by Amy Faye
Diana watched Alex as he walked ahead a little ways. She didn't want to go inside first, and truth be told, wasn't sure she wanted to go inside at all. But more than that, she didn't want either of the who self-proclaimed 'dragons' to be anywhere behind her. They could have been crazy, and hell, she could have been crazy right along with them, but crazy people can still do a hell of a lot of damage if they decide to turn on you. If they're scaly dragons that weigh a thousand pounds, then they're all that much more dangerous.
Diana waited for the reaction to come from one of them. Waited for the screams and the warnings not to come inside. But those warnings never came. A minute later she stepped inside. It was as if he'd never left the place. As if he were just going to come back any minute now, and there would be nothing to worry about any more except for the expense of the funeral that she'd paid for, a funeral where they buried a photo of a living man.
But he wasn't going to come back through the door, she knew. There was no point in getting her hopes up about it when there was nothing to hope for. She had to get over it, get over herself, and recognize that she wasn't going to see Dad again.
It was a tough pill to swallow, after all that time. After spending her entire life with him, only vague half-remembered times with her mother. Only a few years, now, with anyone outside of the cottage and outside of internet chat rooms that she wasn't allowed to be in at all, but more than that, couldn't be on for more than an hour at a time. Dad was smart, in a lot of ways, but when it came to technology he wasn't a brilliant hand.
Diana looked behind her at the sound of a noise, ready to be surprised. Alex strode in with a frown. It was more of a grimace, really, his face fixed in concentration and uncertainty. "This is it?" he said, finally.
"Why, what's wrong with this place?"
"Nothing," he said quickly, as if he only just realized that he might have caused offense with the question. He fit a smile onto his expression that changed nothing but the shape of his mouth, but it only lasted long enough to tell her, as an afterthought, "looks nice; cozy."
Diana dropped into the comfortable chair. She knew that Dad liked this chair, but he never sat in it. Not since she'd claimed it as 'hers.' She wondered if he had started again, after she left. The chair felt well-worn, sat-in, but of course it did. It was her favorite chair, too, and she'd been sitting in it whenever she needed to sit down, for almost twenty years of living in this cabin. So it had a lot of sitting done in it.
There was something else, too. A smell. It smelled like gun oil and tobacco and wood, and that was the smell that Dad had always had wrapped around him. The turpentine did stick to his clothes a little bit, when he wore them to work which he rarely did. In the studio, upstairs, there would be a half-dozen or so outfits he would wear when he worked, and the room would stink to high heaven with near-industrial-strength solvents. But the rest of the house was his domain, for things he enjoyed. Not painting.
"No paintings on the walls," Alex commented from beside her.
"No, there aren't."
"Interesting, that. Interesting."
If he wanted her to respond, he didn't seem to be waiting on it with baited breath. Just adding something that he'd noticed, something that he thought, and he seemed to think that it was going to point something out to her. It didn't.
Dad hated paintings. Hated all of them, but hated his own most of all. 'Practical skill' was as good as he'd talk about it. There was no reason that he would want to have any of those paintings on his walls. The wolf's head over the door, that was him. The cabinet that looked full of fine china, it pulled out and revealed a chest of guns and a heavy, wicked-looking tomahawk. Those were him.
The studio upstairs, that was hardly anything to him. A practical necessity in spite of his distaste for it.
"If you want to see a painting so badly, I can take you to the studio," she said into the room, to nobody in particular. It was just that Alex was the only one there to hear, at that moment. The woman had gone off somewhere, probably looking for something. Probably looking for this mysterious horde.
"Oh? You don't mind?"
"This way," she said, forcing herself out of the chair and leaving a little bit of herself behind in the seat.
The stairs were as sturdy as they'd ever been. When she heard, years later, that he'd built the place himself, Diana had suddenly taken on a new appreciation for the little cabin. It was small, to be sure, but it was well-built. And it must have taken quite some time, quite a bit of effort. She'd also begun to suspect that eventually, in a time not too far gone, it would become rickety.
After all, Dad wasn't a house builder. He was a painter, sometimes a hunter, sometimes a lot of things. But a timber framer, he wasn't. And yet, it was as sturdy as anything she'd experienced, even after all this time. It might be another two hundred years before the place started to feel decrepit, and that was if nobody kept up repairs.
The first room on the right, upstairs, was hers. His was the first on the left. Right across from one another. There was a bathroom beside her room, on the right side. Across from it, another door. It was a closet, just big enough to walk in and close the door behind you. It had a light in case you thought that it was a good idea, but nobody ever did, and now nobody ever would. Still, it made it easier to find things in the dark, as well.
Past that, the entire thing dead-ended in a door, as well. The door was sealed, with little caulking strips at the top, bottom, and sides, to keep the air from flowing from that room into the rest of the house, which was a fact for which Diana was eternally grateful. Art was a beautiful thing, and it was important. A great deal of people would pay a great deal of money to see the inside of an artist's workshop.
Yet, there was a smell attached to it, too, and it wasn't a smell that she wanted to have filling the house late at night, when Dad suddenly decided that 3 in the morning was the time for painting again.
The studio door was locked. It was one of the three locks in the entire building, and the other two were heavy dead-bolts on the front and back door. Dead-bolts that had apparently been left open, at least in the front, because Alex hadn't even realized that it was there.
She pulled back away and reached for the keys in her pockets, found the ring and counted off keys. It was a pure indulgence that she carried it; she couldn't have told Alex if he'd asked how many times she said that she was going to take the studio key off her key ring.
She didn't need it, after all. She'd never needed it, not once, not until today. But now she was glad that she had it, because the only alternative was to scrape the whole house from top to bottom, hoping that there was a spare hidden somewhere. A spare that she strongly suspected wasn't there.
If they couldn't get in with a key, then it would have turned to the next easiest alternative, which was tearing the door right off its hinges, and it would never be set right again. Nobody would bother. After all, who was going to live here?
Diana had a life in the city. She had classes to get back to at some point, if she didn't get eaten before then. She had things to worry herself over. Living in a cabin on the mountain, like a hermit, like her Dad had, wasn't an option for her even if she wanted it, and it wasn't what she wanted.
The bolt made a satisfying clunk when she finally did get it open, and then she turned the handle, breathed in the familiar scent of noxious fumes, and stepped inside.
19
The sickening reality of the entire house didn't change how he felt about it; it was cozy, and it did seem warm, and neither of those things changed that anyone who dared to actually stay there longer than a few hours was going to have a bad time.
"Grab that painting," he told Diana absently. "Take it into the front room. First job as my collection manager."
He sensed an instant's hesitation, which he ignored. The painting was important; sufficiently important that he would make an effort not to forget it in his haste to leave this place. But it wasn't the most important thing here.
Then th
ere was some movement behind them and he felt rather than heard Cyanora come in. He turned to regard her for only a moment before he turned back to the corner, crouched low and examining it with every sense he had at his command, except for scent, which was quite literally the furthest thing from under his command. If he could shut it off, he would, because the information he could get from it was already in his mind. But it would be impossible, and would no doubt continue to taunt him as long as it could manage.
The blue dragon was as serious as ever, and she seemed to think that there was someone around to be tempted by her body. Someone who didn't know that it was all an illusion that she kept up.
Still, he had to give her credit for one thing; she didn't make any special effort to look false, per se. She looked to be approaching middle-age in a graceful sort of way, though her breasts had escaped this effect. Someone who saw them, someone who didn't know that she was something very other than a woman who was making friends with the early parts of forty, might have imagined that she looked the way that she did because of surgical implants that were very well-done.
Now, she was wearing someone's clothes, and from the way that she wore them, he guessed that they weren't hers, and that they weren't magicked into existence. Given the masculine cut, he guessed that they had likely belonged to Keleth. The notion of taking the dead dragon's clothing hadn't even occurred to him, though there was something about it that made him glad he hadn't, even though it meant that he wouldn't have every piece of Keleth's horde, however meager it seemed to be.
He looked over the corner a little more, though he'd already seen what he needed to see. Or, more accurately, he'd already decided that there wasn't anything to see. Whoever had done it had cleaned very thoroughly. A few scratches here and there, but they'd made a very special effort. Perhaps there was magic at work, but the stink of black magic made it too hard to make a judgment.
Magic sight had never been a strength of his, either; he could do it, give or take as well as most, but certainly no better than average. If Cyanora wanted to investigate then she was better than he was, but she seemed to have already made up her mind about who was to blame for the crimes that had taken place here. She'd apparently decided that it was him, and needed no time at all to prove it.
Besides that, she seemed disinterested in making even the remotest serious accusation to begin with. She accused him of killing Keleth with a sense of respect more than anything. The implication was clear in her tone, in her posture, in everything else as well. She would have killed him, herself, eventually, if she thought that she could. He was a low man on the totem pole, in her mind, but only because he was doing something that made no sense to her.
Giving up his birthright, his claim to any particular power, and particular moving out to the middle of nowhere, a territory that he barely knew, was as good as giving everything up, and Alex knew instinctively that there was no way she would understand that.
She, and the others, tolerated Alex's strangeness because he had claimed as much power as he could; the only difference between what he did and what they did was where he did it. They did it in the back alleys of the world, pretending that they were important and drawing invisible lines on the map, lines reinforced as much by their own powers as by the recognition that other drakes gave them.
Alex, on the other hand, had given up much of his territory in order to enter into human society and gain power there, where the humans were forced to watch and admire from afar. Celebrity worship was a bit old hat, in dragon society, but when there were so many humans getting in on the act, who could blame someone who had been around for so long trying to get back in on the action?
That was how they saw it, anyways, and Alex had no desire to correct their perspective. After all, they might have been right, underneath it all. He could have retreated from society like Keleth had. He could have become a nobody, keeping a little place in a backwoods mountain and a small, poorly-maintained roost on a hill at the edge of town. If he didn't want the fame, he didn't have to take it.
But he had taken it, and there were probably reasons for that, probably reasons that, if he saw a therapist, and if he educated them on dragon societies and social forms, would have been very interesting.
But he didn't see a therapist, and if he did, he wouldn't have told them about his place in the world. It would be a fast and easy way to a room with padded walls, regardless of how much he could prove it. He hadn't any desire to get humans thinking about dragons, either way. Aside from the logo of his company, an understated thing that nobody took for anything more than a logo, he had left that world behind.
Eventually, someone would start to ask why he didn't noticeably age, and he would have to stage a death and disappear. A plane crash would work, he thought; the bodies in those were so horrifyingly mangled that there was little doubt that they'd believe him dead, and he could walk away and disappear for a few years, perhaps a few decades.
Perhaps, in that time, he would change his mind about all of this. Twenty years was a long time, but it would only get longer from here, and he would eventually move on. Everyone thought it, and he thought it too, himself. But he didn't think about it, because he'd have been a fool to. That was a long time away from now, and it assumed that whoever had come for Keleth wouldn't come after him, as well. That assumption had already proven itself dangerous.
If Cyanora used her senses, then she made no mention of it.
"What are you still doing here, Diana?" his voice was low and friendly and she seemed to suddenly realize that he was standing there. Even if she couldn't smell it, the magic was working its way into her mind, he knew, and mingling with other things, as well.
This was, after all, her home, even if she had left it. This was where 'Alvin Kramer' had lived most of his life, as far as she knew, and it was where he had died. She might have misunderstood her role in a great deal of it, but she was right about one thing, which was that it represented a history that she couldn't go back to any longer. It was gone, now, and it was going to stay gone.
"What?" Her voice sounded far away; her mind was occupied with something else.
"Take the painting, wait for me downstairs."
"This painting?"
"That painting."
"Oh," she said dimly. "Okay."
He heard the sound of an easel shuffling as she pulled the wood and cloth canvas from where it lay, propped against it, and then he heard the sound of her shoes on the wooden floorboards, retreating and heading down the stairs. Alex frowned and rubbed his fingers together absently. He clicked his jaw in a vain attempt to get his mood under control.
"What do you need?" He wasn't in any kind of mood for any of this, but he was even less in the mood to have Cyanora stand there while he tried to examine the scene of the murder. While he tried to figure out in his mind what they had done and why, and why whoever had done it chose Keleth.
While he wondered what the murder had to do with the ancient red that he'd seen. He was green, and Cyanora blue. Color wasn't so much a hierarchy, though there were plenty who would disagree with that assessment, but it was a genetic line. Keleth had been red, and proud of it. And now there was an ancient red around, perhaps five hundred years or more older than his old rival, and he was either here to avenge, or he was here for something else.
Alex's frown deepened as he waited for Cyanora to respond, but he wasn't worried about her attacking him. It hit him dimly, as he felt the blow hit him, that he'd been foolish not to consider it.
20
It was hard to kill a dragon, and harder still to do it without a weapon; that didn't mean that they couldn't feel any pain, and it certainly didn't mean that Alex felt no pain. The fact that the blow came as a complete surprise, well, that wasn't any help, either. He was set sprawling on the ground, his balance lost and his feelings hurting more than the place where her foot had connected, in the place between his shoulder blades.
The second blow was less of a surprise, and less of an
embarrassment, but it hurt more. The third that came to join it a moment later made him worry that he might be in for a whole world of hurt before he got her back under control.
"You son of a bitch," the blue dragon growled at him, her human-looking breasts jiggling as she punctuated every word by putting the point of the boots she'd pulled on between his ribs, hard enough to hurt. They threatened to start cracking soon, in spite of his relatively improved ability to take hits like this, compared to normal people.
He forced his hands to move, even as they protested against the movement and reminded him how much easier it would be to just stay there and let the hits come. After all, at least then he wouldn't have to expend any energy to continue suffering. Just let the kicks keep coming.
In spite of his muscles' protests, he caught the next kick and pulled her down and to the ground. If she wanted him dead, she could have done it. The fact that she wasn't trying very hard, the fact that she hadn't even bothered to procure a weapon more effective than a pair of worn, ill-fitting steel-toed boots, was proof enough that she wanted him to suffer, much more than she wanted him to die.
"Would you stop that," he asked her, in a harsh whisper. He hoped that Diana wouldn't hear them, but the odds were bad. When she didn't appear in the hallway, though, he reassessed his estimation to 'either she didn't hear or she didn't care.'
Either way was better than having her come up and investigate, especially as she struggled under him and he shifted the weight of his hips to press down on the blue below him.
It had been a long time since he'd been a dragon in anything other than the back of his mind. He'd tasted it, here and there. Enough to make it seem strange to be in such a small, fragile body. Enough to make it a little bit difficult for him to really feel at home looking like he did.
Inside, he would always be a dragon, and he would always think like a dragon, but that was true by degrees, and he knew that it had been a very, very long time since he had really well and truly understood the culture.