Flames to Free (Dred Dixon Chronicles Book 1)

by N. A. Grotepas

  “That’s a relief,” grandma said.

  I wasn’t listening. “It just showed up, Grandma, the powers. I knew it might, since I can see supernaturals. I just didn’t know where it came from. Thought maybe I was the mailman’s offspring.”

  Grandma laughed. “I don’t know about that. Unlikely. Your mother? She’d rather drink fresh milk while eating pizza and watching a movie than break her moral code.”

  Was that true? About the milk, pizza, and movies, my grandma was right. My mother hated all three, everyone knew that and she relished the chance to remind those who suggested she have anything to do with any one of those beastly abominations (her words).

  But I always thought my mother would have a way around a rule if she felt it might serve her. People were good at seeing themselves as the exception when the deck was stacked against them. Even if it wasn’t. If they believed it was, they could do it. Human nature.

  “Well, I think I’ll end this, once and for all,” Grams said. She used her magic to lower the creature and bring it down to our level.

  When I saw the creature closer, I knew it for a dryad. Put next to me, she would come to my waist. Her hair was red and fiery, her eyes an angry blue, and her lips a smirk, in defiance of whatever my grandma was about to do. The silvery cottonwood leaves clung to her like clothing and wisps of sheer robes hung from her shoulders. My grandma released some of the spell, and the dryad hissed and spewed things in a language I didn’t understand.

  Grams responded in the language the fae spoke. I’d never seen such power adorn my family matriarch. In fact, I hadn’t thought of my grandma as a matriarch, ever. I knew strength ran deeply through her—she’d endured so much in her life. Stories circulated among my family of things she’d done, and I knew there was a hidden reservoir of strength within her, the kind that could command armies or defy monarchs and forge new paths if necessary.

  And damn it was awesome to witness it.

  The dryad sputtered more angry words and my grandma listened, then responded.

  “What’s happening?” I asked, during a pause in their exchange.

  “The dryad has owned this tree longer than I have. She’s wanted me to leave her in peace for years. She’s angry about the rope. The ladder. The nails my grandkids drove into the flesh of her tree for fun. Iron in her tree. It’s torture.”

  “Oh god,” I whispered. “I never knew.”

  “Don’t obsess over this Dreddie. The dryad is connected to the tree, but everything in nature has its place.”

  Hank had so far been silent, but he spoke up now. “But, when you explain it that way, it does sound terrible.”

  “We might have chopped the tree down instead. I never did. For her.” Grams nodded toward the furious dryad.

  The dryad spoke again. “She will have to kill both of us to end this war.”

  “Oh,” I blinked, “you speak English.”

  “Do not speak to me, monster.”

  I nodded. “Oh, lovely. For a split second, I felt bad for you, though you just tried to kill me. Silly me.”

  “I wouldn’t have killed you. That was the tree.”

  I scoffed. “I see. The tree hates me now.”

  “Everyone knows trees hate us,” Hank said.

  “Yeah. Apparently, this is no giving tree,” I said.

  Hank laughed.

  Grams held her hand up and we quieted down. “Let us end this feud now, Izmelda. Leave! Or stay, in peace. But if you touch one of my grandchildren again. I will burn this tree to the ground. And you with it.”

  I took a step backwards. Hank touched my back to steady me when my heel caught on a lump of a root poking through the grass.

  My respect for my grandmother increased by a thousandfold. All the times that I’d defied her and she’d merely put me in time-out came flooding back to me. The lies I’d told about the strange dinners she’d made for me—the Hamburger Helper, the fresh peas from her garden, the creamed corn, all the other weird stuff I’d dumped into the compost pile in the ditch at the back of the lot—and never, never had I suffered such wrath as she was giving this member of the fae.

  The dryad, released from my grandma’s spell, leapt up and vanished.

  “Where did she go?” I asked.

  “Beyond our ken,” Grams said, enigmatically. “Where she lives always until she wants to be seen.”

  A cat meowed and began rubbing against my grandma’s legs.

  “I know, Uriel, I know it.” She reached down and scrubbed his gray head. The cat looked up at me with golden eyes, and began to purr.

  “Er,” Hank began, stepping back, a suspicious expression on his face, “she’s not the cat, is she?”

  Grams laughed. “Oh no, this is Uriel. The protector of the yard.”

  “Is Uriel magical?” Hank asked.

  “So far, no. But stranger things have happened.”

  “His name sounds old. Magical.”

  “It is, at that.”

  I needed a stiff drink and some time to process just what the hell had happened. It was all occurring too quickly.

  “Alright, look. Time to decompress everyone. This has been real, but now I need some Dred time. At the very least, I need to run to the gas station. I’ll be back, Grams. Come on, Hank.”

  23

  “No thanks,” Hank said, turning his nose up at the beer.

  I couldn’t blame him. It wasn’t the best, but it was what I could find in a pinch inside the tiny town’s gas station. Major brand. Tasted like urine, a quick solution to my problem—I was tense as hell and needed to relax. And the beer was my current crutch.

  So sue me.

  I steeled myself for the lecture I could feel bearing down on me about how crap Utah is for not having hard liquor for sale in grocery stores and gas stations. Hank would have preferred something different—Jameson Black. A glass of white wine. A shot of tequila. All things I’d seen him drink over the two months we’d been working together.

  We sat on the porch in lawn chairs and watched the sun setting after returning from the minuscule gas station. It painted orange and pinks across wisps of clouds. On the other side of the street, the neighbor sat in his khaki one-piece jumpsuit and watched us.

  Hank threw the toothpick he’d been chewing on out into the grass. “That guy’s unsettling.”

  “I know. He’s been doing that for ages, since I was a kid really. I’m sure it’s harmless.”

  “That you can think anything is harmless after nearly being crushed by a dryad, speaks volumes about your mental fortitude.”

  I snorted. “He’s just an old man. Probably lonely. Most of these people are long-time empty-nesters. They’ve watched the outside world change and become so different from what they once understood.”

  “How you feeling, Dred?” Hank asked, turning to look at me, maybe hearing something in my voice that I didn’t mean to be there.

  I could see the pinks of the sunset reflecting in his eyes. The concern in his tone made my stomach do a flip.

  This can’t happen, I heard a distant voice say in my mind.

  Why not? another, more rebellious voice asked. He’s a man. I’m a woman. When was the last time I’d had a boyfriend? When was the last time I’d slept with someone I could still see myself with in a year, in two years?

  I’m a picky woman. I wasn’t fond of one-night-stands, but I’d had a few—like you do, at times—and when that was the case, I was even more picky. Those flings, as infrequent as they’d been, had been attached to guys who’d never know the truth about me.

  It wasn’t often that I met a paranormal human male that I wanted in an intimate way who knew my big secret.

  “Like I’ll never trust another tree again,” I said, answering his question in a way that could deflect the probing.

  We both laughed.

  “Think you’ll have nightmares tonight?” he asked.

  “Fairly probable. What I’ll never wonder again is if my grams is safe down here all by herself.
”

  “How’s that for a twist? I wasn’t expecting it.”

  “She kicks more ass than I always thought. I wonder if my grandpa knew. Or was it like, he was gaslighted his whole life, like Darrin in Bewitched. Remember that show?”

  “Oh yeah, of course I remember. I had the hots for Samantha.”

  “What? Are you kidding me?”

  “Blonde. Cutie. Tiny nose that she wiggled in that confident as hell way.”

  I squinted. “And you have a thing for women who trick their husbands and hide an incredible secret about their true nature from?”

  He leaned back in his chair and stretched his hands over his head. “Yep. It’s a fetish.”

  I finished the beer and opened another can. I was beginning to feel woozy. I needed it.

  Hank watched me, the sunset in his eyes fading as darkness deepened. “Three beers in an hour?”

  “I’m a heavyweight.”

  He didn’t say anything. He lowered his head, appeared to stare at his shoes. “I’m sorry I didn’t have my stylus with me, Dred. I left you when you needed me most. That was pretty shitty of me.”

  What was this? “You think that’s what’s bugging me?”

  Was it? I didn’t think so. It was everything else. Or maybe I did. Maybe I was feeling shell-shocked from nearly dying alone.

  “I do. I know it is. Maybe you don’t know it, yet. But yes. I ran off while you were helpless, because I wasn’t prepared. Not great of me.”

  “Don’t worry about it, bro.” I said, feeling the gap I’d verbally inserted into our moment with the distance-creating ‘bro.’

  Ok, so maybe I was more bothered than I thought I was.

  His laugh was mirthless. “I wanted to destroy that stupid dryad. If I’d had my stylus, I’d have summoned my gun and sent its fairy ass to the Netherworld. No questions asked. Would have solved your grandma’s dispute.”

  “Yeah. But I keep thinking about the Fabric.”

  “Fuck the Fabric, Dred. You nearly died.”

  “True.”

  “Your death or the Fabric? Which is more important?”

  “I’m not always sure.”

  “You need to sort that out, Dred. Because I know what I think. And I’m sorry, but you and me? We’re more important than balance in the Fabric.”

  He was getting heated, but due to the beer I didn’t care. Let him be a bastard if he wanted. I’d forget it and all would be well in the morning. So I relaxed into it and listened. I was a quiet drunk, and that was because usually I was a loving drunk. So it was either shrink into myself and be quiet, or resort to the dangerous option, which was allowing my walls to come down. That would mean sleeping with Hank right then and there if he so much as looked at me with the faintest fire in his eyes.

  Lucky for both of us, he was getting mad instead of sexy.

  I changed the subject. “Tomorrow we’ll go back north. And sort through some of this at the station. I’ll need to explain what we did with Blue to the captain. And maybe try to find out more about the guy in the Hawaiian shirt.”

  He sighed and ran his fingers through his hair, causing it to stick up every which way, looking wild and unruly. “I get it. We can be done with this conversation. And tomorrow? Grabbing the kid in Gingerbread? Still want to do that?”

  “I keep my word,” I slurred. At least I held onto that part of myself even as the alcohol pulled me under.

  “I know you do.” He began to reach out his hand to me, then pulled it back.

  What was that gesture?

  Ah, who cared?

  We waited till full darkness had set in, and then we stared up at the Milky Way. That was the thing about being far away from the city. Everything else got clearer, including the night sky.

  24

  I stared at the black and white image of my dead uncle Clair as a child, holding an owl in his hands. I was in the back room, near the single bathroom of my grandma’s hundred year old home. In bed.

  Had that owl perhaps been my grandma’s familiar? I’d never wondered till now.

  I was too drunk to be thinking about it, but I was, anyway, trying to sort out the shake-up to my world the day had brought. So much new information, so much to reflect on and restructure to see where it fit together, to see where I fit together.

  Maybe my uncle had also carried the gift.

  The lore about him saving an owl was etched into my family’s verbal record. Maybe it was the photo, or maybe it was the way the story had resonated with all of us—oh to be chosen to have a pet owl, to be such a wild thing that you could tame the most feral of beasts and become like a beast master, an owl-tamer. The kid on the street who held her hand aloft and ferocious birds of prey came to alight upon it.

  Well, that was the kind of kid thoughts that had always bubbled under the surface of my brain. I’d hardly known Clair. He’d died when I was just a child.

  It was funny, the way history could write itself into our brains, etch its marks onto us without even asking permission. Was it stronger than we knew? My grams was formed from the past, like I was formed from pasts that I’d never even been aware of.

  They were the thoughts of an exhausted drunk. I let them slip away. New thoughts entered my mind, of Hank and his hands trying to pry the tree roots from my body. In my memory I could almost see his frustration, my fear, and the hissing chant of the dryad all colliding in one dimension as though each emotion and sound had taken a physical form.

  My partner was sleeping in the upstairs room, while I took the back bedroom near the bathroom. Luckily, my grandma’s old house had been remodeled and the bathroom now included a door. Growing up it had been one of those folding closet doors that couldn’t contain a single sound.

  Imagine Hank trying to take care of his business with me in my pajamas just inches from the bathroom, without a decent door?

  I shut the thoughts down quickly. Or at least as quickly as I could with my brain moving as sluggishly as … a … slug … traipsing across a tennis court.

  I’d think of Hank no more.

  What I needed to dwell on was the insane shit that had filled out my day. How did one go from being on top of a ski resort peak to being at my grandma’s—130 miles away—all in one day? Was it still the same day that that had happened? I scratched my head, my gaze still fixed on the famous image of my uncle with his owl, illuminated by the lamp beside my bed.

  The black and white photo had run in the newspaper at some point, a story about a local boy with a pet owl.

  God, what I’d kill to have a pet owl. Or would have killed, at one point. As a twelve-year-old.

  It was right around the time that I’d wanted to escape from my life, from my family, from the wreckage of my parents’ divorce and my father’s mental illness, from the new step father, from everything. And I’d read a book called My Side of the Mountain. My first exposure to Thoreau, to self-sufficiency, to concepts of escape from the banal cares of normal life. I’d begun to see things I shouldn’t have—traces of ghosts, diminutive creatures living parallel with the normal world, like tiny pixies or brownies, running across a patch of moss or through the ivy clinging to the house and disappearing into cracks in the wall.

  I’d even seen hints then of my fledgling powers, usually at church, when a rebellious fire lit up in me after an authority figure told me things that I couldn’t do.

  “You don’t know the answer, Mildred, put your hand down.”

  “It’s Dred. And yes I do,” I’d say. The necklace around a teacher’s neck floating into the air, or the books on the table and in my classmates hands flipping pages as though being blown by a fierce wind.

  Church was not for me.

  It hid things that were real—ghosts, angels, demons, the innate powers that made some humans paranormals, who would then be labeled soothsayers and heretics.

  I was a heretic. So be it.

  A sound outside my bedroom door told me that someone had entered the bathroom. And then the sound of a urine
stream echoing through the toilet bowl told me it was Hank.

  I turned off my lamp and buried my head beneath my pillow. Even with my eyes squeezed shut all that I could hear and see was his body, begging for my attention, for my thoughts to focus on it and drift into fantasy.

  “Not in a million years,” I whispered, keeping my face buried until thoughts ceased and dreams claimed me.

  25

  “She can’t just sit there all day,” Bianca said, leaning close to whisper it to me the next morning around eleven, back at the Flameheart headquarters.

  “Why not?” I asked, innocently. It wasn’t an act. I really thought we had time to sort through what we’d do with Vivian. She’d resisted coming along with us, but in the end, Grygg’s possessive display seemed to have had a powerful impact on her. Maybe she didn’t like feeling like a pet. Either way, she’d grabbed her backpack and jumped into the Karmann Ghia without a lot of convincing. “She’s got nowhere else to go.”

  The girl was seated against the wall in a random spare chair. Sometimes I laughed internally at that chair, as though we were some kind of police station and ever had occasion for visitors to pop in and need a place to sit down. That it was currently filled with a teenager with a sour look on her face actually gave me so much glee that I wondered if I should take a photo for later, when I felt grouchy. It would cheer me up.

  “Dred, she’s a kid. She either needs to go home or we need to put her to work. Or something.” Bianca spun on her desk chair and chewed on the top of her pen.

  “Hank’s talking to Fua. Then I’ll sort it.” I glanced toward the stained glass windows that towered above Fua’s office. I could see the top of Hank’s wild hair poking above the boundary between glass and solid partition.

  God, he’d been in there forever. What the hell were they talking about? If Hank didn’t hurry up, I’d need to start on the report so that I could leave at a decent hour.

  “What’s the deal with her, anyway?” Bianca asked.