Quicksilver Dragon

by Chant, Zoe

“How do you know?”

  “A little bit of it’s guesswork, but if they use the same name on multiple websites, and it’s something distinctive, I’m willing to bet it’s the same person. So I can track them from a paranormal discussion board to their Twitter to their Facebook. Easy-peasy.”

  “Cool. You’d make a good stalker.”

  “Hey, a few clicks and I can pull up aerial photos of your house. The internet makes it way too easy for anybody to be a good stalker. But right now, I don’t mind.”

  “Okay, so we’ve got a handful of San Marco people—”

  She shook her head. “Not entirely San Marco. One of them’s here, or was here, but I’ve got more in the surrounding areas. And here’s something else that makes me think they might be legit—even when I don’t focus on what’s near us, all these supposed sightings... they’re almost all coastal. If I had time, I could make a map with all of them pinpointed.”

  Lindsay sounded genuinely rueful that she hadn’t been able to whip him up a whole official PowerPoint presentation on the behavior and habitats of dragons. Boone could easily picture her now standing in front of a conference room, directing her laser pointer at a screen.

  With those black-framed glasses and her hair up in a messy bun. And a skirt maybe slightly too short to be professional. Apparently he was back to the sexy librarian thing.

  It was his imagination, after all.

  “I trust you,” he said. “Even without a map.”

  “I don’t know why we would want to be near the water,” Lindsay said, musing.

  We. They were part of the collective whole of dragons now. They hadn’t asked for it, but here it was all the same. Like a car crash. Some sudden disaster and now, boom, their lives were changed forever. He accepted that, but he still wasn’t sure how he felt about it otherwise.

  Your life was changed from the moment you met her, something inside him said.

  No matter what his opinion was about the rest of the upheaval, he wasn’t going to argue with that. And he wasn’t going to remotely be sorry for it.

  He said, “The inland ones you found—are they on lakes or rivers? That might at least tell us whether we’re looking at saltwater being important or just water in general.”

  “Ooh, good idea.” She entered into a flurry of typing. “Yep. Mississippi River, Great Lakes region, Lake Tahoe... Water. There’s a big grouping around Seattle—the Sound and rain, so they doubled-up on staying wet. I can use this to rule out some of the sightings. No Death Valley dragons for us. And that still leaves us with a good handful of convincing people telling convincing stories. And one of them lives just half an hour away. Zeke.”

  “Zeke,” Boone said, trying the name out. “Okay. Let’s see if Zeke wants to talk to us.” He yawned. “In the morning.”

  “In the morning,” Lindsay said. She closed his laptop, echoing his yawn. “I’ve never in my life had a cup of coffee and then gone straight to bed, but I’ve been having a lot of firsts lately.”

  Chapter Seventeen

  Lindsay was on the beach again, in the shade beneath the boardwalk. The sand was gray, and as she looked around, she noticed that everything was gray, like the color was bleeding out of the world drop by drop. Boone was there too, black-and-white like an old movie. While he looked good that way—people usually did look good in black-and-white, in her limited photographic experience—she missed the colors of him, the warmth of his skin and the brown of his hair.

  I’m dreaming.

  The ocean roared in her ears. She felt like she was inside a conch shell, down at the bottom, listening to the noise of the trapped sea. She always secretly believed the legend that she was hearing the ocean whenever she listened to a conch shell, even though she’d known since she was a kid that it was just the echo of her own blood running through her ears.

  Maybe she’d been destined for dragonhood. Some part of her had always believed in magic.

  It felt like everything was on pause. Like she was inside of a photograph.

  Suddenly, Eleanor was there with them.

  Lindsay recognized her at once, even though she looked completely different than she had when they’d met. Her hair was in a thousand little braids. She was wearing a dress that looked either old-fashioned or futuristic or possibly like high fashion straight from some Paris runway. It looked like nothing Lindsay had ever seen hanging in a store, anyway. It had to be from some other world or some other time.

  “Are you a ghost?” Boone said.

  No matter how ethereal and distant everything else was, his voice was immediate and familiar. Lindsay was glad of that.

  “No,” Eleanor said. She sounded very sure of herself. “I’m not a ghost.”

  “But this is where you died,” Lindsay said, looking around at the abandoned beach. It wasn’t raining this time.

  Eleanor shook her head. “We aren’t on the beach. We’re in the fire.”

  It gave Lindsay chills, something she wouldn’t even have thought she was capable of without her actual body on hand.

  She said slowly, “We’re in hell?”

  “No!” Now Eleanor looked aghast. “No, of course not. I’m not—” She sighed. “I’m not a continuation of myself, I’m just an excerpt. When I breathed out the fire that transformed you, it created this little magical nook, this one-time place where we could meet. And it cut part of myself away, like with a pair of scissors, to wait for you here. Until you’d both transformed and could reach me here.”

  Well, Lindsay thought dryly, that makes about as much sense as anything else.

  “We’re asleep,” Boone said. “Back in our world. I think.”

  Lindsay nodded. “I remember going to bed.”

  “Yes,” Eleanor said. “We don’t have much time.”

  Eleanor sat down on the sand and did it so unselfconsciously that Lindsay felt she might as well, too: what was she worried about, staining her imaginary dream clothes? Boone followed suit.

  Eleanor smoothed her skirts over her legs. Her face was perfectly composed.

  “You can’t let the creature find you,” Eleanor said.

  “We think her name is Mullen—”

  “It has no name. It has no gender. It has no one body. You’ll recognize it when you see it again, but you’ll have to look closely. They can’t hide themselves well, but they can hide, so always make sure you pay enough attention to sniff them out.”

  Lindsay nodded. “She looked stiff. Dead, almost.”

  “And furious,” Eleanor said.

  “I saw her too,” Boone said. He glanced over at Lindsay. “I didn’t have a chance to tell you, what with everything going on, but—she didn’t look exactly how you described her, she’d changed clothes and hair... I thought maybe I was wrong. But I wasn’t, was I?” he added to Eleanor. “That was her. It. That was it.”

  “You wouldn’t mistake anyone else for one of them,” Eleanor said, “even if you happened to mistake one of them for someone else.”

  That made a kind of strange sense to Lindsay. Something not-real could fool you into believing it was real, maybe—you could jump if a mannequin suddenly appeared behind you—but you didn’t get something real confused with something not-real. You didn’t think a person was a mannequin or a robot. She wouldn’t have thought a person was Mullen, either, even if she had, at first, thought Mullen was a person. That shivery feeling on the back of her neck had known better.

  “Did you find Henry and Ursula yet?” Eleanor said.

  “No. We didn’t know where to look for them. We want someone to come here tomorrow, someone who might know something, but—”

  “Fly,” Eleanor said. “At night, fly. They’ll find you.”

  Flying. The thought was incredible. She’d known they had wings in their dragon form, obviously, but she felt dizzy at the thought of actually using them.

  “We can’t just go flying!” Lindsay said. “Not just above the city! Someone will notice.”

  “We can all choose to be unseen
and unseeable,” Eleanor said. “Except to each other. The world won’t see you, but other dragons will. You have to find them.”

  “Who are they?”

  “My friends,” Eleanor said, though she made a face that indicated that maybe that wasn’t completely accurate. “Well, they’re sort of like friends and sort of like parents. Or grandparents. You humans don’t have a precise equivalent to them. They lead our clan.” She looked over their shoulders.

  “What is it?” Boone said, turning his head in the same direction.

  Eleanor smiled sadly. “The tide’s coming in. My whole life, every day, I’ve seen this coming. I always knew how it would end.”

  Lindsay blinked back tears. “Do you really have to go?”

  She knew she didn’t know Eleanor, not really. But Eleanor was so alive here, so vivid and helpful, and she had died so bravely and so badly. It felt like all Lindsay wanted was to rescue her from that, from whatever fate Eleanor herself seemed to think had been inevitable.

  “No,” Eleanor said gently. “I get washed away. This is how it goes.”

  She pressed their hands in hers. The physical contact shocked Lindsay—she’d thought it was still impossible here. Maybe it was, outside of Eleanor. Maybe it was Eleanor’s magic—or even her fierce willpower—that was letting her do it. Her hands were cool, and her grip was strong.

  “This isn’t the end for you,” Eleanor said. “This has to be your beginning, or everything else is hopeless. I’m counting on you.”

  “Counting on us for what?”

  But the tide was sweeping up now, wetting their legs. They all scrambled up.

  “Henry and Ursula will tell you everything,” Eleanor said. “Everything they can. I might have seen the future, but they know our present and our past. They can explain what’s needed. But I’m telling you what I know, and that’s that our world depends on you. Everything does.”

  The tide pulled and sucked at their feet.

  Eleanor reached down, took off her shoes, and walked barefoot into the surf. She turned around and grinned at them over her shoulder. She wasn’t sad anymore. She looked calm and fresh and playful.

  “But no pressure,” she said.

  She walked into the sea. It welcomed her in, letting her step further and further out, never quite sweeping her off her feet but letting her have the dignity of choosing its embrace. She was still tall and straight, like a reed, when the water swept over her head.

  Lindsay stood there and watched the waves. This time, she knew, Eleanor was not coming back.

  *

  She woke up before Boone. She didn’t want to get out of bed—it was too comfortable being nestled up against him—and she really didn’t want to wake him up, but she knew she needed to call in sick to work.

  Or maybe take a personal day. What time code did supernatural difficulties and mortal danger fall under?

  She had already texted her boss and started a new pot of coffee when the memories of the dream came back to her, sinking in slowly.

  Eleanor. Monsters who could look any way they chose, except convincingly real. Henry and Ursula. Invisibility. The waves smoothly and seamlessly closing over Eleanor’s head.

  Had any of it been real? She had never had a dream that vivid. She’d maybe had dreams that had rivaled last night’s in sheer weirdness—the one with her high school physics teacher and Oprah’s list of Favorite Things and the broken lemonade pitcher came to mind—but they hadn’t had the same lingering sense of being truer than true. This dream felt like a poem, one where the feeling lingered even if Lindsay couldn’t exactly understand it.

  Her toast had just popped up when Boone came in.

  “I would have made you breakfast,” he said. He actually looked mildly offended.

  “You’ve done enough cooking for me already. And you’re letting me crash here.”

  “I want you here,” he pointed out. “You know that.”

  She did. It was just easy to keep forgetting that their togetherness was a fact now, as unyielding as a law of nature. She could ask him right now if she could move in, and he would say yes. Knowing that, Lindsay decided to defer the pleasure of that conversation for later, when she could really enjoy it. Right now, she just tucked the certainty in her pocket, like a rabbit’s foot to hold onto in hard times.

  She was sure there’d be plenty of those today.

  She buttered her toast and took a crunchy bite. “Plus I wasn’t sure when you’d be up.”

  “That’s a better point,” Boone said. “How long have you been up?”

  “Not that long. Twenty minutes, maybe. Some of us aren’t handsome, self-employed artists who get to make our own schedules, so some of us have to call in sick to work if we’re going to spend the day tracking down dragon hunters.” She opened the fridge to look to see if he had any jelly or jam, and while she was scrutinizing the shelves, she said—trying to sound offhanded—“How’d you sleep?”

  She came up with a jar of blackberry jam and turned around.

  Boone’s face had changed; she could almost see the memories rushing back into him.

  He said, “Did you have those dreams too?”

  Lindsay tried the jar lid and got nowhere. She held it out to him. “Get this open for me?”

  “Why even have a boyfriend if he can’t open jars?” He popped it off in one smooth motion—show-off, Lindsay thought fondly—and handed it back to her. “But did you?”

  It was weirdly hard to talk about it, even to him. She thought it was just that she didn’t have the necessary words. She’d never experienced anything like any of that, never in her whole life.

  But then, she’d had a lot of those experiences lately. She and Boone would have to come up with a whole new language for just the two of them to use with each other.

  “I dreamed about you,” she said. “And Eleanor.”

  “We were with each other,” Boone said. “We were on the beach again, with Eleanor—”

  “We definitely had the same dream,” Lindsay said. She blinked a couple times to hold back whatever tears were there when she thought about Eleanor walking into the sea. “We won’t see her again.”

  “I didn’t expect to see her then,” Boone said quietly. “It’s good to have one miracle. Two, counting you. Three, counting dragons. I’m not going to get too greedy.”

  “Four,” Lindsay said with a weak smile, “counting invisibility.”

  He’d started opening the bread again, and then he almost dropped it. A goofy, delighted smile spread across his face. “That’ll teach me to get sidetracked by something profound. Superpowers. We have superpowers.”

  Lindsay laughed. “We could already turn into dragons.”

  “Turning into dragons isn’t a superpower,” Boone said, with a slightly huffy tone. “That’s an entirely different genre. I’ve got all the Marvel movies, and there aren’t any of them where anyone turns into a dragon. Or a werewolf.”

  “There’s a talking raccoon.”

  “He didn’t used to be human!”

  “Dork,” Lindsay said.

  “Oh, and you came up with that talking raccoon example off the top of your head because you never watch superhero movies.”

  She grinned. “‘I am Groot,’” she quoted in a gravelly voice. “I can’t do a good Rocket Raccoon impression, though, so you’ll have to settle for my talking tree. Okay, yes, we’re both dorks. And you’re technically right, invisibility is a superpower, turning into a dragon is a... I don’t know what it is. A werewolf spin-off.”

  “Thank you,” Boone said primly. She could see the laughter pent up in his eyes. He got the twist-tie off the bread and started making his own toast.

  It was funny how normal and relaxed all this was. The faint smell of sourdough in the kitchen, the smoothness and sweetness of the jam on her tongue, the easy rhythm of their joking around, the shared certainty that they could both get serious when they needed to. It was easy to see what the rest of her life with him would be like. She
’d never had that before, but with him it was effortless.

  They sat down at the table. If one of them had had a newspaper, Lindsay would almost have felt like they were straight out of some upgraded Leave It to Beaver. Maybe if there were a couple of kids running around...

  Maybe one day there would be a couple of kids running around.

  “Do you like kids?” she said. She felt her ears heat up with a sudden blush.

  Boone looked perfectly calm, however. “You mean do I want kids?”

  “Yeah. Not to bombard you with relationship stuff.”

  “I’ll take all the relationship stuff you can throw at me.” He grinned at her. “And yeah, I always thought kids would be nice.”

  Her smile matched his. “Me too.”

  He looked so irresistible sitting there all sleep-rumpled and calm that she just wanted to take him to bed again. He made it hard to remember that their lives might be on the line.

  She cleared her throat, trying to summon up a very serious face to offset the silly heart-eyes she knew she was sporting. “Okay. Dragon business.”

  “So we need to see if we can turn invisible,” Boone said, “and actually, we need to make sure we can turn into dragons.”

  Lindsay blinked. “We know we can turn into dragons.”

  “We know we did it once, involuntarily. I want to know if that was just a first-time thing or if all our transformations are going to happen like that, out of our control, like someone who’s epileptic having a seizure.”

  Well, that cast a shadow over her cozy little domestic scene.

  It had been so easy and quick for her to turn human again that she realized she’d been taking it for granted that going back and forth would, after that first awful breaking-in, be as easy and deliberate as stepping in and out of a pair of shoes.

  If she couldn’t control her shifts, then she couldn’t have a normal life at all. It had been agony keeping her dragon locked away for the duration of that Uber ride—would that just be how things were from now on? She’d be at work, right in the middle of an important project, and suddenly she’d have to get somewhere private—and spacious, too, given how big dragons were—before she became headline news?