by Rena Rocford
A Division of Whampa, LLC
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Reston, VA 20195
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© 2015 Rena Rocford
http://drfaeriegodmother.blogspot.com
Cover Art by Amalia Chitulescu
http://ameliethe.deviantart.com
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ISBN 978-1-62007-039-0 (ebook)
ISBN 978-1-62007-043-7 (paperback)
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For my family
Seven Days Before
efore I was close enough to be slathered in anti-acne cream, the kiosk lady had her bottle at the ready. Her eyes locked on me, the easy target. The stink of acid and rubbing alcohol told me the cream was fake. There was no magic bullet for acne; I’d already tried it all.
The woman held out her hand in the hopes I might mimic her and extend my arm–this wasn’t my first rodeo.
“The salts from the Dead Sea have natural healing properties. I guarantee you’ll see a difference immediately.”
Her smile was as fake as the gold around her neck, and I would know.
I could smell gold.
My mother said I was crazy, but I could smell metals. Gold had a scent like butter. Silver smelled of rain in a forest. Fake gold smelled like burning bread, and this woman was covered in it.
“No thanks.” I kept my hands firmly to my side.
My friend, Beth stretched her lower lip in serious consideration. “Oh, but how do you know if you don’t try?”
I punched her in the arm, but Beth was six-foot-three with a tendency to make refrigerators seem dainty; nothing I did was likely to make a dent in her. With the punch, I threw her a withering look, and Beth smiled, wagging her eyebrows.
I gave the saleswoman my most pleasant smile. “Thank you, but no thank you.”
Desperate for a sale, she reached for my arm. I grabbed her wrist before she could catch me and twisted her arm across her body. The motion smeared the fake Dead Seas salt across her sleeve.
“I have sensitive skin.”
Beth sputtered a laugh, but she walked to the nearest store window, making a show of examining the mannequin on the other side. I slipped away from the kiosk and joined her.
“I like this jacket.” Beth squinted, sighing.
“Then you should try it on.”
“Ha! The clothes in this store never fit”–she pointed at her chest–“they’re always a little too optimistic.” Her golden ponytail bounced as she shook her shoulders suggestively. Beth was many things, but curvy in the right places wasn’t one of them. On the other hand, she could go pro-roller derby at the drop of a hat. Beth was like a force of nature, and she didn’t mind tussling with anyone dumb enough to get in her way.
I was like a reject from a geisha convention. My hair was too straight and black for the Irish heritage of my mother, and my eyes were too green for my father’s Japanese heritage. I was caught in the middle. Half. Mutt.
“How do you know if you don’t try it on?”
“Honestly, Allyson, you sound like a school counselor. ‘How do you know you won’t enjoy fixing farming equipment unless you try?’”
“I was mimicking you.”
Beth arched her eyebrow at me. “Are you saying I sound like the school counselor?”
Before I could respond, a guy our age came into earshot, watching Beth as he walked, even as he passed. His wide eyes tracked Beth like search beams in the fog. He craned his neck, but his legs kept moving forward, as if the two halves of his body weren’t on speaking terms. He smashed into a cardboard ad of a man giving a woman flowers. He fell, his legs tangling in the chain holding the two halves of the ad together.
Beth ran to his side, pulling the cardboard off. “You okay?”
He stared up at her, blinking, like he saw a miracle, not Beth. His lopsided face fit his crooked expression, as if he’d been beaten about the head but more solidly on one side. What he lacked in symmetry, he made up for in size, easily topping Beth’s six-foot-three by another head. He clearly outweighed her by nearly a hundred pounds of lean muscle.
His mouth moved, but no words came out. A half smile of disbelief bloomed on his face as he grabbed the cardboard ad and broke off the flowers still tangling his feet. He took a deep breath as if steeling himself or taking in the fresh scent of a new day. With a mumble, he thrust the cardboard flowers at Beth. The rest of the ad ended up in a pile of broken commercialism.
“Uh, thank you.” Beth’s words sounded like a question, and we all stood there, waiting for the next minute to save us from the most awkward conversation on the planet.
Scratch that. To be a conversation, he’d have to say something. Anything.
“John, I told you to stay away from the–” another man said, stopping midstride when he saw his friend attempting to give Beth fake flowers. The new guy was nearly as tall as the first.
Where John looked like he was lopsided through an unfortunate accident, the second man’s face was actually skewed. One brow was higher than the other, and his rock-breaking hands could have come from two different people. His patchwork appearance made him look like he spent more time working out one half of his body. He even stood with an off-kilter slump to his shoulders.
He glared at Beth, then returned his gaze to his friend. “We don’t have time for anything fancy. Just bag the unicorns and get a move on,” he said, looking Beth up and down. A shiver of danger danced down my spine. I checked over my shoulder for something that looked like a unicorn, but saw nothing.
Maybe unicorn was code for something.
Oh crap, maybe it was code for kidnapping girls. Wasn’t that a problem in some places? People would kidnap girls and sell them as prostitutes. I hadn’t been in Albuquerque for that long, but I hadn’t heard of that being an issue here. Though, really, who advertised their neighborhood was a haven for sex traffickers?
And these guys were big. My self-preservation alarms blared.
In my mind, my gym teacher’s words came back to me in a way her name never would. When being attacked, we were supposed to yell fire because no one would come to the rescue if we yelled rape.
I wasn’t much of a runner, so I prepped to yell fire. The sharp scent of gunmetal and copper reached my nose, kicking my heart into high gear.
My breath rasped in my lungs.
Not good.
I had no reason to suspect them of anything, but big guy number two had the stance of someone used to resorting to physicality to get what he wanted. I cracked the scales at a whopping one hundred pounds, soaking wet. I wasn’t going to take anyone in a straight fight anytime soon. I scanned the mall; aside from a couple of shoppers beating a hasty retreat from the kiosk lady, there was no one. No cops. Not even rent-a-cops. And there was no one big enough to come to the rescue if these giants decided to drag us off.
I grabbed Beth’s arm. “I sure hope we aren’t late meeting your overprotective boyfriend who just went to states in taekwondo.” I pulled her back a step, but she moved like a puppet, wooden and only half as believable.
“What’s the hurry?” A third voice said from behind me. I froze. My stomach cramped and my chest tightened into the beginnings of a full-b
lown asthma attack. So much for running or yelling.
“It looks like this pretty one is well on her way to getting a bonus,” the second lumpy man said. He turned to Beth. “What you got there, sweetie? A bit of gryphon? Some unicorn? I hear unicorn’s real common ‘round these parts.”
Unicorn? Gryphon? How many code words could a bunch of kidnappers need?
Beth’s face turned to ash. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“You’re pretty young to be on the payroll,” the third man said.
Beth’s panicked eyes darted between the men, but her weight shifted to the balls of her feet.
Their faces froze in a confused mask, like they were trying to solve a math problem–something really complicated like two plus two.
John stepped between Beth and the second guy. “I saw her first. I get the bonus.”
“Yeah, well this one’s mine.” He grabbed my arm in his boulder-sized hand, twisting me around to face him. The grip crushed muscles, grinding them into the bone. He could break my arm without even trying. There was no way to break that hold, and I was no match for a three hundred pound bruiser. I took a breath to scream, but my lungs cramped shut as my heart continued to race. My chest burned. I needed to scream. I wasn’t going to be one of those kids on a milk carton.
Air squeaked into my lungs, rasping through my shrinking trachea. It wasn’t enough, but I wasn’t going to magically stop having an asthma attack without my inhaler. He dragged me closer. This was it. I wasn’t going to get any more air than the feeble breath in my lungs now.
Clenching every scrap of muscle in my body, I forced the air out.
The debilitating tightness around my throat released, and the scream unfurled in all its blood-curdling glory. My throat burned with the force of my yell, and the noise raged between my teeth, vibrating like a chainsaw of sound.
Orange flames streamed from my mouth like a fountain. The fire splashed into the huge man, engulfing him in an inferno. The whole world ground to a halt as a raging blaze poured out of my mouth. I gasped, and the fire stopped as quickly as it had come. Smoke stung my eyes, and my chest ached. The scent of burning hair filled the air.
What was that?
What the hell was that?
I blinked, but this new freakish reality kept marching forward like a roller coaster.
My hands jumped to my mouth, but there was nothing there but skin–shaky, clammy skin. It had to be a hoax, but no cameras looked down on us, just people blinking like owls.
I breathed fire like a freaking dragon.
Like a dragon!
Fire!
The soft crackle of flames brought me back to reality. I’d just spit flames at the man who could star in a McBeefcake commercial. Flames licked up through the remains of Mr. McBeefcake’s buzz cut. He scowled and let go of my arm, patting out the burning hairs on his head as if he extinguished fire from his scalp regularly.
I just shot flaming death from my mouth.
And my throat burned to prove it!
But he wasn’t even fazed.
The strong taste of ammonia filled my lungs. Was there some scary chemical in me now? How did this work? I touched my lips, but they weren’t burned.
I ran my tongue across my teeth, but nothing seemed out of place, no burned out gaps where teeth used to be.
Holy crap, I just breathed fire! Actual flames. Out of my mouth!
McBeefcake patted his head in slow deliberate strikes to smother the oxygen from his burning skin. “I thought we’d taken care of all the dragons.”
Flames caught lazily on a cardboard ad behind McBeefcake. He wasn’t burned. His hair burned, but he was undamaged. The blaze crept up the wall behind him, consuming the cardboard. Real flames–from my mouth! –so why wasn’t he screaming in pain? He was more worried about his hairdo than his face burning off.
The alarms blared to life, startling everyone out of the tableau. Like the world had been on pause, the siren jumpstarted the crowd into motion.
I spun, grabbed Beth’s arm, and bolted between the other two. “Run!”
Other shoppers screamed. The crowd pushed for the doors, and the crush prevented anyone from getting there. I dragged Beth toward the fleeing shoppers. Smoke curled up through the second floor, and the chaos of flashing lights and screaming shoppers added to my disorientation.
“Get her!” The words carried over the cacophony of the mob.
Did they get their lines from Rent-a-Thug? Stop thinking, keep running, Allyson.
We charged down the center of the mall avenue, avoiding the traffic at the obvious stores with exits. My feet pounded on the tile floors, but my lungs wouldn’t recover. I just couldn’t manage to draw a breath. The hallway spun, and I bounced off a pillar, only keeping my feet because I clung to Beth for dear life.
I can’t have an asthma attack now! I’m running for my life!Sweet god of asthma relief, could we reschedule this for another day?
Mechanically, I kept throwing my feet forward, one in front of the other, but the vertigo would drag me down soon. The constriction got worse, running up from my diaphragm right to my jaw. My gorge rose in the back of my throat, but I kept pounding past stores. The world spun, and I crashed into a trashcan. The decorative ironwork caught me in the stomach, threatening to spill my lunch into the trashcan right then.
Beth kept running, dragging me along. After three more steps, my stomach had voted lunch off the island, but I pushed on. My breath squeaked into my lungs, and smoke filled my nose. If I could just get it over with, maybe I could run. A rock solid hand hit my shoulder, spinning me around. The whiplash sent me reeling, and I couldn’t hold it in any longer. I puked.
Right on his shoes.
He froze. Slowly, he tilted his head to look at his feet. The pile of puke smelled like ammonia, and lazy flames licked up from the stinking mass like the dying embers of a large campfire.
He looked from his shoes to me and snarled.
I smiled back. The world had already stopped spinning, and I felt one hundred percent better.
His face turned red as his hands shook and he roared.
Beth grabbed an autographed baseball bat off a nearby vendor’s table and smashed it into the guy’s teeth. The bat rang with a deep thunk-click. McBeefcake stumbled backwards, tripping into a kiosk of glass animals and chili peppers. He tilted over like a tree, landing butt first in the display case. Glass sprayed the walls, chunks skittering across the floor.
He moaned from the ground, but stayed down. I scanned for his two cohorts, but they’d vanished into the mall. Where were the cops?
“Come on!” Beth yelled over the blaring alarm. She dropped the bat on the table.
We ducked into the nearest store with an outside exit and ran for the doors among the herds of people. When we burst outside, the cold air stole past my jacket. Wind swirled at my hair, and cable-thick locks flew in my face. Some people milled around the exit, but others fled to their cars. We cut through the crowd, keeping our eyes out for the big guys.
Beth muttered and shook her head. We’d come out of the mall on the opposite side from where we lived. Without talking about it, we walked around the mall toward our apartments, clinging to the shadows as much as possible.
When we were nearly to the road dividing the mall parking lot from the apartment complex, I stopped. “What the hell was that?”
Beth shook her head, pointing at a nearby entrance to the mall, now swarming with escaping shoppers. She kept walking toward the pizza joint, the last establishment before the road.
When we reached the drive-up window, Beth slipped behind the shrubs. They didn’t block any wind, but they seemed safer somehow. At least we couldn’t be seen easily. Between the bushes and the cinder block wall, stumps of dead trees waited, making our own private haven.
Beth paced silently. I bent over at the waist and panted to catch my breath. Beth stopped but wouldn’t look at me.
“You okay?” I asked.
“
It smelled me.”
“It? I was pretty sure they were male.”
Beth turned around. Escaped strands of hair from her ponytail floated on the dry wind. “They weren’t human. Not even part. Those were trolls.”
My heart flip-flopped in my chest. Just bag the unicorns, he’d said.
This couldn’t be real.
I’d breathed fire. Real had a whole new meaning today. “What do you mean by trolls?”
“Trolls, you know, live under a bridge, eat goats; trolls.” Beth raked her hands through her hair, but only managed to pull some strands free. “And what about you? Hasn’t your mom had ‘The Talk’ with you?”
I snorted. “My mom has more secrets than the CIA. She did have the ‘please use a condom’ talk.”
Beth shook her head. “Not condoms! You’re half freaking’ dragon, and you didn’t even know?”
“Dragon? But how?” My questions boiled out of me. “How is that even possible? How could anyone be half fantasy creature, let alone fire breathing lizard?”
She bent a branch, releasing it before it snapped. “You’re one of the Kin. You’re half or part creature of legend. I don’t know how that happened, but that’s what you are.”
My questions rolled around inside my brain, never quite taking form. All I heard was not human, and my brain short-circuited. It was impossible. “How?”
Beth shrugged. “Magic, for all I know. And your mom never told you?”
“Nope.” I leaned against the trunk of one of the trunks.
“That’s rude.”
“What about other creatures? Are there phoenixes?–wait, would that phoenii?–but you know what I mean.”
“I don’t really know what all is out there, only what I’ve run across. Unicorn, here and there, and, of course, trolls and dragon.”
Unicorns.
This was too much. I shook my head. “This is impossible.”
“What’s impossible is that you didn’t know. How come you didn’t guess?”
“I have asthma. In what doctor’s office is there a poster saying, ‘Have asthma? Talk to your doctor about a possible dragon heritage.’ I thought what everyone else thought. Dragons are in books and movies.”
