Dragon Riders

by Elle Casey

  Red took a quick step toward me and pushed the bottom of the cup into my face, ensuring that the last drop made its way down my throat.

  I swiped his hand away, and with it, the cup. It dropped to the floor as Red maneuvered himself around to my back and his hand went to my mouth. Before I had two seconds to figure out what the hell he was doing, he’d trapped my arms at my sides with one arm, and covered my lips and my nose with his opposite hand, effectively trapping and smothering me.

  The stink and taste of that brew was something else. It was so horrible, my stomach started to churn something fierce, and my eyes were burning and watering like I’d been pepper sprayed. Struggling to break free and pissed that I’d way underestimated the old turd’s strength, I reached down to my leg to grab my dragon fang, but I couldn’t get it loose. Every time I thought I had a grip on it and was going to be able to finally pull it from its sheath, Red twisted me around and I lost it again.

  My hands were suddenly covered in sweat, too slippery to gain any traction. We banged into a table, sending the fetal troll crashing to the ground. As it rolled under Red’s cot, I went for the demon sword next, its handle making it easier to grab and hold onto. I scrambled to get it out of my belt, but it was stuck for some reason, and I was quickly losing consciousness and strength. The fumes coming off the formaldehyde that had spilled out of the broken glass container felt like they were burning my nostril hairs off. My head was spinning big time, and I was pretty sure I was about to spew all over that room.

  A banging came at the door along with the sounds of muffled, angry voices. Red’s hand slipped from my mouth and I opened my lips to yell, but nothing would come out. My voice had left me, probably burned out of my vocal cords forever if the sensation in my throat was any indication. The light in the room started turning a hazy orange.

  “I’ll be right out!” Red yelled at the door. He let me go, spun me around, and grinned maniacally in my face. “Have a nice trip.” The outline of his form began to disappear and then so did the room. Within seconds, everything had gone black.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  I SLOWLY CAME back to consciousness and found myself lying on my back. I was very discouraged when I realized that whatever I had landed on wasn’t nearly as uncomfortable as the desert-like rocky dirt in Ishmail’s world. Red had clearly fucked up. It felt like I was lying on a bed—a real one with a box spring and everything, not one made of straw and bugs.

  My mouth tasted like a cat had pooped in it. I wasn’t sure which I preferred: the cat poo thing I had going on then or the skunk gristle breath that came from eating in Ishmail’s kitchen. It was a toss up which one was more disgusting. I smacked my lips and moved my tongue around in my mouth, wishing I had a gallon of Listerine next to me. I would have chugged the entire thing in one go.

  I moved my arms and legs, slowly at first and then more rapidly when I realized they were working fine. Anyone watching me would have thought I was trying to make a snow angel on what was definitely a mattress with sheets. I sighed. What a total waste of time that spell was. I should have known that old coot didn’t have the skills to send me back in time. Leave it to Red to cook up a cat shit spell and send me back to my own bedroom in the compound. He was probably working with the council to keep me from going anywhere. Asshole.

  I cracked one eye open and was surprised to see not leaves and greenery or stone above me, but lumps that looked like…popcorn. A popcorn ceiling? Where the hell am I…hell? I turned my head left and right, letting my brain drink in the details around me. That was when I realized that I actually was in hell—a personal hell otherwise known as my house in Florida.

  “What the fuck?” I whispered as I blinked over and over. I kept hoping the vision I was seeing would disappear, but it just kept getting clearer. The sun was starting to rise, lighting up the bedroom and illuminating all the things I had grown used to seeing over the years I’d lived as a human teenager. Posters of my favorite bands papered the walls. Framed photographs of Tony and me leaned backward on my desk. Rumpled, dirty clothes were scattered around the floor.

  The last time I’d seen this bedroom, it had been full of Rick-the-Dick’s stuff, but now it was back to the way it had been before I’d left with Tony to Miami. That was when it hit me…the horrible, awful, terrible thing that had happened to me, thanks to Red the soon-to-be comasized and de-testicled man-witch.

  “Fuck me with a whole bag of dicks,” I whispered, my voice incapable of any volume. To say I was afraid would have been an understatement. The last time I’d been there, I’d battled a demon and almost lost, and I’d had a whole bunch of friends there to help me out, too. But not this time; this time I was flying solo, and unfortunately, the demon was still there. This was so not good news for my continued existence in this realm.

  I sat up stick straight, throwing my legs over the side of the bed. As fearful as I was, I had to confirm that this nightmare was really happening. I was still holding out the tiny hope that Red had just cooked up a little hallucination to keep me occupied while he convinced the council to lock me down and keep me out of their rescue efforts. Please let that idea be true! I stood and walked over to the door, cracking it open and stepping out into the hallway. Tiptoeing down the corridor, I paused for only a moment outside my mother’s bedroom door before I slowly turned the handle and pushed it in.

  My breath remained frozen in my chest, refusing to come out. There, in their bed and sound asleep, were my mother and Rick the Dick. He was on his back, his elbows and knees poking out at all angles, and my mom was curled up on her side, relegated to a tiny two-foot section that remained free over on the far edge of the mattress.

  I felt the blood drain from my face as I went dizzy. I backed away on shaky legs, afraid to shut the door and wake them up with the noise. Instead, I slinked away in reverse and returned to my room, closing the door and locking it behind me. Once safely inside, I began to tremble all over, trying to comprehend what was happening.

  My mother wasn’t dead anymore; that was definitely a plus. And Rick the Dick hadn’t taken over my room yet. That could have been a plus or a minus, it was difficult to determine, especially since my thoughts were racing around in my brain like they were trying to set a new world speed record. The two of them were sound asleep in my mom’s bed like nothing had happened, like Rick or his friend Leck hadn’t murdered my mother by beating her to death and like I hadn’t gotten Rick shot full of arrows, stabbed in the eye, and sent back to hell where his nasty demon ass belonged. Okay, so that was possibly a plus too…I had always been a little queased-out by the violence. But it also probably meant that my entire life as a fae had been…erased? No, please no! That would be a definite huge, massive minus. The biggest minus of my entire life. My heart was racing, and I could hear my pulse pounding in my ears. I felt like I was going to pass out, so I leaned over and held on to the edge of my desk. My stomach churned, threatening to turn itself inside out.

  After taking a few deep breaths to clear my spinning head, I sidestepped over to my computer and hit a button on the keyboard a few times to wake it up. The first thing I saw was the date on the calendar. “Holy frigging-A. Red, you suck donkey dong in the biggest way possible.” Leave it to that saggy assed old man-witch to send me back ten months in time instead of six thousand years or whatever. I was so completely and totally screwed.

  I stumbled backward until my legs hit the edge of my bed and folded. I landed on my butt after a couple bounces on the mattress. I stayed that way for a long time, just staring at the wall. What in the hell was I going to do now? I knew no witches there in that time or place. I didn’t even know if I was an elemental anymore. The very idea had me falling into an anxiety attack.

  As my heart started racing again, I reached out experimentally to see if I could touch The Green. Relief flooded through me when I realized it was there, waiting as always—I was still an elemental. “Thank God for small favors,” I mumbled. At least Red hadn’t taken that from me. He’d robb
ed me of my present and my future, but he hadn’t managed to completely rape my world. I looked down at what used to be a demon sword attached to my belt but was now just a pocket knife in a tiny sheath. My dragon tooth was just a small stick. I pulled the sad little knife out and held it up in front of me, unfolding the blade so it pointed at my computer screen. “Go, go gadget boner sword.” I jabbed it a few times in the air, but nothing happened; it didn’t grow, it didn’t turn into a demon-killing weapon of glory, it didn’t do anything but sit there being normal and non-fae. Suck me sideways.

  I forced myself to imagine Rick the Dick coming into my room looking for little touchy-feely time, hoping my distressed emotions might somehow trigger some magic in the thing, but nothing happened then either. That was when I realized that the pocket-knife was basically useless and so was my dragon fang. And that asshole Rick had demon blood pumping through his veins, which meant I’d need something a hell of a lot more powerful to send him where he belonged than a human-made, un-charmed piece of metal or a sharp stick.

  I tucked the knife back into its sheath anyway, figuring if he decided to come into my room without an invitation, I could probably manage to carve him a new butthole; I didn’t need magic to do that. Besides, I wasn’t staying in that fucked up time and place any longer than absolutely necessary. I was going back home to the Green Forest where I belonged. After I rescued my friends.

  I let my eyes roam the room, figuring there had to be something in there I could use to help myself out of the situation. I spied my cell phone on my side table and rushed over to grab it, hitting the auto-dial button that would connect me to Tony. Relief flooded through me as soon as the call went through. I wasn’t alone, and that realization was almost as good as taking seriously good drugs. Probably better.

  A sleepy voice answered. “Hey. Why are you calling so early?”

  I wanted to vomit I was so excited. “Tony, holy shitstorm, thank the earth, moon, and stars it’s you.”

  He sighed. “Who else would it be? You just dialed my number.”

  “Tony, shush, I don’t have time for any goofing around right now. I need to talk to you right away.”

  His words were slurred with sleep. “You can talk to me at school. Or come pick me up. I’ll meet you out front of my house…in an hour. Geez, it’s so early. You never get up before seven. Are you sick?”

  “School?” This did not compute.

  “Yeah, school. You know, the place you hate? They make you carry all those books all the time?” He giggled at his own lame joke.

  Dread filled me as I realized what his words meant—I was back to square one…back to being a student at a crappy high school with a nothing life ahead of me. Demons alive, nooooo! My mood was effectively killed. “Yeah, I remember. Unfortunately.”

  “I have to take a shower. See you later.”

  He hung up on me as I reached up to touch my hair, his mention of a shower reminding me how long it had been since I’d had one of those myself. “Please God, tell me I have my old hair.” All I needed to do was go to my first day back at school with my bangs chopped off.

  As my fingers reached past my forehead, I quickly came to the conclusion that any hope I ever had of being popular or even socially acceptable was lost for good. Where there should’ve been hair, there was stubble. Longish, stubble, but stubble nonetheless. I must look like an escaped mental patient.

  I was picturing how my new looney-bin look would be welcomed at school, cringing at the expressions of horror I was sure to see, when inspiration struck. I leaned over and pulled open the top drawer of my nightstand and found the hair clippers that I’d put there to protect myself against the unwanted advances of my mother’s boyfriend. I smiled as I hefted it from one hand to the other. “Time to get my skinhead look on, I guess.”

  Forty-five minutes later, I was freshly showered, pits and legs shaved, and hair fixed. Kind of. I couldn’t help but smile at my reflection in the mirror. I looked so badass, it wasn’t even funny. No more ponytails for me. I was officially a dragon-riding demon-slayer, and now I looked the part, too. So far, re-doing my human life was going pretty well—I was going to see Tony soon and I had fixed my hair problem. Now I just had to get Tony online and head down to Miami with him so I could talk to Jared and get this shit straightened out. Plan made.

  I left the house with a banana in hand before my mother or her demon-possessed boyfriend woke up. It was way too early to be headed to school, but I needed to get the hell out of this town and this time as soon as possible. My first order of business was convincing Tony that he was in the wrong place at the wrong time and that he needed to join me in my quest to save him from the future. Or the past. The expression about a person not knowing the difference between her asshole and a hole in the ground floated into my head as I walked down the sidewalk toward Tony’s house.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  I DIDN’T BOTHER with the front door or waiting. I shimmied up the fence on the side of Tony’s house and leapt onto the roof from there, easily making my way over to his window. I pushed up the sash and climbed through the opening just as he was coming into his room with a towel wrapped around his waist.

  “Jayne! Geez! What’re you doing in here? And what happened to your hair? Holy crud, you look like you just joined the marines.”

  I waved my hands and whisper-yelled at him. “Shush, would ya? You’re going to wake up your parents, idiot.”

  He spoke in a normal tone of voice. “My parents aren’t even here. They’re out of town, remember?” He kept staring at my head.

  I frowned at him when I realized his knuckles were going white. “Stop holding onto your towel like you think I’m going to come over there and take it off you. The last thing I want to see today is your junk, trust me. I have enough stress in my life as it is.” I ran my fingers over the stubble on my head, temporarily shocked at how short it was and how much it pricked the skin of my hand.

  He frowned. “Hey, that’s not nice. My junk is awesome, for your information.” He looked at me sideways. “Seriously, though…what are you doing here and what’s up with the hair?” He looked over at the window and frowned. “Wait…did you just come in my window? How did you get up there? Did my father leave a ladder outside?”

  I smiled and patted the six-pack abs hidden under my shirt. “Nope. I used my kickass ninja moves to get up here, because I’m pretty much a grade-A badass now, but that’s a story for another time. I need to talk to you right away and then we need to go.”

  He looked at his watch. “School doesn’t start for another hour.”

  “We’re not going to school today.”

  He looked confused. “We’re not? Where’re we going?”

  “Another realm and another time. We need to go find this guy in Miami and a witch with some ass-kicking, spell-casting skills so we can rescue our friends.” The words were out before I could stop them. I grinned really hard, hoping the sight of my glowing, freshly brushed white teeth would distract him from what probably sounded like complete and utter mania.

  Tony shoulders drooped and he looked at me like he was incredibly bored. “Jayne, have you been staying up late at night playing those virtual-reality games again? Is that why you cut your hair?”

  I shook my head. I’d already been through this scene with him once before, when I tried to convince him that fae were real and that he was a supernatural creature with empath powers. It hadn’t gone very well, and that was when I had a live pixie buzzing around to help me do the convincing. It wasn’t going to work this time to just come right out with the facts; not without backup. Before, he’d practically disowned me as a friend, and I needed his buy-in this time more than ever. Using The Green to prove a point would be a big mistake—Tony was so easily freaked out—so I left it alone, humming in the ground beneath the earth his house was built on.

  I took a deep breath, hoping I’d be able to finesse the situation long enough to get him to come with me to find Jared. “No, I haven’t been pl
aying any virtual reality games. That was a phase that I grew out of months ago, as you know. And my ‘do is this way because…,”—I really wanted to tell him about the dragon mating and being pixelated, but I held back—“…I got gum in my hair and had to cut it out. Listen, there’s more to the story, but I don’t have enough time to explain everything that’s going on, and you wouldn’t believe me even if I did, so let’s just go. We’re taking the Tri-Rail to Miami.”

  He shook his head, going over to his dresser and pulling out a pair of jeans, socks, some underwear, and a T-shirt from the drawers. “I can’t skip school today. I have a test in biology. Whatever you have going on in Miami is going to have to wait.” He stopped and frowned for a couple seconds, looking off into space. “Although I would like to visit the public library there…I hear it’s pretty good.”

  Library schmibrary. I gritted my teeth, knowing that no argument I could possibly come up with was going to dissuade him from this line of thinking: that he had to go to school today despite the allure of the awesome Miami public library. To Tony, tests were sacred. Even if I threw some Green energy at him, he’d probably still want to go. And he’d probably kick me out of his bedroom too, and that wasn’t going to get me anywhere.

  “Fine. I’ll go to school today so you can take that test, but then we have to leave.”

  “I have some time after school if you want to hang out,” he said.

  It wasn’t exactly a commitment, but it was better than nothing. Luckily, I had awesome skills of persuasion that I had no problem using to manipulate my friend; it was in his best interests to just do what I said and not question me too much about it, so there would be zero guilt involved.

  I grinned. “Perfect.” He had no idea that this little after school study session he was picturing in his head was going to turn into a whole new amazing life for him. I couldn’t wait for the moment when I could tell him who we really were and what our lives were really about. He was going to shit a parrot.