by JJ Jones
It was a brief thought, and the enormity of the situation crashed back over her a moment later as she leaned out the window just enough to watch both dragons try to savage each other.
And one of those dragons was the man she had just slept with less than fifteen minutes ago.
If not for the fact that she was still kneeling on the ground, she would have felt as if she needed to sit down. If nothing else, they disappeared from sight fairly quickly, and she began to
gradually calm down, until it finally occurred to her to perhaps put her clothes back on.
Her hands shook as she dressed carefully, shaking each article of clothing before putting it on to make sure there wasn’t any glass caught in it. Afterwards, once she was dressed and her shoes were back on, she found her way into the kitchen to wash her hands, just to make sure none of the cuts on her palms got infected. It was something to keep her busy for a moment, if nothing else.
She debated leaving after that. Just strolling out the door and calling a car to take her back to the hotel. The night had not gone at all as she’d expected it to, and she wanted to go to sleep and pull the blankets over her head so that, in the morning, she could just pretend none of it had ever happened, and she could enjoy the rest of her trip.
She could have done that, but she did not. She at least wanted to know whether or not Abel
survived his fight. So, she made her way back to the stairs, where there wasn’t particularly much glass, sat down, and got comfortable. She wasn’t sure how long she was going to be sitting there.
At some point, she leaned back until the back of her head came to rest against the edge of
another step, and she was incredibly glad the stairs were carpeted. She didn’t remember
dozing off, and she wasn’t sure how long she slept, but she woke up with a start when she heard a rushing sound and a thump from outside.
She shot to her feet and darted to the door, peering out the tall, narrow window to one side of it. She felt something like relief once she saw that the dragon standing on the sidewalk was Abel, rather than the red one, though she wasn’t actually sure whether or not she should be relieved. For all she knew, Abel would eat her just to make sure she didn’t get a chance to tell anyone about whatever it was she had seen. She got the impression that no one was supposed to know about the dragon detail.
He walked a few paces until he could climb back in the broken window, and Clarissa turned to face him as he did. Once he was standing back inside, he finally turned back into a human—or at least something human-shaped, since she was pretty sure by that point that calling him a human was pretty inaccurate—before he tugged the curtains shut.
He and Clarissa stared at each other for a long moment before Abel cleared his throat and edged past her until he made it to the base of the stairs. Finally, he offered in a rush, “I’m going to go put some clothes on,” before he darted up the stairs as if he were being pursued by the Spanish Inquisition.
(Or by a dragon.)
Clarissa stayed by the door, still not sure whether or not she would need to make a hasty retreat, or even if she wanted to make a hasty retreat. It took only a few minutes before Abel came back down the stairs once more, dressed in jeans and a t-shirt.
They contemplated each other for a long moment until at last he observed, “You probably want me to explain what just happened.”
“It would be a good place to start,” she confirmed, her voice tight and wobbling slightly.
Abel shifted uncomfortably where he stood and dragged a hand through his hair. “All of those creatures they write fairytales about—dragons, unicorns, gryphons, fairies, anything you can think of—aren’t actually…well, fairytales. They exist.” He said it so simply that, for an instant, it almost made sense, until the words themselves caught up.
“What the hell—”
Abel plowed on in a rush, not letting her completely cut him off. “We exist. We just…hide. In plain sight, looking like anyone else, behaving like anyone else, or at least as best as we can. We use our magic to look like humans, and that way we’re safe.” He paused and sighed out a slow breath. “Safe from humans, at least,” he corrected. “Not so much from other magical creatures.”
“Which are all just…wandering around out there, waiting to attack people,” Clarissa stated,
staring at him blankly. “Like that.” She gestured towards the window with a slightly helpless
motion.
“Ah—not…quite,” Abel returned, and he shifted back and forth on his feet for a moment. “On the whole, we’re all pretty content to mind our own business. It’s just—well, most cities with a higher than normal percentage of magical creatures generally have one that’s sort of in charge. Being in charge doesn’t usually amount to much—it’s not like we need to stave off knights or anything like that anymore—but it comes with a certain amount of prestige.” He cleared his throat. “And I’m in charge of Paris. I have been for nearly a decade.”
Clarissa blinked at him slowly, and he hurried to keep talking.
“Like I said, even if nothing is happening, being nominally in charge carries some amount of prestige amongst magical creatures, and for the last few months another dragon has been
attempting to get the title from me.”
Once again, Clarissa blinked at him before she asked slowly, “If nothing really comes of it, why not just let the other dragon be in charge, then?”
For a moment, Abel looked slightly disgusted by the idea, before he shook his head in denial of the idea. “Magical creatures aren’t really any more rational than humans are,” he explained. “If someone is seen as an authority figure says to do something, the ones that argue are going to be in the minority.
And I know my rival—his name is Corvin. Dragons aren’t exactly common; we tend to seek each other out, and my family has known his for years. He’s an uppity git with a head eight sizes too big for his shoulders, and he’ll try to stage some sort of uprising against the humans or wage an attack against Barcelona’s magical creatures for no reason other than the fact that it would make him look good.” He shook his head once again. “I don’t really care about being in charge, but I do care about making sure he isn’t in charge. Nothing good would come of it.”
“So instead, he just periodically smashes into your house and tries to kill you,” Clarissa mused flatly. “That’s so much better, you’re right.”
Abel rubbed the back of his head with one hand, and his expression turned slightly bemused. “Ah, no, not usually. Tonight was…new. I think he figured I might have been distracted?”
Her eyebrows rose slightly as the implication caught up with her, before she deadpanned,
“Wonderful.” She reached up to rub her forehead with one hand before she dragged her hand down her face. With her voice pitched low, she mumbled to herself, “Could tonight get any weirder?”
“Probably,” Abel answered, unbidden. “I have an offer to make.”
Clarissa groaned and hid her face behind her hands for a moment before she straightened up. “What kind of offer?” she asked, her eyes narrowing sharply. “I’m a regular person. I can’t turn into anything, and I’m pretty sure any dragon other than one in an egg could eat me in three bites. I’m not sure what sort of help I’ll be.”
Abel hesitated for a moment, before he began to explain, carefully. “If he’s getting this daring, then it means he has enough other magical creatures in his corner to feel like he won’t need to work hard to gain the city’s trust once he gets rid of me. A friend and I have been looking into things for a while in case something like this happens, but we haven’t figured out a way to get close without being noticed. But you?” His eyebrows rose slightly. “You’re a human. This city is filled with humans. You can get close to specific targets, and they’ll never even realize anything unusual is going on, since you won’t smell like anything they don’t smell all day, everyday, everywhere they go.”
For a very long moment,
Clarissa stared at him, a look of incredulous shock on her face. Finally, after a few moments of staring blankly, she managed, “You want me to spy on magical creatures for you. So, you can…what? Kill them?”
Abel shook his head quickly. “I would rather not. I mean, if I don’t have a choice, then I’ll defend myself, but I just want to talk to them. You’re just going to be getting information to make sure without a doubt that the leads I’ve been following are genuine, so I don’t go accosting magical creatures that aren’t involved.”
Clarissa lapsed into silence after that, mulling it over until Abel added slowly, his voice low, “You don’t have to decide right now. I mean, it’s been a long night, and I don’t doubt you’re in shock over at least a few things.”
Clarissa couldn’t quite help the tiny burst of laughter that bubbled past her lips after that. To say she was shocked was putting things mildly.
She was quiet for only a moment longer after that before she sighed out a slow breath and said, “I’m going to sleep on it. Mull it over a bit. And I’ll get back to you tomorrow.” As an afterthought, though she suspected he already knew it, she added, “I’m going to head back to the
hotel for the night.”
He nodded quickly, and Clarissa didn’t protest when he handed her money for the cab ride. And though it looked like he wanted to protest, he didn’t make a fuss when she decided to wait on the stoop for the cab after she called for one.
The cab arrived soon enough, and the ride back to the hotel seemed to pass by in a flash as Clarissa’s thoughts chased themselves in endless circles for the entire ride. The driver actually had to call for her twice before she realized that the cab was stopped in front of the hotel, and she apologized as she handed him the money and climbed out of the car.
She waved to the receptionist at the desk as she entered the lobby, but she said nothing, and she made her way back to her room in something like a daze.
Once she was safely in her room, with the door closed and latched behind her, she leaned her weight back against it and slowly sank down to the floor. Her head fell back against it with a gentle, quiet thump.
Her mind went blank for a few minutes as she stared up at the ceiling, hardly even seeing it. She wasn’t sure how long she was sitting there before she came back to the moment, and she slowly pushed herself back up to her feet.
Still, she didn’t really want to deal with the situation yet, and she took her time undressing, and then she took her time in the shower, putting her pajamas on, combing her hair out, and brushing her teeth.
By the time she flopped over on the bed, it was late enough that it was early, and she hadn’t slept a wink. But once she was under the covers with her head on the pillow, she couldn’t actually fall asleep, no matter how long she kept her eyes shut and how she tried to make her thoughts go blank.
Part of her wanted to call her best friend back home. She knew she couldn’t actually explain the whole situation, but she could at least put some of it into words to try to get some advice. But it was late enough that she was aware that, even back home, it was well into the middle of the night and she knew her best friend would be asleep. She wasn’t going to wake her up, especially when she could just call her in the morning.
She supposed at some point she must have fallen asleep, fitful though it was. It was not a particularly restful sleep either, as her dreams were full of claws and scales, and she couldn’t help but dream of plummeting through the air at terminal velocity, as if something had dropped her from very high up. She woke up briefly after that, just to roll over and mash her face into her pillow, and though she slept the rest of the night through, her dreams continued, and it still wasn’t relaxing.
*
The morning seemed grey and hazy when Clarissa woke up, the sun streaming weakly through the window blinds as it filtered through a thin sheet of silver clouds. With the greatest of reluctance, Clarissa got to her feet to peer out the window, noting that it didn’t exactly look like it was going to rain, but it did still look like the city wasn’t going to see much of the sun that day, as the same silver clouds stretched out endlessly in every direction.
It seemed oddly appropriate, considering Clarissa’s gloomy mood that persisted from the moment she got out of bed, her mind already racing through the events of the night before. Considering she already had her interview with Abel, part of her rather desperately wanted to just pretend the entire night before had been a dream and act as if he had never asked her out for a date to begin with. Part of her wanted to just carry on with her trip as if everything was still normal and she was still the same woman she had been when she first stepped off the plane.
That wasn’t the sort of person she wanted to be, though. She didn’t want to be someone who just buried her head in the sand when things were difficult. She didn’t want to watch life pass by while she sat on the sidelines and missed it because it might be complicated.
Thoughts like those chased themselves in endless circles in her head as she got dressed for the day and did her makeup, before she very determinedly pushed them to the back of her mind, not to ignore but to concentrate on later. She still had a job to do, and there were a few key locations she needed to visit before it got too late in the day, and she didn’t want to wait too long in case the weather decided that it was going to rain after all.
She left the hotel in a hurry after that, stopping for breakfast at a bakery before she started
jogging towards the nearest subway entrance. Even if she could probably afford to take a cab everywhere, she didn’t exactly want to.
She kept all thoughts of the night before and the deal Abel had proposed out of her mind as she explored a museum and took notes about a beautiful church; only once she was done with that and she was sitting on a bench outside the church did she let her thoughts drift back to the mess at hand. Assuming she could even call it a mess. After all, she only had to be involved if she wanted to be.
But that was the big question, wasn’t it? Did she want to be involved with it, or did she want
to wash her hands of the entire situation, do her job just as expected, and go home? More
importantly, could she live with herself if she pretended nothing was going on?
Because that was a big part of it. Whatever was going on with the magical creatures could
eventually wind up with a lot of people dead if nothing was done to mitigate it, and a lot of them wouldn’t even know anything was going on until they got caught in the crossfire. Because there were certain things Clarissa could do that Abel couldn’t, because she was a human, and she could help make it so those deaths didn’t need to happen. Or at least, so fewer deaths happened, even if she doubted she could stop all of them. Nothing ever went perfectly, after all. But even so, even if she only saved two or three people in the end, wouldn’t that be worth it?
It was a lot to think about all at once, and she pulled her phone out of her pocket. She closed out of the notebook app and pulled up the dialer, entering her best friend’s number from memory. Even if she couldn’t explain the whole situation, she at least needed to get another perspective in some way, so it stopped feeling as if she was stuck in her own echo chamber, just doomed to chase the same cyclic thoughts in indecisive circles until she inevitably gave up.
The phone rang twice before Lacy answered, skipping any sort of greeting in favor of demanding, “Is Paris amazing?”
“Even better than I expected it to be,” Clarissa assured her. “I’ve been taking pictures on my phone; I’ll send you a bunch of them later tonight.”
She was pretty sure Lacy squealed in delight at a pitch only dogs could hear after that, before clearing her throat and calming down enough to ask, “So, what’s up? I kind of figured you’d be too busy living it up to call. Especially not this early on.”
Clarissa paused for a moment before she began carefully, “So, there’s a guy, kind of.”
Lacy made an over exaggerated ‘ooooooh’ noise, and Clar
issa could just imagine her settling in to get comfortable. If popcorn had been an option, she was pretty sure Lacy would have been chowing down.
“He’s filthy rich,” Clarissa continued, and before Lacy could get excited about that detail,
Clarissa added, “but he’s got a lot of, uh…baggage.”
There was silence after that, presumably as Lacy reorganized her mental image of the entire situation, until she finally asked, “What sort of baggage?”
“It’s a little complicated to get into just now,” Clarissa sighed, and she sagged back on the bench. “I just need to know how much baggage is too much baggage before you give up trying, mostly.”
“He’s got you this worked up already?” Lacy wondered, followed by a whistle. “Impressive.
How does he make you feel? I mean, I figure that’s the most important thing to focus on, at least right now.”
“I guess so,” Clarissa agreed slowly, tipping her head back to look at the sky. It was still clouded over, the sun trying to shine through a gap between two clouds. She hauled herself back upright and got to her feet. “I’ll talk to you later, Lacy,” she decided. “And I’ll send you those photos by tonight.”
