The Dragon's Playlist

by Laura Bickle

  “I’d like to get caught up on things here, if you don’t mind.” I grimaced. “Home is a little...crazy, lately.”

  He nodded. He wasn’t a man who did crazy. “Understood. Just log your hours, and I’ll give you time and a half.”

  “Thanks, Boss.”

  He looked at me, and his eyes softened. “You’re doing a great job, kid. Just hang in there.”

  I scurried back to my desk, flushed with pride.

  I listened to Peters gather his lunch box and jacket and leave the trailer moments later. I kept my eyes glued to the computer screen until his boots clomped on the steps outside and crunched away on the gravel.

  And then I started attacking the files called “Water Samples.”

  The company had been keeping water sample files for the last twenty years, as far as I could determine. Sometimes, they were taken annually, sometimes quarterly. I didn’t know what to make of the changes in frequency. Maybe some alterations in reporting requirements?

  Downing the last of the coffee, I edged into Peters’s office. My gaze lit on his trashcan. I snatched it and dragged it back to my office. I upended it and dug through it, pawing past pencil shavings and empty ketchup packets, through wadded-up receipts and notes from a meeting.

  And the water sample report from two weeks ago, balled up tightly. I smoothed it out on my desk to compare to the report I’d sent.

  The numbers were definitely different. And not just the highlighted numbers, as I might have suspected. All of them were different. Most were lower on the one I’d faxed to the EPA.

  Was I making a mountain of a molehill? But something about it nagged me. So I went back through the samples file, paging through the values. I was trying to understand what they meant, what counted as normal...and then I paused on a report from five years ago. The numbers were familiar. I grabbed the fax and placed it side-by-side with the old report. My heart quickened. Each number was identical to those from five years ago.

  I sat back in my chair. Peters had faxed a report to the EPA that was five years old, and changed the date.

  I chewed on my lip. I didn’t know what to do with this information. Not yet. I stared out of the window at the gathering twilight, blue on the mountain. I wondered what Afakos was doing.

  I made copies of the fax, the report from five years ago, and the original that had been wadded up in Peters’s trashcan. I replaced the old report and the fax in the file, and wadded up the original. I stuffed it back into Peters’s trashcan with the rest of the debris from his day.

  I folded my copies carefully and tucked them into my purse.

  I wanted to ask Grandpa what do to ... that was my knee-jerk reaction. But I couldn’t. Tears welled in my eyes.

  I knew that I needed help. This was much bigger than I was.

  I opened the trailer door and headed out into the uncertain darkness.

  *

  Darkness led me to the door of the Enchanted Broomstick, but darkness didn’t remain.

  I pulled up to the curb, into a maelstrom of heat and light. Fire trucks were parked along the curb, and lurid orange flames licked out of the broken first-floor window.

  I lunged out of the car, started for the porch, but a firefighter pushed me back. Heat pressed on my skin, roared behind the lit Christmas lights, and sizzling the shrubbery. Glass shattered inside.

  “You can’t go in there!” the firefighter shouted.

  Volunteer firefighters milled about the yard, struggling to open a rusted-shut fire hydrant.

  “Someone lives there!” I yelled. “On the second floor.”

  The firefighter turned and ran back to the others, flapping his black-clad arms. He pointed upstairs. Someone had an axe and broke in the front door. Black smoke poured out.

  I jammed my fist into my mouth. I hoped that Julie’s strange gods and goddesses would save her. Curtains burned in the bedroom upstairs, going up as fast as tissue paper.

  A firefighter stumbled out of the house. I held my breath. Other firefighters blasted his smoking form with the fire hose as he exited, gasping, and stumbled to the curb.

  He was carrying a small, crying bundle that he set on the ground.

  “Rhiannon!” I fell to my knees beside her. Rhiannon mewed, her fur singed and soaked. Her eyes were wide and terrified.

  The firefighter poured her into my arms and turned back to the house.

  A deafening crack sounded, and the men shouted at each other, “Fall back! Clear out!”

  The roof fell in a dazzling shower of sparks. It was like orange snow, pure and brilliant.

  And then there was nothing anyone could do but watch Julie’s house burn.

  CHAPTER 18

  They never found Julie.

  The firefighters sifted through the wet ash and rubble but found no remains. At first, that gave me hope. Perhaps she’d run to the grocery store when the fire broke out, and she hadn’t been at home.

  But she didn’t come home.

  There was speculation, then. The fire was suspected to be arson. Perhaps she’d set it herself and skipped town with the insurance money? But the insurance company never found her, and had discovered that the gas line from her propane tank had been leaking. A small spark, like the kind from one of her candles, could’ve set it all off.

  Had she met with foul play, and the fire was meant to cover the evidence? The police milled intermittently around the charred hulk of the house, but there were no clues suggesting where someone could’ve taken her. Her car was still parked in the alley. The fire had been reported by a group of kids driving by, presumably en route to chuck their beer bottles into the yard. They’d stopped to call for help at the gas station, where one of the boys told the dispatcher that there was smoke coming from one of the upstairs windows. The cops had questioned them, but they’d had no traces of accelerant with them. The one who’d reported it had confessed to breaking her window several weeks ago by accident, claiming he’d been aiming for the mailbox.

  The last theory was probably the most sinister, the one whispered in the lowest of voices: Julie was a witch. She’d simply vanished, because she’d chosen to, only to reappear once again when it was least expected...the seed of a local legend planted in fertile imaginations.

  That was the story I wanted to believe. I wanted to believe Julie had enough power to escape harm. And that she’d someday come back for Rhiannon. And maybe even for me.

  I lay in bed with my hands laced behind my head. Rhiannon, still smelling of smoke, no matter how many times I washed her, cuddled against my hip. Part of me very much wanted to see how far Julie’s magic could’ve gone. Could it have created a community of magicians? Could she have grown and prospered with her business? Part of me had considered asking her if I could rent the spare room, be within sight and smell of the witchery just down the steps.

  But maybe it was for nothing. Maybe they would yet find her curled up dead in some corner of the basement, and there would be no magic in this part of the world again.

  Rhiannon grumbled in her sleep and purred. I stroked the side of her face, blackened and with twisted whiskers. She’d be all right—only singed fur and sore pride.

  I’d told my mother she was staying. She objected until the little burned cat marched up to my father and curled up in his lap, purring like a chainsaw. My father’s face lit up, and he stroked the cat with shaking hands. I hadn’t seen such joy shining in his face since I’d come home.

  So Rhiannon stayed. I wondered what arcane rituals and knowledge had seeped into her little cat brain from her time in the shop. Now, Julie would never be able to teach them to me.

  And I thought, inevitably, of Afakos. It sounded as if the permit to blast-mine the mountain was on the verge of being granted. I struggled with what I thought I knew, the documents burning a hole in the bottom of my purse.

  I’d seen Afakos, how he lived. I had the irrational desire to protect him, that last bit of magic in my world…maybe the whole world, period. If I didn’t do somet
hing, he’d be discovered. He’d be hunted, exploited, and wind up in a cage. If they even let him live.

  I couldn’t bear that.

  And, remembering the skull rattling in the miner’s helmet, I feared what Afakos would do if efforts to destroy his mountain continued.

  But I also had to consider the real-world consequences. It would inevitably become clear who’d blown the whistle, and I’d be persona non grata. An evil element. And it might not stop with me—it would affect my whole family. Several years ago, a worker had made an OSHA complaint, and he and his family had been harassed to the point that they were forced to move. That could be us.

  There was no winning. Only losing.

  I sighed.

  I think that this is what it meant to be a grown-up: to choose which dead-end to go down and follow that path with stoic resignation.

  *

  The environmentalists organized a march to protest the blast-mining of Sawtooth Mountain.

  It was, predictably, an utter disaster.

  I’d driven into town to pick up the boss’s lunch. He always gave me enough money to cover lunch for myself, too—a fair trade for my time and gas. I was waiting for my order in the sub shop, slurping a lemonade, when I saw a throng of people moving down Main Street. Well, maybe ‘throng’ was overstating it—there were about a hundred people holding homemade spray-painted signs that said “Save Sawtooth.”

  And at least that many jeering at them from the sidelines. Car horns honked. Someone yelled, “Go home!”

  I watched from the window of the sub shop. I couldn’t believe they thought this was going to change anyone’s mind. But Will loved to be at the center of controversy, and he’d managed to be at the front of the ragtag little parade with a megaphone, shouting about how the earth was a universal legacy. He seemed to draw energy from it, and it galvanized him in a way I’d never felt before a crowd. He believed. He moved them. And I wondered if I would ever be able to sway people with my music the way he swayed them with his words.

  The woman who’d made my sandwich stripped off her crinkly plastic gloves to call the cops.

  I pushed through the restaurant door, watching as the protesters moved past. Some of the townspeople lined the street with their backs turned, a silent suggestion to go to hell. I threaded down to the curb to get my car. I wanted to get ahead of the protesters on the road so I wouldn’t be late going back to work...

  No such luck. I edged out behind a pickup truck that was giving Will’s friends a lot of following distance. Traffic stacked up behind us as the main drag funneled into the two-lane road leading to the mine. I leaned my head on the steering wheel and swore.

  It took almost an hour to drive to the mine. I didn’t touch the gas once, just idled along. Horns blared behind me as we wound up the ridge road with inexorable slowness.

  I wondered if Will had bothered to play by the rules and gotten a parade permit. Somehow, I doubted it.

  We reached the crest of the hill before the mine at last. Behind me, traffic had gotten pissed. Really pissed.

  A car zinged past me on the left, passing on the double-yellow line. I honked at him to stop, because he couldn’t possibly see what was over the crest of the hill, going that fast.

  Tires squealed, and screams rattled the trees. The car plowed into the loose knot of protesters, scattering them like leaves. I heard a sickening crunch, like raw meat hitting a kitchen floor, saw the car skid to a stop with people on the ground.

  “Oh my God,” I breathed.

  I pulled my car off the road at the entrance to the mine, in the grass. I popped my car door as the security guard ran to the road, yelling into his walkie-talkie. There were at least three people down on the pavement. And a set of legs behind the front tires of the car.

  I fell to my knees beside a woman on the ground. She was my age. She was bleeding from her head and mouth, and her body was shaking. Her leg was turned back under her jeans at an unnatural angle, and her shoe had been knocked from her bloody foot.

  I grabbed her hand. “It’s gonna be okay.”

  Her eyes rolled back at me. She looked terrified. “Oh, my God... He hit us…”

  I glanced back at the car. The driver was hysterical, wailing beside the open driver’s door with his head in his hands. Will and the security guard were crawling under the car to get to the person who’d been run over.

  Men from the mine were running past the gate, carrying first aid kits. Jason skidded to a stop beside me.

  “Don’t move her,” he said. “Help’s coming.” He shone a flashlight into her eyes and took her pulse. I was impressed with the calm coolness with which he took over. All I could do was hold the woman’s hand and try to distract her.

  She looked down at her leg and whimpered.

  “It’s okay,” I said. “Look at me.” I put my finger on my nose. “Right here.”

  “Stay with her,” Jason said. He grabbed his kit and ran for the car.

  The security guard and Will had dragged an older man out from under the car. He might’ve been one of the men who’d quit the mine, but I couldn’t see clearly. I didn’t think he was breathing. Jason and another miner started CPR on him. Miners ran down to the road to block off traffic in both directions.

  Sirens wailed in the distance, and fire and paramedic trucks drove up the wrong side of the road. They descended upon the scene of the accident with stretchers and oxygen bags.

  Two paramedics transferred the woman with the broken leg to a stretcher. She howled as they moved her, but it seemed like a good sign. I released her fingers as they loaded her into the back of an ambulance. The man from under the car wasn’t howling at all. He was in the middle of a huddle of firefighters, and remained silent.

  I stumbled back to a grassy embankment and sat down, dazed. There were at least a half-dozen people hurt that I could see. Streaks of dark red glossed the pavement, like when a deer was hit by a car. Only these weren’t deer. They were people.

  “It wasn’t supposed to happen like this.” Will sat down beside me, a dazed expression on his face. “Nobody was supposed to get hurt...”

  My boss weaved around the crowd, holding a radio and what looked like a bag of ice from our refrigerator. He leaned down and put his hand on my shoulder. “Di, are you all right?”

  “Yessir,” I told him. My gaze stupidly went to my car, and I thought of his lunch. “Your sandwich is in the car...”

  “Never mind that.” He squeezed my shoulder and surveyed the scene. “All this for nothing.” He shook his head.

  “What do you mean?” I asked, uncomprehending. This seemed such a huge sacrifice for a belief.

  “The blasting permit was just granted. The EPA called an hour ago. It’s all over with.”

  I pressed the heels of my hands to my eyes.

  *

  The boss told me to go home early.

  I insisted that I wanted to stay. The police took my statement and slowly cleared the scene. As the police and firefighters stopped in and outside the trailer to use the phones and pop machine, I learned that one of the men had been killed instantly—I guessed this was the one who’d been beneath the car. Five others were in the hospital, with various injuries: broken bones, concussion, a punctured lung. I blotted at the blood stain on my blouse with water, but it didn’t come out.

  And, as Peters had said, it was all for nothing. I stared out the window at Sawtooth Mountain, trying to imagine it as the sadly scalped mountain Will had shown me days ago.

  I felt sorry for Will and his people. I felt sorry for us. And I felt sorry for Afakos. I felt weak, unable to help any of us.

  Jason came by at the end of the day. He wordlessly walked into the trailer and hugged me fiercely. I hugged him back.

  “I’m glad you’re okay,” he said.

  I breathed against his chest. “It was just...so close, you know.”

  He kissed the top of my head. “You did great.”

  “I did nothing. I just watched.”

&
nbsp; “Hey.” He leaned back and tipped my chin up. “You held that woman’s hand. That meant the world to her, okay? It’s the little things that matter.”

  I nodded, resting my ear against his chest and hearing his steady drum of a heartbeat.

  “Are you heading home?”

  “Soon,” I said. I glanced back at my desk, which was covered in paper. “I have a couple of things left that I need to do.”

  “I’ll see you this weekend?” There was a note of hope in his voice.

  “Yes.” I stood on my toes and kissed him.

  He left then, waving through the window as he crossed the parking lot.

  I waved back. I waited until he was gone, sitting at my desk and stared unseeingly at the paper on my desk. I had no intention of working on any of it.

  I pulled the papers out of my purse and shuffled through them. There was fraud here, but it was meaningless, I told myself. The permit had already been granted. The mountain was going to fall.

  What would happen if I reported this to the EPA? I thought of the jeers and turned backs facing Will and the protesters. I didn’t want that fate for my family. I might be able to leave, start again somewhere else...but I knew my family wouldn’t.

  But it was done. I shoved the papers back into my purse, tidied my desk—the only productive thing I’d done all afternoon. I glanced out the window. I was procrastinating.

  I had a much grimmer task before me.

  I had to talk with Afakos, whether he wanted to speak to me or not.

  *

  I climbed the mountain to the flat rock. The wind was rising, skimming through the trees and shaking leaves from branches that whipped back and forth.

  “Afakos!” I shouted, plucking strands of brown hair from my mouth.

  He didn’t answer, so I kept climbing. I had no idea where his lair was, but I felt compelled to keep winding my way to the top. My hands scrabbled in gravel, and I tripped over tree roots as I pushed through the underbrush. Afakos was here—the birds were silent. I saw no squirrels or chipmunks or deer. I knew he was watching, but he wouldn’t answer.