by Jadyn Chase
Somehow or other, I climbed to my feet. People crowded around. “You look like bloody shit, mate.”
“Sit down over here and wait for the Police.”
“That fuckwit must be drunk off his arse. Did you see the way he drove straight onto the bloody kerb?”
I paid no attention to these comments. I set off the way I’d been going when the car hit me. That confirmed it. I was no longer a dragon. I should have flown away when the car struck me, but I didn’t. What would Paige say? Would she be happy?
One thought kept coming back no matter what else I thought. I wasn’t a dragon anymore. That meant I couldn’t protect her. If anyone tried to hurt her, I was just a man like any other. I would have to strangle them with my bare hands and I couldn’t fight the military like this.
People tried to block my path, but I erased them from my awareness. Police and medical personnel tried to talk to me, but I ignored them and kept on walking. I had to get back to her and I didn’t have much time to get there.
13
Paige
A thunderous knock pounded on my front door. It jolted me out of a dream. I bolted upright to find my laptop still sitting on my lap. I stared around my bedroom trying in every way to orient myself.
I still had on my work clothes from yesterday. The clock by the bed read, 5:30 AM. Another deafening noise came from the entry hall. Had the military finally caught up with me, now that James wasn’t here? Would they shoot me down for helping him?
I peeked through the window. Grey dawn brightened the street outside, but I couldn’t see anyone. No tanks or personnel carriers blockaded the street, so maybe I was all right.
Another hellish knock vibrated the walls. I raked my fingers through my hair and put the computer aside. I better go see who it was waking me up at this hour.
I stumbled to the entry and unbolted the door. I swung it back and James lumbered in. Blood smeared his face and his shirt hung torn and ragged to reveal his scratched chest underneath. Black bruises darkened his neck and a crust of dried blood clung to his lips.
I gasped. “Jesus, James! What the hell happened to you?”
He grabbed me and kissed me. Then he winced. Finally, he burst into a crazy grin. “I got attacked on the train and then I got hit by a car. Come on! Pack your bags. We’re leaving here.”
He charged past me heading for the bedroom. I couldn’t make head or tail of what he was saying. I stared at his back disappearing around the door. “Hey! What do you mean you got attacked on the train? What happened to the family reunion?”
He didn’t answer. Grunting noises came from the bedroom. I hardly dared look in there to see what he was doing. I crept forward and spotted the second half of him sticking out of the closet.
In front of my eyes, he jerked into view and flung my suitcase on the bed. He started snatching my clothes off the hangers and hurling them over the case.
“Hey!” I cried. “What are you doing?”
“I told you. We’re leaving.” He attacked the zipper and wrestled at it, but he couldn’t get it to budge.
“What do you mean, we’re leaving?”
“You said we would leave after the reunion. I missed it. I was passed out in the train for…. well, I don’t know how long. I woke up at eight o’clock last night, so I missed the reunion. That doesn’t matter now. You promised we’d leave after the reunion and we’re leaving.”
“We can’t!” I blurted out. “If you flew out now, someone would see you. We have to go after dark.”
He jumped across the room so fast I didn’t see him coming. He grabbed me and kissed me again. His eyes rolled wildly around seeing nothing. “That’s just the thing! I can’t fly. I’m cured! I’m not a dragon anymore. We’ll have to go some other way.”
“What?” I whispered. “How do you know?”
“The attack.” He stopped long enough to break into insane giggles. “I tried to shift during the attack, but I couldn’t. They hit me over the head and knocked me out. Nothing happened. Later, I was walking down the street and a car drove right into me. I flipped into the air. It even crossed my mind that I should fly away, but instead, I crashed to the ground. They wanted me to wait for the Police, but of course, I didn’t. I had to get back here and tell you. I’m not a dragon anymore. There is no dragon.”
He held his arms out at both sides like this was the most fantastic development in history. He displayed himself to me like that for a second. Then he pounced on the suitcase one more time, but he didn’t have any better success at getting the zipper open.
I blinked down at him. Could this be true? What if it wasn’t? What if those two incidents were just random flukes and he really was still a dragon?
He yanked at the case and snarled under his breath. “How do you get this thing open, Paige dear?”
The words snapped me out of my trance. I rushed him and grabbed his hand. “Hold it right there. Are you seriously telling me you almost shifted and didn’t?”
“That’s exactly what I’m saying, Paige dear. I was angry enough and in enough pain that I would have if I could have. I felt the same sort of bursting sensation from the times I did shift, but I didn’t this time. I tried. I really tried, but I couldn’t.”
I staggered back gaping at him. It really was true. It better be true. I didn’t want to believe it if it wasn’t. “If this is true, we have to prove it. We have to document it.”
He stopped what he was doing. “How?”
“We have to repeat the cattle prod test.”
He held up both hands and backed away shaking his head fast. “No! Oh, no! I am NOT going through that again. I don’t care what you or anybody says. I’m not doing it. No chance.”
I settled down. Now that the realization hit, my critical thinking faculties kicked in again. “Think about it. We have to document that the stimulus doesn’t cause you to shift and the only way to do that is to prove that you’re not taking Depthamol. We would need to hook you up to the serum concentration monitors and….”
“No!” he thundered. “I went through Hell itself in that lab. I’m not going back there for anything. I don’t care what you say.”
I went very still and murmured low. “You wouldn’t have to go back. We could do it here.”
He froze and cocked his head to one side. “Here?”
“I can go into the lab tomorrow and get the equipment.” I paced around the room counting off on my fingers. “I can record the whole thing on my laptop, but we need the serum concentration monitor to prove you’re not taking Depthamol.”
“Then what?”
I halted in front of him. “Then we leave the recording where someone will find it and we get the hell out of Dodge.”
He frowned. “Dodge? What in the world is Dodge?”
“It’s an expression. It means we hit the dusty trail and disappear. We make ourselves scarce and pray to Almighty God they don’t come after us. I only wish we could go to Dover first and make contact with your family.”
“Do you really think that’s wise?” he asked.
“Which part? Getting out of Dodge or going to Dover to find your family?”
“Going to Dover, of course,” he returned. “I’ve been trying to convince you to get…..get out of Dodge, as you say, for ages.”
“Never mind.” I sat down on the bed and picked up my computer. “There might be another way to contact them.”
“How?”
“Never you mind. We’re leaving here, but not before we make that recording. I don’t want to go on the lamb with you unless I know for certain you’re not going to shift.”
“But, Paige dear,” he countered, “what if the cattle prod test doesn’t work? What if I still don’t shift because it’s you hitting me with that thing instead of Tristan?”
“It’s the best we can do.” I bowed over my device. “It’s the closest thing we’ve got to convincing the military that you’re cured.”
He didn’t say anything for a minute. The silen
ce distracted me from my work and I glanced up to find him gazing at me. “What’s wrong?”
“You’re really going to do this, aren’t you? You’re really going to go on the run—for me?”
“Of course,” I replied. “You don’t think I’d let you do it alone, do you?”
He lowered his eyes to the suitcase. “I suppose not.”
I got to my feet and walked around to stand in front of him. “Listen to me. I’m not letting you out of my sight again—not ever. We’re in this together. I love you and wherever you go, I’m going with you.”
“How will we do that if I can’t fly away?”
“We’ll fly—I mean, we’ll take a plane. It’s a big machine like a car that flies through the air.”
His jaw dropped and his eyes popped. “Really?”
“They go back and forth over the Atlantic all the time. Heck, they go all over the world. All we have to do is buy a ticket and leave England.”
“How will we do that?” he asked. “How do we buy a ticket?”
“I already did.” I returned to my computer. “I even got you a passport, which was a lot harder.”
“Where will we go?”
I stole a peek up at his face. “We’re going to Africa.”
“Africa!” he breathed. “We can’t!”
I nodded and went back to work. “It’s only our first stop. I got us a non-stop flight from London to Nairobi. Once we’re there, we can get new passports. We can take a truck to any other African country and then maybe catch a boat somewhere else. We might have to change our identities more than once in a couple of different places in order to completely lose the trail of pursuit.”
He gawked at me with wide eyes. “My God, Paige! How long have you been planning this?”
I had to laugh. “I wasn’t planning it. I just thought about it every now and then in a hypothetical sort of way—like, if someone was going to disappear, how would they do it? I never really thought I’d be doing it myself, but there you go.”
He sank onto the bed. “You know so much more about it than I do.”
I studied him on the side. “You look awful. Why don’t you go take a shower and clean yourself up?”
His features cleared. “Very well. What are you doing there?”
“I’m changing our flights to tomorrow night. I’ll make some excuse to get out of work early tomorrow. We’ll do the test and we’ll go straight to the airport.”
He nodded more to himself than to me. He wandered off to the bathroom. A second later, the spray drummed in the shower. I clicked my mouse around the screen and got the tickets changed. Now there was nothing to do but wait.
If we got out of England, we’d be home free. Getting through Heathrow Airport with one fake passport would be the hardest part. Once we landed in Nairobi, we could well and truly disappear. Africa would swallow us up and no one would ever find us—at least, I hoped not.
I turned my attention to the cattle prod test. What if it didn’t work? What if it triggered the dragon instead? What if James killed me, blew the roof off the house, and destroyed half of England in a rage?
I couldn’t think like that. I popped open my laptop again and started surfing. I navigated back to the advert for the reunion. There it was on the Dover Castle Facebook page. I clicked it and studied the details, but I didn’t find anything I didn’t see last time.
I started doodling around for no apparent reason when I happened to notice another picture on the same page. It depicted a bunch of people standing around the Great Armour Hall. A few snaps portrayed various people with their arms around each other’s shoulders grinning like monkeys at the camera. The caption read, Shelton Family Reunion.
That led me to more pictures of the event. Hundreds of Sheltons gathered from all over the UK, but I didn’t see anybody that made me think they might be James’s immediate family.
I clicked one last image of a man in a kilt. Down at the bottom, the caption read, Kenneth Shelton Menzies of Clyde shaking hands with Bruce Oberton Shelton of Leeds. Special thanks to Rosie Crockett of Sagittarius, Dover, for organizing this wonderful reunion.
That was odd. I thought it was Alexander Shelton who organized it. Who was this Rosie Crockett? I clicked on her name and wound up on a completely unrelated page. It advertised a New Age crystal and incense store in Dover. Hmm. That was really odd. Could she be related to Alexander?
She must be if she put on this reunion in his name. I decided to send her a private message. I tapped out a note I hoped would be both cryptic and revealing.
Hi Rosie,
You don’t know me but I’m a friend of the Shelton family. An acquaintance of mine was really keen to attend the family reunion last night, but he got delayed. His name is James West Shelton and he was hoping to reconnect with his family with whom he lost contact in Dover a few years ago. This friend of mine lost his memory up until a few weeks ago and has been having problems with certain unexplained side effects ever since. He was hoping he could make contact with his brothers Thomas, Alexander, and William Shelton to see if they could explain anything about it. If you can help me out at all, I would really appreciate it. Thank you so much, Paige Kelly.
I hit Send. There. That should do it. If she knew anything about the Sheltons and their mysterious disappearance, that would get her attention. If she didn’t know anything about them and had no connection to Thomas or Alexander, she would ignore the message or say she didn’t know. It gave nothing away.
My heart skipped a beat. What if James’s family was down in Dover waiting for him? Did I really want to whizz off to Nairobi and lose that chance?
14
James
I tugged at the straps holding me to the chair. “Is this strictly necessary, Paige dear? I mean, if I do shift, these won’t be able to restrain me.”
“I know they won’t. They’re not intended to restrain you if you shift.” She snorted under her breath, but I didn’t see anything funny about this. “If you do shift, there’s not a thing I can do to stop you. These are only meant to hold you in one place so the camera records everything.”
I glanced across the room at a small square device propped against the windowpane. It showed a moving picture of me in its tiny aperture.
Next to that sat the strange conglomeration of material I’d seen in the lab when Tristan performed this test. One of those tubes ran out of my arm and into the serum concentration monitor.
Paige blew out a shaky breath. “All right. That’s the monitor all set up. It will produce a printout of what’s supposed to be your Depthamol levels, but since you’re not on it, it will record the level at zero. That way, when I prod you, we’ll have proof that Depthamol wasn’t preventing you from shifting.”
I glared at the screen one more time. A line of curious shapes traced across the bottom. She had already explained to me that the computer printed the nonexistent Depthamol level onto the video recording of the test, but that didn’t make me feel any better. I gritted my teeth. She hadn’t even picked up the prod and I was already breaking out in a sweat.
She retreated a few steps and hefted the prod. “All right. Here we go. This is Dr. Paige Kelly at Number 29 Bonner Hill Road, Norbiton, recording subject James West Shelton undergoing stimulus test to determine Depthamol levels needed to prevent transformation into his dragon form.”
I looked up at her. Her face wrenched in anxious tension and her eyes glistened with moisture.
“I’m sorry about this, James,” she blurted out. “I wouldn’t do this if it wasn’t absolutely necessary.”
“I understand completely, Paige dear. You may proceed without further concern for my feelings.”
Before I finished speaking, she thrust her weapon into my chest. The thing erupted its searing heat and pain into my body and blasted my mind to pieces. I tried to scream, but my jaws locked. Every muscle strained to the breaking point.
As quickly as it started, she cut it off and I flopped in the chair. I thanked the st
ars the restraints held me in place or I would have collapsed to the floor. My head hung from my flaccid neck and I howled out loud.
“I’m so sorry!” she mumbled.
I sagged in my seat for several minutes—at least, they seemed like minutes. I snarled and ground my teeth. How did I ever get into this predicament?
Far too soon, the computer pinged and she jabbed that cursed thing into me one more time. My head shot back and my neck stretched. I bellowed through gritted teeth. This time, she kept the power surging through me for longer. My God, she could be bloody vicious when she wanted to be!
The prod jerked away and I collapsed spasming against the straps. I wanted to die. I couldn’t bear to look at her. I didn’t want to see terror in her eyes. I needed to believe that at least one of us was confident enough to continue with this torment.
I moaned, almost sobbed down at the floor waiting for the next blow. Could I really take this? Could I go through with this long enough to prove I really was cured? How much could I tolerate before my heart stopped?
That wretched machine dinged again. This time, when she stabbed her stick into my chest, it erupted through me in a colossal rage that dwarfed everything that went before it. I flung myself against the straps with superhuman power. Blinding fury forced its way out of me and I roared in torrential wrath at her, at the military, at the world that inflicted this nightmare on me.
I beheld the whole sequence of events from the fight against the bobbies outside Buckingham Palace right up until now. Everything that bothered me, everything that hurt me, every injury I suffered, every indignity everyone inflicted upon me—they all came together in one insufferable insult I could no longer bear. I flailed at these pathetic straps that tried to hold back my anger. I thundered my challenge to one and all.
I hated them all. I hated Sweeney and Tristan and the bobbies and those Palace visitors and the doctors and the soldiers that I killed and the government and my family and anyone else who might be incidentally involved in this disaster.
