Sunshine in the Dragon's Heart

by Jaime Samms

  “Maybe it will think I’m too easy to be prey?”

  “If you were an animal with no reasoning abilities, that might work. But you’re not. And she won’t wait very much longer for you to make up your mind to run. You have to trust me. This is the only plan if you don’t want me to bring it down.”

  “If she was forced here against her will, then just killing her isn’t fair either. Especially if she has babies somewhere.”

  “Babies that will die unless we send her home.”

  “This sucks.”

  “Are you ready?”

  “I suppose I have to be.”

  “Make as direct a line as you can to the willow. The Fold is just past it. Tatzels live most of their lives in the trees, so if you can, stay on the path and out from under low-hanging branches as much as possible. I won’t be able to reach her from the ground, and she’s probably faster than me, so I can only protect you if I stay close. Watch out for her tail. That will be her primary weapon because she can use it from a distance. It will hurt, and if you absorb enough of her venom, she will bring you down. Once you stop moving, either you die, or she does. I don’t have to tell you how that will end, babies or no.”

  “You probably think I’m crazy because I feel bad for her.”

  “No. Quite the opposite, in fact.”

  Above them, the tatzel made a chittering noise that set Fernforest off barking and jumping at it. The tatzel swung her tail at the dog, but Ferny was too small for her to reach. She chattered at him more noisily and bared her teeth.

  “We should go,” Emile whispered.

  Sunny nodded.

  Emile closed his eyes, shook himself, and, a heartbeat later, landed on all six feet. He roared at the tatzel and shook himself again, the rattle of his scales drowning out the tatzel’s chatter.

  “Now that is going to make the neighbours wonder,” Sunny muttered.

  Then the tatzel moved, and Sunny sprang away from the tree and down the path, running like his life depended on it, much to Emile’s relief.

  FOR ONE breath, between blinks Sunny had seen Emile, both as man and as dragon, in many forms at once, with spiky shoulders, with a tail, with claws and a magnificent feather ruff, and then he was all dragon, all scales, and taking up much more space than Emile the man did. In this form, he would never have fit in the tiny hunter’s shack.

  Sunny only wished he had the time to admire him. He was as impressive as anything Sunny had yet encountered, and the sound of him crashing through the brush on his heels did as much to keep him moving as the threat from the cat-lizard-squirrel-thing in the trees above.

  Emile had been right about one thing, though. The tatzel was fast. It outpaced them quickly, then situated itself in the trees Sunny would have to run under in order to get to the willow clearing. There was no going around. Straying off the path under the trees only led him through even more trees that were more tightly packed and harder to navigate.

  “Emile?”

  “Do not slow.” Emile’s voice, as a dragon, was filled with gravel and steam.

  “But—”

  The ground shook under his feet, Emile’s breath flowed hot over his shoulder, and he nodded even as he ran.

  “Okay. Not slowing.”

  The lash of the tatzel’s tail down his back as he entered the trees nearly knocked him off his feet. The fire that sizzled over the back of one arm and along his nape drew a cry from him. The rustle and snap of leaves and branches above as he ran sounded like the forest was tumbling down around him. Emile’s hiss as he stretched his neck out to ward off another blow from the tatzel’s tail buzzed in his ear like a giant snake rattle.

  As he reached the wider path, the tatzel screamed at him, frustration evident in the sound, but it kept pace in the trees as he ran for the willow. It got one last whip of the tail in as he cleared the trees, wrapping around his arm and pulling him backward off his feet even as the spongy moss gave beneath him.

  He tumbled and rolled, saw the flash of claws and scales above him; then the tail was gone, the tatzel was screeching again, and Emile also bellowed, a hot, stone-ground sound filled with pain.

  Sunny rolled to his feet just in time to see them both disappear under the leaves of the willow. He dashed after them.

  The tree itself shook, lancelike leaves showering down around them. The air sizzled and popped. The tatzel glared at Sunny, lunged, but Emile swung his neck, knocking her out of the tree. She landed, rolled, cringed back towards Emile, and glared.

  “Go home,” Emile said, voice now a rough, flat sound that shook Sunny to his bones. He nudged her towards the fringe of leaves on the far side of the willow’s umbrella where the light had intensified. She hissed at Emile, tail lashing but not touching Emile’s dragon form. After a moment he pushed hard, sending her tumbling head over tail out from under the tree to the far side. There was a splash, a brilliant flare of light and a sound like firecracker flares just before they exploded. Then silence. When Sunny parted the hanging branches of the tree to look, the tatzel—and the bright light—were gone.

  The brook at the base of the tree jabbered at him, splashing over his feet. The faint scent of ozone drifted in the air, and the small hairs at his nape and along his arms stood on end. Squinting, he searched for any sign of where the tatzel had gone. Nothing.

  He turned to Emile. “The Fold?”

  Emile grunted and lowered his head in a nod.

  “Is she okay?”

  “I hope.”

  Sunny sighed, chest tight from running, from fear, from anger that anyone would use an innocent creature so viciously. He sank to his knees, thinking to dip his hands into the water to splash over his face.

  Water gurgled and jumped, landing on his arms. He blinked, and where the water had been running uphill up his arm, he saw the faint, shining silhouette of a creature that fluctuated between human-looking and sparkling light. He couldn’t quite get a good look at it.

  “You’re lucky.” Emile’s voice in his ear was back to very human-sounding, and Sunny glanced over his shoulder. The dragon was gone. Mostly. Emile’s hair was now brilliant yellow at the tips, and there were lines of iridescent pink scales flowing up over his shoulders and the sides of his neck. Yellow feathers protruded from his skin along the backs of his forearms and up the sides of his calves. More scales, darker pink, covered the backs of his hands and the tops of his feet.

  Otherwise, his pale skin and delicate freckles were very much in evidence everywhere else. An angry red line marched from his chin along his neck, marring the scales there, to disappear over his shoulder to his back.

  “She got you too.” Sunny touched the mark that darkened and curled some of his scales.

  Emile winced and pulled away.

  “Lucky?” Sunny asked, turning back to the water.

  “They hardly ever show their true forms to anyone, magical or not.”

  Sunny watched in fascination as the water sprites danced up his arm. Everywhere their tiny splashing bodies touched the tatzel’s tail lashes, the red diminished and the fiery pain cooled. He moved his hand to guide the sprites to Emile’s injury, but Emile drew back.

  “I’m fine.”

  “It helps,” Sunny assured him. “Let them help.”

  The sprites shimmered on his arm and hand, waiting.

  “Dragons and water sprites don’t really get along.”

  “And maybe big bad dragons need to get over themselves just a wee bit,” Sunny suggested. “They aren’t going to hurt you. I should think it would take a lot more of them than this to do you any harm.”

  Emile rolled his eyes. “You’d be very surprised, then.” But he held out his hand, wincing again as he moved, but allowed the sprites to traipse up his arm to the injured areas.

  After a few moments of watching them splash over Emile’s skin, Sunny saw the red and the swelling go down. The sprites launched themselves into the air, glittering in an arch that left multiple tiny rainbows in the air as they sparkled and fl
oated back into the creek and were gone.

  “There.” Sunny touched the damaged scales again. “That wasn’t so bad.”

  “They were helpful.” Emile flexed his fingers, then his arm. “This time.”

  “They didn’t fix your scales.”

  “No.” Emile ran fingers gingerly over the damage. “I’ll have to shed those.” He got to his feet and held a hand out to Sunny. “Later, though. For now, we should get back. I would prefer to have you inside before dusk.”

  “Do you think there are more tatzels?”

  “I don’t know what to think right now, but I’d rather not linger so close to the Fold.”

  “Dare I ask what happened to your clothes?”

  “They’ll be back where I shifted.”

  “They just, what? Fall off?”

  “For a short time, during the shift, I am… vision? Light, magic, energy. Not corporeal. The clothes have nothing to adhere to, and yes, they just fall.”

  Sunny narrowed his eyes. “That time. When you ran off into the forest. By any chance, did you…?”

  Emile’s cheeks brightened. “I was still adjusting to this world. The magic is different here. I had some difficulty controlling it, and I didn’t want you to see me….” He shrugged.

  “That’s why I found your shorts next to the creek, then. You shifted right out of them.”

  “I have more control now.”

  Sunny smoothed a finger over the feathers on the back of Emile’s forearms. “But not complete control?”

  “Stopping the shift at this point let me keep the damaged scales for now. A complete shift back to skin will force me to shed them. That will… be unpleasant.”

  “Oh.”

  “It’s part of the healing process. It stings, is all. The skin will be marred, but it will heal once the ruined scales are gone.” He smiled. “Don’t fret. Shedding the scales speeds the healing process along. I fear you will be in much more pain once the water sprites’ magic wears off. If I could help you to shed your damaged skin, believe me, I would.”

  “I’ll live,” Sunny muttered, even as he ran tentative fingers over the numbed mark the tatzel had left.

  “This time,” Emile muttered, and Sunny heard the dark and the hot anger behind the quiet words.

  Chapter 26

  SUNNY DID find that the burns flared up again, but he also found the water sprites amenable to easing the worst of the burning sensations.

  Emile refused their help, and his description of his skin as “marred” when he shed the damaged scales was the worst understatement Sunny could think of. It looked like someone had taken a cheese grater to his shoulder.

  “That’s horrible!”

  “It will heal.” But he said that with clenched teeth and sweat sheening his face.

  “You sit down,” Sunny ordered, gently pushing him onto the loveseat. Fernforest jumped up next to Emile and snuggled against his leg, tongue working over his uninjured arm.

  Once Sunny had rinsed away the blood and loose skin, he could better see that the damage was due more to the loss of the scales than the tatzel’s fiery venom. It reminded Sunny of the skin of a plucked chicken, only with crescent-shaped wounds where the scales had been pulled from their beds. “This looks bad. Will you have a bare spot there now?”

  “The scales will grow back.”

  Emile leaned on his good side and closed his eyes, fingers playing over Ferny’s head, and let Sunny wrap up the shoulder in gauze and some kind of cream that smelled too sharp and alien. He wrinkled his nose.

  “It will help keep infection out,” Sunny said. “You’ll heal faster.”

  Emile just grunted. The shifting and chasing and the effort of removing the ruined scales had taken their toll.

  “Come on.” Sunny glanced to the dark outside the window. “Let’s go up. We can both use a good night’s sleep.”

  “Are you not going to ask why the tatzel was here?” Emile let Sunny drag him to his feet.

  “If you’re right and it didn’t come here on its own, then I suppose we have to assume Hakko sent it. Why? If he knows they won’t hunt dragons, why send it here? Just to try and reveal you by sending a dangerous magical creature to our side of the Fold, in hopes some random human sees it? Or gets eaten by it?”

  Emile made a neutral sound. He didn’t want to think that maybe Hakko knew about Sunny and had sent the tatzel precisely to hunt his lover. But Sunny’s theory made more sense, especially if they added Glimmerleaf’s presence to the equation.

  Salamanders fed on flux. They weren’t any greater danger to humans than a moose or a mother bear if she perceived danger to her cubs. A salamander wouldn’t hurt anyone unless provoked.

  If Hakko hoped to persuade Emile to return across the Fold by threatening to reveal all of the magical realm to the humans, he was far more dangerous than Emile had ever thought. He didn’t think Sunny’s reaction to discovering magic and magical creatures was at all typical. Stories that told of dragons interacting with humans never ended well for anyone.

  If that was the ploy Hakko was using, it might work. There were creatures more dangerous than tatzels he could send across. There were also creatures much more vulnerable to human interference than salamanders or dryads. The realms were separate for a reason, and what Hakko was doing threatened both sides.

  “I don’t know that he did send it,” Emile said as he settled into the bed.

  “You don’t know that he didn’t either.”

  “No.” He rolled to face Sunny as he snuggled under the covers, twining his legs with Emile’s. “And if he did, I don’t understand what he hoped to accomplish. All he did was risk revealing the Fold and everything on the other side.”

  “You said he could get into your head.”

  “Not nearly as well when I’m here.” He touched Sunny’s face. “And he’s even further from me when you are close.”

  “So then he knows about me.”

  Emile thought about that. Hakko’s presence in his head had lessened a great deal when he’d crossed the Fold. It was even fainter now, and especially so when Sunny was close by. There was every reason to think that Hakko understood why the connection had dimmed so much. “I suppose, yes, he likely does,” Emile conceded.

  “So then the tatzel was aimed at me, most likely.”

  “But why Glimmerleaf?”

  “Maybe he thought that would be enough to scare you back home rather than risk revealing everything magical.” Sunny smiled and kissed him. “It didn’t work, so he upped the stakes. You think he’ll try again?”

  “I’m sure he will. But Glimmerleaf and the tatzel aren’t the only creatures I’ve seen that shouldn’t be here. I’ve seen pixies and pixie-dragons. They are both harmless, but they shouldn’t be here.”

  “Would either of them have crossed the Fold on their own?”

  “Perhaps out of curiosity, but it wasn’t easy for me to cross. I don’t know why they would bother trying now if they never had before.”

  “It’s not like we don’t have stories about weird creatures,” Sunny said.

  “True. But it’s been a long time since the Fold was doubled to keep the realms separate. It shouldn’t let small creatures like that through anymore.”

  “Unless something is weakening it.”

  “There would have to be a steady flow of magic passing through it for that to happen.”

  “Like a mind-to-mind connection between two dragons hatched in the same nest.” Sunny didn’t ask, but rather made the statement, and Emile gasped.

  Because of course he was right. Hakko’s determination to remain connected was exactly the kind of low-level magical stream that could point a finger right at the weak spot in the Fold. It was an invitation for a curious pixie or pixie-dragon to fly through simply because they could. Both species were easily intelligent enough to figure out how to do it safely, unlike tatzels or salamanders, who would just ram through even the most uncomfortable of barriers if given the right incentive.


  “Then you just have to sever that connection.”

  Emile studied Sunny’s freckled, open face. “It’s not that simple. It isn’t something we decide to have or not have. It just is. I don’t know what it would do to either one of us if it was cut off.”

  “So you have the same thing with Ananth? And all your other—what do you call each other?”

  “Broodmates. But no, not nearly as strong, because, as is proper, all the other eggs came from different stock. The strength of the magic between me and Hakko comes, in part, from our similarities. We have each other’s power as well as our own. I had hoped to weaken his by coming here, but I don’t know that it worked.”

  “Then if you sever the connection, you weaken your magic?”

  “I can’t see how that would not be the case.”

  “How much?”

  “I have no idea. I may lose my shift. I may not be able to cross the Fold.”

  “You’d be stuck here forever.”

  “If I were to sever this connection, Sunny, I would have to go back. I would have to confront him, and I would have to do it in dragon form. He would never meet me skin to skin. Not when he can be dragon and have the upper hand. So we would have to meet scale to scale.”

  Sunny swallowed hard, his face going pale under the yellow light of the lamp bulb. “You’d have to fight him.”

  “Confront him, at least.”

  “In dragon form, over there. And even if you win, you might end up stuck in scales on that side of the Fold forever.”

  Emile cupped his cheek, soothed by the texture of the wiry short hairs on Sunny’s jaw and that reminder that Sunny was so very real and vibrant and different. “Coming here was a risk. I always knew it might not work, but when all I had to lose was my own freedom and happiness, it was worth trying. If he followed me here, even just up here”—he touched the side of his head—“I always had the option of going back and doing it the hard way. It wouldn’t have been the end of the world for me to be trapped in my scales if it meant I could be free of him. I’d rather have the shift. That’s why I tried this first. But I could have lived without it.”