by Jade White
“Lovely,” said Macy, noting the pause before the mention of the bedrooms. How many did he have? Did he use them all? And with whom?
She preferred to leave the answer to that as an educated guess. Nathairfear men were known for their spectacular masculine beauty. With that beauty came a particular reputation—one that Macy guessed he had earned as well as he had earned his fortune.
The art gallery was the room upstairs that interested Macy the most. Having minored in art while majoring in communications, she always found it insightful to see the kinds of artwork that people had when she visited their homes. The gallery was like a miniature museum filled with paintings and sculptures in a variety of styles by a variety of artists. Macy noted two distinct themes in the pieces that Aaron had collected. She saw a generous number of dragons—and a lot of nudes, individuals and couples, males and females. One subject recurred throughout the array of pieces from one end of the room to the other: sex.
It wasn’t all sex, but it was a motif that presented itself again and again. There were landscapes and seascapes and mountain views of various kinds on the walls. And on shelves and pedestals up and down the room were figures and busts. Among these, there were representations of dragons: at rest, in flight, swimming, even fighting. One painting in particular amused her, a canvas of a dragon slaying a knight, which in any other collection—or in any human collection—would be the other way around. As Macy stood admiring that one, Aaron stood at her shoulder, grinning mischievously. “I think of that one as our little revenge on Saint George.” Macy could not help but laugh at that.
But interspersed through it all were the nudes and the depictions of sex. There were paintings and statues in various states of undress and various states of foreplay (or afterplay), and the same kinds of pieces with dragons in the same situations. Macy wondered if she should be intrigued or relieved that there were no representations of humans actually having sex with dragons. Being two species in one, it would make sense for Aaron to be at least interested in the idea of cross-species coupling. But if he were, there was no evidence of it to be found in his art collection. Where she saw a canvas or objet d’art portraying sex or sensuality, whether human or dragon, it was always within a single species. It made her wonder as well whether her host ever had occasion to pleasure a human woman while in his other body. She did not know how to bring up the question, so she kept it to herself.
What she did say to him openly was, “It’s a really nice collection you have.” It was the most complimentary and least specific thing she could think of.
“I’m glad you like it,” Aaron said. “A lot of these are commission pieces, and some of them are things I’ve found in museums, traveling in different countries. I know that a lot of the museums here in the city have expressed interest in some of these pieces. I could probably make myself another fortune selling off some of what I have in here.”
“Some,” said Macy, thoughtfully. “But probably not all.”
“How do you mean?” Aaron asked.
“Well, some of them are a bit…provocative, you might say?…For the general public.”
“Such as…?”
Macy directed him to one particular sculpture a few steps away. Wrought in black marble, it was a human couple lying in a kind of spooning sex position, the man behind the woman, his one hand encircling her torso and fondling her breast, the other resting—or perhaps reaching—at her abdomen towards her pubic hair. “This one, for instance. I don’t see a lot of parents wanting to bring their children by this one, or a lot of tour groups from schools.”
“Some of them are more for private collectors, I agree. Or colleges, maybe,” Aaron suggested.
“Colleges,” Macy allowed. “But no younger students.”
“I guess so,” Aaron conceded. “Humans do seem to have a problem in that area, if you don’t mind my saying so.”
“No, I don’t mind,” said Macy. “I studied art myself. I understand.”
“Having two bodies and having to be naked when we change from one to the other,” Aaron pointed out, “we’re more relaxed about nudity than humans usually are—outside the art world, that is. And we have a bit less of a problem with sex. We don’t like to keep it as a dirty secret or act as if it’s not something natural to be enjoyed. Again, no offense.”
“None taken,” said Macy. “Though you’ve traveled around and been to enough places to know some of us are a little less provincial than others.”
“That’s true,” Aaron agreed. “Some of you have a better attitude about these things. My friends are usually…not so provincial. It goes with being a dragon. Or being friends with one.”
“I guess it would,” Macy pondered aloud.
“Tell me,” said Aaron, “am I the first Nathairfear you’ve met?”
“Oh no! Not at all!” Macy said. “My father knew some of your people socially and had business with some. I’ve been to parties with weredragons. Your people have a way of getting around, getting invited to places, being asked to attend certain things…”
“I know. Any place where people want the attention of other people, generally. It’s helped us a lot that humans are so…interested in us. You know, for many years we didn’t advertise our presence because we assumed humans would be afraid of us. We thought there’d be violence, bloodshed, if we…to borrow an expression from another group…‘came out.’”
“Well, I remember my history from school well enough,” said Macy. “I remember that at first, when the Nathairfear…‘came out’…there was a certain amount of…tension.”
Aaron chuckled. “That’s a very diplomatic way of describing something like one of your old horror movies come to life—villagers with torches and pitchforks, to use a cliché. There was some violence, some rioting and fires. And there were some deaths—our people and yours.”
Looking about the room again, Macy recalled, “And it was the artists who started to turn things around. Slowly at first, but it happened. It was the artists and poets first, then the musicians and the painters. And the filmmakers. It took a long time, but the artists helped people see the weredragons weren’t really monsters.”
“The artists and the scientists,” Aaron reminded her. “Science loved us from the beginning because of what we had to say to the world just for the fact that we exist. The world, and life, and what’s possible. And what’s out there, beyond Earth…”
“But not on other planets, though.”
“No—not on other planets. But still—beyond Earth. When we revealed ourselves to the world, it was only natural that the scientists were the first to want to be our friends. Just by existing, we redefined what’s real, what’s out there waiting for people to discover it—the whole way that people understand the world. Religion had a big problem with us, of course. Religion is easily threatened. But not science, and not the artists.”
“I’ve always been most sympathetic to artists,” Macy reflected.
“And it didn’t hurt that some of us were artists,” Aaron continued. “When humans started going to Nathairfear concerts and poetry readings, and we started publishing books, it made a difference. A little difference at first, but a little became more. And when it became more, we weren’t quite as scary. Today, most of the richest, most famous humans are our friends. They invite us places. They like to be seen with us. They invest in our companies. We’re good for business, and they think we make them look good. We’re practically a status symbol.”
“I guess that’s been a big help to you,” said Macy.
“It hasn’t hurt,” replied Aaron, grinning—a sexy and disarming grin.
For a moment, Aaron let Macy go on admiring his collection while he admired her and sensed her silent admiration of him. Then, he said, “You know what’s my favorite piece in the collection?”
She faced him, intrigued again. “What?”
Aaron led her down one side of the room to a tall sculpture that she had noticed as they passed through. It was a statue al
most the full height of the room—which had a high ceiling—of two dragons facing each other, plunging downward, their wings folded against their backs, their tails coiled together, their nether parts and their forward talons both locked together. Macy guessed that they were a male and a female.
“You know what this sculpture shows?”
Macy repeated, “What?”
“This is a mating flight,” he said.
“Mating…?”
“Yeah. According to legends, when dragons mated—real dragons, not weredragons—they did it like eagles. The male and the female flew up together as high as they could go, over the mountains. They’d lock themselves together, him inside her, and they’d go into a long, steep power dive, spinning all the way. It’s a dive that would kill a human, and it could kill them unless they timed it exactly right. While falling and spinning, they had to join together and do the deed. Then, they had to come and pull apart before it was too late and they hit the ground and wound up smashed to a pulp. Dragon sex and reproduction was supposed to be about sex and death twining together—playing ‘chicken’ with gravity, you might say.”
Macy could not suppress a shudder. “My God. And if they survived and got themselves to fly apart in time, the female flew out of it pregnant.”
“And pretty soon, she’d lay herself a clutch of eggs with his babies in them. Big risk, big reward—a bit like real life.”
Studying the sculpture, Macy was ever more fascinated. “You know, there’s something I’ve always wondered.”
“What’s that?” Aaron asked.
“Well, I’m not an expert on mythology, but I’m pretty sure human myths about dragons are older than your people—that is, older than real weredragons.”
“Yeah, they are,” said Aaron. “People imagined dragons before Kinross Green got its visitors, who created the first of our kind.”
“So, if we had myths about dragons before there were…your people…my ancestors were imagining something they’d never seen. How did humans come up with the idea of dragons before what happened in that village in Scotland? How did they even think to imagine creatures like that? Is that just some wild coincidence?”
“I see what you’re saying,” Aaron said. “You know, I’ve read that ancient humans cobbled together the idea of dragons by combining different creatures they already knew: snakes, birds, crocodiles, lions. They took different parts of different animals and invented this creature…”
“…that just happened to look like the travelers who came to your ancestors’ village. That’s some imagination humans had.”
Aaron smiled. “Humans have always been good at imagining all kinds of things. They were then; they still are. And you know, we are part human. We have a pretty good imagination of our own.”
Now, they were quiet again. They stood before the statue of the mating, plummeting dragons, locked in a clinch of life and death, and said nothing. They just smiled at each other, a guest intrigued with her host, and the host equally intrigued with her.
The sounds of jazz wafting up from downstairs nudged at them as a reminder. “You know,” said Macy, “there’s a party going on, and you’re the guest of honor. We should be getting back to it.”
“True,” said Aaron. “And there are still a few things you haven’t seen yet. Shall we?”
Macy let Aaron lead her from the gallery. There were definitely, as he said, a few things she had yet to see. There were any number of things she might be seeing, any number of things that her host might yet show her. The evening had hardly even started.
They rejoined the party, and Macy, having gotten acquainted with her host, relaxed and enjoyed herself thoroughly. She mingled about with Aaron’s other guests and found herself in the company of all sorts of people she recognized. There were stars of shows and films that had been on Aaron’s channel, which had commercials in them that Macy’s company produced. There were athletes she recognized from watching the channel, and musical recording artists she knew, and others she didn’t know, who made her wish that she were better acquainted with jazz, which Aaron obviously enjoyed quite a bit. She drank with them, munched hors d’oeuvres with them, took dinner from the gourmet buffet with them, laughed with them, sensed the eyes of some of the men on her—and some of the women as well. And Aaron, in his own mingling, was never far away.
It was not difficult to figure out who the other weredragons were. While they did not take on their full dragon forms, nor did they assume two-legged half-dragon bodies, these were not their only ways of expressing their reptilian selves. Sometimes, it was only a matter of letting parts of their skin change. Macy noticed a couple of them, taking part in the evening as casually as if they were only showing their human-ness. There was a young man who could very well have been a fitness model for one of Aaron’s magazines or exercise shows, nursing a martini and chatting up some young women who could have been models themselves, or starlets. He was clad in an expensive suit, and he had let his temples and a part of his forehead go into shiny blue-green scales with just a hint of horn points at either side of his hairline. Macy watched him hold out his hand and let the back of it also go to plates of shiny scalation, which the young women touched as if they were petting a cat. Macy could imagine what would be getting petted as the evening wore on.
Aaron was always somewhere within Macy’s field of vision, whether in the corner of her eye or just over her shoulder. Aaron, in networking for work and business, had made an art of “working the room.” He seemed to know intuitively how to pay attention to all of his invited guests while also seeming to follow and circle one guest in particular—Macy. He was never rude, always genial, always gracious, good at listening and good at engaging. But there was no doubt in Macy’s mind that he was keeping an eye on her, especially when another man was near her. He had a way of slipping himself into her conversations with other men without it looking obviously territorial. He did it without appearing to be aggressive about it. But he was always there. Macy did not quite know how to take this, except to suspect that it was Aaron’s way of saying that there were other things he was interested in slipping into besides her party talk.
A woman was sitting at the piano, but not playing. She had short red hair and a peach-colored dress. Her shoulders and bare arms were streaked with scales of light and dark green, disclosing her own dragon nature. People were gathered around her, looking rapt and fascinated. As soon as Macy noticed her, she also found Aaron back at her side. “That woman,” Macy said softly. “Who is that?”
“Oh, her?” Aaron replied. “That’s Sophia Leland. She’s a columnist for some of the newspapers I own. She promotes herself as a psychic and a dream interpreter.”
Macy looked over at Aaron, mildly startled. “A weredragon and a psychic?”
“That’s her reputation, yes.”
Macy eyed the woman, shaking her head. “That’s a lot for one person. Do you really believe she’s for real?”
Aaron wore a somewhat bemused look. “What’s important, businesswise, is that other people believe her. There’s always an audience for someone like Sophia. People like to believe unusual things. That’s why my people have done as well as we have, remember?”
“Right,” said Macy. “There’s always someone who wants to believe. And I guess psychics are as much fun to think about as…people who can turn into dragons.”
“Exactly. And her column is one of the most popular things in the papers where it runs. She brings in readers, and the readers bring in money.”
“Well, if she’s good for business,” Macy said, “good for her.”
“And me,” said Aaron.
Macy and Aaron watched Sophia Leland work the little crowd that she had attracted. One by one, she took them by the hand, and when she did so, she closed her eyes for a moment while her small audience hung on the moment of silence, awaiting whatever pronouncement the redhead would make at the end of it. She told one man that his dream of riding a bicycle meant that he needed a better s
ense of balance in his work life. A woman who dreamed of an automobile accident learned that she was very anxious inside, that she needed to “slow down” in certain areas of her life, and that she could not control the actions of others. For a woman who dreamed of playing chess and finding her King piece in danger, Ms. Leland advised that it meant she was feeling threatened by some other woman.
“Is she always so…literal?” Macy asked Aaron.
“I know what you mean,” Aaron replied. “I hardly ever read her column, really, but she seems to be pretty much like that.”
“And people always accept what she says? They really believe that she knows what they’ve been dreaming?”
“Either they believe it, or they don’t want to let on that they think they’re being manipulated in front of other people, so they just go along with whatever she says. They say she’s being accurate, but maybe only they know how accurate she really is.”