Quicksilver Dragon

by Chant, Zoe

  Unless you looked closely enough to see the crease of worry between his eyes.

  She wanted to put him at ease. He was taking care of her, so she had to take care of him too. They needed to look out for each other.

  Lindsay tucked her hands around the mug and drank. The taste wrapped itself around her like a warm blanket. She smiled. Maybe it was best to focus on the little things.

  “How did you even find the cocoa mix?”

  He shrugged. “You’ve got a well-organized kitchen.”

  Good to know there was someone in her life who appreciated her use of a label-maker.

  “I bet you say that to all the girls.” She pushed gently against his hip, amazed at how natural it felt to touch him. “Get yourself some too.”

  He did, joining her at the table.

  Lindsay made a token effort to think about how strange it was to have a hot guy she’d just met in her kitchen. She hadn’t planned on any of this, that was for sure. Her dirty breakfast dishes were still in the sink. The signs of her old, ordinary life were all around her, but they felt off-kilter—and then there was Boone, pale and tense, almost a total a stranger to her, and somehow he felt familiar, like she’d known him for years. He was the only part of all this she felt sure of.

  Actually, no. There was one other thing she knew for sure.

  “I feel guilty,” she said quietly.

  “I know. So do I. But I don’t know what else we could have done. We didn’t mean to run.”

  “No,” Lindsay admitted. “She made us. I don’t know how, though. Then again...” It was time to test out the limits of what ridiculous stuff she was willing to say out loud. “Then again, I don’t know how she turned into a dragon, either.”

  Boone frowned. “Are we calling them that? The d-word?”

  He surprised a snort out of her. Really ladylike.

  Boone’s cheeks turned a little pink. “That’s what I thought she looked like. But we can say something else, if you can think of anything less ridiculous.”

  “No. ‘Dragon’ is what I was thinking of too. We’re on the same page.”

  “Even if that page was ripped out of Lord of the Rings,” he said dryly. “Okay. Most people can’t mesmerize you, but most people aren’t dragons, either. Fair enough.”

  Lindsay held up a finger, putting the conversation on pause, and then darted off; she came back with her favorite Moleskine notebook and a fresh pen. She clicked it decisively.

  At the top of a fresh page, she wrote Eleanor’s name. Then she started making bullet points: one for “dragon” and one for “Jedi mind-trick.”

  “Okay,” she said. “Given that the simplest explanation is usually the best, let’s say for right now that everything out of the ordinary about her was tied up in her being a dragon. Just because the odds of her being a dragon and a space wizard are probably low.”

  Boone’s mouth twitched at the corner. Lindsay knew that look.

  She covered her notebook with her hand.

  “I like to be organized,” she said.

  “Apparently. I think it’s c—”

  “Don’t say cute,” Lindsay said.

  He paused. Very diplomatically, he rounded it off with, “Crucial to our mission’s success.”

  “Well, now I think you’re cute.” She drew a wavy bracket, connecting the bullets into a single point.

  This was how she’d felt with him before all the trouble had started. She knew they were both tempted to fall back into that dizzy, bubbly flirtation. They both craved some distraction from the weight of everything pressing down on them. At least they had their hot chocolate and their slowly drying clothes, and they had each other. Eleanor had lost everything. And why?

  She looked away from him, training her eyes on the cat-shaped clock on her kitchen wall. Its tail tick-tocked from side to side, counting off the minutes.

  “We need to call 911,” she said finally.

  Boone raised his eyebrows. “She died looking like a dragon. What would we even say?”

  She could tell it was a genuine question, and he wasn’t being sarcastic. She just wished she had a good answer.

  “I don’t know,” she said finally. “But if she was human even some of the time, she had to have some kind of family. They deserve to know what happened to her. And the storm’s slacking off. We can’t just let some unsuspecting tourist trip over a dead dragon on the beach.”

  Huh. Factoring in San Marco’s reliance on tourism. Good to know the city planner part of her brain would run on autopilot even when the rest of her was in a panic.

  “That would be bad,” Boone agreed.

  “We could call anonymously. They wouldn’t even have to know it was us.”

  She realized she was picturing old movies where someone made a furtive call to the police from a roadside phone booth. If she actually needed to find a working payphone for this plan to work, she was screwed.

  She added, “If we can figure out how to call anonymously.”

  “Disposable cell phone,” Boone said, snapping his fingers. “We can buy one—with cash, in case they can trace what phone it is—and make the call.”

  “Cool. I feel like a criminal.”

  She had meant it mostly as a joke, but it occurred to her that this might actually make her a criminal. She was arguably about to cause some obstruction of justice by refusing to attach her name to the dead dragon report. But she had no idea what else to do. She guessed she was an outlaw now.

  *

  Standing in a grubby gas station with Boone, waiting to buy the kind of cell phone preferred by drug dealers and hitmen, Lindsay thought, This is the most surreal first date ever.

  Bizarrely enough, though, she wouldn’t have wanted to be in this situation with anyone else. Maybe she didn’t really know Boone yet, but knowing someone in ordinary circumstances wouldn’t necessarily tell her how they would respond to a dying dragon and a shadowy figure in the distance. Knowing those things about Boone, as weird and specific as they were, did tell her something about who he was day to day.

  Kind. Compassionate. Brave.

  Plus, he had good criminal instincts that would be handy if they ever needed to go on the run together.

  Right now, for example, he was pretending to be incredibly interested in the various special features and offers the different burner phones had and how they compared to regular cell plans. It was clearly annoying the cashier, and they’d be remembered as a pushy, overly invested couple—but at least they wouldn’t be remembered as people who didn’t care about anything other than the phone being untraceable and carrying at least five minutes of call time. They seemed obnoxious. Not like they had something to hide, more like you just couldn’t get them to shut up. Lindsay didn’t think the cashier would flag them as suspicious characters if anyone ever turned up to ask him.

  Boone finally picked out a phone and paid in cash. When they left the store, Lindsay hooked her arm through his, pulling close to him. She felt safer when their strides matched each other’s.

  Maybe she was born to be a three-legged race contestant.

  It didn’t seem to bother him. He said, “God, you smell good,” and there was a funny little note of yearning in his voice that made her weak in the knees. “Like gingerbread. I don’t know what’s going on or what’s going to happen after we make this phone call. But I know I’m glad I met you, Lindsay Garza, city planner, trash-picking hero, gingerbread girl.”

  Once again she had the sensation of her body splitting open all the way to her heart.

  She said, “I was just thinking pretty much the same thing.”

  He grinned, and it was like all the worry and exhaustion left his face. “You were just thinking I smelled like gingerbread?”

  I was just thinking you still haven’t kissed me.

  She almost said it, but then she decided she didn’t want their first kiss to happen while they were on their way to secretly call 911. She could pick a better moment.

  Even thinking o
f the phone call made her think of Eleanor, and that burned away the desire that had hit her like a wave. No. This wasn’t the time.

  So she just tucked herself closer to him as they walked, nestling her head against his shoulder.

  He seemed to understand why her attention had trailed off. He just held her.

  After they’d been walking a while in silence, Boone said, “I just wish we knew what happened.”

  “I know. She was nice. She was funny. Who could do something like that?”

  She knew she shouldn’t feel blindsided by the violence of the world. She’d watched enough true crime documentaries to know all the horrible things that could happen and how bleakly common those things could be. Who could do something like that? A lot of people. She knew that.

  But it was one thing to know it and another thing to see it up close. Those slash-marks...

  “Whoever did it,” Boone said, “they might never even have seen her the way we saw her. Maybe they only saw her when she was... you know.”

  The d-word. Lindsay pictured the figure that had been stalking them through the veil of rain, all shadows and menace. Had it been human at all? A dragon hunter? Or another dragon?

  And whatever it was, was it looking for them now?

  That was another thing that would have to wait. She couldn’t stand to think about it now.

  When they got back to her apartment, Boone offered to make the 911 call.

  Lindsay turned him down. “I think they’ll be less suspicious of a woman. What if her body turned human again? Would you believe a random guy who called and said he couldn’t give you his name, but he definitely didn’t kill the lady on the beach, a mysterious figure did?”

  “No,” Boone said, “but I don’t like you being in the middle of all this.”

  “I am in the middle of all this. And if you get to look out for me, I get to look out for you, and that includes making sure you don’t become a murder suspect.”

  She sat down on her couch and stretched out her arms, cracking her knuckles. She felt like she was getting ready for some kind of nightmare final exam.

  “I can do this,” she said firmly. “I’ve got this. I can handle it.”

  “Okay, I believe you.”

  “No, now I’m just trying to psych myself up.”

  She was sure another offer to make the call for her was on the way, and that spurred her on: she raised the phone and dialed before she could spend another second agonizing over the decision.

  “911, what’s your emergency?”

  “There’s a dead body under the boardwalk,” Lindsay said. She was surprised by the steadiness of her voice. It looked like she was still good under pressure after all. “I saw a woman under there. In her twenties, dark skin, light hair. She said her name was Eleanor.” And then she turned into a fire-breathing lizard. “She said someone was after her.”

  Someone or something. Eleanor had kept saying “it.” It was after her.

  She couldn’t say that to the 911 operator, though. There was no way to say “someone... or something” without sounding like you were in a bad horror movie. And she needed the operator to take her seriously.

  How long would it take for them to trace the call to her location? She spoke quickly, interrupting the operator’s questions.

  “I thought I saw someone in the distance, but I can’t describe them, I’m sorry. They were too far away from me, they were just a blur.”

  She had to keep making sure she said “I” and “me” instead of “we” and “us.”

  The operator said, “Your name is Eleanor?”

  “No, her name was Eleanor.”

  “Ma’am, what is your name?”

  “I’m sorry,” Lindsay said. I can’t let you show up to ask me questions I can’t possibly answer honestly.

  “Ma’am—”

  “There might have been some kind of crocodile,” Lindsay said, and then hung up before she could deal with the round of questions that would come from that. “Crocodile” had just been as close as she was prepared to get to “dragon.”

  If she’d been able to stay, she’d have known whether or not the paramedics would find a dragon on the beach or a woman. But no, she’d had to run instead.

  You don’t blame Boone for not being able to stay, a calm voice in her head said. When it comes to other people, you don’t have any trouble understanding what’s impossible.

  Lindsay shook the advice off. The tone of it was so foreign to her that it was disorienting to have it coming from her own head, beamed up like advice from some sub-subconscious she hadn’t even known she’d had. And since when was her subconscious sensible?

  She focused on Boone instead, and as she looked at him, she felt tears well up in her eyes.

  He didn’t need her to say anything. He wrapped her in a hug and let her burrow her wet face against his chest.

  She might have smelled like gingerbread, but he didn’t. He smelled like sea salt and cedar wood, and she was convinced it wasn’t just cologne. The comforting scent felt like it was part of him in the same way the masculine muskiness was.

  “You did the right thing,” Boone said.

  The warmth of his arms around her couldn’t erase her sadness over Eleanor, but Lindsay gave into the comfort of his closeness anyway. She pressed her forehead against him, trying to drown out her thoughts with the feel of his body and the thud of his heartbeat. What if whoever had been hunting Eleanor had moved her body? What if Eleanor’s family never knew what had happened to her?

  They had to do something. Something more than a phone call.

  She pulled back from Boone, wiping her eyes. “Eleanor mentioned some people. Henry and... something Disney-sounding.”

  “Ursula,” Boone said.

  He studied her face, no doubt taking in the tear-streaks around her eyes, but he apparently decided that if she didn’t want to talk about it, they didn’t have to. It was such a small thing, but she liked that he didn’t ask her what was wrong; he knew what was wrong, and he knew he knew. But Lindsay had once had a boyfriend ask her why she was crying two days after her cat had died. (“You should be over it by now,” he’d said, genuinely confused.) Boone wasn’t the kind of guy to be baffled by why she’d be on an emotional rollercoaster after watching someone die in front of them.

  Boone grabbed her Moleskine notebook and slid it over. In square, precise handwriting, he added the two names and then COVE in all caps. He put a giant X through the word.

  “And she said not to go to the cove,” Boone said. He tapped the word with the tip of the pen, leaving an ink blot behind. It expanded gradually, filling in the empty space on the O. “The one just north of town, you think?”

  That was the only one near them that Lindsay knew of. It was a little inlet surrounded by tall cliffs as smooth as glass. The whole area tended to get sharp, strong winds, and between those and the steep drop to the rocks and ocean down below, the city spent a lot of time trying to figure out how to best get people to stay away. There weren’t many ways to warn people of danger without also attracting them to it.

  Case in point: she’d never wanted to go to the cove more than right now, knowing that she’d been specifically told not to.

  She told Boone all that and tied it off with, “But I don’t think she used one of her last breaths to warn us that cliff-diving is dangerous. There’s got to be some other reason.”

  But after they’d talked themselves in circles for the third time, Lindsay had to let it go. They weren’t going to figure anything out tonight. They were exhausted.

  But she couldn’t stand to think about him walking out her door. Couldn’t stand to think about being alone for the rest of the night, shivering in the middle of her bed, scared of every creaky floorboard out in the hallway.

  She’d just found out that she had no idea what was going on in the world. In daylight, she could find parts of that exciting, but at night, in the dark, it was different.

  “Will you stay?” Lindsay asked
him. “I don’t want to be alone.”

  “Of course.”

  He agreed so instantly that she worried he might have thought she was asking for more than just company.

  Did she want more than just company?

  She didn’t usually invite a guy to stay over the first night, but she didn’t usually meet guys she clicked with as quickly and thoroughly as Boone, either. They could have had an amazing, electric night together if they hadn’t gone back down to the boardwalk. Maybe she would have made an exception then.

  But right now, she was exhausted and scared and horrorstruck, and half-expecting the police to knock her door down any minute with demands about why she’d called 911 and not left her name. Those little flashes of attraction when her body was pressed up against his were one thing; actual sex asked a lot more of her.

  And she wanted their first time together to be something extraordinary. Or at least something not marred by her being tense and nervous.

  She said carefully, “I don’t know that I’m up for anything really physical tonight...”

  “No,” Boone said at once. “No, I just figured you meant—so you wouldn’t have to be alone in an empty apartment.”

  “I mean, I do want to—I do want to see you again. Sometime soon. If you want to.”

  She’d felt heat spreading through her a lot on this strange, baffling date, but this was the first time all the blood was flowing to her face. She knew she was turning a dull brick-red.

  She couldn’t help it. She just got tongue-tied about sex. She was good in bed—or at least she thought she was, and she hadn’t had any complaints—but there was a certain kind of self-confidence that you needed to talk openly about sex, and she had never quite found it. She knew there were plenty of guys who found her attractive, Boone hopefully included, but she never really felt attractive. Some part of her was always worried that if she treated sex with her as some automatically desirable thing, the guy would just blink and react with, Who do you think you are?

  It was like how she felt whenever she saw those half-joke, half-serious T-shirts that said things like don’t you wish your girlfriend looked like me? or don’t hate me cuz you ain’t me. If she’d worn one of those, even as a gag, she would have been expecting someone to stop her on the street and say, “No, actually, my girlfriend’s a lot prettier than you are. She’s definitely a lot slimmer than you are.”