I stared at the blank steel door, the panel over its grate tightly shut. Mick, captured and enslaved, was inside, but the glower in his eyes had told me that the three of us were the last people he wanted to see.

“Gabrielle,” I said, holding down my worry as best I could, “open the grate. Gently,” I added hastily as she lifted her hand to blow it apart.

Gabrielle sighed and gestured with her forefinger. The panel over the grate popped open, letting out the acrid scent of dragon and blood.

I stood on tiptoes to peer through the grille. Maya, tall enough, especially in her high heels, looked in next to me.

“Dios,” she said. “You stink, Mick. What are you doing in there?”

I couldn’t have put it better myself. Mick rose and crossed the four feet of his cell to face us, his chains rattling.

“I’m here by choice,” he said. “It won’t be forever, I’m paying off a debt, and you need to stay out of it, Janet.”

He delivered this speech then scowled at me with dragon-dark eyes as though I should turn around and toddle home like a good Stormwalker.

Believe it or not, the answer was a mountain of information for my usually cryptic boyfriend. A few years ago, he wouldn’t have even told me this much.

“What kind of debt makes you have to fight demons without using magic?” I demanded. “You could have destroyed it and the refs in five minutes and blown this place. Come out of there—you can clean up, and we’ll go home. I’d love it if you were in one piece when I marry you.”

“Valid points,” Gabrielle said from my other side, on her tiptoes. “Scrag whoever stuck you in here, Mick, and let’s party. Or I can scrag them for you, if you want.”

Mick took on a look of ancient patience. “I’m not using magic, because I promised. Rules of the game. I will pay my price and finish it. If I’d known the games would be in Las Vegas, in this hotel, this weekend, I would have made sure you didn’t come here. I’m pretty sure this is someone’s idea of poetic justice.”

Gabrielle spoke before I could. “You mean you’re being forced to fight to the death like a gladiator?”

“Something like that.” Mick nodded as though this were the most reasonable thing in the world. “No magic allowed, at least in my case. A physical fight only.”

My mouth went dry. “No magic means you can die. Who the hell would make you do that? And what is this debt? I don’t remember you involved in anything this big—this weird—”

“It happened a long time ago,” Mick interrupted. “Before you were born, in fact. I arranged to pay off the debt now so I can marry you with a clean slate. I didn’t know exactly when the payment would be arranged, didn’t know until late yesterday, and as I said, I didn’t know until I arrived that it would be here. I went to a pickup point out in the desert, was blindfolded, and brought here. I didn’t have time to warn you.”

“Yesterday.” I knew that now was not the time to berate him for not telling me, but I couldn’t stop myself. Mick and I had agreed to make sure we both knew about any danger that befell us, so we could back each other up. Typical Mick to think fighting to the death was a trivial thing he could take care of when I wasn’t looking.

“I planned to be done with it and home before your vacation was over,” Mick said. “You deserve some time off.”

“So do I,” Maya put in hotly. “But for once, I agree with Gabrielle. We can’t leave you in there to be killed. The door’s unlocked—let’s go.”

“I bet it won’t be that easy,” I said. “There will be some kind of contract, maybe a compulsion, that requires Mick to fulfill the debt. That’s how these things work. Right?”

Mick gave me a nod. “I have to finish what I’ve started.” He softened into the smile that could make me melt at ten paces. “And then I’m free. We’ll celebrate when I get back to the Crossroads.”

If he survived the games. The demon he’d faced had been huge and powerful, and Mick had barely bested it. I had the feeling each opponent would be harder to beat than the last, until Mick either died or won his final match.

“What exactly did you do?” I asked. “And to whom?”

“Lost a fight,” Mick said without embarrassment. “When I was younger, against a being vastly more powerful than I was. He was killing another and I decided to intervene, cocksure enough to believe I could best him. To save my life, and that of the one I was trying to help, I agreed to fight in his games, signed a contract in blood.”

“Shit,” I said softly. I shivered, the chill clammy on my bare arms. “I can’t leave you here. I’m not going to lose you again.”

Mick shook his head. “I can’t go, not yet. If you stay to wait for me, Janet, you can’t interfere. I have to finish this, one way or another.”

“And if you don’t finish it? If you refuse to play the game?” I knew the forfeit would be dire, but I wanted to hear it.

“Then not only will I forfeit my life, but everyone I know and love will be hunted down and killed. No exceptions.”

I figured it would be something like that. Mick didn’t respond to threats to his own physical well being—if the cost had been only his life, he wouldn’t care. He was a dragon, and dragons didn’t have much use for fear. Very little on this Earth was more terrifying than themselves.

Gabrielle cocked her head. “Do you have to love the person who gets destroyed, or just know them? ’Cause that lets me out. You barely like me.”

Mick shook his head. “It means you, Janet, Maya, Colby, Janet’s grandmother and father, Gina, Cassandra, Pamela, Fremont, Nash, Jamison, his daughter and wife, everyone in Magellan, Drake, and pretty much any friend I’ve made in my long life.”

“Oh.” Gabrielle blinked. “Even Drake? Wow.”

Drake was a dragon, former toady to the Dragon Council. He and Mick were uneasy allies at the best of times, and I imagined the uptight Drake would not be happy to be lumped in as one of Mick’s friends.

“All right, Janet, you heard him,” Gabrielle said. “We have to leave him to it.”

I didn’t budge. Mick gazed back at me, unmoving, but I read a world in his eyes.

“Who would do this to you?” I asked.

Behind me, Maya said, “Um, Janet. Maybe him.”

Him was a man walking slowly toward us. He was tall and wore a dark suit brushed by the few lights in the hall, his silk tie a hue that changed from dark green, to black, to dark red as he neared us.

His face was attractive, well shaped but with an edge to it, one that said he didn’t give a crap whether people thought him good-looking or not. His hair was dark red, the light above him burning it redder, and a trim beard of darker shade of red framed his face.

His eyes … I had no idea what color they were. I thought brown, but when he turned to the light, they were black, and then a brilliant green, then gold, then back to brown again. Iridescent, like his tie.

The man didn’t look any more threatening than any well-to-do man walking around the casino upstairs. His aura, on the other hand, told me a different story. It was ever-changing like his eyes and tie, flashing, flickering, dissolving to nothing to reform again. He smelled of fire and ash, like most dragons, but the bite of the fire was so ancient it was mellow.

The mellowness did not mean he wasn’t dangerous. The older a dragon became, the more powerful he grew. The three on the Dragon Council were ancient and bad-tempered, but the energy I sensed from this guy was ten times what I got from Bancroft, one of the strongest dragons on the planet.

Which gave rise to the question—if this dragon were so old and powerful, why had I never heard of him?

“Oh, my.” Gabrielle folded her arms, leaning against me as she assessed him. “He’s nice.”

The dragon-man halted about six feet away from us. “So this is the Stormwalker.” His voice was deep and rich, the syllables carefully pronounced, as though English wasn’t his first language. He didn’t have a marked accent, but his speech was careful, almost musical.

Gabrielle answered him. “Yeah, she’s the Stormwalker, and can kick your ass, so don’t get any ideas. My sister is wicked powerful. I’ll tell her to go easy on you, though, because I have a thing for dragons.”

The man had been gazing into my face with the rudeness common to dragons, but now he flicked his attention to Gabrielle, his eyes changing to deep black.

“And this is the goddess-child?”

“The what?” Gabrielle drew herself up, the crackle of her power rising.

“Gabrielle,” I said calmly. “Shut up a minute.” I fixed the unknown dragon-man with a steely glare worthy of my grandmother. “Who are you, and why did you force Mick here?”

His gaze moved back to me, the eyes now dark blue. “Does my well-being depend on my answer?”

“I can’t hurt you, and you know it.” While I might be a Stormwalker with a good dose of magic from my Beneath-goddess mother, I had a hard time against dragons. Whenever I bombarded Mick with my magic, he absorbed it, deflected it, or threw it back at me. “You’re a dragon. Which dragon? Why haven’t I ever met you before? Or heard of you?”

“I keep to myself,” the man said, sounding amused. “I’m not surprised Mick never mentioned me—it is an alliance best forgotten. The other dragons don’t speak of me either.” His lips twitched. “For fear I might hear them.”

I wasn’t sure what that meant, but it couldn’t be good. This dragon didn’t radiate menace exactly—not like the remaining members of the tripartite Dragon Council. The Mighty Three, Colby called them. He didn’t radiate the good-natured energy of Colby either, nor the quiet strength of Drake.

He didn’t exude anything at all, but he probably didn’t need to. He simply was.

“You can call me Titus,” the dragon said in his rich voice. “Janet Begay.”

Titus would be short for the multisyllabic names dragons had. Mick’s was Micalerianicum, which he thankfully never expected me to say.

I didn’t wonder too much how Titus knew about me, because while Mick was a very private person and rarely spilled the details of his life, everyone in the magical world knew I was his mate and soon to be his wife. Titus probably already knew about my Beneath magic, my hotel, my friends, my relationship with Mick—everything.

What bugged me was that I’d never heard anything about him. Not from Mick, not from the other dragons. Why not?

“Pleased to meet you,” I said in a flat voice. “Are you the reason Mick is in a cell, and fighting for his life?”

“No,” Titus said smoothly. “Mick is.”

“I know Mick is here because he’s too damned honorable for his own good,” I said angrily. “I meant—are you the one he made the bargain with? And why?”

“To answer your questions in order: No, and it’s none of your business.”

“It’s dragon business, you mean.”

“Only because Mick and I are dragons,” Titus said. “This has nothing to do with the dragons in Santa Fe who think they run the world. This involves Mick and me, and Mick’s life. He owes a debt. He’s paying it, and I’m assisting him.” Titus looked us over, his gaze taking in Maya, assessing her and the threat she might pose. I saw his dismissal of her as human and harmless. “Why don’t you three ladies go enjoy yourselves? Mick will join you when he’s done.”

I stepped up to Titus. He was a foot and a half taller than I was, and his eyes held the coldness of a vast, forgotten cavern. “Let me understand. You’re compelling Mick to fight demons and who knows what else with his strength alone, and you expect me to go off and play until he’s finished or dead? How can he possibly win without his magic? That demon nearly killed him.”

“But it did not,” Titus said. “Dragons are strong, even in our human forms, Ms. Begay, amazingly strong. You know that.”

“Don’t humor me. You’ll pit him against deadlier and deadlier creatures until he can’t win, won’t you?”

“Would I?” The glint in his dark eyes was unnerving. “And if you stay to watch, you’ll be tempted to reach out and help, and then Mick would forfeit the match. That means with his life.”

“Who would kill him?” I demanded. “You? If you’re hot to see Mick go down, why don’t you fight him yourself?”

Titus gave me an unruffled look. “That was not the agreement.”

“He means he’s afraid,” Gabrielle said. “He knows if he and Mick go one-on-one, he’ll be nothing but a dragony smear on the floor. This way he can get Mick killed without having to mess up his suit.” She edged closer to Titus and brushed a finger over his pristine sleeve.

Titus’s gaze flicked to her before returning his focus to me, and his lips quirked into the ghost of a smile. “Your friends are protective, Ms. Begay. Interesting. That one doesn’t even have any magic.”

He gestured to Maya, who lifted her chin and stared right back at him. “Because I have a boyfriend who won’t give a shit who you are if you do anything to me.” Nash Jones was a magical null—a man who could absorb magic, even the most deadly, and negate it without it harming him. But he could be killed physically—a dragon could easily crush the life out of him.

“Janet.” Mick’s voice rolled from the cell. “I’ll be all right. Let me finish this, and we’ll go out on the town.”

He meant to be reassuring—Relax, baby, I got this—but I was anything but reassured. Dragons were complicated beings. There was more going on here than a simple payment of a debt, I was sure of it.

Dragons are also enigmatic to the point of madness. There’s nothing they enjoy more than not explaining a situation.

I shot Mick a frown and turned back to Titus. “Tell you what. You let Mick go, waive this debt, and I’ll let you live.”

Titus studied me without alarm. “You have just stated you can’t hurt me.”

“Not with my Earth magic, it’s true. But I wield more than that, and I have Gabrielle as my backup. How about you release Mick, and I’ll make sure Gabrielle doesn’t turn you into a pile of ash?”

“Aw.” Gabrielle rubbed Titus’s sleeve again. “I wouldn’t do that. He’s cute. I could enslave him a little, though, if you want, make him be a good dragon.”

Titus gazed at Gabrielle’s finger brushing the fabric of his coat, his expression unchanging. He wasn’t worried about her, which worried me.

Dragons are very much Earth magic—grounded in power as old as the bones of the world. Beneath magic, on the other hand, came from the time before this Earth was created, older and white-hot. Dragons were nearly indestructible, but only nearly.

“Janet.” Mick’s rich voice wove the syllables of my name. “Trust me.” He gave me the words he’d been telling me since he first met me. “Be patient, and all will be well.”

I searched for any hint that he didn’t mean it, was trying to pass me a message, but I found none. He really believed he could survive.

“Seriously?” I demanded, glaring at him through the grating. “You want me to walk away and let this asshole let loose any kind of monster on you just to see how you defeat it? If you can. While I do—what? Sit in the audience and chew my nails? Try to stop myself saving you? Or go dancing with Maya and Gabrielle and leave you to it? Screw you, Mick.”

Mick returned my gaze, unblinking, but I noted that his eyes were still black, his dragon eyes. When he was relaxed, his eyes were a deep blue, beautiful like a deep lake in the sun.

I had to choose. Let Mick keep his honor and fulfill his bargain—and maybe die—or fight Titus on the spot to get him free?

I opened my mouth to give him my decision—Gabrielle and I would dust this guy, and I’d grab Mick, and we’d run—when a couple of things happened.

First, I noticed Maya had wandered down the hall and was talking to someone in a soft but adamant voice on her cell phone.

The incongruous surprise that she’d found a signal down here and my curiosity as to who she’d be calling was drowned out by the second thing—the noise of a wall exploding behind me, and the roar of a giant, crazed being as it broke out of its cell and hurled itself toward us.