by Alan Marble
Rebekah, too, had been there at the table. Her reaction to his presence had been frustratingly difficult to read. At times he could have sworn that she was smiling at him, perhaps even subtly flirting with him again, while at other times she seemed to flash him a vaguely disdainful look, if she even bothered acknowledging his existence at all. After what had happened the past few days he was not sure he could entirely blame her, his own feelings regarding her almost as infuriatingly difficult to sort out. Still, he felt uncomfortable on the receiving end of her uncertain gaze.
As the evening wore into night the quiet sounds of conversation died off around him, the regular clatter of silverware and dishes becoming irregular and then hushing altogether as the others excused themselves, one by one. In the end, Jonah was all but alone at the dining table, shifting the remnants of his peas around on the plate with a fork while he tried not to contemplate the day's events too much, when an unexpected voice spoke up nearby. “I have to apologize for my sister.”
Glancing upward, Jonah found himself face to face with Jason, one of those who had spoken at the meeting. He was fairly short in comparison to most of the others, his black hair flecked with bits of white, the skin around his gray eyes slightly stretched into suggestions of crow's feet, as if he were coming up on middle age. Frowning unintentionally, Jonah blinked at him. “What?”
“Jenna, my sister. I … she was a little hard on you back there. I just want you to know it's not because she hates you or anything ...”
The familial resemblance was obvious now that Jonah thought about it, though at the time he didn't realize the two were siblings. With a little sigh, he shrugged his shoulders. “If you insist. Abe tried to tell me the same thing before. What's she got against me, anyway?”
“It's complicated,” the man began.
Jonah just shook his head with a sigh. “And that's exactly what Abe told me, too. I'm kind of tired of hearing that, to be honest. Things are too complicated to explain to me. It's not the right time. I just have to be patient and take it all on faith,” he said, his voice taking on a sour edge to it as he closed his eyes. “I mean, hell. Here you people are asking me to fight but … why all the secrecy? I'm tired of feeling like I'm being kept in the dark, like I'm not really being told what's going on. I thought I was supposed to be, like, an equal member in your little club here ...”
“She was married to the last silver dragon,” Jason interrupted.
Jonah blinked as he was cut off, and then paused a moment to let himself process that little bit of information. “Christ,” he muttered, slumping into his seat a little bit as he put two and two together. “Which means he … and she blames me?”
“No,” came the rather swift response, Jason shaking his head vigorously. “No, she doesn't blame you for his death. No one would. It's just that she took it hard, and even though it's been years she's still not really over it. Seeing you had dredged up some of those feelings in her, it's probably made her relive it a little bit. It's not personal.”
The mention of reliving the loss made a chill run down Jonah's spine, although he couldn't quite figure out why. Hugging his arms around his chest as if to ward off the chill, a frown cemented itself on his face. “Well. I guess I get that stuff about me not being worthy, then. Big shoes to fill, from her perspective.”
A smile was offered and a hand rested lightly on his shoulder. “You got it. But like I said, it's not personal. In time she'll get over it, she'll remember that you're just you. In the meantime, she still knows you're a member of the clan, and even if she's not your biggest fan she'll at least respect you as such.”
Jonah nodded a little at that. He realized that the man was trying to be sensitive to his needs, was trying to extend a hand of welcome, as it were, but he was still not in much of a mood to accept the offer. He wasn't certain what kind of mood he was in, at all, except that he found it all too easy to latch on to just the wrong part of what was being said. “She'll put up with me because I'm a part of the clan, huh?”
“Well, yes, but ...”
He interrupted with a little shake of his head. “See, that's another thing about what's going on. Clan this, clan that, you're expected to put up with some newcomer just because he's a part of the clan. I'm being asked to stick my neck out for some elder I've never met because I'm a part of a clan, like it's my duty or something. The only duty I know is taking care of my own ass. I don't know if I can do this.”
He realized that he was unfairly unloading on the man, who he had only just met, but the opportunity was there and he'd been itching to get it out. For as unfair as it might have been, Jason was trying his best to respond. “Most of us were raised as a part of the clan, Jonah, so it's more than just that. We're family. It's not really a sense of duty as much as it is a sense of … well … taking care of one's family. None of us had to discover we were dragons, or discover the clan. We knew about it from as early as we can remember. You didn't have that luxury.”
“Tell me about it,” Jonah responded in a mutter.
“Still. Even if you don't see us as family yet, Jonah, we all see you as such. Even those of us who aren't comfortable with you yet. Any one of us would stick our necks out for you, without so much as a second thought.”
“And you expect the same of me.”
“We don't expect it,” he answered in a friendly demeanor, once again reaching over to clasp Jonah by the shoulder. “We hope for it, yes. We hope someday you'll feel just as comfortable with your identity as the rest of us, but we're not stupid. We know it'll take time. Just try to stick with us till then?”
Jonah closed his eyes and pinched at the bridge of his nose before pulling his palm down over his face. “I just … why now? I mean, Rebekah told me you'd been watching me for years. If this shit is so hard to handle when you get old, why not break it to me sooner? What kind of sense does it make to throw me into this when things get tough?”
There was a long pause before the answer came, as if Jason was measuring his response. “The council had actually considered letting you live out your life without knowing, without intervening. Some speculated that if you never had a chance to change into a dragon you might live a normal human existence, grow old like other humans, blend in without ever knowing the difference. It wasn't until the Silver Token came to you, that we knew you were the silver dragon that we decided to intervene, and even then ...”
“I wish you'd never have told me.”
“Jonah?”
Jonah sighed heavily again. The thought that he might have been able to go on with his life, without ever having been thrust into this madness, that maybe he could have been left alone made him feel sick to his stomach. “I didn't ask for this. I don't … I don't want this. I want to go back to my life … why did you have to drag me into this, if you had a choice?”
“It's not like that. We didn't have a choice, not once the token came to you, not once the bull drake tracked you down ...”
“No!” Jonah interjected, nearly shouting as he pounded his fist into the table. “No! I'd have let him have the damned thing and he'd have gone on his way. I don't care what he'd have done with it. I'd have been found innocent of the murder and then gone on with my life like none of this happened, and I wouldn't be here now.”
Jason held his ground in spite of the outburst. “It's not that simple, Jonah. I mean that, when I say we literally didn't have a choice. Do you really think the bull would have let you live after giving him the token? And even if he did, the token would have found its way to you again. These kinds of things are out of our hands.”
“Out of your hands. Out of my hands.” Jonah wanted to be angry, wanted to shout and pound on the table again, but the powerlessness of the moment quickly eroded any real anger he might have felt. Instead, he folded his arms on the table in front of him and let his face droop against them. “Doesn't anyone have any say in what goes on around here? I don't … I don't believe in fate ...”
“Maybe it's fate. Maybe i
t's destiny. Or maybe it's just what happens.” Again he could feel that hand on his shoulder, as if it were supposed to be reassuring. “Maybe we don't have any power to control what goes on around us, Jonah, but then again maybe that's not what matters. But there is one thing that we can control. We're always in control of how we respond to what happens. That choice is always ours.”
He didn't know how to respond, not to Jason's words, not to the situation, not to what was happening to him. “A week ago I was Jonah Fischer,” he mutterd quietly, his voice muffled a bit against his arms. “I was one of a dozen people working in a department. I was one of a hundred people living in my apartment building. One of a million people in my city, just … just a person. Someone who went to work, who came home at night, who rode his motorcycle on the weekends and life was good. It was boring, it was sane, it was good.”
“Jonah ...”
With a heavy sigh, he shook his head and went on. “But now? Now I'm a dragon. Something that's not even supposed to exist, something that's just a legend. I'm fighting for my life, running from people who want me dead. And now I'm supposed to be fighting for the survival of my whole goddamned species? Against some shady Syndicate filled with monsters and magicians? How the hell am I supposed to do this?”
Again Jason responded by squeezing his shoulder. “Jonah, I know it's hard ...”
“No you don't!” Again the anger was coming back, and he pushed himself back upright, clenching his fists and pressing them in against the table. “None of you know jack shit about what's going on! Were you dragged away from your comfortable little life and thrust into something like this? Were any of you?”
“No,” the older man replied with a slightly stern expression. “None of us were thrust into this, but we're no strangers to the reality of the situation. We've been fighting the Syndicate for years ...”
“Exactly!” Again Jonah thumped his fist against the table. “Exactly! I've been dragged out of my comfortable little life only to be told I'm going to spend the next thousand years constantly watching my back, fighting for my life. Hell, Abe says he's been dodging these people for centuries. I don't want to be looking over my shoulder for centuries, dammit! I want to go back. I want to work in the rat race. I want to worry about whether I need to buy new tires for my bike, not how I'm going to rescue an elder. I want to go back.”
In spite of the continued outburst, Jason was able to remain calm. “I understand this is difficult for you Jonah, but you must understand that you can't go back.”
Jonah wouldn't accept that. “No, it's not true! I don't care what you think. I don't care what any of you think. I'm a human, goddammit. I'm not a dragon. I can go back ...”
“You've always been a dragon, Jonah, even if you didn't know it.”
“Bullshit,” he spat back, shaking his head. “I … I don't have to be a part of this. I want to go back. I've always been a human ...”
This time it was Jason who cut him off. “I was there when you were born.”
That revelation cut his outburst short, leaving Jonah unable to do anything but turn back with his eyes wide and his jaw slack. “What?”
“Well. Not exactly there at your birth, but shortly thereafter,” he responded, a faint and vague smile on his features. “I knew your parents well. When you were born, the council dispatched me to Dallas to visit with them, to visit you and to offer the congratulations and the blessings of the elder.”
“You knew my parents?”
Again Jason nodded. “They were good people. Good dragons. No one was as devastated as I was when we heard what had happened to them. At first we feared the worst, that you had been lost as well along with them, until we discovered that they had given you up for adoption shortly before. They knew they were being hunted, and they knew you were in danger as long as you were with them. I know your parents. I know how enormously difficult it must have been for them to let you go, the sacrifice that it was for them. They had to do it to keep you safe.”
It was more than he could take. The anger that had managed to build up in him anew had completely wilted away, leaving in its wake a void that was rapidly being filled by a confused and poignant sense of loss. He opened his mouth as if to say something but no words came out, his voice catching in his throat in a quiet little croak of a sound.
“You've always been a dragon,” Jason repeated, expression somehow stern and soft at the same time. “You've always been family to us, Jonah, from the start. I hope you come to see us as family, too.”
The wild mix of emotions was just too much. Part of him still wanted to be angry, wanted to lash out again. He did still want to go back to his previous existence, comfortable, dull and predictable. He did still want everything to go back to normal, to not have to worry about bull drakes and tokens and training.
He thought of his family back in Florida, his mother and father, who he had known and loved since as far back as he could remember. There had been jokes in his youth about whether he had been adopted, as he really looked nothing like either of them; the possibility that those old jokes were rooted in fact left him feeling uncertain.
And then there were the dragons. Strange characters, all of them in their own ways, come barging into his life and now wanting to be made a part of his family, as well. He looked up at Jason, who smiled to him faintly.
It was all just too much. Suddenly, tears began to well up in the corners of his eyes, making his vision swim and blur, and he found himself fighting the urge to blink, to keep them from spilling out. “I … I just don't know what to do ...”
“Just hang in there with us, Jonah. Do your best. We'll take care of the rest.”
It all seemed somehow too easy an answer, yet Jonah didn't know how to refute it, how to come up with any alternative scenario. He felt like he was caving in to some sort of inexorable force working against him, pushing him onto a path he was neither ready nor willing to embark upon.
At last the tears got the best of him, spilling out over his cheeks. As his vision blurred into incoherence, he felt a strong grip on his arm, pulling him up to his feet, and then hands embracing him firmly around the chest. Without thinking about it, Jonah accepted the embrace, burying his face into the offered shoulder and let himself go, sobbing like had never done before.
FIFTEEN
For the next four days, Jonah had been put through the most demanding series of tests and trials that he had ever encountered. He had been instructed in all manner of aerial maneuvers, how to float aloft for long periods of time, how to catch thermal currents and use them to his advantage. He had been taught how to land without bruising himself, and how to take off from a standstill without toppling over.
Carolus supervised most of it, while Rebekah served as his training partner. He had learned how to better evade her attacks, her fireballs. She had shown him how to balance the need to control his flying while at the same time tracking, evading, and sometimes attacking an opponent.
It had all been a strange mix of exhilarating, exhausting, and patently unbelievable. Though Jonah had actually spent most of his time over the last few days as a dragon, flying through the air, some stubborn part of his mind insisted that it was impossible, and that he must have been hallucinating, perhaps stuck in some protracted dreamstate. Even when he was soaring high above the lake that tiny bit of doubt remained lodged there in the back of his subconscious.
At the end of the fourth day, though, there wasn’t much room for anything other than exhaustion in his thoughts. The sun was setting over the lake again, and Carolus had gone inside to consult with Abe and a few of the others about the following morning when they would make their assault on the Syndicate compound. Jonah didn’t know if he felt ready, but at the moment he didn’t care.
Sprawled out on the deck with his head drooping slightly over the edge, he was trying his best to recover when he heard Rebekah’s voice next to him. “Didn’t wear you out too much, did I?”
Turning to look at her, he realized tha
t she had already gone back into human form, and was wearing that strangely unconcerned smile that she always seemed to wear. By now he had come to realize that it was a sort of mask, something that made her real emotions hard to read, something that made her generally inscrutable. It was frustrating. “You did, but, I suppose that’s the point.”
“I suppose you’re right,” she agreed, sitting on the edge of the deck with her legs dangling, peering out over the lake. “I wanted to tell you that you’ve been doing great. Carolus thinks so too, he’s awfully proud of you.”
“If you insist. Don’t know how much it’s going to matter, tomorrow.”
A slight breeze ruffled her ruddy locks of hair, something that he had seen many a time. She was still beautiful to him, and while she had not come across as anything less than friendly since the day after the incident at the hotel, she still felt unapproachable to Jonah. It was immensely frustrating. “Well, try not to worry about that. Just do your best and we’ll take care of the rest. It’s not like they’re going to throw you to the wolves, and besides. I’ll watch your back.”
He almost scowled at the thought. She had grown abruptly so friendly since they had arrived at the mansion that he simply could not help but to imagine she was doing it out of a sense of duty, and for some reason that infuriated him. “There’s a few things I’ve been meaning to ask you,” he muttered, almost experimentally.
She twisted her head around to regard him a little coolly with her bright green eyes, narrowing ever so slightly. “What do you mean?”
