by Jade Alters
“No. We follow the smoke,” I answer. I point to the rolling plume of black smog that shoots across our hallway. “Besides…she’s hurting. She’s crying for help now, and she doesn’t care where it comes from.” I take a hard right, straight into the black cloud. My unit hesitates a few steps behind. “Everyone put a hand on me, or someone else who’s got a hand on me. I’ll find her.” I feel three hands flatten on my back. I close my eyes and step into the smoke.
“Cece?” I call out without my lips. The call echoes out across the Soul of Fire.
“Someone please…please help!” she screams back.
“Keep talking to me,” I tell her. I say into the windless blackness of the Soul of Fire. I sail between countless embers in search of hers. The place is like the inside of a lightless wood stove, but I know it’s nothing so mundane, or so physical. “We’re here. I’m coming.” It shouldn’t be too hard to find. I’ve seen plenty of yellows, oranges and blood reds, but never a blue ember until hers.
“I… I didn’t… Just please,” Cece pleads in the dark. Then I see it, a flash of searing sapphire. We connect and my eyes shoot open.
There, in the center of swirling dark smog, is a girl wearing a flaming hospital gown. And here I thought I was prepared. I mean, I went through this too, but…not like this. I stand frozen before her, a girl who appears to wear fire as a dress. The smog and inferno that are swallowing the hall don’t touch her. It comes from her. It swirls out from her skin. She kneels to shove wreckage from the blast zone off the limp, pale doctors. If they’re still breathing, it’s too shallow to see. A chill jostles my spine, despite how hot it is there, when I realize - she wasn’t pleading for help for herself. I rush to her side. I grasp her wrist. Her crystal blue eyes turn on me, wild.
“Cece, come with me,” I say to her, but she brushes me off. She rips her arm away from me. She tosses bits of computer equipment and warped door frames off of a woman in a labcoat on the floor.
“I… I didn’t mean to… I just wanted to scare them… I didn’t…”
“Cece!” I call out, and she hesitates, just for a second. “You’re going to do more harm than good if you stay. Look at your arms.” The girl forces her watery eyes down at her skin, where flame and smog swirl out in an endless radiance.
“Lee?” she realizes aloud.
“It’s me,” I smile. I gulp before I dare speak again. I need the right words in just the right sequence, or I might be the only one of my unit who leaves here. “You didn’t mean to hurt anyone. Please, come with me. If you let me, I can help you not to hurt anyone again.”
“Can you…” she sniffles as she falls away from the wreckage and the doctor. At my discreet hand wave, a few of my Warlocks move in to uncover the doctor. “Can you help me…only hurt the people that deserve it?”
Cece’s ocean-deep eyes rise to mine. Inside them, I see her blue fire. I feel her hate. Her confusion. Her sadness. The hunger for vengeance that holds the presence of a whole new person within. Dragonlord Thise warned me about a newly-awakened Dragon’s brokenness. Hell, I went through it myself. I remember wondering if I could be saved, after the pain I’d caused. After everything I’d burned. In Cece’s eyes, in the twisted mind inside, I see no hope for redemption. I see only a singular purpose for what’s left of her. There’s beauty in the raw honesty of it.
“Yes,” is my answer to her question. I lower my open hand to her. She puts her scalding fingers in mine automatically. Her eyes widen when she realizes what she’s done, then again when she sees I don’t burn. “Come on,” I pull her up. “I’ve got to get her out of here, or you’ll never get this fire out. One of you, put a trick on us.” One of my Magicians turns on command, closes an eye to focus on us and snaps her fingers.
“You’ll be hidden within two thousand feet of here. Fly high, if you don’t want to have one hell of a news story,” she says. I nod to her, then turn to pull Cece down the hall to the nearest emergency exit.
My Witches and Warlocks open their arms to the hellfire she’s unleashed in this central blast zone. The flames flicker towards them, seeming to jump into their palms. Cece keeps her head cocked back to watch, bewitched, until we pass through the shell of my Magicians’ illusion. To creatures like Cece and myself, it’s a tangible barrier, something like a curtain of liquid hanging in the air. From the other side, none of the Magicians, Witches or Warlocks are visible. The flames seem, rather, to suffocate and burn themselves out.
“The-the-the-they’ll put all the fires out?” Cece whimpers, stumbling on my heels. The flame emanating from her very body calms as we trot through thinning smoke.
“Our people will take care of everything. They’re an experienced rescue crew,” I assure her. She only believes me in part, I can feel through the Soul of Fire, but her heat begins to cool. The two of us burst through the fringe of the smoke, into a brightly-lit, alarm-blaring tiled hallway. Two minutes later, I throw open an emergency exit door. Cece and I trot out into the cool night. I grip her hand gently, but tightly, to keep her from pulling away when I say, “Stay close to me, and don’t scream.”
Tethered
Cece, Outside Sutter Hospital
“Stay close to me, and don’t scream,” Lee says.
That’s enough to make me want to. Just when I was starting to trust something. I rip my hand away from him. Lee whips around to seize my arm again, but I leap a step back to elude his reach. Our eyes meet again and the surge floods in. It’s like having my mind made up for me. I hate it. And how do I know it’s not a trick? Every time I look him in the eye, I see that orange ember of his. I feel how much he wants to help me, even though he’s afraid. This oriental young man, almost my size and rivaling my physique with the sculpture of his muscles, is terrified of me. I don’t exactly blame him, after what he just saw.
“Is this a rescue, or a kidnapping?” I demand.
“Come on,” Lee says, “Look me in the eye and tell me I’d hurt you.” But I won’t. I look just about everywhere but his eyes, for fear of what I’ll find. Besides that heavenly hazel tint, I mean.
“You’re afraid I’ll hurt you,” I mutter.
“Look at me and find out,” Lee dares me. I’ve never been one to turn down a dare. My eyes climb up his imposing shape, pectoral after ab, past the rounded edges of his collarbone, all the way to his face. Beneath a side-swept wisp of short black hair are those hazel eyes - full of kindness, and fire - somewhat like mine. In them, I feel more fear for me than of me. He wants to get me out of here. To where, I can’t tell exactly, but Lee has a plan. In all my staring, though, I notice Lee staring back at me. Not just at my face, either. The curve of my right breast pokes out from the fringe of where my hospital gown is burnt, though the fire has long since gone out. It doesn’t help that the cool breeze has my nipples rock hard and tender.
“Enjoying the view?” I taunt him as I cross my arms. Before I can search his soul through his eyes for lust, Lee is already behind me. He lowers his black jacket over my shoulders.
“Much as I’d love to stand here and do just that, we have to move. Come on,” Lee urges me. He nudges me gently forward with a hand on each of my shoulders. I dig my heels in just enough to make it a challenge for him to guide me anywhere.
“And don’t scream, right?” I mock him again. I’m not sure exactly why - I mean, he just pulled me out of the fire. But am I any safer? I feel no ill intent from within him, but the very fact I could feel anything from within another person is downright unnerving.
“Not unless you want to spend another day in a world that treats your gift like a conspiracy. Something to be covered up and suppressed,” Lee tells me. I bite my lip for a second while I drink in the feeling of Lee’s hands on me. He doesn’t feel cold, like every other person I’ve ever touched. I can usually sense just how hot I am in how downright frigid everyone else feels to me. Not Lee. I let my toes down and start to walk.
“And what world are you taking me to?” I prod as I let him lead me by the s
houlders. It’s a strangely nice feeling. Though I don’t know a thing about the man, I also don’t feel like I’m going to melt him if we high-five. I leave his hands right where they are as we cross the street. There’s hardly a car on the road, which makes me wonder just how late it is. Just how long they had me knocked out in that hospital.
“One where you can learn how to express your gift with a healthy balance,” Lee tells me. “The same place I learned how.” He’s good. With my interest hooked, I don’t notice how hard Lee is pushing me. I let him guide me along just as fast as he wants to. In no time, we’ve made it from the hospital to an adjacent neighborhood.
“You’re like me, aren’t you? Is that why I can talk to you without you being in the room?” I ask. A million questions froth to the top of my skull. My brain does a triple backflip, and faceplants, trying to convert them all to words. “Is that why I…feel things when I look in your eyes?”
“Parents never gave you the talk, huh?” Lee teases.
“Hey!” I bark, though I find myself laughing the next second. What is this? Why am I laughing - hysteria? Either I’ve finally snapped, or I’m somehow having a good time breaking out of the hospital. I’m having a good time with this stranger, who somehow seems to understand me more than the people I lived with for twenty-one years. “Don’t fuck with me. My mental state is fragile,” I warn Lee. “Are…are we the same?”
“I don’t know about the same. But…certain things that make us different from most of the people around us do make us like one another,” Lee says. I lift my foot onto the sidewalk of the row of high rise apartments opposite the hospital. Police and fire sirens squeal in the distance, on their way to the building behind us.
“And those…people with you, back there… Are they-”
“Not quite,” Lee cuts in, “Witches, Warlocks and Magicians, actually.” A chortle jumps from my lips. Lee stays quiet, maybe testing the limits of the joke. He has to be joking. In this quiet, Lee guides me toward the mouth of a small alley. Anything remotely like a joke is entirely eclipsed in my brain by the narrow, black mouth between two buildings. I know we have to get out of sight, but I freeze. The sight of that hungry darkness, the same kind that swallowed my brother, saps the strength from my legs.
“Lee… Why would I scream?” I ask. He moves closer to me, bringing his chest to where his hands are. It’s almost like a hug. For the first time in my life, it’s not like hugging a giant popsicle.
“Because you’ll finally understand, just a little bit, what you are,” Lee tells me. He gives me another gentle push, and this time we go together. Stiff as I am, I vanish from the street, down another dank corridor. We twist several turns deeper into the urban back-alley jungle. It’s a pattern I recognize all too well.
“What are you going to do?” I ask him. He only leads me further in.
“I told you. Taking you to a better world. For us, at least,” Lee answers. I can’t tell if he’s just teasing me, or if I’m asking too many questions.
“I hate to break it to you, but the alleys of San Francisco are a world I know well. I wouldn’t exactly call them better,” I say. Lee chuckles - a sweet honest sound that dances around my head.
“Cece. You’ve hardly peeped through the keyhole,” he tells me. Lee steers us left to a high-walled dead-end of dumpsters, backdoors and few windows. It’s a spot I immediately identify as a good place to blow off some steam.
As soon as Lee’s hands let me go, I turn to see if that’s why we’re here. Just how similar are we? But Lee lets off no steam. He doesn’t smoke. His face undergoes a transformation of intense and immediate focus. His previously soft, welcoming features wrinkle in some places and sharpen in others. He looks like he’s bracing for impact. Lee skips straight to the pre-explosive mirage coat of heat waves.
“Is this the part that’s going to make me want to scream?” I challenge. His lips peel away to show some off-white enamel. That same challenge catches in my throat when he starts to…change.
It begins slow, with his teeth. Lee’s canines grow down to two crooked scimitars. I don’t scream, but I almost run for it until I see other changes that set him apart from the tall monster that killed Jason. From his previously typical mouth of human teeth, Lee grows not just two fangs, but an entire jaw full of a toothy armory. Then the transformation accelerates, and my brain hardly has a chance to digest what my eyes feed it.
A second, longer and wilder nail shoots out from Lee’s every cuticle. His black hair crawls out of his head, to become a fierce mane around his entire head while it moves up and away from his collar on a stretching neck. Every part of him seems to swell, then lengthen, until he’s roughly a half-size bigger than any man I’ve seen before. I don’t even notice I’m shuffling away until my back touches the cold, wet brick behind me. By the time I’m there, Lee’s skin has begun to change. First, it darkens like he’s being baked from the inside. It turns from a light olive color to brown, then an even deeper color…almost like red. Little arrowhead peaks pop up from beneath, pronouncing to the point I wonder if Lee is about to burst to unleash them. Each little mountain spikes out over another until his entire body is covered in them and I see at last what they are - scales. A thin canvas opens from behind each of his shoulders, stretched between thin bones that show through in the dim alley lights. His clothes seem to have transformed with him, though they take on a sheen and shape more like armor now. His shoes become boots that let his bladed toes stick through. His shirt is a broad, shiny black chestplate. Even his pants look like they could bounce a bullet or two right off.
“Ho-ho-holy shit,” I sputter as I realize I’ve seen something a little bit like this before. On my CT scan. This new, scaly, toothy, taller, winged Lee takes a step towards me. I turn into a pancake against the wall.
“What do you see, Cece? What am I?” I hear Lee’s voice, though the mouth of the creature before me makes no movement of speech. It only huffs piping hot steam in my direction.
“I don’t… A mo-mo-monster? Demon?” I chatter. I turn my head to the side as his scaly snout slides up alongside my cheek. Even with a few inches between us, the fire inside Lee is palpable. He huffs out a laugh, which curls around my shoulders in the form of a twisting warm front.
“We’ve got those, too, but no. Try again. Wrack your brain. Hard. The fire, the scales, the wings… Come on Cece, what am I?” Lee asks.
“A Dra…” I arch my head back to squint at him again. Maybe it’s all just a drug-induced dream. I mean, it’s insane. But then, so is bursting into fire every morning in the middle of my workout… And, when I reach forward, I can touch him. I can feel that he’s real, in the piping skillet of his chest scales. It doesn’t burn, it’s just so novelly odd to feel something hotter than me. I can look in the beast’s eyes and tell it’s Lee by the same connection I feel, that same orange ember light inside. “A Dragon,” I force myself to say.
“And what are you?” Lee asks.
“A…Dragon,” I breathe. The word makes the most sense of any I’ve ever let out. It’s the why to everything - the runs, the gym, college… Jason. Now I understand. I open my mouth in a wide grin to proclaim it for the whole damned city to hear. I’m a-
“Then I’d say it’s about time you fly,” Lee stops me with a gentle, scaly claw on my collarbone.
He crouches and crosses his right arm under my left. He turns around to press me against the wall with his back while he seizes my other arm. I don’t have a chance to catch a breath before both my arms are around Lee’s scaly neck. His wings snap open. The sound, like a parachute being deployed, inspires a chill in me like I’ve never known. It’s followed seconds thereafter by a burning thrill when those wings flap. The sonic boom lifts a cloud of dust from everything in the alley. It also lifts us a few feet off the ground. As soon as I feel my feet dangle, I squeeze Lee tight. His wings sweep down again and again, each time flinging us higher, faster. In seconds, the stony walls of the alley shoot down below us. We fling up from t
he light of backstreets to the light of the moon. Lee opens his wings wide over the brick-and-neon cityscape below. He turns in search of something, then hurls us towards it.
“A-a-a-are you telling me I can do this, too?” I shudder. I bring in my strong thighs around Lee’s hips to clench him like a baby ape would its mother.
“Why don’t you let go and see?” Lee dares me. I’m not sure if he’s joking or not, but I’d rather play it safe for my first out-of-aircraft flight. “After a few weeks at the Academy, maybe. I wouldn’t be surprised. You’re already talking through the Soul of Fire.”
“What do you…” I start to ask him, only to realize my lips aren’t moving. I could get stuck running in that circle all day, so I do my best to accept it and move on. I can talk to other…Dragons, psychically, somehow? Check. Onto the next, before I go insane. “You’re bringing me to an Academy?”
“The Broken Academy,” Lee tells me. His wings fan out to catch the warm breeze rising from the city. We ride it over clusters of suburban grids and tight rows of high-rise apartments. At the occasional spike of a high corporate building in the business districts, Lee elects to turn halfway to his side and glide between them. I suppose it’s better for visibility, but I suspect he’s also doing it to torment me. Or impress me. Or just to get me to hold on to him tighter. I count my thumping heartbeats against the hot, slick surface of his back scales.
“I take it this isn’t the kind of school you find in a catalog and apply to,” I say to him, and this time I notice I’m not using my lips. It’s so natural that it feels almost the same.
“Not quite. It’s more of a search-and-rescue station with dorms and rehabilitation,” says Lee, “You’ll see when we get there. Soon enough. Hey, remember what I said about screaming?”
“Do your worst,” I dare him. Still, I cover his back in a bear hug when he tilts his wings straight up.
We fight against the wind to slow down. Then Lee turns his long snout straight down for the street. He dives. I hold my breath as the world of asphalt and dark storefronts rockets up at my face. My eyes bulge out of my head right up until the second Lee flicks his wings out to slow us to a hover. We glide down the inside of another alley, free to float all the way to the ground without prying eyes. I don’t loosen an inch from Lee until I feel my toes tap the pavement. When I do finally let go, I find gravity so foreign that I stumble back into the wall.