Lupi 06 - Blood Magic

Impulsively she reached out and squeezed his hand. "You're good for me."
    It delighted her to see surprise, then pleasure, spread over his face. "Good," he said. "That's good. I love you."
    Happiness had a kick sometimes. She smiled. For once he was a bit tongue-tied. "Before I get back to work - which I really, really need to do - I'll just add that you matter. It still scares me sometimes, how much you matter, but I've decided... Well, sunshine matters, too, but I don't go around worrying about the sun, do I? So mostly I'm not worrying. Except about the wedding, and I'm trying to cut back there, too."
    "You might let me be in charge of worrying along with venue."
    She shook her head. "You're not good at it. Me, I'm a champion worrier. You remember what Grandmother said about how to get a dragon to do something?"
    He followed her jump in topics without trouble. "There are only two ways - strike a bargain, or go to war. We're not interested in the second option, I assume."
    "Good assumption. She also said never owe a dragon a favor, as they tend to expect a really healthy repayment. But it isn't a favor if they offer something without you asking."
    Lily's dream last night had been the cobwebby sort - gossamer yet sticky. Its residue had clung to her as she stood under the shower's stream, sticky strands of event and emotion clogging her thoughts. While she was rinsing out the shampoo, she'd realized why she'd dreamt of dragons.
    There was one place Cullen should be entirely safe from a sorcerer or Gifted assassin who could disguise himself magically: a dragon's lair. Like sorcerers, dragons saw magic. Like Lily, they were almost impossible to enspell. They were highly territorial. They were also telepathic.
    It was damned hard to sneak up on someone who "heard" your mind buzzing if you got near.
    There remained one problem: how would they get Sam to agree? Grandmother might have done it, had she been around. But she wasn't.
    Lily rubbed her breastbone, where worry had lodged like a tumor, hard and bothersome. That was the other reason she wanted to see Sam. If anyone knew where Grandmother was, he did.
    The reservoir spread along their left to the east, vast and still, smiling up at the sky in placid blue. Lily looked at the unruffled water and tried to absorb some of its stillness.
    "Are you hoping you can get Sam to offer Cullen asylum without asking for it?" Rule asked.
    "I'm hoping to appeal to his curiosity. Somehow."
    "Hmm. I have some ideas. It might not be too difficult to persuade Sam. Cullen got along with Micah well enough back in D.C."
    Micah was Washington, D.C.'s dragon. "Micah's a lot younger than Sam. I'm not sure Sam will find him inherently interesting in the same... Shit, there's the sign. I'd better come up with something."
    The sign she referred to marked the entrance to a gravel road. "WARNING: THIS AREA IS RESTRICTED" it read in large letters. Fifty yards down the road was a gate and another sign: "DRAGON LAIR AHEAD. U.S. AND STATE LAW SUSPENDED BEYOND BARRIER."
    That suspension of law had been one of the trickiest parts of the negotiation that ended in the Dragon Accords. Dragons considered human laws absurd and obviously not applicable to them. Unsurprisingly, the government disagreed. In the end, the dragons had agreed to abide by a few basics: Respect for private property. No eating pets. No killing at all, apart from their allotted livestock, save in self-defense - not even when some human was particularly annoying.
    With one exception. A dragon cannot conceive of his lair being subject to any authority but his own. According to Grandmother, it wasn't that they insisted on absolute sovereignty there; they literally could not imagine anything else.
    Technology had been faltering near the largest nodes, and it would only get worse. The country needed dragons, so tiny pockets were created where dragons' whims prevailed, rather than human law. States - or countries, since just over half of the dragons went to other nations - that refused to create the necessary pockets around lairs simply didn't get a dragon.
    Every state except Utah and North Dakota had complied. So had Great Britain, Japan, China, Italy, Mexico, Germany, Brazil, New Zealand, and Canada, as well as twenty nations who had little hope of getting a dragon, but tried anyway. France refused, as did Russia and Australia.
    In the U.S., the area around a lair was fenced and posted. Some of the dragons set magical booby traps or other