by Payne, Jenna
She woke with a small smile on her lips, and then remembered she had work today and the winter clouds were pouring down some unholy combination of hailstone and rain. She rose from her bed with a grunt. The dream had been so full of sunlight; streams of it curling around her. Her real-life window was white with frost and had a sloshy film of ice-hail-rain at the bottom. She turned the heating to maximum and sat on her bed with a blanket wrapped around her, waiting for the apartment to heat. When it did, she rose and got ready for work.
She showered, dressed, did her makeup, and then left for work. But I was flying. She felt stupid thinking such crazy thoughts. I was soaring through the air. I was soaring like an eagle. Nobody could touch me. She smiled as she exited her building.
“I saw it,” Michael was saying, and his fat, red face was full of excitement. His sausage-fingered hands were gripping the edges of his desk, and he was leaning forward in his chair, making his jowls sag. “I saw it last night. It flew right over the city, and the rain made its wings shine, goddam it. Shine! I swear to you, man, I saw it!”
“Wow!” Stacie said, in that faux-chirpy voice she used at work, especially on the phone. Hello, you’re through to blah-blah-blah this is Stacie blah-blah speaking blah how can I blah-blah. “It must’ve been a pretty big bat.”
Michael looked at her like she was a mischievous child. The man was almost fifty and attracted to her. Stacie knew this because she had caught him looking through her Facebook pictures two months ago. He had asked her out twice. On the second refusal, he had become aggressive. ‘No-one else wants you.’ He had growled, leaning forward with his predominating girth. But somehow a simple apology had made faux-chirpy Stacie forget all about that.
“Don’t you see?” he asked. “It wasn’t a bat. It was a dragon.”
Stacie laughed. She couldn’t help it. This was the worst, and strangest tactic Michael had tried. He beamed at her when she laughed, and then he tried to make it into a ‘moment’ by leaning on his desk. “I love it when you la—”
Stacie’s phone began to ring. Sickened and glad, she picked it up. Michael kept looking at her with hungry, ugly eyes. “Hello, this is blah-blah-blah—”
A dragon! A dragon, just like my dreams. Maybe I was the dragon he saw. Maybe I was really flying. Maybe I’m a dragon! Not a boring call-center worker, but a dragon, the stuff of legends. Yes, it is me, the secret dragon!
Yeah, right. You’re also the second coming of Christ, a wizard and a superhero all rolled into one. Get a grip, Stacie!
She got home around five, which was normal for her because she lived around the corner from the office. Michael had offered to walk her home but she had declined. ‘Leave me alone, you old, fat pervert!’ she had spat. ‘I don’t want anything to do with you. Why can’t you see that? It’s disgusting. You’re twice my age.’ You wish. Her thoughts were mean but he was disgusting. No, she hadn’t said that because that wasn’t nice, and Stacie was always so, so nice. No, she had thanked him and politely refused.
She wanted nothing more than to veg out and watch some bad TV. Maybe cook herself a nice casserole and eat the whole thing at midnight, like she sometimes did. Or maybe she would order Chinese food and have a nice pig out. Stacie dinners were always inconsistent in substance. One day, it would be a banquet and the next, a mere slice of bread. This resulted in a medium-sized figure that she was neither happy nor upset with.
She walked through her door feeling tired and hungry and almost turned right around and ran out of the apartment. There was a man standing a few feet away from her door, inside her apartment, and another man sitting on the couch, his back turned. The first man was tall with Viking-blonde hair tied in a ponytail and reptilian-yellow eyes. His face was clean-shaven, showing a square jaw, and he regarded her coldly. The other man had long black hair; that was all she could see.
This is it. This is how I die. I’m going to be one of those people employees stand around muttering. ‘What a shame, so sad.’ And they’ll drink their coffee while I am cold and dead in a box.
Stacie’s heart was pounding and she thought for sure they could hear it. Her ears were ringing and she could feel sweat sliding down her back. Gosh he’s gorgeous. Too bad he’s here to kill me. The man stepped toward her.
*****
Stacie wanted to run. She wanted to turn and race down the stairs like the Boogeyman was after her. She wanted to leave her apartment building and never return. She knew what would happen next. The men would attack her. She had watched enough crime shows to know what was about to happen. It was inevitable. The question was, how would they do it? Did the Viking-like man have a weapon? Or was the black-haired man the aggressor? Who was the leader here? Who should she present the blackest heart of her fear?
The Viking-like man stepped closer. It’s him. He’s the one who’s going to take my life. I wonder if it will hurt. I wonder how badly they’re going to hurt me before they kill me. I hope they don’t leave me in a mess. Mom really wouldn’t like that. She’s had enough since dad died.
“What do you want?” Stacie asked. Her voice was remarkably clear and detached. “I haven’t got much money.” She knew how clichéd that sounded but there was nothing else to say. She really didn’t have much money; only three-hundred dollars stuffed into a pillow case in the back of her closet. “Please, just tell me what you want.”
And now it would come. He would growl and pull out a knife, or the man on the couch would stand up with an axe. ‘We want you, he would tell her. We want to chop you into little pieces and feed you to our dogs. Yes, we have dogs. They’re not here with us. Don’t worry about the dogs. Worry about us.’
Instead, the Viking-like man smiled at her. “We have frightened you,” he said, in an English accent. “We did not mean to frighten you. I apologize. I understand it is strange our being in your flat, err, I mean apartment, but there is a good reason, I promise you. And I promise you this, too, we are not going to hurt you.”
The black-haired man stood up. He was taller than the English man. He had a big, bushy black beard and wild, black hair. His muscles were visible through his shirt and he had the look of a beast. A wild, untamed beast. His eyes were a black-silver that seemed to sparkle like scales in the moonlight. “Don’t be scared,” he said, in a rough Texan accent. “We’re not going to hurt you, girl. We didn’t mean to scare you. My name is Joshua Mathewson. My friend here goes by the name of Ragnar, after some famous warrior in the Viking age.” A Viking! Joshua laughed and shook his head. “He has never told me his real name, and I’ve never asked. Have I, Ragnar?”
“I do not need my old name,” Ragnar said, smiling fondly at his name. “And neither do you.”
“No? Well, I don’t need a fancy new one neither.”
“What is happening?” Stacie asked. She actually felt like she might faint. “Can somebody please just tell me what is happening?”
“You should sit down,” Ragnar said.
Stacie knew she should tell them no, she wouldn’t sit down. What kind of idiot did they think she was? But she didn’t. She did the most stupid thing; she walked to the couch and slumped down, glad to be off her feet.
The men sat on chairs opposite the couch. Stacie didn’t feel as though any of this was really happening to her. A distinct feeling of unreality had come over everything. She, Stacie Simmons, was not sitting opposite two strange men in her apartment, one of whom was an English man with a Viking name. No, that was too strange. In reality she had passed out at work from exhaustion and was having the most lucid, strangest dream of her life.
“What do you want?” Stacie asked again. “Why are you in my apartment?” She was talking robotically, each word enunciated clearly, without inflection or distortion.
Ragnar looked at Joshua and then back to Stacie. “This is going to sound strange,” he said, in his ‘James Bond’ voice. “This is going to sound very, very strange.”
“Even stranger than two random men showing up in my apartment?” Stacie said.
“Yeah,” Joshua said, and then shrugged. “It probably will.”
“Right,” Stacie said. She was angry with herself by how badly she wanted to know. They had piqued her curiosity. If they were not here to rape, rob, or kill her, then why were they here? “Go on, then,” she said, when neither of them spoke.
“You had a dream last night that you were flying,” Ragnar said, and the bottom fell out of Stacie’s world. But somehow she didn’t cry or flee or attack him. How did this man know about her dreams? “You had a dream that you were flying over the country. Am I right?”
“No!” Stacie blurted. “No, you’re not right!” Suddenly, she wanted all of this to rewind; for these men to return to whatever mad place they’d come from. She didn’t want men in here who knew what she dreamt. Dreams were a private place, a special place, a place without interference. In her dreams she could explore her darkest and most stupid and most beautiful ideas and feelings. And now, here were these—these dream-sharers.
“I am,” Ragnar said calmly. Joshua just stared at her. “I am,” Ragnar went on. “And you know I am. That’s why we’re here, Stacie. Yes, we know your name. And no, we are not stalking you. We have shared your dream.” Dream-sharers! “In a way, at least. In fact, what your dreamt was a memory, Joshua’s memory. You see—”
Ragnar stopped and looked to Joshua. Joshua, without taking his eyes from Stacie, nodded. Ragnar nodded in return and turned back to Stacie. “You see, Stacie, Joshua and I are dragons.”
That was it. The shock was too much. The absurdity was too much.
Stacie threw her head back and laughed.
The men regarded her oddly, like two types of creature who had never encountered each other before. They looked at her like she was mad, like there was something wrong with her. And they looked at her understandingly. They looked at her in all of these ways at the same time, and she felt both ridiculed and protected by them. “I’m sorry,” she said, when she’d calmed down. “I’m sorry but this is so ridiculous. I can’t help but laugh. How on Earth can you be dragons? I mean, I can see you here, before me. You are clearly men. You do not have wings, or any reptilian features at—” She stopped short. Ragnar’s eyes were yellow, and hadn’t she thought they were—No, don’t think like that. You can’t think like that. These men have broken into your home and now they’re making a fool of you. Don’t give them the satisfaction of thinking like that.
Ragnar leaned forward, with a serious expression on his face, and Joshua smiled at her. “This isn’t a joke, Stacie,” Ragnar said. “This is dead-serious. We are dragons, and I believe that you have a bit of dragon in you. That is how you dreamed our memories.”
“Come on, Ragnar,” Joshua said. “You can see how the girl would laugh, can’t you? It’s damned strange, when you come out and say it like that. When you say it aloud, it sounds made up. Hell, maybe it is made up.”
“What?” Ragnar said, turning to him. “What the hell does that mean?”
There was a mischievous twinkle in Joshua’s dark eyes. “Maybe we’re all crazy and we’re all actually friends in an insane asylum and this is a shared dream because we’re taking too many meds.”
Ragnar shook his head. “This isn’t the time for your sick sense of humor,” he said. He looked at Stacie. “We are dragons, Stacie, and I believe you are a half-scale; that is, I believe you have some dragon blood in you.”
“Ha! Believe!” Joshua boomed. “We know you do, girl. We can smell it on you. We could smell it on you when we were two-hundred miles out of the city. Now we’re here next to you, it’s damned overpowering.”
Stacie’s mouth was dry. She reached for a glass of apple juice she’d poured out this morning and drank it down in one gulp. It was stale but it wet her mouth and that was all that mattered. She cleared her throat and then said, “So, what?”
“What do you mean?” Ragnar said.
“So, what?” Stacie repeated. “Say all this is true, say you are dragons, say that I’m a half-scale, so what? What does this mean, practically speaking? What’s going to change? If I’m a half-scale, I’ve been one all my life, so why does it matter?”
“Ah,” Ragnar said. “That’s the thing. Right now you’re a half-scale, but we’re here because you’re developing into a full-fledged dragon. You’re changing, Stacie. Soon your dreams will literally come true. We’re here to guide you through your transformation.”
“Ha-ha-ha-ha-ha!” Stacie guffawed. “Ha-ha-ha! Yeah right!” She slapped her knee and rocked back on the couch. Then she killed the laughter and stood up and headed for the door. She held it open and regarded the men. “Thank you for coming,” she said. “It was very kind of you. Now, if you’d be so kind…” She gestured at the open doorway.
“Come on,” Joshua said.
They walked through the apartment door.
Just as she was about to close the door, Joshua stuck his foot in the way and handed her a piece of paper. “Take it,” he said, in a voice that she couldn’t argue with. She took the piece of paper and closed the door behind them.
*****
Meet us at the café on the corner of… Joshua had asked her to meet him and Ragnar at a café near her workplace, in the note he had given her. He asked her to meet them there after work, and added that they wanted to explain everything. Stacie couldn’t sleep that night. She held the note in her hand as though it would impart its meaning to her somehow. None of it made any sense. Two men had broken into her apartment and hadn’t taken anything, threatened her, assaulted her, killed her, or done anything apart from say strange, meaningless things.
Half-scale, ha! They were crazy she told herself, over and over. But the more she protested, even to herself, the weaker her protestations seemed. Was she protesting because it actually was absurd, or because she knew, deep down, that something was happening? It didn’t have to be dragons. Maybe it was a mental breakdown. But something was definitely changing within her.
It was those dreams. They came to her almost every night now; dreams of soaring over America, over the entire world. Dreams of having wings and being free. They were dreams in which she was completely untethered, free to do what she wanted when she wanted with whomever she wanted. Her life was no longer self-consciously mediocre. It was sublime. But that was all they were; dreams. There was no way she would read more into it.
So why did she find herself at that café, waiting for Ragnar and Joshua?
They entered around five minutes after she arrived. It was snowing and Joshua was wearing a Sherlock-Holmes-style black coat with black boots. Ragnar was wearing an army-like jacket with jeans and sneakers. They brushed the snow from themselves, looked around, and sat down.
“Drink?” Ragnar asked.
Stacie said she’d have another coffee.
Ragnar returned with three coffees and they just sat there for a minute. The café was full of other people, all talking desultorily into the winter lowlight. Finally, Joshua set his coffee down, wiped his beard, and almost shouted at Stacie. “You’re in denial. You know you are. We know you are. You’re trying to trick yourself into thinking this is all just a bad dream. But it isn’t, and you know it. How long have you had the dreams for?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she said ridiculously.
“We’ve known about them for two months,” Joshua said. “How long have they been happening?”
One and a half years. “You’re crazy,” she said.
“You know we’re not,” Joshua said. “You know we know. We know you’ve had these dreams for at least two months. But we don’t know how much longer than that. Weeks, months, years? We need to know, Stacie. To know how far along in the changing process you are. Goddam it, you can’t keep living in denial.”
“I don’t even know you!” Stacie snapped.
Everyone in the café turned. Stacie blushed and stared down at the table until everybody went back to their conversations.
“Okay,” Ragnar said. “Okay,
Stacie, then get to know us. Let me propose something. Let Joshua and I take you out. If you are to be a dragon, if you are to be a Queen, it is only right that two Drakes court you.”
“Wait—what?” Stacie breathed. “Both of you?”
“Yes,” Ragnar said, not taking his eyes from her eyes for a moment. “That is not strange to dragons, only to many humans.”
Joshua was nodding along with him. “Let us earn your trust,” he said. “We’ll take you to dinner, and then—” He met her eyes with a meaningful stare. It was so intense that Stacie had to avert her eyes and turn to Ragnar. Even after she’d done this, she felt him gazing at her. The eyes were roaming over her neck and down to the top of her chest. She had taken her winter coat off and was wearing the blouse and pencil skirt she always wore to work. Joshua was devouring her with his eyes; gorging himself. And Stacie discovered something she hadn’t expected. She liked it.
“So, a date?” Stacie asked, gripping onto this one piece of half-normality. “When?”
“Tomorrow night,” Ragnar said, and then rose to his feet. Joshua rose with him, and then the two of them were looking down at her. Joshua regarded her with open lust. His eyes were still devouring her. Ragnar looked less sure of himself, more curious, like a teenage boy who wants to explore a woman for the first time.
“Wear something sexy,” Joshua said gruffly.
