Free Dragon's Teeth by Mercedes Lackey Page A

wall. The stranger was still there—and the pits were for the first time today, quiet. They would not be that way for long, as damaged or empty cars staggered into the hands of their keepers, but they were for the moment, and the silence impacted the ears as the silence between incoming artillery barrages had—
    She headed for the stranger—but he was heading for her. “Miss Duncan?” he said quickly. “Jim got me this pit-pass—he came over to see us do Death of a Salesman last night and when he came back-stage and found out I race too, he got me the pass and told me to check in with you.”
    “What kind of racing?” she asked cautiously. It would be just like Jimmy to pal around with some kid just because he was an up-and-coming actor and saddle her with someone who didn’t know when to get the hell out of the way.
    “Dirt-track, mostly,” he said modestly, then quoted her credentials that made her raise her eyebrow. “I’ll stay out of the way.”
    The kid had an open, handsome face, and another set of killer blue eyes—and the hand that shook hers was firm and confident. She decided in his favor.
    “Do that,” she told him. “Unless there’s a fire—tell you what, you think you can put up with hauling one of those around for the rest of the race?” She pointed at the rack of heavy fire-bottles behind the fire-wall, and he nodded. “All right; get yourself one of those and watch our pit, Porsche, and Ferrari. That’s the cost of you being in here. If there’s a fire in any of ’em, deal with it.” Since the crews had other things on their minds—and couldn’t afford to hang extinguishers around their necks—this kid might be the first one on the spot.
    “Think you can handle that—what is your name, anyway?”
    “Paul,” he said, diffidently. “Yeah, I can handle that. Thanks, Miss Duncan.”
    “Dora,” she replied automatically, as she caught the whine of approaching engines. She lost all interest in the kid for a moment as she strained to see who was in front.
    It was Lola, but the car was already in trouble. She heard a tell-tale rattle deep in, and winced as the leaders roared by—
    Jimmy was in the first ten; that was all that mattered, that, and his first-lap time. She glanced at Fillipe, who had the stop-watch; he gave her a thumbs-up and bent to his clipboard to make notes, as he would for almost every lap. She let out her breath in a sigh.
    “Miss Duncan, how did you get into racing?”
    She had forgotten the kid but he was still there—as he had promised, out of the way, but still within talking distance.
    She shook her head, a rueful smile on her lips. “Glory. How fleeting fame. Retire, and no one’s ever heard of you—”
    “Oh, I know all about the Grand Prix wins,” the kid said hastily. “I just wanted to know why you stopped dancing. Jimmy told me you were kind of a—big thing in Europe. It doesn’t seem like a natural approach to racing. I mean, Josephine Baker didn’t go into racing.”
    She chuckled at being compared to the infamous cabaret dancer, but no one had ever asked her the question in quite that way. “A couple of reasons,” she replied, thoughtfully. “The biggest one is that my dingbat brother was a better dancer than I ever was. I figured that the world only needed one crazy dancing Duncan preaching Greek revival and naturalism. And really, Ruth St. Denis and Agnes de Mille were doing what I would have been doing. Agnes was doing more; she was putting decent dancing into motion pictures, where millions of little children would see it. When I think about it, I don’t think Isadora Duncan would have made any earthshaking contributions to dancing.” Then she gave him her famous impish smile, the one that peeled twenty years off of her. “On the other hand, every Grand Prix driver out there does the ‘Duncan Dive’ to hit the cockpit. And they are starting to wear the driving suits I’ve been working on. So I’ve done that much for