by Amy Faye
Diana felt weak, shaky. Her body barely wanted to move, which was good at that point, because whatever was happening, imagined or not, she couldn't have stopped it.
A great shadow spread over the ground around them. A strange, vaguely musical sound threatened to overwhelm her, and again sent her dangerously close to vomiting as the sound rang through her body. And then, all of a sudden, as the red huffed and prepared to spray them, she didn't doubt for a moment, with a gout of flame that would end her day in the worst way possible, something blue smacked into the red drake.
It wasn't as big as the red, not by a long shot. But the way it hit was like a cruise missile, and it was the size of a fighter jet. The noise that the blue let out as it landed, as it skittered and turned and came around for a second attack, puffing out its chest, threatened to pop her head like an overfilled balloon.
Lightning screamed down from the sky and met a bolt that seemed, to all the world, to have originated from the blue drake's mouth. The sound was so loud that she felt it more than she heard it, and it was the last thing that she heard for a long time.
Then the green and the blue took turns at odds, turning the red round and round, claws digging in and tearing. If the blue appreciated the help, then there was no sign of it. It took as many swipes at the green dragon as at the red, but the difference in danger was clear from the beginning, and neither was ready to commit to attacking anything other than the massive red, as big as the other two put together.
And then as another crack of lightning smacked into the red, so bright that it blacked out her entire vision, it let out a bellow that Diana saw rather than heard, and took off screaming into the sky.
The blue took off only a second behind. The green, on the other hand slumped to the ground. Diana, for her part, kept pressed against the trunk of one tree, her eyes wide, and her body feeling an electric tingle that she didn't like or want to think too hard about.
One thought ran through her mind, on near-constant repeat. A thought that she didn't want to think too hard about, regardless of what happened next, because the only answers she could find were absolutely insane.
What the fuck happened?
If everything she'd seen was all in her head, why was it that as she tried to snap her fingers right by her ears, she heard nothing at all?
If it wasn't all in her head, then what the fuck could that possibly have meant for her? What could it have possibly meant for her entire understanding of reality? Her body tingled and hurt and she stayed pressed against the tree trunk until something dark and blue and glittering almost wetly in the sun, descended on the green dragon that had carried her all this way.
Then it landed and that sonorous roar came out again. The volume must have been extreme, but she made it out only softly, as if it were miles away. It regarded the green, circled it with a gnashing of teeth, and Diana thought that perhaps, she was about to watch one of these dragons die.
And then the blue seemed to notice her, and fixed her with a stare, and Diana realized that there were much more immediate concerns for her to be worried about.
14
When a car-sized killing machine that only exists in fairy tales bares teeth the size of your arm, you tend to have strange reactions. Diana's reaction was to press herself flatter still against the tree, hoping that it wasn't going to notice her. As if it hadn't already.
"Don't, uh... don't do anything crazy, now," she said out loud. If it hadn't noticed her before, she would be sure to draw its attention by talking. But she stayed pressed against the tree and as still as possible, like a squirrel that had frozen in the middle of an open field. The irony didn't seem to be immediately obvious.
The blue drake let out a shriek, shrill and loud and considerably less sonorous than its previous two roars. The sound actually made it through the veil of silence, which was a surprise and a half, she had to admit. But the ringing that replaced the muffled silence wasn't any more welcome.
Diana sucked in a breath. "I... God, I must be crazy. Please, just don't kill me. I don't know what's going on!"
The green, positioned between the two of them, shifted and stood, panting like it was exhausted from the flight and the battle. For a moment, she thought that it might prove itself to be too weak, too tired, and it would slip back to the ground. But it didn't.
The blue shrieked again, her shoulders dipping down like a threatening dog. The gesture didn't leave her wondering what it meant. The green seemed to react immediately, though. His own shoulders, too, dipped. His head went with them, his upper body pressed into the ground, his thick and powerful rear legs remaining straight.
The blue let out a third shriek. This one was quieter, and for a moment Diana thought that there was some chance that her hearing was going again. And then the blue relaxed into a position that might have looked relaxed. It flexed its long wings and fit them in behind.
If Diana hadn't seen cats make a very similar pose, she might have thought that it had very suddenly decided that there was no danger at all. The tail, though, stiff and nearly straight back, told her what she needed to know. The blue was worried it might need to pounce at any moment, and it was making sure that it wasn't going to be caught out.
But it wasn't going to attack right then and there. At least, that was what Diana hoped. It was a ready position, and if they were both very lucky then she might make it out. The green, if it made the way out, was probably good for her as well, but since all of this was some kind of fever dream, she wasn't exactly too worried if things didn't work out well.
The green, too, relaxed, and then whipped its long neck over to look at her, let its gaze fall back onto the blue, and let out a cry, the quietest one yet.
There should have been birds here; rabbits, maybe, or squirrels. Something. Hawks were far from uncommon, and this would be prime hunting ground. The fact that no bird calls answered the cacophony told Diana that this was perhaps not something she wanted to be present for.
The blue's posture, though, and the way that its gaze fixed on her, kept Diana fixed in place. The blue didn't react to the roar, at all. She guessed that it was some sort of communication going on, but if it meant anything then Diana was in no position to say what it could be.
Then the shape of the massive dragon in front of her shifted, her eyes seemed to blur out, and there was a man in front of her. A man wearing very little. The clothes shimmered into existence afterward, but not before she got a good look at that body.
It was big and broad, with light-colored hair and a tight, narrow waist. He wasn't thickly muscled, at least not as far as Diana was able to discern, but that didn't stop him from looking good. In fact, if anything, it made him more appealing, svelte. A crisscross of scars worked their way across his back.
The clothes that appeared were familiar, in a way. An expensive suit, probably with an Italian tailor's name on the label, dark enough that she wouldn't have been able to tell it wasn't black without comparing it to a color card.
He slipped to the forest floor on his knees, and again, he bowed, this time with a body on two legs. Then he turned, and Diana's suspicions were confirmed.
Alex Blume looked at her with an expression that was too exhausted to be anything but tired. It gave him a sad tint to his face, but the way that his chest heaved told her that there wasn't going to be any way to tell what was and wasn't just a result of exhaustion.
The hard stare told her that there was something else in his look, too, something that she utterly failed to grasp for a long time. And then, suddenly, she got it. He wanted her to copy him.
Diana slipped down the tree, her eyes still locked with the giant beast, until she felt the dirt under her butt. Then she slowly leaned forward from the hip until her hair pooled in the grass and she finally forced herself to look away, praying that the dragon didn't decide to kill her after all. Not that it would have mattered, she reminded herself. There would be no escaping if the dragon decided to kill her.
There was no sound t
o indicate when the change occurred; no feeling in the air, no weight lifting off her shoulders. No gust of wind. Just a woman's voice, speaking loudly enough that Diana thought that she was listening to a P.A. system.
"You shouldn't have come here," she said. Diana wasn't sure who she was addressing it to: her, or Alex, or both. She was even less sure how she was supposed to answer, so she said nothing.
"I was attacked." Alex's voice didn't have that quality. He sounded like he was a dozen paces away, speaking loudly. Which he was.
"I can see that," said the woman's voice again, amplified still. Diana didn't dare look up to see her expression. "And you thought that I would help you? After all these years? That's terribly cute..." she paused a long time. Too long, Diana thought. "Alex."
The tone that she said the last name with gave Diana the distinct and unmistakable impression that Alex wasn't his proper name. Diana made a space for that information in her memory. Panic fought into her throat and Diana stifled it as best she could.
"And you," said the woman. "You came with him?"
"I don't know what's going on! This is crazy!" Diana's voice sounded like a screech beside the other woman's. It held an otherworldly quality, in addition to the volume, one that Diana didn't want to think too hard about. She didn't want to think about any of it too hard.
"You should know, Diana," the woman started, and paused. If her purpose was to let Diana try to figure out why the woman knew her name, then Diana used the silence appropriately. "You can't trust this Mr. Blume."
Diana said nothing. Alex spoke up, though. "Don't listen to her. She doesn't know anything."
"In my house, you claim this? You know, I still haven't decided what to do with you, 'Alex.' You ought to keep quiet while you're still in my good graces."
"Why can't I trust him?"
Diana kept her eyes on the dirt, counted the blades of grass in her field of view, and hoped that she looked sufficiently penitent.
"Well, for a start... you don't want to tell her, 'Alex'?"
"I have something you'll want," Alex answered. "If you let us go, you won't regret it."
"No?... Alright, then. I guess I'll do it myself. Do you know who killed your father, Diana?"
"He didn't do it," Diana said, her gut twisting with the thought that he very well could have. "That... doesn't make any sense."
"No? Well, that remains to be seen," said the woman. "Look at me."
Diana did, and found herself staring at a woman that she'd never seen before. One that stood over her with a slender build, breasts that might have been appealing to a man, hips that would have been appealing to anyone, and most notably of all, not a shred of clothing on her. Her eyes shined gold.
"What do you want from me?"
"The same thing that everyone wants," the woman answered. "Certainly the same thing that Alex here wants: Alvin Kramer's horde."
15
Alvin Kramer had many things; he had a double-bit axe, for example, that he was always looking for uses for, and a great deal too many saws, but the one thing that Diana would never have accused her father of having was a 'horde.' So to hear someone trying to seriously suggest to her that they were after his 'horde' told her everything she needed to know about these people.
Specifically, they were crazy. All of them, as crazy as anything. They obviously didn't know her dad very well. If they did then they would know, right off the bat, there's nothing about Alvin Kramer that hordes. He was constantly looking to get rid of things. If they wanted to find out, all they had to do was go to the cabin, which was... she tried to orient herself.
It wasn't far, just a few dozen miles to the North-East, she thought, if she knew where she was, which she probably didn't.
"Horde?"
The sound of her voice was dim and maybe a little bit stupid and she should have sounded less stupid, she hoped, but there wasn't much chance of that happening. After all, if she was going to sound like she knew what the hell she was talking about, the first step was going to have to be knowing what the hell they were talking about.
Since they were crazy, and more than that, she was also just as crazy as they were, it wasn't going to do a whole lot of good.
"Horde," the woman said. "Look, this is all so tiring. I can't stand doing this, but..." then she let out a sigh and leaned back against a tree. She looked up at the sky.
"There's nothing you need to worry about, Diana," said Alex. He had apparently decided to join the conversation after all. His hair was matted to his head from sweat that still formed beads on his forehead. He still took noticeably deeper breaths than should have been necessary. "Just forget about all of this."
"Good, I think I should."
"Oh, you definitely should," he confirmed. "Because if you don't, Cyanora here is going to kill you, I guarantee you that."
"You'd like that, wouldn't you? Finish what you started."
The conversation between them went on as if she wasn't right there. As if they weren't talking about killing her, killing her father. As if it were perfectly normal to talk about killing people. To make matters worse, Alex didn't deny it.
"Stop it," Diana said, as the two of them stared. Alex looked over at her immediately. The woman, the one that he kept calling 'Cyanora,' took a little longer, and there was a subtle stiffening in her posture when she did it, less relaxed than she had been before. "I don't see what this has to do with me or my father. Hell, I don't see why I don't just wake up and realize that this was all just a weird, trippy dream."
Cyanora looked at her, her lips big and voluptuous and pouty even as the expression on her face continued to be a hard stare. Then she spoke. "You're not going to forget this, and I'm not going to kill you, in spite of that. In spite of the fact that I probably should kill you, if I were being smart, to be perfectly honest."
"Oh, good," Diana said, in a voice that said it was anything but good. "I'm glad you're not going to kill me, at least. That's good news."
"You're not dreaming, either, I'm sorry to say."
"That's obviously a lie, though, because just a minute ago, you were both dragons," Diana said. She laid her head back against the trunk of the tree behind her and closed her eyes and used a little force of will to try to wake up. Any second, in the space of a heartbeat, she would kick awake in her bed.
"That's not technically true," Cyanora's voice said, as Diana willed the voice away, willed the forest away, willed the whole thing out of existence so that she could go back to her bed and back to her perfectly normal life where there weren't crazy people trying to tell her that her father had some kind of horde they were all after.
"No? Well, good. I'm glad that there's some complexity to my dreams. I was thinking that dreams about getting fucked by billionaires were getting too simple and straightforward."
"Because the billionaire you were dreaming about fucking is still a dragon, even now," the woman's voice said. "He's just putting up a front. A fake. We've transformed our bodies to look like yours, which is something that we do to get by in this day and age."
"Oh, good. I imagine you've got a desk job somewhere? With a body like that, you could land any man you wanted. Never have to work again."
A laugh cut through the darkness of her closed eyes, and Diana opened them automatically at the noise. "Please, little girl, I don't think that you're understanding. I've lived here for a hundred years or more. I've been here so long that if I wanted to, I could own most every part of this state. Hell, if your boyfriend ever gets around to explaining any of this to you, he might just tell you that is why he came here.
"So for now, you know nothing, and that's why I'm going to let you leave, and I'll admit that Aleroth did me a favor, getting rid of your father, so I'll cut him a little bit of slack this once."
"I didn't," he finally started, but the woman, nude and attractive enough to keep even Diana's attention on her, shot him a look that could have burned a hole through his expensive suit.
"Lie to the girl all yo
u like, but don't lie to me. Everyone knows, he was at the top of your list, and who should show up right before he dies, but you?"
Alex's lips pressed together to make a firm line across his face, but he didn't say anything else. There was nothing else to say, really. If he was guilty, then lying was only going to dig him in deeper. If he wasn't, well...
Diana's eyes slipped shut. If he wasn't, then it looked pretty damn bad for him. Maybe he should figure that out before he tried to claim that he was totally innocent.
There was a noise behind her. The woman's eyes snapped up, and Diana turned to look. An instant later she heard another noise, loud and bellowing and powerful, and a voice snapped inside her head as a sonorous roar shook her ribs. "Time to go," it seemed to say. If she had a place to go, then she didn't know where it was.
A big clawed hand grasped her again, and she was squeezed and pressed into a sea of rough blue scales and then the forest started to move around her all at once.
Around her, the forest exploded in flames, the heat unimaginable. She tried to find that limp place of acceptance that she had felt before. Tried to go away in her mind. Something stopped her, and it wasn't hard to figure out what it was. There was something that she had to think about, and think very hard.
Someone had killed her father. Someone or something. There was no proof that it was Alex; that was pure conjecture. That was something that the woman, the blue dragon that now clutched Diana herself to its chest, had speculated. But there was no proof of any of it.
The blue was smaller than the dragon that Alex had transformed into, though not by near the difference between either of them and the red dragon. It turned and pitched and rolled as it flew and Diana could feel the rotational forces trying to wrench her out of the big dragon's grasp. She had to pray that it wasn't going to kill her, but something told Diana that they were making an effort not to.
Otherwise, she told herself, the blue could have killed her when it had the chance. There was nothing that she could have done to stop it, when she was standing there in the forest. One of those blasts of lightning would have crashed down on her head and she'd have been an ex-girl.