I shoved the little voice aside as I descended the final escalator to the casino floor. It was truly another world down here: colored lights, ringing bells, an air of chaos and excitement that was lacking in my empty hotel room. Just what I needed to take my mind off…everything. I didn’t want to think about Talon or St. George. I didn’t want to remember Lilith’s training, or Dante’s betrayal. I didn’t want to think about Riley, or this sudden, crazy longing for the human standing beside me. I didn’t want to feel any of that. For a few hours, I wanted to turn off my mind and forget everything.

Garret, looking even less enthused as we stepped off the escalator onto the carpeted floor, did his normal crowd-scanning thing while talking to me. “Where to first?”

Good question. I’d never been to Vegas before, though I’d seen plenty of commercials and several movies that featured the famed City of Sin. They all showed Las Vegas in the same light: an almost mythical city where you could make your fortune in a few hours, or lose everything just as quickly. To our kind, that concept of instant wealth was intriguing, almost intoxicating. I might’ve been a hatchling, on the run from the organization and St. George, but I was still a dragon.

Spotting a row of bright slot machines along the wall, I smiled and tugged Garret’s sleeve. “This way,” I told him and started toward the twinkling lights. “That looks easy enough. Let’s see how fast you can lose a dollar to penny slots.”

* * *

Answer: about thirty seconds, the first ten spent figuring out how to make the machine work. Modern-day slot machines, I discovered, didn’t require you to pull the “arm” on their side down. In fact, the arm was just for decoration now. Everything was automatic, which meant you pressed a button and watched the pictures of apples and bells and sevens spin around for a few seconds before they came to a stop—always unmatched—and the screen announced that you had lost.

“Dammit,” I muttered, after I’d fed a third dollar into the side of the machine and lost it almost as quickly. “That was my last single.” I looked to the soldier, standing vigilant at my side like an alert guard dog. I didn’t think he’d taken his eyes off the crowds once. “Hey, Garret, you don’t happen to have any loose change weighing you down, do you?”

He gave me a split-second glance, the corner of his lip curling up as he went back to surveying the floor. “I thought dragons liked to hoard their wealth,” he said in a low voice. “Not throw it away at slot machines.”

“I’m investing.” I wrinkled my nose at him. “That last spin was almost triple sevens. I’m gonna get lucky any second now.”

“Right.”