by T D Raufson
Melissa bolted upright in her bed. Sunlight was pouring into the room through the slightly east facing window, which meant she was sleeping late, but that was normal for a summer visit with her grandmother. In fact, everything was exactly the way it should be, except she was naked. She released a breath she realized she was holding.
Had yesterday been a dream? She ran her hands across the sheets. The dull ache of loss locked in her chest seemed to tell at least part of the story. The funeral, the will, the journal: when did reality stop? She looked around the room. The journal sat accusingly on the nightstand beside her bed. She shivered a little as the pieces continued to fall into place. She didn’t remember putting the journal there.
Had Nicklaus, the boy she had spent most of her life teasing, really attacked her? Had she run from him and fought him in the yard? Her hand came to her neck and the gold chain that had not been there the day before. Her fingers followed it to the gem-encrusted claw hanging at its end along with the key to the box. The claw pulsed warmly with her touch. Her shoulders slumped a little. That was real, too. There was very little left to question, but Melissa hesitated to face the one thought that filled her with fear and uncertainty. Did she really change into a dragon after failing to cast an ancient spell in time?
Yes, you did, traitor. Why are you struggling with this so? The voice in her head answered her with a growl.
Why did it insist on calling her a traitor? What had she done? She had tried to cast the spell. She had followed the directions but failed.
You failed – this time.
The accusation hissed at her. This time, the words convicted her of some greater crime. She suddenly saw herself again, standing on the pentagram with her wings spread wide voicing the words of the spell. The image shattered into a spike of pain that ripped into her head. She threw her hands across her eyes and cried out, but she couldn’t block out the searing light that was still receding to pinpoints of pain in her eyes.
As it cleared, she tried to recapture part of the image. Anything that would help her understand what she did. The pain and brightness returned immediately like a warning. A tear ran down her cheek, and she retreated to a thought of something safe, her grandmother writing in the library.
She had failed this time, not before. She had failed to fulfill her grandmother’s last request, but some time before she had not failed. Some ancient time ago, she had cast the spell. Was that such a crime?
You know the answer.
“How?” she asked the room.
Think. Use that ancient brain of ours.
“We’re free now. The spell is broken.”
Right.
“I cast the spell that trapped us.” She had intentionally trapped dragons in their human form.
That’s right, I did. The voice sounded both accusing and consoling.
But, why? She struggled to drag a memory out of her resistant mind and paid again with pain. She had no idea why she cast it the first time, but she knew why she had failed. She had ignored her grandmother’s directions. She had wanted to go to bed. Maybe in her heart she had wanted to fail. Maybe she had made a mistake ages before. Maybe no one was ever supposed to cast it.
Maybe.
“Then why did she want me to cast it again? Why was it so important?”
The voice in her mind did not answer.
Melissa pounded her fists into the soft mattress.
Why had she forgotten?
Why was her memory such a mess?
Who was she?
Was she this frail girl in the bed?
No!
The command stopped the breakdown that was rushing into her mind, and halted the panic that was screaming from the resistant corner of her mind. For some reason, she remembered things she never could have done, but she couldn’t be sure when and what she had done the night before.
I am Meliastrid. The voice in her mind shouted.
“Who’s Melissa?”
I am.
Her eyes rolled to the ceiling and she flopped back into the soft pillows. The comfortable and well-known memories of Melissa were floating on an ocean of memories she didn’t have the day before. Which ones did she trust?
Both and neither.
She brought both hands to her face and pressed her palms into her eyes, wishing the horrible headache would subside.
Melissa sighed into the empty room and stopped resisting. She stopped trying to remember any one thing and just laid on the bed thinking about what she knew.
She was Melissa and Meliastrid. She was human and dragon.
No, I am one. They are just forms I take. I am Meliastrid.
Again, she sighed and accepted these points as fact, and the voice in her head sighed as well.
“Now I just have to figure out why this spell is so important.”
It is important, why it was cast may not be important. The fact that it was is, however.
She rolled onto her side and stared at the leather bound journal on her nightstand, its mere presence seeming to accuse her of neglect and avoidance. In a single motion, she threw the covers back and was standing on the plush carpeting of her room. It was time to face this new day.
—
Dressed in blue jeans and a red sweatshirt, Melissa looked nothing like the mistress of the manor that she now was. She didn’t feel like her, either. She walked down the empty hallway on the second floor of her new home and into the middle level of the library where she was always so relaxed. The overstuffed chairs and old carpet of the expansive room with the dark wood immediately comforted her. This was the heart of the house to her.
There were equally elegant rooms on the ground floor and throughout the house, but this was its soul. It was where her grandmother had written. It was where every book Melissa had ever read was stored. Old friends watched over her here. She felt bad that she might have abandoned them for a while, but she was back now.
She ran her hand along the warm wood of the rail surrounding the opening in the second floor that looked down onto the desk below. The sounds of work and the smell of sawdust and wood stain greeted her from the damaged doors where Nicklaus had smashed into the back yard. A cool breeze from the open doors wafted through the opening and she shivered.
In her mind, his hands closed around her throat in a final attempt to kill her. Rage filled his eyes. She wished she could forget that scene, erase the black mark of that encounter and what it meant about her childhood friend.
He’s more than that.
She nodded to herself. He was, and that made the situation even more complicated. He was Nickliad, her mate.
The odd feeling of old memories of what seemed to be thousands of years blending with what had been her very short life made her a little dizzy. She gripped the railing and looked down at the new doors. The repairs were well on their way to completion. Charles had already been busy.
He would be down there somewhere among the work, seeing to the manor. The construction blocked her normal path to the ground floor, so she retreated back to the hallway and down the main stairs into the front landing. Another group of workers was repairing the damaged woodwork in the foyer. In a few hours, the scar of the fight that had ranged through this house the night before would be gone. Yet the wound Melissa carried within herself struck far deeper.
At the foot of the stairs, she turned left into the kitchen to get away from the noise and intrusion she felt from the workers. She stopped on the other side of the door to collect herself. It seemed wrong to wipe away the evidence this soon. There should be a period of mourning for her ancient relationship.
Why do you wish to leave your mate?
“He tried to kill me.”
You still don’t understand his side of this.
“He was going to kill Charles.”
He was angry, and that is a human.
“He was wrong. Humans didn’t trap him.”
No, we did.
“And you think he should kill me?”
I
think he would be angrier if he knew what I know.
“I had a good reason.”
Share it with me when we find out.
Charles cleared his throat from deeper in the kitchen to let her know she was not alone. She stopped talking to herself and walked over to join him. The comforting sameness of the kitchen along with the rock-solid presence of Charles helped stabilize her. She had spent many of her years in the brightly lit, white pine and stainless steel of this room. For five years of her life, she had eaten her oatmeal at the long bar and watched the news with Charles before they each had gone to school. This morning was a little different but still brought back the comfortable memories of her childhood. New, deeper, memories swirled beneath those, threatening to dislodge what she knew of herself, but she clung to the familiar to keep the panic at bay.
You are more than that. If you accept those memories, we will not suffer so much.
She ignored the advice and sat down at the bar in front of a tray where Charles was pouring a glass of orange juice. His left arm seemed stiff as he set the carafe aside. There was no other sign he had been in a fight with a dragon the night before. A news story continued to play and hold his attention.
Throughout her years away at school and into college, she had stopped watching the news. It had never been important to what was going on around her, but this morning it was all about what she had failed to accomplish.
A video clip of two young men fighting filled the small screen above the bar. The clip was very short and changed quickly to a dark scene in a large city where a single man was running down the street screaming something at the camera. The scene changed again to a bad quality video of two women at the head of a traffic jam. They were mostly naked, and the video was appropriately digitized for television. Across the bottom of the screen, a ticker scrolled with short snippets of news to go with the quick intro scenes.
“Reptilian men fight to the death in the streets of Athens.”
“Snake women stop traffic in India.”
Charles pointed out the tray on the counter. Beneath his coat, she caught a quick glimpse of a pistol that had not been there the day before.
“Good Morning, Miss. I was bringing you some breakfast.”
That will not be enough.
“Thanks, I thought I would come down and see what was real this morning.” She ignored the sudden empty feeling in her stomach and the complaint about the size of the morning meal.
Grabbing the remote to the television, he turned the volume down as the reporter was talking over the image of a fifteen-foot-tall, blue-scaled basilisk that was crawling over cars in a scene out of the best Hollywood films. Smoke and fire flashed across the screen as rockets leaped toward the beast. The scene shifted back to the reporter before the rockets hit.
“What’s that?”
“You should eat first.” He switched the set off completely and motioned for her to sit down.
He’s protecting you. How sweet of him.
A flash of fear crossed his face.
“Relax. I’m not going to hurt anyone.”
“Of course not, Miss.”
She sat down in the suddenly cold and foreign room. She would not be able to stand it if Charles was afraid of her.
But, he should be. That is where humans belong.
Melissa shook her head and looked down at the plate. The tray held a plate of eggs and ham with wheat toast. She had requested the same breakfast the day before, but this morning she was craving raw meat and lots of it. How did she tell Charles that when he was staring at her that way? She moved the eggs to one side of her plate and cut into the ham. The salty meat soothed the edges of hunger she had not realized she had. She would need more of that, lots more.
“Charles, I think we should talk about this.”
“About what, Miss?”
“Well, to start, what’s with the pistol?”
Charles never looked away from her face. He had been trained by the Marines to deal with questions he didn’t want to answer and by his father to control a delicate situation.
“I felt, with last night’s events and this morning’s news, that I should be prepared.” There was no request for permission. There was no apology. There was just fact.
“Prepared for what?”
“This is a compromise. I didn’t think you would like me walking around with a rifle and grenade launcher.”
His humor, dipped in truth, took her off guard as it always did, and she grinned. He was as serious as he had been with his first answer. He had no intention of backing down, so she decided to pay attention even though he was being flippant to soften the impact.
“What makes you think you would need them?”
He sighed. “The news is not good this morning. Apparently whatever happened here last night was repeated all over the world.” He refilled her juice. He was avoiding something. “There have been incidents. The news is reporting both outbreaks of lizard man violence and hunt teams scouring the woods and jungles for them. They’ve even killed a dragon.”
Fear and dread she had never felt before filled her mind.
That’s not possible.
Melissa realized it was wrong to think humans could not kill a dragon and asked the question that was troubling her.
“Where?” She ran through a list of dragons she knew were near her.
“Not around here.” He seemed to realize her fear. “It was in France. That was the report you were just watching. It’s been all over the news, and they won’t stop showing that video.”
Muscles she was not aware she was clenching relaxed, and for the first time that morning she had agreed with the voice in her head. “That’s not a dragon. It’s a basilisk.”
Charles stared at her for a moment, and she realized suddenly why he was confused.
“It’s an abomination. It’s a merging of species that creates a rather vile creature that has no redeeming qualities at all. They were right to kill it. It has no mind but hate and rage.” Melissa had no idea where the information had come from, but she knew all about the beast and why it was important to kill it.
Charles continued to stare at her until she stopped eating to think about why he was confused.
They are common to us, but he has never seen any of this. But, why are they here? How did they return?
Fear returned for a moment when she considered what it would take to create the creature that was supposed to be extinct. The fear was followed by a searing headache when she attempted to remember why it was extinct. She couldn’t answer her own question.
Charles was waiting for some kind of answer to the unasked question on his face. She had the impression that if it had not been for his training his mouth would be open.
“What?”
“Nothing, it’s just… strange, Miss. No disrespect meant.”
“I know, don’t you think I know? I have no idea why I suddenly knew that was a basilisk and not a dragon. I can’t tell which of the thoughts in my head are mine and which ones belong to the dragon that I changed into last night.”
They are one and the same, we are the same being.
Melissa shook her head at the intruding thought.
“What you can’t hear is the argument I’m going through as I try to figure out all of this. What’s real? What’s fantasy? What will cause the pain.” She threw her hands up. “I can’t explain why that thing is here.”
It really shouldn’t be.
“I can’t explain why I’m glad it’s dead.”
Because it’s an abomination and should be destroyed.
“Ahh!” she screamed into the ceiling.
Charles watched her internal argument with concern. She shook her head at him.
“Don’t think I’m not concerned. This is freaking me out. I’m trying to figure out what’s going on, and every time I get close to an answer I get slammed in the head with this blinding, painful, bright light. The only thing keeping me sane is that I know I’m still Melissa. I’m s
till Mel.”
Meliastrid.
He grinned at the use of the nickname he knew she protected. She felt a little better. A flash of pride crossed Charles’ eyes as he nodded to her that he understood. They were not back to what they had been before he left for basic training, but their shared experience was breaking through his stony exterior. She smiled back at him from her plate.
“Could I have some more ham?” She had eaten all that was on her plate, and she was not going to be able to make it without more meat.
“Of course, Miss.” He nodded and stood up to prepare it for her, and she felt a pang of guilt at continuing to treat him like a servant, but a gentle pressure at the back of her mind stopped her from saying anything about it. Her mother was reaching out to her. It was the first time she had felt another dragon’s mind that morning, and it awakened a desire far more voracious than the hunger she still felt. She had not felt a deeper need in ages and to feel the suddenly warm feeling of her mother’s presence soothed an absence she had not been aware was there. When it retreated, she felt disappointed in being alone again. She nearly cried out at the loss of the connection, but she controlled her emotions and looked up at Charles. He was watching her with a curious look on his face as he seared another ham steak.
“My parents are coming.”
“In what form?” he asked.
Odd question, why would they not come in dragon form?
Melissa suddenly realized he would have no way of knowing the answer that seemed so natural to her.
“I expect father will be very unlikely to ever take human form again.” She grimaced at how right he had been searching for their birthright and how disappointing it must have been to him for so long. Had he known all along that he was trying to get back this heritage? How many other dragons knew they were trapped? How many had suffered and for how long? He was the King of the European Dragons, and he was trapped in such a feeble form. That was not how she wanted to think of her father. “In fact, I expect this will be a very uncomfortable meeting.”