by C. E. Murphy
"And what is revenge?"
"Best served cold," the girl breathed, then met Lona's eyes. "This isn't about revenge. Not for me. Maybe for you, but for me it's about righting a wrong. He shouldn't have buried you. Maybe you didn't hear me. Things are changing. There's a future for us, for the Old Races, one that nobody saw coming. We have an impossibly long way to go to get there, but the vampires deserve the chance to be part of it."
"No." A second denial, when she would never have thought even one would pass her lips. Lona settled into her crouch, studying the girl, studying the blank walls, scenting the wind and the distance of her running brethren. "Some of us," she finally said. "Some of us, Daisani's daughter. Some of us deserve the chance. You have made a mistake, girl. You should not have awakened so many at once. We will have to hunt now."
"We?"
Lona's jaw elongated, oily flesh tearing through the veneer of her humanity. It had been far too long since she'd felt that. Far too long, and it re-awakened hunger in her. There would be meat, though, while they hunted. Hunted together, if Daisani's daughter chose to side with her, and not against. "We," she repeated. "Or I will hunt alone."
"You just said I shouldn't have woken you at all. Why would I let you hunt?"
#
Vampires were fast. Ursula knew that, of course: she was one of them. Half of one, anyway, and faster, far faster, than anything human could ever dream of being.
The newly awakened vampire was faster. Even dry and hungry, she moved so quickly Ursula didn't see it until she was upon her. Black and sleek and oily, hard to grip and absolutely wretched of breath, she had Ursula's shirt in her hands, had Ursula slammed into the floor and breathless before Ursula blinked. Speed: that was a vampire's gift. Not strength, though momentum lent them the illusion of strength.
Speed was Ursula's gift, too, but she had shared a womb with a dragon's daughter, and thus was half of one thing, yes, and yet also something more, of another.
Blinding fast, fueled by anger, powered by a core of fire burning within, she grabbed the vampire's throat and threw her. Across the room, against the wall, a sick thunk of flesh meeting stone. Hard enough to stun, when a vampire's strength should only have been enough to shove the other away. Ursula was on her in an instant, long fingers turning to claws in the other's flesh. One shake, one hard rattle and the other's head would crack against the floor, rendering her insensible long enough to bind her. Dangerous knowledge, how to bind a vampire. But instead of shaking her, Ursula hissed instead. "Why," she said again, "would I let you hunt?"
"Because the vampires you need are the ones who have learned patience," the other replied. "The ones who ran? They are dangerous. Dangerous to humans and so dangerous to us. We cannot integrate if we are hunted by mortals, and so we must hunt those who are our kind but not our allies. Do not be a fool, Daisani's daughter. I am Lona, and I am what you need."
There should be a clock, Ursula thought: a clock ticking away the seconds, loud with its own importance, as she stared at the other. At Lona, whose matted hair had cleaned itself now and whose human veneer grew steadily more striking. Not beautiful, but beauty was overrated. She now looked like someone people would want to know; someone interesting, compelling, exciting. Dangerous.
"Hunt the vampires you've loosed," Lona said. "Waken others one by one, so we might find those who can be patient. And we will integrate, Daisani's daughter, and we will show your father the power he has wakened in you and in us through the dead sleep and the learning of patience."
"Coming of age," Ursula said, with almost a laugh. "Is that what you think this is? Me trying to get Daddy's attention? I'm four hundred years old, Lona, and Daddy's the bastard who locked the rest of my people away. I don't really think I need his approval, and if I did, this isn't how I'd get it."
"Not approval." The female vampire hadn't moved, though she could have. Could easily have thrown Ursula off, started their fight anew, maybe even killed her, but instead her eyes were bright with conviction. "Challenge. You have already thrown down a gauntlet, Daisani's daughter. You have undone what he began, made a statement of intent. His mastery is no longer accepted by all. You have proclaimed yourself his heir, and an heir must depose the father in order to survive. Is that not your aim?"
She had no ambition. Not that she was aware of, not in that manner. What she had, what she had always had, was anger. Not so Kate; Kate, for all her dragonly fire, was easy-going, casual, and more inclined to laughter. Her father Janx was like that too, perhaps, though his rage was all the greater for its charming mask. Kate, like Janx, flexed and changed to meet the needs of the day. It had fallen to Ursula, always, to move their little family when they were too young for the number of years they'd spent in one place; Ursula who had kept her mother and sister close and shared nothing of them with the world. Ursula who boiled with fury at how neither world, neither human nor Old, could accept them. And it was she who most clearly saw what Margrit Knight had put into motion, a changing of the guard, a chance for a future wherein Ursula, Kate, Margrit herself; where every chimera had a place in the world, and where so too would their fathers and mothers.
And she meant to make the vampires a part of that change, and that desire was against Eliseo Daisani's wishes, and that meant that yes, in fact, she had ambition after all, and that this vampire woman was right in what she saw.
She let Lona go and straightened. Stood over her, and thought of the vampires already loosed, and of the wisdom of Lona's words, and decided.
"Ursula," she said, and offered Lona a hand. "Ursula Daisani."
PERCHANCE TO DREAM
The mask was nearly as beautiful as the woman bearing it.
They were both dark: it of ironwood so old its chocolate hues had aged to black; she with lustrous skin that said no white men had bred into her aboriginal stock. She was small but strong: had to be to lift the mask's weight so gracefully, when it was more than half her size. It was never meant to be worn: its fist-sized opal eyes couldn't be seen through, nor were its interior struts intended to be placed over shoulders. It was to be carried, danced with, thrust forward so its size and exaggerated features could bring watchers into a world beyond their own.
Janx knew a thing or two about worlds that went unseen.
He had shed his bulky dragon form weeks ago and had taken a commercial flight, like any ordinary man, from Indonesia to the Australian outback. The necessity irked him, in a vague and distant way: a creature born to wings should not have to place himself in a long metal tube and trust another to guide his flight. On the other hand, satellites now watched every surface of the earth. It was perhaps unlikely that human eyes should look at just the right time to see a serpentine red dragon skimming across the surface of the ocean, but it wasn't a risk Janx was willing to take. He hadn't lived this far into modern society by being that particular kind of fool.
Watching the mask-bearer dance, he was quite happily reminded of what kind of fool he was, and how well-worth the price such foolishness could be.
#
"Go away," she said to him when he approached, and shouted a bright laugh at his astonishment. "You think I do not mean it, but I do. I am not for you, the mask is not for you. Go away, with your handsome smile and fiery hair and green green eyes."
"How," he said instead, and sat down in the red sand beside her, "how could you possibly know I want the mask?" The other was more obvious: men often wanted beautiful women, and she had great strength of personality in her round features. She was right, though. Women he could find a-plenty, but the mask was a rarity and he had nothing like it in his hoard. That was, as far as he was concerned, reason enough to desire it. "No, that's not the question I should have asked. What's your name?"
"Darri, and it is the question you meant to ask. What are you called?"
Such a subtle difference in phrasing brought a quirk to Janx's lips. Not what is your name, but what are you called. There were those amongst the Old Races who hoarded their names close, an
d it was a mark of her wit that she asked the one question rather than the other. "I am Janx."
"Janx." Darri tilted her head back and forth a few times, then poked it out like a child trying to emphasize her words. "Go away, Janx."
"I can't."
"You will wish you had."
"Perhaps." Delight bounced through him. Most people deferred to him without noticing. Women who did not were particularly splendid but Darri's forthright counsel went well beyond a lack of deference. It virtually threw down a gauntlet, challenging him to try whatever foolishness he had in mind to pursue. Almost no one dared do that; almost no one was bold enough to consider herself equal to him, a worthy adversary. The last such woman had managed to drive him from New York, a city he'd called home for three decades; the last such man—or something like a man, at least—had lately proven himself a far less admirable opponent than Janx had imagined. With his retreat, Janx had thought himself unlikely to find such another rival for decades, perhaps even centuries.
But Darri gave him hope, and for a creature as old as Janx, hope was precious indeed. "But I would far rather regret what I have done, than what I have not."
"Then you are not very smart," Darri said cheerfully, "but you have been warned."
#
He rather expected the mask to be harder to steal, after all that. But no: it was left where it belonged, a ceremonial piece at the heart of the gathering. There, visiting outsiders gave it uncomfortable due, and Darri's people treated it as more of an old friend, apparently capable of taking care of itself. Janx watched it well into the night, stars catching in its opal eyes, and listened for the particular silence that said all nearby humanity had taken sleep.
Once, a very long time ago, he would have changed form then and there, letting the concussive blast of shifting knock sleepers awake and send them staggering from their tents to catch a glimpse of his sinuous shape striving for the skies. That was in a time of legends, though, long before video cameras and corroborative evidence. Tonight, prosaically, he hefted the mask's weight onto one shoulder, and walked out of the camp into the desert, like any other thief.
He could not, of course, leave the country in the same way he'd entered. Not carrying a dreamwalker's mask half the height of a man, though the sheer outrageousness of bringing it through customs seemed almost worth inevitably losing it.
Almost. Chortling, Janx took to the sky, leaving behind the echoes of his transformation with a few wingbeats. Wisdom dictated he fly to the northern shore, and wait for nightfall again before crossing to Indonesia's southernmost islands. But the flight across the ocean would be wearying, and there was a dragon in the Northern Territory's capital. Better to not alert it to his presence by transforming too close to Darwin, and to rest somewhere he would certainly not be disturbed. Uluru would welcome him; it always had, red rock calling to red beast, and he could linger there as long as he needed to prepare for the unpleasant flight across the ocean.
Besides, the sun-baked stone was warm even at night, and the temptation to flatten amongst its broad smooth top and let distant satellite-viewers imagine they saw a dragon on the holy mountain was too great to resist. Playing to human rules all the time was exhaustively dull. Making a handful of scattered mortals wonder if they'd lost their minds made up for it in some small way.
Darri, quite impossibly, awaited him atop the sandstone mountain. He was no sooner settled comfortably in its red ridges, mask safely curled in his talons, than she was there, looking for all the world like a mother who'd caught her toddler misbehaving. "I told you not to take the mask, dragonlord."
Just that: no shock, no surprise, no wonder at his vast serpentine form, just a single scolding sentence. Astonishment flapped Janx's jaw, human words unwilling to scrape from a throat not meant to shape them. He transformed back to his mortal shape, barely disturbing Darri's thick curls, and knew he sounded exactly like the petulant, chastened child Darri was treating him as: "You can't possibly be here. And how do you know I'm—"
That, at least, was so self-evident he bit his tongue on finishing the question. Darri laughed anyway. "I know so much about you, and you hardly know we exist. Dangerous, dragonlord. Dangerous to think you Old Races are the only magic-users in this world."
"I know we aren't." An automatic, peevish response better suited to an infant of any race than a creature his uncountable age. Janx bared his teeth, submitting to a rare inhuman impulse, and saw Darri mark that they were too long, too white; that they were, by all mortal legends, vampire teeth, with canines far too sharp for human comfort. The vampires, though, had ordinary flat teeth, at least until they shifted to feed, and no one lived to speak of what they saw then.
Or they had, until their lord and master, Daisani, had betrayed them all, which in itself was what sent Janx to the Outback, hoping to find a new and worthy rival. Which was what put him here, now, facing a girl whose bright smile seemed suddenly laced with daggers. "There are witches," he grated. "I have met a few. Are you one?"
Darri mimed spitting, too elegant—or too aware of water's cost—to waste it in the actual action. "No. Maybe their cousin, because all human magic is related, just as all Old Races magic is. But no, dragonlord. The witches are born of secrets, and only the one who was made by learning God's most secret name might be a force of good. The rest are evil. Dreamwalkers are something else."
"Something which knows about the Old Races, when we know nothing of you," Janx whispered. "How do you know us?"
"How could we not? Your memories are collected and archived, kept tidy by your stone men, within the Dreaming."
"The—" Cold sluiced over Janx's arms. Cold never touched him, not like that; it was a gift of being what he was. But the repository of knowledge Darri spoke of went back beyond active memory, even beyond his own long remembrance. "You mean the gargoyle gestalt? The memory banks? You can access those?"
"Where do you think you are now, dragonlord?"
He straightened, affronted. "Uluru. Ayers Rock. This is no dreamtime."
"Is it not?" Darri tipped her chin back, gaze going to the stars, and Janx followed it automatically. Familiar band across the sky, the galaxy stretching out uninterrupted by usually-pervasive human lights, distant stars fading in and out at the corners of his eyes.
It writhed, that milky strip across the sky. Writhed, pulled itself loose from its black background, and twisted to gaze down at him with eyes that were the hearts of stars.
Janx, in as human a thing he'd ever done, gasped and scattered backward, scrambling on hands and feet under the sound of Darri's laughter. The serpent in the sky coiled downward, heat raging into streaks of brilliance across the night before it faded away. Faded entirely: moonlight rose, eating the stars and turning the red stone around them to ghostly purple. Then the earth shifted beneath them, rising up into mountains more familiar to him: jagged, alpine, snow-capped. "Where are we?"
"This is how your stone men see the Dreaming," Darri murmured. "Each new memory adds to the mountains. But see how they are dying, dragonlord. See how the memories are fewer and farther between in collection than ever they were, and how wind and water and time wear away the tips, the very oldest memories of who and what your people are. This worries us, as you are living things of this earth, it is our duty to protect you."
"You. Protect us." Equilibrium briefly restored, Janx stared at Darri. "We are the Old Races, little girl. We are dragons and vampires, selkie and djinn, gargoyles and once, so much more. You're human. How could you be meant to protect us?"
"We were all souls in the Dreaming before we were given physical form. Humans were the last to be shaped, and in our creation accepted custodianship of all that had been made before. We lose so many, every day, and now the Dreaming fears losing you too."
"No." Janx passed a hand over his eyes, then flicked his fingers, throwing the action away. "We have made laws amongst ourselves recently, laws to change who and what we are, and those would be written by now in the gargoyle memories. Yo
u would know that, if you were genuinely conversant with the memories, and because you don't I think I can safely say this is a trick, nothing more. Dragons don't dream, my dear. This isn't what you say."
"Beings who do not dream," Darri said, drolly, "perhaps should not steal dreamwalker masks."
Cold washed him again, discomfiting human response. Janx's gaze snapped to the mask, almost innocuous under the blue-lit sky. Only its eyes were alive, opal drinking down the moon, dancing with stars that no longer shone above. "That sent me into the gestalt?"
"I sent you into the Dreaming." Darri no longer sounded young, but ancient and implacable. "I told you, dragonlord, that you should have gone away. You will not leave here unless I consider you fit and trustworthy enough to go. A dragon who does not dream," she said, more quietly but no more gently, "will not wake up on his own."
Anger knotted a place beneath Janx's breastbone, though he was careful to only let a smile show. He smiled easily, and knew it; it made him seem approachable and friendly, which made turning coat all the more delightful. "Then I had best learn as much as I can from the gestalt while I'm here, hadn't I? Surely there are ancient memories of my own people which might stand recovery." Or better yet, memories of the others, which could prove invaluable.
Darri tipped her head. "Be warned, dragonlord. No one takes anything from the Dreaming without leaving something behind. Are you very certain you have no memories you would rather not share?"
"The secret I have spent rather some centuries protecting has been outed," Janx said dryly. "I believe I have nothing to fear. But here, Dreamwalker." Dismayed amusement coursed through him: most humans took months, more often years, to earn a title from the Old Races, and he'd granted this girl one within minutes. Daisani would never forgive him.
Daisani, Janx reminded himself, was in no position to forgive anyone.
"A game," he said, more subdued by that recollection than he would have thought possible. "Let me search the archives for ancient histories."