A Pet For Lord Darin

by Hollie Hutchins

  I could make out just about every other word. “New…Earth…pretty…” said the dragon, followed by Alar, which I was pretty sure was Shorty’s name.

  They talked and talked and talked. Most of what they said was petty small talk – comments about the weather and the overabundance of clouds in Birthav, which was either a month, a season, or a region – and the rest was very basic mobster discourse.

  The dragon was, I’d learned, something of a criminal, the kind that made an absurd amount of money committing morally ambiguous acts of public service. Best I could tell, their chief endeavor involved some sort of plant, and a tonic they intended to make from it, or were already making from it, or suddenly couldn’t make anymore. It was hard to follow.

  “Salthun,” the man said, jowls jiggling like jelly as he spoke. Salthun was a new word. I’d heard it in passing, but it was never the topic of conversation long enough for me to identify context clues. I leaned forward, watching his lips intently, parting around his teeth. White and white and white, with a single onyx black canine that shone in the light. Pedestrian replacement or fashion statement? I thought. No reason it couldn’t be both, I guess.

  “Salthun, il nor vari, viando, nerotum,” he said, and those words I knew. Skin, meat, bone. Slaughterhouse words. Il nor meant if not. So, “blank if not skin, meat, bones”. They were talking about cattle, or some agricultural equivalent, and their associated resources.

  “Zho, is nostril badila go rum…” The man trailed off, and he looked at me, practically salivating. I glared at him, quietly translating.

  Go rum was the most infuriating kind of homonym. It meant half a dozen things: they, them, the plural you, ours, we. It was also a kind of lightbulb, one the household always seemed to be out of.

  The rest of the sentence I caught: So, if we breed…

  The dragon glanced at me and scowled at the man. Arms crossed, scales clicking like hail on stone. “Humans aru nor mirit.”

  My stomach turned to water.

  Humans are not animals.

  They were talking about people, me and Jonathan and everyone, and what they could get from our bodies if they killed us. I prayed to high heaven that didn’t mean one of us had been split open, taken apart and examined and mined for anything we could give. Suddenly that was all I could think about. Naomi or Katy on a white table, folds of skin pinned back with sharp silver needles, liquids drained, blood spattered on the blue aprons of curious surgeons, organs swimming in tempered glass jars of formaldehyde…

  Jesus motherfucking Christ, I’m gonna be sick.

  I swallowed a mouthful of panic and bile and said, “Humans aru nor mirit,” as loud as I could – which was somewhere between a murmur and the whispers of the damned.

  The man didn’t seem to hear me, but the dragon did, and when his eyes found mine they seemed troubled. He was sucking on his lower lip, the way he did when he was in an especially irritable mood. I looked pointedly between him and his guest and said, “Humans aru nor mirit,” consonants sharp as spears.

  And he nodded. Just once, the movement so small I almost didn’t catch it, but he nodded. An absurd relief washed over me and I nodded back.

  He returned his smoldering red eye to the man and said, “Sal vest nor tun ad badila.” His tail lashed forward, nocking a glass from the coffee table. Wine – or something that looked and smelled very much like wine – spilled and soaked into the carpet. The man stared at the small, dark stain, and suddenly he wasn’t talking with his hands. “Is tun va corlisda,” he began.

  “Thaldun,” said the dragon. Good day.

  The man blinked in confusion and outrage. “Thaldun.” He straightened his coat, looking spectacularly unhappy, and, with a rather stiff bow, he left.

  The dragon did not smile when he was gone.

  I pushed the last of the tension out through my nose. There was a long silence. The dragon didn’t move. He stood in the center of the room, next to the ever-growing red stain, staring at nothing in particular.

  “He seems nice,” I said at last. The dragon took a book from the shelf, a thin red tome with letters etched into its spine in gold.

  “It’s rude to ignore people,” I said. He continued to ignore me, the way you ignore a dog when it keeps barking at the door. It’s just a noise, loud and irritating and certainly not anything remotely interesting. Definitely not words with meaning smashed together to form a coherent sentence or anything. “Impolite. Verda.”

  I’d made a habit of this over the last few weeks. Talking at the dragon when he stayed in the room after meetings, which he almost always did. He paced and he scowled and he cursed under his breath – and it was definitely cursing. It involved a lot of fist clenching and teeth gnashing – and talked to himself. Sometimes he picked books off the shelves and read for an hour or two, always too far away for me to look over his shoulder. I wouldn’t have a hope of reading it without some kind of Rosetta stone, but I wanted to know what the alphabet looked like, just because I was curious.

  Sometimes I spoke his language – what little I knew of it – but if that impressed him, I couldn’t tell. It was probably no less exciting than hearing a parrot say your name for the first time. Parroting and repeating are synonyms for a reason.

  “Whatcha reading there?” I said.

  The dragon looked up. His hair was tied back in a low ponytail. The ear on the scaled side of his face was absent of scales, but it was bright candy red, and it twitched when I spoke. He had made a habit of staring at his book or his hands and never, ever responding to me. But he usually didn’t even look up; so, progress.

  I pointed at him, then opened my hands like a book and shrugged. He looked at his book, back at me, back at his book. He blinked at me and said nothing. Fuck his eye was weird. The white one alone was vacant, almost like he was blind, but the red one…it was like he’d been possessed. When the light was low and the clouds were thick, it looked a hell of a lot like it was glowing.

  “No, that’s fine, it’s not like I’m trying to have a conversation or anything,” I said. I crossed my arms and sat back on my bed, leaning against the cold metal bars and scowling at him.

  I’d always been a sarcastic person as a rule, and since literally no one could understand me, the sarcasm had taken off like a rocket on every drug known to man. If there was a meter for glibness, I’d broken it like glass with a fucking sledgehammer and lots of rage.

  But for every dry comment I made, I withheld a thousand real-world questions, ones I knew he wouldn’t answer. Ones I didn’t dwell on or even bother to ask because it would get me nowhere. Am I ever going home was a.) a really dumb thing to ask and b.) only succeeded in making me think of home, and how very likely it was that I’d never see it again, and how it was his fault and the fault of the little alien who’d brought me here and the captain of his ship and the doctor who examined me. It made me hate the dragon more than was healthy, the kind of mentality you find in prisoners of war. Acceptance of the most feeble kind, because an out-and-out prison break was simply out of the question. Even if I could kill him and everyone in this house, even if I could neutralize every alien on this godforsaken planet, it wouldn’t matter, because I couldn’t get a human ship off the ground, let alone one of these wheel-less shuttle monstrosities the aliens used to get on and off planet.

  Saying anything sincere sent me into an infinite feedback loop of “I’m here and I can’t go home and I want to go home, I’m here and I can’t go home and I want to go home.” And honestly all that did was freak me out. If I went out of my way to be irritated with the dragon for indulging the human-ish feeling of “Jesus leave me alone, I’m just trying to read”, I didn’t have to think about why I was really angry.

  Psychology had never been a favorite subject of mine, but being alone in a cage in a functionally empty room for several weeks would drive anybody to introspection. I honestly wished I was less self-aware – coping mechanisms like this only really work when you don’t realize you’re doing them.<
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  “…Thank you,” I said. I heard myself say it, I had nothing to do with the words. “Um. Halan.”

  The dragon blinked. He put down his book, forefinger and thumb kneading the corner of a page. His eyes were a little wider, and his mouth was open in a small o.

  “Halan,” I said again. He closed his mouth, and he nodded.

  “Tun voras,” he said. He returned to his book.

  I went back to counting my steps.

  ***

  It was ungodly early in the morning when the next one came to call.

  I heard a pounding on the door below, and opened my eyes to see two bulbous moons hanging on the stars. The sky was mostly clear and the ocean below was a series of crosshatching white lines as the waves caught the light. Light pollution wasn’t any less a problem here than it was on Earth, so I could only make out a handful of stars. It was somewhere between the middle of the night and the haunted hours of dawn.

  Monsters never sleep, I thought, and my beleaguered brain quietly corrected me with images of hibernating bears and snakes.

  I sat up, stretching, knowing that going back to sleep would be totally useless. They would meet in here, assuming the dragon didn’t kick the visitor out on his ass for waking us all up, and even if the meeting went perfectly, they would still make a substantial amount of noise. I pushed the pillows up against the wall and leaned against them, crossing my legs and staring at the door so I could make direct eye contact with whoever walked in first. It was kind of a petty thing, trying to scare them, but the sight of an alien something-or-other staring you down from the corner of its cage was spooky to anybody, and it worked more often than it didn’t. And it was very funny.

  The butler – Yita, I think his name was – finally led the visitor into the library, and he looked absolutely exhausted. His white hair was all in a frizz, his eyes were drooping and watery, and he walked with the slight hunch of a man who wasn’t quite sure yet whether he was actually awake, and who very much wanted to be asleep.

  The person he led in had lighter skin than most aliens, and was clothed in something I could only describe as comically regal: a pale blue coat with gold stripes and elbow patches, with pants of the same color and pattern. Black boots with straps done over with shining gems that might have been diamonds, a blue choker at his throat and an equally blue shirt underneath it. His hair was up in a high ponytail, blue and gold ribbons trailing down his back from it. He was either very important or he was going out of his way to look very important.

  The visitor snapped and said the name of some red drink the dragon was fond of. Yita bowed clumsily and swept out of the room to retrieve it.

  The man stuck his hands in his pockets and looked around, squinting. Yita had neglected to turn on the lights. With a huff, he wandered over to a blue patch of metal on the wall and drew a line across it. The lights came on slowly. I blinked until it stopped stinging.

  By the time my eyes had adjusted, the man had moseyed over to my cage, and was standing with his nose to the bars, staring with unchecked interest.

  “Qel tor su?” he whispered, awed. What are you?

  I glared at him, too tired to think of something quippy in English, let alone in his language. I was half tempted to lunge at him, snarling, just to watch him shrink back, but I couldn’t be bothered to move. I raised my brow at him and sat up a little straighter, staring, blinking slowly. He followed my every movement, eyes wide with wonder, taking copious mental notes as he wrapped his pale grey fingers around the white metal.

  I smacked my lips and finally found my words. “Milthak vol taras?” I said, voice scratchy with sleep.

  He jerked backwards, surprised. Then he smiled and laughed lightly. “Valutar,” he said.

  I drew my knees up to my chest and wrapped my arms around my legs, burying my nose in the crook of my arm. I watched him watch me, slowly waking up. I wondered what he thought of me, what his speculations were. Was I dangerous? Domesticated? Was I trained? I must have been, if I was speaking comprehensibly.

  I flipped him off. The gesture didn’t mean anything here, but I guess he understood that it wasn’t supposed to be nice. He scowled at me and pushed away from the bars, muttering to himself and straightening his jacket. It was actually kind of adorable, so very like what happens when your big angry football friend is rejected by someone’s small dog and they get all bent out of shape about it.

  And no, the irony of flipping someone the bird from a cage was not lost on me. I was not, however, nearly awake enough to appreciate it properly. So I just kind of stared at the concept and blinked a lot until it vaporized like fog in the desert.

  He was muttering obscenities to himself when Lenada came in, just as flustered and unkempt as Yita. Midnight is midnight no matter what planet you’re on.

  “Luras fil be nur tulin en va gon,” she said, keeping her eyes down. Luras, I’d learned, was the dragon’s formal title, something akin to my lord or your grace. I’d yet to hear anyone use his first name – these people were obsessed with honorifics – but one of his visitors once referred to him as Luras Arill, which might have been his surname.

  The man turned to her. He said a soft word that most closely meant Brilliant, and gave Lenada a smile I could feel in the air. She visibly stiffened.

  Yita brought in a short, squarish glass of red and offered it to the man. “Luras Orin,” he said, setting it lightly on the dark coffee table.

  Huh. Another Luras.

  Yita asked quietly if there was anything else he could get the man. He took his sweet time replying, examining his nails and looking around the room with a practiced disdain.

  “Nor, halan,” he said, waving Yita away like a fly. Yita and Lenada exchanged irritated looks and Yita left the room.

  The second he was gone, Orin advanced on Lenada. Slowly, with the casual stride of someone approaching an old friend to give them a firm handshake or that arm-clasping thing men do in old movies. Lenada didn’t move, but it was clear she desperately wanted to.

  “Ji am hirtun mon tiris?” she said quietly.

  He was turned away from me now, but I could see the smile in his shoulders, in the way his back straightened when he spoke, in the sudden jauntiness with which he walked. He stopped a hand’s breadth from her and touched her face, drawing a pale grey thumb down her cheek as though wiping away a tear. Lenada stepped back, still not looking at him. She muttered something along the lines of, “If you don’t need anything I’m leaving,” and made to do just that.

  He grabbed her wrist and pulled her back, quickly enough that she stumbled and fell into him. He smiled and laughed and made some lame joke about being unbalanced in the presence of…okay, he either said “such great beauty” or “such beautiful greatness”, and I think he was referring to himself. My nose crinkled in disgust.

  Orin leaned in, keeping her close to him, and smelled her hair. He whispered something in her ear, and Lenada squirmed to the left, just enough so I could see as Orin drew his tongue across her neck.

  Every muscle in my body went rigid. No, no, bad touch, very bad touch.

  Orin pressed his hand against Lenada’s lower back, a viper’s grin splitting is face near in half. His eyes roved over her form, lingering on her breasts. She lifted her hands to push him off, and he lurched forward, kissing her neck…and doing a really poor job of it. Lenada clearly wasn’t having it either way, but Jesus this man had no idea how foreplay was supposed to work.

  “Nalis.” Lenada’s voice was a breaking whisper, like the sound acrylic nails make on glass. She was frozen stiff, moving slowly, trapped in hardening amber. She looked over her shoulder at the door and opened her mouth, but no words came out this time.

  She looked at me. She thought I was an animal, I don’t know what she thought I could do, but she looked at me, desperation carved into her face.

  “Leave her alone!” I shouted. Orin, predictably, didn’t respond, no more than you would to a chained guard dog. I rattled the door of my cage, shoutin
g, fumbling for the lock, but I had no way out. “Orin, stop!”

  Orin reached down and down. His intentions were clear.

  I screamed.

  I screamed as loud as I could, loud enough to make my throat sting and my lungs ache. The sound stopped Orin in his tracks and he buckled over, putting his hands over his ears. His mouth moved, and when I took a breath to scream again I heard him cursing. He squeezed his eyes shut and Lenada, free of his filthy groping hands, stumbled back until she hit the bookcase, plugging her own ears.

  So they do have really sensitive eardrums. Duly noted.

  I screamed and screamed and screamed, and on my fourth breath, the dragon appeared.

  Lenada saw him first. “Luras,” she said, and Orin thought she was talking to him.

  “Mi vorun,” he said, voice oily, returning to her, hands everywhere they shouldn’t be. His tongue leapt from his mouth and dove towards hers.

  The dragon cleared his throat. Orin froze solid.

  “Dah-reen,” said Orin, dropping Lenada. He stumbled backwards, tripping over air he couldn’t seem to breathe enough of.

  The dragon looked from him to Lenada, crying into the carpet, and back again. He cocked his head sharply, and something popped, loud enough for all of us to hear.

  The man swallowed audibly. He held up his hands and took two small steps backward. “Valtak, ni romati nir tholus – ”

  The dragon raised his hand, and the man went flying backwards.

  He slammed against the window hard enough to crack the glass. It bowed outward, groaning as his body pressed tight against it.

  My heart stilled. The sarcastic part of my brain that takes over in a crisis giggled and thought, Hey look. Magic.

  The dragon stayed where he was, one hand in his pocket, standing in the doorway. His free hand was outstretched, relaxed, almost lazy. His face was blank, the way the faces of these creatures were always blank – but his red eye was afire, his tail was twitching, gouging long, thin lines out of the carpet in an expression of pure animal rage.