Dragon Rising by Jaime Rush Read Free Book Online Page A

open her door if she hadn’t already done so.
    She pulled her keys out and jammed the right one into the lock. “Why are we coming here?”
    “It helps to go to the place where the event happened, keeps you from wandering to other memories.” He stepped in behind her, and she flicked on the lights. “You’d be surprised what I’ve found in people’s minds.”
    Oh, gawd, she hoped he couldn’t see anything but the memory. What if she had a thought about him? Of course, the memory of his jeans, tight over his erection, and his bare chest, and his wings…
    Oh, boy, she was in trouble.
    “So we went to the Raphael because of the wraiths?”
    “I didn’t want to engage them here. I’m sorry you had to fight them. I would have sent you away, but I suspected one would have followed you.”
    “I can handle myself, as you saw. Dragons are trained to fight from the time they’re Awakened at thirteen. Living among the Hidden, you have to be ready for anything.”
    She led the way to the back, where the ovens and worktables were. Footsteps scurried across the floor. Something skittered around the corner.
    Archer shifted into fight mode, body stiff, arms akimbo as he scanned the space.
    “Sorry, forgot to warn you about the Earthies. Elementals,” she clarified at his questioning expression.
    Pink fairy dust, made of colored sugar crystals, covered one of the tables with the telltale impression of squat bodies having been rolling in it. Peering around the corner of a cabinet was one of them.
    “Gogo, what did I tell you about getting into the fairy dust sugar? That stuff’s expensive.”
    Gogo stepped out, eyes too big for his face, with a bulbous nose and puffy lips. At least he had the decency to look chagrined. Perhaps his chortling sound was an apology. When he saw Archer, he ducked out of sight again.
    Archer had been watching. “You employ Elementals?”
    She laughed. “No, we sort of have a deal with them. When I started working here during high school, I discovered that Pop had instigated a war with them. The sugar draws them, and they’re hard to get rid of.”
    “Have you tried a fumigator?”
    She waved that away. “We don’t want to hurt them. Well, my pop did. They would dump out flour and spell obscenities in it. They’d appear when Mundanes were out front, and he couldn’t control himself. He’d yell and throw things, and the Mundanes thought he was a crazy grump.” She laughed, but it died down as she thought about that crazy grump being missing.
    Archer took one step away. “We’ll find him. Go on.”
    He had known what she was feeling. She tucked that away. “So I made a deal with them. They could stay in peace if they behaved. I even leave them treats. Four of them keep the deal. Two, not so much. But it’s better than it was before.”
    He turned around. “What do you do here?”
    “I manage things. Since my mom died when I was fifteen”—another step away—“I took over her role, which is dealing with the bigger customers and sometimes handling the front.” She opened an old pie safe. Inside were several shelves full of goodies. She plucked out a triangular cookie with a corner filled with jelly and handed it to him. “Raspberry jelly,” she said when he eyed it. “It’s called a Dragon tear. I came up with it myself.”
    “Clever.” He took a bite and then finished it off. “Good.”
    “I created Dragon pastries and Deuce stars. Nothing for Caidos, sorry. They never come in. And now we don’t even have many Crescent customers. Once Pop was cast in the shadow of suspicion over Tara’s disappearance, it tainted the shop. We lost a lot of locals, people who’d seen Pop’s outbursts and figured he must have done something to her. Luckily, we didn’t lose the bigger accounts, like restaurants and hotels.”
    She stuffed a tear into her mouth, letting the butter cookie melt on her tongue. “These are the products that didn’t sell yesterday.” She took in the shelves