by Chant, Zoe
“She was nice, though,” Lindsay said. She shook her head, blinking back tears. “I don’t think she would have ever hurt anybody. And someone butchered her.”
Zeke nodded. Her face was full of painful mixed emotions—Boone saw everything from empathy to sadness to the weird thrill of someone who has finally found people she can talk to. He could even pick up on the flash of guilt she felt about that last part.
“More and more of them have been dying lately,” Zeke said quietly. “I think so, anyway. I found one too.”
“That’s why you’re interested,” Boone said, relief washing over him. So maybe a dragon hadn’t hurt Zeke.
Zeke smiled. “I couldn’t walk away from something like that. Apparently you guys couldn’t either. The one I found—it was hurt bad. Limping along the shore, bleeding this crimson light. I thought I was losing my mind. That the best-case scenario was someone had slipped me peyote. I went down to it.”
“It was just out in the open?” He had pictured Eleanor crawling back under the boardwalk like a cat, wanting to die in some relative privacy, wanting to stay hidden from the prying eyes of the world.
“In the cove,” Zeke said. “There’s not a lot of foot traffic there at the best of times, and this was mid-December and in the middle of the night. I was up on one of the cliffs.”
The cove. He saw Lindsay lean forward a little, like she needed to catch every word.
The cove was a gorgeous spot, but a dangerous one. The beach was just a thin ribbon of sand hundreds of feet below the slippery cliffside. In the summer, people picnicked on the cliff, spreading their blankets on the sleek stone... but they kept well away from the edge and never brought their kids there, not until they were old enough to know how to be careful.
(Even if, as Lindsay and her fellow city planners despaired, the ones old enough to know to be careful still often weren’t.)
He still had no idea why Eleanor had warned them away from it. Lindsay was right: she couldn’t have just been worried they’d slip.
And he couldn’t imagine why someone would be there in the winter, in the dark.
He had the feeling he was about to find out the answers to both.
Lindsay started to ask. “Why were you—”
Zeke shook her head swiftly. “Doesn’t matter.”
He guessed it didn’t. At any rate, that part of it wasn’t their business—no matter how curious he was.
“Anyway,” Zeke said, “I made my way down the path. It’s steep, and it winds around, and in the dark, you can barely see where you’re going, so it took me forever to make it down. I almost thought it would have disappeared by then. But it hadn’t. Not all the way.”
“All the way?”
“It was flickering. In and out like a candle. There, not there, there, not there. When it saw me, it looked at me for a long time with the saddest eyes I’ve ever seen... and then it slashed at its own leg.” She reached into her bag and took out an enormous, shiny, red-violet dragon-scale. “It pried off one of its own scales and slid it to me across the sand. And then it changed. It turned into this man—this guy my dad’s age. He was roughed up and bleeding everywhere, but he could talk. He asked me to drive him somewhere, said I should keep the scale. He was kind of out of it, but it was like he thought the scale was some way of repaying me.”
“It is beautiful,” Lindsay said.
“I’ve never shown it to anyone before,” Zeke said softly. “It’s the most beautiful thing I’ve ever owned. But I don’t know what it meant to him. And I never got a chance to ask—I took him where he wanted to go and some people took him in.”
She put the scale back in her bag. Even though Boone knew it was hers, he felt a weird, horrible sense of loss at the idea of never seeing it again.
“I went inside,” Zeke continued, rubbing now at her forehead as if she were getting a headache, “and someone came and talked to me... and then all of a sudden I was standing in front of my bathroom mirror with my toothbrush in my mouth. At first I thought I’d just lost my mind. But then I found the coat I was wearing—and the scale was in my pocket. I’ve been running after dragons ever since. And I’ve found something incredible.”
She had a good sense of dramatic timing. That pause was impeccable.
“Dragons,” Zeke said, “are just the beginning.”
Sure, he knew that. There was also the fake cop on their tail. But Boone had the feeling Zeke was talking about way more than dragon-killing monsters.
“The beginning of what?”
“A world that’s so much bigger, and so much better, than any of us could have imagined.” When Zeke talked about it, her face almost glowed. “The world’s full of all these different kinds of creatures. Dragons are just one.”
“Nessie?” Lindsay said.
Zeke looked thrown. “What’s a Nessie?”
“Loch Ness Monster. I have a secret hope.”
“Sorry, can’t help you there. Get me a free ticket to Scotland, and I’d love to poke around, though. Take some lake samples, try to watch them film an episode of Outlander... No, I meant stuff closer to home. I know we have dragons, even if I’m having trouble finding them. But I’m pretty sure we have other supernatural creatures, too, people that work off the same kinds of rules.”
“And what kind of rules are we talking about?” Boone asked.
He worried he sounded too eager. Maybe he should have followed it up with something like, Just asking for a friend. Definitely not for me. Definitely not for Lindsay. Because obviously we’re not dragons!
Though it seemed like it would be hard to find anyone more pro-dragon than Zeke, and she gave off a trustworthy vibe. She was solemn but had flashes of a good sense of humor. Seriously capable. She was tiny and slight, like some kind of pixie who had popped up to give them information, but Boone felt like anyone who underestimated her would regret it. She reminded him of some of the female soldiers he’d known, the ones who had determination to spare.
Zeke ticked rules off on her fingers. “I think they can all turn back and forth, human to whatever, whatever to human. It seems to run in families. But it can’t be all regular genetic science, I mean, you can’t convert a human body to the size of a dragon, you just can’t. There’s not enough mass, there’s not enough energy. So we’re talking magic—maybe limited magic, maybe bound magic, maybe magic that only does that one thing, but magic. And that’s what I’ve been following. I figured if I could come up with a way to measure whatever residual energy the dragons were throwing off, at least during their transformations, I could find them eventually.”
She pulled out a little black sensor about the size of a remote control.
“You’ll never guess what the residue looks like. How I finally measured it.”
“I was a steady C student in science,” Boone said, “so I’m going to agree with you. What does it look like?”
Zeke grinned. “Gold.”
“Gold?”
“Gold dust, to be really accurate. Every time a dragon shifts in and out, they leave behind tiny traces of gold dust. I’m lucky some of it was left on the bottom of my shoes from that night, because otherwise the wind would have blown it off the beach.” She held up the sensor. “This tracks it.”
Boone squinted at the carpet, trying to see if he could make out any sparkle in it. They’d both transformed here. If Zeke turned her detector on, it might start going wild.
Thankfully, Zeke pocketed the device again. “That’s another reason they’re hard to find. The dragons. Because if you could, say, do a bicep curl and throw off gold dust, even a little of it, you wouldn’t need to work for a living, not if you didn’t want to. I think a lot of them are independently wealthy, making all their money off changing back and forth and harvesting the dust.” She nodded at Lindsay. “You might own earrings made out of draconian energy.”
Should he go combing through the carpet to scrape up whatever gold dust was around the house? He could start saving it up to make Lindsay
some draconian earrings.
He couldn’t believe his life had gone from worrying about deadlines and having residual old girlfriend-related self-esteem issues to being a human-dragon hybrid capable of spontaneously generating jewelry for the newfound love of his life.
Or maybe, just maybe, he should be focusing on Mullen. He didn’t know how Zeke had accepted the change in her world so quickly and gotten down to the science of it all, but he didn’t need to know. What he needed to do was protect Lindsay.
And at least Lindsay was as overwhelmed as he was. She was looking at Zeke admiringly and saying, “I need to hire you to contract on half the stuff my office does—we need people who can do that kind of thorough research, you know? People who can come up with practical solutions.”
“Well, I’m available,” Zeke said. “And I can give you one of these if you want. Or you can, you know, buy a metal detector and learn to have a really good eye for shiny stuff. Or both.” She hesitated. “I don’t get the chance to talk to people much about all this. Online, sure, but not in person... I never told anyone about it. I don’t have any family, and I never had the kind of friends I’d trust with something like this, something that could get me in a straitjacket. It’s nice. You two are nice.”
Now Boone felt even worse for only giving her half the story. He looked at Lindsay, trying to silently get or give permission to go further. “Zeke—”
“Which is probably why,” Zeke said, overriding him, “you’re the kind of trusting people who might, say, tell somebody who’s basically a stranger that you’re dragons. That’s fine when the stranger’s me. But it’s not always going to be fine.”
“God, we’re bad at subterfuge,” Lindsay said. “You knew?”
“Boone started staring at the carpet the second I mentioned the gold dust. And then there’s the broken couch. And you both kind of ask questions like you’ve got a huge, personal stake in the answers.” She shrugged. “But mostly it’s the gold dust thing.”
“All right,” Boone said. “So we’re dragons, and we’re lousy at hiding it, me especially. You’re in the loop now.”
Zeke studied them, her dark eyes full of curiosity. Boone felt like she could almost see little connections firing back and forth. “The woman you found... she turned you? How?”
“She breathed this weird—” He hesitated, maybe wondering if “fire” was really what he wanted to mention to a woman with severe burn scars. He decided that it’d be worse to make it awkward. “This weird fire-like stuff over us. It didn’t hurt. It was just warm and sort of...”
“Tingly,” Lindsay said.
“Tingly,” Boone agreed. He couldn’t come up with a better word.
There was a longing in Zeke’s face that was so obvious it was hard for Boone to even look at it. “Do you think any dragon could do that to someone? Do you think you could do it to someone?”
He knew what she meant. Could they do it to someone like her?
There was no way he was trying to turn Zeke. Not right now. He shook his head firmly.
“We have no idea what we’re doing. We just worked out invisibility—”
“Invisibility!” Zeke said, delighted. “I always thought that had to be a species-wide trait.”
“—a couple hours before you came over. We don’t even know for sure how to breathe regular fire, let alone whatever kind Eleanor used to change us.”
He wanted it to be clear that he wasn’t telling her what to want or not want. He didn’t know whether it would be right to casually change someone into a dragon—he didn’t have enough data for that yet, as Lindsay would point out. But he was drawing a line in the sand because they were ninety percent more likely to kill Zeke than change her at this point, and he didn’t think either of them wanted to be murderers.
Zeke absorbed that silently. The longing look didn’t go away, though. She said, “When you know more—if you know more—will you contact me again? At least consider it?”
To Boone’s surprise, Lindsay said, “Yes,” immediately and firmly. Apparently once they cleared up the practical side of things, she didn’t think she’d have any moral reservations about turning Zeke.
Maybe he was trying to protect two women who wanted their share of adventuring. And feeling guilty for not keeping them safe when he hadn’t been the one to endanger them in the first place—maybe that wasn’t a helpful way to feel.
So he seconded Lindsay. “Yeah. Of course we will.”
Zeke smiled. She produced a stylish black business card with her name and phone number printed on it in a silver font.
“Very Goth,” Lindsay said approvingly.
“I was going through kind of a phase when I had them printed,” Zeke admitted, “and I didn’t want to pay for another set. I don’t go through them very quickly. Here, take one for each of you. And call me if you need any help or backup. If there’s anything I can do—”
“What if I just want to go see a movie?” Lindsay said.
Zeke had already been smiling and had already been sincere, but now a kind of surprised happiness radiated out of her. It made Boone feel a little better about the world.
“Then that’s the same number,” Zeke said.
*
“I like her,” Lindsay said, once Zeke had left and they had the house to themselves again. She’d gotten down on her knees and was scrutinizing the carpet for gold dust, patting around with her hands. “She reminds me a little of you, actually.”
“There are some obvious differences,” Boone said dryly.
“Yeah.” She sat back on her haunches. “You’re taller. And hotter—for my personal tastes.” She deliberately let her eyes drift down towards his belt buckle and grinned. “I could go on.” The expression on her face softened then, becoming more thoughtful.
“But?”
“But you had that same vibe when I met you. That feeling like you were incredibly, unbelievably good at things—but very lonely.”
She was right. He had let his life get pretty empty. He had already told her about the way the days could get long if he wasn’t careful, the way he could see tasks played out before him like a half-finished game of solitaire. His friends helped, of course. But they were buddies, guys to get drinks with and not guys to really confide in. It had been a long time since he’d felt like he could be real with anyone—and that wasn’t surprising, was it? He hadn’t even been real with himself.
Funny how becoming a dragon really reconciled you to to the different sides of your character. Like Lindsay had said, he had a little bit of a split personality going on now. What was the point of adopting Talia’s belief that he contradicted himself and that that contradiction was something he should be ashamed of?
He said as much to Lindsay.
She touched his hand and said, “‘I contradict myself; I am large, I contain multitudes.’” He could tell by her voice that she was quoting someone.
“Who’s that?”
“Whitman.”
Boone’s first thought was of discounted yellow boxes stacked up in grocery stores near Valentine’s Day. He said, bewildered, “The chocolate company?”
Lindsay snorted, but not in an unfriendly way. “The poet. Walt Whitman. And if you ever want to buy me chocolates, for the record, I’m more of a Dove girl.”
“If you’d said Walt Whitman, I would have known what you meant,” Boone said, feeling like he should defend the honor of his freshman English teacher.
Without getting up, she patted his knee. “You can name a bunch of painters later and totally stump me, don’t worry.”
He realized that she was gently letting him off the hook of continuing the conversation—she was giving him a chance to steer their talk away from his loneliness. But while he would have needed that kind of shepherding once, he was glad to know that he didn’t need it now. Instead, he knelt down beside her to examine the carpet. Up close, he could make out a few tiny particles of glittering gold in the weave.
He said, “You said it yourse
lf, I’m not lonely anymore. And with you and me around, maybe Zeke won’t be either.”
Lindsay leaned forward and kissed him, giving him the briefest chance to savor the fullness of her lips and the faint cherry taste of her mouth. He couldn’t get enough of her. Every time they had to pull away from each other, it was like his skin hungered for more. Every kiss felt like a gulp of air that would have to last him for another dive down into cold, airless darkness.
She wriggled forward a little into his lap, and he caught and held her, balancing her on his legs.
Lindsay’s mouth quirked. “Look on the bright side. Maybe if you vacuum in here, you’ll turn up enough gold to pay to have the couch fixed.”
“I think the couch might be beyond fixing. And I think we’d need a lot more transformations to churn up that kind of gold, anyway.”
He knocked his hand against the splintered couch frame and listened to it groan. She’d gotten his heart racing, and he felt like his dragon’s strength was surging through him, like he could have broken through the couch all by himself. He’d certainly welcome the chance to try to break some more furniture with her.
Later.
Lindsay had a slightly better sense of priorities than he did, saving him from himself. She looked at the big picture window. They’d left the shades down, but you could still tell that twilight was setting in on the other side of the glass.
“Almost showtime,” she said. For the first time, he could pick up on a strain of nervousness in her voice, even though he could tell that she was trying to hide it. “What do you think Henry and Ursula will be like?”
He didn’t feel like they’d ever even had time to think about it. Everything since their turning had been one long rush punctuated by constant interruptions. He didn’t feel like he’d had time to think about anything. Every decision he’d made lately had been made on instinct—and he just had to hope that his instincts would keep on proving to be good ones.
So he felt out whatever feelings he might have about the dragons they were supposed to meet tonight.
“If we’re lucky, they’ll be like Eleanor. If we’re unlucky, they’ll be just as confused as we are.”