Quicksilver Dragon Read online

  QUICKSILVER DRAGON

  by Zoe Chant

  This is a work of fiction. Similarities to real people, places, or events are entirely coincidental.

  QUICKSILVER DRAGON

  First edition. August 19, 2019.

  Copyright © 2019 Zoe Chant.

  Written by Zoe Chant.

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Epilogue

  A note from Zoe Chant

  More Paranormal Romance by Zoe Chant

  Chapter One

  It was the wrong day for the beach.

  Or, Lindsay Garza thought dryly, it was the wrong day for the beach for anyone but her. For her, it was perfect.

  Not that she especially liked blustery wind and unseasonably chilly weather, of course. But San Marco’s beaches were normally packed, and it usually took apocalyptically bad weather to empty them. Lindsay had been out there before on days when the wind had been strong enough to whip her hair out of its ponytail. She’d been there when the rain had been so heavy she’d hardly been able to see six inches in front of her nose. Compared to that, this was postcard-perfect.

  She leaned down and nabbed another piece of trash—discarded beer can, this time—with her reacher-grabber before dropping it safely into the heavy-duty garbage bag at her side.

  Cleaning up the beach was so much easier when people weren’t around, which was why she only ever tried it on bad weather days. And in sunny, mild San Marco, bad weather days were few and far between, so the junk had a lot of time to accumulate. Her guess was that no more than five in every hundred people on the beach tossed their soda cans onto the sand instead of into the trash... it was just that the multiplication on that wasn’t in her favor. Five people out of every hundred a day, with the hundreds of people they got during the city’s busy season? Multiplied by the number of days it all built up before Lindsay could get to it?

  Well, it still wasn’t enough to spoil the way the beach looked. Lindsay might have honed herself to have eagle eyes for any glitter of aluminum or—way grosser—used condom, but when she relaxed and straightened up, letting herself look down the coast, she still saw something absolutely magnificent.

  Sapphire-bright ocean. Sugar-white beach. Mountains in the distance.

  Lindsay loved her hometown. She’d never want to live anywhere else.

  Which was why she was currently stooping down to hoist up someone’s Styrofoam cooler. She loved the city too much to let it wreck one of its star attractions.

  Who tossed a cooler? These things were reusable, weren’t they?

  No way. You’re thirty years old. You’re past your days of? scavenging people’s thrown-out futons and dressers with missing knobs—you can definitely afford to buy your own cooler.

  Still, throwing away something useful always gave her a little pang of guilt. She’d grown up without much money, and she’d been raised to always think twice before tossing something that seemed broken or useless at first glance. There’d been no limit to the amount of patching and darning her older sister could do on clothes, often making them sharper and more stylish than they’d been before. And her dad had had the electronic equivalent of a green thumb—computer chip thumb?—and had been able to keep their old TV and family computer limping along for years. She liked to hold onto things and repair them wherever she could.

  Maybe that was how she felt about the city, too. Even when it wasn’t ideal, it was hers, and she’d rather fix it than abandon it.

  That being said, the Styrofoam cooler with a slightly rank package of cheddar cheese slices in it wasn’t a metaphor for her loyalty to San Marco. It was trash. She trashed it, wrinkling her nose a little at the smell that wafted up at her as the lid clunked off, falling into the bag first.

  Yuck.

  She felt the first couple of raindrops patter against her head. Uh-oh. She’d brought both a massive golf umbrella and the world’s most ridiculous waterproof poncho, but even when you came prepared, rain tended to cut a trash-picking session short. There was only so long a girl could sustain her will to live under those kinds of conditions.

  Still, she was game to try. Going home and relaxing with a hot bath and a good book would feel even better if she knew she’d really done all she could first.

  She dug into her backpack and came up with the poncho, which had been a gift from her niece, who had a sense of humor about her tía Lindsay’s over-the-top sense of civic pride. The poncho was an eye-gouging shade of neon green and covered with splashy floral designs in equally brain-melting colors. It was the most hideous thing Lindsay had ever seen—but as her niece had pointed out, it was ridiculously good at keeping her dry and it was from a local independent business-owner. And wasn’t part of Lindsay’s job as a city planner encouraging local businesses?

  Her niece was a ruthless evil mastermind. Lindsay was proud.

  She got the poncho over her head—it smelled like one of those inflatable rafts—and kept moving.

  Granola bar wrapper. Old copy of People Magazine. Scrunchy. Birthday card.

  She was so busy looking down at the sand and keeping the rain out of her eyes that the voice to her left came as a complete surprise.

  “Want some help?”

  Lindsay let out a squeak of surprise that she desperately hoped he hadn’t heard and then looked up.

  She had trouble making out the guy’s face through the thick veil of rain, but he was wearing a bright blue windbreaker. Even with its hood up, he must have been getting soaked. Despite that, his voice had sounded completely friendly and even relaxed.

  Lindsay couldn’t count the number of times she’d done beachside clean-up. She could count the number of times someone had ever offered to help her with it: one. This one.

  Usually, if there were people around at all, all she had to do was reassure them that she wasn’t a prisoner on work-release, just a concerned neat-freak citizen, and then they backed away slowly and left her alone.

  She blinked rainwater out of her eyes. “Thanks, seriously. That’s really nice of you. But I’m about to pack it in and go home anyway—this is getting pretty bad.”

  He nodded. “Carry your trash for you?”

  Sure, why not? She’d been lugging it down the length of the beach, and it was pretty cumbersome by now. It would be nice to have an extra set of hands. “That would be amazing. Thank you. I keep worrying I’m going to rip it open on a seashell.”

  He shuddered. “That would terrify me. Everything just flying away, all the hard work undone... Let’s make sure that doesn’t happen.”

  She handed him the bag, and he twirled it around a few times, choking the neck closed, and then slung it over his shoulder like it weighed nothing at all.

  “There’s a dumpster in the parking lot,” Lindsay said. “If you really don’t mind.”

  “Not even a little,” he said cheerfully. He started walking. “I’m Boone, by the way. Boone
Keller.”

  “Lindsay Garza.”

  He held out his hand sideways to her. “Nice to meet you, Lindsay Garza.”

  She shook. He had big hands with long, lean fingers, and even though they were slippery with rain, she felt like there was something sturdy about them. “Nice to meet you too, trash-carrying hero.”

  “Come on. You’re the trash-picking-up hero, I’m just your sidekick.”

  He caught her arm when she stumbled over a piece of driftwood. His reaction time was bewilderingly fast, lightning-fast.

  He said, “So are you... with Sanitation or something? Public Works?”

  “City planner’s office,” Lindsay said. “But this is, depressingly enough, off-the-clock.”

  “You just don’t like a messy beach.” He made it sound completely reasonable.

  “What about you? Why are you out in the rain?”

  “I was sketching.” There was an odd tinge of embarrassment in his voice. He didn’t follow up with more details, either.

  Men were so weird sometimes. Hadn’t they seen Titanic? Didn’t they know how much women tended to swoon over dreamy artists?

  Technically, she guessed she didn’t know for sure that Boone Keller was dreamy. Whenever she turned her head to get a peek at him, she was still mostly seeing a rain-colored blur. But even if the sun came out and revealed him to have two heads, he’d still have those steady, capable hands and the kind of sweetness that made him help a stranger carry an enormous bag of beach trash. She doubted he had anything to be ashamed of.

  She was about to say that it must be a lot easier for him to work without all the background hubbub of the typical beach crowd, but then she saw a gossamer shimmer out of the corner of her eye. She pulled up short.

  Boone stopped immediately. “What is it?”

  “There’s somebody there,” Lindsay said. She pointed. “Under the boardwalk.”

  San Marco’s boardwalk was usually as crowded as its beaches, bustling with food trucks, carnival-style games, and couples strolling along hand-in-hand. Today, of course, it was deserted.

  But the underside of it wasn’t. Huddled beneath the wooden planks, down in the mess of slimy seaweed and cigarette butts, was a young woman. She was curled up with her arms wrapped around her knees. She looked out-of-place—and maybe scared.

  “She shouldn’t be out in this,” Boone said. “She doesn’t even have a raincoat.”

  Lindsay hoisted up her umbrella. “I can loan her this. Let’s get her somewhere dry.”

  They made their way closer. There was something Lindsay didn’t like about all this. All of a sudden, she felt like she was in the beginning of a horror movie. Everything seemed ominous: the jagged purple-white scars the lightning made on the sky, the torrential rain that filled up their footsteps the moment they left them, the total isolation. The storm was so loud. She and Boone had almost had to shout to hear each other, and they were less than a foot apart. No one farther away than that would hear a thing. They wouldn’t even hear a scream.

  And here was this woman, alone and shivering, hiding out in the one part of San Marco even Lindsay thought was gross.

  She didn’t like it. Didn’t like any of it.

  She was just glad Boone was there so she didn’t have to go through it all alone.

  “Hey,” Lindsay called out as they got closer to the boardwalk. She saw the woman start. “It’s okay! We’re not going to hurt you! We’ve got an extra umbrella, that’s all, and you look like you could use it.”

  The boards of the boardwalk weren’t completely watertight, but getting under them still made all the difference in the world. The moment Lindsay stepped beneath the shelter of them, she could see and hear clearly again. That instantly helped take some of the creeping fear away.

  The woman looked to be in her early or mid-twenties. Up close, she looked tough and determined, like all the rain in the world wasn’t going to get in her way.

  She was beautiful, in a haunting and somehow old-fashioned way. She had delicate features and enormous eyes; she was dark-skinned but had long white-blonde hair that she wore in loose, tumbling waves. But she was drowning in a flood of heavy makeup, most of which the rain had hit enough to streak down her face, and she wore grungy flannel and ripped jeans that looked like she’d gotten them straight out of the nineties. She didn’t match.

  She was also staring at them like she’d never seen people before.

  “Hi,” Lindsay said. She gave the woman an awkward wave. “We just wanted to see if you needed any help.”

  “This is better than standing out in the rain,” Boone said, “so you’ve got the right idea, but we’d be happy to get you someplace warmer and less... algae-covered.”

  Lindsay had been so focused on the strange woman that she hadn’t even thought about seizing the opportunity to look at Boone. Not that she exactly felt the same fizz of possibility now that they were face-to-face with somebody in trouble, of course—but she was still curious. She turned her head—

  And was confronted with the fact that even without a curtain of rain, a guy in a windbreaker, with his hood up, seen only from the side... still basically didn’t look like anyone. All she could see from here was the tip of his nose. She guessed it was kind of a cute nose.

  He was tall and broad-shouldered, but she had known that much already.

  Focus, Linds.

  She squatted down, bringing herself eye-to-eye with the huddled woman. She tried to smile encouragingly. “I’m Lindsay. This is Boone.” She could try Spanish next, if that would help.

  The woman swallowed. “My name is Eleanor.”

  She had a high, lilting, musical voice that made Lindsay think of Disney princesses.

  “Hi, Eleanor. Do you need some help? An umbrella?”

  Eleanor shook her head. “I just want to sit here. I like the ocean.”

  “I like the ocean too,” Boone said. “But it’s bucketing down right now. Are you sure—”

  “I’m waiting for someone,” Eleanor said, cutting him off. There was something imperious about her tone—so not a Disney princess after all. More like a Disney queen. “Thank you for the offer, but I promise you I’m exactly where I want to be.”

  What else could they do? Eleanor clearly knew her own mind, and if she wanted to hang out under a dripping-wet boardwalk all day, there was nothing they could do to stop her. She didn’t seem to be in any distress, aside from how forlorn her self-hugging had looked. She wasn’t hurt or crying. If anything, there was a profound and almost eerie calm to her.

  Still, Lindsay hated the idea of just walking away from her and calling it a day. “Boone, you’ve got some paper and a pencil on you, right? If you were sketching?”

  “Sure.” He unzipped his windbreaker and took out a sketchpad with a charcoal pencil taped to it. He passed it over to her.

  It was strange handling something that was still warm from his body. Lindsay opened it from the back, where she thought she’d be most likely to find blank pages, and tore off a corner of one creamy sheet. Unsticking the pencil, she wrote her name and phone number on the slip of paper and held it out to Eleanor.

  “Just in case you need anything.”

  Eleanor looked at Lindsay’s hand for a long time, long enough that Lindsay thought she really might refuse, but then she stretched out her own and took the piece of paper. Their fingers grazed together, and Lindsay felt a small spark of static electricity. Eleanor’s eyes widened, her hand closing tightly around the paper.

  “Thank you,” she said. “Thank you so much for coming.”

  Like she was the hostess at a party.

  “Our pleasure,” Boone said, which made Lindsay laugh.

  To her surprise, Eleanor smiled too. She had a wide, charmingly unselfconscious smile, nowhere near as delicate and ladylike as the rest of her. “Fine, it was a ridiculous thing to say.” She slid Lindsay’s phone number into her hip pocket. “See you later, then.”

  “See you later,” Lindsay said.
r />   Boone echoed her, and then the two of them stepped back out into the rain. Lindsay at least felt a little better leaving Eleanor behind now that Eleanor had a way of asking for help if she needed it and now that the woman’s perfect facade had cracked a little to show a real human being underneath. Maybe she was just eccentric. Or going through a bad breakup—Lindsay had done some stranger and more pathetic things with her heart broken than sit morosely underneath a boardwalk.

  She and Boone finally reached the parking lot. Boone swung the garbage bag up into the dumpster with an odd gracefulness and then turned to her.

  “Thanks again for lugging that all this way,” Lindsay said. She felt awkward. She wanted to see him again. For that matter, she wanted to actually see him and verify that he wasn’t just naturally blurry. “I really appreciate it.”

  “This one really was my pleasure,” Boone said.

  Warmth spread through Lindsay’s chest. She smiled, having the distinct feeling that she looked much dorkier than Eleanor ever had.

  “I know we’re both drenched,” Boone said, “but since we can’t get any wetter, do you want to go to that diner up the block?” He jerked his head in the direction, but she knew instantly which one he was talking about. It had a neighborly greasy spoon vibe to it that she’d always liked. “Get something hot to drink so we could start warming up?”

  “Yes,” Lindsay said immediately. “I’d like that a lot.”

  She didn’t care if she was wearing the world’s most atrocious poncho and looked like a drowned cat, and she didn’t care if her plans for the evening had all been about unwinding in a hot bath and letting the world slip away from her. Right now, she liked the world a lot. And nothing sounded better than dripping all over a diner booth with Boone, sipping hot chocolate and making conversation.

  They walked to the diner because, as Boone had said, they couldn’t get any wetter, and it didn’t seem to make sense to immediately start soaking their cars, too.

  As soon as they got inside, though, Lindsay determined to get this poncho off. The second she felt the rain stop dripping on her head, she turned her back to Boone and lifted up the poncho, peeling it off. She felt the slick vinyl catch a little on her shirt, pulling it up in the back—of course, why should the poncho let her be cool now?—but at least then she had the damn thing off her. She folded it over her arm and turned back around.