That morning dawned clear and bright with only thin, wispy cirrus clouds at the very top of the sky.

Dragon weather, Theo St. Vincent thought with great satisfaction.  In the dragon-settled valley of Riell, any forecast that boded well for flying was considered good luck.  Theo had left his home years ago, but as much as he had sometimes tried to shake off its legacy, the stories and lore of Riell had stayed with him.  Clear skies, to him, meant he was about to get what he wanted.

The Marcus case.

Gordon Marcus had swindled his investors for years.  As far as Theo could tell, the man had done it without ever acquiring so much as a wrinkle in his face, his suit, or his conscience: all the available photographs of him seemed to show a hale and hearty man with a suntanned face and a natural, relaxed smile.  It was an affront to honor, and all the more so because Marcus had stolen from the poor as well as the rich.

Dragons took wealth personally.  Their hoards were built up carefully over lifetimes and lineages and were valued for their beauty and rarity, not only for their price.  Centuries ago, dragons had claimed gold by force and fire.  Now the worst sin for a dragon was to increase one’s hoard dishonorably.  Where there was no principle, Theo had always been taught, there could be no prize.  They held to that rule very strictly.

A human financier like Gordon Marcus, as far as Theo was concerned, was a paper dragon.  If Marcus insisted on trying to claim draconian wealth, Theo would ensure that he faced draconian justice—or the nearest thing to it.  It was his sacred responsibility to deal with the havoc this pretender had wrought.

Besides, he had to admit he liked combing through treasure.  He didn’t mind enjoying the fulfillment of his duty.  And as the only US Marshal dragon shifter in the country, he was surely the natural choice.

He’d prepared a speech to this effect but only got a few words into it before Martin, their office’s Chief Deputy Marshal, cut him off.

“Theo, I never considered assigning anyone else.”

This threw him.  He had expected to have to argue his case.  Nearly all his colleagues were shifters—their office quietly handled shifter-related crimes and emergencies in addition to regular Marshal duties—and all of them knew the valley’s reputation.  All shifter enclaves were secretive and cozy, as they had to be to survive, but Riell had always taken that one step further.  It was clannish and insular even by shifter standards.  Riell dragons didn’t socialize or intermarry.  They didn’t help.  They tucked themselves away with their hoards and their stuffy, antiquated ideas; they settled legal disputes by fighting duels; they had their own figures of speech and their own unique accent.  Theo had come out into the wider world from a life with no McDonald’s and no TV.  Early on, he had learned to explain his ignorance away with some vague story about having been homeschooled in a nearly Amish community, but shifters and their kin knew the real truth was even stranger.  And knew that it came with its own kind of snobbery.

He’d only been here six months.  He’d expected to have to spend years changing their minds about him.

“Your background in asset forfeiture is extensive,” Martin said, considerately acting as if Theo weren’t staring at him with his mouth half-open with shock.  It was this kind of discretion that made Theo prize him so highly as a superior.  “You’re more than qualified to evaluate what’s worth us seizing to sell to help the victims.  I can’t think of anyone who could do a better job with it.”

Theo regained a little of his cool.  “Probably the extensive Marcus dossier I emailed to you revealed my interest.”

“Yes,” Martin said gravely.  “All forty-seven single-spaced pages of it.”  His brow furrowed in a little.  Martin was a pegasus shifter in his early fifties, with salt-and-pepper hair that was only now starting to turn more fully to the lustrous gray of his shift-form, and he had the kind of natural gravitas that made even Theo’s dragon, a prickly and status-conscious beast, defer to him.  It was strange to see him worried.  “I think this is the only time you’ve ever come to me with a request.  Why Marcus?  If you knew one of the people he defrauded—”

Theo shook his head.  “I don’t know anyone who puts their money with such people.  Dragons like gold you can touch.  I can almost guarantee you Marcus never made a cent off any one of us.”

“So there’s no grudge?”

“All my hereditary enemies are archaeologists and brave knights who defend villages,” Theo said.  “I bear him no grudge.  Only ill-will.  He gathered his hoard dishonestly, and that makes it my business.”

“Marshal business or dragon business?”

He hesitated.  He tried as much as possible to avoid talking about his heritage and he had already done it more than he liked, but he couldn’t look into Martin’s eyes and lie to him.  “Both.”

“That’s lucky for you,” Martin said, his voice as calm and steady as ever.  “And Theo?”

“Sir?”

Martin had told him a dozen times that Theo didn’t need to call him sir, but he couldn’t seem to get himself to stop.

“If you want something, you don’t have to assemble a fifty-page—”

“Forty-seven.”

“—dossier on why you should have it.  Not to begin with, anyway.  You can just ask.”

Theo nodded slowly, fighting back his desire to protest against this.  Of course he should have to prove that he was deserving, how else could he trust that they would take him seriously?  Why should Martin take him on credit alone?  He felt like they were speaking different languages.  But he said, “Yes, sir,” and tried to ignore the ache that went through him, since it didn’t make any sense.

“Dragon instincts aside, asset expertise aside,” Martin said, “I’d send you on this one anyway just because it’s going to need such a delicate touch.  Marcus’s wife and daughter are still in residence, and I need the Marshal who knocks on their door to be the kind of person who, say, has the fugitives he catches write him love letters from prison.”

“That only happened once!”

“It happened twice.”

“I’m polite,” Theo said.

We are dignified, his dragon said, decorously inspecting his claws.  It would be beneath us to be anything other than courteous to a fallen enemy.

He tried to focus on what mattered.  “I thought the Marcuses were warned ahead of time about when the seizure would go into effect.”

“They were.  They decided to stay.  Or, more accurately, Tiffani, the wife, decided to stay, and Jillian, the daughter, decided to come back home.  Your guess is as good as mine as to why.”

“It spoils the fun.”

“I’m sure if you tell them that they’ll go away.”

Perhaps as a followup to his seizure of the Marcus assets, he could join the hunt for Gordon Marcus himself.  Who would leave his family to shoulder all the consequences for his actions?  Theo was sure all the country clubs had closed their gates by now.  Most of the so-called friends would have disappeared, as well.  It wouldn’t matter to most that there was no proof whatsoever of either woman being involved.  All that mattered was avoiding scandal like it was the plague.

As much as it confused him, he respected Jillian and Tiffani for taking on the weight that Gordon Marcus had refused.

You would have stayed, his dragon said.  Why should you run as though you were ashamed, merely because a thief tried to steal your honor along with another’s gold?

Theo squared his shoulders.  “I can handle it.”

*

His partner for the day was Gretchen, one of the team’s few non-shifters.  Gretchen came from a family of lynx shifters and had that same watchful slink and dangerous playfulness, but she was, as she put it, stuck on two feet.  Growing up the odd one out had made her attuned to any change in the mood around her, which Theo found staggeringly useful in a US Marshal and staggeringly disconcerting in a friend.

Today it meant that she listened attentively to his explanation of the Marcus case and then said, “Something’s bothering you.”

He couldn’t admit to her that it bewildered him that Martin had all but told him he had value independent of whatever treasure he brought in.  By Riell’s terms, he owed Martin his fealty, and Martin’s opinion of him would have depended almost entirely on what Theo brought to the table, whatever literal gold or intangible expertise he had to offer.  A superior might show respect or courtesy, of course.  A well-bred dragon would never show poor manners.

But Martin had trusted him.

No one but a dragon could understand how strange that realization was.

So he said, “I was looking forward to rolling around in treasure.  Like that cartoon with the duck swimming in the gold coins.  It’s a little awkward with the family there.”

“Theo, don’t think you can distract me with your adorably awkward pop culture explanations.”  She made the turn that would take them out into the expansive—and expensive—countryside around Sterling, where each enormous house seemed to come with its own walled garden and two swimming pools.  She pointed at one.  “Where you come from, does everything look like this?”

“Ah, no.”  He looked out the window, heat rising in his face.  He didn’t know how to delicately express his distaste for them.  “These would be considered small.  And lacking in history.”

“Old money snob,” Gretchen said fondly.  “And I’m not buying that it’s just the Marcuses that have you looking like someone turned the world upside-down on you, but I can appreciate it if you don’t want to talk.  I usually don’t.”

He wouldn’t have guessed that, and it made him look over at her with a new curiosity.  Gretchen was talkative, easygoing—the first friend he had made on the team and the first human friend he had ever made at all.  But he hadn’t known that there were secrets locked up in her golden-brown eyes.

“So,” Gretchen said, ignoring his stare, “I’ll just opt for reckless speculation.”

“Do your worst.”

“You met your mate.”

Theo laughed.  “The culmination of a lifelong dream.”

He had told all of them before that he had never been raised to expect a true, destined mate.  Dragons kept to themselves so thoroughly that only a handful of people Theo had known in the valley were mated pairs.  Most contented themselves with ordinary, companionable marriages and usually they seemed happy enough.  He had sometimes hoped for the more intoxicating, incandescent joy that seemed to come from those who found their mates, but only in the same way he had daydreamed of coming across the Hope Diamond.  Some things were too rare to waste your time wanting them.

He had to admit that when he’d broken with centuries of tradition and gone out into the world, the subject had sometimes crossed his mind.  In Riell, it had been considered the height of rudeness not to make eye contact with a stranger, lest you miss identifying your mate, and so Theo had assiduously met everyone’s eyes as he passed them on the street until he had realized people in cities considered a direct gaze an unwanted encroachment on their privacy.  Or until, as Colby, the team’s resident werewolf and voice of reason, had put it, he realized it made him look weird.  But during those days, he would sometimes think, Maybe it’s her.  Maybe she’s the one.

Despite all that evidently untoward eye contact, however, his dragon had never given anything more than the laziest flick of his tail, as if this wasn’t worth Theo waking him up.  So the fixation had turned out to be mercifully brief.

Gretchen said, “Your skepticism is noted.  Okay, guess number two: you’re molting.”

Thankfully, no.  That was all part of a teenaged dragon’s growing pains and therefore well in his past.  “Wrong again.  I’m completely settled into this skin.”

Even if he wasn’t always entirely comfortable in it.

Once they were within sight of the Marcus house, they both turned entirely professional.

“Do you want me to talk to the family?  It’d give you more time to roll around in the money.”

He suspected her real offer was to spare him the discomfort of dealing with the unavoidable collateral damage.  He appreciated it but couldn’t take her up on it.  It was his operation, so it was his responsibility to take on the worst parts of it.

He shook his head.  “I can talk to them—unless you think it would go better if you did?”

“Please, you could out-manner Emily Post.  No amount of human-to-human sympathy on my part is going to outdo that.”

She parked at the end of the long, winding drive up to the Marcus house, which was, Theo observed, immense but without the faintest hint of character or grandeur.  It looked like it had been picked out of a magazine of the world’s most lavish houses and then plunked down on the ground in one piece, with no one bothering to see that it took on any harmony with the landscape or, for that matter, any individuality.  It irritated him that Marcus has wasted other people’s money on something so unimpressive.  More selfishly, it irritated him even more that he would have to take charge now of auctioning it off and do his best to gain a good profit from its ugliness.

“I had a Barbie Dream House that looked exactly like this,” Gretchen said.  “Ready?”

Dragon weather, he reminded himself.  For all that he would have the unpleasant task of disappointing two women who had already been disappointed enough, he was getting what he wanted.  None of this was pretty, but it was the best chance Marcus’s victims had of being made whole.  And, with him gone, their only chance of getting justice.  There was some luck buried in the day, even if the circumstances made it harder to see than he would have thought.

He unbuckled his seatbelt.  “Ready.”

The house had officially become property of the United States Marshals’ Office at nine a.m. sharp, which meant there was no legal obligation for Theo and Gretchen to knock.  They already had keys to the new locks.  They knocked anyway.

The doorbell, Theo saw, had been ripped out of its fixture and was dangling loosely from its wires.  He wondered if that had been the work of a vandal or if one of the women inside had gotten sick and tired of people ringing it to tell them how awful they were.  He hoped the first.  He hoped it hadn’t been that bad.

When Tiffani Marcus opened the door, he knew at once that it had been even worse than that.

Theo had seen pictures of her before.  Her image had made the rounds on every channel: no one could get enough of Gordon Marcus’s trophy wife.  As the investigation had wound endlessly on, she had come to look more and more haggard as she was asked to repeat the same answers over and over again.  No, she didn’t know where her husband was.  Yes, she was proceeding with divorce filings.  No, she hadn’t known about any of it.  Yes, she was horrified by what he’d done.

The coverage of Jillian Marcus was comparatively gentle.  She had, after all, distanced herself from her father years ago, to the point where their lives hardly seemed to intersect.  That made it all the more puzzling to him that she had come back now.

Then, seeing Tiffani, he knew at once.  She hadn’t come back for her father.  She’d seen the same press coverage he had, and she’d come back for her stepmother.

Who was... covered in flour?

“Ms. Marcus?”

“Tiffani,” she said, holding out one flour-stained hand.  Theo and Gretchen politely shook.  “I could stand hearing my married name a little less right now, so please: Tiffani.  You must be the US Marshals.”

“Yes, ma’am.  I’m Deputy Theo St. Vincent and this is my partner, Deputy Gretchen Miller.”

Gretchen said, “I’m sorry we’re meeting you under these circumstances, Tiffani.”

Her voice made it clear that her regret was genuine, and Tiffani, seemingly starved of ordinary human kindness from strangers, smiled at her.  “Thank you.  I’m sorry my husband turned out to be a monumental prick.  Would the two of you like some cookies?”

He was relieved the flour had a mundane explanation.  He sized up her offer and decided that if she’d put herself through the trouble of baking on a day like today, it would be a sign of disrespect to not have a cookie.  His seven year-old self, he thought dryly, would have highly approved of this logic.

“Thank you, ma’am,” he said.  “That would be lovely.”

They stepped into the house and were greeted by a battalion of nutcrackers.

Gretchen yelped.

Theo’s dragon reared up in alarm, nostrils flaring with small puffs of fire.  Soldiers!

Not that this isn’t alarming, Theo said to his dragon, but you’re an idiot.

“Sorry,” Tiffani said, her nose wrinkled with distaste.  “They’re Gordon’s.”  Then it was like the sun came up in her eyes.  “Bringing them all out here was Jilly’s idea.  She said you might as well gather his things up first.”

The circumstances made it rude to laugh at that, so Theo put his hand up to his mouth to cover the sound with an unconvincing cough.  “Okay, nutcrackers first.  I can see why you’d want them out of the house as soon as possible.  He had a lot of them, didn’t he?”

“He had even more nutcrackers than he had mistresses,” Tiffani said.  “And believe me, that’s saying something.”  But the fond look hadn’t left her.  She shook her head.  “Jilly always knows what to do.”

If he wanted to make her feel better, concentrating on her stepdaughter rather than her scoundrel of a husband was probably the best tactic.  “The two of you must be close for her to come home to help you out with this... transition.”

Over in Tiffani’s blind spot, Gretchen shot him a thumbs up and then said, “I’m going to do a quick perimeter check just to make sure we don’t have any uninvited guests—the press love those shots of Louis XIV furniture being dragged out onto the lawn, and I think you’ve probably had enough of that attention lately.  But please save me a cookie.”  She bounded off, a lynx in spirit if not in fact.  If there were anyone there to catch, she’d catch them, and send them off reconsidering ethics in journalism, Theo had no doubt of that.

It left him to follow Tiffani to the kitchen alone.

The chocolate chip cookies were the size and consistency of saucers.  Theo had never baked anything so homey and uncomplicated—dragon households had soufflés and madeleines and petit-fours or they had nothing at all—but even he could tell that there had been either too much or too little of something or something else had been done for too long or not long enough.  Or both.  They had an enticing smell that reminded him of human open houses, but when he snapped off a bite, he felt a throb in his gums as his teeth cursed him for it.

“Tell me more about Jillian,” he said quickly, hoping to distract her from what would probably be an ongoing attempt to dispose of this without actually eating it.

Tiffani ate her own cookie without the faintest trace of fear.  She must have had a jaw like a crocodile.

“She’s extraordinary.  She works for the community center over in New Rochelle.  She started off just doing their marketing work, but now she heads up all their kids’ activities, too.  I’ve seen her go to a gala with finger-paint still drying on her hands and make presentations that had the whole room digging for their checkbooks.  She’s nothing like her father.”

He stepped around the subject of Gordon Marcus.  “Did the two of you hit it off right away?”

“Oh, when we first met, I was too terrified of where I’d ended up to charm a potted plant, let alone some shy thirteen year-old.  I was only twenty-two myself and I was just so unprepared for everything.  I wouldn’t have known what to do with a baby, let alone a teenager.  And I thought for sure she hated me.  The wicked stepmother.”

Dragon fairy tales were always just a little cockeyed from their human counterparts, but Theo recognized this bit.  “You don’t seem especially wicked.”

“The cookies are poisoned,” Tiffani said.  “By my terrible baking.  I can tell they’re awful, by the way, you don’t have to pretend to eat it.”

“You’re eating it.”

“I’m eating everything.  I’m exhausted with trying to look like an aerobics instructor.”  She took another vicious bite of cookie.  “Gordon didn’t try to help us get to know each other, either.  He said Jilly had a mom already and he didn’t want that ‘maternal shit’ all around him.  He said he liked me because I was ‘fun.’  He meant dumb.”

“You don’t seem dumb any more than you seem wicked,” Theo said.

It sounded to him like Gordon Marcus had thought his new wife would be a younger, sexier, bouncier version of himself: selfish, devoid of conscience, and intent on moment-to-moment gratification.  To Theo that made Marcus the dumb one.

He wished Tiffani would have nodded, at least.  That she didn’t showed that her husband had stolen something from her, too.  Not her money, maybe, but her confidence.

“Anyway,” Tiffani said, “I didn’t listen to him.  But all I knew back then was how to do hair.  I’d been a stylist, before Gordon.  Jilly has such beautiful hair.  I put it up in Princess Leia buns for her, gave her a million little braids, whatever she could think of.  That perm just about killed me—living through the eighties once was bad enough—but I still did it.  She was such a shy little girl, but if you paid even a moment’s attention to her, you could see how smart she was.”

“I loved those Leia buns.  I wore them every Halloween.”

Jillian Marcus breezed into view to Theo’s right, passing him to inspect the cookies.

Theo, who had only just managed to find a tactful moment to drop his in the trash, decided at once that he would take one from her if she offered.

Her long, dark auburn hair was pulled into a casual ponytail.  Her clothes were rumpled and dusty from a hard day’s work unearthing nutcrackers.  Everything about her radiated a lively, down-to-earth warmth that that made it impossible to look away from her.

Though he had to admit that his delight at having her in the room wasn’t entirely about some high-minded, ethereal notion that, though he’d never met her, she felt like coming home.  She was also gorgeous enough to stop his breath in his throat.

Jillian Marcus was all beautiful curves and soft-looking skin sprayed with freckles.  Her hips were round and generous, made for hands to cradle them as she danced.  He had the strange thought that she would taste of cinnamon, hot and familiar and intoxicating.

He forced himself, with great difficulty, not to stare.  Be professional.  Be Emily Post.

Who is this Emily Post to us?  His dragon lashed his tail from side to side.  She is not this lady whose hair is the color of fire.  Never mind Emily Post.

Her hair is a much darker red than fire, Theo thought back, feeling like he was somehow playing directly into his dragon’s claws.  She’s just—hotter than fire.

He hadn’t yet stopped staring.  He was glad her attention was elsewhere.  She was looking at the cookies with a curiosity that suggested they were the end result of some decades-long experiment.  She picked one up and then put it down.

“I knew it was too good to be true.”

“It’s unbecoming to gloat,” Tiffani said.  “Jilly, this is Deputy Marshal St. Vincent—”

“Theo’s fine,” he said immediately.

“It’s nice to meet you, Deputy Marshal Theo,” Jillian said, but she was still mostly looking at Tiffani.  “Actually, no matter how rock-hard these turned out, they smell incredible.  I vote we reinvent ourselves as bakery perfumers, like whoever makes that artificial bread scent they spray around in all the Subways.”

“Do they really do that?”  Theo’s interest was sincere.  Dragons didn’t have especially keen senses of smell, but Colby had never been able to stand going near that sandwich shop.  He complained that they were just as bad as candle stores and perfume counters for giving him headaches.

“It’s the legend passed around the teenage fast food workers circuit, anyway,” Jillian said.  She turned towards him now, but her gaze was still downcast.  Long, dark lashes hid her eyes from him, but he could tell that they were just a little red-rimmed.  She had been crying.  Maybe not just now, but recently.

She should never experience a moment’s unhappiness, his dragon opined.

That seems impractical, Theo thought, though part of him—the dragon part, obviously—agreed.

Instead, he said, “Oh?”

He was really excelling at smooth reactions today.

Luckily, Jillian read more thoughtfulness into the sound than he had really had.  “Nothing made my dad more annoyed than knowing I was employee of the month at Burger King.  How’s that for a rebellious childhood?”

Theo’s own boundary-pushing years had involved sneaking beyond Riell’s borders into places as ordinary as supermarkets and bowling alleys.  He’d gotten in trouble for his breath smelling like root beer or chewing gum.  So he could sympathize.  He couldn’t tell her the whole truth, obviously, but he could give her a version of it.

“I once decided,” he said, “to do the sort of all-out revolt that makes parents say, ‘I have no son.’”

“I like the commitment,” Jillian said.  “Do your bosses know about this?  Are they worried that if you get bored, you’re going to go off and join the Mafia?”

“It’s a huge concern,” Theo said.  “It shows up in all my performance evaluations.”

She laughed.  The sound was husky, inconveniently attractive.  To even hear it felt like he’d been given some rare jewel; to have caused it felt worth everything in his hoard.  He wished he could get her to look at him.  For some reason, he felt like an arrow drawn back and waiting to fire, the full force of the bent bowstring behind it, if he could only...

He had to keep the conversation going, though.  He forced himself through his anecdote.  The agony of waiting would be worth it if he could make her laugh again.

“I went,” he said, with a dramatic pause, the kind more usually inserted at the climax of a draconian epic, “to a waterpark.”

“A waterpark?” Tiffani said.

He liked her very much and it was very rude to have so thoroughly turned his attention away, he knew that, but he couldn’t make himself turn more towards her.  He could only hope that she would excuse his discourtesy and write it off as an attempt to draw Jillian more into the conversation.

“It was called Waveland.  It had slides and huge swimming pools filled with inflatable toys.  There was a tall hill that you rode down on a small open tram car shaped like a log.  It was quite exciting.  I rode the Wave Mountain and slid down the Wave Vortex and ate a Waveburger with Wavefries and a Waveshake.  And I kept thinking, This will show them.”

“Did it?”

“It did.  My parents were—strict.  Different.”

“Not just the managers of a competing waterpark?”

The corners of her mouth had turned up, further rounding her cheeks.  Botticelli’s Venus had nothing on her.  Then, smiling, she finally truly looked at him.

An inferno blazed up inside Theo.  It was like nothing he had ever felt before.  It bore no relation to his own fire, to its shades of red and gold—this was white-hot, like a lightning strike.  His whole body yearned to shift.  He wanted to soar, to proclaim what had happened to him.

More importantly, he wanted to take her with him.

It’s her.  She’s the one.  She’s the one I never thought I would find.

Our mate, his dragon said, spreading his wings out to their fullest span.  Our beautiful, kind, perfect mate.

Shifters were in-between creatures in every way but love, where there was this one absolute, unshakable truth.  Jillian was his perfect match.  All he wanted was to tell her so.  And he could tell her, too, that he already understood that he was drawn to more than just her beauty.  He needed every bit of her.  Her laugh.  The love and loyalty that had brought her back home.  The way her voice tilted when she was joking.  Her good heart.

He would die without her.  It was madness for his clan to have ever dismissed this as irrelevant or unnecessary.  What if he had spent his whole life within the valley and never met her?  His life would have been such a dull, quiet thing, so colorless and lonely.  What if she had someday needed him and he hadn’t been there?  The thought horrified him.

Almost as much, he realized with a sinking feeling, as being gawked at by a complete stranger was possibly horrifying her.

No, scratch that.  Not a complete stranger.

By the man who had come to paw through her father’s hoard and take it away from her.  By the man who would strip her home to the bone.

Dammit.

Evidently dragon weather had a sense of humor.