Read The Dragon Conspiracy for Free Online

diamonds. At the instant of contact, a blaze of white light exploded from either the guy, the harpy, or the diamonds. Hell, I didn’t know. I hadn’t seen light that bright since I’d nearly fried my own retinas the first time I’d used my phone’s flashlight app. The screams in my immediate vicinity changed from terror-fueled to pain-induced. I think mine might have joined them.
    There was something else. A tightening in the air, pulling in toward the core of the light, then releasing in a shock wave of color and heat that felt like it went right through me, popping the hell out of my ears in the process.
    The harpy he’d attacked shrieked in outrage, and I knew what was coming next, even though I still couldn’t see for crap. That harpy had two hands, both with talons, and the one not holding those diamonds would be coming to slice through that idiot’s midsection or take his head off.
    Blinking back teared-up eyes, I dove toward where the guy had been before I’d been struck blind.
    A male-sounding “Oof” told me I’d latched on to my intended target.
    We landed in a heap and tumbled ass over teakettle, off the floor slab of the Temple of Dendur, crashing into a nearby buffet table.
    Over the screams came a roar, a roar barely contained in a human throat.
    Oh hell.
    Viktor Kain.
    All we needed was the Russian going dragon and getting medieval on three harpy asses in front of hundreds of witnesses uploading it all to the social media of their choice.
    I quickly crawled to the corner of the temple and peeked around.
    Kain was fast but his speed was limited by his human form. The Sackler Wing was large enough for him to turn dragon, but he wasn’t that desperate.
    Yet.
    And if he chose to go dragon, there wasn’t a damned thing any SPI agent could do about it, except the same thing every human who witnessed it would do—run like hell.
    Kain shouted something in Russian, and a trio of men ahead of him ran faster. They must work for him, and knew what would happen if they didn’t stop those harpies.
    Harpies that had just gone airborne.
    The first one crashed through one of the glass panes of the far wall and out into the Central Park night. Her sisters followed, leaving us in the middle of SPI’s worst nightmare.
    Public evidence of the existence of monsters.
    And three harpies on the loose in New York with seven cursed diamonds belonging to a Russian dragon.
    Happy Halloween, y’all.

4
    I was wearing cocktail sauce. At least I think it was cocktail sauce. It was too thick and too cold to be blood—at least the human variety. I had no clue what harpy blood looked or felt like.
    The man was sprawled next to me, half under the buffet table, all the way out cold. At least I thought he was only unconscious. I put two fingers to the side of his throat, checking for a pulse. The guy shifted and groaned, answering my question. What he had running down the side of his face from a cut on his forehead was definitely blood and positively human. It looked like that harpy had clocked him, or since he was still breathing, just grazed him.
    He being mostly unconscious gave me the chance to give him a good seer once-over.
    There was no sign of a ward, shield, or magical disguise of any kind. He was exactly what he looked like: a human who’d made the monumentally bad choice of tangling with a harpy.
    But as a seer, I could also detect the residual traces of magic having been worked.
    The man had the aura of a practitioner who’d just engaged in some serious practicing.
    He hadn’t had the aura before he’d touched that harpy, which meant he’d had more than a little to do with the flash of light that’d temporarily blinded everyone who’d seen it.
    He had magical talent. I wasn’t familiar with the type, but whatever he had, it was a lot.
    I reached up onto the table and grabbed a cloth napkin and a handful of ice from a big bowl of shrimp. I put the ice in the napkin, and the napkin against a goose egg forming