Dragon Riders

by Elle Casey

  “It’s only temporary,” she assured me. “You need to find a place where you can discover yourself and learn to control your temper. Become more mature. Learn to take responsibility for your words and actions. Be someone we can count on.”

  It was my clueless mother standing there being so sanctimonious and Rick nodding his head with that nasty smirk on his face that flipped the switch for me. They thought they were going to send me away to some group home or some weird ass camp, when all I was doing was reacting in a totally normal way to their terrible parenting? And for the last year all I’d done was be a mature, self-sacrificing adult person, dealing with war and conflict and learning a whole new way of life? What. The. Friggin. Hell.

  Well, I had news for these assholes: I wasn’t going anywhere they wanted me to go. Not today and not any day in the future, either. They could go suck a duck butt as far as I was concerned. “Just so you know, Mom, I do have my head on straight. I know exactly who I am, what I am, and where I belong…and it’s not here. So thanks for packing my bag, but I’m not going to any stupid ass group home.”

  I moved to get my clothes, but Rick was faster than I was. He grabbed hold of me from behind and held me in a full-body lock-down with my arms trapped at my sides.

  “Get off me, asshole!” I struggled to break free, but his grip was like iron. The stupid, stringy muscles of his arms were impossible to escape. He definitely had some demon power going for him. I grunted my words out. “If you don’t let go of me, I’m going to jack your ass up with my elements, motherfucker!”

  He looked at my mother as I struggled to get free. “You hear that? I told you…this girl’s got mental problems.”

  I started screaming; I couldn’t help it. That shit was just outer limits nuts. Nothing was going like it was supposed to. I had plans to leave for Miami but this evil fucknut was going to screw everything up. “I’m not the one with mental problems, okay?! You’re the one with mental problems!” I twisted my head around to try and see my mom. “He’s possessed by a demon, Mom! A demon named Torrie! Can’t you see it?!” My eyes felt like they were bugging out of my head from the strain of trying to get her to understand and to just breathe. He was really squeezing the ever loving crap out of me. “Mom, he doesn’t love you! He’s a demon! He just wants to have sex with me and make me have a demon baby with him!” I tried to kick him but he easily avoided my efforts. “I’m not lying! I’m not joking! This is real! This is real! I’m not human anymore! I’m fae! I can prove it to you!”

  Rick turned me around so I could watch my mother backing away with her hand on her mouth and tears coming to her eyes. “Jayne, please stop.” Her fingers were trembling at her lips as she unlocked the door and opened it.

  “Mom! Don’t leave!” Panic was taking over. Any rationality or reason I might have had fled my mind in favor of the desperate need to be understood by the one person in the world who should have been willing to make the effort for me. “I’m telling you the truth! I’m not human anymore! I’m fae! I’m an elemental! I’m important! I’m special!”

  I knew I probably shouldn’t have said those things, even as the words were leaving my mouth they felt like a mistake, but they were true, and everything that was happening in that moment was completely wrong and false. I needed to get out of that situation, to rescue myself with the truth. I desperately wanted her to just hear me for once.

  My mother was no longer in my room when I was finally able to look into Rick’s eyes, his grip on me loosening just a fraction so I could turn around. His face was mere inches away.

  Spittle flew from my mouth as I leveled my threat at him. “If you don’t let me go, I swear to all that is fae and holy, I’m going to send your demon ass into a realm you’ll never come back from.”

  His voice dropped to a whisper. “You could try, but your magic won’t work on me.” And then his eyes glowed red, and I knew I was messing with the demon and no longer with The Dick. Fear struck me like a bolt of lightning, right in my chest, joining the pain my mother’s harsh words had already inflicted. Desperate for some sort of safe haven, I tried to bring up The Green, but something was blocking it from joining me. “Oh God,” I cried, so scared I was nearly pissing my pants, “what’s happening?”

  “You’re not the only one with witches for friends,” he said, right before he tipped his head back and laughed and laughed.

  I started screaming, and I didn’t stop until some guy wearing an EMT uniform jabbed me in the arm with a needle and sent something into my system that made everything go all hazy and dark.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  I WOKE UP with a serious case of cotton mouth and a raging headache banging away inside my skull. My eyelids were literally stuck to my eyeballs. I had to peel my tongue off the roof of my mouth, and I squeezed my eyes closed over and over in an effort to get my lids to loosen up enough to open. I finally succeeded and blinked several times until they were working right again.

  It took a while for my vision to clear up enough for me to see my surroundings. Everything was painted white except one muddy green foot-wide stripe that ran horizontally all the way around the walls. My eyes stopped following it when they locked on a human form across the room from me. I tried to twist onto my side to see her or him better, but I couldn’t move. I struggled left and then right, quickly becoming pissed when I realized that I’d somehow been immobilized. Someone had used a spell on me or something. Whoever was responsible was going to be so very, very sorry when I introduced them to my cousin Sam.

  “You should probably just chill,” said a voice off to my left. So she’s a girl. “You are all jacked up.” She snorted after she delivered that choice news. She sounded high or like a surfer girl. They were always so chill. The fact that she could be so relaxed when I was lying there trussed up like a Thanksgiving turkey didn’t help my mood. She was probably in on it.

  “Whoever fucking jacked me up better run, that’s all I have to say,” I grunted out as I wrestled with the spell holding me fast. The girl didn’t leave, so she either wasn’t in on it or she wasn’t afraid of me. Maybe she was pretty powerful. Or stupid.

  My vision became even more clear, and I paused to look down at my body. A mixture of rage and disbelief flowed through my brain at what I saw. A straitjacket? Seriously? This was no spell; it was old-school false imprisonment!

  I looked over at the girl who I could now see was someone of Asian descent, wearing what looked like hospital scrubs, sitting on a twin bed about five feet away from the one I was in. Hers didn’t have rails on the sides like mine did. “What the fuck, man? Who did this to me? Was it you?” She looked a little young to be a nurse or whatever.

  She shrugged. “Not me. Probably your parents told them to do it.”

  “Those dicks are not my parents.” I went back to wrestling with my new outfit. If that woman who’d stood in my room telling me she’d packed my bags for me were really my mother, she wouldn’t have let Rick do this to me. She had to have been possessed by a demon too; it was the only explanation for her having an empty cold heart that sucked the love for her only child right out of her soul.

  “Whatever, dude.” She yawned. “You know, though…the sooner you chill, the sooner they’ll let you out of it.”

  I paused my struggles. “Who’s they?”

  She gestured at the doorway and lowered her voice. “The Establishment.”

  “Where am I exactly?” I was almost afraid to hear her next words.

  “You sure you don’t already know?” She stared at me like she was seeing into my soul. I was pretty sure it was her slanted eyes giving her that power, but being who and what I was, I didn’t dismiss the idea that she could be fae. Maybe she’s part of a rescue party! I dumped that thought two seconds after it entered my brain. A rescue would certainly have involved immediately releasing me from a straitjacket, which she clearly had not done.

  “Is it camp?” I suggested weakly.

  Her smile was sad. “Is that what they told y
ou it was? Damn. That’s harsh. At least my ‘rents had the decency to tell it like it is.”

  “Feel like telling me the rest of your sad story?” Being the glutton for punishment that I was, I had to hear the words coming out of her mouth; otherwise, my brain wasn’t going to accept that this was really happening to me. I still had the tiniest of hopes that she was about to grin and yell, “Surprise! Come on in, guys!” And all my friends would walk through the door, and Sam would be especially proud of the spell she’d created that made me think I’d gone back in time and been tricked by my parents and ended up in a straitjacket. Ha, ha! Joke’s on Jayne! Very funny, guys!

  She flopped onto her back on the bed and stared up at the ceiling as she answered in a monotone. “You’ve got serious problems. You need professional help. We’re putting you in a mental institution.”

  Mental institution? Not even mental camp? Tears welled up in my eyes and slipped down to my temples, tracking through my hair along my scalp. I was pretty sure I was going to vomit too. This was way worse than I’d originally thought. Way, way, way worse. I tried slowing my breathing to calm my heart and stomach down, but it wasn’t working.

  As sick as I was feeling, I realized two things pretty quickly: first, that my mother was one hundred percent asshole, and second, that if these people were willing to put an innocent teen in a straitjacket, it was going to be really hard for me to get the hell out of there. It wasn’t like I was going to be able to saunter out the front door or anything that simple, anyway. In other words, I was going to need a real plan not a half-assed one, and I was only good at the half-assed kind.

  She lifted her head and caught me being miserable. “Hey, man, it’s not all bad.”

  “How so?” I asked, choking on my last word.

  “They’ve got orange jello, dude. Every Tuesday.”

  And that’s when I really started bawling.

  CHAPTER NINE

  I CRIED UNTIL I ran out of tears. It went on for hours. I wept for the loss of my mother’s love, for the loss of my fae life, for the loss of my friends, and for the loss of my freedom. There was a lot to be sad about. Hell, I even cried about missing Tim’s farts, which shows you where my head was. Then, when I’d finally shed all the tears I had in me, I stared at the ceiling of my prison. I stared and stared and stared, my mind a complete mess of disjointed thoughts and feelings. At some point later, someone wearing a white lab coat came in and sat down next to me.

  She said something I didn’t pay one iota of attention to and eventually let me out of the straitjacket. I didn’t respond to that either. My brain was numb. Short-circuiting. Lost in a maze of thoughts going absolutely nowhere. I should have been coming up with my escape plan, but I couldn’t focus for the life of me. All I could think about was how hopeless everything was. I’d been defeated by evil. The bad guys had won. My friends and my entire fae family were going to think I’d just wandered off and left them to fend for themselves. I was totally and completely useless. Life had zero meaning.

  The lab coat lady disappeared, and all I had left in the world was the ceiling. That’s what it felt like, anyway. No friends, no family, no fae life, no fae world. Hell…I didn’t even have Brad Powers around to harass me. I was living in my own personal void. Would there be trolls in this void? Probably. I wouldn’t have been surprised to find that I’d been hosting trolls in my brain all along. It might explain some things.

  A face appeared above me: Black hair. Slanted eyes. Crumbs around her mouth. “Hey, dude. You hungry?” She held out half a sandwich with at least two bites taken out of it.

  “You already ate most of it,” I said, going back to staring at the ceiling. I didn’t even have a whole sandwich to my name.

  She looked at it as if surprised. “Huh. When did I do that?”

  I tilted my head to the side a bit so I could see her better. “Are you on serious drugs or what?”

  She nodded. “Yep. So are you.” She winked and then disappeared from view.

  I heard squeaking next to me that told me she had taken up residence in the bed next to mine again. Turning onto my side to face her took supreme effort, but not because I was strapped in again. I was just completely and totally exhausted, not to mention probably high on whatever chemicals they’d poisoned me with. I was pretty sure my new roommate wasn’t kidding about us being on drugs. The last year I’d spent in the fae compound had honed my body into that of an athlete’s but it sure didn’t seem like it today. It felt more like I’d gained a hundred pounds and gravity was weighing me down twice as much as the laws of physics should have allowed. If it wasn’t drugs, it was probably a spell. I’d call it the Fat-Ass Spell if it were one I’d made.

  My new roomie was staring at the last bit of sandwich she hadn’t yet finished as she chewed slowly. “Ever notice how jelly sometimes looks like blood?”

  Maybe I should have been creeped out by that strange comment, but I wasn’t. It was hard to be scared of a girl who might have been all of five feet tall and not even eighty pounds soaking wet. I could see the bones of her wrists and shoulders protruding through her scrubs and the long-sleeved shirt she wore underneath.

  “No. I’ve never noticed that.” If she thought a PBJ was weird, I wondered what she’d think about the squiggly meats on the fae buffet. If someone offered me a plate of those worms in exchange for my fae life back, I’d dive right into it. I’d eat every single last one of them, just for the chance.

  She held it out to me. “Peanut butter and blood sandwich anyone?”

  I reached for it and she got up, making sure I had a good hold on it before she let it go. “Be careful. The first couple days are really shaky. Usually they don’t feed you anything other than IV fluids until the end of your second day, but I remember being starving, so…”

  First couple days. Pfff. No frigging way am I hanging around long enough to find out if that’s true. I’ll be outta here by nightfall. “How long have you been here?” I bit into the crust of the sandwich. It tasted like cardboard wrapped around glue. So not delicious.

  “Six months, give or take a year.”

  Mental hospital humor. I like it. “Me too,” I said grinning, not at all worried about the bits of bread and whatever else stuck in my front teeth. If you can’t have food shrapnel on display in a mental ward, what’s the point?

  She smiled back. “Your name is Jayne. Mine’s Long.”

  “How long?” I was imagining it would be something like Qweechowlingmauwpan or something.

  “Four letters. L-O-N-G.”

  I could not stop grinning. “Please tell me your last name is Dong. Middle name Duck.”

  “Nah. It’s Dang. We put last names first, so really it’s Dang Cuc Long.”

  “Dang, your cock is long,” I said, giggling for a second before a wave of nausea stopped my juvenile humor dead in its tracks. My head was spinning a little and the peanut butter and blood sandwich was not settling very well.

  “Whatever helps you remember it, I guess,” she said, sighing. “Are you going to finish that?”

  I looked down at my hand and saw the rest of the sandwich hanging limply between my two fingers. “I don’t think I can.” I wasn’t even confident I could get it close to my face for a second bite; I had zero strength left in my arm all of a sudden.

  She walked over and snatched it away from me, popping it into her mouth. “Don’t tell anyone I fed you. I’ve gotta go.”

  I managed to sit partway up as she walked away. “Where are you going?”

  “TV room. Ten minutes ’til Judge Judy. I’ve got five carrots riding on the defendant.”

  She exited the room, and I was left staring at the empty doorway. They bet carrots on legal outcomes here? Have I died and ended up in the human version of the Underworld?

  I lay back in the bed and contemplated my situation and near future. The ceiling went in and out of focus while my head spun and went off in ten different directions. I didn’t belong in a mental hospital. Obviously. Anyone wh
o truly knew me would agree. But none of those people were here, which meant I was stuck. So, when was Rick going to make his move and try to impregnate me? What was Spike doing? Was he worried about me? Could I use my powers here? I was afraid to try when I felt so out of it, seeing as how I could accidentally put myself in a coma, and I was already halfway there. What was the routine around this joint, and how could I take advantage of it and sneak away to gain my freedom? I glanced down at my body again. I was wearing a hospital gown, the type that’s open in the back. Where can I get some real clothes?

  When no answers were forthcoming, I decided my best course of action was to start scoping the place out. As Niles says, the first step in any battle situation is to do a little recon. I sat up and waited for the bed spins to stop before I swung my legs over the side of the mattress below where the rails came up. I was looking around for some slippers or something to put on my cold feet when a large form darkened my doorway. My heart skipped a beat when I realized it wasn’t Long Duc Cock or whatever her name was. This person was way bigger.

  “What’s going on in here?” a male voice said. He sounded like he was laughing at something.

  I felt myself shrinking down into as small a form as I could. The Establishment. He was wearing white clothes, tall and on the thin side—an orderly or whatever. He walked into the room and came right over to stand in front of me, using his knee to push my legs apart so he could put himself between them. He rested his hands lightly on my shoulders. “Be careful now. Wouldn’t want you to get hurt.”

  I looked up at his acne scarred face. His hair was greasy and slipping over his forehead, and the smile he wore that didn’t even come close to meeting his eyes totally creeped me out. “I’m fine,” I said, resisting the urge to clamp my legs together and put him in a scissor hold of death.

  His hand ran down the top of my arm, his thumb grazing my side-boob, and I was pretty damn sure it was intentional.