Free Hunting Down Dragons (Moonlight Dragon #2) by Tricia Owens Page A

pushy things try to squeeze past. Usually they're bad things. But not always. Sometimes a spirit can't or refuses to let go of their former life."
    "This one was definitely bad, bad, bad!" Melanie scrubbed her arms violently. "I was super scared."
    "That one was not one of the 'good' ones, I agree." Celestina blew out the candles. The smoke that rose up reminded me of the ghostly emissions that had leaked from her face while she was channeling. "Your mom was here," she said, watching me. "In the beginning. The Lwa brought her forward. That part was real. That was her spirit speaking to you."
    The muscles in my chest squeezed tight for a moment. My mom had been here. She'd talked me. As best she could, at least. What was it she'd said?
    Miss you so much.
    I had to blink rapidly for a couple of seconds to stem the emotion that wanted to boil up and over. I never cried over my parents. I cried over the loss of them, over the life I'd been forced to live without them, but not over them in particular. I didn't know them.
    But those four words were a parent's words. A mother's words. Words that I hadn't heard in over twenty years. Later, I promised myself, I would pull up the memory of the séance like a favorite book, and I would pore over every word and allow myself to feel the sorrow and pleasure that they invoked in me. But now was not the time for that.
    "We need to write down everything she said." I looked around for paper and a pen and settled with grabbing Melanie's phone and accessing the memo app.
    I entered the words as my friends called them out. When we were finished, I studied everything I'd typed with a frown. "Was she trying to say the gargoyle now lives in Texas?"
    "Near a lake in Texas," Melanie suggested. "We can look that up!"
    "I think the lake reference was about Lake Mead." I related what Vale had told me about the golem and how it had been made from the mud of the lake.
    "What does the 'like us' comment mean?" Celestina paused in the middle of the room, cheese platter in hand. "Dragon sorcerers can make golems?"
    "Not that anyone's ever told me. Otherwise I would've constructed a housekeeper and a cook by now." 
    Christian laughed. "That's all? Oh, that's right, you ran into Vale again. So you're good in that department."
    I gave him a look before concentrating again on what my mom had told us. She had specifically said a dragon had made it. How was that possible? Had my parents been hunting down another dragon sorcerer who'd gone rogue?
    Or was the 'like us' comment something simpler, an indication that the golem-maker was a magickal being? Or perhaps even Chinese? Or a woman? So many possibilities…
    Melanie picked up a fallen piece of cheese, blew on it, and popped it in her mouth. "Are you thinking what I'm thinking?"
    "That's usually dangerous or crazy," I replied. "Or it involves sugar."
    She grinned around the cheese. "What if that dragon we saw out in the desert tonight was the guy who made this golem thingy? What if he's coming for you, too?!"
    I'd already considered that but it didn't make sense to me. "Why tonight? Why come after me over twenty years later? Why not hunt me down when I was just a kid and didn't have a good handle on Lucky?"
    "Maybe they didn't know about you until now," Celestina suggested. "You said you used a lot of magick to defeat the demon inside Vale. Maybe the Oddsmakers weren't the only ones who noticed when you did that."
    That made sense and it worried me. I preferred flying under the radar. Attention usually came from the wrong sorts of people, even if on the surface they seemed friendly or were admirers. When people came looking for you, they usually wanted something from you, if only a chunk of your time.
    "I hope you're wrong. Both about someone noticing what I've done with Lucky and about the dragon on the playa being a signal that someone's coming after me." I walked to the table and picked up my panda pin. I rubbed it for good luck. "Unfortunately, I won't know