by Amy Faye
But there was no photo, and that seemed wrong, because Dad had always worked from a photo. She frowned. That was one thing that was wrong, but there was something else. Someone had put the painting back there. Someone had decided it shouldn't be on the ground floor, by the couch. And that same someone had started the fire right beside it.
25
Alex Blume had been a dragon for a little bit over a thousand years; in that time, he'd been human whenever it was necessary or convenient, but it wasn't something he was committed to. The change to being human, day in and day out, was something very recent, in the grand scheme of his life, an effort to turn over a new leaf. But he was never going to really be human, not the way that Diana was. Not the way that his driver had been, before he became a red stain on the asphalt.
He didn't dwell on it. There was a lot of loss in a human being's life. There were a great many things that they never really came to understand, things like the scale of centuries. They never really understood how quickly things could move, and how slowly. How things tended not to happen at all, as tension built and built, and then all at once history snapped like a rubber band pulled too tight and went flying off into the distance.
The last hundred years had been quite a lot of that, as the stretching came quicker and the snapping got stronger. As they developed new weapons, weapons that could very nearly counter anything that dragons had access to. The youngest dragons probably didn't understand the change. Even though Cyanora was young, compared to him, compared to Keleth, she had been around long enough to get a taste for the kind of power that people could be subjected to, if you squeezed them.
But now, it was all completely different. There was no more of that. You couldn't afford to really terrorize an area, not when they could decide to drop a nuke right on your head and then, no more dragon. It didn't much matter how old you were. The only thing was that younger ones, less than fifty, the real newborns, they had never lived in a world where there was literally nothing that humans, aside from the blood-drunk hunters, could do to stop them.
He took in a deep breath. Diana had gone in, but she wasn't out yet. He lamented that it was taking her so long, but humans had their own motivations. There was a crash, on the other side of the house. A thud. Then a scream, and a second thud. The scream ended exactly where the second thud began.
In that moment, Alex felt a little bit of the humanity that he'd learned to imitate nearly to perfection call out inside his chest unhappily. He looked at Cyanora, looked at her hard expression, looked at her emotionless face, and he decided that he wasn't going to change anything by being there or not. She was closed off to him, and there was nothing that he could do to change things for her, except maybe to make things worse. He wasn't going to do that, not if he could help it. But he could change something, just maybe, for Diana.
He made his way around slowly. Someone had set that fire, as sure as anything. And whoever it was, they were likely still around. The possibilities ran through his mind one after the other. The idea that it was an outside attack, perhaps by the red, was unlikely. They'd backed off.
But it was possible, and that meant that he ought to be extra careful. There wasn't going to be anything good coming out of getting himself killed, and it was more likely than it might have seemed. Everything that was dangerous needed to be treated like it was more likely than it initially seemed. It was easier to take the time now, rather than to let himself slack off, only to find out in the end that if he'd only taken the time he might not have gotten himself killed for nothing.
There was nothing, though. No waiting ancient drake, about to come down and pull them all up into the sky, to pick the meat from their bones before they even knew to transform into something that fought a little bit better in the air. No assassin waiting in the dark. Nothing but a big, blazing house, its timbers beginning to crack and pop loudly inside.
The middle of the house seemed to collapse in on itself all at once, the central support apparently dropping out first, and the rest of it moving in where the timbers no longer had any support, and now served only to weigh down other parts of the house.
It occurred to him as he walked around, giving the house a wide berth, that there was something else to notice. Or, perhaps more accurate, something not to notice. The smell that had been inside was being eaten up by the flame. Now all he smelled was the chalky, rough, unpleasant scent of smoke that had filled his chest.
For a human, it might have been unthinkably unpleasant; for a dragon, it was no different than cigarette smoke to a smoker. Even for an ex-dragon, there was something a little bit appealing about it.
"Diana?" His voice called out loud. He repeated her name again. "Diana?"
There was no reply, not right away. He continued heading around, until she appeared on the horizon, just at the same time that she shouted out her location.
He wanted to run, wanted to go up and grab her and whisk her away from all this. If he was tired, if he was emotionally spent, then he could only imagine how it was for her. But he didn't. His muscles relayed back to his brain that he was too tired, too weak. He wasn't going to be going anywhere fast, not today.
He took a breath and trudged. It was the best he could do, in spite of himself. He would have gone faster, if he could, but he couldn't.
There were two things that gave him energy. The first was the painting, propped up against a tree beside Diana. His prize from the cabin, and she'd saved it for him. He could about kiss her.
The second, the one that it took him a little bit longer to notice, was the way that her arm hung limp at her side. With her reclining back in the grass, it wasn't immediately obvious until she pushed herself up to a seated position, and very noticeably used only her left hand to do it.
"You're hurt," he said. It wasn't a question, and though he had intended for it to be, it wasn't quite sympathetic, either.
"I didn't fall very well."
"You jumped? From up there?"
"The stairs were burning," she told him, as if it were the answer to his question.
"You could have killed yourself."
"I saved the painting," she told him. She turned to look at it. He turned to look at it, too. He'd seen hundreds of Kramers. The style had clearly developed over the years; in the beginning, it was hardly worth the canvas it was painted on, but he had them. Within a year or so, he had developed some small talent, and in recent months, he'd been commanding a very respectable price on the market, when he had something new come along.
This one was raw, unrefined. Honestly, unfinished, he knew. There would be time, to refine it. It would take hours or days or weeks, but eventually, it would be full of details, full of life. Full of Keleth, in its own strange way. But right now, it was raw and little more than an idea sketched out in paint on a canvas. Unrefined.
Somehow, that fit even better than one last finished painting. As if, in his last days, he'd returned to being the artist that still didn't really understand what he was doing, and certainly didn't appreciate it as an art form.
He took a breath. "You did," he agreed finally. "But you hurt yourself."
"It hurts to move too much," Diana confessed. "But I didn't have much else choice. I had to."
"You shouldn't have gone back in," he told her. It was only then that he noticed the rest. She had them all arrayed out, next to the painting. There was a notebook, thick and bound in leather. On top of it was a pair of glasses, the lenses broken and the frames twisted.
On the other side of the painting was a stuffed doll. He smiled when he recognized the shape.
"Is that a dragon toy?"
"It was a gift," she said, without looking up at him. "My mother made it for me, when I was just a baby."
"An interesting choice of gift," he told her. She didn't need him to tell her that, of course. She was smart enough to have already come to that conclusion herself.
"I guess it is."
"Can you walk?"
"I don't know," she said. "
I'm tired. I just want to go back to sleep."
"I know you do." Hell, he knew that he wanted to. "But we need to get you out of here, and get you somewhere safe. I'll help you up, okay?"
She turned and gave him an empty look. "Okay," she said, like there was nothing to her at all. And then she settled back down to the ground and closed her eyes. His stomach did a flip, but he forced himself to move his aching muscles and lifted her up by her good arm, picked up the few things she'd managed to save from the inferno, and carried her back around to where Cyanora stood, still watching, her eyes never leaving the building in spite of the flames.
26
It had taken a monumental force of will for Alex Blume to find the energy to convince one woman to come with him, away from the inferno that had overtaken the house; he wasn't going to find it a second time. Particularly not when there were so many unanswered questions about why she seemed so upset about all of this. He could make guesses, but he wasn't such an idiot as to think that they counted for much of anything.
And whatever was going through her head, whatever affect it was having on her psyche, he wasn't going to interrupt that and face the consequences. So he stopped and waited beside her. Maybe it would have been expedient to say something first, something like 'Come on, it's time to go.'
The assumption, though, would have to be that she was an idiot. It wasn't a particularly safe thought to have, particularly when she was the only other one in that room who he didn't have strong reason to suspect might have been involved in the murder. The way she'd tried so hard to kick the hell out of him didn't leave the impression that she'd killed Keleth just for kicks, or something. It left the impression that she was as angry as anyone could be over the death.
The fire was starting to die down, still clutching at what few parts of the house remained standing, when she finally turned away, perhaps an hour after the fire had begin. Perhaps three hours after he'd run off looking for Diana.
"Come on," she said. From her face, she looked rough. She looked like she wasn't exactly sure how she was going to get by after this. But if that was how she felt, it didn't reach her voice. Her voice was hard and almost mean, and he had to ignore it as he roped Diana's arm across his shoulders and pulled himself to his feet.
She could walk, for the most part, but he kept the arm there, enjoying their closeness. Enjoying the feeling of her body pressed up against his, even if it were through all these clothes. He could almost feel the softness of it through all the layers separating them and it gave him all the energy and determination that he was going to need to keep going.
"Where to?"
Cyanora didn't respond right away, just started down the mountain in those ill-fitting boots that looked like they weighed more than anything she'd ever worn in her life from the way that she had to clod along in them.
He followed without prompting for another answer again. In time, maybe, she would explain it to him, but he had his doubts. So the answer would come when they got there. It was a couple of miles to get into her territory, most of it downhill, but it would have been faster to fly. It would have probably hurt a little less. She didn't make any effort to find a clearing, didn't make any effort to transform, and said nothing to explain why she'd apparently decided that was how it was going to be.
He didn't need to think too hard about it, of course. There was easy, readily available magic to summon up clothes out of the ether. If she wanted to wear a dress of the finest silk, then she could have it, and it could show off her body's curves in a way that even made her fully nude form less appealing.
But when you were wearing clothes, made from real cloth, there was no way to bring them with you. Maybe you undressed, which was how he generally did it when the need arose, or maybe you just let the clothes tear themselves to shreds. The transformation was too fast to feel much, and no seams were remotely powerful enough to stop from tearing. If they were, then the fabric around them would tear.
She'd dressed herself, though, and she'd used someone else's clothing to do it. He didn't need to ask whose clothing it was. If Diana had any wonders about why the woman was wearing her father's clothing, then she didn't voice them. She kept her head hung low and stumbled along beside him, drained and clearly in a lot of pain. But she kept up like a champ.
All the way down the mountain, he followed her. It was perhaps ten miles, taken all together like that, and then another two miles across open ground. His head worked on a swivel, watching the skies for trouble that never came.
Thunder clapped in the distance, clouds covering what little there was to see in the rapidly oncoming night sky. In an hour, maybe more, they'd be wet clear through, and if they hadn't found shelter by then, he wasn't sure how well Diana would be able to handle it. There was a stand of trees, off in the distance, perhaps a hundred yards. Cyanora eased her path south until she was headed straight for them, and then stepped into the thicket, and when he followed her through he saw why.
A pickup truck that looked like it was nearly as old as he was sat there, untouched by rust. The paint was faded and in some places had been rubbed away altogether, but it was there, and the door opened for her easily. The dragoness slid her wide hips up into the driver's side of the bench seat, reached behind the wheel, and torqued something he couldn't see, but it didn't take a genius to identify the turning of a key. Particularly, he thought, when the engine came readily to life.
"Get her in," Cyanora said, the first thing she'd said in almost three hours of walking.
He did as he was told without responding, and then climbed up into the bed of the truck and stretched out his long legs. The vehicle started to move before he really got himself settled in, but it made a minimum of shaking and rumbling as it drove out of the trees, across the field, and met up with a dirt road, barely wide enough to fit the wide tires.
The window to the back was open, and it wasn't until they were on the road that someone started speaking.
"He wasn't totally alone up there, you know," she said. Alex wasn't sure who it was that Cyanora was speaking to, but he was sure who she meant.
"No?"
"Aside from Diana, that is." She said it as if the girl wasn't right beside her. Alex's eyes shifted automatically over to her. She leaned against the back window and off to the side, her head lolling limply back. When she slipped into Cyanora's shoulder, it drove home that she was asleep. That, or she was dead, but the rhythmic expansion of her chest nixed that fear in only a moment.
"What, you? The two of you?"
"He didn't like it, not at first. Said he wanted to get away from... from people like us."
"You didn't agree?"
"I was hunting. Didn't have to agree. There was nobody trying to stop me, and his land had the best hunt."
"So you trespassed?"
"At first, that's what it was, at least."
"But not after a while."
"Not after a while," she agreed. "There was more to it. I don't want to claim it was something long term. It had only lasted a couple decades, and then only occasionally. Once, maybe twice a year. Sometimes he'd get randy and it would be once or twice a month."
He looked for a sign of movement in Diana's body. He could imagine that it wasn't a conversation she'd like to be a part of.
"So what was it, then? Sex? Something more?"
"I don't want to think about it," she answered. "All I know is, he didn't like it when I came around unless I was, uh, dressed like this."
"No, he wouldn't," Alex agreed. "He thought he could give it up."
"You didn't think so?"
"You know better than that." There was always talk, in any circle, and dragons were no different. When one of them went weird, there was talk. When two went weird, all at once, the talk wasn't just doubled up. He ignored it for the most part, but it wasn't as if he were blind.
"I guess I do," she agreed. "You swear you didn't kill him?"
"I'd have left him a thousand years if he never called me out to see hi
m. Two thousand. I'd have waited to be asked for until time itself ended, if that was what it took."
"He talked about you, you know. Once."
"You two were big on that, then? Talking? Politics, of all things?"
"I wouldn't call it that. It was only the one time."
"I thought he'd forgotten all that. Or... not forgotten. Put it behind him, I guess, would be the way you'd put it. I thought he'd moved on."
"Nobody ever moves on," Cyanora told him. She shook her head, her hair making waves that might have been enticing. "It's strange, you know? Sex. In this body. Everything's so... ticklish."
He didn't want to think about it too hard, so he didn't respond, and she didn't bring it up again.
27
The image of seeing Alex, handsome billionaire, transform into, and then back from, a flying lizard the size of your average Sport Utility Vehicle put a thousand thoughts into Diana Kramer's head, and the number one among them, as well as the one that she knew she shouldn't even have been considering, was how big his cock had to be when he was like that.
"Are you going to transform, or..."
He looked at her like she'd suggested he might want to dress up as Mickey Mouse first.
"What?"
"Would that be weird?"
He raised an eyebrow. "First, it would be intensely weird."
"And second?"
"Second, I don't like to if I don't have to."
"Is it hard?"
"Stop asking questions," he told her, and lifted her by her waist to sit atop the side of the truck. Then he wedged one foot up on top of the back tire and stepped up and into the back, and pulled her in on top of him.
"I can do that," she agreed. Something hard and big pressed at the sensitive spot between her legs. A welcome distraction from the long day that she'd had. A welcome return to the last good thing that had happened to her, and she'd fucked that up by running off. Maybe everything else that had happened, all the craziness of the last eighteen hours, was all karma punishing her for looking a gift-horse in the mouth.