by CK Dawn
When she’d surfaced from that high, it only took her a few days to notice that feeling like a winner had done nothing to change her loser status. If anything, she was more hated than ever. Deservedly so, she'd thought, barely able to look at Ryan who had become such an asshole. And so after that final year of high school, when her failure had ensured that she reigned undisputed as resident pariah, she tried again to pull a good-boy rabbit from a bad-boy hat. She made a third attempt with increasingly depressing results that she bemoaned once she’d surfaced from her lucrative payment.
But then this fourth try had come along and, in addition to seeing who he could be, Dragon had thrown up. As her sight had delved into him to evaluate his potential, a squeezing pressure slowed her heart and weakness suffused her as if her soul was being divided into cuts and sold off piece by piece. Stupor had been bypassed by Hangover, which quickly morphed into pain.
A wake-up call if ever there was one, and enough to force Dragon to contemplate going to Jasper, revealing every humiliating detail of this secret part of her life, and begging him for help.
Reveal to her dad that everything she’d ever accomplished, every accolade and every award should be credited solely to bliss. Reveal that six years ago she’d learned to prioritize the most irredeemable clientele—the lower the life, the bigger the soaring payoff. Reveal that she recently discovered that fucking her fixes intensified that slithering, irresistible high.
She was a fraud, and his pride in her—in the woman she’d become—and all that he’d sacrificed for her was for shit.
He’d stepped into the role of father twenty years ago and hadn’t wiped off his shoe. In the old days, he would’ve loved the turmoil Dragon now suffered. Would’ve rolled in it like the dog he used to be able to shapeshift into. He’d denied sixty thousand years of instinct to keep her safe. He denied sixty thousand years of instinct to be her father and love her with all his dark, mischievous heart.
Strange ways for a two-thousand-year-old phooka.
She couldn’t let him know that pieces of her soul now contributed to the success of her fixes. She couldn’t let him know that she was dying. No, not dying; she wouldn’t accept that. Sick. Dreadfully, curably, scared-shitless sick—that’s what Dragon hoped the emergence of this inexplicable agony meant.
It was an indication of her failure—that much was clear. And with failure came no power to save the day, no unnamable thing that made her special. Failure meant that all she would ever be was that baby whose mother had once traded her to a shady clinic for a carton of cigarettes.
She couldn’t do that to the phooka who dared to love a forgotten girl child.
Ryan wasn’t just a shot at happiness. He was, as far as she was concerned, an ER team attending a coding patient. Never mind that he was now an actual pimp, no thanks to her. Wavering promise barely lit him now. As worn out and on its last leg as his potential was, it was a beacon of hope just the same. Two weeks ago she’d wanted to fix him desperately, promised herself that after him there would be no more. She’d hang up her hat and put her superhero cape in storage. She’d also try to forget that she’d been fantasizing about their happy life together since she’d been a teenager.
The fact that she shouldn’t use her power on herself obviously didn’t apply anymore, so when she ran into him unexpectedly a couple months ago, she’d accepted a date, hopeful that happily-ever-after would finally be in her cards. Hope made her overlook the smarminess that had diminished his bad boy sheen. Hope made her believe that he could be hers and that finally fixing him would make up for her past mistake. Hope made her believe that she could be In for once.
Just one last fix. If this one doesn’t work, I’ll tell Jasper everything.
Ignoring the depressing familiarity of the promise, she reached into her clutch and pulled out a small spiral notebook with FIXES handwritten on the cover. Flipping past the pages she’d clipped with a red paper clip to indicate the three failed efforts, she turned to the section she’d dedicated to Ryan—the last three wrinkled sheets of the book.
The first page, labeled IS, was an unbiased list of Ryan’s attributes and character. Violent, narcissistic and lazy, mingled freely with fun-loving and spontaneous, as did daredevil, artistic and short, but cute. The next page, entitled COULD BE, detailed all the possibilities she’d seen in him in high school, and though the potential to be a good father and devoted lover had been hazy even then, she’d included them on that list anyway. The last page was a no-nonsense to-do list, the top six items of which had been indicated accomplished with a decisive strikethrough.
Call if you’re going to be late and hold doors open for me she’d been forced to achieve through blood, sweat and tears, her balm’s potency watered down, even with her soul added as secret ingredient. Horrified that her power, her only claim to fame, might be waning, Dragon pulled the plug on it, hoping that a full shutdown and an eventual restart was all that was needed to get it up and running at optimal strength. She dared not use it to fix piddling character flaws like ease up on the cologne and don’t belch in public; instead she’d remembered a magicless technique she’d used to get the boyfriend before Ryan to put the toilet seat down and hastily tweaked it for Ryan with almost instantaneous results.
Seeing her successes on paper brought her a measure of calm, and she shored up her waning enthusiasm like a decaying levy. A few more manual tweaks and then she’d bring out the big guns for the finale; magic would guarantee success and, of course, bliss.
The groan of iron being slowly and continuously bent made Dragon smile and she gazed affectionately at the profiles of the lion and lioness that decorated each wrought iron door. The lengthy latch fit into the lioness, making it appear as if the extravagantly maned lion hunched over her back mated her, which he did on occasion.
The gate creaked again and Dragon grinned as the lion’s hindquarters slowly thrust against the lioness’s. She envied the magical bond that promised them eternity, happy together.
“From your lips,” she said, hoping their good fortune would rub off on her.
She fiddled with a sequined silver clutch and adjusted the black velvet belt around her waist. The hem of her tissue-thin blouse lay in pleated lines over a light blue skirt. A pair of pewter high-heeled sandals, Dragon’s 40-29-46 dimensions and the confidence to glory in her own curves completed the atmosphere of structured wantonness.
A high-pitched horn sounded behind her and she smoothed a hand over her outfit, fitted a welcoming smile on her face and rushed to the scooter coming to a stop alongside the curb.
“Hey. You look great,” she murmured, running her fingers along his jaw, more chiseled now thanks to a thirty-day detox and exercise program she could never stick to herself, but that Ryan followed with religious zeal. His dishwater-blond hair, free from the bondage of too much gel and a ponytail holder, had been cut, and his even blue eyes sparkled with something other than a cocaine high.
Dragon admired the tailored slacks and crisp oxford he wore. A far cry from the velour track suits drenched in drugstore cologne he’d thought showed his assets—a bare chest underneath the zippered jacket and bare everything else under the pants—to their best advantage.
Putting the old Ryan behind her, she viewed her latest creation and deemed him a tentative success, even though she still had work to do before she could declare him well and truly fixed. Good-looking, though not so much as to be off-putting, well-dressed and well-spoken, gainfully employed, and seemingly kind. She released a surprised huff that she’d managed to accomplish so much with so very little, mentally patted herself on the back and murmured, “Well done, me.”
Hitching her pencil skirt almost to her hips she swung her leg high to mount behind Ryan. When she’d settled, he twisted around and held a helmet over her head, sucking lasciviously at her lips before smooshing it over her carefully arranged hair and now-smeared lipstick.
“Hey yourself,” he said. “Hold on.” He revved the engine and lifted his feet
to the pedals. The bike rolled about four feet before Ryan brought it to a halt. “Dragon, I said hold on.”
“I am,” she insisted, wiggling her fingers against his stomach.
“Tighter,” he insisted.
Dragon sighed, but scooted closer so that her groin fit snugly against his butt and one arm crossed diagonally over his chest, the other wrapped securely around his waist. “That better, sweetie?”
He grunted, ground his backside into her crotch, chuckled and took off.
Suppressing a sigh over behavior that cheapened all her hard work, Dragon leaned her head against Ryan’s shoulder, grateful for the high-pitched whine of the scooter’s motor that made conversation impossible. Instead she drank in the sights of Halo City and Sixth Avenue knowing that their topsy-turvy beauty would be the highlight of her evening.
God she loved this city. Secretly loved the way the Unveiling had molded it into a living dreamscape, though she’d never say so out loud; even these days, approving of what it had done to Halo City was tantamount to craving Hell when you’d had all that Heaven had to offer.
What hadn’t merged during the Unveiling had been magically altered by K’Davrah. Buildings once tall and rectangular bowed over West 50th Street like concrete stalks, their windows, sills and gutters blooming into exaggerated stone bubbles, bells or ornaments and decorated with curly-lashed bumble-bees or fat Arabian horses with flowing manes and tails that unfurled like pennants—the result of a firefight between a smattering of good guys and a legion of bad that lasted longer than either one had anticipated. The diorama she’d created in grade school depicting that battle had garnered her an A minus—points deducted for gratuitous detail. Jasper’s well-meant yet inappropriate contribution.
Very strange ways for a two-thousand-year-old phooka.
The flourishes of that war were abundant at every intersection all over the Halo City island, despite the substantial death toll that the City’s new façade masked. Dragon was grateful for it. This landscape had once been real and purposeful. War had seeded unruliness and chaos, and though the City grew into an ungainly mismatch of magic and mystery now, it was fixed. Purposeful again, its potential had been realized and its loyal citizens happy. For the most part.
Gave her hope. An un-PC kind of hope.
They crossed the Zinc Bridge—electrotyped as part of the City’s Art from War restoration program—into Horace’s Alley. Marble seraphim choirs presided over the historic section of the Alley and Lucifer’s minions and hordes of the damned peered over the eaves of churches, synagogues, and mosques in stone that ranged in color from lime to blue.
These stone émigrés from Heaven and Hell were the shoddy work of a disgruntled Races United for Order (RUFO) lieutenant commander. Semiliterate and ignorant of the “standardized” craft RUFO’s wartime curriculum required of senior officers, he’d been left unsupervised for so long that he’d managed to amass “followers,” create a “town,” and enact a plan to take over the world. Dragon had received another A for a research paper on the subject. She’d had to hide the assignment from the phooka to keep him from co-authoring the “truth.”
Gradually, the landscape became shyer until the squat brick buildings only blossomed graffiti, broken neon lights and boarded up windows.
Ryan hit a right turn at the scooter’s top speed, extending his right leg to hover over the newly resurfaced street to keep the bike from toppling over.
Dragon nearly forgot to lean into the curve as Ryan had instructed her several times. Motorcycles, magically powered or the latest crank models, were something with which Dragon was familiar. Cornering a scooter with a plastic crate attached to the handle bars with bungee cord was ridiculous and made Dragon’s hope for a successful night deflate a bit more, but she obediently leaned.
The scent of fried food, urine and cigarette smoke hit Dragon and she lifted her head from Ryan’s shoulder. So-So Corridor, she noted, her fingers curling into fists.
Named for Tso Ping, a human general appointed by RUFO at the height of the K'Davrah to keep the peace in what were once the choicest five blocks in the city. Now they were a typical urban ghetto, teaming with lowlife both human and not.
“Their methods rival that of the worst ethnic cleansing the human world has ever seen,” Ping had been quoted in the Rapture as saying of RUFO’s leaders during the height of the war. More inflammatory quotes had preceded a two-page spread of confidential RUFO intelligence documents, heavily redacted, which the rest of the article deciphered with help from a source.
Ping was later outed as that source, but it was his very public affair with a nixi demon—a mermaid-like creature, absurdly wrinkled with jade skin and hair and the kind of specimen RUFO regularly experimented on—that lost him his commission and disgusted even his most fervent supporters. Nixis lived in packs that hunted like barracudas, even on dry land where they sloughed off their fishtails and grew pruney legs to chase their prey. Their capacity for any emotion was said to be nonexistent, as evidenced by their cannibalism of any young not strong enough to leave the nest immediately after birth.
An oft-replayed television interview of Ping advocating for the rights of every being targeted by RUFO—no matter how evil—won him the Coalition for the Rights of All’s (CRA) military support. Before the nixi ate his heart, Ping had been able to hold So-So Corridor against the bottomless might of RUFO’s moral majority, even armed to the teeth with bullets and casters as they were.
Now, years after the last spell had been sung, So-So was no longer a bastion of affluence. Its exquisite architecture was witness and enabler to crimes so heinous and so abundant that drug dealers fearing for their own lives and the maintenance of their product began policing the neighborhood themselves.
It was also the home of one of the worst Jamaican restaurants Dragon had ever been to.
Junior’s. Dirty beyond description, the food wasn’t the only deterrent. Vermin of all kinds peered out of dark corners, the sounds they made as they went about their dark business made Dragon’s flesh crawl.
The fact that the man who’d killed her biological father was a fixture at the bar made her hate Junior’s even more.
But.
Ryan loved the restaurant. Figured he was being thoughtful by hauling Dragon there every other date—bring a Jamaican girl to a Jamaican restaurant equals major score—and that Dragon would show her gratitude in her usual fashion.
“Junior’s,” Dragon said with false enthusiasm as they pulled to a stop in front of the restaurant’s boarded windows. On one of its chipped brick walls, the universal frustration with K’Davrah had been spraypainted: “FUCK THIS PAN BULLSHIT,” it scoffed in fading red. A sentiment Pan himself had seconded while freely admitting that the panic and devastation of K’Davrah surpassed even his wildest dreams. This comparatively simple vestige of war could be found in the City’s poorer neighborhoods and was the only testament to the fallen god’s military service.
Dragon pulled off her helmet and scrubbed the heel of her hand along her cheek to wipe away her smeared lipstick.
“I know how much you like it here,” Ryan said, shooting her a leer as he dismounted. His thinning hair was matted to his head from the helmet, but his eyes sparkled like a little boy’s on the verge of a grand adventure, and when his lips eased from smarmy to smile, the impatience and resentment that had a foothold on Dragon’s heart faded away.
She powered up her second sight and viewed him wearing his full potential to reassure herself of his suitability. Her skin prickled painfully as the vision of who Ryan could be was superimposed over the lackluster reality of who he was: Ryan donating his time to paint a fantastical mural in the children’s ward of Halo City Hospital.
The image, though watery and less distinct than it was when she first met him, was enough to validate the faith she had in him—in his ability to be her savior—and a smile spread over her face. Breathing through the dizziness and nausea that just trying to see him caused, Dragon dismounted the scoo
ter, doing an eye-catching shimmy as she settled her skirt’s hem back around her knees, then flung herself into Ryan’s arms and whispered, “Thank you.”
“Your ass is so juicy,” he groaned, massaging her backside and pushing his tongue between Dragon’s unprepared lips.
Shoving her surprise to a dusty corner in her mind, Dragon responded in kind, making sure to do that thing with her tongue that he liked.
“Mmm, mmm,” Ryan moaned, pulling away from her lips with an audible smack. “Let’s eat.” He slapped her ass and strode into Junior’s, leaving her on the sidewalk.
Dragon smoothed the front of her blouse and licked her bruised lips. She reached into the crate at the front of the scooter for her clutch and the compact that was in it to make sure her shadow still highlighted and her mascara hadn’t flaked. She frowned at her mouth, puffy and lipstick free, then sighed and shook her head as if to reboot her enthusiasm for the date specifically and Ryan in general. She tilted the compact to her eyes again. “He’s the one, girl. Believe it, Dragon,” she whispered to her reflection as she retouched her lipstick.
“Dragon!” Ryan stood at Junior’s entrance looking annoyed. “Are you coming or what?”
“Here I come!” She injected gaiety into her tone and hurried to him, her three-inch heels clicking like an exuberant puppy’s nails on hardwood.
She caressed his clenched jaw as she breezed into Junior’s then stopped inside the foyer to allow her eyes to adjust to the gloom.
He grabbed her hand as he walked briskly into the restaurant, forcing her to trot to keep up.