Chapter 673 | The Shark Towel Plan

Chapter 673: 673 | The Shark Towel Plan

The Eighth Street Community Manifestation Clinic used to be a bank, and nobody had bothered to break the news to the building that it had changed careers.

The teller windows were still there, thick bulletproof glass scratched cloudy by twenty years of elbows, except now the two women behind it wore scrubs instead of security vests. One of them was a broad Filipina nurse in purple scrubs who typed hard enough to file charges against her own keyboard. The other was younger, braids pinned high, and she had the hollow stare of someone who had started her shift at six and been promised a lunch break that never arrived.

Forty orange plastic chairs sat bolted to the floor in four rows of ten. The old vault stood open at the back of the room, its round steel door swung wide on hinges thicker than my thigh. Somebody had stacked gauze and tongue depressors on the shelves where the cash used to live, and a laminated sign taped to the door read PLEASE DO NOT LET THE CHILDREN PLAY IN THE VAULT, which was a sentence with an entire incident report hiding behind it.

Dralun sat beside me and occupied the width of three chairs, his tail curled under the row in front of us so nobody would trip on it. He held a paper cup of clinic coffee in one claw and had not taken a single sip in eleven minutes. I knew it was eleven minutes because I had been counting, mostly to avoid thinking about a photograph frame sitting face down on my desk across the river.

"You keep checking the door," Dralun said without looking at me.

"I’m checking the exits, which is a completely normal hobby."

"Nobody is coming through that door who wants to hurt you, kid."

"You say that, but this building has a vault and I have trust issues."

He grunted. Ophelia had briefed me on the grunt dictionary over a pork bun last Monday, and this one was the long low version that meant he found me tiring but had decided not to say so out loud. I wore the boots his nephew abandoned for dentistry, and they were still a half size too big, so every time I shifted my weight the steel caps knocked against the chair leg in front of me with a dull tok that made the old man in that chair turn around and glare.

I was the third-highest scoring applicant in the nation. I had stood between a twelve-foot monster and forty children while wrapped in lightning. Now I was sitting in a defunct Wells Fargo, losing a staring contest to a retiree in a bowling shirt.

The door opened at three fifty-eight, and the room shifted in that small way rooms do when a kid walks in.

Carmen came first, her forearm still wrapped in clean white gauze where the bandage from Monday had been swapped for something less dramatic. She wore a grey work polo with a cleaning company logo stitched on the chest, and her dark hair was pulled into a knot so tight it looked painful. Her eyes went straight to Dralun and some of the strain in her shoulders let go.

Mateo came second, at knee height, and he was wearing the best hoodie I had ever seen.

It was bright green with a row of floppy felt spikes running down the hood and the spine, a dinosaur costume pretending to be regular clothes. Somebody had cut holes in both shoulders and at the backs of the forearms, then hemmed every opening in tiny careful stitches so the fabric wouldn’t fray. Pale curved bone poked out through each hole, the spurs grown out maybe an inch past where I had last seen them, smooth and cream-colored and catching the overhead light. He had a juice box clamped in one hand and a toy triceratops in the other, and he was walking very carefully so the spurs wouldn’t snag on anything.

Carmen had made that hoodie by hand, at night, after a double shift, and I filed that fact somewhere I wouldn’t have to look at it.

Mateo spotted the tail first. His whole face lit up, and he abandoned his mother mid-stride to climb onto the chair directly beside Dralun, which took him three attempts and a grunt of effort that sounded exactly like Dralun’s. The juice box made a squelch when he squeezed it too hard. He set the triceratops on Dralun’s knee like an offering, looked up at the dragon very seriously, and asked his question.

"Do your horns hurt when it rains?"

Dralun set the coffee cup down on the floor. He considered the question for real, which I respected.

"Only the chipped one hurts when it rains."

"Mine hurt when I sleep on them," Mateo said, pointing at his shoulder. "Mama put a towel on my bed. The towel has a shark on it."

"A shark towel sounds like a smart plan to me."

"Do you sleep on a towel?"

"I sleep on a mattress that I have broken four times."

Mateo considered this fact with great weight, then nodded, apparently satisfied that the two of them were in the same professional situation. Carmen sat down two chairs over and pressed her hand against her mouth, and when she lowered it she was smiling in a way that looked painful.

"He asked about you every day," she said to Dralun. "Every single morning, I swear to you. Is the dragon coming, Mama? Does the dragon have a car? I told him dragons don’t drive and he cried for twenty minutes."

"Dragons do not drive cars," Dralun agreed. "Dragons take the bus, mostly."

Mateo turned and found me, and his eyes went big.

"You’re the gold boy."

"I prefer the term Lukas, but gold boy is fine for professional purposes."

"Can you do the gold thing?"

"The gold thing needs a monster in the room first, and I’m not seeing any monsters here."