The Infamous Beast

by T Shadow

  I watch the tea cascade down the edges of the broken cup, down the leg of the coffee table and onto the floor in a puddle that slowly begins to resemble my ego right now. Flat, a mess, broken and brown, cause I feel like fucking shit. Who claims a mate without their consent? Did he even want it? Oh my god… I’m mated to their Heir of the Draconis line. FUCK. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fu-

  “Last night in the bar. You were wasted, with good reason. You told me about what happened with Finn in the shop, that’s why we spiked your drink with Fae juice so you could finally let loose for once. I didn’t expect us to be there until five in the fucking morning with you pissed as a fart. Okay, well maybe I did, kinda, but I didn’t expect the three freaking amigos to rock up like bitches in heat!”

  “Three amigos?”

  “Yeah, Finnegan, Landon and Leland. They came in the bar in the early morning posturing and poking their chests out like cockerels vying for your attention. Unfortunately you were so shitfaced you didn’t acknowledge them for ages and then you fell off of your fucking stool onto me!”

  I snort. I try to hide it behind my hand, but with Mika’s hearing, she would’ve heard it regardless. “Karma.”

  “Karma? What the fuck do you mean, karma?”

  “Well, you roofie’d me, so I fell on you,” I shrug, “you did it to yourself, really.”

  Getting up from the sofa, I walk into the kitchen and pick up the now empty chicken packet from the floor. Lucius is sitting on the counter scowling, satisfied, but not at all happy about it. I stick my tongue out at him and lean against the counter top, rubbing my hands over my eyes to ease the reality that I have not one, but now two mates.

  “Which one did I publicly claim?”

  “The kid, of course.”

  When I open my eyes Mika’s there in front of me, shrouded in her blankie like it’s a cloak of protection or something. Lucius’ rumbles beside me, confused at the giant fabric monster before us.

  “God,” I whisper through shaky fingers, “I really claimed the kid in public?”

  “Yep,” she pops the ‘p’. “In front of Matthuis, Finnegan, Landon and I. Although, Finnegan seemed to encourage it rather than stop it.”

  I hold my hand out to stop her mid-conversation. It’s all too much for my small brain to handle right now. I, a 'I’m-so-old-I-stopped-remembering-my-age' Dragon, who has lived for millenia without mates, now has two in the space of twenty-four hours because my beast is a greedy bitch?

  In my head I picture her laying on her side, bathed in her iridescent glory, batting her eyelashes at her suitors whilst eating grapes from their hands. We’re not too far from reality, are we?

  “I’m so fucked.”

  A giggle escapes her, “Yes, yes you are.”

  Fuck. My. Life.

  I’m laying, no, floating, on a bed of clouds. Cloud Nine never felt so real. Running my hands along the cover, I feel the soft cotton between my palms. Except it doesn’t exactly feel like four-hundred thread Egyptian cotton sheets— it does really feel like a cloud. I feel cold air slipping through my fingers and nothing holding my body up. Therefore, clouds.

  Opening my eyes, I survey my surroundings. I must be dreaming, because I am literally lying in clouds. It’s just not possible in real-life. Physics and all that.

  They say the way to know that you’re dreaming is to count your fingers… you’ll have more or less than you’re supposed to, but never the right amount. Or, think of how you got here. Most of the time, you randomly appear in space and time like you stepped through a portal and your memory was wiped on the way.

  I can’t remember getting here. So I can only assume that my subconscious is trying to tell me something. I’m good with code, computers and anything that is made of metal and needs a button to turn it on, but dream interpretation? Eh, not my forte.

  Getting up from my weirdly solid cloud, I walk away from it onto marble floors. Another weird instance, solidifying my dream-thesis.

  Glancing around the room, I see basic things. A desk with a chair, a wardrobe and an ottoman at the end of the bed— wait. Okay, it sure felt like clouds but now it’s a bed. Weird. Another weird thing is that there’s no door to the room. It’s just a framed hole in the wall.

  I walk through it gingerly, cautious of any creatures that lurk in the dark or monsters that hide under the bed. Instead, I step into a great hall, and I vaguely recognise it. Banners that hang down from the stone covings, four chairs that sit higher than anyone else and tables and chairs line the edges of the room. But that’s not what catches my eye. It’s the picture above the chairs that ensnares my attention like a siren at sea.

  I recognise the man, because he looks like my father. Yet more regal. More refined. It must be my grandfather, you know, the one who died in mysterious circumstances? Yep. Him. The portrait is in a gold frame, probably pure gold knowing him, but it’s the only portrait in the whole hall.

  Stepping closer to the chairs, I see the inscriptions on them. The two in the middle have Lord and Lady, but that’s to be expected. It’s the one to the left of the Lord’s chair that surprises me. Normally that’s the Heir’s chair, but it says First Knight. It’s the chair to the right of the Lady that the chair for my father would sit on.

  Remi did say that the previous Lord was closer to the First Knight than his own son. I don’t know what that says about my grandfather, but I know how much of an asshole my father is.

  Shaking my head, I turn away thinking of the family I never had. The grandparents I could never get close to because they aren’t here anymore. I drop to the floor and bury my head in my hands. I feel like a burden on my comrades and my family, and now I feel like if my grandparents were here, my life would be completely different.

  I contemplate my entire life while clutching my head in my hands with my eyes closed. My body feels heavier with the weight of my world on my shoulders, and here I thought dreams were meant to be full of sunshines and rainbows. Maybe this is my own personal purgatory.

  Opening my eyes to the room again, I expect to see the floor opening up and flames sprouting from the center of the world. But no. Instead I see a very large, white iridescent dragon in front of me. My first thought is that it’s Remi— she’s the only iridescent I’ve seen or heard of. But when that creature turns to face me, and it opens its reptilian eyes, I notice that they’re hard and unforgiving. Not like Remi’s playful, sarcastic, yet sometimes crazy personality.

  What do I do when confronted with a dream-dragon that looks at me like I’m worse than the shit on the bottom of their shoe? I sit ramrod straight, like if I sit still enough, maybe, it won’t see me.

  Staring at it— it just in case I assume its gender wrong— I hope that my foolproof plan will work, but when I see it push smoke through its nostrils, I know that I’m truly, and royally fucked. But the real question is— who the fuck is in my dream? Nightmare. I mean nightmare.

  The dragon starts its slow walk towards me, almost as if it's cautious, but I think it’s preparing its body to eat me while continuing its slow perusal. Reptilian in nature, I expect it to size me up, devour me and then ask itself, “hm, should I have done that?”

  The last thing I expected it to do, however, is speak. The rumble coming from its scaled chest rivals even the oldest of dragons that I’ve met, but its voice is feminine, prim and proper. I don’t know what’s more worrying, the large beast or the fact that it’s a large, female beast. Their fury is unrivaled when defending their home or their family. And there’s no one else here, so that must mean I’m in its home.

  Home… but how have I managed to end up in a dream, in a possessive Dragon’s lair?

  The odds are stacking up against me.

  “How did you get here?”

  It’s a simple question but she says it like I shouldn’t be here at all, like being here is unnatural and confusing… to us both.

  “What do you mean, I just woke up here?” Looking around I ask the question I’ve been dying to understand
, “Where even is here?”

  She doesn’t answer me, but rather follows my lead and looks around the hall we’re in. The silence hangs in the air like a cloud before a storm, and at any second, it could pop and rain down on our para—

  “You’re the son, aren’t you?” Her voice raspy and cold.

  “The son?”

  “You’re the son of the son of that man, up there, aren’t you?”

  I look over my shoulder at the picture of my grandfather, I nod my head, and although I’m not facing her, I feel like I’ll be paying for my father’s bad attitude once again.

  “You look a little like him, you know, but you’re quite the opposite.” As she moves closer to me, her talons clicking on the floor and her tail swishes back and forth— similar to a cat when it’s happy.

  “The-the opposite?”

  “He was a ruthless bastard and a terrible dictator. Still is, actually, but you, you’re soft, gentle… broken. Even though you pretend you’re not.”

  “Wait… just wait a second…” I hold my hand out, stopping her, “How do you know me, my father… how am I here?” My breathing starts to escalate, and I can feel the anxiety skirting around my skin like goosebumps forming from the cold.

  “Fear not,” As I look up, she’s there before me, “I will not hurt you, for I fear you are tied to the one I love the most, and if I hurt you, I hurt her…” She captures my eyes with hers and with the look of sincerity splashed across her features, a small piece of information comes back to me. “If I hurt you, any of you, she would never forgive me.”

  “You said her… There’s only one iridescent dragon I know of, and she mentioned a sister… is that you?”

  “We are but two sides of the same coin. We always have, and always will be.”

  “You’re… You’re twins?”

  “Yesss…” Her voice takes on that reptilian quality, becoming more sinister with the hissing. “But you won’t ever find me, and she won’t let you.”

  “I would never-”

  “You’d never have the chance. But remember, boy. I will always be able to find you. That’s not a threat, it’s a promise.”

  “I won’t, I promise… you have my word…”

  “And you have mine.”

  I think that’s the end of the conversation, but I’m startled when she opens her maw very close to my head, because that's when I start to worry. I fear that my worst nightmare will come true, and I’ll finally be devoured by the same type of beast that resides in me.

  Just before she lowers her sharp-tipped teeth, I close my eyes and accept my fate. Decapitation by Dragon, not the way I thought I’d go, but if I’m to die by digestion, then I’m good to go.

  I feel the hot breath brush over my skin as she gets within eating distance, and just before the proverbial knife comes down on my neck, everything goes black.

  And I wake up.

  I don’t wake up with a shock, I wake up like I’ve had a broken night of sleep. But thankfully there really is cotton sheets between my fingertips this time. My skin is sticky and my hair is plastered to my face as if I’ve been sunbathing during a heatwave. But this isn’t a heat sweat, this is a nightmare sweat. I experience them often enough to know the difference, but thankfully for once, I wasn’t being drowned repeatedly by my siblings.

  “Let’s not think about them or that.”

  Shaking my head to get me out of my stupor, I rise from my now drenched sheets and quietly move over to the bathroom to clean off the physical reminder of the weirdest dream of my life.

  “What happened? In the dream?”

  I look in the mirror at my flushed skin and my tired eyes as I step into the shower, the cold spray relieving some of the tension I feel in my tightly wound muscles. The cold water droplets feel like ice rolling down my heated skin and it provides a sensation that almost feels pleasurable.

  It was weird, I was in the great hall, staring at a memory, not one of mine, from ages ago. Just as I thought ‘wow, you know, my life is really fucked up’, a dragon appeared in front of me like a higher power. But not just any dragon, one that looked identical to Remi… but not her. More hardened, more sinister… more… unforgiving.

  “But it definitely wasn’t her?”

  No… No… It was her sister. She didn’t give a name, didn’t tell me anything about herself, only implied that she would always know where to find me. And she did, I mean, she was in my dream… right? Can dragons even do that? Take over someone else’s dream?

  “There’s only one way to find out, and you know the best person to ask.”

  Finn? You think he’d know?

  “He’s a scholar. I’d be slightly worried if he didn’t know shit.”

  Pushing my head under the spray of cold water, I turn up the heat as the rainfall washes down over my sweat-drenched hair, along my neck, and down my chest. I feel each drop of water from the top of my head until it reaches the bottom of my feet. Putting my hand to my chest, I feel the remainder of the claiming mark that was inflicted on me yesterday. The raw, burnt flesh under my palm is healing slowly, but the talon marks will take weeks, if not months to heal.

  But as the water runs over it, it causes a sting that I feel from my skin to my bones. It’s something that reminds my blood to continue to pump through my veins, my lungs to keep breathing, and my brain to remind me that I finally have something to live for.

  Because even if I experience the end of everything, I’ll have her. She claimed me first, after just one heated kiss. And I'm damn sure that ain't gonna let her down.

  •°•

  I find Finnegan in his small room, lying on the bed surrounded by factual books, ones linking to our heritage, race and even religious teachings, but in his hand is a book with decorative writing and a colourful cover. It definitely doesn’t look like a non-fiction book, that’s for sure.

  He’s so engrossed in the book that he doesn’t see me here in the doorway. I know what Finn’s like with his books. He gets into them, then can’t hear anyone or anything until the end of the chapter and only if the chapter doesn’t have a juicy ending that requires reading the next one immediately.

  “What’re you reading, Finn?”

  Although I didn’t shout the question, Finn still jumps like a cat confronted by a cucumber. The book snaps shut and is quickly hidden under the hotel pillow, away from prying eyes. Not mine of course, but Remington doesn’t approve of seedy out-of-the-box romance novels. Says they’re not ‘realistic’, they provide fantasies that reality can’t afford. Or some other shit.

  “Uhm,” he coughs nervously, “you know, old lore, just brushing up on dragon races, the usual, why, what’s wrong?”

  “So, something funky happened to me, and I need your help figuring out what the fuck is going on.”

  “Alright,” he scoots to the edge of the bed, sitting with his feet pressed firmly against the floor. He pushes his glasses up on his nose before grilling me to the nth degree. “First of all, you woke up without a stutter? Second, what was the funky thing, and thirdly what the fuck is going on?”

  Before taking a seat next to him I move some of the books out of the way. I’d get bollocked for disrespecting a book before I’d get answers to any of my questions. I pointedly ignore the remark about the stutter, thinking that, if I pay it no attention, it won’t matter. “I woke up in a sweat this morning, drenched from head to toe because of a nightmare.”

  “Okay…” Rubbing the back of his neck, he looks at me through his periferal. “You’ve had nightmares before… was it the same one?”

  “N-No, completely different.” The stutter returns for a second, but I hope to god it vanishes, “I wasn’t being held against my w-will in a bathtub. No, I was in the great hall back home, but it was different. Before I could stop wallowing, a dragon appeared from nowhere and started asking questions.”

  “What kind of dragon, did it say who it was?”

  “Not entirely, she gave a small hint, but she was white, iridescen
t and had harsh, accusing eyes.”

  “Wait, hold up,” he holds his hand up before turning around to scour through the books behind him, “another white iridescent dragon? A she?”

  “Yeah, well, she kinda mentioned that if she ever hurt me, she would hurt her in return, and she couldn’t do that.” Looking over my shoulder, I add, “And don’t you remember Remi saying she had a sister? One that’s hidden away?”

  His head whips back around to face me, and I see his eyes go from small, to-tripping-major-ballsack-on-drugs kinda wide. Yes, it’s a Jump Street reference, but it’s fitting at this moment in time. He wastes no time ripping— figuratively, he’s not a monster— those books apart for any shred of evidence that he can find. He’s an encyclopedia of knowledge, but that doesn’t mean he flips that shit back and forth like a rolodex.

  He mumbles something incoherent, but it's enough to be classed as a response. I can see him flicking rapidly through the dragon races book, forgoing any common dragons and moving straight to the back of the book that harbors all of the ‘mythical, super talented and uber rare’ dragons.

  “Have you heard from her?”

  “Who?” I have a mind fart for a moment. I’m still thinking about sparkly dragons and shit.

  “Remi, of course. You heard from her this morning?” Invested in his research, he adds, "you know, she’d know more about this than any of the people who wrote these old books would. She is one of the three rarest monochromatic dragons.”

  “But should we ask her? It was her sister I saw.”

  He puts a folded piece of paper in the page that holds the first bit of information about our long lost brothers. It’s as if a lightbulb came on in that ginger head of his, because he gives a megawatt smile that the man only usually wears when he’s blissfully maiming some unlucky son-of-a-gun, or so I’m told.

  “I think we should go and see her, she’d know more about this and we should really discuss our situation without prying eyes.” He nods to my chest where my claiming mark is and his eyes become milky.

  “I’m jealousss, Leland.” Oshi hisses, “why you firssst, and not usss?”