We walked up the stairs and through the bone-white gardens in a strict line, and I swear cold marble has a smell.
The inside hall was hardly what you’d expect from a…whatever you’d call this building. It was less of a skyscraper and more of an art installation gone awry. I looked up, and I could see all the way to the point. It was enough to make me dizzy. There were cold stony rooms to either side of the hallway, and a staircase at the very end, one that spiraled up and up and up, seemingly forever, letting itself off to the left or right with each floor. A red carpet ran from the entrance to the stairs, and clung to them as it rose, probably going all the way to the top. It reminded me somehow of a tongue – a long, bloody tongue in a mouth full of star-white teeth.
Shorty snapped his fingers and a servant appeared from nowhere: a woman in black with her white hair in a tight bun at the nape of her neck. She saw Shorty and her flat face went even flatter. He said something, to which she nodded and disappeared up the stairs, walking with her hands clasped together at her waist.
When she was gone, the guards dropped to one knee, their fists over their hearts. Shorty went all the way down to his hands, bowing with his nose to the ground, arms stretched out in front of him. His breath came slow, and his hands twitched.
Whoever we were about to meet, they were important.
I heard footsteps. Heavy ones. Slow, methodical, cracking the thin silence. Shorty visibly tensed, as did his guards.
He came down from the coiling bone staircase, the woman trailing behind him like a shadow. The guards didn’t move, but Shorty went stiff as ice in the wind. The man came to a halt half a yard from Shorty’s hands and stood there like a statue carved from hungry stone.
It hadn’t been a trick of the light before. His eye was as red. Red as blood in the dark.
“Woah,” I said. The sound escaped me before I could get my teeth around it.
The dragon looked at me and turned up his nose. He was handsome, by human standards. His face was long and elfish, the way all of the alien faces were, but his jaw was a touch stronger, his chin a bit wider. If his kinsmen were saplings, this creature was the full-grown tree, thick and stoic and utterly immoveable. He wore black folding robes, loose, a thick band of red silk wrapped around his waist. He looked every inch a warrior.
And his wings. Dear God, his wings.
They were folded up behind him now, but even then, they were wider than I was. Even in the dim stormy light, they shone, as though they’d been polished. Stretched out, his wingspan must have been three, four times his own height, and at least twice as tall.
He crossed his arms. His right hand was scaled, with black-clawed fingers and pointed knucklebones crosshatched with old scratches.
“Luras,” I said. He looked at me, visibly startled, and I couldn’t help but smile as I added, “Milthak vol taras?”
His eyes narrowed and he cocked his head slightly. “Milthak vol taras?”
I pointed at him.
He turned his eye back to Shorty, mouth twitching. If it was a smile, I couldn’t tell. “Human?” he said.
Shorty nodded, nose pointed firmly at the floor. “Human, Luras. Fal Erith.”
Erith, I thought. I wondered if that was a name or if he was just bungling the pronunciation of Earth.
“Ji alsent tun…galis arvi,” said the dragon, and the woman behind him pursed her lips and looked down – so it probably wasn’t something pleasant. Shorty didn’t move, but I could hear him inhale sharply, and he held his breath for a very long time. I felt myself growing impatient again, and at the same time desperately afraid for the moment of silence to end, because when it was over something would happen, and I wasn’t sure I wanted to know what that would mean.
After what might have been a second, a minute, or an hour, the dragon snapped his fingers – his grey ones, the hand I’m tempted to call human even though that isn’t even close to what he was. The hand without scales snapped, and snapped loudly, and the guards rose from the floor and carried me upstairs.
“Jal,” said the dragon as we passed him. Shorty stood slowly, keeping his eyes down and maintaining his bow, so he stood with an uncomfortable looking hunch. He clasped his hands together at his forehead and said nothing.
“Jal,” said the dragon, sharper this time, biting off the end of the word with razor teeth. The air around him went cold.
Shorty straightened. He dropped his hands to his sides and looked the dragon in the eye. He kept his face blank, but his lips were pressed together in what was either indignance or fear.
The dragon closed the distance between them with a single silent step. He reached out, quick as lightning, and grabbed Shorty by his collar, lifting him off the floor as though he weighed no more than a paper doll. He shouted at Shorty, a flurry of words and curses closer to growling than anything remotely phonetic – and then I thought I knew what had happened, the key word being “think”.
A few things I was reasonably sure of: Shorty worked for the dragon, the dragon was very important and powerful, and the dragon was very, very angry with Shorty, and probably not for bringing me home with him. Something else had happened, something bigger. Something that warranted the nightmare beating he was receiving downstairs.
If their tone was anything to go by – if Shorty’s presence on that ship in the human solar system meant what I thought it did – Shorty was taking a tremendous risk coming back here. He worked for the dragon, or did work for him, and he did something unfortunate that got him banned or banished or very nearly killed. If I had to guess, I’d say Shorty was on that ship for one reason and one reason only: he was running.
We’d seen neither hide nor hair of these aliens or their ships, and traveling exclusively through hyperspace wouldn’t have hidden them forever: anything traveling through any variation of the pocket universe couldn’t be seen per se, but it could be read, picked up by machines carefully combing through the universe looking for minable worlds – the same way you can see ultraviolet light and the skeletons of soundwaves, we would have known if they were cruising within a hundred lightyears of Sol.
But we didn’t. So they hadn’t been around Neptune for very long, and a hundred lightyear radius meant they didn’t live anywhere near us, even on the cosmic scale. Earth was very, very far from home as they knew it. Not the kind of trip you make on a whim. If he’d been sent to the ship, the dragon would have greeted him with…maybe not with open arms, but certainly not with so much active animosity. No, he wasn’t in our system on any assignment, he was scrambling for a rebound: one he apparently thought he could find in the gifting of a human girl, the way a disgraced sailor might present the captain of his old ship with a parrot or a monkey, something strange to worm his way back into the good graces of someone he’d failed or betrayed.
If I was right, it was kind of a pathetic way to recover. If whatever he’d done, or hadn’t done, warranted running as fast as his stubby little legs could carry him all the way to Neptune, a new pet wasn’t going to save him.
Or maybe beating people to a bloody pulp when they gave you gifts was just part of the social order. Who knew?
There were two rooms on either side of this hall. There was something hanging from the ceiling in the first – impossibly high, rising three stories at least – a chandelier of mirrors with a single burning bulb at its center, scattering cold light all around. The walls were dark and the floors were grey, wood like the trees outside. The furniture was all white: everything was flat and sloping, chaise lounges and long plush benches, enormous flat circular pillows scattered in front of an unlit fire pit in the center of the room, dug out of the grey floor and filled with sparkling stones. A window at the far wall, tall and square, floor to ceiling, let in cold, impersonal white light. There was a small kitchenette in the back-left corner, an alcove for drinks and ice, if they put ice in their drinks. They’d displayed less ubiquitous human characteristics thus far, I couldn’t imagine tonics on the rocks would be the part they threw out th
e evolutionary window.
On the other side of the hall was a massive set of double oak doors – or whatever took the niche of oak on this planet. They were wide open, twice as tall as the alien guards, and within was the most enormous library I’d ever seen. Shelves lined the walls, packed with books, rising at least ten stories straight up, and it made me wonder if the entire building was like this: a haphazard bundle of Tetris pieces stacked on top of each other, some tall, some short, all infuriatingly irregular. There were several desks placed at intervals on the dark red carpet, and a massive black fireplace to one side, flanked by wide chairs with low backs and what might have been a coffee table. One wall was nothing but glass, staring out at the infinite grey sky and its companion sea, hundreds of feet below the cliff the monolith was perched on.
I thought it was pretty until I saw the cage.
It was big, white latticed metal with leaves and flowers wrapping around the bars. Its back was pressed up against the wall, nothing but glass from floor to ceiling, wall to wall. It looked out over an ocean: slate grey waves with frothing white crowns, crashing against a thin sliver of beach. Inside it was a bed, an enormous plush red cushion and an exorbitant number of white and black pillows. Blankets, too, lots of them, and black gauze curtains that could be pulled over it to mostly close myself in; it looked cozy.
But it’s still, you know. A fucking cage. And the sight of it sent me reeling again. The world went fuzzy and nothing seemed real.
We stood there for ages, listening to the dragon beat Shorty into oblivion in the hall. I heard an oomf and a thunder-boom-crack as the dragon slammed Shorty into the wall – once, twice, again and again and again until I was surprised there was still a wall to slam him into. The sound followed us up and up and up, getting louder as we got farther away. Poor Shorty. I imagined the stout little alien with blood in his teeth, arms wrapped around a throbbing stomach. It didn’t make me smile, but I thought about it for a while. I closed my eyes and tried to imagine the sounds were just part of a movie or a game, something Jonathan was playing on his phone on the shuttle. Just a cutscene from a game about thieves and gems and bad history, nothing real, not something that was only a floor and a dozen steps away.
It almost worked. I stayed in this vague in-between place between reality and fiction, just trying not to think – and my mantra popped back into my head, the words coming much slower now.
I won’t have to do my homework. I won’t have to do my homework. I won’t have to do my homework.
The dragon arrived, and I was placed in the cage. I let them do it. I had nowhere to run and no energy to fight. They closed the door, locked it, and left – and after a cursory moment examining me, the dragon left too, and I was alone.
I laid down and closed my eyes, and a second later felt tears in my hair and at my throat. I wasn’t crying, not really; there was no sound, no movement, no coughing or screaming or blubbering. I was absolutely still, a statue curled up in the dark, staring out the window at the turbulent sea.
I won’t have to do my homework. I won’t have to do my homework. I won’t have to do my homework. I won’t have to…
I fell asleep like that. Chanting it, breathing it to myself like a prayer, burning the words into my pillows and the silver face of the moons that were far too big.
I didn’t remember closing my eyes, but when I opened them, it was dawn.
Part Two: Kept
I wished I had a chalkboard. Or a really sharp stone, or a stick of charcoal. I wished the glass was fragile enough to carve into, so I could keep track of the days. Keeping a mental tally wasn’t going so well.
It had been several weeks at least. Either the days on this planet lasted much, much longer than they did on Earth, or I was just so profoundly bored that every minute felt like an hour and then some. I had a perfect view of the ocean, which was better than nothing, and I could see every inch of the massive drawing room, but there was nothing to do. My cage consisted of the bed, a little wrought-iron bench, and a cluster of bells and feathers hanging from a string in the middle of it – which I was reasonably sure was the alien equivalent of a fucking cat toy. There were books, real paper and leather books, packed into the dark enameled shelves that lined the walls, just begging me to try and read them, alien language or not; but I couldn’t reach them, and no one was ever in any mood to hand them to me.
I spent the majority of my time pacing in my cage, which didn’t feel nearly as spacious as it did when I got here. I could walk for ten paces in any direction before my nose hit the cold white steel, and I’d turn around, ten more paces, and it would happen again, and again, and again – because that’s what happens when you live in a box. You pace and pace and pace and somehow convince yourself that this time you’ll turn around and you’ll walk eleven paces, then twelve, then thirteen, and you’ll be on your way home.
I was counting my steps out loud when the front door flew open downstairs.
The door slammed into the wall hard enough to make it vibrate. Not on purpose – I could hear the wind skirling across the marble outside, the branches of trees clacking together like broken wind chimes. Three men came bumbling in, the collars of their absurdly long black coats turned up against a lashing rain. I felt the wind itself a moment later, freezing cold, smelling like salt and mud.
The butler – a man in a long grey robe bound at the waist with a thin black cord who was probably the butler – closed the door behind them and bowed low, saying something softly under his breath. I’d seen him do it often enough to know it wasn’t a simple “may I take your coats”. This was a demonstration of subservience, a gesture of class-based reverence. He never looked them in the eye, and they never addressed him directly. The men who came and went from the dragon’s house would snap their fingers when they wanted something and speak to no one in particular, and one servant or other would trip over themselves to accommodate him.
I spent most of my time doing two things: counting my steps and listening. The most interesting thing to do in this stupid room was listen.
It had taken me a while – not a long while, since I’d had literally nothing else to occupy my time – to even begin parsing out the language, but between gestures and tones and their admittedly scarce facial expressions, I started to pick out certain words and phrases. I’m positive I wasn’t translating them exactly, but I was getting close enough. It’s like watching a Spanish soap opera with no subtitles. Eventually you pick things up, and sometimes you can just tell.
The men shed their long, long coats and laid them across the butler’s outstretched hands. They were absurdly tall, all of them, but not especially tall for their race. They all had stark white hair and stark white eyes, and their skin was a lighter grey than most of the aliens in the house. They wore their hair in long braids draped over their left shoulders, always their left shoulders.
They all carried themselves like I’d imagine elves would: straight backs, raised chines, hands clasped either in front of or behind them. They looked at everything like they owned it, and like they weren’t at all pleased to be here, wherever “here” happened to be. Even when these meetings ended well, no one ever smiled.
The dragon did sometimes, but only after everyone was gone. And only after he was completely alone, completely besides me, anyway.
The dragon offered his hand to the men to shake – to the first of them, the tallest and the angriest of the bunch. The man hesitated before he took it; barely, less time than it takes to blink, but he hesitated, and the dragon could tell. He looked from his hand to the man he was shaking with it, and something in his face told me he knew. His smile, his strangely wide alien smile, was fixed and his eyes were narrow and cold.
It wasn’t a huge leap to assume that the dragon was an anomaly. He was the only scaled-winged anything I’d seen since I got here, and everyone, everyone was antsy around him, even for emotionally constipated aliens. I didn’t want to say it was magic, because that’s absolute crap, magic is just science w
e haven’t explained yet – but what else was there? Government experiment? Gene splicing gone wrong?
Maybe his mom fucked a dragon. Not that it mattered, I had no way to find out.
The man in the suit sat down in the low-backed chair next to the continuously unlit hearth. His hands were on his knees and he was smiling at the dragon like an overconfident shark.
The dragon always held his meetings in here. A hundred other floors full of God knows what, and he holds his meetings in the library. I initially thought it was because it was a little more homey, some paltry effort to throw the men in question off their game – entering the razor-sharp monolith of a building and being greeted with a room full of books and a big window.
And of course, his new pet. The exotic human that started and ended so many conversations. Which is why he really had all of his meetings in here. “Look at my pet,” he seemed to say. “Look at this creature you’ve never seen from a galaxy you’ve never heard of, that I just have and don’t particularly care about.” It was a power play – the way a morally ambiguous banker might have a peacock or two enormous tigers on either side of his office chair while he talks to his accountant. If nothing else it was frivolous, and there’s nothing more terrifying than an angry rich somebody who visibly does not care.
The man was staring at me now, eyes somehow equally wide and narrow with what was either curiosity or disgust…but I guess the two aren’t mutually exclusive. He leaned forward in his chair and, when he realized I was looking back at him, recoiled like I’d made some God-awful noise. He reminded me very much of Jonathan when we were in grade school, walking through the woods in the dark or through campy Halloween stores: “Eww, gross! …What is that?” Horrified, sure, but dammit, he had to know what it was, fake blood or dead animal or anything else.
The man said something in a guttural accent I couldn’t make out, pointing at me and trying to smile at the dragon. The man’s companions looked straight forward, stationed on either side of their master’s chair, but every now and then I caught them stealing glances my way.
A Pet For Lord Darin Page 5
