by Chant, Zoe
Stop panicking, her dragon said firmly. She recognized the way that particular voice cut through the hubbub in her head. It was her dragon, and it sounded like her—but it also sounded a lot like her older sister.
Apparently her instincts knew that in bad moments, you wanted someone else to comfort you. You didn’t want to do all the work yourself.
You don’t have to worry about that, her dragon said. It’s insulting that you think I can’t control myself.
You couldn’t control yourself, Lindsay said.
It ruffled its wings at her irritably. Dragons were the true Angry Birds.
Boone said, “Are you okay?”
“I’m fine.” She realized she’d closed her eyes, but she kept them closed. “Just having an emergency summit with my inner beast.”
Change is hard and bloody, her dragon said. Especially the first time. Your body had to crack to let me out. Next time it will be easier, and then it will be easier still. Easy to bring on, easy to resist. We can work together now.
And no argument about being my inner beast? That’s not mean or anything?
It let out a low, growling purr that Lindsay liked—even though she thought the smart thing might have been to be afraid of it.
I am your inner beast, the dragon said. I am wild, and so are you.
Okay. That was... something.
She opened her eyes again. “Dragon-me says that’s not going to be a problem. Now that we’ve broken ourselves in, so to speak, changing and changing back is going to be a lot more comfortable. We can do it when we want, and we won’t do it accidentally.”
“Does dragon-you know anything about invisibility?” Boone said. “It’d be nice to have a cheat-sheet.”
No, Lindsay’s dragon said crossly. It’s not instinctual. You don’t know how to juggle instinctively, even though humans can juggle.
“No,” Lindsay said. “And it’s really defensive about it.”
Boone’s eyes also dropped closed for a second, and then he said, “Yeah, so is mine. You know, you wouldn’t think that things that breathe fire should be so touchy, but I guess it means everyone has to try to stay on their good sides.” He added a little more jam to his toast. “So after breakfast, want to spend some time trying to be invisible?”
“You took the words right out of my mouth.”
*
Unfortunately, the only strategy she and Boone could think of was to try to relax themselves into a state of total transparency.
They didn’t know it would work. But they didn’t know it wouldn’t work, which was more than Lindsay could say about some approaches. If complete embarrassment could make a person turn invisible, she would have figured it out in high school. The pool party with the white shorts and her surprise first period... even now, thinking of that made her want to wink out of existence. So humiliation was off the table. Relaxation was on.
She just wasn’t very good at it.
Plus, they both kept closing their eyes to try to relax, and then they couldn’t tell if anything had worked.
“Am I invisible yet?”
Quick peek. “No, sorry. ...Okay, am I invisible now?”
“Nope.”
“Dammit.”
And so on and so on.
Finally, Boone said, “Either this isn’t working, or we’re just not very relaxed people. Or both.”
Lindsay opened her eyes. “Plus, I’m getting sleepy.” She plopped down on the broken sofa, running her hand over the split where Boone’s dragon tail had lashed it in two. “My office brings someone in every couple of months to lead us through guided relaxation sessions—it’s cheaper than giving us more vacation days. I’m never very good at that either.” She frowned. “And I’m not always very good at taking my vacation days, for that matter. I still think we deserve more of them, though.”
“I’m a big champion of the four-day work week,” Boone said.
He collapsed beside her, and she snuggled up to him, resting her head on his shoulder. She was in serious danger of falling into the crack in the sofa, but she couldn’t bring herself to care.
Boone continued, “Of course, I can just take days off whenever I want—ow.”
She’d given him a light smack. “Don’t rub it in that you get to work from home. ‘Ooh, I’m Boone, I can sleep in till ten o’clock and wear pajamas all day.’”
Boone shook his head. “It’s not everything it’s cracked up to be, really. I get lonely.” He grazed his fingers over her arm, making her skin tingle. “If I don’t think about it, I can go all day without seeing another person. I still see my friends, but that’s usually once a week. Sometimes I feel like I’m going feral, cooped up all day without anybody who knows me around. So I take walks, or go to the beach and fall in love with pretty trash-pickers. It’s not like it’s always depressing, but it can be, if I’m not careful to break up my time with errands or time spent outside the house.”
She could see that. She had a little bit of a homebody streak herself, and a few days vegging out on the couch sounded heavenly—but if those few days just kept stretching on and on, if she couldn’t joke with anyone or talk about TV or even just complain about a bad night’s sleep... that could get lonely. Lonely and sad.
“You don’t have to worry about that now,” she said. “You’ve got me, and you’ve got a split personality riding shotgun in your head. Three’s a crowd.”
He smiled at her and motioned for her to lean back; she lay against his chest, her feet up on the couch.
It was comforting to be held by him. It was impossible for her to get enough of it.
Lindsay could suddenly feel a strange rectangular ridge under her scalp. She stuck her hand back there and realized he was wearing dog-tags. She toyed with them, flipping them back and forth between his fingers.
“I put those on this morning,” Boone said. “It just felt right.”
“They suit you.”
He chuckled. “You’re not even looking at me.”
“I’m feeling you. Even better.” She ran her thumb over the ridged letters of his name. “We’re going into battle. Now you’re armored.”
His arms tightened around her almost in a spasm, and then he said, “Lindsay Garza, you’re a genius.”
She sat up and turned around. “Not that I’m refusing the compliment, but—why, exactly?”
Boone was grinning. She loved the way such a wide smile created those little crinkles at the corners of his eyes. “Because the invisibility doesn’t have anything to do with relaxation. That relaxing would help us turn human again—sure, that makes sense. People are more vulnerable than dragons, so it makes evolutionary sense for us to have to feel safe in order to change back. But invisibility is a stealth mechanism, something the dragons have because they know the human world can be dangerous for them. It’s not something you relax into. It’s armor.”
He stood and squared his shoulders.
“I’m going to try again. Tell me if it works?”
He was still there for another moment, solid and opaque, and then he winked out like a light.
“Boone!” Lindsay reached out and caught his invisible hand. “You did it!”
It was so uncanny to hear him answering her out of what seemed like thin air. “This is maybe even stranger than turning into a dragon.”
“Can you still see yourself?”
“Yeah, but I look different. This is going to sound weird, but there’s a kind of shimmer. I don’t know how else to describe it.”
He wrapped his hand around her wrist, but every part of her stayed firmly in sight. She didn’t know if he was checking that on purpose, but she thought it was good info to have.
“Try taking your shirt off or something. Or a shoe.”
“A shoe,” Boone said. “I know where taking my shirt off around you leads.”
She heard a low thump as he kicked it away from him, but she couldn’t see it—until slowly it dissolved into view again, an ordinary men’s tennis shoe.
> Lindsay tugged her ponytail down and handed him the hair tie. “Hold this and see if it disappears.”
He took it from her. In a reverse of the shoe thing, the hair tie stayed visible for a few seconds, hovering in midair, and then faded into nothingness.
Okay. So if they needed to take something with them, they needed to make sure to keep hold of it the whole time—or if they dropped it, to pick it up quickly.
“I need to write all this down,” she said, making a move for the kitchen.
Boone’s invisible hand lightly stopped her, startling her.
“Sorry. I keep forgetting you can’t see me. The suspense is killing me, though—can we try to see if you can do this too?”
That seemed fair enough. Lindsay rolled her shoulders back and shook out her arms like she was limbering up for a particularly strenuous bit of exercise.
But unlike Boone, she had no experience in gearing up for any kind of real fight. The closest she’d ever come to that was tense, high-stakes presentations, and while she was sure they would have been stressful for anybody, she was pretty sure they wouldn’t feel the same as actual warfare. He had had an easy comparison to reach for when he imagined gearing up. She didn’t.
“Talk me through it a little,” she said. She still felt like she should be bending to touch her toes. Or she could break into jumping jacks. “I don’t know what armor feels like.”
She still couldn’t see him, but being able to hear him was enough. His voice was steady and almost hypnotic—maybe he would have been the one person who’d be able to talk her into an actual meditative trance.
“It’s not about feeling safe,” Boone said. “There’s no way to feel really safe—not down in your bones. Not even when you’re on the base, because you know the war’s just outside. It’s hard enough feeling safe at home. It’s about feeling how dangerous life can get and strapping up to face it anyway. You’re glad to have your armor, your flak vest or your invisibility or whatever, and it makes you braver, but it gets you further into the fight, not out of it.”
If she mastered this, today could end with the two of them turning the tables on Mullen and stalking her instead. It could lead to whatever threat lurked at the cove. It could lead to Henry and Ursula, dragon clan leaders who could tell them what the hell was going on.
Boone was right—the invisibility would give them a little bit of protection, but that protection was just a way to get them into a wider and more dangerous world.
It was a way of acknowledging that she was joining the fight. And was she? Was she ready for that?
Yes. Yes, I am.
She had always felt like the world was something big and exciting and colorful, and now it felt like the world had finally agreed with her. She wasn’t going to run away from that.
Bring it on, Lindsay thought, and girded herself with invisibility.
Unlike the dragon transformation, this came on fast and didn’t hurt at all. She just suddenly acquired that shimmer Boone had mentioned. Maybe he hadn’t known how to describe it, but she did: it was like wearing a slightly glittery coat of foundation.
She could see him now, too: he looked normal to her. If anything, the colors of his hair and eyes and skin looked richer and more real.
“Are you shimmering?” he said.
“Full-body shimmer,” she did. “We did it.”
“We did.”
They went on looking at each other for a long time. Lindsay thought this might be the last real quiet moment they had for a while, and she wanted to savor it. She wanted to soak in this jewel-bright glimpse of him and hold it close.
He was her armor as much as the invisibility was. He was what made her feel ready to tackle anything.
So she took a deep breath and did it.
“Well,” Lindsay said, “Eleanor said to fly at night to meet the people we’re supposed to meet. That leaves us with a couple hours before sundown. We need data. You should go pick up your car from my place in case we need it. And then I can contact Zeke. Does that work?”
She looked at her watch and reconsidered her question. They had some time to kill.
“What if we have sex and then you go get your car and I contact Zeke?”
“That one,” Boone said. “I vote for that.”
Chapter Eighteen
Zeke wasn’t what Boone had expected.
To start with, she’d completely ignored the ruined couch and asked no questions about it. Maybe once you accepted the existence of dragons, coming into a house with trashed furniture wasn’t even worth asking about.
He’d also thought she was going to be a man. Apparently that surprise had shown on his face when he’d let her inside.
“Sometimes it’s safer online if people assume you’re a guy,” Zeke said, stripping off her leather jacket and folding it over the back of one of Boone’s chairs. “Not a five-foot-two black girl. And, let’s face it, I’m not what most people would be looking for in a woman, anyway.”
She probably meant her scars, which he had to admit were extensive. Zeke wore an embroidered tank top that didn’t even cover the ones on her shoulders, like she didn’t care at all, but the slight trace of bitterness in her voice made him wonder how true that was. More than that, it made him wonder what kind of assholes she had dealt with before to make her so defensively, self-deprecatingly tough. Whoever they were, Boone had the instant and ridiculous big brother desire to pummel them for her. Anyone who couldn’t tell that she was perfectly cute, scars or no scars, was an idiot.
And then that protective urge was buried by a slow, chilling realization that was like a glacier steadily freezing him in place.
The rippling, wrinkled scars that disfigured Zeke’s arms and almost half her face were burn scars.
Boone could think of a lot of ways for someone to get those kinds of burns. But when that someone was an expert on dealing with dragons...
He pictured Eleanor—not the slight, underdressed waif she’d transformed into but the enormous creature of coiled muscle and folded wings. He tried to imagine that kind of beast next to Zeke, a pixie who couldn’t have topped five-two if her life depended on it. It wasn’t hard to see who would have won in that fight.
And I was just getting over worrying about being a monster.
“Sorry,” Zeke said, looking back and forth between Boone and a speechless Lindsay, who was probably thinking exactly the same thing he was. “I know there’s nothing anyone can really say when I bring up the scar thing. Didn’t mean to make it awkward. Um, so you have a dragon problem?”
I’ll say.
Boone cleared his throat. He looked over at Lindsay, who gave him a tiny nod.
Limited honesty, they’d agreed. Time to give it a try.
“We found one,” Boone said.
Zeke raised her eyebrows. “And you’re sure? No worries it might have been a really ugly crocodile or a Komodo dragon that escaped from some rich guy’s private zoo?”
“I don’t think it was a crocodile,” Lindsay said. “And I’d definitely know if it was a Komodo dragon. I’m scared to death of those things.”
Boone was taken aback. “Really?”
“Sure. They’re enormous. They terrify me.”
“It’s such a specific animal to be afraid of, though. Not like spiders or dogs—”
“I love dogs,” Lindsay said. “And I work in a decrepit old building, I run into spiders all the time. They’re basically my coworkers. I couldn’t function if I was scared of spiders. I can function being scared of Komodo dragons.” She paused. “Oh, and Gila monsters.”
“I’ll go out on a limb and say it’s a good thing your office isn’t infested with Komodo dragons or Gila monsters,” Zeke said. She was grinning, like she’d taken an instant liking to Lindsay, which made Boone like her even more than if she’d taken an instant liking to him. “And okay, you know your scary reptiles. Maybe you did see a non-Komodo dragon. What did it look like?”
The first word that came to Boone’s mind
was the really unhelpful draconian, so he waited a minute before he could come up with something better. “Huge. Over eight feet long, definitely. Scales—”
“What color?” Zeke said sharply.
“Purple. Well, sort of all along a pink-to-purple spectrum.”
“Like an ombre-dyed T-shirt,” Lindsay said.
“Talons,” Boone continued. He didn’t know what “ombre-dyed” meant, but he was willing to take Lindsay’s word for it. “Like a bird’s, long and black. Wings.”
“Also like a bird’s?” Zeke said. There was a glint of humor in her obsidian eyes, enough for Boone to suspect that she already knew they were telling the truth and now she was just screwing with them.
He was willing to play along. “More like a pterodactyl’s, actually. Or at least like one of the pterodactyls in Jurassic Park. And...”
He looked at Lindsay, trying to silently ask her if he should go on, get more specific. They didn’t have nearly enough information to know whether or not they should trust Zeke one hundred percent, but they’d have to make a call on it sooner or later. Boone didn’t know how much he’d have to know about someone to be sure he could trust them with dragon-related secrets. Might as well start now.
Lindsay said, “And she was dying.”
“She?” The razor edge was back in Zeke’s voice. She sounded like the question was urgent. “How did you know it was a she?”
“She... changed.” Lindsay’s voice shook a little, and as Boone watched, she tightened her hands into fists as if to steady herself as she revisited the memory. “When we found her, she was a dragon, and then she changed into a woman. Someone had hurt her. She was dying.” She swallowed. “She did die. We didn’t know what to do.”
Boone waited for Zeke to say that it was good the dragon woman had died, that the dragons were monsters, but to his surprise, she only reached out and squeezed Lindsay’s hand.
“I’m sorry. There probably wasn’t anything you could have done. They don’t go down easily, and if she was already that badly hurt... maybe another dragon could have helped her, but not a human. And not anything you’d find in a hospital.”