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“You stole a dragon’s egg.”
At this point, Peter isn’t even surprised. Trouble follows Neal wherever he goes, and what’s more trouble than dragons? He looks at the egg—maybe two feet tall, and a pretty pale green—then back at Neal’s twisted, miserable face.
“I know, I know,” Neal says. He drags a hand through his hair. “It was for Kate. Which was stupid, you don’t have to tell me—”
Peter closes his mouth, heart aching, and reaches out to grip Neal’s shoulder. “It hasn’t hatched yet. You know you’ll have to give it up into custody,” he settles on saying, voice rough.
Neal’s mouth quirks in a tired smile, and he cants a glance at Peter. “Why do you think I’m showing you?” he asks.
Peter squeezes his shoulder again. “Do you know how close it is to hatching?”
The words are barely out of his mouth when a violent tock startles them. They jerk towards the egg, and Peter’s stomach falls. It’s spiderwebbed with cracks. “Shit.”
He gets Diana on the phone—“Tell the nearest dragonry we have a hatching egg, smallish, green. We need bonding workers at Neal’s place ASAP,” he tells her, and rattles off the address. She promises she’ll have them there in ten minutes.
That turns out to be too long. The egg hatches all at once, an explosion of shell that reveals a small, wet brown smudge of dragonet on the floor. Peter knows instantly that it will go for Neal, so he reaches for the Reubens in his bag, thinking they’ll make good dragon food. The feeling of a snout on his knee stops him.
He looks down into the dragonet’s brilliant blue eyes.
“Hello,” she says, blinking up at him. “You’re mine, I think. Do you have something to eat?”