We stepped through the door into a massive, dimly lit cavern. A huge, yawning chamber that soared up into the darkness, hiding the ceiling from view. The floor was cement, but the walls, as far as I could see, were of natural rock and stone. The air in the cave was unnaturally warm, surprising for being so far underground, and smelled faintly of smoke, though I couldn’t see any fires. There were also no overhead lights, no florescent bulbs or lamps, or even candles. In fact, the only light came from a group of enormous flat screens near the back wall. Over two dozen televisions, bolted to a network of steel frames, formed an immense, flickering semicircle of noise and images. Each huge screen showed something different: sports, world events, news stations in several different languages. A few of them appeared to be casino security, cycling through different areas of the hotel. More than one screen showed nothing but the Dow, tracking the rise and fall of stocks. Horses sped down a track, police sirens wailed and an attractive Asian reporter babbled at me in Japanese.

It was a chaotic flood of imagery, a hundred different things happening all at once. So I didn’t immediately notice what lay beneath the circle of screens. Then Mr. Smith put a warning hand on my shoulder, stopping me from advancing any farther into the room, and I dropped my gaze from the televisions.

My mouth nearly fell open, and I bit my cheek to keep from gasping in shock. An enormous pile of gold lay sprawled on the floor beneath the screens, the light glimmering off the metallic surface. In the darkness and shadows, it was difficult to see how big it really was, but I guessed it was at least forty feet long and fifteen feet high, a virtual mountain of gold in the middle of the cavern. So this was why Reign was so touchy about other dragons being in his territory. He was sitting on a literal treasure hoard. Old-fashioned indeed.

And then, the mountain moved.

The bottom dropped out of my stomach, and my mouth did fall open this time, as the entire hoard shifted, unfurled two colossal leathery wings and sat up. A head rose on a long, snaking neck, and a tail uncurled to double the length, as an eighty-foot golden dragon turned with a scraping of claws and scales and fixed us with a massive yellow eye.