by Chant, Zoe
She’d thought she was doing a good job hiding whatever the hell was happening to her, but she’d forgotten the psychic sense Uber drivers had for people who might be about to throw up in their cars.
“Ma’am, are you all right? Do you need me to pull over?” There was an edge of panic in the guy’s voice. He jerked them into the right-hand lane like he wanted to get them to the shoulder of of the road as quickly as possible.
The lurch didn’t help Lindsay’s stomach. But, she realized, it didn’t hurt it either.
Whatever was going on with her wasn’t about motion sickness. It wasn’t about the danger they had been in, either.
Boone put his arm around her shoulders. “Lindsay, are you all right?”
She clenched her teeth for a moment and then managed to relax her jaw enough to manage a relatively normal response. “I’m fine, I promise.”
“You’re not carsick?” the driver said, veering over to the right again. “You can roll down a window.”
He went ahead and did it himself, sending a strong breeze whipping in to send Lindsay’s hair flying all around her. She got a piece of it in her mouth. It turned out that that having hair in her mouth definitely did not help with her nausea—yuck. That was the only thing so far to really make things worse. She pulled it out and rolled the window up, finger-combing her hair back into some semblance of order.
“I’m fine,” she said again, more firmly this time. Under her breath, just to Boone, she added, “How far are we from your place?”
He pressed his palm against her back, steadying her. “Ten minutes, probably.”
“I can drive faster!” their driver said. He flattened his foot against the gas pedal, and the car lurched forward so quickly they almost rear-ended the truck in front of them.
“See, honey,” Boone said, “he can drive faster.” Irony was coiled tightly around his voice. He was rubbing her back in little circles.
Lindsay tried to focus on breathing evenly. Was this what it felt like to be going into labor? In and out. In and out.
Boone definitely had the role of the worried husband down, she thought fondly. Suddenly it was easy to see him as exactly that. He’d be exactly what any woman in that situation would need. No anxious pacing back and forth, no disgust at the whole process. He’d hold her hand all the way through.
He rubbed his thumb across her shoulder blades. “You’re smiling. Feeling better?”
“Not really,” Lindsay said. “Just... thinking.” This didn’t seem like the right time to ask if he wanted kids.
“So I have a theory.”
Keep breathing. In and out. “Yeah?”
She said it as lightly as possible, but the driver still made another attempt to break the sound barrier.
“I’m not going to throw up in your car!” Lindsay said, losing her patience.
“Everyone always says that!”
“I promise you it’ll be way more of a mess if you get us killed than if she does throw up,” Boone said. “What the hell, man?”
Oh, Boone was going to get such a bad Uber rating from this guy. Lindsay hoped he was resigned to that. She moved her hand off her knee and onto his, squeezing it until she had his attention again.
“Theory,” she said through her teeth.
“I think you may have the same case of food poisoning that I did,” Boone said. “Remember how we wondered if it was going to hit you? We ate at the same time, but I got sick before you did?”
Their driver made brief, freaked-out eye contact with Lindsay in the rearview mirror. This time, Lindsay suspected, he wasn’t worried about the possibilities of food poisoning. Instead, he could tell by the blatant air-quotes in Boone’s voice that this was some kind of code, and now he was wondering whether or not this was a sex thing.
Lindsay at least respected his ability to speculate about that in silence. Presumably he drew a professional line. He might have been curious about whatever they’d done in bed, but if it wasn’t going to lead to ruined floor-mats, he wasn’t going to ask.
Little did he know, the true answer was so much weirder.
Draconian food poisoning.
A rush of strange, unearthly euphoria complicated the pangs that had Lindsay almost doubled over in her seat. So this was it. She hadn’t been left out. Whatever Eleanor had passed on, whether that was a poison or a gift, she had passed it on to them both. She and Boone really were a team.
She was going to become a dragon. Maybe, on whatever genetic or spiritual level that transformation took place on, she was part-dragon already. When they’d made love, she’d been stronger than she’d expected, stronger than she’d ever known herself to be before...
Another wave of pain made her clutch her stomach.
“Oh, that’s it,” their driver said. He seemed to view it more as a formal objection than an actual attempt to kick them out of the car, though, because he kept driving.
At this point, Lindsay was more than willing for him to stop. It felt like the atmosphere of the car was closing in around her, hot and sweaty, like she was being squeezed by some enormous hand. She rolled her window down, holding her hair back with one hand this time, and tried to gulp in fresh air. It burned on her tongue and all the way down her throat.
What if it happened too quickly? What if they didn’t get into Boone’s house in time?
But she couldn’t ask the driver to stop, she realized. She couldn’t afford for him to stop, no matter how much he wanted to, no matter how much she wanted him to.
If he stopped the car, she’d turn into a dragon on the side of the road. And the whole rest of her life, if she even survived to live it, would be spent inside a lab, being poked and prodded by scientists determined to figure out how she worked. That would have been a fate worse than death for Eleanor, and now she knew first-hand how the possibility of it felt. When she thought about this happening out in the open, her blood ran cold.
And the rest of her ran hot—hotter than ever. She coughed once and felt like fire was racing up her throat, eager to erupt from her mouth. She clapped her hand over her lips, trying to breathe in and out through her nose. No wonder Boone had worried about burning her by mistake.
Time stretched out like taffy. Once again she could hear Boone talking to the driver—probably convincing him to keep going no matter what—but this time she couldn’t make out any of the individual words. But his voice was a lifeline to her just as much as his knee and his hand on her back. She had him to hold onto.
For some reason she groped around inside her mind for the strange voice that had drifted in and out of her since Eleanor and the beach. It had reassured her before.
Now, she sensed, she needed to reassure it.
It’s the dragon part of me. It’s thrashing around inside me, making me burst at the seams.
We can’t go on like this, dragon-Lindsay. We have to work together.
She imagined reaching out a hand to the dragon that had burned her, the dragon that was tearing her apart from the inside-out. She didn’t know what it—what she—would look like, so she just imagined some cross between Eleanor and Boone... an image that dissolved, in her mind’s eyes, into something new.
A dragon with shining silver and gold scales. A dragon with majestic golden wings that looked like they were made out of living sunlight.
That’s me, Lindsay thought, stunned. I’m beautiful.
She had never really known that about herself before. But now, looking at the dragon she had become or was becoming, she couldn’t avoid the knowledge. She didn’t even feel proud of it. It was simply true, and the truth of it rocked her back on her heels.
She reached for the dragon that was the other part of herself.
Shh, Lindsay said. She touched the dragon’s nose and felt the touch herself, like a mirror had reached out and touched her with a cool and watery hand.
Shh, she said. It’s all right. I’m okay with you coming into this world. I’m okay with you being me. I’m not scared, and I won�
�t fight you. We’ll get through this together. But you have to wait. If we change right now, all that’s going to happen is we’re going to rip this car apart and get a lot of people killed. Including us.
I can’t wait, the dragon said. It looked at her with pained eyes. Its voice was her voice, but not the way she’d heard it—usually while cringing—on her voicemail or in a home movie. It was the way she heard her voice inside her head. It had the familiar cadence of her own thoughts. Our mate needs us. The creature is coming. Everything depends on us being able to fight.
Their mate? Boone?
Mate, Lindsay thought.
She felt like she was tasting the word. She liked it.
She said, We don’t have to fight right now. You have to believe me. You have to wait until we get to Boone’s house, until we get somewhere private. Can you do that?
The dragon shuddered. It was in pain too, Lindsay could see that now. It was having a hard time not bursting into the world, just like she was having a hard time stopping it. At least there would be relief for them both soon.
Unless this really was the longest ten minutes in the universe.
Lindsay decided that she wasn’t really asking a question. The dragon was her, wasn’t it? Then she was going to exert a little willpower and self-control.
Keeping herself from turning into a dragon could be a lot harder than stopping herself from reaching for another Oreo, though.
And to be fair, she’d never had a ton of success with Oreo moderation. But still. She could do this.
We can do this, Lindsay said to the dragon. She kept her voice firm. We can do a lot of things, and we can absolutely do this. Now hold on.
She squeezed Boone’s leg for dear life and closed her eyes.
She counted the seconds.
*
The instant the car stopped, Lindsay sprinted out of it.
Under normal circumstances, she would have tripped over her own feet. Right now, despite the pain and the mini-convulsions wracking her body, she felt eerily graceful. Her only obstacle was Boone’s front door, which she beat her fists against in frustration. Some part of her knew she was out of her mind, but she couldn’t help it. She could hear the dragon inside her head keening in agony.
“I’ve got you,” Boone was saying. He was suddenly there, holding her in one arm while he used his free hand to open the door. “I’ve got you. Inside.”
Lindsay stumbled past him and into the house. She fell down on all fours, banging her knees on the floor, and coughed another burning cough. It felt like her chest was splitting apart.
Boone was pulling all the curtains and blinds, shutting out any prying eyes.
When the house was dark, Lindsay grabbed weakly at the dragon part of herself.
Now. It’s time.
The dragon needed no convincing.
Lindsay’s new form exploded out of her. It didn’t feel like a transformation. With Boone, she had watched as scales had bloomed on his skin and curved talon-like claws had ripped their way out of his hands. It had been violent, and it had looked painful, but she had seen it like a change. This—this felt like her whole body was being ripped apart, torn to shreds by what was bursting out of her. Only her mind, agonized and panicked, stayed the same.
No: her heart was the same too. And it wasn’t panicking. It was full of happiness and fierce, hot, pride, like some part of her was singing, YES, YES, YES, over and over again.
All around her, colors leapt into an almost hallucinatory level of brightness. Everything seemed to have its own sharp, glowing outline. She could see all the individual grains of the wood and the silky strands of Boone’s hair and every mote of dust that was hanging in the air. She spread out her wings, and the movement felt like stretching when she hadn’t been allowed to move for years and years. She was just waking up.
The pain was gone. This body was a pleasure.
She could do anything.
She turned to Boone and smiled at him, even though she knew that for him it would just be an extended row of prickly, needle-sharp teeth.
“You’re okay?” Boone came to her without hesitation and hugged her. The feeling of him against her newly-grown scales was strange but welcome. Any touch from him was always welcome.
She nodded. The burns in her mouth had disappeared, too. She felt new and unmarked.
Carefully turning her head away from him, she tried to shape this long, forked tongue and these nonexistent lips into words.
“It doesn’t hurt,” Lindsay said carefully, though what came out was something slippery and buzzing, like, “Ih duhssssssnnnn hurrrrr.”
“You can talk,” Boone said, floored.
If he wanted to call that talking. Lindsay raised one—hand? paw? foreleg?—and seesawed it back and forth. Sort of.
Boone tentatively ran his hand down her neck. Lindsay extended it for him, feeling like she was preening. The feathery spines running down her back straightened up at Boone’s touch.
“You’re beautiful,” he said softly. “You look like you’re made out of metal. Gold and silver and diamonds.”
It was what she had seen in her head, more or less. She nuzzled him, rubbing her head against his.
She couldn’t stop marveling over these new sensations. It wasn’t just the sensitivity of her skin or the feel of the air moving over her wings. It was the way it felt like she’d just been given an injection of clarity and courage. She felt super-charged, capable of tackling any problem that needed tackling. More than capable: eager.
She felt like the most potent, most distilled version of herself. This was her essence. In a way, it felt like this was who she had always been and like it was truer than anything else, the way a caricature sometimes felt more truthful than a photo.
Eleanor’s fire had burned away all the brushwood and trash that had cluttered up Lindsay’s life, and in its wake, all the things that were truly her—all the things that were only her—were bright and shining amid the ashes. The way she and Boone had huddled together intact on top of the glimmering, distorted glass made from the melted sand.
Maybe she shouldn’t find that as incredible—as powerful—as she did. Maybe losing some of her worries and weaknesses had meant losing part of what made her human.
But maybe not all weaknesses were created equal.
Parts of Boone had burned away too, but not his uncertainty over those bad memories about Talia; those were part of what made him who he was. Lindsay was sure that if she looked closely enough, she’d find problems of her own that had stuck around. She was defined by some of those faults just as she was defined by some of those virtues, and those would have been too strong to be simply burned away.
But she didn’t mind that. If that was true, they were her faults, to be mended or dealt with or even just lived with. What mattered was how clean she felt.
No more insecurity about her body. Either of her bodies. No more worries about whether or not she and Boone had fallen for each other too quickly. She knew herself.
And she knew him—and she knew that he knew her too.
My mate, Lindsay thought again. Yeah. She could get used to that word and the weird sense of certainty it carried with it.
But there are other things to be concerned with.
Now that she’d transformed, her dragon’s voice was distant; now that she’d accepted that this was part of who she was, the voice sounded more and more like her own thoughts. But at least for now, Lindsay could still sense a little bit of difference there. It was the difference, she supposed, between her instincts and her conscious mind. Her conscious mind might be rejoicing in all this self-actualization, but her instincts knew that the threat to her and Boone was still out there somewhere.
And if she owed all this to Eleanor, then her instincts and her conscious mind knew that Eleanor’s death had to be avenged somehow. What had happened to her couldn’t be allowed to happen to anyone else.
There were things to do. She could fight better in this body, but sh
e couldn’t strategize better in it, not if she couldn’t really talk to Boone.
As a dragon, she couldn’t do the hard, unglamorous work of finding out who exactly they were fighting. Who was Mullen? What did she want? Were they the only dragons out there?
No, Lindsay’s dragon said, a rumble from the bottom of her mind. We are not alone.
The sentence sent chills through her. Good? she asked the dragon. Bad?
I don’t know them any more than you do, the dragon said. But they are of our kind.
She had to admit that that didn’t tell her much. Humans were her kind, too, and look at all the things humans did to each other.
“I need to change back,” she said to Boone in that garbled, gargled slithery-hissy way. She had to say it three times before she saw the light bulb moment in his eyes that meant he’d understood her.
“You can do that,” Boone said. His voice was calm and reassuring. “You talked me through it, I’ll talk you through it. Piece of cake.”
Would it be? Really? Her transformation had come later than his—later and rougher. Maybe her transformation back would be harder, too. Maybe she’d be stuck—
Ah, there was one of those lingering faults. A tendency towards rapid-fire contingency planning for worst-case scenarios. That one was definitely part of who she was. Control freak Excel spreadsheet diagram girl.
It was part of who she was, and she couldn’t pretend it wasn’t, but right now, she knew she had to let it go.
All that power—and she still had to accept that she couldn’t control everything.
Boone had given up his shame. She had to give up her fear.
If she didn’t, she couldn’t get back to him. She couldn’t even get back to her own life.
Lindsay slowed her breathing down, wishing that she had given meditation a try just once. She knew she had to put herself into a calm and receptive state, but how did she do that? It felt like she was on a hamster wheel inside her head: Am I calm yet? Am I calm yet? Have I changed yet? Have I changed yet?
She pushed that away. She held onto the sound of Boone’s voice as it rose and fell. It didn’t matter what he was saying; it only mattered that he was there for her.