Before their set, he’d been showing the pretty bartender in the bosom-flaunting leather vest the many pictures he carried in his wallet.
The young woman had cooed and hugged Phil. Then she’d spent the rest of the night eyeing Billy as if he deserved a blowjob for being a good boss.
Too bad she’d shown Phil pictures of her own little one—a curly-haired, bright-eyed child.
Phil stepped off the concrete and into the night. “Yeah. Don’t forget the rednecks with shotguns.” He hooked a finger into his belt and spread his feet shoulder-width apart. “And the bad beer.” He held up his bottle.
“What do you know?” Billy watched the drummer and the other guitarist herding three girls between them as they staggered onto the bus. A good time, surely. “You’re from, where, Daytona?”
“Dayton, you ignorant British git. In Ohio. Seriously, dude, learn some geography.”
“This from an American.” Billy pointed at the trucks. “I’m going for a walk.”
Phil tossed his empty bottle at the dumpster. “You’d think they’d recycle.”
Dust swirled around Billy’s boots as they walked toward the blacktop. “Like you could find North America on a goddamned map, Phil.” Another big truck rumbled toward the pumps and they both stopped to allow to pass. “And when did you start saying ‘git’? You sound like an idiot.”
“I suppose I do. In good company, I am, then. Aye?” Phil’s lips bunched up in an exaggerated smirk as he chopped out the worst impression of a Cockney accent Billy had ever heard.
“Oh, for the love of all things great and good, don’t ever do that again.” No one talked like that. He certainly didn’t. “I’m hungry.”
Several parked trailers blocked their path to the sprawling truck stop, but the promise of scrambled eggs and good Texas picante beckoned from the diner.
Phil winked. “Sure thing, barrister.”
Billy didn’t answer. Arguing with Phil would only lead to worse cartoon accents.
They moved between two trailers and the space narrowed, forcing Billy to drop behind his guitarist. “Seriously, man—”
Phil stopped suddenly. His back straightened and his hands shot to his mouth.
Something stung Billy’s eyes. Why did this always happen in Texas? His last time through, kids had set fire to a car in the lot of the venue.
A gag gurgled from Phil’s throat. Billy gripped his arm. “Hey, don’t lose your beer.”
Then the stench hit him and he gagged, too.
A truck battery must have ruptured. The smell burned as if they’d stepped into an acid bath. It bit hard into Billy’s eyeballs and ate away at his nose and throat.
A haze hung in the yellow halogen of the truck stop’s lights, orange and sick like vomit.
Or maybe his mind gave it form. Sometimes he saw music, its reason and its waves. He locked onto it, then wove it into songs that made girls weep.
This stench, it did something similar. It had purpose.
Phil staggered backward wiht his hand over his mouth. “Lord,” he choked out. “What the—”
The light dimmed—something fast moved into the gap at the head of the trailers. Billy peered into the shadows and yanked Phil back.
A man, so fat it seemed impossible he could move that quickly, scraped his nails across the trailers’ corrugated sides.
Grease smudged his face and his tattered plaid shirt. He wore a coat—a thick, puffy, lime-green thing that should make him sweat bullets—and fingerless gloves.
“What do we have here?” The man fanned his fingers over the painted surface of the trailers. “You two lost?”
Phil pushed Billy, his hand jittering as it slapped Billy’s chest. “Go!”
How could lime-green man standing at the end of the trailers and giggling like a schoolgirl be breathing the same air? They’d all need medical attention if they didn’t get into the open.
A new shadow appeared. Billy threw out his arm to stop Phil. Another man stood backlit by the lot’s lights at the other end of the trailers.
“Looks like we’ve got new recruits, huh, Professor?” The fat man in the coat behind them grunted.
The man in the shadows nodded.
Then he opened his mouth.
His teeth glowed. It must have been the light hitting the reflective tape on the side of the trailer next to the Professor’s head. It had to be.
No one’s teeth shined like that.
“Looks like it, Stan.” He tapped the trailer and the sound crackled as it bounced, a searing fizzle adding intense notes of chaos to his finger’s thump thump thump. He tapped and little lights popped off his fingertips as if he’d glued sparklers to his hand.
His finger glowed, and a haze curled off the side of the trailer. The paint melted. This man called the Professor literally melted paint.
Behind them, Stan smacked his lips. “They sure look tasty.”
The Professor snorted. “Quiet, Stan.” He jutted out his jaw and clicked his teeth.
Little flashes popped in his mouth. What were these two on? Had they been drinking gasoline?
Phil had been shaking, his hand tight around Billy’s upper arm, but lights-in-the-mouth must have overpowered any calm he had left. He gasped.
Billy spun and grabbed Phil’s face. “Listen to me, mate. Keep it together. You’ve been in a real fight before?”
Phil glanced over his shoulder at their fat attacker.
Billy’s stomach dropped. “No matter what’s happening, it’s a fight, do you understand? Wits and punches. Break more on them than they break on you, got it?”
Know what they’ve got and don’t think about what it is, only what it does. Billy pulled the thought front and center. Phil from Dayton didn’t understand knife fights, or clubs, or hooligans with some sort of acid weapon. But Billy from Manchester did.
“Don’t panic! Got it, Phil? Do not panic.”
The Professor chuckled. “Can’t run. Panic’s all you got, you skinny foreign fuck.”
Stan’s bulk shot forward. Billy curled Phil sideways and moved an arm between him and the lime green rushing toward them, but it didn’t work. A hand wrapped around his neck.
Stan dropped Phil into the dust and a high-pitched giggle erupted from his mouth. It, like the haze—like the crackle—rolled with chaos, as if these two popped on the inside.
The Professor’s arm snaked around Billy’s elbows and drew his arms tight behind his back. His shoulder blades slammed together. His chest bowed out as the Professor yanked his neck to the side.
“You ever look someone in the eye and seen the devil lookin’ back at you? I mean the real devil, you prissy little wanker. A Burner like me.”
Billy couldn’t answer. He couldn’t talk. The stench filled his airways and sizzled his skin. The pressure made his eyes feel as if they were going to burst. Tears dropped onto the Professor’s wrist.
Stan giggled again as he waved a hand. A glow randomly moved across his fingertips, turning on and off in a haphazard way.
Then he laid his hand on Phil’s face. He did it gently, like a lover touching his beloved’s cheek, or a mother touching a baby. But it wasn’t gentle at all.
Phil’s flesh cooked under Stan’s fingers. His chest rose up and down, his throat working, but like Billy, no sound pushed past the stench.
“Have you ever known—I mean truly known—when you faced a monster? When you should put a bullet right between his eyes—right here—” The Professor tapped Billy’s forehead. “—and put that monster down? That you needed to do your duty and protect the innocent and the whole goddamned world from something so foul, so terrible, you’d forfeit your own soul to do what’s righteous and good?”
Stan snorted.
“Have you?” The Professor jerked on Billy’s neck again.
Billy had never been in a good fight. He’d never seen combat or worked in the law or done security. But he’d dealt with raving loonies whipping broken bottles and he’d lived then.
The monster’s teeth latched onto the curve between Billy’s shoulder and his neck. He jerked, expecting scalding pain, but the Professor’s incisors sliced his flesh with such precision he felt nothing.
Until the fire hit his blood.
It should hurt. It did hurt. It burned as if someone used a scalpel with purpose, intentionally, to peel back his skin. The fire seared up his neck and down his chest, spreading through his veins. It took the path of least resistance and it filled every hollow of his body.
Each nerve it touched transformed. Each cell swelled. Pain became something crisp and writhing, flickering like a chemical flame. A liquid ghost slithered between Billy’s skin and what it meant to be him—between his surface and all that was William Barston.
His childhood erupted from his memory. He didn’t see it—he saw only Stan’s gleaming grin and Phil’s shocked body. Billy heard the grinding of the tractor-trailers, the slamming of metal doors, and the Professor’s random breath in his ear. Smelled something burning.
But Billy’s childhood played through his muscles. He jerked to kick a ball. His fingers plucked his first guitar. Lips rounded for his first, precious kiss. Legs pumped as he ran for the wall behind his mother’s row house, pushing with more strength than he thought his ten-year-old body had. He’d crested the top, made it over, and landed with twelve feet of concrete between him and Bernard Jenkins’s gang.
Little William hummed. Little William strummed. He banged out a rhythm and he threw dirt in Bernard’s face. And little William grew tall and lean and when he held a guitar in his hand, all the girls sighed.
Now his skin floated on a thin layer of effervescence as if bubbles lifted him into the air and throw him against the trailers. He’d hit high up and be stuck there, crucified on sheet metal.
Pain he didn’t feel but hurt him anyway boiled away William. Pain that melted.
Pain that needed to be fed.
The one called Stan snickered. The Professor held Phil in front of Billy the way he’d hold a dead chicken by its neck.
Hungry, he thought. He sniffed the air.
His mum cooked birds in a clay pot in the oven for hours until the meat fell from the bone. Back in the day, his whole neighborhood would sit up, sniffing at the air like Billy sniffed now. Sniffed for Mrs. Barston’s special clay pot chicken. The recipe with the peas she mixed in at the end. The peas she plucked from the vines growing along the wall behind her home.
And little William sat at the table and whined because his mum told him to wash off that punk crap he’d drawn around his eyes. She’d not have the neighbors thinking her boy a ponce.
Then he went outside and punched the kid next door, more to prove his manhood than for any other reason, even though his mum’s issues were stupid and irrelevant and unimportant.
The burning forced into his veins by the Professor circled around, meeting itself on the backside of his legs and arms. Billy was now encased under his pasty exterior, remembering what it meant to be him.
The girls liked the eyeliner.
On stage, he became someone new, someone handsome, someone with swagger the girls wanted and weren’t frightened of. Someone who sang instead of hit and someone who built with rhythm and voice and once had made a stadium’s worth of young women bounce as one being.
A deep red popped through the Professor’s eyes. A red darkened by constriction, as if the sick orange haze had condensed.
They’d poisoned him. They’d filled him with this thing that should hurt but didn’t because the pain it caused burned away all that made him Billy.
Burned away his life and his mind. His body stopped jerking. His muscle memories vanished. The world, its reasons and its rhythms, boiled away.
He should remember his mum’s face. Her name. He remembered the chicken in the clay pot, the smells of a dinner well received, the hunger fulfilled. They all remained. But his mum as she dished, she was nothing but a hole.
What invaded his body wanted. It screamed in his head. This thing now held him up, kept him upright and moving, with hunger alone.
A memory popped. Chicken.
Phil tried to scream. He tried to get away, but Stan and the Professor held him with caustic fingers. His eyes were wide, pupils so big his eyes turned black.
They cooked him. His forearm smoked. Their palms glowed and Phil became meat.
Billy didn’t remember ripping into Phil’s shoulder. Nor did he remember the laughs of the other two. When he was done, he stared at the only thing left—Phil’s wallet.
A picture—a wife with her hand on her big belly. Two more—a daughter taking her first steps. A wife holding her to the sky.
Billy blinked back the red haze in his eyes. Between his forefinger and thumb, a third picture combusted—a man he should remember but didn’t holding a little girl he’d never met.
The Professor yanked him deeper between the trailers. “Find him another one, Stan, so he stabilizes.”
Billy’s jeans smoldered.
“Don’t want him naked.”
It didn’t matter. Nothing mattered any more but the hunger.
Because everything else had burned away.
The Shifters tell their children a story:
* * *
You are descended from our Progenitor, a goddess more powerful than Nanabozho, than Kutkh or Loki or any of the other figments of the normals’ imaginations. You are descended from one of the true gods who walks this earth—a real woman, a real goddess—and that is what makes you exceptional.
* * *
When the Progenitor of Burners would ignite the world, your Progenitor tricked him inside the mountain. When the Progenitor of Fates would set him free, your Progenitor tricked him of his midnight sword—and pinioned the first Burner to Vesuvius’s cinder cone. And when the mountain exploded and the dragons came, your Progenitor negotiated for your safety.
* * *
So remember, my children, you are exceptional. But you must follow our Progenitor’s examples: Trick a Burner. Steal from a Fate.
And always be wary of a dragon.
Scent of a Dragon
Wisconsin Dells, Four years ago….
Chapter One
Shifters perceive the world differently. How could they not? A morphing body sets the stage for a morphing mind, Daisy Pavlovich’s father liked to say. One should always make the most of one’s mercurial nature.
Just as one should always enjoy a warm, summer day. Sunlight danced over the gray canvas of Daisy’s pack and onto her red hoodie, and she raised her chin to the sky above.
The ash and pine trees towered over the trail, all at least seventy, maybe eighty feet tall. The high branches scattered the late August sun as if it were water droplets. The light cascaded through the needles and cones, over trunks, and onto the single, bright patch of sun in which Daisy stood.
Rain had moved through two days ago, and the undergrowth off the trail still gave off the gentle humidity of plants not starved for water. The entire forest happily breathed. No parched birches here. No snapping kindling. Only the pines and the brush, and the amazing mineral dustiness of the many sandstone formations along the Wisconsin River.
Daisy’s boyfriend was still down the ridge. He’d stopped to pee on a tree and she’d kept going to listen to nature’s quiet.
Quiet rustling of leaves. Quiet chirping of birds and all of the small mammals of the forest. Quiet light and quieter scents.
Brad’s marking of territory screamed “human male!” and she was walking in nature to get away from people and their scent-scapes.
At five and a half feet above the ground—Daisy stood just shy of six feet—her Shifter bloodhound nose picked up the midlevel currents of the forest. She might not be a trained bloodhound—one of the Shifters who could pick up a bit of bleached bone and know just by sniffing what the animal was and when it died—but she did love the woods. And
love meant paying attention.
Here, trees talked to each other with the clear, fresh scent that could only be described as green. Late summer pollen swirled and left a slight grittiness on her tongue. Decay from the forest floor smoothed out and added murky subnotes to the forest’s living scent.
And even though the humans who walked these trails rarely saw the animals that made their homes under the canopy, Daisy’s nose placed them perfectly into her map of the landscape. A bobcat had come through no more than an hour ago. At least six different squirrels darted through the trees. A snake hid under the brambles about ten feet to her left. Some small burrowing creature watched her from its hole in the ground. And…
She turned so she faced downwind. Brad had started up the ridge—she heard him as much as smelled his annoyance that she’d gone ahead—and was also off to the left.
Off to her right, no more than fifteen feet away, a fallen tree had broken into a mess of scrub and twisted branches. Under the main trunk, back in the shadows, was an excellent place for a predator to hide.
She got only a hint of him, since he’d hidden himself deeply inside the decay of the wood and the shadows of the bushes. But he was there, and he was watching her.
A wolf. A young male that had likely left his home pack in northern Minnesota or Michigan and followed the rivers south.
Loneliness mingled with the clear aware of a human wafting out from under the fallen tree—but also sharp, sour pain. He was hurt and he didn’t know what to do other than to hide.
Daisy set her pack on the ground and slowly, carefully squatted so she could see into the shadows under the log.
And there, in the dark, two wolf eyes stared back at her.
She was fifteen feet from a wounded wild gray wolf. He wasn’t growling, but the sour notes of canine fear flowed out from under the trunk. If she scared him worse than he was now, he’d bolt.
Dragon’s Fate and Other Stories Page 22
