Chapter 1
It should’ve been an entirely normal, early morning, absolutely nothing-unusual-happens run on the beach.
I left the house at 5:37 a.m., the sun a hazy reflection behind the horizon. I wore my usual outfit—long hair in a pony, light hoodie, jogger shorts, and high-end Saucony Endorphin running shoes.
No, my family wasn’t rich.
We were more endlessly-on-the-verge-of-foreclosure, worry-instead-of-sleep, dead-but-unburied-due-to-costs broke. Dad, Gramps, my brother, and my brother-in-law went in on the Sauconys as a combination Christmas and graduation gift. Yes, I’m that girl who graduated from high school a semester early.
The drive to my favorite beach took ten minutes. I parked in the sand-strewn lot, hid my keys under my seat, and stretched my upper body as I hiked over the dunes to the water. Running in the mornings was pretty much the only quiet time I got, and I cherished it like most people my age did their cellphones. Okay, I totally cherished that as well, even if mine was six years old and had the crappiest cell service on the planet.
I knew the moment I left the dunes that something was off about the bay. No salty breeze. No morning bird calls. Even the surf seemed muted.
Meh. Enjoy the peace. I had a small window here.
I had the timing of my runs down perfect. If I began at six a.m. sharp and kept my pace, I’d finish at 6:54. This gave me twenty-eight minutes to get back to my car, drive to Carmel, and arrive for my Job #1 only two minutes late. Any later than that and Mrs. Lee gave me a bruising lecture on punctuality and threatened to fire me. Yes, it was a weird motivational tactic. Yes, it worked.
The moment my phone chirped six a.m., I shoved it into my pocket and took off across the damp sand.
Only then did I notice what was wrong.
Something in the distance blocked the beach. An overturned boat hull maybe, half out of the rolling tide.
That happened sometimes. A boat would get loose during a storm, drift down the coast, and show up somewhere else beat-to-death. But it was April and this was California. Whale, then?
That happened too. A couple years ago, my dad and brother had taken me with them to get pictures of a partially eaten whale calf. Gross.
This was much bigger than the calf. Much, much bigger. “Fourteen hours,” I complained to the object, the ocean, my dad and brother who couldn’t hear me anyway, “That’s how much I worked yesterday. Fourteen very long, very tiring, very doing-ten-more-today hours. I deserved to get to run. I earned this.”
I slowed to a walk anyway, pulling my phone back out and setting it to video. My dad had a minorly successful social media channel, meaning he made enough money to not quite cover his expenses. My brother, Antony, was his producer. While the platform was exotic car parts, they could work in pretty much anything that might get views. A recently deceased whale was a no-brainer, especially as Ant would find a way to blame cruisehips or fishermen or someone like that for the death.
“This isn’t likely to make any financial difference,” I grumbled to myself. (Nothing ever did.)
I hit Record. “Oh, wow,” I exclaimed in a hopefully-not-too-fake tone for the benefit of the channel’s audience. “Upside-down sailing boat? Gray whale? Giant squid? What could it be?” I panned my phone, watching the screen to make sure I framed it well. Weirdly, the boat/whale/squid didn’t end where it should’ve but continued on and on and on and on into the water like it had a massively thick, extremely long tail. Also, the whole thing appeared to be purple.
“Mother of Dog, no way.” My pulse leaped so hard a quiver ran through my body. I lowered my phone. “I think it’s a seadragon.”
The thing’s front end was blunt with a wide mouth and enormous eyes. Very whale-like, really. That was the end of the resemblance, though. The curve of the body was longer and more serpentine. Instead of fins, it had water wings, long, thin appendages that were currently limp and crushed against the sand but underwater supposedly floated like rippling gossamer webbing.
Supposedly, because no one had ever photographed a seadragon underwater. Magical-creatures were rare. Seadragons were . . . well, whatever “rare” was divided by a hundred thousand.
They were also valuable. Pricelessly valuable.
I jerked my phone back up and continued filming. “No one’s seen a dead seadragon since . . .” My voice hitched. Not fake this time either. “Since . . . that one they made the movie about before I was born.”
I walked forward again, describing what I saw, my voice ragged with excitement, my pulse still in high-gear. This dead seadragon had to be worth an easy hundred million. And I was the only person who currently knew it existed.
There was an opportunity here.
However . . .
Seadragons were protected under every single international law on the planet, and the Monterey Bay was a marine sanctuary. Removing anything, touching anything, was likely to get me into serious trouble, possibly even arrested.
Right.
I wouldn’t touch it.
I was totally going to touch it.
A single scale would pay for four years of college without my living at home and holding down multiple jobs. Two scales would cover my brother’s school debt. Four would pay off my dad’s credit cards. Five (maybe more like nine) would save our house from the never-ending threat of foreclosure.
Yeah. No way was I not going to pilfer as many scales as I could carry. I’d just snag some quick and hightail it back to my car. No one would ever know.
The sun cracked over the dunes, splitting the shadows and lighting the carcass in iridescent purple and green and black. I froze mid-step, momentarily awed.
“It’s . . .”
The perfect word to describe the resplendence in front of me lost itself halfway up my throat. It wasn’t just the richness of the color, either, but the sinewy shape and texture of the hide. Everything about it was just so stunning, gorgeous, amazing . . .
“ . . . dead.” I finished softly.
I headed to the seadragon’s blunted head, trying to be respectful while still filming and gauging how I was going to remove the scales. (Because admiration didn’t pay the bills and nothing I did now would bring it back to life anyway. Gotta be practical about these things.)
“I’m so sorry,” I whispered as I neared. “I hope you weren’t in pain.”
The head was twice my height. Its huge eye had a hazy, dead cast to it. The scales were even more colorful and gorgeous up close, pearly and reflective and gleaming all at once. Each scale was twice the size of a piece of binder paper and lay smooth against the hide.
After taking some close-up photos, I tucked my phone under my arm and ran my fingers under the edge of a glossy scale. It lifted easily, as if meant to flare out. “Please, don’t hate me for doing this,” I said to the dragon as I gave the scale a tug. “I really, really need the money, and I promise not to waste what I take.” The scale didn’t budge, so I put a foot on the side of the dead creature, leveraged my weight backward, and pulled as hard as I could.
My hands slipped down the velvety smoothness, and I toppled backward, landing on my butt in the sand. The massive eye blinked at me.
I screamed and clawed backward, my hands digging wrist-deep into the sand as I panic-pushed myself away as fast as I could. I flipped over and jumped to my feet, running up the beach faster than I’d ever run before.
It wasn’t supposed to be alive.
How could it be alive? Was it now going to kill me? I had, after all, been attempting to tear a piece of it off. A small piece, but still. How salty would I be if someone tried to steal one of my fingernails while I watched?
Since it made no move to chase me, I slowed and glanced back.
Seadragons weren’t thought of as killers, not like the desert fire-lizards of Africa or the eel-like-things that lived in Norway, but all magical-creatures had better-than-cow intelligence. It blinked a second time. The milkiness I’d assumed was the cast of death was some kinda inner lid.
Before I could do more than recognize this, it threw its head in the air, and I threw my arms over my head as I was peppered by sand. The seadragon thrashed against the beach. Great thumping thrashes, head up and down, body back and forth, salt water and grit flying everywhere. A screeching flock of gulls broke from the dunes for the safety of the sky. The surf crashed violently against the shore. I bolted backward again.
At the same time, I could just hear my father’s voice when I told him I’d witnessed the death throes of a seadragon, and I hadn’t filmed it for his channel. Sasha Beth Clems, Have. You. Learned. Nothing?!
I stopped again and hit Record right as the creature lunged backward cobra-like and threw its upper body fifty feet in the air, revealing a pale underside.
And an anchor-sized harpoon jammed into its scales.
“Holy freaking not-a-cow. Someone shot it?”
The seadragon fell back to the sand with the loudest thump I’d ever heard, making the ground shake way worse than the 6.3 earthquake we’d had when I was ten. The wind disappeared and the ocean waves stopped waving for a long, held breath.
I kept filming.
The creature had come down crooked and facing me. Its eyes narrowed to slits and its face wrinkled as if it were in horrible pain. Pain so strong the sand under my running shoes shivered with it. Or maybe that was actually me shivering in reaction.
This was so wrong.
The seadragon was beautiful and it was in pain and it didn’t deserve this. Regardless of my family’s financial needs, I was an animal lover and I truly, deeply, didn’t want the creature in front of me to die.
The wide grimace of a mouth parted, showing huge ice-pick teeth. My pity dove behind my liver and I bolted backward a third time.
The creature made a wet popping sound as if blowing the world’s largest kiss. Then its entire body shuddered, teeth to tail. The surrounding sand shook in response, for-real-this-time. The seadragon went still. Slack. Limp. Dead. (Again, for-real-this-time.)
I stared at it for a long moment, silent, sick, somber. I glanced at my phone to be respectful. “6:07 a.m.”
Only then did I notice what the seadragon had expelled onto the sand with that kiss.
Oh. My. Dog.
What a complete and utter idiot I’d been. Dumbest of the dumb. Too stupid to own a phone, smart or not. There was only one group of people with the gall, the resources, and the desire to kill a seadragon, and especially to do so within a marine sanctuary.
“The magic-handlers,” I whispered and then frantically scanned the bay as if saying their name might call them.
Magic-handlers wouldn’t care about the scales or the value of the creature itself. They had more money than many small nations (Lucky!) and were said to have their fingers in the economies of half the planet (Unfairly lucky!). Nope, the magic-handlers didn’t care about the creature’s value or beauty or pain. They cared about the thing that made magical-creatures alive, the thing magical-creatures gave up when they died.
The raw magic.
The seadragon’s magic sat half-buried in the sand in front of its slack mouth. A basketball-sized sphere glowing with internal swirls of blue and purple and black like something from a trendy glassblower shop.
Semis. That’s what raw magic was called. A Latin word that rhymed with “freebies” (or “feces”).
If a handful of scales would solve all my family’s financial problems, a Semis would make us gazillionaires.
