by Aiden Bates
The cotton was soft, stretchy, pliable. I stood, buck naked, in a bathroom stall and hesitated before I finally worked up the nerve to step into them and pull them on.
It’s going to sound kind of ridiculous, but… it felt really good in a really odd way to put on a pair of comfortable briefs. Like my ass and my junk were getting the first hug in a long, long time and I kind of just stood there, my eyes closed, indulging in the feeling of it. When I recovered, I tore the tags off the jeans and pulled them on. Boot cut—kind of tight around the hips, but I could afford to lose a bit of weight from not eating regularly and they wouldn’t fall down. The tee-shirt was next, and that sterile scent of clothing that had last been cleaned in the factory. I pulled on one of the two button-ups I’d admitted to myself that I kind of wanted, and rolled the sleeves up, then pulled on fresh socks and slipped my feet into new shoes.
Then I leaned against the wall, and looked down at myself and…
It kind of just grabbed me before I knew what was happening. My eyes burned, all of a sudden, and I couldn’t see through the tears that welled up. I held my breath, trying to keep from letting out a sob that welled up in my throat and tried to strangle me if I didn’t let it out. I pressed my hands to my mouth, and closed my eyes tight. The impulse was so powerful that my shoulders shook with it even though I managed to keep the sound itself locked tight inside.
And then, because I’m fucking broken… the air around me began to pop.
“Fuck,” I gasped as I jerked away from the snap of air near my face. “No. No, no, no, damn it. Just fucking stop, please…”
I sank down against the wall and tried to get myself under control. Magic sizzled along my nerves, stirring like it always did when I slipped up and got emotional. I smelled something burning, and looked down to see a tiny hole in my new shirt. I slapped at the glowing edge, mashing it out to smother the cotton and polymer cinders, but my frustration at having ruined the shirt just made it worse. A spark leapt from my hand and struck the knee of my jeans. Denim smoldered before I was able to slap that out as well.
I got up, wiped my eyes and flinched at another pop of ionized air, then grabbed the bag with my book and the bag with the clothes and hurried out of the bathroom.
Rez was just outside. He reached for me as I rushed past him and back out into the store to make a mad dash for the exit. I heard his footsteps beating the tile to catch up. “Whoa, hey—Daniel, wait, what’s—”
Fire burst to life along my forearm, licking my shirt sleeve and snapping out between me and the sliding door. Metal and glass, thank the gods, but still—a guy in a trucker hat stopped in his tracks on his way in, and stared at me as I ran past him and out into the parking lot.
Rez caught up with me just as I left the sidewalk. He grabbed me, turned me around, and dipped his head to catch my eyes. “Shit. Okay, what do we do? What do you do when this happens?”
“Run,” I sobbed. “I just fucking run. Especially in a parking lot.”
He looked around, his expression falling hard as he realized that we were standing in what was now the equivalent of a minefield. “Oh.”
I pulled away from him, and searched both ends of the lot. One side was more empty than the others, but this place wasn’t remote. It wasn’t a massive city, but across the street there were other stores, and the four-lane highway out front was the only border between this place and a strip mall. There was nowhere I could run fast enough that I wouldn’t risk blowing something important to hell.
I started to move, though. Any place was better than being fifty feet away from a bunch of gas tanks.
Rez gave a quiet curse and grabbed my arm. “Come on. I have an idea.”
I didn’t, so I let him drag me toward the end of the building. Sparks flashed over my hands and arms, and blossomed to life by my head. Some of them struck his skin, but left no burns and he didn’t seem to notice. When we reached the end of the building, he pulled me down the side street that was probably just meant for deliveries, into a significantly less packed parking lot.
Then, he started to take his clothes off. Fast.
When he dropped his pants and underwear—if he was wearing any—I looked away quickly. “What are you—”
“Put your stuff over there,” he said, “by the retaining wall.”
“We’re in the middle—”
“Trust me,” he said firmly, and startled me when he took the bag from the store from my hand and tossed it. He started to take the strap of my messenger bag from my shoulder.
I clamped down on it. “No, I can’t. And it doesn’t burn anyway, just—what the hell are you doing?”
He pulled me away from the wall, his hand firm on my arm, and in a moment his skin changed. Blue scales that were almost black in the night, except for the highlights from the distant street lights, rippled over him, emerging like little metallic shoots from the spring soil. His body swelled, changed. His torso lengthened. He let me go long enough to take several steps back before he stretched out and took on his dragon form. Wings stretched out, gave one shuddering flap before he tucked them close and then held a paw out to me.
I thought he intended to pick me up and carry me somewhere, like before. Instead, when I hesitantly reached out for one of his claws, spraying a shower of sparks and flame onto his paw when I did, he drew me close and then craned his neck and tail around me, encircling me. His wing spread and closed down over me as well, enclosing me in a darkness broken only by the crackling bits of fire around me and the glow of one great red-gold eye that watched me with a hooded eyelid. I turned slowly around in the tight, warm space looking for any peek of light. There was nothing.
I jerked away from a gout of flame as air ignited near my shoulder, and slapped out the fire that caught on my shirt sleeve. My skin was fine—I could have laid down in an inferno and not noticed—but the sleeve was ruined further.
Rez gave a deep chuff. And in the darkness his claw brushed against my leg. I don’t know how I knew, but it felt reassuring.
That was, until it tugged at the fabric. His great eye blinked, and he chuffed again.
Right. I was fireproof, he was fireproof—but my clothes weren’t. “I can’t just… I mean… close your eye or something, at least…”
His next chuff was somehow seemingly more amused. Sharper. But the light dimmed as he closed his eyes.
I scrambled out of my jeans, then my shirt, kicked off my shoes, all the while doing a close-quartered dance as I put out little fires or got startled by a fresh burst of fire. Sparks leapt from my skin, snapping in the air and making me temporarily light blinded. But I managed to get down to my new underwear. I shoved the clothes against his paw, and he carefully extracted them, stuffing them underneath him.
The magic’s buzzing grew more intense, like it would claw its way free of my skin. It made keeping myself calm impossible, and the more I tried, and failed, the more distressed I got. Rez, his eyes still closed, offered me a claw and the attached finger. I took it, just because I needed something solid to hold onto.
It never hurt when it happened. It was like sneezing, kind of—I felt the escalation, the sudden pressure, the inevitability of it, and then the teetering moment where it might or might not happen. And then, in a sudden burst and a rush of overwhelming force, it exploded out of me.
Fire ignited in the air all around me, a bright yellow-orange halo of liquid heat that boiled near my skin for several moments before it burst outward, filling the space. I cringed down, holding my breath to preserve what little oxygen I could as the fire burned through the rest of it in an instant, and if I hadn’t looked up in fear for Rez’s safety at that very moment, or to find out if he would pull back and let the world around us ignite, I would have missed it.
It was short-lived, but when the fire filled the dark little cave he’d made around me, it lit his scales up. They glowed from the heat, and the bluish color of them became a bright, vibrant purple. A shimmering dome of opalescent violet light shined around
me. The intensity of it and the uniformity of the glow made it difficult to pick out the lines of his neck, and shoulder, and the texture of his wing. It was like being inside some kind of big-bang display at a museum—raw force and cosmic fire burning and exploding but still contained by the force of a singularity, just on the verge of bursting out to become creation.
Sigils that I’d learned from the book flashed in my mind. Some of the earliest from the book. As if I could almost see that moment.
The fire whirled around me in slow motion. Rez’s eye was still closed, but it wasn’t wrenched shut—if his saurian profile could be called calm, that’s what it was. He didn’t flinch, didn’t shift, didn’t wince in anticipation of the burn. If he even noticed it had happened, I couldn’t tell.
That calm in the face of the inferno eased my nerves. The magic had gotten out, been spent. The fire sputtered and died. I let out my breath and tried to suck in a new one, but the air was too thick. I pawed at Rez’s arm, and managed to wheeze out, “Can’t breathe.”
He shifted, and air that was frigid in comparison rushed in through a gap between his snout and his tail. A glow filled the space. His big eye looked me over, searching. It angled down, and a slitted pupil about as long as my hand was widened, stared, and then disappeared as he closed his eye again.
I reached down to find that, indeed, all that remained of my new briefs was a mostly melted band of elastic. I sighed and snapped it off, then dropped it. “Good thinking,” I muttered. “Um… can you…?”
He moved, his scales scraping at the pavement, and pushed my clothes against my feet. I dipped and collected them, and put them back on—sans briefs this time—and when I was finally dressed, I reached out cautiously and patted what I was pretty sure was his eyebrow. “All set.”
Slowly, Rez unfurled from around me. Great black scorch-marks made an abstract pattern over his side, one foreleg and one hindleg, and his neck and jaw. He gave a sniff, and his form began to shrink and twist. I looked away from him before he became fully human again.
“You all right?” he asked.
I shrugged. “Tired,” I admitted. “It takes a lot out of me. Sorry about that. I didn’t mean to—”
“Don’t apologize,” he said softly. “Look, believe me, I know how it can be. I know another dragon, Tam—his mate is a mage. An esper. He had some really wild problems with his magic, apparently. Like… drag you into a shared dream kind of thing. It happens.”
“Did your friend’s mate get better?” I asked, with more bitterness than was really deserved probably. “Or does it happen every time he gets a little emotional?”
There was a comfortable numbness that came after. One part exhaustion, one part reflex. Once I had the space to shut down, and all the steam had blown off, it was a lot easier to flatline my mood. Better not to feel anything, when you can literally level a town because you got your feelings hurt.
“He’s doing better,” Rez admitted. “Sorry. I know it’s not the same, I just…”
“You just wanted to say something that would make me feel a little less like a freak,” I said coolly, and made the mistake of glancing back at him.
Hot damn.
He zipped up, and bent to pick up a shirt to cover up the ridiculous muscles that churned under his skin like they were all engaged in unseemly business for being out in public.
It was harder to notice that when I was about to explode.
I looked away, and hunted down the bag with the clothes, putting that well out of my mind. Like, way, way out, before I lit something on fire again.
“I know it probably doesn’t really help,” he said softly. “Sorry.”
I sighed, and peeked to see that he was fully dressed before I turned back to him. “That was quick thinking. Thanks. You’re… okay, right?”
He grinned wide, and dusted himself off like there had been some leftover ash. “No sweat. Like I told you—one hundred percent fireproof.”
“Good thing, too,” I muttered. I glanced toward the parking lot at the front of the alley. “We should get back.”
Rez dipped his head, and patted me on the back as he fell in beside me to walk back. “Now that we know it works, next time just give me the heads-up, and we’ll find a spot to let you get it all out.”
“I’ll do my best to let you know,” I muttered. “You probably won’t need me to tell you, though.”
He gave a soft chuckle. “Guess not. So… it happens when you get emotional?”
“Yeah,” I said, not eager to elaborate.
He seemed to accept that, for a few seconds at least. Then he just had to know. “What set you off? Or, I mean—well, you know, what were you emotional about in the bathroom?”
I glanced up at him, chewing in the inside of my cheek, weighing whether I should tell him or not. That all of this was… maybe the only real kindness I had felt since I could remember.
But even the thought of saying anything about that was pretty clearly going to put me at risk for another meltdown.
“Nothing,” I said. “It doesn’t take much. I just… remembered an old pet from when I was a kid. A dog. He died. So.”
Rez grunted sympathetically. “Sorry.”
“It’s fine,” I muttered as we reached the car. “Happened a long time ago. Let’s just get to New Mexico and… try not to blow up the car on the way there.”
He slipped into his side, I got into mine. And then he did a really scary thing.
He cranked the engine, then looked at me for a moment, and reached over to put his hand on my knee and squeeze. “It’s all gonna be okay, Daniel. I’m still not scared of you. Just so you know.”
That was all. He took his hand back, checked behind us and pulled out of the parking space and in a few minutes, we were back on the road like nothing had happened.
But the way my heart lurched, and my stomach fluttered when he touched me like that, when he said that so… earnestly?
That was terrifying.
9
Rez
When Daniel said that he sometimes exploded, I kind of thought he meant it almost figuratively. I had seen the motel, of course, but following his trail hadn’t revealed any blast site. I wanted to ask him more about it, about how it happened and what to expect, but I got the sense that he would literally rather talk about anything else.
Talking about the book, or Ivan and his acolytes, or hell, even his childhood which couldn’t have been great if he was here now all seemed like topics that might make him feel even worse.
But the silence was awful, and I didn’t want him to think that I was lying when I said I wasn’t afraid of him. Because I really wasn’t.
Fire didn’t scare me, of course, and the more I got to know him, the more I became convinced that he really was a victim in all of this. In stories from before the enlightenment, dragons always had a soft spot somewhere on their chest. The kind of place that an intrepid, if somewhat murderous, human could shoot an arrow just so, and take down the great fire-breathing beast of the sky.
Maybe there was a little truth to that. I did have a soft spot, and it seemed that it might be someone like Daniel—someone who’d been shown so little compassion that they recoiled from it when it they finally saw it. I hated to think about what all he’d been through, how it must have worn him down. Though, just the fact that he was still standing was kind of amazing. Without my weyr, without my people, I didn’t know how I’d do.
“This is just a hypothetical,” I said, “but once we get this all figured out—let’s just assume we can get this djinn off your tail, or get rid of it or something—if you could have a safe place to stay, would you want it? I mean, if we could set you up at Emberwood in like… a fireproof place or something?”
Daniel gave me a sideways look that said he felt sorry for me that I needed to fill the quiet with conversation. But after a moment, he at least talked back at me. “Is every dragon there like you?”
I raised an eyebrow. “Generous with our time and resourc
es and inclined to help strangers?”
He winced. “I didn’t mean it to come out like that. But sure, let’s start there. I mean—what do you think they all say when we get there and you’re like, ‘Hey, everyone, this is Daniel, make sure not to startle him, he tends to go off like a hellfire missile and might burn down the school.’ Does Emberwood have a school or like… do all the little dragons go to public school or—how does that work?”
“We’ve got a school,” I said, smiling. “And yes, that’s exactly what I’d tell them. And they’d probably say, ‘Nice to meet you, Daniel, do us a favor and stick to the east side of the weyr, it’s mostly just trees and dirt.’ We’re all fireproof.”
“Yeah,” he said, “but you’ve got houses, right? I mean, I’ve been through a couple of shifter territories, you don’t live in caves and shit. It’s wood and brick like the rest of us.”
“That is true,” I admitted, “but when you’re raising a bunch of young dragons you get used to being vigilant about fire. Tween dragons are the absolute worst, they’re all a bunch of firebugs. And if you thought wet dreams were embarrassing as a teenager, nocturnal emissions of napalm are, trust me, a lot worse.”
He laughed. Just a little bit, and quietly, but there it was. When I glanced at him, he was grinning. “Well, at least it comes from your mouth, right?”
“I didn’t say that,” I said, deadpan serious.
His brow knit tight as he turned to look at me, uncertainty bordering on horror in his face.
Now I laughed, waving a hand. “I’m kidding. Of course, we don’t shoot fire out of our dicks or anything.”
He snorted, and shook his head but kept smiling. “I mean… I guess the idea of finding some place where I can settle down is nice? But even if we do deal with the djinn, Rez—someone, at some point, is going to send something else. The djinn isn’t the first thing I’ve had to run from. It’s just the most recent. If I settle down somewhere, that place becomes a battleground, one way or another.”
