by CK Dawn
Not a dragon mimicking the night to absolute invisibility. Not a bison-sized beast with giant six-taloned hand-claws. Not a beast who, when he wasn’t completely hiding himself, smelled of sunshine and cinnamon and oranges.
Orel touched nothing.
“Orel…” she said. What could she say? You’re imagining a dragon?
Or was someone manipulating him to think he saw a dragon? Technically, a Shifter with morphing abilities could morph themselves into a dragon. Supposedly, some idiot tried to every century or so, but soon realized that changing from the basic human body plan caused internal organ problems, not to mention issues with mass and density.
Her father would nod his head and dismiss such stupidity out of hand. “Shifters are not magic, daughter,” he’d say. “One cannot make a body break the rules of physics and biology.” So no werewolves, or werecats, or weredragons. And anyone who tried ended up dying a painful, twisted-up death that not even the most skilled healers could undo.
Manipulating perception was so, so much easier than manipulating reality. Which made enthrallers, of the three types of Shifters, the most dangerous in immediate, close quarters.
Hell, some enthrallers could force a bloodhound to think they were scenting trails that weren’t there. All you needed was refined calling scents and the skill to target your attack.
So little Orel probably believed down to his bones that he was a friend to the Dracae. That his imaginary friend, Drako, was as real as the real beasts.
Thing was, knowing that you might be enthralled was half the battle against any enthraller. Even normals with their hackles up had a chance against a class-two enthraller trying to get them to do something they didn’t want to do.
Unless you were a little boy plucked from your home and tossed into Wisconsin Dells. A little boy who needed an imaginary friend.
“Hello, Drako,” Daisy said. “Why can’t I see you?”
Orel grinned and stood up straight as if proud of how well he’d trained his dragon. “Real dragons are invisible to everyone except their humans.”
He knew about the dragons’ mimicking ability. And he understood at least something about the human-dragon bond. More than an eight-year-old living with a class-three enthraller should know.
“I won’t hurt you, Drako,” she said.
“Oh, we know,” Orel said. “You’re here to heal him.” He rubbed at the air as if rubbing the side of a large beast. “We knew after you healed the raccoon.”
She stepped closer. Real dragons mimicked. They didn’t vanish. Any real beast still breathed, still stomped on plants, and was still touchable.
Nothing but air slid along her outstretched palm.
“He needs a healing?” She’d heal this imaginary dragon if it helped Orel through whatever set him on this path. “He didn’t get hit by a car, too, did he?”
Orel frowned. He leaned into the air and wrapped his arms around the dragon that wasn’t there.
A person could not fake leaning against a dragon. Different muscles fired when leaning into a beast who took your weight than when you leaned on air. Your body still had to hold itself up. Your core responded differently, as did your back and your arms. Differently enough that even in the night gloom illuminated only by the scatter from her motorcycle’s headlight and the dim lights on the sign, anyone who understood what to look for would know immediately if there was a dragon about.
Drako was not real, no matter what Orel believed.
“Sometimes I hear him talking to me,” Orel said. “Sometimes not. If you heal him, he will talk to me all the time.”
Dragons did not talk. Not like people, anyway. “What do you mean, Orel?”
“He’s not always the same,” Orel said.
Drako acted differently at different times? “Does he ever ask you to do things you don’t want to?” Because if Nax was making this boy—
A man appeared directly off Daisy’s left elbow. A huge man, one a couple inches taller than her five eleven frame, and with shoulders at least half again her width. His t-shirt stretched around his large biceps. He glared down at her with shadow-dark eyes from under an unruly mop of curly dark hair. A full-but-trimmed beard hid most of his face.
He looked like Nax. A massive, scaled-up, hairy version of Nax.
“Liar!” Daisy hissed, and stepped back.
She blinked, and the man she thought was mega-Nax clearly was not.
No, her perception had been wrong.
“Ladon?” she said.
Ten
No, not Ladon. Not a person. A phantom.
Not her friend and the man who taught her how to defend herself. Not Ladon-Human, the human half of the pair known to so many of the long immortal by their Roman Empire honorific, the Dracos.
Daisy blinked again. She could have sworn she saw Ladon. Or a huge man who looked like Nax. Just for a moment.
But only the evening’s darkness filled the space off her left elbow. “What the hell?” she muttered. She inhaled. No calling scents in the air.
Orel touched her arm. “Drako sometimes does that,” he said.
Daisy looked down at her young friend. “Does what?”
Orel looked as if he wanted to roll his eyes. “Mimics, Daisy.” You know that, his face clearly said.
The dragons’ hides reminded Daisy of the skin of a cephalopod—the cuttlefish and octopuses that changed colors and textures to camouflage themselves from predators. The dragons operated in much the same way, and happened to be extraordinarily good at it.
But they were real creatures who walked a real world, and even they had their limits. The real dragons would mirror sometimes, but they never pretended to be a person. It would be difficult, anyway, because both beasts were approximately her height at the shoulder, which meant that their main “screen” space where they would need to mimic a person’s face sat on the upper area on the sides of their bodies. That area curved toward their uneven and complicated back ridges. And that didn’t take into account the open air under their bellies.
Mirroring a human was, for the dragons, sort of like projecting a picture onto the side of a bison. They could contort themselves enough to pull off such a reflection, though, if they had to.
But only if they had to. And interacting with Daisy was not a “had to” situation.
And Orel had leaned against the air.
Daisy shook her head. Every little flicker made her second guess what she saw. Not even her nose seemed to be telling her the truth.
“He says I must fit in to stay safe,” Orel said. “He does what he must to protect me.”
“By mimicking men?” At least one of the men had been Ladon.
She swung her hands around hoping to catch something. What was the illusion here? Nax or the imaginary dragon friend?
“Yes.” Orel’s defiance filled the air with the prickliness of a strong static charge. But anxiety also wafted off him in ice-scented waves.
He smelled as if he’d run off again at any second.
Daisy bent over to look Orel in the eyes. “Is ‘fitting in’ why you learned English so quickly after coming here?”
Orel nodded yes.
Her stomach sank. How terrified was the kid? And of what?
She picked up nothing beyond Orel’s scent-scape and the damned creeping Charlie. She would never look at ground ivy the same way again.
But answers about Orel’s past would not give her answers about Orel’s imaginary friend in the present. “Ask Drako to show himself.” She looked around. “I can’t heal what I can’t see and touch.”
It was a partial lie; she probably could heal an animal she couldn’t see, as long as she could feel its body.
Orel looked up as if looking at a dragon’s head. “Not this close to the road,” he said.
Of course not, she thought. And once again, liar flooded in from somewhere below her consciousness.
Some part of this was a big, fat, ugly lie. Pieces weren’t fitting together. Her attention mig
ht be warped and manipulated, but her gut still said not right.
And she would not go with a Fate—even a proto-Fate who was also likely being manipulated—to the isolated office and garage with lie hanging over her head. Not this time.
Not ever again.
“Orel, if he wants to be healed, he needs to show himself right now. Right here.”
Orel twitched. His eyes did the blank, dazed stare he’d been in when she found him. But he twitched again and it released.
He looked up and to the side as if listening to Drako. “He says you want to hurt me.”
“What? No!” Daisy faced the space where Drako most likely was. “Who are you? Why are you doing this?”
The trees rustled. The scent of adult male followed.
Nax walked out of the woods. “Orel?” He stopped just on the edge of the cycle’s circle of headlight shine. “What the hell are you doing out here with my son, Ms. Pavlovich?”
He wore the same blue t-shirt and jeans he’d had on when he helped her with the motorcycle. Same rag in his back pocket. Same mutating hot-to-cold-to-hot undertones to his hair and eyes.
His words dripped with insinuation.
Son of a bitch, Daisy thought. “I saw him sitting under the sign. I stopped to make sure he was okay.”
“On a motorcycle with a broken fuel line?”
Oh, he was good, all right.
“The fuel line is fine, Mr. Nax,” Daisy said.
Nax extended his hand to his son. “Orel, let’s go. It’s time for a bath and bed.”
Orel looked up at Daisy, then at his father, then back to Daisy. “But she is a healer, Father.”
Nax frowned. “Did you tell Ms. Pavlovich about your friend?” His words came out in the structured way a parent or a teacher uses when trying to admonish a child without being punitive—slowly and well-articulated, with a raised eyebrow at the end signaling that the child should have thought through their behavior first.
And now he was expecting Orel to do that thinking, and to rectify the problem he caused.
Except he hadn’t caused a problem.
Orel looked down at his feet. “Yes.”
Nax stayed on the edge of the light thrown by the sign and the bike’s headlight. “What did I tell you about your friend?”
“That it is okay to have a dragon friend but that I needed to remember what kind of dragon he is.” Orel sounded as if he was about to get a spanking.
“And what kind of dragon is your friend?”
“The kind like all the dragons in the stories.”
All the dragons in the stories. All the imaginary characters in imaginary worlds where Orel could go in his mind and not have to deal with his past or Wisconsin Dells or living out in the woods with his weird dad.
So she’d been correct about Orel’s friend being imaginary—but she still had questions.
“His friend seems to know a lot, Mr. Nax,” she said.
Nax frowned. “You talk a lot, Ms. Pavlovich.”
Those words, You talk a lot, Ms. Pavlovich, turned Daisy’s gut cold.
Run washed through her body. Not as a thought. Not as a decision. But as a deep-in-her- spine understanding.
But if she ran, Orel would be all by himself with this man who set off every single one of her danger vibes.
She backed toward Orel and placed her hand on his shoulder. “It’s okay,” Daisy said. “I understand about your friend.”
She bent over and looked him in the eye, though she kept Nax in her line of vision. “I had two friends when I left Australia to come to America.” They were stuffed toys, but Orel didn’t need to know that. “A koala and a kangaroo. They were my best friends until I felt safe where I lived.”
Orel frowned and narrowed his eyes. “Drako said you want to hurt me,” he whispered.
Then Orel ran for his father.
“Please leave, Ms. Pavlovich,” Nax said. “I do not take kindly to you coming around and frightening my son.” He pulled Orel close and hugged him to his side.
Liar, flickered again, the same way it flickered every time Nax walked into a situation.
Every single time.
Orel ran toward the driveway. Nax watched him go. “I know who you are, Ms. Pavlovich,” He slowly turned to face her. “I am surprised you are in Wisconsin Dells. I am surprised you feel safe in the territory of Shifters who do not work for your father. I am quite surprised.”
The Shifters of The Dells had no beef with her father. Daisy was well aware of the groups that did—and knew to stay out of their way. But The Dells was no more their territory than it was her father’s.
Or so she thought. Nax, it seemed, believed otherwise. And he wasn’t above using the threat of those groups as a weapon.
“Fuck you,” Daisy said.
Nax laughed. “Orel is not your business. My life here is not your business.” He pointed at the motorcycle. “Get back on your bike and leave us alone.”
Something about Orel’s life was wrong. It had to be wrong. Why else was she constantly thinking liar?
So much about tonight had been wrong.
He looked over his shoulder. “Do not come back.”
She should stay away. She should run. What choice did she have? Nax had made this bigger than him. Bigger than Orel or her. He’d made it about her father.
He’d pulled in her family.
No, she thought, and chased after Nax.
Eleven
Daisy parked the motorcycle on the gravel between the garage and the office. The sign on the oak tree by the shop and garage had been painted over, and the one hanging in front of the office had been removed.
Locks hung on all the doors—garage and office.
“Nax!” she yelled.
Daisy whipped a pebble at the closed and locked garage door. A hollow ping echoed off the metal and bounced around the small gravel parking area as if the surrounding buildings had always been empty.
Perhaps they always had been. Perhaps Orel and his father had been nothing more than a dream spun up by the damaged brain of a vet student who didn’t know how to ride a motorcycle.
No. She’d had enough of men—Shifter, Fate, normal-ass douchebag—trying to inflict non-reality onto her life.
Not again. Not on her. Not on anyone. Not when a child was involved.
The massive oak near the office rustled. Its leaves wavered in the late evening breeze, and an acorn dropped from a high-up branch. Tink, the acorn hit a branch. Tink tink tink, it hit another, bounced, hit the trunk, and dropped silently to the ground underneath.
The tree was trying to tell her something. What, she didn’t know.
Another acorn hit the sign nailed to the trunk.
The plank vibrated and for a split second, the dark green blankness jittered.
The color jittered. Not the sign. Not the tree. Not the shadows. Not the acorn or the breeze or the fresh scent of creeping Charlie—but the dark green Daisy perceived shook as if it couldn’t quite hold itself to that particular frequency of light.
Like it wore prosthetic make-up. Good make-up, the kind made by professionals that can, unless you look real close, make an actor look like an alien, or an old person, or someone completely different.
But the actor is still the actor, just wearing a disguise.
She touched the sign. The surface stuck to her fingers slightly, as one would expect something recently painted to stick. She sniffed. It smelled like paint.
Yet it jittered. Orel’s scent had also jittered.
Not once in her life had she even heard of an enthraller capable of changing someone’s full perception of reality. Enthrallers could command someone to ‘ignore’ them but not the world. Not things.
The fear tinked like an acorn down her spine—from one vertebra, to another, then another. By the time it hit her gut, her legs were ready to run.
“I told you to leave.”
Daisy whipped around. Nax stood no more than five feet away, well under the oak’s canopy
with her, and in the stance he always took with her—his arms crossed and his eyes narrow.
“I am a bloodhound enthraller,” she said. “It’s my secondary gift, but I’m good at it.” She wasn’t, but he didn’t need to know that.
“Yes, Ms. Pavlovich. I know your gifts.” He did not move.
She waved her hand as if the action would clear away whatever kept her from scenting him. “Explain how you consistently sneak up on me.”
Nax sniffed. “Combination of downwind approaches and the constant background calling scents I make.”
Lying, roared through her mind so loudly she wondered if she’d screamed it at him.
He sobered. “I told you to get off my property. You are not wanted here, do you understand? Leave my boy alone. This is your final warning. I will call the authorities.”
No he won’t, she thought. Something about the hiding, and the isolation, suggested that Nax did not socialize with other Shifters. His threat of calling in “people” was likely as hollow as his explanation of his sneakiness.
“Who, exactly, will you call?” Calling his bluff probably wasn’t the smartest idea, but it gave her a good excuse to pull out her phone. She swiped it open and held it up. “The Dells police department?”
Daisy pulled up the camera app. Shifter enthrallers couldn’t enthrall cameras, though a good one could enthrall a person to still see a falsehood even when everyone else saw the truth of photographic evidence.
She did her best to look as if she wasn’t taking photos. Hard, though, when the camera wouldn’t focus in the dark.
She took a step closer to get a better image. The shadows under the tree were messing with the phone’s light sensors and she damned well better not use the flash.
“Are you going to call the FBI? They’ll run you and Orel through all sorts of databases.” Maybe. Honestly, she didn’t know, but it sounded good.
“Put away your phone, woman,” Nax growled.
Nax squared his shoulders and he… flickered. Five-eight Nax suddenly felt a lot taller, and a lot broader, than he appeared.
Daisy blinked.
No, he looked like normal Nax. Not like the mega-Nax she saw earlier. The version Drako supposedly made. She snapped a photo. It might be blurry, but at least she would have something. She swiped to look at the picture.
