by Faye, Amy
"He was a pervert and very little more. Gotta say, though, he knew how to keep a woman entertained. And men, too, if we're being honest." Alex looked at Cyanora hard, his eyebrows furrowing together, at that comment.
"What? A girl can't have a little fun for herself?"
He blinked. Hard. It wasn't unconscious. He forced his eyes shut and then forced them open again. She smiled at him like she was so pleased with herself over the reaction he was giving her.
"But magic is real, then?"
"Things are magical, and if you know how to harness that, then you can do what you like, more or less."
Alex stood himself up and stepped away, let out a long breath. The house was big, and it was dusty, but even then it looked nice. There was a kitchen dining area, a proper separate dining room, and probably more space to eat somewhere else, too. How they had such a nice place out in the sticks, he'd never know.
"So what about the rules of magic? Threefold rule and so on?"
Cyanora laughed behind them. She must have been loving the conversation. Then again, she seemed to have a fascination with human understandings of magic. Without a doubt, she had at least a hundred different grimoires filled with made-up spells, back at her proper lair.
Something moved in the distance. A tree swayed in the wind. Then it swayed another way. The wrong way. It swayed both directions at once, and then straight back. Alex stepped closer to the window and looked up, afraid that he was right. Afraid he was going to confirm exactly what he knew he was.
"Guys?"
He didn't get a reaction. He could hear the silence in the other room crackle with the effort of Diana trying to put magic into a box that she already understood. Then she tried again, and he cut her off again.
"Guys?"
"What?"
"It's time to go," he said.
The big red spot in the sky moved closer, and in another two minutes he'd be right on top of them, and there wouldn't be any more running away after that.
So the time wasn't in two minutes, after Diana asked her question. It was right now. He was already moving toward the garage door by the time he realized that wasn't going to work.
32
Alex hated what he was. He'd hated it for a long time, and there was something strange about it. When he changed back into the lizard, he was like a different person. It messed with more than just his body. It messed with his brain, and made him different. There was more to it than he really could have understood by himself.
That was exactly what had driven him to suggest staying in his current form. It changed him, and it changed Keleth. They were fundamentally different than they'd been before. And that was fine, in its own way.
It was hard to stay human, hard to force himself to think like a human, even for a minute or two. It was harder still to change back, after he needed to transform. But all of that paled in comparison to how hard it was to change into the giant dragon. How much he didn't want to do it. But there wasn't much choice, either way.
He caught Diana going the wrong way and pulled her by the arm, pulled her in the only direction there was to go. Out the front, and then travel au-naturale.
Alex stripped as he ran. It was hard, and slowed him down, but having the clothes still on would be harder and slow him down just as much. So he stripped in spite of himself and kept moving as best he could. Thirty seconds later, he was running in the nude, made it to the street, and transformed with a conscious effort of will.
Diana had made it a little way ahead of him, thanks to the delays his clothes introduced, and that made things easier for him. No need to turn back to get her; she was right there in front of him. He beat his wings, pushed with his legs, and skimmed along the surface of the ground.
As he pulled higher and higher into the air, high enough to start hitting warm, powerful gusts of air, Alex thought that for Diana, it probably seemed as if he spent the majority of his time split between his dragon and his human life. He smiled at the thought. The past two days hadn't only been strange for her, no sir.
He flew hard, away. There was a lot of thinking they had to do. A lot of planning. They couldn't be going off half-cocked.
Then he noticed something else. Something a little bit strange. Something that twisted his gut up inside, even as he whirled to avoid a darting white dragon, its scales practically reflecting the sun's shine right into his eyes. There wasn't any blue beside him. She was somewhere else, and he knew without having to look where she was going. He knew further that she was making a mistake.
For an instant, he considered turning around. She was going to get herself killed, that much was clear. But then a second thought occurred to him, one that twisted him up inside. He soured and closed his eyes and tried desperately to pretend that it wasn't a problem, but it was.
Cyanora, for better or worse, was going off to die. There wasn't much avoiding it.
He turned and ducked low, careful to swirl in a loop around Diana, rather than whirling her around like a discus-thrower. Then he turned hard to the side, ran through his head what his options were. There were few, and with the blue disappearing behind them, disappearing to her own death, the options were fewer than they had been before.
Whatever happened, he thought, they hadn't followed the three of them onto the mountain. There was a reason for that, a reason he didn't begin to understand. It didn't bear considering. They were short on options, and if there was some danger on the mountain then it couldn't possibly have been greater than the danger that they were leaving behind. He swooped toward the slope, mapping the space in his mind. The distance was long, but he had a long lead.
The white swiped at him longside again, and he dodged it again. She was small, and she was young, and she was terribly fast. But she wasn't fast enough to overcome the age difference, the experience difference. Alex had escaped more chases than the white had ever been in, and she wasn't smart enough to outfox him, no matter what she might have thought or wanted.
A thermal caught him under his wings and pulled the green upward, and Alex had a long view of the mountain. He tried to guess where the cave system was. Where Diana's meager roost was. There were so many conflicting things running through his head all at once.
She couldn't smell the magic. She couldn't have ignored it, if she could. There was no way that she simply failed to interpret, or that she'd smelled it without realizing. She hadn't smelled it, and that was wrong from the word go. It was downright impossible.
On the other hand, she had a roost. She had a horde, as meager as it was. She was barely twenty years old, though. At that age, he'd barely gotten himself started.
He ducked down lower. Lower still. He spread his wings, turned to avoid the white like a bullfighter, only to catch a blow from the black. The pair of them streaked to the ground in a tangle, and for an instant, he was afraid that Diana was entirely lost to them. She slipped out of his hands, twisted and tumbled, and from a hundred feet, there was no way. Not for a human.
She screamed the whole way down. It tore at him, and he fought to free himself from the black's jaws, but it was futile. He'd gotten the point of his beak lodged into the massive bulk of Aleroth's shoulder. Short of letting him pull the arm right off, he wasn't going to be freed quickly and easily. They slapped into the ground hard, and Alex's mind raced.
Thinking about humans, about their well-being, about how they might survive, was all too human. He'd been that way for a long time, now, and there wasn't any way that he could go back and pretend that he wasn't all of a sudden.
The scream cut off an instant before he thumped into the ground. He told himself that it was because she'd been falling straight down, while they were at an angle. Regardless of the fact that the black was committed to pulling him to the ground, their wings still caught the wind, pulling them this way and that, tangling. That slowed them down.
He hit the ground with a dull thump, and immediately forced the thoughts out of his head. Aleroth couldn't afford to let himself get ki
lled. He'd already lost enough the past week. After a thousand years, he ought to have been used to loss. He'd lost and won several dozen fortunes. Political boundaries had shifted so quickly that friendships seemed to be made and lost in an instant. Alliances made and then broken as soon as the ink was dry on the paper.
But nothing could change how he was feeling, and the sadness was only going to make his life harder. So instead, he did what he had to do. He forced himself to ignore it, forced himself to forget the sadness, and let the anger burn hot. It came easily, even to the lizard brain. He felt the fury screaming out of him, and turned his claws on the black.
The feeling of scales slipping aside under his claws to reveal soft, sensitive flesh wasn't one he'd experienced in a very, very long time. But it wasn't something that he was afraid of feeling again if he had to, either. The black had just caused him to lose something very important, and the revenge was going to be sweet and complete. Then he would turn, he would take the white, and then it would be time to leave.
Time was on his side. The red was older than he, and that meant he was smarter, he was stronger, and he no doubt had better resources. At the same time, Alex had spent the past twenty-five years tying a hand behind his back. The entire time, waiting for someone to come along and put him out of his misery.
Now, though, things were different. If it were just about him, then that would have been one thing, but it wasn't. They'd not only put Diana in danger, they'd downright killed her. Unacceptable.
He bit down hard on the white's neck. Red blood stained the glistening, shining scales and it started to flail, screaming out its death. The notes lost their musical quality as it started to panic and throw itself harder and harder at him, hoping to take him with it.
But it was young, and it was inexperienced, and it was weak. Alex had been young, once. He'd been weak, once. But that was a long time ago. If anything, now he was too strong. Strong enough that for twenty-five years, he'd paid the price for that. There was a part of him that thought everything that had happened this past week was just paying penance for what he and Keleth had done, all that time ago.
But he’d paid enough, now. No more.
33
No matter how tired he already felt, Alex wasn't done yet. So he only allowed himself a momentary rest. Cyanora had been a fool for throwing herself into the fray against an opponent she couldn't beat. When she'd done it, he couldn't understand why.
That, at least, had changed. He could throw himself at the giant red without a moment's hesitation, now. But it wasn't wise. He would just have thrown his life away for nothing.
The white circled above, looking down on the land. She seemed to be the more cautious of the two; perhaps that was what had allowed Alex to escape her so many times on the flight over. A lack of commitment on her part.
He surged upward, the feeling of air under his wings a good feeling. He'd missed a great many things, but this was one of the strongest. The feeling of strength, of being exactly where he needed to be. He didn't need to think. He could get by just reacting, now.
Off in the distance, a thunder clap dropped out of a dry, empty sky. Alex hoped that he was wrong. Hoped that the fight would end in a standstill, and that the female blue would get away. But he was afraid that wasn't very likely.
There was no time for him to think about that, though. He narrowly avoided the diving white as she came down out of the sky, spotting him and heading towards him with her talons outstretched, like a bird of prey.
He whirled and avoided it, and then caught her tail as it whipped past in one of his claws and pulled hard. The momentum went wild and she let out a scream of pain. Then Aleroth pulled, scrabbled the white up in his arms, and began a death-dive. He hurried it along with his wings. Hard towards the ground. As hard as anything. Just like Diana had experienced, he thought bitterly.
Barely a foot off the ground he pulled himself up at the last moment. The white, though, tangled up on herself, wasn't so lucky. She landed hard on the rocky soil, and a nasty 'pop' echoed through the forest.
Alex killed his momentum by letting his feet drag behind, through the earth. A hundred yards later, he turned and sped back. The white was slow getting up, and he took advantage of her weakness.
His teeth dug in and his neck gave a mighty whip, and another pop released. Her wing hung uselessly, now. She was grounded, and she was going to stay grounded.
The violence that had welled up in him came to a head; there was nothing to stop him. No reason, not any more. After all, the only thing he'd been avoiding it this long for was that he had something he needed to protect. Bigger concerns than taking out his vengeance on anything and everything.
But she was gone, now. The black had ripped her right from his hands, and in spite of himself, he'd let her fall.
The blood started out as a spray that ran across his green scales. The red stood out against them, but he didn't care. He dug in and stained the white with her own blood until she was the same color as her master. Then he let out another primal roar. It had been a long time since he'd let himself go like that. But the time to leave was long since past. If he was going to get away from the red, even for a moment, he needed to get gone.
They'd come here for safety. And it was safety he was going to claim for himself, no matter how badly things had gone. He needed time to heal up. Time to make a plan. Time to make the red pay. Time to think about what this was all about.
The trees around were tight. Too tight for a creature his size. He forced himself back into the little flesh-form of Alex Blume, and then started to move. His feet stung with the pine needles that stuck out at odd angles across the forest floor, but he ignored them and ran. Two miles up the mountain, and a mile to the east, maybe. He could cross that distance in fifteen minutes, on a good day. There, he'd find the cave structure.
With Diana gone, it would leave little more than remnants of the power that had kept it sealed, but those remnants would be enough. It would give him the time he needed and that, in turn, would give him the chance to hit back. He was through pretending that he could just grieve for an old friend, pretending that none of it mattered. But he wasn't through running, not yet.
Thunder clapped off in the distance and something roared, loud and powerful. Alex was breathing hard by the time that he made it to the place he was going. He had been wrong about the distance. It was five miles, not three. But he'd made it, and he'd made good time doing it. There was no reason to hold anything back for later, and he was too angry besides.
The front door was easy to find. Better that than taking the hole in the roof, he thought. But it was locked. He put his shoulder into it. Diana had a key, but there was no keyhole here. Just a heavy wooden door that wouldn't budge for anything less than a truly hard hit. He soured, not daring to imagine what that could mean.
There was another entrance, a few hundred yards up the mountain. He'd be able to get in that way, the same as he had last time. He crossed it in a matter of seconds and dropped in, hoping that he'd been able to get there fast enough that the red wouldn't have found him yet.
Once he was inside, he moved out of the open-roofed library quickly. The soil was drier today, compared to before, but it was nice inside. Warm, maybe even hot.
He frowned. That was wrong. He stepped through the door and into the hall. It was lit with electric lights, as it had been the day before. The doors were all closed, as they had been the day before. He took the door to the front room. It was empty. Same as it had always been, as far as he could tell, except for the evidence that once, someone had stocked it with things.
Except that there were two big differences from how it had been the day before. First, there was a fire lit in the brazier. It was high and hot and must have led to some kind of chimney but he couldn't begin to guess where it might have let out. The second change was a heavy oaken bar across the door, stuffed into a pair of heavy steel brackets. It could only have been put there from inside, and then only if that someone had
n't left again.
He frowned, turned, and re-examined the room. Again, he decided that it was empty. There was no doubt about that. Then he went back to the library. Empty and unchanged, except where someone had pulled away half of a shelf and a dozen or so books lay on the floor in a big heap.
He looked at them for a long moment and then tried the third door in the hall. The one that Diana had hidden behind before.
It was locked. He put his shoulder into it and this time it opened, despite its best efforts. The lights were on this time, and that was why it was very easy to see a positively tiny red drake collapsed in the middle of the floor.
34
Diana's body hurt. She'd never hurt so bad in all of her life, and that was including some very unpleasant episodes with people who she should have known better than to get involved with. There was one thing, though, that kept running through her head, over and over again.
She should have been dead. She'd watched herself fall, like it was from far away. But she never left her body. She screamed the whole way down, and imagined how much it was going to hurt. But when the time had come for her to die, she was far away. Someone else was terrified. Someone else was screaming. She was watching it happen like a movie reel was playing, and she was just watching it in a comfortable, warm movie theater.
The ground hurt. It hurt so bad that she passed out entirely, and when she woke up it still hurt so bad that she thought she ought to have been passed out even still. But she didn't. She just wanted to go home. The cabin had burned down, and her apartment was so far away. But the cave? The cave was right there.
She crawled on her hands and knees part of the way, stood and walked part of the way. Her body felt off. Wrong. But she didn't know what to think about it and sure as hell didn't care. She just walked and hoped. Off in the distance, she heard the sound of dragons roaring, a few miles away. But she ignored those sounds. There were more important things to worry about. Things like how she was going to get the hell out of here without getting herself killed, for one.
