Betrothed to the Dragon (Lick of Fire)

by Kara Lockharte

  He smiled with sharp pointed teeth that hadn’t been there before. “We’ve been searching for you for a long time. The fox is stubborn but we knew she would bring us to you.”

  Cold dread coated my skin as I realized what he was. He had been human, once but was now a flesh puppet controlled and piloted by the Devourer.

  The man took another grinning step toward me, likely expecting me to turn and run. I extended my umbrella as I screamed and charged, taking him by surprise. He held his arms up, protecting his face from the coming blow.

  I ducked and hit him in the legs.

  His knees buckled and he crashed to the cement.

  “Hey,” I heard him yelling. “The black bitch stole my wallet!”

  Blood pounded in my head as I scanned the streets, dreading the sound of sirens or the appearance of a trigger-happy cop. I ran. I ran with everything I had, years and years of track and training all for the inevitable day I’d have to use it.

  I sprinted across six lanes of traffic, ignoring the shrieks of the horns. I looked back to see the man stuck on the other side. I was on Hunter’s block. I just had to get to his building. Dragons always had some sort of invisible protections on their domains, which would extend to the land it was built on. All I had to do was cross the threshold.

  I ran, this time not looking back, dashing as hard as I could, the contents of my backpack bouncing as I shoved my way into the double doors of the gilded foyer.

  Classical music played, intermingling with the gentle sounds of a trickling fountain and a doorman who didn’t even look up from his phone. From the tinny sound of laser swords and dramatic music, he was in the middle of watching a movie.

  I sought to catch my breath, leaning against the wall, until the doorman finally deigned to speak to me. “You got a package?” he said, still not looking at me.

  “What?” I remembered the backpack I wore and realized he must have thought I was a messenger. “No, I’m here to see Hunter.”

  The doorman gave me an irritated glance, pausing his movie mid-explosion. “Just a second.”

  It seemed like an eternity as the doorman called. I kept my gaze on the glass doors, waiting for the man to show up.

  “It doesn’t seem like he’s in.” He went back to his smartphone’s screen, and immediately I heard pew-pew laser guns.

  I felt as if I had been punched in the stomach. I hadn’t known how much I had been relying on Hunter to be there, until he wasn’t. “Do you know what time he’ll be back?”

  The doorman shrugged. “Could be today, could be tomorrow.”

  Fuck. “Do you have his number?”

  He sighed, pausing the movie again. “Leave a message.” He set a pen and a pad of paper on the counter in front of me and resumed the movie.

  I picked up the pen and froze. What would I say to him?

  Hi, I need help, come rescue me.

  Fuck no. That wasn’t me.

  Hunter. When you have time, let’s talk. Here’s my new number.

  I wrote the note, slid the pad back to the doorman, and stopped. I retrieved the pad.

  Just in case my phone gets broken again, here’s my email.

  The doorman put the note on top of his desk. “I’ll make sure he gets it.”

  I looked back at the dark, cold, wet streets, and thought of the man lying in wait.

  I turned back to the doorman. “Can you call a cab for me?”

  The doorman frowned and was clearly about to throw me out.

  “Come on,” I said, trying a different tack. “Do you think any cab is going to stop for me if I try to hail them at this time of night?”

  His glare didn’t change. I didn’t blame him; the movie sounded like it was just getting to the good part.

  “I’m happy to tell you what happens next. They make it to the planet and realize—”

  He picked up the phone. “Okay, already. I’ll get you a cab.”

  5

  A cab ride to a parking lot of a 24-hour used car lot in Queens, resulted in a functional if beat up old Honda that still smelled of onions. After a nerve-wracking, barely deer-avoiding, four-hour drive to the forests of upstate New York later, I pulled up to a small lakeside cabin. My high beams flashed on the massive stone lions flanking the open driveway. I stopped at the invisible line where my grandmother’s land began, rolled down the window, and yelled into the dark.

  “Mack and Jack, wake up. It’s me.”

  The eyes of the stone lions flared red in response. They stretched, bowed, and then resumed their position.

  With the protections activated, I continued onto the gravel and parked beside the back-porch door.

  Wooden wind ornaments I’d made at camp when I was twelve chimed as I opened the door. The scent of night-blooming jasmine hit me. Tears filled my eyes as I flicked on the lights. Vines of Grandma’s favorite tropical plant had twined upward and over the trellises. Of all the treasures she had amassed over the centuries—scrolls, jewelry, silks—the cutting from the plant had been one of the few things she’d rescued while fleeing the place of my birth. The childhood scent of my summers enveloped me, that of oranges mingled with jasmine. A brown plaid couch on a faded blue oriental rug along with a scratched-up coffee table with a laminated crayon drawing turned into a placemat and a faded copy of a Nancy Drew novel.

  I let out a breath I hadn’t even known I was holding and dropped my bag by the door.

  Finally. Safety.

  I headed over to the carved rosewood side table, where a bowl of oranges in blue-and-white china sat, flanked by two incense burners filled with ash. Above the table, a scroll of a painted tree reached to the top of the thirty-foot ceiling, the names of my ancestors.

  But at the very bottom of the scroll, at my eye-level were the names of the parents I had never known.

  I reached into the drawer for matches and lit the incense in greeting and memory and then watched the slender white smoke threads spiral upward.

  “Hi, Mom. Hi, Dad.”

  Incense was only lit for the dead. I did not light one for Grandma. She was still alive somewhere.

  She had to be.

  The brown plaid couch creaked as I sank into it. I glanced at my phone for the thousandth time. The bars of service kept moving between one and none. I’d forgotten how terrible cell service was up here. I had gotten a text message from Hunter at some point, but it had been blank. And it wasn’t like the cabin had Wi-Fi; Grandma had been planning to add it this summer.

  I grabbed a pillow from the couch and wrapped my arms around it.

  I was not going to cry.

  But even as I vowed not to, I could feel tears streaming down my cheeks.

  It was all my fault.

  And the Devourer was still out there.

  My stomach churned with a bone-chilling cold.

  Grandma was one of the greatest of our kind. She had outlasted dynasties and outlived all her children and grandchildren. And now she, like my parents, was going to die because of me.

  I picked up the laminated drawing I had made when I was—five? Six? We were making cupcakes together. In the sky, my parents stood on a cloud, smiling.

  I placed the drawing face-down on the table. I was ashamed to look at it, ashamed to face my grandmother, ashamed to be what I was.

  Grandma wouldn’t have run. She wouldn’t be looking for some random guy to save her. No, she would have laughed, waved her hands, and turned him into a frog or something.

  I stared at a knot in the wooden floor, the one that looked like an ugly dog, and willed myself not to cry. This cabin was probably the last refuge of my grandmother’s power. Grandma’s magic wasn’t just limited to what she could do physically but included the self-sustaining magical algorithms she could build into ordinary objects. It was a rare ability, even among shen. Like a house with electricity, I could turn on and off light switches, but wiring the house? Generating the power? That was beyond me.

  This house could be all I had left of her.

&n
bsp; I took a shaky breath. I wasn’t leaving this place. Ever since I had been young, she had drilled into me what I was to do in the event something happened to her: come to this cabin and wait.

  Wait for assistance, Grandma had always said.

  But then a thought struck me—who was I waiting for help from? Somehow she had left that part out. And why had I never thought to ask?

  When my magic didn’t manifest, more than a few Shen that were left shunned us, afraid that they might “catch” my disability. Not all of them, but enough to hurt.

  I wanted to scream. Grandma and her always so-secret plans. I cursed my selfishness, thinking of the message I had left for Hunter. I couldn’t drag him into this. I couldn’t let another person die protecting me.

  I stood up and moved around the room, holding up the phone like a talisman hoping to get just a few more bars. Still nothing.

  I sank back into the couch.

  I hated this, hated the fact that I was just waiting for someone to fucking come and save me.

  I walked back to the bowl of oranges and picked one up. I was startled by the green mold underneath.

  My grandmother’s magic kept the jasmine blooming and the oranges fresh. She wouldn’t have let the oranges mold, not unless…

  I’d begun to lower the orange back into the bowl when a knock at the door startled me. I dropped the orange on the lip of the bowl, and in my efforts to catch it, I knocked over the entire bowl. Pieces of delicate porcelain shattered as oranges, all partially furred with green mold, rolled across the floor.

  Alarm thudded through my veins. There should be no way anyone reached the door without tripping a ward alarm.

  But the wards had remained silent.

  I grabbed my umbrella from the stand and asked, “Hello?”

  The knocking stopped.

  I swallowed, went to the door, turned on the porch light, and looked out the peephole.

  No one was there.

  “Mack, Jack,” I called, my voice shakier than I expected. “Anything out there?”

  The distinct sound of heavy thumps came from the back of the house.

  I ran to the back door, pulled back the curtains, and turned on the backyard lights, even as I was terrified of what I would find.

  Nothing. There was nothing.

  “Mack? Jack?”

  No response.

  I called their names again.

  Something exploded toward the front of the house. I ran back to the door, looked through the peephole again, and saw the glowing, crumbled remains of the two stone lions.

  I tightened my grip on the umbrella, hot tears streaming down my cheeks. Mack and Jack weren’t even alive, just magically programmed constructs. But I had known them all my life, had decorated them with plastic leis and cheap Mardi Gras necklaces when I was six.

  I should have felt sorrow. Fear would have been a more rational emotion.

  But my family was gone, my grandmother was gone, all because of me, and all I had left of them was this place and my anger.

  More thumps banged in the back.

  I made sure the front door was locked and went to the back, and turned on the back porch lights, half expecting to see nothing.

  At the boundaries of the wards, a crowd of shrouded semi-human figures with glowing eyes, stared.

  I closed the curtains and turned my back, bracing myself against the wall, angling my shaking umbrella across my body.

  Well, those things were almost certainly not the help I was looking for.

  Wait, why was my umbrella shaking? I looked at my hands and realized it wasn’t my umbrella. It was my hand, trembling.

  My heart was pounding so fast. Grandma’s wards would hold against whatever those things were. They had to hold until help arrived.

  Across the room, the incense curled around my father’s name. Stormmaker. Lightning had obeyed him, and the thunderclap he’d made with his wings had shattered buildings.

  He would never have cowered like this. Nor would my mother or my grandmother.

  I dove for the trunk that served as a coffee table, unlocked it, and flung open the lid to find a gray vest and gray gloves inside. I put those on and steel-like metal vambraces. There were black shin guards, and I put those on too.

  At the bottom of the trunk lay a sheathed sword with its pommel partially melted, but the blade was still functional.

  It had been my father’s. I could use it to bargain with Hunter.

  I picked up the umbrella and headed for the back door. Slowly, I walked towards the back, and smelled something…burning. It smelled awful, industrial and chemical.

  Then I realized what that odor was. The shadow things were testing the wards, burning themselves out against the invisible barrier with tiny little sparks.

  The wards were too spread out. To intensify their strength against these things, I had to shrink them back.

  Which would bring those things even closer.

  I swallowed, putting my hand on the cabin walls. “Move back.”

  Grandma’s magical programming was way better than some of the smart-houses being built, allowing even someone like non-magical me to manipulate her wards. The barrier shrank, but as it did, the walls strengthened. Now the shadows huddled closer, having taken a more solid human form, but with bald skulls and glowing eyes. I didn’t know exactly what they were, but I didn’t need to: the wards were built with the Devourer’s magic in mind.

  Something huge landed in the darkness beyond the shadows.

  The shadows turned swarming into the darkness.

  Fire erupted, blindingly bright.

  I shut my eyes, willing my vision to return.

  A massive, five-toed black reptilian claw emerged from the darkness, followed by a large, smoking snout and bright golden eyes. The black dragon stepped fully into the light. He was as big as a bus, his tail twitching. He watched the cabin with a golden gaze.

  Was this the help that was supposed to come?

  Was it Hunter?

  I unlocked and opened the door. Smoke and bits of swirling ash filled the air.

  I took a step out of the cabin. Steam hissed from the dragon’s scales as rain began to fall.

  It really was a dragon.

  My family was made up of fantastical creatures of human mythology. Mermaids, firebirds, unicorns, I had met, and if I had been whole, I would have been just like one of them.

  And yet, seeing a dragon, for the first time, was another experience all together.

  The dragon blurred, scales sliding and reforming.

  They weren’t of this world, they weren’t like us shen.

  Hunter stood there in human form.

  Surrounded by darkness, the mortal, affable façade of the man I had joked about Hoboken with seemed to have vanished. His dark hair was slickening from the rain. His shoulders, his arms, his torso body was so cut, so chiseled, he was basically the manifestation of masculine perfection. Steam hissed when it hit his flesh as it had the dragon’s scales, surrounding him. Some drops slid down his very naked body, and I told myself I was keeping my eyes on his face to be appropriate, but the truth was I was captured by that golden gaze. His look was so intense, there had to be magic behind it.

  But dragons didn’t do that kind of mental hypnosis magic, did they? As a shen, I should be immune to such tricks, but then again, I was no proper functioning shen.

  I swallowed, my mouth as dry as my hair was wet.

  I knew what I looked like to him with my mismatched armor and umbrella; liked a drowned rodent.

  “You’re not easy to find,” he said.

  “How did you do it?”

  “Magic,” he said with a straight face.

  I gave him a look of disbelief.

  The corners of his mouth turned up, and it was like the sun had come out. “You expect me to say something else?”

  Something huge and four footed leapt from the shadows, launching itself at Hunter’s back.

  “Watch out,” I screamed, even as
I knew it was too late.

  6

  I had never seen a dragon fight.

  He moved with the quickness of a shen, turning and punching the beast in the side of its head to bring it down. It was no natural thing of this world, with a flat, round rubbery face and rows and rows of serrated teeth. Its tiny eyes and scaled tail brought to mind a strange cross between a shark, wolf, and a lizard.

  The thing tried to scrabble to its feet, but Hunter had put his foot on its side, holding it in place. He brought another fist down on the thing’s neck. The crack resounded through the yard.

  The air filled with unearthly squeals.

  Two more shark-wolves dashed from the darkness. He picked up the corpse of the thing on the ground. It burst into flame as he swung it. One of the shark-wolves dodged, but he hit another and it ignited.

  I couldn’t stand by and let him do this on his own. No one else should die for someone as useless as me. I ran to the edge of the barrier. “Hey! I’m over here!”

  Three shark-wolves ran for me.

  Hunter yelled, but more leapt toward him and blocked his path to me.

  The three shark-wolves snapped and crashed into my grandmother’s invisible barrier.

  “Hold,” I said.

  The wards solidified, holding the shark-wolves in midair. They struggled and hung there, snapping with massive rows of teeth. Tentacles tipped with tiny mouths extended itself from the shark-wolves’ throats, like eyeless glistening eels.

  I took Grandma’s umbrella and mentally focused on the switch she had made for me. It shimmered into a black sword. I swung it, and it cut through them in an instant.

  Task accomplished, the sword reformed itself into an umbrella.

  I looked to Hunter. There were shark-wolf bodies strewn around his feet. He stepped over them and came to the barrier, stopping in front of me.

  “Come in,” I said. The barrier shimmered an opening, and Hunter stepped inside. He was wet, naked, and splattered with shark-wolf gore, yet an irrational heat surged forth at his nearness. I closed the barrier behind him.