by Amy Faye
That got her attention. The girl opposite him took in a deep gasp. "That's..."
"That's not chump change," he said, smiling. "Now, as to the work."
"You already said," she cut in. It was partly true, but as with every other part of the conversation he had strung her along as slow as he could manage, hoping to keep himself entertained for as long as possible. "'Various simple tasks, gofer duties, making calls, in addition to other duties that remain to be named.' Is that right? I'm not an idiot. Ten thousand a month for an errand boy? You could have anyone doing that."
"And they'd be doing it for the money, I might add," he told her, though he had other tasks in mind for her. It was that much more entertaining to keep pretending that he had nothing to do for her, the more offended she got. The more angry she was, the more he kept doing it.
"Well, I'm not just some schlub from the street. I've got actual goals, you know."
"To be fair, you won't just be an assistant. But understand, the main parts of your job won't be particularly demanding, most of the time, so..."
She cut him off, not for the first time, and he had to rein in the instinct to finish there and not continue when she gave him space to speak once more. "You're absolutely right. I've just got to lie back and think of England, is that it?"
He clicked his jaw. It was a bad habit, but not one that he intended to make an effort to fix. Not after twenty-odd years of doing it.
"Your primary job is perfect for you, in fact. You'll be maintaining my collection."
"Collection?"
"Art collection."
She didn't have anything to say to that. What a surprise. She had some snappy response for everything else that he said, but this was the first thing that had well and truly caught her off balance.
"Art collection?" Diana parroted the word back to him, with an expression as if she were trying to hold a pencil between her eyebrows. "I don't know if I follow."
"I've had a collection for some time, and I was just beginning to think that I might be in a position to expand it."
"Oh," she said vaguely. "But I'm still just a student. I'm not really qualified..."
"There's a saying, you might have heard it." He waited for her to look at him, and a moment later he finished. "It goes, 'shut up and take my money.' You familiar with that one?"
She clapped her mouth shut and kept the furrow between her brows.
"Very well, then," she said. Her eyebrows stayed furrowed. "But I want to know something. Why me?"
"There are a great many reasons," Alex started. "I can think of at least three off-hand." He looked pointedly down at her breasts, and waited for her to get the idea. She didn't take long. "But first and foremost, because you're the best candidate for the job."
"How could I be?"
He left out the explanation of her role in the entire collection. "Because I think you might have known the artist," he told her instead. "I believe he was a friend of the family."
"I'm not sure I follow," she said. Her eyes said that she had guessed it already, but he was couching everything in such vague language that she didn't want to make any guesses.
"He was tall, dark, handsome. Dark hair, not entirely unlike yours. Dark eyes. Wore thick coke-bottle glasses and liked to work with his hands more than he liked to paint, but the painting was something he did for the money more than for the creativity of it. I heard he died recently. Is any of this sounding familiar?"
She screwed up her face. "I don't see how my relationship with my father has anything to do with," she got out before he started speaking over her.
"I heard that the collection is now closed. There won't be any more Kramers coming out any time soon, I shouldn't think. Which means that now is the time to start solidifying what I've got, and acquiring anything as it comes onto the market. Is that about right?"
She swallowed hard. "I suppose that sounds right."
Diana had looked as if she might throw up at any moment, before; as he had finally started to give her the details on the job, details she'd been asking for several minutes, that look had cleared up into confusion, and then starting to edge up to understanding and acceptance.
The casual way that Alex spoke about her father, though, had brought that sick look back on her face. "As you know, though, there aren't many on the market. There never are. There weren't many to begin with, for that matter."
"No, there weren't," Diana agreed quietly.
"So you can see, then, that I don't need you for your art history degree, nor your museum science. I need you because you're hungry for this sort of work, and because you are uniquely situated for the task that I've got for you."
She nodded blankly.
"Think of it as a way to get closer to your father. A second chance."
The shade of green her face turned was almost delightful enough to make up for the fact that someone had killed the only other dragon that Alex had ever really thought understood him. At least, before Aleroth himself had gotten around to it.
12
Alex Blume was already reacting to the oncoming threat before he realized two very important things: first, that he was the only one who'd seen a dragon before, and more important, second, that he wasn't the one driving. He bit out a curse as the old man started to led out a low moan, and yanked the wheel off toward the edge of the road.
At interstate speeds, yanking the wheel like that is a mistake. In a best case scenario, it does almost nothing; the wheels slip, and after a brief, sickening moment of twist, the entire car loses traction and turns all too slowly around the corner.
This wasn't a best-case scenario, though. The car's wheels bit into the asphalt and pulled the nose sharply to the side, the car wobbling dangerously forward, the rest of the vehicle not seeming to notice that it was supposed to have turned.
As a rule, tires struggle to roll sideways, and so it was with the SUV that he'd taken her in. Under normal circumstances, he would have driven himself. It was his preference. But this was supposed to be an impressive display, one that cemented his dominance in her mind.
That dominance would have grown and shifted as time went on, but it would have been first cemented in her mind that he wasn't the sort of man who was trifled with. He had a driver, had a blacked out car, and had a lot of other things, as well.
Some parts of it were lost in translation, but it hadn't escaped Alex that the first time he'd seen something he really, truly wanted, in over a century, he'd started acting less human, and more dragon. Create an impressive display, show your dominance through your things. Prove that you know more, that you're more in control, that everything is well in hand.
But as a result, the big SUV, already a little bit too top-heavy, started to tip, and then turn, and finally turned over onto its side and skidded that way another twenty or thirty feet, flipping brilliantly as Alex forced his body into the corner with Diana's, cushioning it as best as possible.
It was only after they'd come to a stop that the second part arose. The heat came hard, and as hot as anything that he'd ever felt, and there wasn't going to be much time before there was a big hole, at least the size of his head, that had been burned straight through the side of the vehicle.
Alex turned and looked at Diana; she was wild-eyed and panicky, but he could deal with that later. There were other things he had to deal with right now.
"What was that?" Her voice sounded like she was ready to start sobbing, and it told him everything he needed to know at that moment about her mental state. She was close to panicking, first, and second, she had definitely seen the dragon, even if had been far too late for her to react to it in any meaningful way.
Alex turned and looked to the opposite corner of the car, hoping to check on the old man. He was nowhere to be found, except that there was a hole where the passenger side door should have been, and a spatter of red where something had been thrown up against the windshield. He grit his teeth together, and decided what needed to be done, a moment before a second
blast of heat like being stuck inside of an oven hit.
"I need you to close your eyes and hold onto me very tightly," he growled. She listened, thank God, because if she didn't then she was going to find out that it hadn't just been an idle suggestion.
He dropped the transformation and leapt into the air, flying hard. He gripped her as tight as he could with his front legs, but kept the grasp loose enough that he he hoped, however impotently, that it wouldn't do any lasting damage. If it did, then all of this would have been for nothing. A waste.
He could hear the sound of screams from the ground, and could hear the low, rumbling bass of the beginnings of a dragon roaring, and then overtones layered on top of it until the sound covered the whole spectrum of noise, and threatened to pierce into his skull.
And again, he dove, hard. The air pushed back at him, tried to force him to slow, and Aleroth, no longer Alex Blume, pulled his arms in tight, pulling the human against him. She was light, even for a human, and barely added a third of his own weight to the flight, but that still made it that much more of a challenge to maintain his speed as he leveled out and started to move as fast as his body would propel him away from the scene.
It would have been easier, he thought bitterly, if he'd already been able to claim this domain as his. But with the territory up for grabs, he wasn't in his element, and there was no roost near enough that it could save them from the attack.
He pushed the thought out of his mind, where it sat along with the limpness of Diana's body in his clawed grip, something to be worried about as soon as he had a way out of this. There would be plenty of time to mope about how things hadn't worked out the way that he'd planned when they were both out of it and alive.
The answer wasn't one that he enjoyed, not even for an instant, and there was going to be a price paid for taking it. But if he had to pay it, then he would do so, gladly. He turned north, every aching muscle screaming out as he pulled the air as hard as he could with his long, powerful wings, unconcerned with who might see.
There was no time to be worried. Just a few short miles to the North, and he would cross an invisible line. There was no guaranteeing that it would save him, of course. There was no guaranteeing that anything would save him, short of a bolt of lightning striking his enemies down.
There was a good chance, though. There was a better chance that, if the drake behind him had dared to attack in broad daylight, then they would pursue past the lines of territory. Beyond that, the question became whether or not there was any chance of retaliation, for him and for his pursuer.
It wasn't much, but it was something, and something had to be enough now. There wasn't much other choice than to do it and hope that things went better than he expected them to. After all, if he didn't, then what was the alternative? To die horribly, consumed by gouts of flame?
He wasn't going to do that. Not when he had treasure right there in his arms. He wasn't brilliant, but he was hardly a fool.
The line edged closer. He dared, for a brief moment, to let his head slip out of the most optimal line of wind resistance and looked around behind. The drake was on his tail, sure as could be. At this speed, there was no danger of flames overtaking him. But the big beast was closer than he had been, and in the moment that Alex took to look, he gained speed even more.
Aleroth was many things, and he certainly was faster than the average young dragon. But he wasn't ancient by any stretch of the imagination, and he was out of practice with quick flight. Out of practice with escaping. And worse still, out of practice with fighting.
The dragon behind was bigger than him, stronger than him, older than him, and worst of all... faster. It was a deadly combination. Another mile down, and only three more to go. He wouldn't be caught before they hit the threshold, which was all that he could credit his confidence to. If they made it across, they were in occupied territory.
If Corinth, for some reason, didn't respond, it would be an embarrassment. A humiliation. A grave insult. It would have ensured that he remained alive, as well, which was the only reason that a dragon would endure such a thing. But not Corinth, not under normal circumstances, and Aleroth relied on knowing that he wouldn't.
There was a palpable change in the air when he hit the threshold. He didn't need to wonder about the exact line. Dragons could sense it. 'You've entered the wrong neighborhood now,' it seemed to say. If the circumstances were any different, then he would have. But as it stood, he'd entered exactly the right neighborhood.
Sure enough, the drake on his tail didn't slow for an instant. He was near enough now that Alex could already imagine the feeling of his beak punching through his scales, the feel of his teeth biting in to the tender flesh beneath. The feel of claws ripping him limb from limb. He ducked lower, dodging the tops of trees, and when a satisfactory-looking clearing appeared in the midst of them he pulled his wings in, turned, and went screaming through the brush and slammed bodily into the ground.
But he cushioned the blow for Diana, and he'd made it into the blue's territory, and that was all that he could hope for as the terrifying, massive, ancient red bore down on him.
13
Diana Kramer hadn't died when she'd ridden a roller coaster for the first time, in spite of herself. She'd gone limp, and if she were as made up of jelly as she felt, she would have gone flying out at the first opportunity. It had been a mistake, and not one that she'd repeated, in spite of the "fun" that she'd had.
She wasn't screaming through the sky at a pace so quick that she thought her skin was going to pull itself right off her bones. She wasn't held tight to some sort of giant... well, her eyes said it was one thing, but her brain said that her eyes must have been wrong. It had been a long time since she'd felt the dissonance so strongly but the brain usually won in the end.
She was on a roller coaster, and imagining what it must be like, for the straps to instead be arms wrapped around her. Some part of her subconscious mind had written in strange arms, something like a bear's arms, or a demon's, or something.
Well, if it were all her imagination then she ought to at least call it what it looked like. A giant, flying lizard? One that had breathed fire? That didn't leave a lot of room for wondering what she thought she'd seen.
She thought she'd seen a damned dragon. Since dragons weren't real, she had to have seen something else. Presumably it was a large bird, of some kind, which explained the wings and the flying. The rest was just a flight of fancy.
Maybe it had been brought on by the stress of losing her father. Maybe it had been brought on by the stress of losing her job. Maybe it had been brought on by the stress of sitting in a car with a man who was clearly missing several screws.
A man who was extremely attractive, she had to admit, and if he wasn't obsessed with her and apparently her father, she wouldn't have had one problem with the attention that he was paying to her. It was more of a tone problem than a real issue of not wanting him to look her way.
Whatever it was, she was living in a fantasy land, now. She'd lost the time between the car and the roller coaster, and filled in the gap with a fantasy scenario of a dragon burning a hole in their car, of Alex transforming into another dragon.
She twisted her head a little bit to look up at his green scales, shimmering in the light. The only proof she needed that it was all fake was that the dragon behind them didn't breathe out any flame. If he were a dragon, he could breathe fire. If he could breathe fire, then he would have done it again, and they'd be burned to a crisp.
The air whipped at her, and she felt as if she were going to slip out any second. No matter how rock solid everything felt now, she knew, any minute there was going to be some kind of gust of wind and she was going to be carried, hurtling, towards the earth and then she'd be splatted out like a bug.
Well, that was, of course, if any of this was real. But since it wasn't, her arms didn't make any real effort to grip. When the coaster's train pulled into the station, her endorphin rush would wear off and she'd be abl
e to finally calm down and see things rationally.
And then the ground started to move faster below them, and it started to get bigger, and she didn't know what was going on except that they shouldn't have been getting bigger. The whole fantasy was fine specifically because so far, it hadn't involved splatting on the ground.
The world got bigger, bigger, and bigger. The trees looked big enough and close enough now that she was worried that they would thwack her leg if she let it dangle any lower. She pulled futilely up, hoping to avoid it, though it was probably more than ten feet away and there was no real danger.
And then everything went completely topsy-turvy, and she got a look back at the red dragon, as big as a city bus and careening towards them, the trees under his belly whipping hard, beneath his notice.
When she had ridden the roller coaster, the one time, it had been on a dare. The coaster went up five hundred feet before it dropped her, almost straight down, and then went back up for more.
She'd gone limp, let it try its best to throw her at a thousand miles an hour into the concrete below. But to her credit, something she'd always been proud of, she hadn't thrown up. It had sapped every bit of her, but she hadn't vomited, and that was all that counted when she wasn't even sure that she could get on the thing, never mind handle it.
The feeling of impact an instant later, though, took her stomach and wrung it out, and there was no stopping herself. Every muscle between her stomach and her mouth heaved and her stomach violently upset its contents into the grass below as she rolled off of the thing that she'd landed on.
At the edge of her consciousness she could see it moving, whirling and wrapping its body around her. Then one of those big, dragon arms, arms that she knew she had to be imagining, dug a claw into the back of her shirt and pulled hard, and she pulled off of her feet and into a thicket of trees behind it, her upset stomach emptying itself in a line of sick and disgusting.
Diana felt weak, shaky. Her body barely wanted to move, which was good at that point, because whatever was happening, imagined or not, she couldn't have stopped it.
