Page 15 of Your Final Resting Place

Nobody can hide forever. But I’d gotten so used to being Adam the human that my future had become an uncertain blur. What if, when I was dragon again, I hurt the two people I loved the most in all the worlds? What if they didn’t want me when they saw the real me?

“Are you alright?” Victor asked. He’d twisted in the front seat to peer over his shoulder. Zee hadn’t asked, but I caught his concerned glance in the rear-view mirror.

“Yeah.” I smiled, and hoped he’d believe it. “I’m fine.”

His stoic mask softened some. “You know that whatever your fears or concerns, we’re here for you, Adam. There is no force on this earth that can change that. Not even change itself.”

“I know.” Which was why the fear that I’d somehow ruin everything we had was a very real one. If we could just be a vampire, a demon, and a not-human running a hotel for supernaturals forever, that would be my dream. But with my curse broken and my glamor now temporary, when I did get my power back, change was coming.

Assuming we survived Gideon and the prophecy, would anyone want to visit a hotel where the manager might eat them? Would Zee and Victor still love me when I was a forty-five-thousand-pound mass-murdering monster? I could always shift back to being Adam, but there would be no hiding who and what I really was anymore.

Zee fiddled with the radio and found “House of the Rising Sun” by The Animals, and immediately began to sing. This was the first song he’d danced to in the hotel bar, and right after, we’d toasted to new beginnings. A whole lot had happened since then. We’d saved each other so many times, and in so many ways.

All of that couldn’t be for nothing, right?

Zee cruised the Love Wagon alongside the black-steel-clad, single-story warehouse, so we could get a look at its exterior before unleashing thirty gremlins through its chain-link perimeter fence. For a company that was just supposed to be making pretty jewelry, the razor wire and searchlights seemed a bit unfriendly.

“Are we all thinking the same?” Victor asked as soon as Zee pulled the van around the back of an adjacent building.

“That we should turn this puppy around, go back to the hotel, get wasted, and have sweaty, filthy, group sex with toys until breakfast?”

Jimmy—on my shoulder—stopped licking his balls and raised his hand.

“I should have expected that,” Victor sighed. “I was not thinking of sex—although now I am.”

“Hah.” Zee waggled a purple-painted fingernail in Victor’s face. “I got you thinking about dick.”

Jimmy flew off my shoulder, grabbed Zee’s finger, and licked it.

“Ew! Get him off!” Zee flapped his hand, flinging Jimmy back at me. I ducked, and Jimmy landed in a pile of gremlins, sending them bouncing off the van sides. The Love Wagon’s door burst open and the flurry of gremlins spilled out. Jimmy hovered, stuck his tiny finger up at Zee, then zipped through the air, heading toward the warehouse.

“It’s probably best, demon,” Victor began, in his scolding voice. “Not to make the pixie angry before he leads a small army of chaos gremlins in a covert mission against our enemy.”

“He licked my finger, and we all know he wasn’t thinking about fingers.”

“What could have possibly made him think about penises at a time like this?”

“It’s not my fault that pixie is sex obsessed.”

Victor’s knowing glance snagged mine, then chased after the receding flock of gremlins. “We should probably find a vantage point from which to observe their progress.”

“I got this.” Zee turned the Love Wagon around and parked it up in a lot adjacent to Agatha’s warehouse. From there, we spotted the gremlins scurrying through a hole in the fence that Jimmy must have bitten his way through. Then they dashed across a grassy area, scaled a small wall, and vanished up a drain pipe.

“Now what?” Zee asked.

“Now we wait,” I said.

“Jimmy knows what the locket looks like, right?”

“Yeah.” I’d shown Jimmy the sketches before we’d left. If everything went to plan, Jimmy would find the locket while the other gremlins caused enough chaos that Gideon and Agatha wouldn’t know their special locket was missing until we’d had enough time to plan our next move.

We played “I spy” while waiting for Jimmy to return—Victor won every time. Zee claimed he cheated, as he could see in the dark, but it was more likely that he won because Zee’s subjects were all body parts.

How long did it take a pixie and a small horde of gremlins to raid a jewelry warehouse?

We probably should have given Jimmy a time limit, not that the little pixie had a watch, or any way of telling the time.

“You don’t think they have gremlin traps, do you?” I asked, interrupting a heated discussion during which Victor was trying to explain that frogs weren’t a threat and Zee was refusing to believe him, accusing Victor of a blatant attempt to get him murdered by frogs.