The Dubious Gift of Dragon Blood

by J. Marshall Freeman

  You knew the rule, Crispin, I could hear him thinking. Don’t ever let anyone know.

  So, in order to show I was in complete control of the situation, that I didn’t give a shit what anyone thought about me, that I was a proud, self-determining gay man, I climbed to my feet, turned on my heel…and ran. I blasted through the exit doors, across the parking lot, and out into the street, legs pumping until the school was around a corner and four blocks away. I finally stopped, gasping for breath in front of the sad little excuse for a parkette off Snowrose Avenue, charmingly decorated with used condoms and a syringe or two. I sat down on one of the benches and cried and cried and cried until my guts hurt so bad that I cried from the pain.

  Where the hell do I go now? In ten minutes, my whole life had spun apart like jars of spice flying off a lazy Susan. I couldn’t go back to school, maybe not ever. I couldn’t just walk the streets, because for one thing I had run off without my jacket. Go home? You must be kidding. After all the dragon stuff—and wow, I had actually forgotten all about the dragon stuff for an hour—my parents had probably both called in sick and were waiting at home so we could have a good talk. No, the last place I wanted to go was our house. If I showed up a blubbering mess like this, I’d end up coming out to them in the worst possible way. I’d confirm every fear they had about what a stupid homo whore their son was, getting with his friends’ boyfriends.

  The truth was, I wanted to be nowhere. How could there ever be a place where I was accepted? Where could I ever find love? A devouring darkness was closing over my head, dragging me down into a place where light couldn’t reach me. I had never felt like this before, and it was terrifying. But I’d had enough. I wanted out of this world altogether.

  I was starting to really feel the cold, and I thought, Good, let it kill me. But that’s when my brain kicked over, like that first blip on the cardiac monitor after everyone’s given up on the fallen hero and quit the CPR. I suddenly realized there was somewhere I could go, somewhere literally out this world.

  Surfing the wave of renewed determination, I opened up the map on my phone and looked up directions to the Ambassador Hotel.

  Chapter 4: Small Talk with a Quadrana

  Luckily, my transit card was in my back pocket, and I caught a bus to the subway station. As I stood on the platform, waiting for the subway downtown, I felt marked, as if everyone could see I was skipping school. Or maybe they could see I was gay. Was I more effeminate than I thought? Did the fact that I dyed just the top of my head blond and left the back and sides my natural dark brown give it away? Maybe they could even see that I had been preying on a poor defenceless straight guy. The train arrived, and I stumbled on board and sat down in the corner.

  The mid-morning subway was half-empty, especially out here at the end of the line. With no signal for my phone underground, I had nothing to do but turn everything over in my head again and again. For instance, was Altman really straight? I mean, I’m a guy, and he, um, enjoyed what I did for him. But was I just a convenient orifice? Did he think of me when we did that, or was he running clips of porn girls behind his closed eyes? It didn’t matter. It was over. He hated me forever.

  I started to cry again and realized that someone really was watching me—a middle-aged lady in a purple duffle coat. I hoped she wouldn’t offer me a tissue or free advice, though I wouldn’t have minded one of the doughnuts in her paper takeout bag. She exited at the next stop.

  I got off the train twenty minutes later and walked down Jarvis Street in the direction of the Ambassador. The farther south I walked, the sketchier the area got. In the park north of the hotel, homeless people were cocooned in sleeping bags, and I’m pretty sure the women leaning against the metal fence were already open for business despite the early hour. But the hotel, disconcertingly opulent, didn’t seem to care what a crappy neighbourhood it was in. As I climbed the marble steps, a doorman in impeccable grey livery pulled open the doors for me, complete with a “good morning, sir.”

  My shoes tap-tapped on marble and shuff-shuffed across thick carpets until I came to the front desk. A soft lounge arrangement of Nirvana’s “Heart-Shaped Box” was leaking through the speakers as a clerk approached and fired his professional smile at me.

  “Can I help you?”

  “Uh, there’s this woman staying here. Consul Crazy-Ducky or something.” The clerk’s smile didn’t falter, though his eyes widened. “Short copper hair?” I suggested. “Shoulder pads?”

  The clerk made a show of squinting at his monitor and typing. Probably he was just humouring me, or maybe playing solitaire.

  “Nothing that I can…” He paused, and I leaned forward hopefully. “No, nothing. Is she expecting you?”

  “Um, yeah, maybe. Can I sit and wait for her?”

  “Certainly!” And he was gone so fast, he might have dropped through a trap door.

  I collapsed into an enormous wing-back chair, exhausted by the futility of my life. All around me, people were coming and going purposefully: business professionals talking loudly into their phones; well-heeled tourists corralling their confident, French-speaking children and heading out for a day of sightseeing; a man and woman throwing each other covert looks across the lobby, the man mouthing “five minutes” before walking to the elevators and disappearing. Life was going on for all these people while I had no next move. Maybe I’d just make my new home in this chair. How long would I be able to sit here in the opulent warmth of the lobby before they threw me out? Maybe I could charge meals to random rooms until I got caught.

  Someone tapped me on the shoulder, and I spun around in panic to find the front desk clerk crouching beside my chair.

  “Are you Crispin?” he asked, and I nodded. “And it was…” He consulted a scrap of paper. “Consul Krasik-dahé you were looking for?”

  I jumped to my feet and began babbling. “Yes, that’s it! I forgot her name because, see, she’s my aunt, but she used to have another name before she married this guy from, uh, Iceland and she was going to hyphenate it, but her lawyer said…” I realized the guy didn’t give a crap, so I just repeated, “Yes.”

  “She phoned down to the front desk. They’re waiting for you in room 1412. The elevators are there beside the bar.” He pointed and then vanished again, leaving me thanking the empty air. How had the Consul known I was down here? Who was this “they”? My heart started beating faster as I stepped into the elevator, because it had just occurred to me this plan of mine might be the equivalent of escaping a bear by jumping off a mountain. I was sharing the elevator with the woman who had been told to wait five minutes by, presumably, her illicit lover. She seemed just as nervous as me.

  Ms. Hotel Quickie got off on the fifth floor, and I travelled alone to the fourteenth. As I walked down the empty hall, my footfalls muffled by thick carpet, I wondered what was going on behind all the closed doors. Were people watching me through the peepholes? Were the rooms filled with the bloody aftermaths of mob hits? Were there dragon eggs inside, ready to hatch?

  I turned a corner, and at the end of the corridor stood a strange, skinny figure in a long trench coat, so tall the fedora on his head brushed the sprinkler nozzle on the ceiling. He lifted his long arm and motioned me closer with a bony finger. This did nothing to slow the pounding of my heart, but still I approached, like the next victim in a horror movie.

  His face was shadowed by the brim of his hat, but I could have sworn his eyes were glowing.

  “Strrrzzkral,” he said, and “khalkhh.” I moved forward like I was sleepwalking as he intoned, “Thoc. Thoc, thoc! Bound you are by ekdahi. Thoc! Welcome, Dragon Groom.”

  And now I was standing in front of him, looking up into his long, bony face, with its high cheekbones and what might have been the scar from a harelip under his nose. The pupils in his big eye sockets weren’t round—more like vertical ovals.

  “Khhif,” I heard myself say and cleared my throat. I tried again, and my voice, though unsteady, seemed to be working this time. “Thanks.�
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  To my left, the door of room 1412 was slightly ajar, and now it swung open to reveal Consul Krasik-dahé. I was impressed I could remember her name now. Her outfit today was a silky dress in shades of blood and earth, the matching jacket again equipped with mega-shoulders. She was padding around in her stocking feet.

  “Come in, Crispin,” she said, not sounding the least bit surprised I had shown up. Something about her voice was…wrong.

  In no uncertain terms, I told her, “Wekhtrrz.” Now something was wrong with how I was speaking. “Why did I say that?” I asked uneasily as I entered the room. It was actually a full suite, with decor that was trying too hard. We were in the living room, and through the door to our left was a bedroom.

  “Linguists call it code switching,” she answered unhelpfully and invited me to sit. The door clicked closed behind me.

  “I don’t know if I can stay long,” I said, noticing the tall guy was standing between me and the door.

  The Consul smiled, the first time I’d seen her do that. “Well, you’re here now. Tiqokh, you’re making Crispin nervous. Tiqokh is a quadrana, another of the mixed beings. He has more dragon in him than I, and is therefore less attuned to human social conventions. We’ll all sit down and have a pleasant talk in a minute, but I’m just in the middle of a conference call, if you’ll excuse me.”

  She disappeared into the bedroom, closing the door behind her. I sat on the couch. The quadrana, Tiqokh, had removed his hat and coat. He folded himself into the desk chair opposite me and stared, unmoving. I could see why he needed to cover his body when he was out of the room. Bony protuberances tented his shirt and pants at the elbows, knees, and shoulders, and two lines of bumps ran across the top of his hairless head. The skin stretched over this frame was grey and cracked, almost like scales. Unlike the Consul, he couldn’t pass for human.

  I tried the small talk thing. “So, you’re, um, one-quarter dragon?”

  “I am,” he answered. Did he ever blink? I didn’t want to stare back long enough to find out. Something about him seemed always on alert, poised to pounce.

  “Uh, do you live around here?”

  “I have spent seven of your years here on Earth,” he replied. “I manipulate the strands. I facilitate the crossing.”

  “Good to know,” I said. “Tiqokh. Your name sounds…familiar.” My brain was reaching for something, like when you’re writing a history quiz, and the name of the guy who defeated Napoleon is just on the tip of…

  Sitting up straighter, I asked, “Does it mean, like, ‘crimson,’ or ‘tower’?” How did I know that? Other than twenty-five words in Tagalog and enough forgotten French to earn me a B minus on last year’s finals, I didn’t speak any languages other than English.

  Consul Krasik-dahé had slid back into the room, silent as a breeze. “Yes, both meanings are correct. Together, they can be understood as bonfire or a signal light.”

  I stared at her. “In what language?” I asked, but you know what? I already had a guess and I didn’t like it.

  “In the Tongue of Fire, the language of our Dragon Lords.”

  The surreal, heart-slipping feeling I’d had at my house yesterday was back. “But I don’t speak the Tongue of Fire,” I said. Helpfully.

  “You are speaking it now. Can I get you some tea?” She disappeared back into the bedroom.

  “Rakhdin,” said Tiqokh, and I realized I was hearing both that strange word and simultaneously, heritage. “The copper in your blood allows you to speak the ancient tongue.”

  It felt like some alien embryo had started moving in my chest. Who was I? What was hiding inside me that I could make rocks glow, speak languages from another world, impregnate lady dragons? Whatever it was, I suddenly didn’t want it.

  I jumped to my feet. “Coming here was a mistake,” I said, in English probably, though I had no proof of that.

  “Not a mistake,” Tiqokh said. “You came here because of the copper. I smelled it as soon as you entered the building. You came because of your duty.” The equivalent word in the Tongue of Fire—ekdahi—rolled on my tongue like a bitter lozenge. Then the quadrana leaned forward stiffly, seeming to pivot only at the hips and the neck. His upper lip pulled back, and he began sniffing. “Or are you here for more earthly reasons?”

  He stood and crossed to me, sniffing, sniffing, bringing his face close to my chest, my armpits, my crotch. I pulled back against the cushions, frozen in terror. I could smell him, too—stone, smoke, something earthy.

  “Yes,” he was murmuring. “I sense pain, rejection. You come here stinking of misery. Someone has hurt you.” He pulled back and stared at me with eyes that looked more lizard-like now that I knew what he was. “Ekdahi is more important than your human concerns. The Realm of Fire has need of you! What more reason do you need to respond?”

  I jumped up and escaped sideways over the arm of the couch, knocking down a lamp on the side table. I ran for the door, waiting to feel a clawed hand raking across my back. The door was locked, and I spun back in panic just as Consul Krasik-dahé—which I now understood meant “honourable flying frog”—entered, carrying a tray with my tea in a fine china cup, little roses on the side, matching milk and sugar.

  “Please sit and have your tea, Crispin,” the Consul said. “I understand how unusual this must all seem.” And damned if I didn’t obey.

  Back on the couch, I tried to keep my cool, to think my way through this madness. “Why now?” I asked. “Why didn’t you come to find me next year, or the year after? Or when I was twenty-five, like my mom thought?”

  “There has been a prophecy,” said Tiqokh, as undramatically as you might say, “I got an offer code in my email.”

  But my imagination grabbed hold of this word. “Prophecy? You mean, like the coming of…the One?”

  Krasik-dahé shook her head. “No, not like that.”

  But I wasn’t giving up so easily. “Am I…I don’t know, the lost heir to the ancient throne? Gondor, or…or Narnia!”

  “Crispin…”

  “Am I the boy who didn’t die? Is that why you chose me?”

  “If you had died,” Tiqokh said, “you would obviously not have been chosen.” Deflated, I glared at him. He was like some dead-eyed school guidance counsellor, who wouldn’t even laugh at a knock-knock joke.

  Krasik-dahé said, “A dragon will die. One of the five. We don’t know which, and we pray it is not the Queen, but this tragedy has been recently foretold.”

  The gravity of her words hit me, maybe because I was now talking in Dragon. “I’m sorry,” I said.

  The quadrana touched his forehead and his heart. “The Realm of Fire cannot exist without its celestial lords. The Five must be maintained. That is why you are needed, Dragon Groom.”

  “Okay, could you maybe not call me that?” I slurped my tea to buy some time to think, although frankly I had been trying not to think about the details. Did a dragon look like I thought it did? Four-legged, big as a bus? Because I couldn’t quite picture the…uh, act. My mind flashed images of a giant squatting lizard with its tail raised while I climbed up a step-ladder with my shorts around my ankles. I shuddered.

  I decided to focus on some simpler questions. “If I do choose to go with you to this realm place, how do we get there? Where’s the magic chariot or the portal, or how does it work?”

  Consul Krasik-dahé stood. “Come, we will show you.” At the door of the suite, she pulled on a pair of chunky brown pumps, and I followed her into the corridor, Tiqokh bringing up the rear, again in his trench coat and fedora disguise. We took the elevator up to the seventeenth floor, then opened the fire exit and climbed up one more flight to the flat gravel roof. Tiqokh propped the door open with a lava rock pulled from his deep coat pocket.

  “Are we allowed out here?” I took a circuit around the roof, checking out the views of the city. The dragony folks didn’t seem interested in the question. The clouds had parted, and the pale November sun was offering at least the idea of warmth. Lo
oking east, I could see the Don River and the bridges that crossed it. To the west was the Eaton Centre’s glass roof. In the south, the lake was a brooding slab of slate patterned with triangular white caps. My circuit of the roof ended on the north side, where I looked down on some guy in the park peeing against a dumpster. So much for sightseeing.

  I wandered back to Consul Krasik-dahé and Tiqokh, who were closed into a tight huddle in the middle of the roof. Tiqokh had removed not only his trench coat but his shirt, revealing a gaunt torso that seemed to have too many ribs and vertebrae. As I approached, I could hear a familiar humming coming from another lava rock in Tiqokh’s hands. It glowed like the Consul’s disco rocks had. The quadrana was chanting softly, almost a cooing sound. Come on, pretty little rock, do your thing. That’s a really rough translation. Not taking their eyes off the rock, they shifted apart, offering me a place in the circle.

  “Ready yourselves,” said Tiqokh, and Krasik-dahé took a step back. I was so intent on the glow and the unearthly hum, it took a moment for me to realize the world around us had grown dark. Looking up, expecting to see a storm cloud overhead, I was greeted with a sight that made me cry out and stagger backward. I would have fallen on my ass if the Consul hadn’t grabbed my arm.

  “Behold,” she said. It was the kind of bogus, overblown word a magician uses to impress you because he’s made some smelly pigeon pop out of a shoebox, but she had every right to use it. Though the rooftop of the Ambassador Hotel hadn’t changed, I couldn’t see any city beyond its limits. Instead, we were surrounded and surmounted by a new sky of blue-black, shot through with fractures of crimson and yellow. And hanging in this primal expanse were three planets—massive and way too close.

  Chapter 5: Out

  Every few seconds, great world-rending thunder reverberated through the terrifying new sky. It was like ice sheets shifting, or a giant cracking its neck. A harsh, hot wind that tasted like chalk and ozone blew around us. I wasn’t cold anymore, but I was shaking.