by Chant, Zoe
“I think it’d be hard to equal us for confusion,” Lindsay said.
True enough. “Eleanor seemed to think they could help us. I guess I trust her to point us in the right direction—so I’m assuming that they’re going to be good. Maybe not nice, but good.”
Still, Boone knew the way responsibility could sometimes sap niceness out of people—the best officers he’d ever known in the field had been the ones who didn’t care about being liked, they just cared about keeping their people alive. He could imagine Eleanor’s clan leaders being the same way.
Lindsay stood up, dusting off her clothes.
“Only one way to find out,” she said. “Sun’s down. Let’s go.”
Chapter Nineteen
Lindsay tried to stay calm.
Boone’s excited about flying, she pointed out to herself. You should get excited too.
Boone’s a soldier, her panic retorted. He probably gets off on the adrenaline. He probably goes sky-diving on the weekends. I like solid ground.
She’d never even been on a plane before, and tonight she was supposed to fling herself off a mountain and hope for the best. No matter what her dragon side felt, she couldn’t think that was a good idea. Except, of course, for how it was the only idea and their only real option.
Boone was driving them out to Kissing Cliff, which seemed like as good a place as any to die, according to her currently morbid imagination.
Kissing Cliff was not, in fact, a cliff—something every resident of San Marco was prepared to discuss at length. It was one of those quirky local facts the town cherished. Kissing Cliff was, in actuality, a smallish mountain, a popular weekend destination because its gentle, rambling slopes made an easy climb for even inexperienced hikers like Lindsay. And when you got to its rounded peak, you were rewarded with a ton of great picnic spots and a wild, vibrant expanse of California poppies.
Those picnic spots and wildflowers had helped lead to the mountain’s name: in the eighteen hundreds, an enterprising young man named Cliff Andrews had made a habit of taking his sweethearts to the mountains for romantic getaways. He’d been San Marco’s answer to Casanova—a cheerful, amiable guy who had provided a great many young women with their first kiss. (And probably their first taste of other things, too, though the legend stayed tactfully silent on that point.) Enough of those women grew up to fondly reminisce about those dates, and so the mountain, once dully called Wild Peak, had gradually become Kissing Cliff.
“I kissed a Cliff here,” Lindsay said as they parked at the foot of the slopes. She was trying to distract herself.
Boone grinned. He clearly wasn’t nervous in the slightest, the jerk. “Town tradition. Every girl in my class senior year tried to drag some guy named Cliff up the mountain. Convincing a girl your middle name was Cliff was the one sure way to get a date.”
“Most of us settled for middle namers. Or guys who had it as a nickname—and funnily enough, a lot of you seemed to suddenly get nicknamed Cliff right around high school.”
“I did know one real Cliff,” Boone said. “But he went by Ford the whole time and swore me to secrecy. He got a boyfriend in our senior year, though, if I’m remembering right, so I assume he eventually took that guy up here to, ah, celebrate town history.”
“I’d like to thank the good people of San Marco for making ‘celebrate town history’ into a dirty joke about having sex on a picnic blanket.”
“It’s a beautiful town,” Boone agreed. “Did you, um...”
“No, sadly my Cliff wasn’t worth swooning over. He really did have Cliff as a middle name, and he’d show his birth certificate to prove it, but he charged ten dollars a kiss and basically just did the whole thing to save up for a car.”
They were starting up the incline now, settling into a rhythm.
“I can’t imagine demanding ten dollars for the privilege of kissing you,” Boone said.
“I can’t believe I paid it,” Lindsay said. “But it was a seller’s market.”
It didn’t take them long to get up to the top. Truthfully, she’d have preferred to spend hours hiking up. Maybe exhausting herself getting to the summit would have worn the fear out of her.
Kissing Cliff itself had never bothered her. She could feel the rock beneath her feet. It was the prospect of being propelled into thin air, with nothing to support her—nothing but wings she’d only acquired a few days ago. Fear was like a sour taste in her mouth.
But at least from where she was, she could look down at the town. It lay beneath them, a map of streets and parkland, with the ocean blue and endless just beyond it. Darkness had fallen over the place like a blanket, but streetlights and windows shone out like stars, helping people find their way back home. Lindsay was always sentimental about her town, but right now, she felt even sappier about it than usual. This could be the last time she saw it. If she was going to die, she wanted to die with Boone, and she wanted to die looking down at that, at the city she had helped craft, refine, and perfect.
“It is a beautiful town,” she said softly. “And we’re not going to let Mullen hurt anybody else in it.”
For a second, she felt like Batman, standing over Gotham and proudly championing it, but then, unsurprisingly, she was a little too detailed to let it go.
“We’re ideally not going to let her hurt anyone outside the city, either,” she added.
Boone was very carefully not laughing at that, she could tell by the tension of his lips. “I agree.”
He was the one sure remedy for her fear, she decided, so she kissed him again. It felt good to do it underneath the stars, in the balmy summer night air, the breeze stirring against their skin. And in another moment with him, the outside world vanished, and she wasn’t thinking about the air or the night or anything else.
They might not have figured out fire-breathing yet, but she could sense that they had the potential for it simmering inside them. When it finally came out, it would erupt from this—this passion.
You have everything you need to fly, Lindsay’s dragon said.
When they stopped kissing, Boone skimmed his fingers down her cheek. “You want to tell me what’s got you on edge? Besides everything?”
She swallowed. “I’ve always been afraid of flying.”
He didn’t laugh at her, thank God. He just said, “You can fly. I know you can. I’m surprised you can’t do it right now, no dragon necessary.”
“Well, I haven’t tried throwing myself off the edge yet. If you really want me to believe in myself...”
“I believe in you enough for both of us,” Boone said. He was just ignoring her joking around now—the tone of his voice was dead serious. He meant every word he was saying, and it made her breath catch in her chest. “You’re the most amazing person I’ve ever met.”
It was hard to be on the receiving end of that compliment. It felt cheap to say, “You too,” but it was true. She couldn’t imagine anyone more incredible than Boone, artist and dragon and soldier, the man who comforted the dying and made breakfast and helped her lug a trash bag around.
Maybe if you think that much of him, you’ll give him enough credit to believe he’s not making a mistake betting on you.
This wasn’t something she could enter into a spreadsheet. It wasn’t a formula that would suddenly resolve before her eyes. It wasn’t even a task, like cleaning up the beach, that she could slog through on her free weekends, satisfying herself with logical but step-by-step progress. She just had to trust him.
And she did. She trusted him to mean it, and she trusted him to not be too ridiculously wrong.
Those hazel eyes of his were dangerous. She was about to jump off a cliff because of how persuasive they were.
Because when he looked at her, she really could believe she could fly.
“Okay,” Lindsay said. She took a deep breath. “Let’s figure out the logistics here. It’s not like we want to just jump off the side of a mountain and hope the whole ‘flying’ thing comes to us before we hit the grou
nd.”
“That would be bad,” Boone agreed.
Logistics were supposed to be her strong suit. “Let’s transform,” she said. “We’re not going to fly like this, no matter how many extremely sweet things you say to me about my amazingness.” She winked at him. Maybe if she acted carefree, she’d start to feel carefree. “Let’s go into stealth mode and then... dragon up.”
Putting on the armor of invisibility came easily this time. After all, she was already on her guard, steeled to head into a terrifying situation. Being seen was far from her top worry, but any little bit of reassurance helped. She snapped into stealth mode right away.
The dragon transformation still wasn’t instantaneous, though. It was easy to hide her body, but hard to give it up, even if she wanted to believe—even if she did believe—that this dragon body was hers as well. So this change was slower, but at least it wasn’t painful anymore. She could watch her skin turn to scales without even a twinge of pain.
He was right. She could handle this. She trusted herself to do that—and she, like Boone, was a person worth trusting.
He had changed too, but she saw that he was waiting for her lead. He knew she was scared and didn’t want to rush her into anything.
If Lindsay needed a push, she’d have to either ask him for one or push herself.
I can push you, her dragon offered.
Huh. Okay. She wasn’t going to refuse any help, especially not help from the sub-basement of her unconscious.
Push away, she said.
Almost of their own accord, her wings unfurled, stretching out wide. Lindsay could feel the air passing over and under them. The skin there was incredibly sensitive, but nothing hurt: instead, it felt like the most wonderful kind of caress. It was like the feeling of every good summer day rolled up together, the feeling you had as a kid that the world was pleading with you to come out and play.
The wings were new. She hadn’t had a human equivalent for them; they’d just sprouted on their own. They had their own kind of power, and as she flexed them, she felt an enormous, primitive joy.
Her fear was ebbing away.
Perfect night for flying, her dragon observed.
Lindsay looked out at the clear night sky. She looked inward, too.
She discovered she couldn’t agree more.
She flapped her wings up and down and found herself lifting up into the air. She felt like a colt standing on wobbly legs for the first time, but as long as she beat her wings steadily, she seemed perfectly able to hover there. It didn’t take much energy. She looked down at the several feet between her and the grassy picnic spot where they had stopped.
She was flying.
It unleashed something inside her. Suddenly she was spiraling up into the sky, flinging herself through loops and twists, feeling the incredible rush of the night against her scales. This was flight, real flight, as humans could never know it. This wasn’t about sitting in a plane full of stale air, slowly vibrating her way up to a steady flight under someone else’s control. This was wild and dizzying and completely hers.
Boone rose up to meet her. He flew so quickly he became a silver blur, almost disappearing even to her eyes. He could have been a comet, seen only as a passing streak across the sky.
Their flight paths braided together as they crossed each other, dropped beneath each other, soared above each other.
It was the purest kind of excitement, and Lindsay felt her human mind slipping away from her. She was pure dragon now, a dragon flying with her mate, a dragon with no other concern but to play this dance out amid the stars.
She wasn’t afraid. Her body knew how to do this. When she walked, she wasn’t afraid of falling. Flying felt just as natural now.
And far more exhilarating. If being a dragon had already felt empowering to her, this was like being suddenly crowned a queen.
Human terms, her dragon scoffed.
Good point. What was being a queen compared to this?
She twitched her wings at Boone, hailing him the way one ship might hail another, and saw him twitch his own back. Together, they rolled over and over again, synchronized like swimmers.
They’d already gone far from Kissing Cliff. Lindsay’s dragon-sharp eyes could see strange, shimmering bars in the air, and she instinctively flew towards them.
She found that the shimmers buoyed her up without any effort on her part. Her wings relaxed and stretched out. As long as she kept them spread, she could soar along without beating them at all. She could drift from shimmer to shimmer. This must be how hawks and eagles flew—gliding on the thermals.
She’d lost any sense of a plan. She and Boone just gloried in the flight, following the thermals up the coast. They stayed near the beach, since the thermals dropped out a little above the ocean, but they flew along the shoreline. The waves beneath them looked small and harmless.
When they idly drifted inland, the city looked more beautiful than ever, like a toy Christmas village sparkling with lights. She could pick up on everything, from the color of an orange’s rind in the dark to two kids carrying on with their soccer game, undeterred by the darkness. A woman in a sleek cream-colored convertible was driving along the winding cliff roads, her long blonde hair floating back behind her like a scarf. It was like a whole movie had opened up beneath them.
But it was still Boone who captured most of her attention. In full flight, his dragon form was more glorious than ever. He looked like his colors had been specifically chosen to turn moonlight and starlight to his advantage. He looked like he was that light, actually, just condensed and embodied.
No wonder he had to be invisible to everyone else. If anyone had seen him, they’d have spent their whole life looking for him again.
But she had seen him. She had found him.
They’d found each other.
Chapter Twenty
Boone could have flown with her the rest of his life, without any kind of plan at all. For a moment, that future was as vivid as the town below him, like he could see every last blade of grass. They could go on the run together—on the wing together—and leave everything else behind. The two of them in the sky, brightly colored against the black canvas of the night, was better than anything he could have painted. They could hunt as dragons and pick fruit as humans, and they could make love in the long, soft grass of Kissing Cliff and other places like it. He held the possibility tightly, like a precious jewel.
And then, bemused at his own fantasy, let it go.
It wasn’t them. They didn’t run from a fight. And Lindsay couldn’t abandon her town any more than he could realistically abandon his drawings. He was already on edge from having gone a few days without even getting a sketch in. They couldn’t live like this, not really, no more than they could have really lived in bed.
It didn’t mean it didn’t make for a hell of an interlude.
Still, he wasn’t surprised when their idyllic little holiday in the sky was interrupted. The real world had to catch up with them sooner or later.
They were joined in their flight by a dragon that dwarfed them both.
Awe swept over him. It wasn’t just its size. It looked, bizarrely, like some kind of elder statesman of dragonhood. Its scales looked rougher and less flexible than theirs, more like bits of horn and bone. Its ruff had been torn at some point. Scars streaked its hide.
Those signs of old violence made a brief fight-or-flight reflex seize Boone. He tensed his muscles, but his instincts told him to back off: this dragon wasn’t picking a fight. He was just latching onto them, coasting on the same thermals. This was, if anything, a welcoming gesture, an offer of camaraderie. Like the dragon equivalent of pouring the new folks a cup of coffee.
Eleanor had said they’d meet with someone. Time to find out if this was that someone.
They fell into a sort of V-shape, like geese, with the bigger dragon leading them.
Lindsay flexed her wings at him again, silently asking a question. Boone felt like there was a separate sens
e of draconian body language, but he’d only half-developed it; it made him feel tongue-tied. He couldn’t quite understand her and couldn’t quite talk back. But he could guess what she was asking. Were they going to trust this other dragon?
And he could guess, or hope, that she was picking up on his answer: For now.
They could break off if the other dragon was leading them into some kind of trap—if they could even recognize a dragon trap before it was sprung on them.
The big dragon led them higher, through the veil of clouds that parted around them, dewy and gauzy. The sky above the clouds was impossibly clear, a luxurious black with the brightest stars Boone had ever seen in his whole life.
Boone didn’t feel like he could ever get tired of this. This wasn’t like a workout. It wasn’t even like one of his rare spots of runner’s high, when endorphins pumped wildly through him. This didn’t feel good for him in that healthy, dutiful way. It felt both decadent and necessary.
All it reminded him of was drawing and Lindsay.
They slowly veered south, following the coastline out of town. He was surprised to discover that he had a strong internal map of the land beneath him, a kind of intuitive topographic understanding of what San Marco—our territory, his dragon said—looked like from above. Landing spots seemed to jump out at him like someone had gone over them with a highlighter. Here was a flat piece of land with no one around... here was another one... this spot would only fit one of them, not all three at once, but could maybe work if they landed one at a time...
His sense of smell was keener like this, too. He could smell and taste the salt off the ocean.
His dragon, he could tell, wanted to fish. He could see little flickers as prey moved beneath the surface of the water, and he knew just how he would dive down and grab up a fish with his talons—
We’ve got a lot going on right now, buddy, Boone said to his dragon. We can get sushi later.
He wasn’t even too repulsed by the thought of it, even though fishing had never been a sport he’d had much interest in, and gulping down barely dead, bone-in fish had definitely never been a culinary interest. His dragon wanted it, and the line between them was very, very blurry, especially when he was shifted. He knew the fish would taste delicious.