Dragon Born 1: The Shifter's Hoard

by Dante King

  “Well, you know, in college, the only French Canadian girls I ever met were the sort of crazy that went in for soup sandwiches,” I said. “I guess the novelty of meeting one that is actually cool and sane hasn’t quite worn off yet. So, how’s it going with you?”

  “Probably a little more productively than things are with you I'd say,” Cherie replied, her half-smile broadening so that she flashed me her pearly white teeth.

  I pointed at the page of my notebook with its seven words. “Like you say though, I’ve got the title, right? Rome wasn’t built in a day.”

  “Hm, still struggling along, huh?” Cherie asked.

  “Would we say struggling?” I asked.

  “Yes,” Cherie said. “Yes, I think we would at this point.”

  I took a sip of coffee and sighed again. “Thanks for the breakfast, Cherie,” I said. “Again.”

  Cherie waved a hand. “Don’t worry about it, Matt.”

  “I promise, if I ever get this freakin’ article finished, I’ll settle my tab with you.”

  “I said don’t worry,” Cherie insisted. “You know I’m doing okay here. A few slices of pie and some coffee isn’t going to break the bank. Besides, you pay me back with supernatural gossip, which happens to be my favorite currency!”

  I laughed. “Giving you the inside tips on the latest UFO sightings and America’s latest haunted buildings, and keeping you up to date with Oregon’s mystic rumor mill hardly seems like a fair trade after I’ve polished off one of your epic lunches, though.”

  Cherie shrugged, looked around to make sure that her few staff were pulling their weight, and then slipped lithely into the booth seat opposite me.

  “Well, I like it,” she said adamantly. “You know I’m a nut for all things eldritch. You know I’m a true believer.”

  “I know,” I said, smiling at her. “That’s why you brought this place after all, right?”

  Cherie sat back in her seat and crossed her arms. The vinyl creaked under her. She gestured around the cavernous old industrial space, which was now filled with carefully mismatched furniture, the delectable smell of coffee, and a bunch of men and women dressed in the hardhats, overalls, and high-visibility clothing of American laborers.

  “I told you,” she said, “the ley lines guided me here. My parents thought I was fucking off my head when I moved here and brought the place with all my savings. We’d visited Portland lots of times from Quebec, you know, but they were staunch in their views. All the good cafes were east of the Willamette, they said. What the hell did I think I was doing trying to set up a place like this in the Northwest Industrial Area?, they said.”

  I looked around us at the bustling cafe. “You know, if I was sceptical, I might be tempted to think that you’re just very smart. Setting up a cafe in a busy industrial area that had a distinct lack of them, filled with hardworking and hungry people… Might have just been a savvy business decision.”

  Cherie smiled. “Are you saying I’m smart, Matt?”

  “Coming from the people that brought us the likes of Justin Bieber, Canadian bacon—which, if we’re honest, is just ham—and the caesar cocktail, I would say that you’re very smart, Cherie.”

  She giggled and slapped me on the back of the hand.

  “Some might say that it was a savvy business decision,” she said. “But I’m the one who set up here, and I’m telling you, as a source to a reporter, that it was the ley lines that guided me. Sometimes, you just have to try and feel the energy and let it take you where it will, you know?”

  I opened my mouth to respond with something suitably sarcastic, when I felt a thrumming rush of something emanate up from my feet and into my chest. My breath caught, and the piece of pie that had been balancing on the end of my fork fell topping side down on the table.

  “What the…” I said.

  The bell above the door tinkled behind me, and a wash of cold air entered the cafe.

  “Did you feel that?” I asked.

  The frisson of weird vivacity that I had momentarily felt inside of me was already fading away like indigestion.

  “Feel what, Matt? That chill? Oui, summer is almost over, isn’t it?” Cherie replied. “I’ll have to put my shorts away for another season soon.”

  “What? No, not the chill. There was that sort of, buzzing sensation… Didn’t you feel it?”

  Cherie picked the dropped pie from the table and put it back on my plate. “I told you,” she said, winking, “it’s the energy.”

  I shook my head and touched the centre of my chest. “The energy… Sure.”

  “Besides,” Cherie continued, licking cream off her finger in a way that instantly distracted my attention, “I thought the ley lines, the conduits of paranormal energy flow, is what brought you here to my door all those months ago? That’s what this article,” and she nodded at my notepad, “is all about, isn’t it?”

  “Well, yeah…” I said. “But I told you what really started the whole thing, right?”

  Cherie leaned forward eagerly. “You mean your sighting?” she said in a low and, what I thought, overly dramatic voice.

  I nodded.

  “Of course, I remember,” Cherie said, her green eyes shining with enthusiasm. “You only mentioned it briefly about a month after coming in here every single day. I’ve been wanting to talk to you about it for ages. Only, I never wanted to push you about talking about it because of it being of, well, your mom… ”

  “The whole dead parent thing can be a minefield of awkwardness for those with the tact of a French Canadian,” I said with mock severity.

  Cherie snorted, reached out, and took a sip of my coffee.

  “Well, we weren’t such close buddies then, were we?” she said.

  “I guess not,” I said.

  “So, you want to tell me now?”

  I puffed out my cheeks and speared another forkful of pie. “There’s not much of a mystery to reveal, I’m afraid, my little occultist. To cut a long and heart-wrenching tale fairly short, my dad left me and Mom before I was born. She raised me. Told me stories. Fired my imagination. She was a great mom, really. In my last semester of college, she was crossing the road when a tanker came out of nowhere and…”

  I popped the pie into my mouth and chewed it without tasting it. I swallowed and speared another forkful, maybe a little more aggressively than that delicious key lime goodness deserved.

  “Well…” I said, “like I said, that tanker came out of nowhere—and I’m not just using that phrase for the hell of it. This eighteen-wheeler literally came out of nowhere. There were no witnesses because it was late and she’d just finished doing the graveyard shift, but there were a couple of security cameras outside of a gas station and the hospital where she worked. The street was empty both ways for at least three blocks as she stepped off the curb, then both cameras cut to static for about four seconds. When they cleared, Mom was lying broken and twisted on the road and this fucking tanker that couldn’t have been there had crashed through a shopfront.”

  Cherie didn’t say anything, but her eyes were fastened encouragingly on my face.

  “Anywho,” I said, letting out a deep breath, “a few weeks later, I was walking along and I realized that I was walking by the very spot she’d been killed. I slowed down, and I felt this swooping sensation, like I’d just missed a step. I looked around then, because I had this weird notion that someone was standing over my shoulder. Then, behind me, I saw Mom walking through the crowd—walking through it, I mean, like all the people weren’t even there.”

  “Was she green?” Cherie asked abruptly.

  “Was she - was she green? No, she was a sort of pinkish color, the same as she’d been when she was alive,” I said, nonplussed. “Why would she have been green?”

  “You know, ghosts are commonly green, aren’t they?” Cherie said reasonably.

  “Are they?”

  “I think so.”

  “Have you ever seen one?”

  “Well… no, not
as such,” Cherie replied, “but there are loads of people who reckon they would be green.”

  I shook my head. We were wading into waters that were pretty foreign to me, and I decided to stay on topic, as far as that was possible.

  “She was dressed in her scrubs and a jacket,” I said. “Just like she’d been when she left the hospital. She was kind of blurry though, smudged in a kind of way.”

  “And then what happened?” Cherie asked eagerly.

  “Um, nothing,” I said, somewhat lamely.

  “Nothing?” Cherie asked, a slight disappointment edging her words. “She didn’t point at anything or entrust you with any final instructions so that she could have everlasting peace, or whatever?”

  “Not that I noticed,” I admitted.

  “Not that you noticed? Matt, come on! You say a fucking ghost!”

  I swallowed some more pie, practically whole. “Hey, I don’t know what I saw. Could’ve been a trick of the light…”

  ”How’re you not going to remember every little detail of something like that, or a ghost encounter?” Cherie said, shaking her head.

  “Look, I was a little preoccupied with the thought that I might be suffering from some variety of grief-triggered aneurysm or something to whip my notebook out,” I said defensively.

  Cherie made an understanding face.

  “Might have been a bit overwhelming,” she admitted grudgingly.

  “Very generous of you to say.”

  We looked at each other for a moment or two. I felt a little out of breath after that interchange. It was a feeling that I had often experienced since meeting the vivacious, driven, yet endearingly nerdy Cherie Couture.

  “Can I ask you a question?” Cherie said as I took a sip of my strong, black coffee.

  “Will you ask it even if I say no?”

  “Obviously.”

  “Ask away, then,” I said.

  “Do you believe?” Cherie asked.

  “Do I believe?” I repeated her question. “Do I believe in…?”

  “The other side of the veil,” Cherie said, her sexy voice dropping even lower so that I was forced to lean across the table to hear her over the hubbub of the busy cafe. “The flip side of the coin. The world that converges with ours, overlaps it, and sometimes breaks through. The place where all those weird and wonderful things we’re told stories about when we’re children live. The shadowy realm where myth and legend and reality are blended up.”

  “Ontario?” I quipped.

  “I’m serious, Matt,” Cherie insisted, rolling her eyes. “”Do you believe? Do you believe what you write about? Do you believe what you saw?”

  I chewed on another mouthful of pie slowly and thoughtfully while I considered the question. As I did so, as I really, truly ruminated on whether or not I set any store in the paranormal, the hairs on the back of my neck crackled. One by one, or so it seemed, I felt them stand on end.

  That’s not a real sensation, I told myself. That’s just your brain playing tricks on you.

  The speaker system, which had been playing the ubiquitous, smooth house music that is so unique to cafes the world over, suddenly switched to a well-known psychedelic rock band at that precise moment. It was that famous track about the wizard on the train, the one that mentions boning centaurs, or smoking weed with centaurs, or at least doing something fairly illegal with centaurs.

  All right, that was weird, my mind admitted, but nothing more or less than a coincidence.

  I swallowed and looked into the bright green eyes of the sexy cafe owner sitting across from me.

  “I think,” I said, being mindful of my audience, “that I want to believe.”

  Cherie tipped her head to one side. That gorgeous, quirky half-smile of hers never left her lips. If anything, it might have widened just a fraction of an inch.

  “What?” I asked after she had declined to respond to my neutral statement.

  “It’s just, you know sometimes in life when you tell yourself that you have a choice in some matter, but really you don’t?”

  “Like when you walk into the ice-cream store and tell yourself that you’ll just see what flavors they’ve got going on, but that you won’t get a cone?” I said. “But really, you’ve already made the decision to buy a triple scoop?”

  “Yeah. Like that,” Cherie replied.

  “Yeah, I know the feeling.”

  “Well, that’s what this is like,” Cherie said, matter-of-factly. “You believe. You’re just a little afraid of thinking about what that might mean. You're concerned with what it might mean if you kick that door open, rather than just peek through the keyhole, hm?”

  The lights flickered above our heads. Just for a second.

  I made a little disbelieving noise in the back of my throat, while I tried to think of something contradictory to say to Cherie that wasn’t a lie.

  I couldn’t.

  Luckily, at that moment, I was saved by my cell going off on the table in front of us. I scooped it up and saw that I’d been sent a message from the office of the Occult Times, back in Los Angeles.

  Matt, it read, I hope everything is progressing smoothly with the article and that you haven’t reached the end of the maze just yet.

  I blinked. Weird that the message should have contained the exact words that I’d been thinking to myself not a quarter of an hour before. I set that coincidence aside for the time being and read on.

  Readers are lapping up those pieces you wrote about ghost crossing boundaries and weak spots in our world. Don’t take this the wrong way, but we’ve organized a car to take you out to a possible site of supernatural interest this afternoon. We received a very well informed tip-off that checked out. You can expect the car around 3pm. Good luck. F.

  “Hm, well that’s a turn up for the books,” I said.

  “What’s that, Matty?” Cherie asked.

  I passed her my phone and read the message.

  “A possible site of supernatural interest,” she said, her whole face lighting up like a kid that’s just spotted the presents under the Christmas tree. “Man, I wish I could come!”

  “A possible site of supernatural interest, Cherie,” I said, emphasizing the word. “Who knows what the hell is waiting for me wherever it is I’m being taken. Could be some tip from a Portland State University student off his rocker on acid and thinking that he’s some sort of paranormal investigator for all I know.”

  Cherie laughed and slid out from behind the booth. “Well, Portland’s Portland, mon cherie. Nothing would surprise me in this town. The thing that I’ve realized in my time here, though, is that even if you’re hoping for a certain result to manifest itself, even if you think you’ve followed the ley lines to the destination you were after, life still finds a way to take you by surprise in some way.”

  I laughed at that, drained my coffee, and picked up my pen.

  “I’m not sure if that’s just Portland, Cherie,” I said. “Seems my whole life has been a big-ass case of that.”

  Cherie took my now empty pie plate and cup and went to move away.

  “You’ll just be hanging around here until this mysterious car comes to pick you up, right?” she asked, stopping in mid-stride.

  “I don’t know if there’s going to be too much that’s mysterious about it,” I said. “Knowing Frank, it’ll probably be some piece of shit taxi whose driver owes him a favor somehow. But, yeah, I’ll just be hanging here working on my extreme pen twiddling skills, if you’ll allow it.”

  “So long as you promise to make sure the crowd of potential spectators doesn’t get too unruly.”

  I laughed again. “Why’s that anyway?”

  “I just… I’ve got something I’d like to show you in a little bit. Something that I think you might want to see, and that you might be interested in.”

  “Now that sounds mysterious,” I said.

  To my amazement, Cherie pushed a strand of brown hair away from her face and gave me a smile that was almost bashful.

/>   “I'll come and grab you around two, yeah?”

  “Uh, sure,” I said. “Yeah, I’ll be here. Can I ask what it’s about?”

  Cherie shook her head. “It’s a surprise.”

  Then she was gone, calling loudly for one of her staff to restock the pancetta and parmesan muffins at the counter.

  I watched the French Canadian cafe owner go, my eyes drawn irresistibly to the way her ass moved in her denim cut-offs.

  “A surprise…” I muttered to myself.

  My twirling pen dropped from my suddenly nerveless fingers as my imagination, fired by the potent combination of pie and coffee, started tripping over itself in its haste to lay out all sorts of wondrous scenarios that might be waiting for me come two o’clock.

  “Holy shit,” I whispered to myself, snatching up my pen, rubbing distractedly at my stubbled jaw and almost taking my own eye out. “Does she mean what I think she means…?”

  As it transpired… No, she did not.

  Damned French Canadians.

  Aether Mage: Chapter 2

  I actually managed to knuckle down and at least write an exciting and captivating starting paragraph for my article on ley lines, and how one could follow them across America, and visit some of the country’s most haunted and occultly sensitive places, by the time two o’clock rolled around.

  All Cherie’s talk and probing questions about what had happened the day that I had thought I’d seen the spectre of my dead mother seemed to have kicked my motivation in the pants, and I found myself revitalized.

  After all, it was that fleeting glimpse of my mom that had pushed me into applying for a job with the Occult Times, to see whether there might be more to this world than met the eye. I guess, in retrospect, it might have been my way of coping with the loss of the person that I had been closest to in this world.

  They do say that the darker the night, the brighter the stars, and maybe I’d just been looking for some tiny twinkling ray of hope in the inky void that my life felt like it had become in those proceeding weeks.

  That inspiring paragraph being jotted down though, I quickly realized that I might be at a bit of a deadend here. The fact was that, as much as I might like to believe in all this inexplicable shit, I had nothing much more to go on.