by Chant, Zoe
“I have Tweety Bird boxer shorts that I sleep in sometimes. Sometimes by accident I drink orange juice after I’ve already brushed my teeth. I stub my toe on one chair in my apartment every other week and for some reason I never move it. I can’t be anybody’s miracle.”
“You’re selling yourself short,” Boone said. His hand on her arm was warm and steadying. “You make cities happen, remember? You help dying dragons without a second thought. You clean up beaches in your spare time. You could absolutely be someone’s miracle. If there’s a mistake here with one of us, it’s me.”
She didn’t know how he could even think that. He was a soldier—a warrior—and he saw the world unlike anyone else she’d ever met. She’d seen his drawings. He had found magic in the world long before they’d run into dragons. When Mullen had threatened her, he had been ready to kill her for Lindsay’s sake.
Mullen.
“I think we’ve met one of them,” Lindsay said, for now leaving aside the whole question of worthiness and miracles. “One of the Unchangeable.”
Ursula gasped, one elegant soapstone-carved hand covering her mouth.
Ordinary conversation was so short on gasps. Lindsay was starting to think that talking with dragons could be a really rewarding experience. They were so dramatic.
“It was pretending to be a detective. A woman named Ann Mullen. We figured out she couldn’t be a cop—San Marco doesn’t have detectives, just sheriff’s deputies—and we thought she must have been the person who killed Eleanor. The thing that killed Eleanor. But we didn’t know anything else. Then we had this dream, where we could talk to Eleanor, and she told us that what we thought was Mullen was really just a thing. It must have been one of the things you’re talking about.”
“If you’re being hunted by the Unchangeable, your lives are at risk,” Henry said. “Especially since it knows where you live.”
“I don’t think it knows for sure yet that we’re dragons. It just thinks we’re....” She hesitated. Was it rude to say? “Contaminated.”
“It doesn’t matter. If you make it wait long enough, it’ll kill you without knowing whether you are or not. It’s not like it has any love for people. And if it’s scented you, then we may have to abandon San Marco. The last thing we want is for it to track you here.”
“You’re just going to leave?” Lindsay said.
She was surprised how betrayed she felt. She couldn’t think of San Marco as being inhospitable to anyone, let alone to people like this—long-term residents with deep roots who were still happy to welcome newcomers into their circle. People who knew the landscape of San Marco from the sky.
“You’ll need to come with us,” Ursula said. “We can’t just leave you here to die.”
Even though she couldn’t imagine pulling up stakes in the middle of the night, she was still touched at how instantly Ursula and Henry’s clan had adopted them; first Octavian had been ready to offer them turndown service, and now Ursula was just taking for granted that of course she would continue to offer them whatever protection she could.
Boone said, “But if Mullen’s tracking us, and we go with you, won’t it just track you too?”
“We’ll have to take our chances. We can’t just leave you behind. If we’re able to run far enough fast enough—”
“We aren’t running,” Lindsay said firmly. “This is our home. I’ve poured too much work into this town to walk away from it.”
“You don’t understand,” Henry said. “The creature will come for you, again and again. She will be relentless.”
“I’m not going to let anything happen to Lindsay,” Boone said. There was a ferocity in his voice, like crackling fire, and he took her hand and squeezed it hard.
“And I’m not going to let anything happen to Boone,” Lindsay said.
“She’ll come after us before she comes after you, if she’s as dedicated as you think. And if she comes after us, we’ll deal with it.”
“How, exactly, then?” Ursula said, folding her arms. “The Unchangeable are extraordinarily hard to kill. Most dragons who face them—even the strongest of us, like Eleanor—lose. Even Henry and I only barely escaped the one time we encountered one of those creatures.”
“But you did escape,” Boone said. “Dragons must have won these fights before.”
“On a very few occasions.”
“Then I want to know what they did.” He squared his shoulders. “If the one after us is as relentless as you say, I need to know exactly how to counter it.”
“Yeah,” Lindsay said. “You said we were a miracle, your sure way to win to the war, so you have to think there’s a chance. You need to teach us how to fight. Like we told Octavian, we’re in this now. Show us what we can do.”
If her life were a movie, Lindsay thought this would be exactly the right spot for a training montage.
It would have been great. Henry and Ursula would have taken her and Boone into some kind of dragon super-gym, and over a period of about two minutes, scored to a catchy, upbeat song, she and Boone would have had an ultra-condensed tutorial in being the best dragons they could be. Maybe they would learn how to breathe fire, blackening cardboard targets of Mullen at a hundred paces. Or they would practice flying while carrying weights in their talons. Or—and she knew this was a reach—they could learn how to wield machine guns with their claws so that one day they could fly into battle maniacally mowing down the Unchangeable and its cronies in a hail of gunfire.
She knew that last bit was a little too violent for her actual tastes. But it did make for a good visual.
Instead, Henry just said, “We certainly don’t know what you can do, either.”
Ursula nodded. “You’re as much of a mystery to us as you are to yourselves.”
Lindsay had never had to work too hard to keep her temper under control—she’d never thought of herself as hotheaded—but right then she had to bite her tongue for a couple seconds to keep from breaking out into some really colorful language.
“You can’t tell us anything helpful? You think we’re heroes capable of facing down someone who’s already killed a really strong dragon, and you can’t even give us a hint?”
Henry at least had the decency to look a little abashed. “We’d like to. Believe me, there’s nothing I’d like more than to give you some kind of silver bullet that would solve all of our problems. But if we knew what was needed to defeat the Unchangeable, we wouldn’t be in the position we’re in now. Hiding, scared, afraid to live openly.”
“Openly?” Boone said. “How openly could you possibly live?”
“Oh, there are all kinds of ways of keeping secrets—and all kinds of ways to keep them so that some people find out while others don’t. When the Unchangeable were a little worse at tracking us, we took more risks—we found ways to meet other shifters. We had communities that weren’t entirely bound by species.”
He sounded regretful, and it made Lindsay’s heart hurt a little for him. Again, she was familiar with the basic outline of this loneliness, even if the specifics were obviously new. Henry was an old man whose neighborhood had grown steadily isolated. He’d been split up from all his old friends, and now, except for his sister, all he had were people he was supposed to take care of. He and Ursula both had to be lonely and under immense pressure.
Lindsay would have tried to do something about that in the real world, and she was going determined to do something about it in dragon world, too. But first she wanted—for Zeke’s sake as well as theirs—to at least get a couple questions answered.
“Other shifters?”
“Of course,” Ursula said, her lovely face wrinkling into a frown. “The world is more than just dragons and humans, you know.”
Boone said testily, “For the purpose of this conversation, assume that we don’t know anything. We already told you that we just found a dragon—Eleanor—on the beach, and it turned our whole lives upside down. We don’t know shit about dragons or shifters or magic.”
&nb
sp; Lindsay was glad to have him along to be openly rude when she felt reluctant to do it herself. This was why you always needed a partner, she decided. Someone to have your back and say the things you didn’t quite dare to.
Ursula did apologize. “I’m sorry. We’ve had only our own company for so long, it’s easy to forget what humans know and don’t know. We used to intermarry with humans, but it’s been a long time since that, too—we’re older than we look.”
There was something a little unsettling about that, and while Lindsay wanted to know how long she could now expect to live and how long Henry and Ursula, in particular, had been around, she also didn’t want to know. Not yet. She was still reeling from everything else. She didn’t know that she could deal with suddenly knowing she was immortal, too.
By the look on Boone’s face, he was thinking the same thing. He squeezed her hand again.
“Okay,” Boone said quietly. “Why don’t we just tell you if we need something explained to us? I know we both want to know what other kinds of shifters there are.”
“Definitely,” Lindsay agreed.
Ursula seemed to be trying her best to be straight with them now, but she also seemed overwhelmed. “There are many. It’s possible that every animal has its own kind of shifter. I’ve known or heard of... let’s see. Ravens, wolves, panthers, a phoenix. Sharks, dolphins, whales. Stags and bears and rabbits. Lions, tigers, leopards, jaguars... right down to squirrels. I once met a cockroach shifter, poor man. He was very shy.”
“Seymour?” Henry said. He smiled. “I’d almost forgotten about him. Good old Seymour. I always liked him.”
Cockroach shifters. Lindsay was very, very thankful to have landed with a dragon form if cockroaches had also been on the table the whole time. Although at least Seymour the cockroach probably didn’t have to worry about the Unchangeable. He’d be around even after the apocalypse: just Seymour the cockroach, ruling over a pile of Twinkies.
“Mammals are the most common,” Henry said, abandoning the question of poor Seymour. “But there are oceanic shifters, and living by the water as we do, they’re actually the ones we meet most often.”
Lindsay remembered her research. Oceans, lakes, rivers... “Dragons mostly congregate by large water sources, right?”
“Yes,” Ursula said. She sounded pleasantly surprised. “We do. It’s more by tradition than necessity. Young dragons used to start fires by accident fairly often when they were still learning, so their parents would take them to practice down by the water, where it would be safer.” She sighed. “Then, of course, you’d have the occasional wave of boiled fish. We always tried to haul them back to shore—or just swoop down and eat them ourselves—but every now and then some fisherman would notice. Then we’d get into the paranormal magazines again. And I never even liked boiled fish—cooks all the flavor out.”
“And the ocean is beautiful from above,” Henry said simply. “As I’m sure you noticed. I could never settle for a lake or a river myself—I love the coastline too much. The wildness of the sea.”
Lindsay no longer found it easy to mock—even in her head—his elevated, poetic way of speaking. He felt too real now to be the butt of any joke.
So she only nodded. Yes, the ocean had been glorious from above. And she too loved the wildness of the sea.
She was stepping into a wider and more powerful normalcy. She felt like there was nothing strange in the way she talked and thought reflecting that.
But while subtle changes in her perception of herself were all very well and good, she was still holding out for a training montage.
“So we can breathe fire, then,” Lindsay said.
Ursula brightened. “Yes! Certainly. All of us can. And that we can teach you. I’m sorry—we almost take it for granted by now.”
Lindsay couldn’t imagine getting to the point where she took breathing fire for granted, but she guessed it wouldn’t occur to her to explain to someone that if they got in a fight, they could curl their hand into a fist and shove it in their opponent’s direction, either. You didn’t talk someone through a punch. And if there really hadn’t been any turnings in years upon years, then they were the first adult dragons Ursula and Henry had ever had to explain this to.
They walked Boone and Lindsay down another long corridor.
Lindsay surreptitiously crossed her fingers. Please be a dragon gymnasium, please be a dragon gymnasium...
No luck. Just a wide, stone-floored back porch that looked out onto the sea. The night air was cool and sensuous against Lindsay’s bare arms. It would feel good, she knew, to transform.
She wriggled into her dragon-skin.
Strength poured into her, widening her frame, sending muscles rippling across her back, toughening her skin until she felt invincible.
She remembered what it had felt like to be able to wrap her wings around Boone. What it had felt like to be able to fly. She just moved towards that feeling until she was immersed in it completely.
She’d seen Henry’s dragon on their flight in, of course, but not Ursula’s. Her dragon was unsurprisingly elegant—a sleek, jet-black creature with a long trail of crimson spines running down her backbone. Silver scars streaked her back like lightning tattoos.
Henry stayed human and appeared to be trying to do his best to respect their ignorance. He patted his sister’s side and said, “As you can see, we come in all colors. There are some theories that a dragon’s color can signal hidden gifts, like Eleanor’s, but it’s too hard to know for sure.” He smiled. “But it’s considered a good omen to be silver, actually. I was stunned when I saw the two of you in flight.”
We were stunned by you too.
In another life, Henry would have been one of those strict-but-beloved teachers. When he said, “Let us discuss fire,” it had a ringing, authoritative tone that summoned attention at once.
“Fire is a gift to dragonkind,” Henry went on. “But the idea of it belongs to all shifters and all humans. Fire is life—the sun that warms us, the fire that cooks our food and keeps us alive in the harshest winters. Fire is what Greek myths tell us Prometheus stole from the gods and gave to humanity. In the Old Testament, fire is how God appeared to Moses, in the form of a burning bush. Fire is change, turning wood into ash, water into steam. It is life and death. It is not ours to command, only ours to capture for a little while, with love and respect. And great, overwhelming gratitude—because fire has always been our best weapon against the Unchangeable.”
He gave Ursula some signal, and she breathed out an enormous wave of red-and-black fire that at first seemed hot enough to make the rock sizzle.
With a start, Lindsay realized that what was sizzling was the rain in a handful of puddles and cracks, and the rain was left over from the last storm.
The storm where Eleanor had died. Everything kept coming back to that. And it was so recent.
“Fire is change,” Henry said. “And you do not unleash change lightly. Try to remember that. Yes, our children grow rambunctious and rowdy, they play with fire very literally, but for anyone old enough to understand, fire is an enormous responsibility. Don’t think about it as only a matter of life and death. Think about it as unleashing great change.”
Death felt more serious to her than change—at least at first. But then Lindsay thought about how profoundly different her life was since she had met Eleanor on the beach. She was always going to die someday—but she had never been destined to be a dragon until suddenly she’d become one. Eleanor had reshaped the course of Lindsay’s life, and maybe that did matter as much, or even more, than if she had just ended it early.
It wasn’t that death was more or less than change. It was that change was bigger. Change included death.
“It’s hard to breathe fire and be careful at the same time,” Henry said with a slight smile. “But you should try. Fire may be our best weapon, but as I said, it’s often still not enough to save us. The Unchangeable are, after all, very resistant to change.”
So they
could master fire-breathing tonight and unleash an inferno on Mullen... and Mullen might just stand there and take it.
Boone shifted, falling back into his human form again. “Is there anything we can do to make the fire more effective?” He asked the question in what Lindsay was beginning to recognize as his soldier’s voice, crisp and efficient.
“Magic is strange,” Henry said. “But it feeds on passion. If you can possibly avoid it, don’t give into despair. That’s how the Unchangeable win.”
Boone’s grin looked like a challenge to the universe. “We aren’t really the giving-in type.”
Lindsay curled her tail around his shoulders in an improvised hug, heartily seconding that.
“You two are bonded,” Henry said. It didn’t sound like he was asking a question. “No wonder Eleanor always saw the two of you together. You’re a matching set.”
They were. And unquestionably, at the very bottom of her heart where her human and dragon selves mingled to form her soul, she knew without a doubt that they always would be. He was her one true constant—and she only had him because her world had broken apart completely and let him in. She could see what Henry meant about change. It ran through their lives like a river.
“I love her,” Boone said simply.
Lindsay nuzzled her enormous dragon head against him, feeling silly and wonderful at the same time. He laughed, leaning against her, and then transformed, intertwining with her. It was ridiculously charming to see a dragon grinning from ear to ear.
Even in the midst of all this, she could make him happy. She was so thankful for that.
He made her stronger. He made her more herself than she’d ever been before. Her last few days had been a whirlwind of change, and she didn’t regret any of them.
Suddenly, a kind of calm certainty fell over her, and she knew what it really felt like to be a dragon. She knew what she could do.
Lindsay turned to look out at the waves, watching them crest and fall, the white foam falling back down again, the tide coming in and out.
She breathed in deeply—
—and breathed out wildfire.