by Ann Gimpel
Despite the minus temperature and the wind, I was enjoying being outside. It couldn’t hurt to take a bit of a walk while I waited. Movement would help keep my blood circulating, and I felt the bite of cold even through my triple-layer neoprene boots.
No one knew much about me, but I’d arranged my life very carefully after finishing high school. And I’d taken care to move far from the small town in northern Arizona where I was born. I would say reared, but I more or less raised myself.
I rarely allowed myself to reflect on the years before college and med school. It was as if my life began when I was eighteen and enrolled in a huge junior college in East Los Angeles. I picked Harbor JC on purpose because it had something in excess of 50,000 students. A great place to be invisible. And I was.
I went to class and to work and to the one-room walkup I could afford. Two years later, I transferred to UCLA on a full scholarship. From there, med school at Tulane in New Orleans, and thence to a surgical residency at Northwestern. Once I hit med school, I no longer needed excuses for why I chose not to socialize. Everyone understood I had no time for anything beyond classes, studying, and my hospital rotations.
I shook my head and turned so the wind hit me in the back rather than straight on in my face. I was still being a coward. It was simple to replay my history from my favorite starting point—because it sidestepped the sordid parts. My childhood read like a bad soap opera. Even back in the days when child services rarely removed kids from homes, mine was bad enough to catch their attention.
I tried to hide my situation, but I didn’t have many resources when I was six. Showing up to school in filthy, stinky clothes day after day must have led to phone calls. Strangers tried to quiz me, but I was really good at keeping my mouth shut.
One day, I was called to the principal’s office. I was so scared, I wet myself, but I smelled so bad anyway, probably no one would notice a touch of ammonia on top of the dirt and grime and sweat. Someone must have figured out how horrible things were at home. It was the only explanation for my summons.
I’d get blamed for telling, even though I hadn’t said one word.
I’d be whipped and maybe burned with cigarettes. Usually, Dad’s wrath fell on my big brother and sister. They did their best to protect me. They were why I was even in school. They’d never gone and wanted me to have a chance to learn to read and write.
Mom was dead. When Dad was especially angry, he told me she’d died having me, but my brother told me she died from a drug overdose when I was not quite a year old. My father was a right bastard. Drug dealer. Pimp. Addict. Boozer. I have zero good memories of him, but my thoughts were getting off track.
I forced myself to recall walking into the school office that day. A youngish woman with messy blonde hair took one look at me and wrapped her arms around me. When I glanced about, wild-eyed, I saw my brother and sister standing quietly next to one wall.
“What happened?” I cried, sobs obliterating my words.
“Dad’s in jail,” my brother told me.
“We’re going to foster care,” my sister added. “No way it can possibly be worse than home.”
Brave words from her, but they gave me enough to make it through that day. And the next. I suppose the system tried to place us all together. No one wanted three derelict kids, though, two of whom had never gone to school.
I blew out a shaky breath. Over the next twelve years, I grew a very thick skin; it got me through the worst of things. Shunted from foster home to foster home, I stopped trying to develop any connections with my families.
What was the point?
Some were worse than others, but none were as bad as living with Dad had been. Obviously, I lost track of my siblings. Last I heard, my brother was in juvenile hall. I have no idea what happened to Sissie. Guilt burned in my guts. I’d promised myself I’d look them up—many times. Except I never did.
School always came easy to me, so I became adept at ignoring my surroundings and focusing on my studies. No one came to my high school graduation, but no one showed up for any of the other ones, either.
I’m many things, but stupid isn’t one of them. I fully grasp the connection between how I grew up and my lack of ability to develop much in the way of relationships with anyone. I dated plenty, but as soon as the guy started making noises about wanting anything more complicated than an occasional meal, movie, or roll in the hay, I pulled out my excuse du jour and dropped out of his life. Surgery was a slam-dunk choice. My patients are asleep—for the most part.
Feeling worse than when I’d begun my backward-looking journey, I scanned the skies. The dragons should be back by now. Why weren’t they? Wrapping my arms around myself, I shivered. Not from cold so much as fear. If they didn’t return, I’d have to fall back on luck and hope to hell if I did see a ship or a raft, it would be carrying friendly folk rather than the Russians who’d boarded the Darya.
I clenched my jaw. I was losing it. The Russians were unlikely. If what Konstantin and Katya relayed was accurate, probably all of them were dead. Good riddance, but I still felt hollow inside.
I missed cell phones and the Internet and my cozy cabin aboard the Darya. Hell, I missed my home north of Seattle, and my well-curated surgical practice with its blend of plastic surgery that paid in cold, hard cash and patients with decent insurance. Our practice had opted out of Medicaid and Medicare long since.
It wasn’t that we were cheap bastards, but standing on my feet for ten hours doing a complicated surgery where the patient’s life literally hung in my hands just had to be worth more than the $247 Medicare was willing to pay me. An amount far less than minimum wage when I factored in pre-op visits, paperwork, post-op visits, and everything else required for a reasonable standard of care. One of my exceptions was I did pro bono work at Planned Parenthood two nights a month. Far as I was concerned, any woman wise enough to know motherhood wasn’t going to work out deserved my help. My family was a living testament to what happened to unwanted children.
I may have clawed my way out of the pit, but the price was high.
I rubbed ice off my cheeks. No reason to think about any of that. My chances of ever practicing surgery again were looking pretty thin. To put a finer point on it, my chances of returning to a life where things like minimum wage mattered were probably nil.
I trotted back to the place the dragons had launched and looked upward once again. Nothing. I tugged off a mitten and dipped my hand inside the pocket that had the stone Konstantin had given me. The one he’d formed from thin air. It was still warm, still pulsing.
Should I call him?
Why did I even believe saying his name would work?
I dropped the crystal back into its pocket and put my mitten back on. I was being stupid. His instructions had been clear enough. To call if I ran into trouble. The only trouble I might run into here would be a renegade elephant seal, and I hadn’t seen even one of them.
A wandering albatross winged its way past me, majestic with its better than ten-foot wingspan. Next came a flock of blue-eyed shags. Penguins honked as they trotted up and down the expanse of open shoreline. Normally, I adored the rich variety of bird and sea life. Today, it was tough to give them more than a passing glance.
After checking the wind direction, I hunted for a big enough boulder to shelter me from the worst of it. The entry to the chromium dig site had to be somewhere around here, but locating it wouldn’t buy me much. The Russians had blown it sky high. Besides, the jumble of rocks below its entrance hadn’t been much of a picnic, either. Although, were it not for a teensy shove from Konstantin, I probably would have made it out of there.
“Yeah,” I mumbled. “And Johan’s leg would still be broken.” Not that it mattered. Had the dragons not intervened, the Russians would have killed me and Johan as soon as they discovered their first attempt to eradicate us had failed.
I found a decent wind screen and hunkered behind it. Penguins trotted close, examining the stranger in their midst. Not
being continuously blasted by the brisk, icy wind helped. I leaned against a rock and concentrated on wiping my mind clear of everything. It was almost like a Zen meditation, familiar because I used a variation of the same exercise before I entered the surgical suite.
It settled my mind, blanking out everything but the task ahead. Whether I was nipping and tucking or going after tumors didn’t matter. What did was the patient got 110 percent of my concentration.
I liked surgery. There was something clean and beautiful about “see problem, fix problem.” Most of the other medical subspecialties were far murkier.
Wishing for a watch, I stared at the sky, hoping for clues about the passage of time. It seemed like I’d been wandering on this beach for about an hour, but it could have been double that, or only twenty minutes.
I was having a hard time not worrying about the dragons and Johan. Konstantin had said they were doing a quick reconnaissance. Quick suggested they’d have been back long since. They must have run into something unexpected. My stomach twisted into an uncomfortable knot.
I wanted to help but had no idea what to do. Sitting wasn’t working for me anymore. I scrambled to my feet. Penguins that had settled close to me scattered. The wind hit me hard enough to make me stagger, and I cut a path crabwise into it. Earlier, I’d gone the other way. This time, I traveled to my left along the shoreline. Shoulders hunched, I fought gusts that wanted to send me back the way I’d come.
I tried not to interpret it as a bad omen.
The wind howled, shrilled, shrieked, almost like it was alive. The penguins lumbered into the sea. They might be clumsy on land, but they’re exceptional swimmers. Between the wind, the birds, and keeping my head down, I didn’t see—or hear—the raft until it was only about seventy-five feet from me, angling in toward shore.
My first instinct was to yell and scream to make sure they saw me. Rafts meant ships and warmth and rescue, but then I came to my senses. I had no idea who was in this raft, and I’d do well to conceal myself until I figured things out. I glanced all around me but didn’t see anything big enough to hide behind.
Had the men already seen me? It was likely. My black suit would stick out like flashing neon against the gray-white of the shoreline. I turned around and realized I was a long way from the sheltering boulder that had protected me from the wind. So far, I could barely make it out.
The raft was closer now. Near enough I could make out four occupants dressed similarly to me, but that meant next to nothing. Polar suits were ubiquitous. One of the men raised a hand, which clinched they knew I was here. I guessed the hand’s owner was male, but covered up like they all were, some of the people in the raft could have been women.
I had a bad feeling about this. Really bad, and I’d always had sharp instincts. Honed and developed during my earliest years, they’d saved me from beatings more than once. While I still had the opportunity, I turned my back to the raft and dug out Konstantin’s stone. He’d said to call his name, so I did, following it with, “I think I need help.”
After hiding the stone away, I tried hard for “normal” and strode to a slightly less icy stretch of beach where I thought the raft would land. I kept telling myself Antarctica was full of scientists, and this batch could be from any ship—or research base—but I didn’t believe my own hype.
I’d called Konstantin. Despite my ambivalence about magic’s existence, I’d dragged out the miracle stone and followed instructions about using it. That I hadn’t relegated it to the realm of the impossible told me how worried I was.
Shy of running—a fool’s errand because if the raft’s occupants meant me harm they’d catch me eventually—I’d shot my wad. No more options. Safest bet was to play dumb. I’d never done that particularly well, but there’s a first time for everything.
The next few minutes lasted forever. The raft scraped ice, and the pilot sprang over the pontoons, dragging the anchor rope with him. Now that they were closer, my bet was they were all men. Tall with heavy bodies and wide shoulders. Their faces were hidden behind hoods, goggles, and balaclavas.
I fully expected the penguins, a curious lot if ever there was one, would stream out of the sea to examine the raft and its occupants, but none of them did. The few seals on the beach veered away too, hustling their bulk into the ocean.
Oh-oh. Animals sensed danger. Their hasty egress validated my fear.
Once the raft’s pilot had buried the anchor with a few handy rocks, he straightened. I’d walked near enough to talk, but I wanted to hear what his voice sounded like before I said anything.
“What are you doing here?” he asked in strongly accented English. I ran the inflection through my mental databanks. Not Russian. Maybe Scandinavian, but with a very old-fashioned edge. Probably because I didn’t answer right away, he fired off what I presumed was the same query in two other languages. German and maybe French or Italian.
I settled on truth woven with fiction. “My ship was boarded. I’m the only survivor.”
“You do not seem glad for rescue.” Another of the raft’s passengers had joined us.
I shrugged. “Because I have no idea which side you’re on. For all I know, you’re part of the contingent that boarded our ship and killed everyone.”
“What are we waiting for?” The third and fourth men strode near. “We must leave.”
I made shooing motions. “Fine. Go.”
“You will accompany us,” the pilot said.
“We cannot leave you here,” man number two chimed in.
“Where are you going?” I asked. “What is the name of your ship?”
“We are from…Arctwsko.” The pilot hesitated before butchering the name of the Polish base, and my blood ran cold. I’d spent enough time at Arctowski to know all the scientists, and I’d never run into anyone who talked like this bunch did. Even if I couldn’t see them well enough to identify them, I knew from hearing them they had to be lying.
“I’ll be fine.” I smiled. “I put out a distress call with my satellite transponder. Help is on the way.”
The men glanced from one to the other. Something eerie passed between them, like when Konstantin and Katya talked mind-to-mind, yet not quite the same.
The pilot tried to grab my arm. I twisted away from him. “I’m not going anywhere with you. If you want to wait until the ship comes for me, that’s fine, but I’m staying right here.”
The pilot lunged for me again. I evaded him, but the other three men were positioning themselves around me, cutting off any possibility of escape. “Why are you here?” I asked.
“For you, why else?” The pilot’s expression made my heart feel like someone had wrapped a fist around it and squeezed hard.
Still doing my best to play dumb, I said, “Huh? Makes no sense.”
“You summoned aid.” The pilot spread his arms. “We are here.”
“Yes, in response to your…satellite summons,” another man said from somewhere behind me.
“Then why didn’t you say so from the beginning?” I was buying time, staving off the inevitable, but I’d be damned if I’d get into a Zodiac with this bunch. Not willingly.
“We assumed you would know,” the second man said smoothly.
I started to point out a whole lot of inconsistencies. Instead, I smiled again and said, “Privacy, please. If I’m going to go with you, I need to relieve myself first.”
Amid grumbling, the men who were behind me joined the other two. I waited until they were facing the water rather than me, and walked as fast as I could toward a jumble of ice blocks. Once I was behind them, I squatted to get most of my body beneath their line of sight.
Where could I go?
More importantly, who the hell were those men? Were they even people? Or were these some of the serpents wearing their human bodies? They seemed fluent in many languages—just like Konstantin.
I could crawl, but they’d see me soon enough. I could dig, but that wouldn’t be fast enough. Determined to maximize whatever time I
’d bought myself, I remained crouched behind the ice.
One of the men yelled at me to hurry about the same time as I heard dragons bugling from above. From its place in my pocket, the stone sent out waves of heat. I started to stand, but I was safer where I was. Konstantin and Katya might be here, but I was a long way from being home free.
I craned my neck upward and saw blasts of fire arcing from both dragons. A gust of displaced air right next to me turned into Johan. I was panting from fear when I managed. “They taught you to teleport?”
“No. Explanations can wait. We have to help.”
“How?” My voice was a squeak.
“Those are sea-serpents. The longer they remain human, the weaker they will become. We were gone so long because we were gathering information. Our job is to keep them human—and on land—for as long as possible. They must be in the sea, or they cannot shift.”
With my teeth clenched to keep them from chattering, I surged to my feet and ran after Johan, right toward the four things that only looked like men. I tried to tell myself it was better than cowering behind my icy shelter, but I didn’t quite believe it.
Chapter 11
After leaving Erin on the beach, Konstantin flew higher than he normally would have with Katya winging along beside him. Johan didn’t appear to have any fear of heights, which was a plus. The ships came into view quickly. Konstantin battled fury and disbelief while he hastily draped a shield around himself and his twin. Where before there’d been a handful of serpents, now both ships were crawling with them. Many had left the water and slithered across open deck space.
Decks running dark red with blood.
Shrill cries, like dragon bugling but with deeper discordant notes mixed in, rose in bursts.
In between the serpents, men and women crouched, their faces smeared red as they stuffed body parts from dead crew members into their mouths. At least it solved the question of whether serpents could still take human form. The grisly scene also violated one of the covenants binding dragonkind. Humans were off the menu unless exceptional circumstances intervened, like a war where they were dead, anyway. Even then, they were to be avoided unless starvation threatened.
