Monsters, Book Two: Hour of the Dragon

by Heather Killough-Walden

  “You’re new here, aren’t you?” she asked.

  I couldn’t answer.

  But she gave a small laugh good-naturedly. “I just ask because you seem a little lost.” She stopped right in front of me and waited.

  I still couldn’t answer.

  More soft laughter, like crystal rain. “I’m guessing that’s a yes. Tell you what, I’m headed to the admin offices right now if you wanna tag along?”

  That was how she was. She was straight-forward, kind, helpful, and not at all shy.

  I wasn’t lost, not in that way at least. But I would have said or done anything in that moment for an excuse to remain in her company. So I finally came-to, thanked her, and gave her my best killer smile.

  I admit I felt immense relief when she blushed. For a second, I’d been afraid this girl was so different, so vastly out of my league, she wouldn’t fall for my normally foolproof charms. But it looked like I’d been afraid for nothing. She was falling for them after all.

  That single meeting in those halls on that momentous Friday in 1966 was the most important few minutes of my life. But it wouldn’t be until a year and a half had passed and the snow was piling up in December of ‘67 that I’d realize she wasn’t the one falling hard in the school hallway that first day.

  I was.

  Leia and I became friends. It’s rare for a dragon my age to say that about a human. Human life is so fleeting, it barely registers for us sometimes. But the days I spent with Annaleia were worth more than centuries. We became the best of friends. The things she taught me about life, freedom, and what they were both worth… I thought I’d already known. But sometimes it takes a fresh perspective, and a beautiful new set of eyes.

  She had this way of boiling down a situation to its fundamental roots, of stepping back from the picture and taking me with her. She would monologue like the best litigator, using the most imaginative analogies that somehow packed an un-pulled punch. I loved the sound of her voice, the reason in her mind, the way she saw the universe. It was different. She was so damn different.

  I was the only one to call her Leia. Most called her Anna. But my teasing nickname for her of “White Rain” eventually truncated to “Raindrop,” and it was something she seemed to like very much. It also suited her. She was one human amongst billions, but as fresh as a spring storm, and just as new to me. I only used the name when she was around. When she was looking at me. Then it was like I could taste her, like catching a drop of storm on my tongue in May.

  Annaleia Faith was what I think you’d get if you turned a dragon into a human permanently. She was strong and brave. By that I don’t mean she could bench press two-twenty. I mean she didn’t let anyone push her around. Like a dragon. Every guy in my class wanted to get under the sheets with her, but Leia had no interest in any of them. She didn’t let them bully or cow or shame her horizontal. She just smiled winsomely and shrugged off their taunting, carefree and confident. Just like a dragon.

  And every now and then she would even effortlessly cut them to the quick with another of her analogies. Her talent for wit was as bottomless as her imagination. And whatever poor schmuck had tried to get under her skin would slink away, a little less sure of himself and a lot more desperate. I could smell it on them… that need for her.

  Every time she stopped them cold, it only grew stronger.

  I sometimes used that smell to track them down after the fact and kick them into the following week. Retribution felt good, and I’m no saint. But payback had to go down when Leia wouldn’t find out. She’d have given me hell if she’d known it was me who sometimes put those boys in the hospital. No matter what they’d done to her, she was just that kind of person. She hated seeing people suffer. She hated pain in any form.

  That was maybe a little less like a dragon.

  Leia was also strong in that she could take bad news with the fortitude of a soldier; something I learned very quickly. It turned out her father had died earlier the same year we met, near the end of the previous school term. She claimed that because he’d been sick for a while it made his death easier to take. But I knew she was holding something else back.

  In mid-October of ‘66, when she started working every night at a diner near her house and I could tell she was getting tired, I found out what that was. “Raindrop,” I finally sighed, gently taking her elbow until she turned in the hall to face me. “You just got a C on your physics exam, and you love physics. I’m not letting you leave the school until you level with me. What’s going on?”

  She told me her mother was pregnant. She explained that while her mother felt blessed to have that piece of her father still with her after his death, the news was also a devastating blow. The sad truth was that in 1966 a woman wasn’t allowed to keep her job if she conceived. By October her mother was going on six months, and it was impossible for her to hide the pregnancy any longer. She’d been fired.

  Annaleia had gone to work to support the family in her mother’s stead.

  I had fortunes to my name. I could have given her the world, and some nights I still lie awake and wonder why the fuck I didn’t. I tell myself what I told myself back then – that if I had offered, she would have just refused. What’s more, because she was smart she would wonder where the money came from. She would maybe even stop trusting me. Then she would push me away. I couldn’t let that happen. Not for anything.

  But whatever my stupid reasons, I let her burn her free time with other people, customers in a diner, co-workers, strangers, when I wanted her all to myself.

  My remedy for this dilemma was to acquire a job in the same diner where she worked. That part was easy. Dragons are attractive no matter the form they take, and the diner’s owner recognized a pull when he saw one. More people came to eat, and yeah I used my magic to make sure every customer capable of doing so would leave massive tips for Leia. It usually turned out they were going to anyway. She was beautiful too. She was also sweet. So, what asshole wouldn’t tip her?

  With the extra help, it went a little easier on her, and we were able to spend more time together. Back then Philly was dangerous in that area of town at night. I kept her safe, especially when she wasn’t aware I was doing so. We wrapped up work nights with homework sessions over tea or coffee and pastries. Always pastries. She loved them as much as I did, hell I think she loved them more. Though you’d never know it to look at her. It was probably that mind of hers running full tilt twenty-four-seven that kept the weight off.

  Sometimes she stayed over in the apartment I had convinced her my always-away-on-business uncle owned. She would fall asleep in my arms on the couch.

  She felt so good against me, warm and soft. Yielding. She trusted me. I can’t tell you what that means to a monster like me. In her dreams, she would twitch or laugh softly, and I found myself rapt. There was nothing more interesting. Nothing more pure.

  Those nights, I stayed up until morning just to listen to her. I can’t tell you the depth of the imagination on that girl. While she slept, she came up with shit that was way ahead of her time, inventions, movie plots, musical numbers… it was like her dreams were an outlet for a mind that wouldn’t stop churning, stop producing. In a world where she was forced to work so hard at something as mindless as waitressing, knowing how brilliant she actually was underneath was more tragic than ever. But I knew she felt she had no choice, and I knew better than to mess with the system she’d set up.

  I said nothing. Instead I cherished the time I had to hold her against me and watch her face and listen to her breathe. I memorized her in those moments. And then we slept, nothing more. No matter how much I might have wanted it, and I fucking wanted it, there wasn’t anything more. Hell, some nights I was diamond-hard for hours, to the point of very real torture, before I would allow the powerful magic running through my veins to bring my body back under control. I almost enjoyed the punishment. It was part of being with her, and I wanted to experience every part of being with her.

  I was falling in
love. Me. A dragon, an ancient dragon – an ancient black dragon. The most ruthless and admittedly the loneliest of our kind. Falling in love. I realized as much when I realized that I respected her enough to never push the subject of sex between us.

  A black dragon respecting someone? I’m laughing as I write this. Thinking on it now, I realize such a thing is unheard-of, and if you know dragons then you probably don’t even believe me when I admit it. But it’s true. And I also realize now how even more special that made Annaleia. My precious, pure, and refreshingly new Raindrop.

  We continued in this vein for a year and a half, she and I.

  Then December of ’67 came, and Annaleia grew increasingly quiet. She was troubled, and she managed to hide it from everyone but me. I knew her too well to mistake the distance in her gaze for anything but worry and stress. Something was wrong. But when I questioned her, she insisted I was imagining things.

  Right. Imagining things. That was her shtick, not mine. Dragons aren’t known for their imaginations, especially my kind. They’re known for burning villages and eating priests. I wasn’t imagining squat.

  If I’d only been a vampire rather than a dragon, I could have read her thoughts. By the time Christmas rolled around, she was so distracted, I thought about using magic that was at the time considered forbidden. Warlock magic. I knew a few warlocks… they owed me favors. And that was the kind of magic it took to break into a person’s mind.

  It was my fear of damaging our friendship that kept me from actually doing it.

  Then late Christmas Eve, she came to me in a snowstorm. At first I was pissed as hell that she’d taken to the streets in that insane mess. There was actual lightning running through that blizzard. It was rare enough that I wondered if something supernatural was going on. There were a few rare breeds who could pull off weather like that.

  But the moment she parked in my driveway and turned off her engine, I forgot about everything but her. I’d sensed her coming – maybe from miles away – and I was already standing on my front doorstep when she opened her car door and climbed out. Our eyes met.

  My breath went completely still in my chest; my lungs were paralyzed. There was more storm going on inside that look of hers than there was in the tempest outside. It was a violet-colored supernova.

  She broke into a run toward me, and I met her more than half-way. She put her hands on my chest and said, “I want you to be the one.”

  I will never in my life – never – forget the way she said those words and what they meant. Fuck… fifty years later, I hear them every time it gets too quiet. Every time I’m too alone. One of the reasons I ride now is because a V-twin engine is loud enough to drown out the sound of that memory.

  I didn’t ask her for clarification. No man would need it. I could see it in her eyes, I could hear it in the crazy beat of her heart, and I could scent it on the wind. For whatever reason, she wanted me. She even needed me.

  Finally.

  I wrapped my arms around her, crushed her to me, and my lips slammed down on hers with all the hunger I’d held in check for sixteen months. While my mind practically detonated, I bent and lifted her, cradling her against me to carry her into my home.

  That night, I shut out the dragon in me entirely. It was the first time I’d ever done so in my life. A dragon can do this, if and when he wants. With a shit ton of effort, we can forsake ourselves, pushing our true natures so far back, those natures become temporarily inaccessible to us. We can do it for an hour or a decade, even a century. Like setting an alarm clock, we shove the beast away, and wait for the time to run out. Stories claim that some dragons have lost themselves permanently this way, that they wander the realms as humans or fae or shadows, in time completely forgetting that their forms are fake and borrowed and that their true nature is massive, scaled, and magnificent. We even have names for those lost souls.

  But I wouldn’t be one. My “alarm” was set for only one night. I’m proud to be a dragon, but I refused to allow the monster in me to ruin this moment. I would not ask anything of Leia that she wasn’t willing or ready to give. She was too special and this night too precious, and the beast in me was too strong and too dangerous. It was too hungry. I couldn’t let it harm my best friend in any way. Especially the way it so badly wanted to – with a sacred bite and its permanent mark that would make her mine once and for all.

  That night, I was gentle. It wasn’t easy, but I would have done it if it were a thousand times harder. The gift she was giving me was the most beloved thing I’d ever been given. Patiently and deftly, I guided her and helped her, awakening the sensations within her that would eventually cloud her mind with lust, and finally ecstasy.

  It’s true what they say; dragons love treasure. But in ten thousand years, I’d never unwrapped anything as priceless as Annaleia. It wasn’t her physical virginity I cared about. It was the fact that she was trusting me with it. It was the fact that she’d out-and-out said she wanted me to be the one.

  That was what drove me that night, what filled me with white-hot need and hotter bliss, and took us both to the edge of ecstasy and shoved us over it again and again. And again.

  We fell asleep in each other’s arms. We were in the living room when we finally succumbed to exhaustion, and her long rose-gold hair was spread out over my chest. The silken strands shimmered in the glow of the crackling fire. I remember running my hand over those strands, marveling at their pure scent and satin feel… until I surrendered to the deep, peaceful sleep that only the complete satisfaction of happiness can provide.

  When morning came, Annaleia was gone.

  I kept my shit together. So she’d left. Big deal, right? Maybe she had to go home for her mother. Her mom’s due date was January 4th, but the last few weeks of a third trimester were always touch-and-go in a pregnancy.

  No one answered Leia’s home phone. I called the hospital, figuring they’d for sure had to go there. But no one under the name “Faith” had checked in.

  I drove to her house, keeping up the calm human pretense.

  The house was empty, no furniture, no car, no pregnant mother, nothing. There wasn’t even a “For Sale” sign in the front yard. No one in the neighborhood had any idea where they’d gone, in fact no one had even heard of them. It was a live-and-let-die neighborhood, but that level of ignorance was unbelievable. Literally.

  I won’t bother describing the panic and knee-jerk fury that came over me. Suffice it to say, I developed a new hatred that day, this one for myself. If I hadn’t forced my dragon into submission, I wouldn’t have been so susceptible to human weakness and its need for sleep. I would have noticed when she’d gotten up to leave, heard her leave, felt her.

  But in the grip of my love for her, I’d let my guard down in the biggest and worst way.

  The dragon I held at bay the night before was in full control as I slipped into hunting mode. I checked with the hospitals again just to be sure. I checked with the school next. I checked with the diner. None of them had a clue where she’d disappeared to.

  None of them had any clue she’d ever existed.

  And I knew first-hand no one was lying to me. I made sure of it.

  I had no leads. She was just gone.

  Over the year and a half that she’d known me, Annaleia had woven a brilliant tapestry of feelings in me I hadn’t realized was even possible for my kind, something bright and colorful against the field of black that was my soul. She’d sewn the final stitch to that tapestry on Christmas Eve.

  Then in the blink of an eye, she’d ruthlessly ripped the material away, leaving a gaping, jagged, bleeding hole where her presence had once been.

  I spent every second of the next year in the mortal realm searching for her, with no luck. On December 24th of 1968, I was in a body I’d made to look about ten years older and sitting at a seedy bar in Philly, one of around ten that were still open Christmas Eve. I was about to celebrate the anniversary of the utter annihilation of all three of my hearts when a man in a bla
ck leather motorcycle jacket walked through the door. The back of the jacket was decorated, and two others with the same jacket came in after him, but I knew right away he was their leader.

  He sat down next to me at the bar and told the bartender my drinks were on him.

  When I met his very blue gaze, I knew he wasn’t human. Not even close. Not even in the same universe kind of close. And I was fine with that. I hated humans right about then. Humans had ruined my life. In fact, I vowed never to suppress the dragon in me again in favor of a human. Never.

  The stranger didn’t ask me why I was drinking, yet somehow I had the feeling he knew. I could tell he understood. I was wrapped in a kind of pain that only the very old or very different could recognize and I was pretty sure he was both.

  I was a vessel of bitterness and regret, as doleful as that sounds. It’s just the damn truth. I had no idea what to do with myself any longer and wasn’t in the mood to talk or make friends. But a kind of silent camaraderie came over me that night as the two other motorcycle club members joined us as at the bar and the four of us drank. It was the quiet start of something different, something that would take me from one century into the next.

  I’ve accepted that life will never be as it was before Annaleia. The beast in me is a little darker, and unfortunately a little meaner. Pain will do that. But it turns out I’m not alone.

  Now I have twelve clan brothers. For our own reasons, we were all pulled into Cain’s club over time. We were given refuge in a leather jacket, and freedom in a V-twin.

  A white patch on our backs gives fair warning to the world of who and what we are:

  Monsters.

  Part Two – From the diary of Annaleia Faith

  It was November of 1967 when I learned the truth of what Hamlet had been trying to tell Horatio for more than four hundred years. There really was more in heaven and earth than was dreamt of in our philosophies. In his screenplay, Hamlet had been shouldered with the incredible burden of opening one’s eyes to the limited knowledge of humanity. Of course, he was doomed to fail. Humans are the most stubborn of the realms’ races.