The Last Unicirim’s Bride

by Hollie Hutchins

  Plus, the area was considered dangerous. Any werewolves that had fled the city would be in the woods.

  Something green hit her eyelids, and it took her a moment to register the softly glowing ring upon her finger. A jolt of adrenaline hit her brain, and she instantly dug for her phone, fishing it out of her inside cloak pocket, and turned it on.

  A moment passed. Her eyes fixed upon the signal indicator.

  One bar. She flew to messages, since one bar wasn’t great for a call, and frantically tapped out a new message.

  Mom, dad. I’m okay. I’m alive. I can’t get back to you just yet. But I’m trying. Bibbity boop love you.

  She sent it, and watched as it took a long time to attempt to send, hoping she wouldn’t get an error. A breath of relief left her when the message confirmed itself as sent, and she hugged her phone close.

  Now she had to try and call. A message wouldn’t be enough, even if she did send the stupid phrase they used with her all the time to confirm her identity. Bibbity fucking boop. She hated it, but sometimes, sacrifices had to be made.

  Her mom was the first target. Least likely to be working, as dad earned enough for his wife to enjoy working on home decor and babysitting. The signal went up to two bars. Three.

  Click.

  “Maya? Maya?”

  Maya held her breath, emotions flooding through her, so sudden that she wanted to start blubbing on the spot. Finally, she croaked out a “Hey, mom. It’s me.”

  “Oh my little girl! Are you okay? Where are you?” Her mother sounded hysteric, close to tears.

  “I’m fine, mom. I’m just stuck. But I’m trying to get back, okay?”

  “What do you mean, stuck?”

  “I don’t know where I am,” Maya said, which was about as close to the truth as she could get. She couldn’t exactly say she was trapped in another realm. She wanted to keep speaking to her mother, but knew her mother would fixate on saving her, trying to get the police her way… and realized with a stab of sadness she’d have to end the call.

  “The FBI are looking for you, Maya. You’ll be found soon. If there’s anything you can say about where you are, please say it. Everyone here is so worried about you. Your friends, they were crying and sobbing – Danielle felt so bad, she says if she hadn’t left you at the party… we were talking about holding a funeral for you, but I said that was silly. Oh, Maya...”

  The pain increased inside. But Maya kept her voice as steady as possible. “I’m alive, mom. I love you. And I’ll find a way back. I love you,” she repeated, closing the call to her mother’s protests. She’d likely inform the people in charge of investigations of the call. They might think she deliberately chose to flee to another country, or that she was trapped or coerced into making the call.

  But at least her mother knew she was alive. And just like that, the desire for her to make it back home lessened under the knowledge that the people she loved no longer needed to worry about placing her body into a grave. She checked the messages that pinged up on her phone, noting a great slew from her mother, Danielle, Charlotte, and her father. She didn’t read them. She turned her phone off, noting the nineteen percent battery left. God, it felt so good to have that knot in her throat unravel. It also felt bad, because she couldn’t tell the truth. She stood there for quite some time, doing little, imagining her mother contacting everyone, telling them she’d heard from Maya. Maybe angry the call ended so soon. Danielle had been crying about it. Yes… she could picture that. Danielle would gain a lot of attention from pinning all the blame on herself as well, all the sympathy – and Charlotte would want to ask everyone at the party who saw her last, and make sure they didn’t leave anyone out.

  She memorized the location around her, thinking if she needed to contact back home again, she could return here, where it was safe.

  Right now, she better hurry back to Renne and settle next to him. Get some more cuddles out the way, see if he wasn’t traumatized or something for taking her out of wedlock.

  A shadow passed over the light she bathed in, and she stared upwards, to see two shapes, like birds, circling around one another. Getting closer. One of the shapes twisted, and red-orange flames shot out of its mouth. All of Maya’s previous excitement and relief vanished in an instant. Fire. Dragons. Hurtling downwards at such rapid speeds – she soon realized one of the two was falling rather than flying. And also, for a dragon – if the other one was even a dragon at all – it seemed to be far smaller than the fire breathing attacker.

  Unicirim? Heart in mouth, she called out for Renne, but was too far away for him to hear her.

  Renne! Renne! She didn’t sense her mental call being any more effective than before. The one falling now hit the side of the basin near Maya, and slid down in what appeared to be a painful, vicious way. The chaser gave a distant roar.

  Mind made up, Maya sped towards the danger, even though she didn’t have her bow on her. She didn’t know what to expect, only that there was something off about that scene. Her breaths became ragged in her throat, and her cloak flapped behind her as she stumbled over rocks and shale to reach where she’d seen them fall. She hauled herself up a rocky, jagged slope, in time to witness the larger dragon savaging its smaller opponent. The opponent snapped back at the dragon weakly, struggling to escape from the slashing claws and the blasts of fire upon its body.

  Maya desperately cast her eyes around the scene before spotting a crooked branch that in no way looked like a bow, but was the only thing on offer. She seized it and tried to draw on her magic, unsure if it’d even work with an object without a string to pull back.

  A shimmering, fiery string formed in her hands, attached like a ghostly thread to the stick. An arrow flared into existence, sending a dangerous heat inside her. Urging her to fire, to kill.

  The molten arrow spat away and clinked off the dragon’s scales as if it was nothing. The attacker paused in its mutilation and fixed one burning orange eye upon her.

  Shit. Right, shooting at a creature that could breathe fire with a fire arrow probably wasn’t her brightest idea to date. Fear mingled with determination and adrenaline, along with an acute awareness that the dragon was enormous compared to her. Enormous in a way that she’d disappear in one bite.

  Drawing back the string, she decided to go for the previously dismissed notion of the ice arrow. If fire didn’t work, maybe ice might. The dragon drew in a deep breath, turning its snout in her direction. The icy string dissolved as she released the arrow, which sped in a light blue streak towards the dragon. She had enough time to register a flicker of flame in the dragon’s large, cavernous mouth, before the ice arrow penetrated the lizard’s long, serpentine neck. The fire instantly fizzled to nothing, and the light in its fearsome orange eyes dulled.

  Meanwhile, the dragon’s opponent lay upon the ground, taking slow, heaving breaths, but otherwise not moving. Maya fired two more arrows off into the attacker, just to make sure it was dead, and approached the injured one.

  Where the bigger dragon was a bright green, with leathery bat wings, four stumpy legs with wicked claws, and a long, sinuous neck – the injured one was more of a muddy green color with splotches of brown. But definitely a scaly, leathery dragon like the other.

  The dragon opened its eyes and fixed them upon her. Blood dripped from the snout, and the dragon’s mouth opened, then closed. She came up to the dragon’s head, so that one yellow eye, as big as her hand, stared. She knew, with a lurch of sadness, that the injuries it had sustained were too great. Life leaked out of it with every second. Blood smeared that great body and dripped onto the pink rock.

  Renne claimed all dragons were enemies. Yet these two fought each other in the skies. Why?

  “Can you speak to me?” she said, crouching by the creature. “Can you tell me why you were fighting?”

  The dragon said nothing, but continued to heave breaths. Then, with a gurgling hiss, it said, in a surprisingly deep male voice, “You… they will come to the city. In four days.
”

  “Who?” Maya said, panicking, because the dragon looked on the verge of expiring. “What do you mean?”

  “My… wife. Protect her. My child. They are… in the city...”

  He closed his eyes, and his form melted down, until what lay in front of Maya was a naked, dead human.

  She struggled to process what she saw, but felt Renne approaching her, fear emanating in their connection. A black, winged unicirim glided through the air, speeding down towards her, to where the dead dragon and dragon-turned-human lay. Renne touched down and shrank into human size. “Maya! Did you do this?”

  “No. Just him.” She indicated the big dragon. “But he was distracted in trying to kill this one. He was a dragon… but not now.”

  Renne appeared deeply disturbed from her announcement. “He was a dragon?” The dead man had muddy brown hair, like the splotches that had been on his hide.

  “He said something to me.” She let Renne wrap his arm around her and felt the relief and fear mingling in him. “Um, ‘they will come in four days to the city,’ and his wife and children were in the city. I didn’t quite get out of him which city before he died.”

  She wondered why his death didn’t upset her as much as it should have. She’d watched him die so clinically, as she tried extracting a last sliver of information.

  Somehow, the person she was before didn’t fit in with the world here. The thought of her mother knowing that Maya had it in her to do this – she didn’t think she’d ever tell the truth of her time in Albalon.

  It would break her mother’s heart.

  “I don’t understand this,” Renne muttered, examining the human as if hoping to find scales on him. “Dragons are dragons. They don’t shapeshift, they just kill, murder…” He leaned his head against Maya. “This shouldn’t be possible.”

  “There’s not a lot you know about them though, is there?” She didn’t plan to press him any further, suspecting backlash.

  “I…” He held his tongue. “The city. He said the city. Could he mean Bastion?”

  “It is the nearest city in the region, right?”

  “Yes. And they were… flying. You say they were fighting?”

  “It looked like he was being chased by the other one,” Maya said.

  A short pause. “You think he was trying to warn his… wife?”

  “Who might be in Bastion? I don’t know. Why would a dragon have a wife there? They all live over the sea or at River’s End, am I right?”

  “Mm,” Renne said. “This… you realize what it means, if they can shapeshift?”

  Maya shrugged, and his hand tightened around her waist.

  “It means they can hide among us. And pretend to be human.” His voice became a growl. “It means, for all we know, there are dragons in Bastion right now.”

  “Okay, okay, before you go on your witch hunt,” Maya said, “what explains one dragon attacking another?”

  He had no answer. And neither did she.

  Renne

  Why couldn’t they just have a whole day of peace, with no interruptions? Plummeting dragon bodies and a new mystery upon their hands wasn’t what Renne had in mind when he took Maya out for her date. Then again, he also didn’t intend for what did transpire between them.

  He wasn’t complaining, though. Not with this amazing woman at his side. Who he definitely planned on spending more time with in an intimate manner. Maya slept next to him now in his bed, with the drapes rumpled down, revealing a spill of brown hair, pale pink skin, and strapless shoulders. He was tempted for a moment to slide down the cover to reveal more of her naked body underneath, but unfortunately, there was another pressing concern.

  The matter of the dragon’s cryptic message, and the growing anxiety of an attack being imminent upon their city. They are coming. Who? The dragons? All the dragons? Werewolves and dragons? Were they prepared for an assault from the air? He knew Witslaw had the siegesmiths working overtime to create ballistae capable of knocking the dragons out of the air. They only had a few dozen constructed, which might not be enough for a fast-moving invasion force. The population of Bastion, so recently taken back under control of the unicirim, just started allowing food supplies to flow into the city again. They now felt the tension of troops preparing for battle.

  It was hard to sleep when visions of Bastion collapsing in flame filled his dreams, when he remembered how the flames licked the buildings of River’s Ends, as those beasts destroyed everything beautiful and sacred. He feared when they did reach River’s End, they’d see nothing but dull, smoke-scarred rubble, with skeletons heaped together in a city-wide mass grave.

  Curse it. How was he supposed to pursue a relationship and develop things better with Maya with all this potential chaos lining up? It was tempting to just run away and leave everything behind, fly to some new continent, fly to a new realm, although he didn’t like the sound of Maya’s realm. No magic, multiple countries all vying for more power, and humans so technologically advanced that they could communicate instantaneously with people all over the world. It sounded soulless to him, without magic, and the prospect of feeling an intense connection – though Maya insisted that people could feel intense connections, even without a Bond.

  He’d been looking for the supposed “wife and child” in Bastion as well, but since they didn’t know the dragon’s name and there were plenty of widowers in Bastion, there was little to no chance of finding these people. They might have fled from Bastion after it was annexed as well.

  They might be dragons in disguise. He shuddered at the notion. Horrible, vile creatures. One with a wife and child? They could love?

  Maya stirred in her sleep, her hands grabbing the side where he had lain. Her face puckered up in some mild annoyance, but she remained unconscious.

  One day left until a city was attacked. Part of Renne wanted it to be a false alarm, but right now, they couldn’t afford to ignore any kind of warning.

  “We’re not ready,” he said softly, stroking her head. “We need more time.”

  Now she woke up and blinked sleepy eyes at him. “Nnn...not ready for what?”

  “A battle against a lot of dragons. If it’s even happening. Our armies might be decimated. We’ll be back to the beginning, and people will be too scared to resist again.”

  Rubbing her eyes, which now spilled yawn-induced tears, she shook her head. “Yeah, this is too early in the morning for me to process.”

  “Sorry. I didn’t mean to wake you.”

  “Touching and talking to me does tend to do that,” she said with a hint of annoyance in her voice. “I’m a light sleeper.”

  “Maybe you shouldn’t move around so much in bed. You woke me up.” He kissed the back of her hand, before trailing more along her arm, enjoying her quick intake of breath.

  “Yeah, whatever, we’re both terrible bed partners. Okay… let me get a drink, and we’ll speak more on what’s bothering you. Good?”

  They kissed one another lightly on the lips, and she slid out of bed, ready to go and consume her coffee drink. One coffee later, with both of them sitting in the small communal dining hall on their floor, she cleared her throat and nodded curtly towards him. “Sorry about that. Go on. What’s bothering you?” Her leg brushed against his under the table, and he liked that small, poignant contact between them. It made everything a little less intimidating, a little easier to process and deal with.

  “Stressing about the end of the world,” he said. “About everything we’ve been working for turned to naught, because we weren’t able to take on the one enemy we’re actually supposed to take on.”

  “We’ll be fine,” Maya said, giving him a wide smile, but he sensed that inside, she was every bit as nervous. It was hard to lie to someone if you knew what they were feeling all the time. “I think I can just about shoot arrows on your back now without falling off.”

  “That’s because you’re strapped to my back. It’d take some skill to fall off me.”

  “Then I must b
e incredibly skilled,” she said, arching one eyebrow.

  “They didn’t adjust the straps right. We’ve got it perfected now.”

  “So comforting.” She grinned, closing her eyes to smell the coffee in the dregs of her cup. “I honestly think we’ll make a big difference. All you need to do is just avoid being roasted, and I think we’ll do great.”

  Come to think of it, Renne noted, Maya did seem to be in a much more cheerful mood lately. As much as he wanted to think it had something to do with the connection they shared, the intimacy they had after finally copulating, even if they weren’t married… there was something else about her manner. Like all her burdens, her fears, had just evaporated. No more staring at that peculiar device she had, which Maya had explained was a way for her to contact home (not that he understood the mechanics behind it), and no more of that melancholy, lumpy throat feeling that sometimes leaked into the Bond.

  Something was up.

  “I’ll try my best to avoid becoming a flying bonfire,” Renne said. “But you know, you have me curious about something. How come you don’t look at that little black box anymore? I remember you looked at it at least a few times a day. Even if you never turned its little light on. Yet you’re not doing that anymore. How come?”

  “Ah...” her smile lessened. “Well… I’m glad you brought that up.” She placed her cup down, fingers curling around it. “Since I’ve been meaning to talk to you about it.”

  “About what?”