Dragon Lessons

by Eve Paludan

  We were almost late, so I quickly set up the freestanding heavy bags for the kickboxing class and got my Everlast gloves on—the MMA style with the open fingers, which I loved. As I kicked off my shoes, Jacky and I reviewed what I was gonna do with the kids. Jacky was the main teacher, but he was unable to demonstrate the moves because of his old age and reduced flexibility. That was where I would come in with my high kicks and spins. I had butterflies in my stomach because I was going to be on display.

  “Are you excited to coach kiddie kickboxing?” Jacky asked as he got out the new pairs of the junior mitts for the kids.

  “I’m fired up. Ready to go.” I raised my hands in the stance and gave a combination strike-kick to one of the heavy bags.

  “What’s the most important thing you will have to keep reminding the kids?”

  “Keep their hands up,” I said.

  “Right. You got this, Anthony.”

  “Thanks.” I was getting some water bottles lined up when a small group of kids and adults came in the door. I grinned because I could see how Jacky’s bulldog face softened at their wide eyes and hopeful expressions. Their foster parents took seats on the bleachers.

  After he did a head count of the little people, Jacky nodded at me. “It looks like they’re all here. We’re on.”

  I clapped my gloved hands together. “Let’s do this.”

  Jacky took charge. “Welcome to beginning kickboxing! I’m Jacky, your senior instructor, and this is Anthony, your coach, and we’re both happy to meet you.”

  I nodded to the little kids and then, I said what we had practiced. “Today, Jacky, a former pro boxer, is going to talk about the basic moves and also striking and kicking combinations. And I’m going to demonstrate them to you.” I looked at Jacky, so he could explain the next part.

  He said, “And then, everyone will get a chance to try out the moves on the heavy bags. We’ll be running practice drills for the first hour, and then we’ll take a short water and bathroom break. Then, in the second hour, we’ll do sparring—Anthony will be the one behind the pad. Ready, Anthony?”

  “Bring it!” I said to the kids and clapped my gloves together again. A couple of them laughed in a way that let me know we had a couple of bullies in here and which ones they were. They were mostly scrawny, but with some hard mileage in their eyes for such little kids. It was always the wiry, skinny kids you had to watch out for, not because they had a physical advantage, but because they had a scrapper mindset.

  Jacky had them introduce themselves and I tried like heck to memorize their names because Jacky told me that when you talk to kids, you had to use their names, so they paid attention better, and also to let them know that you valued them. These were poor street-smart kids, for the most part, getting shuffled around in the foster care system because of their shithead parents. Or their dead parents.

  I knew I was luckier than anyone else in this room to have my mom, who was now sitting in the visitors’ bleachers to watch us. Her shirt was wet from rinsing it out, but still faintly bloodstained.

  I wondered if she ever licked off the blood that got on her from fighting bad people. I knew she craved blood, being a vampire, even though she had that alchemy ring that let her eat regular food.

  Mom had this thing inside of her called an entity that was always trying to get her to drink people’s blood. Before mom had the alchemy ring, to stay alive—or undead, I mean—she drank packets of disgusting pig’s blood that she bought from a slaughterhouse and had delivered. She used to keep it in a locked fridge in the garage, but even when we were little, Tammy and I understood what she kept out there was her only way to stay alive. Well, technically, she’s not alive, but she is here and that is what counts. Being there for your kids.

  My mom raised her eyebrows and gave me a look that meant she could see my mind was drifting and I wasn’t paying attention—how did she know these things?—so I straightened up and got into the routine that Jacky and I had practiced, where he would talk about a kickboxing move and I would show it to the kids. I tried not to be self-conscious that my mom was watching this whole thing, along with the foster parents who’d brought the kids and now filled the bleachers.

  I looked at their hardened, distrustful little kid faces and knew it would take a lot to get them to warm up to Jacky and me. But I sure didn’t want these kids to end up as carjackers like the ones who’d attacked us tonight at the intersection.

  I suddenly heard my dad pipe up in my head. Yeah, the spirit of my dead dad was inside of me and sometimes, he said stuff.

  Dad told me in my head: “Anthony, please be the role model I never was.”

  Chapter 12

  TAMMY MOON

  Nick and I stepped out of the elevator on the third floor of the Cal State Fullerton Library.

  He looked confused. “The main part of the library seems to be downstairs. Are we even supposed to be up here?”

  I laughed. “Of course not.”

  “I just hope we don’t get caught.”

  I rolled my eyes. “It’s not like we’re here tagging or something. We’re researching a school assignment. The worst they could do is ask us to leave.”

  “I hope you’re right.” He paused. “What are we looking for?”

  “The door to the occult book room.”

  “The ‘what’ room?”

  “You heard me. Where they keep the magic books,” I said.

  “Please say they are books about magic and are not actually magic themselves.”

  “If it makes you feel any better, we’ll go with that.” I gave him the side eye. “You believe in magic?”

  “I believe that it exists, but a person should be careful not to get too involved in the occult.” He paused. “I mean, it’s not evil, but it can be dangerous.”

  Our eyes met. “You say that like you’ve had a personal experience with it.”

  “I just know there’s a lot of weird stuff that happens in the world, but it goes unexplained how it happened.”

  “Like what?”

  He said, “I have the occasional déjà vu.”

  “As in, you’ve been to a place before, but you know you haven’t?” I offered.

  “Exactly!”

  “That’s not necessarily magic, Nick,” I said.

  “Tell that to the time travelers of the world,” he said.

  I laughed. “I haven’t crossed paths with any that I know of.”

  “Tammy, I’m talking about you.”

  “Me?” I squeaked. “I’m not a time traveler! Where would you get that idea about me?”

  “The point is, you wouldn’t know you were a time traveler,” he said with confidence. “That’s what makes time travelers so convincing. They might be unaware of it themselves, until a déjà vu experience and then, bam!”

  I looked hard at him. “You said, ‘déjà vu’ a couple of times. So, do you think you met me before you really met me in the school nurse’s office that time?”

  He nodded. “I feel really comfortable with you, like we’ve known each other before.”

  “Like in another life?”

  “Uh-huh, but not in the U.S.”

  “Where?”

  “In a dream.”

  “Oh, no. Please tell me you didn’t have a creepy boy dream about me?”

  He blushed. “It’s not like that at all.”

  “Like what, then?” I pressed him.

  He huffed out a breath. “That day when we met in the nurse’s office and were both joking around with ice packs on us, I went home that night and had a dream about you. A dream where you were dressed in these, um, medieval clothes and we were in this hut with a big fireplace and the biggest dried herb collection in the village. But you were older than you are now.”

  “How strange. What do I look like, old, I mean?”

  “Pretty, but like you’d had a hard life. We were both dirty.”

  “I’m a fan of bathing, and I don’t think I would like medieval times.”

&nb
sp; “I gathered as much, but you were always on the run from people who wanted to call you out as a witch.”

  “Sounds scary. What was I doing in the dream?” I asked.

  “Stirring a cauldron.”

  The hairs rose on the back of my neck. “Go on.”

  “Don’t get mad, but you were making a spell with some smelly stuff.”

  “You smelled stuff in your dream?”

  He nodded. “It seemed real. I swear.”

  “I believe you.”

  “Why do you believe me?”

  I admitted, “I’ve recently had reason to believe that dreams are just another reality.”

  “If that’s true, in that reality, I was your apprentice. Your sorceress’ apprentice and resident herb gatherer.”

  “For real?” I asked. “You lived with me?”

  “Yeah. I snuggled up to the hearth like some kind of reverse Cinderella.”

  “That sucks. I’d hope I was nicer to you than that.”

  “That’s all you had to offer me. The hearth. It was a place of honor because it was warm.”

  “Oh. Where did I sleep?” I asked.

  “In a tower with a window so you could take moon baths.”

  “This gets weirder and weirder. What kind of spell was in the cauldron?” I asked.

  “You were trying to make a protective charm to ward off evil.”

  “So, I wasn’t evil myself?” I asked.

  “Heck, no, you were a good witch and the village was full of… well—evil torch mobs—and you were always trying to fix things in this primitive society where no one understood you.”

  “Sounds like me.” I paused. “Just to be clear, I am not a witch in this world, or if I am, I don’t know it.”

  “And I am not a time traveler.”

  “I see.” I kept walking, and he kept following me. “What time and place did you come from?”

  “The future. Here. And I think you came from even further in the past, looking for a place where you wouldn’t be chased down for your love of magic and the practice of it.”

  “Oh, weird.”

  “I know, right?” he said.

  “Did I make you sleep in the fireplace? In the dream, I mean?”

  “No, I did it in case… in case that sleeping… in your room… would somehow diminish your magic.”

  “Uh-huh, so I was a virgin witch and you were respecting that.” I tried not to smile at his gallantry.

  “A virgin? I assume so. We didn’t talk about it.”

  “Sounds like you were the Lancelot to my Guinevere.”

  “What do you mean by that?” he asked.

  “Nothing. What did we speak of in the dream?”

  “How to make evil find its death.”

  “That is one interesting dream, Nick, one which deserves more discussion and analysis, but we better find the occult book room and get back on track for our research assignment.”

  He shook his head. “I didn’t know this library had an occult book room.”

  “It’s a big secret from the public that it exists. And the door is hard to find.”

  “How do you even know about it then?” Nick followed me closely.

  “I read my mom’s mind and plucked out a whole bunch of useful stuff that she doesn’t even know I know.”

  “I really wish I could read minds,” he said.

  “No, you don’t,” I said. “I mean, I love doing it, but it’s both a blessing and a curse to know what everyone is thinking.”

  “Can you turn it off if you want to?” Nick asked.

  “I think so, but I don’t have a whole lot of self-control because I am so curious by nature.”

  “Don’t you mean, you’re nosy?” he quipped.

  I replied, “Okay, nosy, curious, whatever you want to call it. Because even when I sleep, my mind drifts out to the people in the house and the neighbors. They don’t even have to be awake themselves. I can even see what they’re thinking in their sleep. Or when they’re awake.”

  “Like that most famous voyeur of all, Santa Claus,” Nick quipped.

  I laughed. “Very funny. Santa has never seen the inside of people’s heads like I have.”

  “Besides, he isn’t real. And we are.”

  “That’s right.”

  “Does it ever get creepy when you’re reading people’s minds?” he asked.

  “Very creepy. But very fascinating, too.” As we walked, I thought of how I had met a dragon in a dream and awakened with his actual dragon’s quill in my hand—a quill that was now in the backpack I carried, but I didn’t tell Nick that. I didn’t understand it myself, how an object from a dream could show up in real life.

  “Do you ever get traumatized by reading people’s thoughts?”

  “I guess so, Nick, but I’m learning to embrace the horror of mind reading, take the good with the bad and try to filter everything in a detached way so I can deal with it all.”

  “Detached?”

  “Yeah, if it isn’t someone in my family, or a friend, and they are in trouble, and there is nothing I can do about it, I try to just let go of their thoughts and move on to someone else’s mind to read. I guess I’m bored when people aren’t having these juicy, forbidden thoughts.”

  “Juicy? Ha! What am I thinking right now?” Nick asked.

  “That you hope you don’t get a parking ticket tonight.”

  Nick’s eyes widened in shock. “Damn, you know everything I think, don’t you?”

  “Not really. I try not to pry because you’re a friend and I respect your privacy more than your average person on the street.”

  “Good thing, or you could mentally crush me, right?” Nick asked, a catch in his voice.

  I nodded. “I suppose I could mentally take someone down if I tried, but the worst thing I have ever done, as far as mind control, is, about a month ago, I made my mom’s boyfriend fall asleep while he was supposed to be watching Anthony and me.”

  “So, that’s not witchcraft?” Nick said.

  “No, it’s mind over matter. More like science than hocus pocus.”

  “You’re sure about that?”

  I shrugged. “I guess so. The more I learn, the less I know.”

  “Ain’t that the truth. Hey, aren’t you kind of old to have a babysitter?” he asked.

  “We only have Kingsley guard us sometimes when we’re in imminent danger.”

  “Is he a bodyguard or something?”

  “We’ll go with an ‘or something.’”

  “You’re a very spooky girl, Tammy Moon. In or out of dreams.”

  I laughed hard. “Don’t pretend you don’t like it, Nick North.”

  He laughed back. “I admit I do, but what kind of danger are you in?” Nick asked as we moved through the hallways and I looked harder for the secret unmarked door.

  “What kind of danger? I really don’t want to say.”

  “Come on now. How about a little transparency between friends?” he cajoled me.

  “Fine, but you probably won’t even believe me. And it sounds pretty crazy, but I swear this is the truth: The devil is trying to get his hands on me because I can read minds and he wants to use me to take over the world.”

  He sort of gulped and his blue eyes got even bigger, like they were going to pop out. “The devil is real?”

  “Of course, he’s real. Look at all the crap happening in the world. Like mass shooters unexpectedly killing co-workers or fellow students, or random people at concerts or the movies. But then their friends and families say of the shooter, ‘He was such a nice guy. We never expected it.’ That kind of stuff happens when evil is let in and allowed to grow so powerful that the devil has complete control of someone. And then they go off and do these crazy, horrible shocking crimes. And no one can wrap their mind around it. Except the people who believe that the dude was taken over by the evilest creature of all.”

  Nick cleared his throat nervously. “Have you ever seen him?”

  “Who?” I asked.<
br />
  “You know who.”

  I lifted my chin a bit. “I’ve seen people he’s possessed.” He’s tried to do it to me. “One of them was an ordinary guy until the devil made him jump in front of a train. In front of me.”

  “I saw a news report on that. That’s some sick stuff you’ve witnessed.”

  “Yeah, it was gruesome, but I couldn’t look away. It made me feel awful when I saw it. I’ll never forget it.” Suddenly, I spied the secret door and it looked just like it had in my mom’s mind. “There it is!”

  “There what is?” he asked.

  “The door I’m looking for.”

  “I don’t see anything but a long, blank wall.”

  “You probably wouldn’t,” I said. “Maybe only people with special abilities can see it.” I grabbed Nick’s hand and jerked him through the secret doorway with me.

  “Wow!” he said when we were on the other side of the wall. “I didn’t see that one coming.”

  “Can you see the door now?”

  “Hell, no.”

  “Then we better stay together.” I let go of his hand, so he wouldn’t think it was a romantic gesture. “Stay right with me. Let’s go to the help desk and see if Archibald Maximus is here.”

  “Who’s that?”

  “The Alchemist Librarian. He’s one of my mom’s friends and sort of her mentor. The man-behind-the-curtain kind of guy.”

  “Sounds mysterious. What does he do here?”

  “He’s the keeper of all the occult books,” I said, waving my arm at the stacks filled with weird-looking old books. “And he also knows a lot of supernatural stuff and practices alchemy in a back room, a private lab of some sort.”

  “It smells weird in here, like old books, but perfume-y, too, like incense with an underlying smell of sulfur.”

  “Or a perm,” I added.

  “It’s sort of disturbing, like a church has been on fire in here.”

  I nodded, realizing what he was smelling because I smelled it, too. “Now I recognize the smell. That’s the smell of evil, Nick.”

  He shuddered. “Tammy Moon, just what are you getting me into?”