“I don’t know,” Travis said thoughtfully. “They said it was drugs. Besides, Mr. Ireland is a pegasus.”
“Maybe they just have something against dragons, then, and not sissy flying horses. And what drugs could possibly survive a dragon’s bloodstream?”
“It was some designer thing, specific to dragons,” Travis explained, reading from his tablet. They call it goldshot, and it has some kind of enhancing properties.”
“Enhancing what?” Breck asked suggestively from across the room.
“Hey, there’s Graham!”
The surly landscaper made a brief appearance in the background of the interview on the screen, scowling and vanishing as soon as he realized he was in the field of the camera’s view.
In person, Graham grunted and took a drink from his beer.
The Mr. Shifter competition was on the staff television, streaming through the Internet, rather than broadcast television. Shifters weren’t acknowledged in all of the countries represented, which made the competition more complicated, and the contest was being hosted through a webpage. At least part of the contestant elimination was done through Internet voting, though there were also a half dozen celebrity judges wandering the resort acting important.
Tex sat at the other end of the couch from Graham, nursing a beer and paying the barest of attention to the screen he was staring through.
“Damn, this place looks great on camera,” Travis said proudly. There were aerial shots of the pool, zooming in through the palm trees to the Greek columns and grand steps, flanked on each side by waterfalls. Mr. India was stepping out of the water, and the camera lingered on the water slipping off his dusky skin, and the tight, shiny spandex of the very spare swimsuit he was wearing. It was a bit of a disconnect, seeing the sunlit resort when the darkness outside was so complete.
“Man, that French villa is wishing they hadn’t fucked up their contract,” Breck agreed. Every shot made the resort look good, with gleaming cottages and landscape that was dripping in riotous flowers. There had been multiple shots of the pristine beach, with its jeweled jungle backdrop and crystal blue water. It was the kind of advertising you couldn’t buy with money.
“That probably had something to do with Mr. France’s disqualification, too,” Bastian muttered acidly.
“It could have just been that Mr. France couldn’t fake his way through the part of the contest where he had to actually speak in complete sentences,” Travis suggested.
“Not that he has to for the swimsuit portion,” Breck countered merrily.
Bastian’s face went black and he rose up out his seat with a growl, but he pivoted on his foot and left in a grouchy huff.
“What’s his problem?” Tex asked, momentarily distracted from his own problems.
Breck shrugged, and surprisingly, it was Graham who answered.
“He had to move his hoard. It’s a dragon thing.”
“Oh,” Breck, Tex, and Travis
said in understanding unison.
Bastian had been in a vicious mood since they’d moved out of the hotel, though any of the other staff would have cheerfully said that the house by the cliffs was actually a step up. It wasn’t as private, but the rooms were bigger, and the common areas were stunning. The only real problems were that the toilet clogged if you flushed anything larger than a grape, and that Breck refused to tie his bathrobe closed when he was wandering around early in the morning drinking coffee.
The pageant stream went to a sponsored commercial for energy drinks and Travis muted it.
“I have a question,” Tex finally started, and stalled out. He had his guitar in his lap, but his fingers were uncharacteristically still on the strings.
“Out with it, Cowboy,” Breck prodded him.
“Do you… believe in mates?”
“Hard to deny them,” Travis said solemnly.
Graham just grunted, but Tex thought it sounded affirmative.
“I just hope it never happens to me,” Breck said, clutching his neck in a choking motion.
“But if it does,” Tex pursued. “If it does, it’s supposed to be at first sight, right? You’re supposed to know immediately.”
Even Graham nodded at that.