Chapter 629 | The Dragon, The Drunk, and The Thief [GT BONUS]

Chapter 629: 629 | The Dragon, The Drunk, and The Thief [GT BONUS]

The third call came next Monday morning had no victim at all. Somebody with a corrosive Aspect had walked down Moss Street overnight and put a hand on every parking meter from Fourth to Seventh. Eleven meters stood there in a row, melted down into grey puddles of slag, and the smell of burnt metal stung the back of my throat.

Dralun crouched and took pictures with a phone so old it had a physical keyboard. He took twenty of them from different angles while a woman leaned out of an upstairs window and yelled that it was a public service, since those meters had been robbing the block for a decade.

"She has a point," I said.

"She has a point, and I still have to file it," Dralun said, without looking up from his phone.

I filed it back at the office, and it came out to two hundred and eleven words because vandalism apparently deserved the full treatment. Ophelia got off her desk to read over my shoulder, which meant she bent forward and put her whole chest right next to my ear. The black velvet bodice was laced tight enough to push everything up and toward me, and a curl of pink hair fell across my collar and tickled my neck.

"You spelled corrosive wrong," she said, and her breath touched my ear.

"I spelled it right, actually."

"You spelled it wrong emotionally, and there’s a difference." She tapped the screen with a black-lacquered nail, and her arm brushed mine. "Why do you have to be so smug about typing?"

"I have a lot of practice at being smug."

"I know that, and it’s minus ten for it." She stayed bent over me for a full three seconds longer than the insult required, and then she straightened up and went back to her desk. The interface had opinions.

\[Temptation Gauge Updated: Ophelia Lin — 11%\]

\[Note: Heroine initiated proximity under the pretext of spelling. Heroine was also wrong about the spelling.\]

The fourth call was the one I didn’t like at all, and it came in at 6:40 that same evening. Fifth and Harlan was a two-bedroom unit over a closed dry cleaner, and the man inside was big and loud and extremely drunk. He had his girlfriend backed into the kitchen, and he was shouting that she owed him rent while she held a frying pan in front of her like a shield.

He didn’t have an Aspect. I checked him twice with the Oracle Feed out of pure spite, and all I got was a blood alcohol estimate that would have killed a smaller man.

Dralun didn’t raise his voice once. He walked into the kitchen and put one scaled hand flat on the drunk guy’s shoulder, and the guy looked up, and up, and up again at the horns. Something in his face went very small.

"Outside," Dralun said. "Sleep it off in your cousin’s truck."

"This is my apartment, man."

"It’s her name on the lease," Dralun rumbled. "I checked at the dry cleaner."

The drunk guy went outside, and Dralun walked him all the way down to a dented pickup on the corner. I stayed in the kitchen doorway with the girlfriend, whose name was Maricel, and asked if she wanted to press charges. She put the frying pan down on the stove and shook her head at me. She had a red mark on her wrist in the shape of fingers, and I wanted to go down to that truck and do something to his face that would get me expelled.

"It’s the drinking," Maricel said. "He’s fine when he’s sober."

"That’s still a hand mark on your arm," I said.

"I know what it is, and I’m not stupid." She rubbed her wrist and stared at the window. "Could you please go now?"

I left the number for the Harlan Street shelter on a sticky note on her fridge, next to a magnet shaped like a mango. Then I went down the stairs, and I found Dralun standing on the curb and watching the pickup truck.

"We just leave him there," I said.

"We leave him there tonight, and I come back tomorrow, and I come back next week too." He started walking back toward Halverson. "It’s her life, kid, and you don’t get to fix it by breaking his jaw."

"I really wanted to break his jaw."

"I know you did, and so did I," he said.

The fifth call on Friday came from the bodega on Halverson, three doors down from Lin’s, where the old man who sold Dralun his terrible coffee also sold lottery tickets and very suspicious pickled eggs. His name was Mr. Haddad, and he was standing in his doorway waving a broom and yelling about a ghost stealing his chips.

The ghost turned out to be a fourteen-year-old Branded kid whose skin had gone the exact grey-green of the linoleum floor. He was crouched against the bottom shelf between the chip racks, and he would have been invisible to anyone who didn’t have a dragon’s nose. Dralun’s tail swept across the aisle and caught the kid around the ankles, and a bag of hot fries fell out of his hoodie pocket.

"Let me go, you lizard!" the kid shouted, and his skin flushed brown as the camouflage broke.

"I’m a dragon, and you know it," Dralun said, sounding bored. "Your name is Tomás, and your mother cuts my hair."

Tomás went quiet very fast after that.

Mr. Haddad wanted to call the police, and he wanted a sign in the window, and he wanted Tomás banned from the block until the heat death of the universe. I stood at the register and let him yell at me for a while, because yelling at a stranger is easier than yelling at a kid whose mother you know.

"He’s taken stuff from you before," I said when he finally ran out of air.

"Every week for two months now," Mr. Haddad said.

"Does anyone stock your shelves for you on Saturday mornings?"

He squinted at me across the counter for a long moment. Then he looked over at Tomás, who was sitting on a crate of bottled water with his arms crossed and his skin turning a sullen shade of red.

"My back hurts on Saturdays," Mr. Haddad admitted.

"Then he stocks your shelves for free until the chips are paid off," I said. "If he steals again after that, I’ll hold the door while the dragon calls his mom."