by Chant, Zoe
They began dropping back down through the clouds, lower and lower, until the big dragon landed on a huge piece of shale right off the beach. Boone and Lindsay came to rest beside it.
Now that he knew to look for it, Boone could see the shimmer of falling gold in the air as the other dragon became human.
Their new friend—if he was a friend—was a tall black man in an old-fashioned suit with a Victorian-style waistcoat. His hair was touched with white at the temples. He made Boone feel underdressed, which wasn’t something he’d ever worried about before.
He concentrated and felt himself growing more and more human. It was like he’d found his own familiar shape lurking around inside him like an old memory. Once he had it, it was easy to step into it again.
He blinked and found himself standing on two legs. Lindsay, human again herself, was next to him, and Boone reached out reflexively to take her hand. They were a duo, and he wanted to impress that upon the man in front of them. They came as a set and would not be broken up.
“I don’t think we’ve met,” the Victorian gentleman said. He had a mild voice with a hint of an English accent that went well with the rest of his Masterpiece Theatre style. “My name is Henry.”
Boone and Lindsay traded glances.
“Henry as in ‘Henry and Ursula’?” Boone said.
“Ursula is my sister,” Henry said. “And you are...?” His tone seemed to imply that whatever else they were, they were unforgivably rude.
Even aside from the age, this man felt like he was in a completely different generation from Eleanor. He seemed like a stranded time traveler.
But he wasn’t wrong: they did need to introduce themselves.
He let Lindsay take charge of that. She was the one who was used to wheeling and dealing.
“I’m Lindsay,” she said. “This is Boone.”
Henry didn’t move towards a handshake but instead offered them a slight bow.
“It’s a pleasure to meet you,” Henry said. “Are you new to the area?”
Lindsay shook her head. “We’re locals. We’re just new to this.”
“You’ve never flown?” Henry said.
A native Californian, Boone could recognize the tone: it was how he sounded on the rare occasion he met an adult who didn’t drive. Life was full of freeways. How did they get around?
“We’re new to being dragons,” Lindsay said. “Period.”
Which was probably, Boone reflected, the Californian human equivalent of retorting, I just moved here from New York.
But the parallel stopped dead, because Henry didn’t say, “Oh,” in the familiar way of someone suddenly understanding you. Instead, his jaw actually dropped, something Boone had never seen before.
Henry said, “Do you mean—you can’t really mean that you were turned?”
Did Henry think being made a dragon by someone else was somehow in poor taste? Maybe he and Lindsay were the lottery-winning upstarts to the classy old-money dragons.
He said, “It just happened.”
“No,” Henry said. “It didn’t. It couldn’t have. It doesn’t just happen. It can’t have just happened. Turning—for a mythical shifter to have passed on their ability—” It was like he was a robot whose programming was shorting out on him. He took a deep breath, retreating into that stately politeness. “Would you come to the club with me, please? I believe we have much to discuss.”
The club? There was a dragon club?
The world was so weird.
*
The club Henry took them to was like nothing Boone had ever seen outside of a movie. Like Henry himself, it seemed straight out of a more refined century. The furniture was dark, gleaming mahogany. The lamps all had golden bases and stained glass shades. Everything seemed like it had been hand-crafted for luxury, and everyone’s clothes hung like they’d been perfectly tailored.
It made him nervous.
If Henry seemed to have stepped right out of the nineteenth century and that accounted for his courtesy and the flawless good taste of his world, Boone had to take into account that that same century had given the world unbreathable, pea-soup London air and children in workhouses.
The nineteenth century had also had more than enough racism and sexism to make him particularly wary on Lindsay’s behalf, but luckily, a glance around the room proved this place was more diverse than some stereotypical country club. It wasn’t just Henry; the whole club was far from a bunch of elderly white men sitting around smoking cigars and discussing the stock market. This looked like any San Marco neighborhood gathering—as long as it was set in a retirement community and involved Victorian cosplay, at least.
When he looked closely enough, he noticed that even the antiques were from varied cultures: there were milky jade elephants and stone fertility statues and Navajo turquoise jewelry. Everyone here was old-fashioned—and most of them were just old, period—but they didn’t seem to be narrow-minded, at least.
That made sense. He’d felt a kind of unlimited energy at his disposal as a dragon. Maybe dragons had been crossing oceans and borders for centuries, long before humans had found the technology to do the same thing. Of course they could get along with each other.
The person they couldn’t get along with was Mullen.
And possibly interlopers who came into their company wearing battered workout clothes. Including, in Lindsay’s case, the neon joke T-shirt that said CITY PLANNERS DO IT ALL OVER TOWN. Everyone was staring at them, and Boone couldn’t even blame them, since he’d been staring right back. And he’d certainly stared at Lindsay’s shirt when he’d first seen it, too.
Henry cleared his throat. “I have news.”
The room had already fallen silent when everyone had noticed Boone and Lindsay in the first place, but now there was a hushed, waiting quality to it. Everyone seemed to be on the edge of their seats.
“These two people,” Henry said, emphasizing “people” like what he really meant was “barbarians,” “claim that they were... turned.”
“That’s ridiculous,” a woman snapped. “There hasn’t been a turning in two hundred years.”
Apparently she felt so strongly about it that she rose to her feet in protest. She was slim and elegant, and in her layered silk gown, she also looked untouchably regal.
“This is my sister Ursula,” Henry said quietly.
Finally, Henry and Ursula both. Finally, they were fulfilling part of what Eleanor had asked of them.
Lindsay made a curtsying motion that should have looked silly without a skirt but somehow didn’t. “We found a woman named Eleanor—”
“Eleanor?” That was from a thin, dark-haired man.
“Eleanor!” Ursula pushed her way forward. “You’ve seen her?”
“I’m sorry,” Lindsay said quietly. “She—she’s dead.”
Another hush fell over the room. Ursula pressed her hand to her mouth, already starting to silently cry; Henry closed his eyes and stood very still. Boone spotted more tears in the crowd. The nervous-looking man put his hand over his face, like he was trying to hide from the news. These people had known Eleanor and cared about her.
But none of them were asking what had happened. None of them even seemed surprised. It was as if a woman’s death was—however tragic, early, and violent—almost expected.
Lindsay must have been noticing the same thing. She said, “We can tell you what happened.”
“We know what happened,” the thin man said. He’d turned pale, and now he covered his eyes, wiping at them. “She is our latest casualty. May she rest peacefully in the skies. There’s nothing to be done.”
There was a murmur from the crowd, but Boone couldn’t tell if it was one of agreement or disapproval.
“She is our latest casualty,” Henry said, correcting him, “and we know why and how she died, but there is not nothing to be done. I refuse to believe that. We do not give up the fight, Octavian.”
Octavian nodded, giving Henry a brief bow. “I know. I should not
despair.” But he still looked like he was going to be sick.
It drove home how ill-equipped they were for this. They couldn’t possibly have time to mediate a dragon clan group therapy session.
“Someone was hunting her,” Boone said, getting back to the facts.
“Yes,” Henry said. “Someone is hunting us all.”
Henry scrutinized them. His grief for Eleanor, even though it had mostly gone unspoken, seemed to have stripped some of the smooth veneer away from him. For the first time, Boone saw how old he really was. He looked like a man who had seen more deaths than he could count and had had more sleepless nights than restful ones. Ursula looked the same. Careful touches of makeup hid it a little better in her case, but up close, Boone could see the look in her eyes. She was as weary as her brother was.
Boone remembered the scars he’d seen on Henry’s dragon hide. He wouldn’t be surprised if Ursula had some to match. These people had been through a lot.
Henry said, “Eleanor turned you. How?”
“She breathed out fire,” Boone said, “but it didn’t burn us. We were on the beach, and it turned all the sand underneath us into glass, but it didn’t leave a mark on us. And then—” He shrugged, not wanting to get into the little details of painting sponges on claw tips and arguing with Uber drivers. “Before she died, she told us to come find you. You and Ursula. I think she thought we could help you somehow.”
Maybe just with an infusion of new blood, if this crowd was the entirety of Eleanor’s clan. She must have been the youngest of them—though Octavian might have been close.
When Ursula spoke, her voice trembled. “Eleanor had visions. One in particular haunted her all her life. She believed that the days of turning were not yet over, and that when they returned, they might mean our salvation. She said that there were two people she would meet near the end of her life, and if she could pass them the gift of dragonhood and if they could accept it... But I never thought it would happen. After all this time. And both of you.”
She touched Lindsay’s cheek first and then Boone’s. Without realizing it, he’d been expecting her to run hot, like being a natural dragon meant fire would burn in her veins. But her hand was cool, and her fingers were shaking.
Boone couldn’t stand any more of this. “Would someone explain what’s going on?”
“Of course,” Henry said. He bowed to the assembly. “If you all will excuse us? I think our new friends could stand to hear this news in private.”
“But—who are you?” Octavian said, with another bow, this one directed at them in general. “If Eleanor truly did succeed in turning you, then you belong with us now.”
“Octavian is our... social secretary, more or less,” Ursula murmured. “Indulge him.”
“We’re Boone Keller,” Lindsay said, pointing to him, “and Lindsay Garza. And we’ll certainly do whatever we can for you. We’re in this for good, we get that.”
“We are honored by your presence here,” Octavian said quietly. “You are a rare gift indeed. Are you... fighters?”
“I draw for a living,” Boone said, “but I used to be a soldier. Fighting’s in my wheelhouse.” He fished out the dog tags like evidence exhibit A.
“I’m a city planner,” Lindsay said. “My fighting experience is limited to running campaigns to get people to consider working out more. Plus that archery course in college, which feels... less relevant than Boone’s experience. But we’re a team.”
“Anyone underestimating her would be making a serious mistake,” Boone said.
“Yes, I can see that. Do the two of you need a place to stay? You are welcome to use the club’s rooms—”
He guessed he had to be impressed by dragon hospitality. The guy seemed two seconds away from laying mints out on their pillows. It almost felt mean to disappoint him, but he didn’t want to trust Lindsay’s safety to such an unknown place, not yet. It would be better if they had a little hole in the wall of their own to retreat to.
Henry said, “Perhaps it would better to save collecting their membership fees for another time,” and although his voice was ninety-five percent gentle and only five percent scolding, Octavian still retreated instantly, bowing yet again.
Eleanor had said they could trust Henry and Ursula. Clearly they commanded a lot of respect here, if no one even blinked at Octavian bobbing up and down like one of those old drinking bird toys.
Boone could see why. The brother and sister pair had a kind of innate nobility to them, and definitely enough charisma that it was hard to look away from them.
“Come along,” Ursula said, touching his elbow.
They took Boone and Lindsay to a small library. They arranged themselves silently, with Ursula surveying them while Henry stood with his back to them, holding out his hands to the fireplace.
Boone recognized the art on the walls: all oil paintings and all originals.
Not the time to go look at them, he told himself. Do it on some other visit.
It was nice to believe that there would be other visits, that all this hassle with Mullen would be neatly and cleanly cleared up. He held onto the thought like a rabbit’s foot.
Finally Henry turned around.
“I’ve been trying to think of a better, easier way to introduce you to our world,” Henry said. “But you’ve already been introduced by death. After that, even this might come as a relief. So—welcome to the war.”
The War
Henry said:
You couldn’t understand why we didn’t ask about Eleanor’s death. The truth is, we have seen so much of it that none of it surprises us anymore. Our natural lives are very long, and it is hard to kill a dragon, but there are those who can do it. There are those who do it constantly.
We call them the Unchangeable.
The Unchangeable are old. They are not old the way your grandmother is old or even old the way a country is old. They are old the way mountains are old. They are older than the stars. At least that’s what they claim, and we have no record of a time when they did not exist and did not burn to destroy us.
Evolution does not happen to the Unchangeable. Creation does not happen to the Unchangeable. They are as they were and as they ever will be. They exist regardless of time and space and circumstances, and what they hate, more than anything else, are shifters.
If the Unchangeable are rock, shifters are water. Our forms are not fixed. Even our minds are like two minds within one. It is bad enough, the Unchangeable think, that primordial sludge coughed up a world, and that that world grew full of life, full of living and dying and growing and transforming. That in and of itself is intolerable to them. But shifters... we are worse. Change defines a shifter.
So they want us dead. Every last one of us.
And when we are gone, they’ll turn to the humans, who are almost as quicksilver as we are.
And when the humans are gone, they’ll turn to the animals.
Then to the jungles and forests and meadows and deserts and tundra.
Until all the universe is empty and eternal.
There are things we know about them. They have a true form, and they wear it whenever they can. They can put on human skins as a disguise, but their hatred for that shape always bleeds through—they never look entirely convincing. Either there are little faults in the design, or you can just sense it. Something about them always makes your skin crawl.
They don’t strategize, really. They don’t have tactics. They can’t think quickly. That’s our only true advantage over them—they’re still working off the same plans they made centuries ago. You’d think that would make it easier to outwit them, but only barely, because they never tire. They never need to sleep or eat. They don’t get bored or distracted. If they find you—and sooner or later, they always find you—they will do the best they can, unceasingly, to run you to ground. And they will kill you.
And for the entire duration of our existence, we have contended with them. Warred with them. Sought in vain to negotiate with them
. (You cannot negotiate with people who want your extinction.)
But in the last few decades, the unthinkable has happened.
Something in the Unchangeable has changed.
It’s as if they’ve started sensing us. Before, they had to track us down with reason and wit and persistence, but now some of them seem to be able to sniff us out. We have hidden ourselves perfectly, but suddenly we are found all the same.
And the Unchangeable with these heightened hunting skills aren’t just going after anyone. They’re killing particular shifters, people who have caught their attention.
Our boldest, bravest, and most powerful shifters. Our leaders.
Eleanor had a powerful magical gift—she could see glimpses of our future. We haven’t had any seers for generations, but Eleanor knew things she could not have known.
And she knew that she would die.
She said that she would die, but that something new would come after her. Someone extraordinarily powerful. Someone—two someones—who could save us all.
And now I think that’s you, Lindsay, Boone.
If the magic to create new dragon shifters has come back into the world, then we are changing too, and we might be able to change so far and so fast that the Unchangeable can’t keep up with us. We might be able to stop this endless war of attrition—
—and finally win.
I believe you are the miracle we’ve been waiting for.
Chapter Twenty-One
The miracle they’d been waiting for.
Nothing on Henry or Ursula’s faces indicated that this was meant to be a hilarious joke. No one jumped out to reveal that they were on some secret prank show.
“I am not a miracle,” Lindsay said, making sure to enunciate the words very precisely. “I work in the city planner’s office.”
“Well, that explains the T-shirt,” Ursula said dryly.