to be rare ...

  Focus.

  The trouble was, Jen was bored, and she didn't handle boredom well. Below her, the poker game went on like a form of slow torture, in the lazy flip of a card, the laconic nudge of chips. She had found it interesting for the first hour, and tolerable for the next few, as wiped-out players dropped out of the game and the crowd in the card room shrank steadily.

  Now the only thing keeping her from dozing off, and probably falling off the ceiling into someone's drink, was watching one of the players, who currently held the deck of cards in a practiced dealer's grip.

  Most of the players in the card room were nothing to hold her interest. There were about five times as many men as women, and most of them were veteran gamblers, hard-eyed and cool. She wouldn't have bet a red cent against any one of them.

  But of the six players at the table below her, only one kept drawing her eyes, time and again.

  He was the one they called Lucky.

  He had been calmly and quietly winning all evening. Oh, sometimes he would lose a hand or two. But he always won just enough to catch up and then some. Slowly but surely, the pile of chips in front of him grew.

  He'd caught her attention the moment he walked in—and not for the reasons one might expect. There was certainly plenty about Lucky to catch the eye. His face was sharp and handsome: dark hair swept back from a high forehead, clean cheekbones and deep olive skin. And he knew he was good-looking. She could see it in his swagger, sense it in the way his green velvet jacket gaped to show a glimpse of the toned pectoral muscles rippling underneath his black silk shirt ...

  Green velvet jacket. Who wore something like that? It was like he deliberately wanted to look like a lounge lizard.

  No, none of that turned her head. Not in the slightest. The guy she'd heard the other gamblers address as Lucky Lucado caught her attention because he was a shifter, and shifters could always recognize each other. In fact, when he first stepped into the card room, she'd seen him pause, looking around, and held her small gecko body very still on the ceiling, heart pattering. Some shifters were more sensitive than others, and just her luck, he'd be aware enough to know she was in the room even without being able to see her. But as she waited and stilled and imagined herself part of the low ceiling tiles, he relaxed somewhat.

  She didn't know what he turned into, but he was definitely a shifter. There was no mistaking that flash of recognition.

  And if he was a shifter, then odds were good he was involved with the shifter drug trafficking ring she was on this boat to crack, which put him under the jurisdiction of the Special Crimes Bureau.

  And therefore, she was here to arrest him.

  ***

  Twelve hours earlier, Jen's handler for this assignment, Special Agent Avery Hollen, had seen her off at the Seattle dockside.

  "I hate knowing you can't check in."

  "I can check in if I need to," Jen pointed out, bouncing on the balls of her feet. The sharp sea breeze cut through her coat like a knife, smelling of salt and mud and freedom. "I'll just have to go human-shaped to do it. If Eva did her part, there'll be a burner phone in my supplies on board."

  Eva Kemp, the SCB's resident orca shifter, had been on the boat in early morning and had stashed a small plastic-wrapped package containing a change of clothing, a gun, Jen's badge, and a phone. If it became necessary for Jen to stop observing and take direct action, she'd have everything she needed. If not, well, she would wait and observe until the boat came back into dock.

  "Yeah, which you can't use unless you're in range of a cell tower. That's not the same as being in touch."

  "Worrywolf," she teased him. Her whole body quivered with anticipation. "Avery, they're going to cast off soon. I need to go now."

  Avery sighed and smiled slightly. Leaning on his polished wooden cane, he followed her into the narrow space between a parked delivery truck and the side of a warehouse. Avery was young—about Jen's age, just shy of thirty—but the cane was a memento of his one tour in Afghanistan, which had left him with a bum leg and a lot of memories he never quite talked about.

  In the relative security of the shadows, Avery took a plastic Ziploc bag out of his pocket and tilted the contents. Inside, a small glass vial rolled back and forth. A few droplets of transparent liquid shifted within. He held it up so it caught the light, and the clear liquid glimmered with sudden jewel tones. The bag was labeled Dragon's Tears - Sample 1.

  "Did you take that out of evidence?" Jen asked, delighted. "Avery! I didn't know you had it in you."

  "I'm going to put it back," he retorted. "I wanted you to be able to take a good last look before you get on that boat. You need to be able to recognize it if you see it."

  "Like it isn't going to be obvious. From what I hear, the street value of what you have there could be as high as ten grand. If I see anyone carrying around a bottle of water and treating it like it's worth a couple mil ..."

  "The lab still doesn't know exactly what this stuff is. For all we know, it might be transported in a different form, maybe solid or mixed with something." He handed her the bag.

  Jen dutifully looked. It still looked like water to her, or maybe something more oily, with a higher surface tension. She opened the bag and unscrewed the vial's cap, shooting Avery a challenging glance as she did so. He winced, but didn't object. Nobody in the lab had let her actually handle the stuff.

  She took a sniff. At first she thought it had no smell, at least not to her; geckoes were not good scent hounds. But no, there was something—faint, distant, floral ... and melancholy, nostalgic. It struck notes of bittersweet longing from the brass bell of her soul. She had a sudden insane urge to stick her tongue into the vial and lap up those tiny droplets like the water they resembled, to see if it would taste like it smelled ...

  Hastily, she put the cap back on. "Don't lick it," she said, handing it back to Avery.

  "Uh, thanks for the advice. I'll keep that in mind." He quirked a slight smile. "What's it smell like?"

  "Dragons," she said flippantly.

  "Well, if you meet one," Avery said dryly, "now you can reco
gnize it by smell."

  Dragons didn't exist—shifters yes, dragons no. The SCB still didn't know what the drug colloquially called Dragon's Tears was actually made out of, only that it was intoxicating and addictive, and word on the street was that it had almost miraculous healing properties. Which was where the shifter connection came in. Shifters had accelerated healing abilities, which could mean shifters were making it, or were being held prisoner and somehow used to make it. Either way, that made it an SCB problem rather than a problem for the federal drug authorities.

  Which meant she needed to get on that boat before it cast off.

  Jen looked around to be sure there was no one to see, no security cameras or tourists with cell phones. "Make sure you hang up this coat properly, Hollen," she told him. "It's wool, and it was expensive. I don't want wrinkles."

  "I'll take good care of your coat. You take good care of you."

  She didn't bother dignifying that with a response, and without waiting any longer, she shifted. She'd done this often enough to have delicate control over her shift, allowing her body to collapse down to her tiny gecko shape in a controlled fall. Coat and sweater crumpled in on her, and by the time her shift had finished, she was at the bottom of a cozy mound of body-warm clothing.

  Going out into the stiff February chill took no small measure of resolve. Avery, a gallant prince among werewolves, crouched with his bad leg thrust stiffly out in front of him and put his gloved hand down beside the pile of abandoned clothing. Jen scuttled up his sleeve and snugged herself against his wrist, under the cuff of his sweater. She felt him quiver.

  "That tickles," he murmured, bundling her clothing up in her coat. Jen's tail jerked indignantly. "Yes, I'm taking care not to leave wrinkles. I'll give it a good brushing at home, just for you."

  Jen crawled forward and poked her small head over the cuff of his leather driving glove. She watched gravel and pavement jolt past, giving way to the slatted surface of the dock.

  It would be very easy to miss her cue and plunge between the slats into the gray and icy water of Puget Sound ... but Jen was no dummy, and she'd done this particular maneuver before. Still, her gecko heart beat faster with anticipation.

  Avery paused and took out his cell phone, holding it up to his ear and bringing Jen close to his face. He wasn't actually using the phone, just using it as a pretext to talk to her, which probably meant a last-minute admonition to be careful or some other overprotective Avery thing.

  "Remember," he murmured, "if there are shifters on that boat, they'll be able to sense you, and you have no idea what kind of shifters they are. Something that eats geckos, for example. You're there to observe, and report, and not to do anything unreasonable while backup can't get to you."

  Jen poked out her tongue and jerked it back in.

  "I'll take that as 'Yes, Avery'," he said dryly, and put the cell phone away before clumping casually down the dock. His pace was slow: just a man looking at the boats, for reasons of his own. The angle allowed Jen glimpses of the boat they knew to be a floating casino, though from the outside it appeared to be nothing more than a medium-sized luxury yacht, with the name Fair Lady on the bow. Jen glimpsed a security guard at the bottom of the gangplank, and another at the top, checking people for weapons as they boarded.

  Avery gave the guard a wide berth, but his path took him past one of the passengers waiting to board, an elderly, heavyset man in a black wool coat. Avery did not quite come close enough for their sleeves to brush—but his hand swung out especially wide as he missed a step with the cane, and Jen gauged the distance and leaped. A quick flash of dock and cold air ... sticky feet on wool ... and down she went into the depths of his coat pocket.

  She could see nothing now, but she heard Avery's uneven footsteps receding. The pocket smelled overwhelmingly of wool and pipe tobacco. Jen tried not to cough. In fact, she tried not to do much of anything, because her ride was now in motion. As Jen lay still in the bottom of the pocket, the coat swayed slowly with each rolling footstep. She was nestled beside an envelope with the flap folded over. It smelled of paper and a tangy ink scent. Oh, she thought, there's money in there—just as a hand plunged into the pocket and felt around for it.

  Jen flattened herself in the bottom of the pocket as the envelope was removed and, she assumed, handed over to the guard at the bottom of the gangplank. Her ride lurched into motion again, tromping up the gangplank. Jen wished she could see. A pause, the coat shifted—arms being raised—and brisk hands patted down both coat and owner. Jen lay stiff as a dried bit of jerky, stretched out in the bottom of the pocket in the company of a tissue and a packet of pipe tobacco. Expert fingers prodded the pocket and moved on.

  And then the danger was past. The footsteps beneath her clumped onward.

  Jen unbent from her rigid posture and grasped the lining of the pocket with tiny gecko feet. One careful step at a time, she climbed until she could poke her head over the edge. The faster she got out of here, the better, but she needed a good spot where she wouldn't be stepped on. Indoors would be best; the cold was already making her faintly lethargic. She hated the Pacific Northwest climate with a passion; her gecko soul cried out for warmer, sunnier shores.

  The world looked different through gecko eyes, and her distance vision was not the best, but she thought she could pick out Avery's dark coat from the smattering of other people on the dock, and the pale splash of her coat tucked under his arm. He would stand there and watch until the boat cast off, she knew.

  Worrywolf.

  For Jen was in her element now. She didn't work with a partner, and she was never so alive as when she was undercover, away from backup, relying only on her own wits and skills.

  Jen Cho loved her friends ... but of all the people in her life that she knew, in theory, she could count on, she trusted no one but herself.

  And she liked it that way.

  Chapter Two

  "You gonna call or raise, kid?"

  Lucky glanced at his cards, a nervous tic that he knew would scream I'm a rookie to the other players at the table. With this group of middle-aged card sharks, he'd chosen to play "nervous newcomer", making his wins look like flukes as much as possible. On his own turn at the deal, he'd dealt himself a middling hand, and he planned to lose. Nothing screamed I'm cheating like winning on your own deals. He'd been doing this much too long, and too successfully, to be stupid about it.

  "Call," he said pleasantly, and shoved a handful of chips into the pot. He considered raising, but there was no need to be vulgar about it. He'd let the next hand fall as it would, he thought, and then perhaps win one; or, if ordinary luck brought him victory on the next, then it might be a good idea to lose a couple more.

  There was nothing visible to indicate they were on a boat rather than onshore—no windows, and no tells in the dark wallpaper or the baize of the table—but the lamps swayed gently, and the amber liquid in the drink glasses in front of the gamblers rolled slowly back and forth. Lucky averted his eyes from the slowly rotating shadows. It wasn't that he got seasick, precisely. Not ... as such. But he was all too aware of the vast depth of the cold dark Pacific under their feet, and he didn't quite want to stare too long at his cards, or at the table, or at any one particular spot without raising his eyes to rest them a bit and give his stomach time to settle.

  It wasn't just the motion of the boat making him queasy. That nagging sense of another had never quite gone away. He had carefully examined every person in the card room, but none of them put off the particular cold tingle that Lucky associated with others of his kind. Maybe it was someone who had shifted and then made themselves small, but he couldn't go around staring into every one of the deep shadows clustered along the baseboards ...

  And now cards were turning up around the table. Lucky flipped his, keeping his face still; he certainly didn't want to display relief when his pair of eights were trumped by three jacks across the table. Instead he watched the chips gathered in, the cards gathered up, and he made an effort
not to want, or push, or do whatever that little mental twist was that made luck—or something he liked to believe was luck—fall his way.

  There was a reason they called him Lucky.

  But he was also a good card player. And a good cheater. For a moment, like a faint echo from the past, he felt the ghostly sting of the peeled stick across his knuckles, every time he'd failed to palm a card deftly enough that his old man couldn't catch him at it.

  You get caught cheating at cards, boy, it won't be a foot-long stick of maplewood they'll hit you with. It'll be lead bullets.

  And:

  Luck won't help the stupid, boy, and it won't help anybody who won't help himself.

  But damn it, he could still feel that presence in the room, as if another shape-changer was crouched at his shoulder and breathing down his neck.

  It made him distracted. It made him stupid. He lost the next hand, and he wasn't entirely sure he'd meant to lose it. Then he lost the one after that, on a turn of the cards that was nothing other than blatant stupidity. If he'd been paying attention, he would've noticed that two of the players already had a pair showing, and all four aces were still in play—but he missed it, and he lost a pile of chips he hadn't intended to lose.

  Sting of maplewood across the knuckles.

  No supper tonight, and perhaps a beating.

  But that was only the boy he'd been, and on this night, Lucky played for much higher stakes than his own comfort.

  ***

  He has nice hands, Jen Cho thought.

  She liked to think she wouldn't have paid quite so much attention to Lucky Lucado's hands if there'd been anything else interesting to look at. But he did, damn it. Long fingers, neatly manicured nails. Dexterous hands, deft and strong, working the cards. Pickpocket's hands; magician's hands.

  She'd just bet he could work magic with those hands, all right ...

  Jen drew her eyes away from Lucado's hands and the gleam of lamplight on his black hair. Whoever had outfitted the card room seemed to be drawing on a Mississippi gaming-boat theme, even if they were thousands of miles and a hundred and fifty years from the Deep South decadence the rich wallpaper and dim golden light appeared to be aping.