Chapter 674 | We Buy Shed Material

Chapter 674: 674 | We Buy Shed Material

He swung his legs and looked around the waiting room with suspicion, as if a monster might be hiding under one of the plastic chairs and he wanted to be the first to spot it. Then he held up his juice box to me. "Do you want some juice?"

"I would never take juice from a man in a dinosaur hoodie, but thank you."

"It’s apple," he said, offended.

"That changes the entire negotiation," I said, and he giggled so hard the felt spikes on his hood bounced.

The interface pinged softly at the corner of my vision with a note about pediatric rapport generating zero progression points. I closed it so hard I gave myself a mild headache.

The nurse in purple called two names in a row, a man with what looked like quartz growing out of his collarbones and a teenage girl whose ears had gone fully feline. The room shuffled. A mother at the far end of the second row bounced a toddler covered head to toe in soft grey fur, and the kid was patting at his own cheek and laughing at the texture. Behind them sat a boy around fourteen with antler nubs pushing through a beanie he’d cut holes in, scrolling his phone with his whole face set in the expression of someone who had decided to be bored by his own body as a defensive strategy.

Branded families, mostly. A couple of Flux surfacings with nervous parents and ice packs. Nobody in this room had the money for the private clinic up in Creston, where Diane said the waiting room had a koi tank and a sommelier for the parents.

The windbreaker came in at four-oh-nine.

I clocked him on entry, the way I clock everyone, except my instructions forbid me from using that phrase in my own head, so I’ll just say he walked in and I knew. Navy windbreaker, zipped to the chin. Khakis pressed with an actual crease. Clean white sneakers that had never walked on Halverson in the rain, and a lanyard hanging around his neck with no badge clipped to the end, just the plastic clip swinging empty against his chest.

He didn’t check in at the teller window. He didn’t sit.

He worked the rows instead.

He moved like a man who had done this before, easy and friendly, crouching to eye level with each family, smiling wide enough to show molars. He started at the back, with the grey-furred toddler’s mother, and I watched him press a small white card into her palm and fold her fingers over it with both of his hands. His voice was pitched low and warm, the voice of a youth pastor or a guy selling extended car warranties.

The mother looked at the card for a long time. Then she put it in her diaper bag, in the inside pocket, the one you use for things you mean to keep.

He moved to the antler kid next. The kid glanced at the card, laughed once without humor, and stuck it in his beanie.

"What is that guy doing," I said, very calm.

Dralun didn’t answer. He had gone still in the specific dragon way that I was learning to recognize, the stillness of a big animal on a riverbank right before the water does something. His tail had stopped moving under the chairs.

The windbreaker reached our row. He crouched in front of Carmen, ignoring the dragon sitting four feet away, which told me he either didn’t know who Dralun was or had decided Dralun was furniture. Either option made him stupid, and stupid people with soft voices were the worst kind.

"Ma’am, hi, sorry to interrupt," he said, all teeth. "First surfacing? Spurs, looks like. Bone type."

Carmen’s hand moved to Mateo’s knee. "We’re waiting for the doctor."

"Of course, of course, and you should, they’re wonderful here. I just want to leave you some information." He held out the card. I could read it from where I sat, black block capitals on cheap white stock. WE BUY SHED MATERIAL. TEETH, SCALES, SPURS, HAIR. CASH SAME DAY. "Bone-type Branded kids drop their first spurs around six months in, same as baby teeth. Most families just throw them out, which is a real shame. That material’s valuable to the right buyer. Research, collectors, you’d be amazed. Covers a month of rent, sometimes two."

Carmen looked at the card. I watched her do the math in her head, rent against groceries against the gauze on her own arm, and I watched her hand start to lift.

My read was simple, and I stated it to myself once without decoration. The man was a buyer, and buyers in this district only ever bought from people who couldn’t afford to say no.

Dralun stood up.

He didn’t do it fast. He did it the way a building would stand up if a building decided it had been sitting long enough. The plastic chair under him groaned and then popped as the bolts flexed, kreeeek, and the whole row shuddered. He rose to his full six-foot-five, then a little more, his horns nearly brushing the drop ceiling tiles, the old scars across his bronze scales catching the light like cracks in pottery. His tail uncurled from under the chairs and began its first sweep along the floor, a long heavy fwumpf of muscle and scale sliding across the carpet.

The man in the windbreaker looked up. He looked up some more.

He was out the front door before the tail finished its arc. I want to be clear about the physics here: the tail of an adult Branded dragon is not fast when it sweeps, it is merely enormous, and this guy still lost the race. The door clanged, the bell above it jangled, and his clean sneakers went slap-slap-slap down the sidewalk at a pace I’d only seen from Caden when Steele said the word laps.

In his hurry he dropped a card. It fluttered down and landed face up on the carpet next to my left boot.

The waiting room had gone dead silent. The grey-furred toddler had stopped laughing and was staring at Dralun with his mouth open. The antler kid had lowered his phone. Even the nurse in purple had stopped her keyboard assault, her fingers frozen over the keys behind the glass.

Dralun stood there for a moment longer, breathing slow through his nose. Then he looked down at Carmen, and his voice came out low and level.

"Don’t sell your boy’s spurs to that man."

"I wasn’t going to," Carmen said, too fast, and both of them knew she had been about to.

"If money gets tight, you call Ophelia. She’ll yell at you, then she’ll fix it."

He sat back down. The chair made a new and frankly concerning noise. Mateo, who had watched the whole thing with the rapt attention of a kid seeing his first fireworks, reached over and patted Dralun’s scaled forearm twice.

"You scared him," Mateo said, delighted.

"I stood up, which is different from scaring anybody."

"You scared him a lot."

Dralun picked his coffee cup back up off the floor and finally took a sip. He grimaced. "This coffee is terrible, kid."