“Ah, that’s ok.” I’d already seen what he had to offer when he Sharon Stone-d me the first time I was here.

  “Oh, come now.” He rose and turned his back, something I was extremely grateful for, before shucking his kimono. Then his flesh rippled like I was looking through a heat haze, and something angular appeared as the shaking air returned to normal.

  Gleaming grey chitin. Way too many legs, two of which were far too long to be easy to balance with, and when he skittered round to face me, his head was a nightmarish cross between a horse and a dragonfly. Multifaceted green eyes showed dozens of tiny reflections of my horrified expression, so I quickly schooled my face.

  “I’m magnificent, am I not?” The insect-dude preened, the over-long forearms unfolded, and the three-feet-long claws that had been folded back against his elbows smoothed the array of antennae that stuck up above his head like he was a living cell tower back home.

  “You’re something alright. So what the hell are you?”

  “I’m an Infernal Mantislord. My experiments in demonology led to some fairly dramatic shifts in my physiology as I got more evolutions. My very successful experiments, if I say so myself. Not many of us can fake having a human class for long. My kind are generally green, and perhaps half my size. And you, dear Bob, are just like me.”

  “I’m really not.” I hadn’t been phobic about insects back when I was a puny mammal, but they were hard to think of as ‘cute’, like you could with bunnies and dogs and whatnot. Some of that old revulsion was stirring in my mind as I took in the chittering mandibles and… I didn’t even know what to call them. Like face-fingers that closed in around his mouth? The only comparison that came to mind was when the Predator gets his mask knocked off, but if he were a man-sized cockroach. “How do you even talk like that?” His voice hadn’t changed, still the smooth basso rumble from his human form.

  Now, a dragon is a majestic beast. We fly through the skies on leathery wings, we’re sleek and handsome. Our scales gleam in the moonlight, women want us, and men want to be us. We are awesome in every way. Phillpot looked like he was designed to open giant bottles of beer with those forelimbs. And give children nightmares.

  “How do you speak as a dragon? System-fuckery is fine when it works in your favour, Bob.” Touche. “So let’s see the Dragon of the gentry!” He waved half a dozen legs at me in a ‘come on then’ gesture that came through despite his inability to have facial expressions.

  “It’s a bit cramped in here, maybe some other–” Philpott cut me off by waving one of his limbs more firmly, and the walls retreated until we were in a room the size of a football pitch. The heart-shaped bed looked like it was a couple of hundred metres away. Prendreghast the Expander did good work.

  “Go on then!” he said happily. I felt like a kid being told by a parent to perform a party trick that was cute five years ago but was now embarrassing. I turned around, sucked my clothes into my storage space, and transformed. It felt good to be back in my real body, and I shook myself out from nose to tail before turning to treat Phillpot to a saurian smile as I looked down on him from a couple of metres above his head.

  “That feels better. Still think we’re the same?”

  “Most impressive– are those?” He suddenly leapt forward like a cat on a mouse, and one of his long forelimbs flashed out to pluck a single midnight feather from my wing.

  “Oi!” I flapped hard enough to launch myself back a dozen metres and glared at the being I was suddenly thinking of as eco-sustainable protein. Phillpot held the feather close to his refractory eyes and turned it left and right. “That kind of hurts!”

  “I bloody know, Nyal! I didn’t believe it either! We need… Of course I won’t do that. Look, shut up, I’ve got this… No, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to snap… Yes, I know you’re going to punish me for speaking to you like that… That sounds worse than usual. How delightful! Can we stay on topic, please? OK. Ok. Yeah, I’ll try that. I know what they’re like, Nyal! Remember Halister Hungerfang? Hah, yeah, such a stupid name… No, you stay there! I’ll handle this.” As he finished his schizophrenic conversation with the uber-demon floating in his eyes, he looked up at me, face-fingers twitching.

  “Are you trying to smile at me?” I growled.

  “Yeah. It really doesn’t work in this form. I’m sending you friendly pheromones if that helps. One sec.” He shimmered again, and a fat naked man looked behind him to find his kimono was now half a mile away on his bed. He shrugged and turned back to me, pulling another one from a storage device or some personal pocket dimension, and thankfully returned to modesty. “How much?”

  “You want my feathers. No way, dude. You’re not strip mining my wings like a fucking locust!” My snout swung from side to side, and I backed up more. A blast of fire and acid, a quick transformation so I could fit through the door, and I’d be away. There’s no running from Nyal. The thought stopped my plans before I could put them into action. Whatever the hell the demon was, I knew I couldn’t fight it.

  “Locustmen are lovely if you grill them on a high heat, by the way. A little garlic, a splash of murmin towards the end, then salt heavily and, well, chef's kiss. Crunchy delights.” He did the gesture as he said the words. Casually discussing recipes for sentient monsters had not been on my bingo card this morning. “Those feathers are worth as much as the Arkendrite you’re selling to Dalgliesh.”

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  “I’m not–”

  “Don’t bother, Bob. Nyal and her pets see almost as much as the real angels. Which you most certainly don’t qualify as, but these feathers…” A blob of my shadow detached itself, swam across the floor and climbed the man. It vanished into the eye with the ball of tentacles in it. “I’ve shown my cards and withdrawn my spy. Please do me the courtesy of not treating me like a fool.”

  “How much per feather?” Fuck you, greed-demon! I needed Esme around so the lust-monkey could keep that bastard in check.

  “Twenty K per feather.” He said it so casually, and I immediately began calculating how many feathers I could do without and still be able to fly. My wings were worth hundreds of times more than my hoard!

  “What do you use them for?” I didn’t really care. I was going to be rich!

  “Healing mostly,” he said with a shrug that parted his kimono down the front. It has a belt, man. Use the belt!

  “You aren’t a healer,” I grumbled.

  “I know healers. They can also be used for other things. Rituals, summonings, erotic tickling devices, that kind of thing. Lots of applications, and almost impossible to get hold of. Angels don’t tend to hand them out, and the last time someone got an angelic wing evolution… what was it, Nyal? Oh yeah, Argath the Unperturbable. He was a Peliman King, big fucking bird. That was a couple of thousand years ago. By weight, those feathers are the most valuable material on Helstat. And you, my new best friend, are going to be rich.” The greed-demon’s activities in the back of my mind shall remain unrecorded for decency's sake.

  “How deep are your pockets, Phillpot? I know some pretty rich people.” I reached up and plucked four more feathers from the leading edge of my left wing. Hopefully, I wouldn’t be flying in circles as a result. Then I shifted back to human, in case I needed to book it in a hurry, and dressed quickly. I held out the feathers. “That’ll be a hundred and twenty grand, please.”

  “Done.” Shit. I should have pitched it higher.

  “That price doesn’t apply to future trades,” I added hurriedly, and he grinned at me.

  “Of course. Of course.” The room contracted around us, and he made his way back to his drinks cabinet and pulled out a pouch from behind the bottles. There was a rapid clinking sound I knew and loved, but I didn’t see any coins. He tossed me the pouch, which I snatched from the air and checked the contents. That brought the shiny fruits of this trip up to 1.2 million gold. My greed-demon fainted, and I felt a brief sense of freedom.

  “You might want to be careful who you offer these to,” he said as he accepted the other four feathers. “Some people could do some really evil shit with these. Wipe out cities, enslave a minor angel. If you know what you’re doing, the possibilities are endless.” His eyes glittered, and Nyal bounced up and down happily in the left one.

  “And you of course won’t be doing that?” Could I burn this shop down and fly away? I’d need to do it when it was shut and free of shoppers. This posed an interesting question: was shopping morally neutral? From my draconic vantage, it seemed like an evil that was only really matched by murder. Still not as bad as theft, though.

  “Certainly not. I’m rather invested in this city. I have no wish to start again somewhere else. Can you imagine being stuck in the form of an Ogekrin or a Pixie for days on end?” He shivered. “Never again! Humans might be mundane, but at least the females don’t try to eat you after sex!”

  “Ogekrin and Pixies do that?”

  “No. Mantiswomen do that.”

  “So that’s why this place looks like a cheap brothel? Because you can get laid as a human?” I asked.

  “It looks like a very expensive brothel, thank you very much. Also yes. So let’s talk numbers. How much do you want per feather? They take a few months to grow back; that snippet of info is a freebie.” He rubbed his hands together in a way that caused my greed-demon to come round and start hammering at my mind again.

  “I think I’d like to see what other offers I can get. Not sure I trust you to give me a fair price.” He sucked air through his teeth like a car mechanic about to present a huge bill back on earth.

  “I’d be careful there, Bob. I won’t hire powerhouses to overpower you and lock you in a cell so you can be regularly plucked.”

  “Nonetheless. I’m not so easy to catch anyway. The Hunters Guild has priced me out of the market, so they’d be paying top dollar.”

  “What’s a dollar? Nevermind. Bob, old friend, I’m not sure you’re understanding me right. Feathered dragons are ten a bronze, so you won’t need to worry about everyone automatically thinking you’ve got angel wings, but if anyone else finds out, they will just kill you, if they can’t capture you, and strip your corpse… YES! Fine. Dammit Nyal! She wants me to tell you that I may have undersold the value of these feathers… Say’s a fucking BDSM dream-demon! Shuttup! Ok. I’m sorry. I did understate the value of these feathers. But that deal is done now.” Greed and wrath started tag-teaming the violence centre in my brain.

  “It can be undone,” I growled.

  “I don’t have enough on hand to make it right. But I will. Come back tomorrow and I’ll fix it and we can talk contracts, ok?” He was desperate to secure a supply of my precious feathers. How much could I push for? “I’ll have the other three million ready in the morning, ok? I can’t take more than these five now, but come back in a couple of months once I’ve moved some assets around and called in some debts, and I’ll take ten for… Nyal! I’m doing it! I’ll take ten for six mill, but that will take me a while to pull together.”

  My mind spun. Screw the arkendrite! Stupid shiny rocks were worth naff all compared to my beautiful feathers. Feathers that were a vital part of me and, in some way, were touched by the gods. Bloody karma. Greed-demon shrugged and once again assaulted the decision-making parts of my brain. Git.

  “Why is Nyal so interested in me getting a fair deal?” Owing a powerful demon didn’t seem like it would do my soul any favours either.

  “She is… a little concerned that they might fall into the hands of her friends… Alright! Hells, Nyal. If one of her competitors got access to a supply of your feathers, it could upend the balance in Hell. If the Ruler of the Fourth or Fifth Circle got a hold of them, it would mean Infernal War. That would be… less than optimal, shall we say. I’m laying all my cards on the table here, Bob. I hope you appreciate that.”

  “Hmm. If you’re offering half a million or so per feather, you must think you can make a profit on that cost.” I congratulated myself for being such a clever dragon.