Quicksilver Dragon

by Chant, Zoe

  Instead, he said, “Yeah, I know what you mean. I feel like I’m back in Ir—” He cut off whatever he was going to say and then, after a moment of walking in silence, added, “I think it’s jamais vu.”

  He pronounced it jah-may voo. Lindsay curled her mouth around the sounds, trying them out.

  “The opposite of deja vu,” Boone said. “Feeling like something you’ve done a hundred times is weird and unfamiliar.”

  “Well,” Lindsay said, “this qualifies.”

  Then she saw it.

  The actual boards of the boardwalk were laid very close together, with just the tiniest of gaps. That was what had kept Eleanor relatively dry, after all. They were almost watertight.

  But not quite. And light could go places water couldn’t.

  Lindsay had never had to think about that before, but she had to think about it now, because right in front of her, spilling up through the hair’s-breadth cracks in the San Marco boardwalk, were curtains of shimmering purple light.

  She reached out blindly and grabbed Boone’s hand. He closed his fingers around hers at once, holding her tight.

  In defiance of all the laws of nature, the purple light continued to bleed up into the air around them. It looked like condensed twilight, bewitching and unearthly. But even though it had a stark, impossible beauty, looking at it gave Lindsay a sense of bone-deep horror. It almost made her sick to her stomach. It was just wrong, like an emergency warning siren her body understood even though the rest of her didn’t.

  It felt like holding Boone’s hand was the only thing keeping her sane.

  She swallowed. “Are you seeing this?”

  “Yeah.” If he was afraid, it didn’t show in his face. His jaw was set. He looked focused and grim. “I don’t know what it is, but it’s not good.”

  “Not good at all,” Lindsay agreed.

  He turned to her, and the smallest of smiles cracked the rough-and-ready facade he’d been wearing. She was glad to see that there was still a human, vulnerable Boone underneath the new steely hardness. This was the Boone that was holding her hand.

  “What?” Lindsay said. Despite everything, the way he was looking at her made her flush, her cheeks warming.

  “I’m just glad our instincts are on the same page,” Boone said. “And that we’re listening to them. I had a second there where I was worried you were going to tell me a glow-stick must have washed in with the tide.”

  God, it would be nice to have that simple and plausible an explanation. If only she could believe it.

  She waved her hand at the luminous waves around them, still the same dense, sparkly purple. “I’d like to see the glow-stick that could do this.”

  But she knew what he meant. It was the exact same way she had felt about the jamais vu. When you were hip-deep in craziness, it was comforting to know someone else was right there with you, thinking and feeling the same things. Neither one of them was going to tell the other to snap out of it. They both had the same sense that whatever this was, it was for real.

  She would have said that all her body wanted to do right then was run. But her heart felt differently.

  She said, “Let’s go look.”

  “Yeah,” Boone said. He sounded as surprised as she felt. “Let’s do something stupid.”

  They were still a quarter of a mile from the end of the boardwalk, where it petered out into the beach and where they could easily start walking under the boardwalk, back along the coastline itself. Without a doubt, that was where it would be simplest to make the over-under switch. But Lindsay couldn’t shake the feeling that time was of the essence.

  She eyed the drop from the boardwalk railing to the beach. Not too bad from here, especially since they’d be landing on wet, sugar-soft sand.

  She stepped on the lowest bar of the railing, testing her balance.

  “Whoa, whoa.” Boone moved his grip from her hand to her arm. “What are you doing?”

  “Jumping,” Lindsay said matter-of-factly. “It’s not that far.”

  “It is if you make a bad landing.”

  “I’ll land with cat-like grace.” She flexed her toes inside her sneakers. “I didn’t know this morning that I’d wind up on a date, so I’m even wearing practical shoes. And I took two whole gymnastics lessons when I was in seven, so I have serious skills.”

  “At least let me go first.” He stepped up onto the railing beside her. “I’ll go ahead and drop down, and then I can catch you if it looks like you’re going to slip.”

  Lindsay would agree to any fair solution that would get them both down to the beach as soon as possible, so she nodded and stepped back onto the reassuringly solid, sturdy boardwalk. She didn’t know why he would be any more qualified for spontaneous beach jumping than she was, but she had to admit that there was a weird thrill to knowing he wanted to protect her. She’d never really had that before.

  Boone was clearly relieved. He flipped one long leg over the top of the railing and then the other. When he was poised like that, standing on the opposite side of the rail from her, he gave her a daredevil kind of grin and said, “See you on the other side.”

  Chapter Four

  Boone tumbled down. He landed hard on the wet sand, but he landed on his feet. That was good, because as soon as he hit the ground, he saw how studded this part of the beach was with sharp-edged seashells and broken bottles that had washed in with the storm. He was glad he’d gone first. If one of them had to risk a bad landing and a trip to the ER for a dozen stitches, better him than her. And now he could catch her if it looked like she’d fall.

  He could smell the sea salt up close now, briny and wild, but there was something else, too. A wilder, stranger smell.

  He had meant to look up to tell Lindsay she could jump, but then he saw the source of the strange purple light.

  It wasn’t human.

  Whatever it was peeled back his understanding of the world, stripping aside everything he’d always thought he’d known about what was real and what was impossible. He could hear his own heartbeat thundering away in his ears.

  At first his mind tried to insist he was looking at some kind of malformed mutant crocodile. When he couldn’t make himself believe it, he thought wildly of pterodactyls instead, like what was lying beneath the boardwalk was an escapee from some Jurassic Park experiment.

  But he knew it was neither. This was more unreal than even the most farfetched science fiction.

  And he had drawn one of these things before.

  It’s a dragon.

  “Boone?” It was Lindsay, calling down to him from over the railing. By the sound of her voice, this wasn’t the first time she’d tried to get his attention. There was a silvery quaver of fear there. “What is it?”

  He had no clue how long he’d been standing there trying to process what he was seeing. He made himself look away so he could at least reassure her a little.

  Only the words dried up. What did you say when you found a dragon under the boardwalk?

  Pretend it’s an IED that could explode any minute. You have to get her out of range.

  “Go get your car,” he said in a flash of inspiration. At least that would put some distance between her and the dragon. “I’ll be right behind you.”

  But Lindsay wasn’t having it. “Just tell me what it is.”

  “I can’t.”

  “Fine.” She hooked one leg over the railing. “Then I’m coming down.”

  “Lindsay—”

  “I was kidding about the cat-like grace, for the record. If you could stop me from falling on my face, I’d appreciate it.”

  In another instant, she was headed down to him.

  He caught her. They wound up posed like they were about to start dancing: her hands on his shoulders, his hands around her waist. She leaned into him, and he smelled the warm cinnamon-sugar scent of her skin. She rested her smooth forehead against his chest, like she was breathing in the smell of him too. There were little tremors running up and down her body. From
the cold? From knowing that there was something life-changing behind her?

  But even though he would have let her hold onto him forever, she didn’t do it for more than a second. She had to look.

  Boone watched her face. He saw the dragon reflected in the black mirror of her pupils and saw her eyes get wider and wider, like they had to make room for it.

  “Is that...”

  All Boone wanted was for her to have a reasonable explanation for this. She was a city planner, wasn’t she? She had a finger in every pie in San Marco. He wanted her to say, “Is that the rare Ecuadoran lizard that escaped from Mr. Smith’s private zoo?” Or something equally ridiculous but equally grounded in reality. “Is that the animatronic model they stole off the movie set on the south side of town?” Anything.

  He said, “What do you think it is?”

  Lindsay inched forward. She opened and closed her mouth, looking for the right words, and then said, “Something that isn’t supposed to be real.”

  The dragon—if it was a dragon—was enormous, almost twice as long as Boone was tall. Its body was thick and muscular, with powerful haunches that made it look like it was made to spring into attack. Its front legs were tipped with onyx-black claws, razor-sharp and several inches long. From its head its slowly thrashing tail, it was covered with purple scales in shades that ranged from soft and rosy pastels to deep blue-violets. It was terrifying. It was magnificent.

  It was hurt.

  Lindsay seemed to care more about that last fact than she did about the mystery of the thing’s nature. “It’s bleeding!”

  She knelt down on the sand and tentatively stretched out one hand, settling it down between two deep, long scratches on the dragon’s side.

  If this were an IED, an unexploded bit of fantasy-world ordinance, Lindsay was now petting it. Every muscle Boone had tightened up, wanting to get her as far away as possible, make sure she didn’t have to pay some price for her compassion, but—

  He had just barely started processing that the dragon was bleeding light, not just blood, when there was suddenly no dragon there at all.

  Boone stared. “Eleanor?”

  The woman lay where the dragon had been just a second before. “Run,” she said hoarsely, grabbing at Lindsay’s arm. “You both have to run.”

  “We’re not leaving you,” Lindsay said.

  Boone agreed. “No way. We need to get you to a hospital—”

  “Run,” Eleanor said again. “Find Henry and Ursula. They’ll help you.”

  “No, you’re hurt, we need to get you to a hospital—”

  But even as he was saying it, he realized that that couldn’t possibly be an option for her. Even now that she was back to looking human again, that strange purple light was still radiating off of her. If she went to the hospital, she’d be in some Area 51 lab before the day was out.

  “Henry and Ursula,” Eleanor repeated. “You have to find them. You have to stay away from the cove.” She was looking over their shoulders now, but when Boone turned a little to follow the direction of her gaze, all he could see was the rain.

  But when Lindsay looked, too, she gasped. “Boone. There’s someone there.”

  Was there? He squinted and thought he could make out a faint, dark shape. A silhouette.

  Eleanor bent double and changed again, falling back into her dragon shape. The transformation meant there was suddenly so much more of her that she knocked Lindsay off balance and sent her tumbling against Boone. He caught her and just barely managed to keep them both upright.

  Eleanor-the-dragon looked at them. Her eyes were bright sapphire. There was something hypnotic about them, something that made it impossible for Boone to look away—

  Then Eleanor exhaled, and fire erupted all around them.

  Bright purple flames. Right in their faces. All over them.

  They both cried out in shock, recoiling and patting at themselves frantically. For an awful second, Boone felt a visceral, searing pain, one that was less like he was burning and more like his skin was being flayed from his bones, like he was turning inside out. Then the sensation vanished, and he felt whole again. Unburnt. Alive. It must have just been panic.

  But sand beneath them had turned to warped, bumpy glass. The heat of the dragonfire had been enough to make it molten, and he and Lindsay had been right on top of it. How were they even alive? How was the new beach-glass already cool and solid?

  He looked at Lindsay again.

  No, he decided. She didn’t look completely untouched, not exactly. She looked—

  He wouldn’t have thought it was possible, but she looked even more beautiful than before. She almost glowed, the way people talked about pregnant women glowing. Like some extra life had been breathed directly into her. What had this thing done to them?

  Nothing. Get a hold of yourself. It might have looked like fire, but it was just more of that weird light. You’re not hurt. You’re both fine.

  Sure. Weird light that had melted sand into glass. Much like fire did.

  “Oh, my God,” Lindsay whispered. “What the hell was that?”

  IT’S COMING.

  It was a roar inside his head. Lindsay recoiled too, like an air horn had just gone off in her face.

  It was Eleanor’s voice, beamed directly into their brains.

  And it had the hypnotic power of her eyes times at least a hundred.

  RUN, Eleanor bellowed. It was a command. As much as Boone wanted to stay, as much as it went against everything in him to run away from trouble, he could feel his body starting to obey her. Lindsay was shaking in place, all of her weight balanced on her toes like she was about to spring.

  They were resisting her order as much as they could, but they couldn’t hold out for much longer.

  Then Boone saw the light go out of Eleanor’s eyes, and he knew she was dead.

  Without a chance of saving her, he couldn’t fight off the hypnotic force of her order any longer. He felt Lindsay seize his hand. When she started running, he ran with her.

  He couldn’t see the mysterious silhouette following them, but he still had the eerie feeling that they were being chased.

  Chapter Five

  Whatever spell Eleanor had cast on them had made them go out of their minds. They ran from the beach at full-tilt, faster than Lindsay had ever run in her entire life. She suddenly had an infinite reserve of energy. Her breath was even and cool inside her chest.

  They almost sprinted right past their cars, like they were bound to the letter of Eleanor’s law and not just its spirit, but they pulled up short at the last second. Even then, Lindsay still felt a kind of elastic band around her—some magical impulse trying to slingshot her forward, trying to make her run and run and run.

  It wasn’t the exercise that was making her heart pound. It was the helplessness.

  She looked at Boone and felt her mouth tremble. “What was that? What happened?”

  “I couldn’t make myself stay,” he said.

  He was blaming himself, she realized. The thought made her heart hurt. She squeezed his hand.

  “She was gone,” she said firmly. “There wasn’t anything we could have done. She did something to us—something magical.” The words sounded silly, but she knew they were true.

  Boone fished into his pocket and came up with his keys. His face was grimly set. “Let me get you somewhere safe, Lindsay. God, please.” He swallowed. “It’s too late for Eleanor, but I can still make sure nothing happens to you. And as far as I know, you can’t Jedi mind-trick me out of this.”

  No, she couldn’t, and if she was going to be honest with herself, she didn’t want to. She still felt completely powerless, and all she wanted to do right now was lean on him.

  “My car’s over there,” she said. “I can drive myself home.”

  Spoken like a woman not used to doing any leaning.

  “Please,” Boone said again, more quietly this time. “I don’t want us to split up.”

  Driving away from him did s
ound like her worst nightmare. If she didn’t know where he was—if she couldn’t see for herself that the silhouetted figure at the end of the beach hadn’t gotten him—

  She nodded and slid into the passenger side as he opened the door for her.

  She hadn’t even realized it was still raining until she had a roof over her again. She looked down at her jeans, the dark denim black with water. Her socks were soaked through too.

  Dimly, distantly, Lindsay remembered that a couple hours ago, her biggest concern had been what kind of bath bomb to use when she got home. Then Boone had come along and changed everything. It was like she’d found pirate’s treasure while combing through the garbage on the beach.

  And now it was like she’d found a pirate’s curse.

  *

  Purple fire.

  Now that Lindsay knew it hadn’t burned her, she could remember a little bit about how it had felt.

  Warm, mostly. Warm, tingling, hair-rising, like a flood of static electricity that was also a summer breeze full of the scent of wildflowers.

  That scent had been the most confusing part of it.

  More confusing than fire that doesn’t burn?

  Yes, Lindsay thought. Sort of.

  She knew it sounded insane. But the flames really had been almost fragrant: she had breathed them in and immediately felt like she was standing in the middle of a garden full of all her favorite flowers: jasmine and lavender and freesias.

  It was like the heat had cracked Lindsay open right to her very heart.

  Unless, of course, it hadn’t. Maybe she was just imagining it. Maybe she was trying to tell herself that a few moments of sheer terror had actually been transformative and special.

  Like seeing a dragon?

  Boone put a cup of hot chocolate down in front of her, and she almost jumped out of her skin.

  “Sorry!” He held up his hands. “I didn’t mean to scare you.”

  They had gone to her apartment. Sitting in her own kitchen drinking hot chocolate from her own favorite mug should have been reassuring. She was the one surrounded by familiarity, and yet he was the one who seemed to know what he was doing.