'Til Dragons Do Us Part (Never Deal with Dragons)

by Lorenda Christensen

  And human knees. There was never any rhyme or reason to the parts of my body that changed first, and I cursed the fact that this time my right thigh had been affected. As my massive dragon-sized muscles tried to gain support from my much weaker human bones and joints, I’d been forced to sink the rest of the way to the ground until the weight of my upper body was more in proportion with the legs that had to carry it.

  So there I was, lame and weaponless without my claws. And probably flightless as well. Though my wings were still on my body, they were still weak from my tussle with Oyen’s guard, and I wasn’t sure I’d be able to get off the ground without a good heave-ho from the vicinity of my thighs. One of which was useless due to the whole knee thing.

  The man hadn’t made any attempt to come closer, and I, unwilling to take another swing at the guy for having done nothing more than startle me, hopped awkwardly backwards to get a better view. Dark eyes, dark hair and a face I’d seen in newspapers for months. Recognition hit me like a sledgehammer to the chest.

  “Trian Chobardan.”

  He nodded, but didn’t step forward to shake my hand. Instead he simply smiled, his eyes full of a gleeful humor as he spoke to me in perfect dragonspeak. “I hope you believe me when I say that I am truly delighted to meet you.”

  “I ah...” I didn’t know what to say, and the words came out in a dragonish rumble. I’d never run into a dragon morph celebrity in the middle of a deserted field before. Speaking of which...

  “What are you doing here?” The question came out ruder than I’d intended, but I was totally freaked out. I was only a half-inch away from reconsidering that attack. I must have made some sort of movement in his direction, or Trian just happened to be the observant sort, because he slowly raised his hands, leaving them stretched out in front of him in a placating gesture.

  “Calm down. It wasn’t my intention to startle you.”

  Had Relobu discovered our plan and sent his assassin to take care of me? My mind was spinning with possibilities, each one a little crazier than the last. But I couldn’t help but find it odd that I’d managed to stumble across the man who was whispered to be Relobu’s number one enforcer, on top of his other duties.

  “Where are Simon and Jeanie? So help me, if you’ve harmed a single hair on little Emma’s head, I’ll kill you.” The burn in my fingers was back, signaling that this time if I took a swipe at Trian’s head, it would be a dragon claw splitting his skin open and not a harmless human fingernail.

  His soothing expression gone, Trian never took his eyes from mine as he smoothly transformed one of his own arms into a scaled weapon.

  “I asked you to calm down. I don’t know these people you’re talking about, but I can guarantee that I’ve done nothing to harm them. So why don’t you tell me why you’re out here on DRACIM land?”

  “DRACIM?” The unexpected pronouncement had me looking around, as if the empty pasture would suddenly sprout a sign announcing DRACIM’s ownership. “This belongs to Dragon Relations?” I’d seen the DRACIM offices as I flew over, their ranch-style buildings eerily similar to old world military camps, each structure separated from the next by a neatly manicured lawn. I’d identified one of the larger buildings as their feeding pens, based off the intermittent sounds—not to mention the smells—of cattle and pigs emanating from the darkened interior.

  But I’d deliberately avoided their property, unwilling to draw attention to myself. And now it appeared I’d done exactly the opposite.

  In answer to my question, Trian nodded. “It’s their grazing land. This section is mostly used as an overflow area when they order large amounts of stock and the main pasture can’t support everyone.”

  Well that would explain the lack of cattle. Still not completely convinced this wasn’t some elaborate scheme to see me in chains at a Lord Relobu-led execution party, I lowered my front claws, but kept my wings up and ready to get me out of there at a moment’s notice.

  Trian caught the movement, and morphed his own claws back into a set of perfectly normal human hands at a speed that was almost too fast for me to follow.

  We stood there for several seconds, each of us silently sizing up the other, until Trian shook his head and grinned. “Well this is awkward. I honestly didn’t mean to scare you. I’m just getting back into town, and my fiancée asked if I wouldn’t mind checking the fence on my way through. DRACIM has offered to stable most of the livestock until just before our wedding, when they’ll be moved to Relobu’s. She wanted to make sure the land was ready before she had them delivered. I noticed you here, and was just about to be on my way when I saw you start to morph. It surprised me.”

  I’ll bet it did. Considering I’d lived a good ten years not realizing there were others like me, I was comfortable saying that dragon morphs were incredibly rare. Add that to the fact that I’d inadvertently picked DRACIM land to rest on, and I could see how that might draw his attention. The last of my suspicion drained away. I nodded toward his hand. “How did you do that?” He’d shifted faster than I’d dreamed was possible, and managed at the same time to contain the transformation to only his arm. And better still, he hadn’t seemed to be in any pain whatsoever.

  He lifted his hand, once again morphing his human fingers into a scaled arm that looked almost cartoonish in size compared to the rest of his body. His claws were as black as his scales—deadly sharp and perfectly formed. No embarrassing reveal of a stray knee or buttocks in sight. It was, in short, amazing.

  To have that kind of control would be life changing. There had been so many times on a job that I’d needed desperately to access my human side for the relative dexterity of a five-fingered hand, while at the same time keeping the wings that held me in the air. Or to have the ability to shrink my body small enough to fit in tight spaces, but keep the claws that could cut through glass. And to be able to achieve the transformation in seconds instead of minutes? The possibilities were endless.

  “It took me a long time to figure it out,” he admitted. His scales crawled up his arm another couple of inches, until the sleeve of the cotton shirt started to strain. Then, as if it were no more difficult than slipping something into the back pocket of a pair of jeans, Trian forced his scales to soften and wiggle like jelly until they melted into the form of a tattooed dragon on tanned skin.

  “One of my trainers—a dragon—suggested that I try concentrating on a single body part as I morphed. I’d laughed, thinking that I’d tried that approach before with no success.”

  I huffed out a snort, knowing exactly what he meant. Once or twice, Simon and I had considered the same approach. But I’d close my eyes, focus hard on the claw where my big toe should be, and the burning would start up along my back, nowhere near the foot I’d “willed” to change first. “It just seems to make my toe or finger fall asleep and fire sprout up somewhere else.”

  Trian nodded. “That’s what I told him. But he cuffed me on the side of the head and told me to think about a dragon’s physiology. Our claws, our scales, everything on the outside of a dragon is basically dead flesh. Similar to hair and fingernails, unless you get up near the root, it’s all lifeless keratin. He suggested that instead of focusing on an extremity that had no life in it, that perhaps I should attempt to ‘rebuild’ myself from the inside out. Focus on the blood and muscle, and see where that took me. It worked.”

  It sounded completely crazy, and I was just about to say so. Until I thought back to those tests with Simon and realized that when I’d tried to focus on a single body part, I’d never once focused on the inside of that body part. I was suddenly curious to see whether, like those old brain-teasers, the trick was simply emptying my mind of preconceived notions, and viewing something from a different angle.

  I looked at him, and he moved back. Far out of striking distance, just in case something went wrong. “Go ahead. Try it.”

  I had an idea. Trian’s appearance and my earlier freak-out had ensured that my knees were once again the proper size and shape of n
ormal dragon haunches, so I cautiously approached the small ribbon of running water in the creek-bed.

  Giving Trian one more measuring look, I closed my eyes and did what he had described. I focused on my foot, but instead of just imagining it as a series of toes covered in human skin, I drew from my rather limited memory of my ninth-grade anatomy class and pictured the phalanges, along with the muscles and tendons that held them together. I felt a small tingle where the arch of my foot would have been if I were in human form and stole a peek from behind lowered eyelids. Human toes—still covered in the yuck that I’d stepped in—protruded from the end of my foot while the heel sported the barbed toe of my dragon form.

  I lifted my leg for a better look, wiggling my toes to convince myself what I was seeing was real.

  “Super creepy. But very very cool.” I inspected the rest of my body, as much as I was able to without a mirror. Nothing seemed to be out of place, the familiar dark scales of my body glinting slightly under the light of the moon.

  I looked up to find Trian standing on the other side of the water, now in his full dragon form. “Can I ask your name?” The words came from his throat in a growling rumble of dragonspeak.

  I opened my mouth to respond, then paused. While I still held hopes that I could smuggle the Tofegaard from Relobu’s without resorting to morphing, there were no guarantees in this business. And a guy like Trian, no matter how rare his abilities, wouldn’t have been named Relobu’s second in command if he wasn’t up to the job. I had no doubt that if word got out that a dragon found its way into Relobu’s and back out with a priceless painting in tow without anyone noticing, Trian would immediately suspect me of the theft. No, I couldn’t risk sharing my real name.

  “It’s fine. I totally understand,” he said before I’d had a chance to come up with a name that didn’t sound blatantly fake. “In the years before the world found out what I could do, I was just another human dragonspeaker, one of the many that dance around Relobu’s mansion on any given day, ready to jump in with their translation skills should Relobu meet with humans. But I can say without a doubt that my job description changed drastically the minute word got out that I was a dragon morph.”

  “How so?” Based on the chatter I’d heard from Relobu’s staff, Trian was still an integral part of the dragon lord’s operations, and most talked as if Relobu thought of Trian as his own son. According to Simon, Trian had been Relobu’s chief of security long before the news hit that he was a dragon morph. And as Cameron had referred to Trian as his boss, I had no reason to believe the dragon before me had been removed from his position.

  It didn’t seem like his duties had changed at all.

  “Before China? My primary job was behind the scenes work. Before, it was much easier for me to slip in and out of crowds, with no one the wiser on who I was, or what I knew. Now, with my faces splashed all over the newspapers, I find I can no longer pass as just another human grunt. It’s made undercover operations an impossibility, and me completely worthless as a bodyguard.” He gave me a wry smile. “In fact, Relobu’s new manager just assigned me a bodyguard of my very own. Now that the world knows there are people like you and me, they’re a lot more careful about where and when they share information.”

  “Now you’re the celebrity.” It was the kiss of death in my line of work. If you couldn’t blend, you couldn’t borrow. Or steal.

  Trian nodded. “It took everything I’d learned—the camouflage, the shadows, the ability to become the person I needed to be to gain someone’s trust—and tossed it all out the window. I went from being a master spy to a flaming beacon of curiosity. Overnight. It was enough to give me whiplash. I’m still feeling my way through the new landscape, but going public will definitely change your life. There are a lot of good reasons to keep your secret hidden, and I respect that.”

  I shifted uncomfortably. I wasn’t sure Trian would consider art theft one of those good reasons.

  He flashed his razor-sharp teeth in a smile. “For me, I had one very good reason to open my life up to public scrutiny. And that reason is currently waiting for me at home. But I want you to know that you’re the first dragon morph I’ve met since Hian Puo, and I’d be interested in chatting with you if you ever have the time. You’re not alone out there.”

  He waved one of his wings at the expanse of pasture. “I come here a lot, so odds are you’ll be able to find me if you’re in the neighborhood. And you’re always welcome to ask for me at Relobu’s. Or DRACIM.” He leaned in to mock whisper. “Just between you and me, there’s a super-hot girl who runs the show down there.”

  With one last nod in my direction, Trian jumped and spread his wings, rising into the air until he was only a black spot against the creamy white of the moon.

  I kept my eyes on the sky until he disappeared, then turned with a growly laugh to wash my feet.

  * * *

  In consideration of Myrna and Trian’s hectic schedules, the wedding rehearsal had been scheduled a weekend in advance of the ceremony and, in light of the security concerns, had also been moved from its previously reserved venue to Lord Relobu’s backyard.

  I wondered whether the dragon lord had begun to feel as if he were running a full-time public park with all the people coming and going.

  As I’d discovered that night in the field—and learned again the following morning from Amanda—Trian was back in the country, along with Carol’s boyfriend Daniel.

  A former newspaper reporter for the Tulsa Times Chronicle, Daniel was now happily employed by Lord Relobu, and with Trian’s help, had spent the last few weeks tracking down a group of scientists believed to have helped develop a dragon-killing bio-weapon.

  Whether they’d tracked them down to offer them jobs or scare them into turning their backs on science forever, I had no idea, and I didn’t ask. Either way, the trip seemed to be a success, because spirits were high as the friends got together for food and conversation.

  My spirits, however, were far from functioning at peak capacity. After leaving the DRACIM pastureland, I’d tried Simon on the satellite phone and received no answer. This morning, I’d gone back to their house to find Mr. Ruff as delighted as ever to see me, but no Jeanie or Emma.

  One day they were here, and the next...nothing. As the pup had indeed wreaked havoc on Jeanie’s furniture, I’d had no choice but to fly across town and install him in my kitchen with a childproof gate to keep him off my carpets until I figured out what to do with the poor thing.

  In preparation for tonight’s reception, we were once again toiling in Relobu’s backyard, only this time Amanda was here as well, prancing about in all her drill-sergeant glory to bully us about the placement of chairs, arches and sound system. Apparently my boss didn’t do rehearsals halfway. With Myrna leaving the details in Bridal Visions’ hands, the event was almost as lavish as the ceremony itself was going to be. I’d spent the entire day tying endless bows, stuffing flowers in any space that needed covering, and doing my best to stay out of Amanda’s sight.

  But I had to admit, the place looked great. Done up in the lighter colors from Myrna’s wedding palette, Relobu’s gardens looked gorgeous. The CreaTV photographer must have thought so too, because he was busy snapping pictures of just about everything. I was beginning to develop an ulcer trying to avoid both him and Amanda while still doing my job. He’d decided that his feature story would focus on the preparation involved in such a huge event, and by extension, the employees of Bridal Visions. It had taken at least five polite refusals and one teeth-baring snarl in the negative before he finally stopped trying to take my picture. Luckily, Glenda and April were only too happy to be models for a magazine spread.

  “Are you hiding?”

  I smiled at the sound of Cameron’s voice at my ear and turned to greet him. Dressed in another of his button-up shirts and dress pants, his only concession to the party atmosphere was the lack of tie and a loosening of a button around his neck. He’d had a haircut since I’d seen him last, and I took
a moment to admire the effect. I’d thought that the slightly scruffy look of his longish hair was the perfect look for him, but I’d been wrong.

  I loved how the strong bones of his face managed to draw attention to his startlingly blue eyes. I couldn’t resist the urge to reach up and straighten his collar, not because it needed the help, but because I wanted an excuse to touch him.

  I grinned into his eyes. “It’s you who should be hiding. When Amanda sees you looking like this, she’ll have you tied down and in front of a green screen before anyone can yell stop. If she gets her way, you’ll be the new spokesman of all things Bridal Visions.

  “And I’m telling you, that guy right over there?” I pointed to the CreaTV photographer, who was snapping pictures of April as she gently placed baskets of rolls in the center of the dining tables. “He’s a monster. Won’t take ‘I don’t want my picture taken’ for an answer.”

  Cameron followed my gaze, rubbing a finger absently against his bottom lip. He glanced up to the lookout towers on the roof. “Want me to tell him that dragons sometimes mistake the flash of a camera bulb for a signal of aggression?”

  I turned my head for a view of the guards manning the turrets. There were only two in sight, and neither were particularly awe inspiring. One of the dragons, who went by the name of Plob, had to be a zillion years old. He’d mostly sat on the perch the entire time and watched us set up tables. When he’d finally decided to change his position, his movements had been marked with a pronounced limp.

  The other guard was as wet behind the ears as Plob was dried and withered, and the only thing he’d done of note was babble apologies since the point in the evening where he’d accidentally flown a bit too low and tangled a wing in the decorative tent we’d erected to display tonight’s human food.

  With Trian back on site, the majority of the household guards had been moved out to the fenced perimeter of the estate to help discourage the paparazzi who’d taken to following Myrna and her beau wherever they went. Threats on her safety had continued to roll in, and despite Cameron’s jovial attitude, I could tell by the set of his shoulders and the dark circles under his eyes that he was tired.