by Amy Faye
Diana let out a yelp of surprise. Surprise that she could do something like that. It made perfect sense, but she'd always been petite; to imagine that she could tackle two large, adult men without difficulty? It strained credulity.
Alex tried to slip free, but she didn't let him go, either. Someone was going to give her answers, and they were going to do it now.
"What did you do to my father," she shouted. The roar came out loud and sonorous and pure. It echoed in the space of the little cave, and for an instant, Jeremy looked shaken. Then he squirmed inside her grasp and she put her shoulder into him again, hard.
He looked like he wanted to vomit. She didn't let him slip, regardless of whether or not she might have felt bad. He didn't deserve her sympathy. Not until he'd answered some very basic questions at least, about why he'd been shooting at her, at the very least.
"Tell her," Alex said. "Go on."
His own voice was strained, probably from the pressure of her body weight pressed against him.
"I'm not telling you anything, you scaly fucking freaks!"
A loud 'pop' went off as he fired another shot. The bullet pinged into her chest, between her front legs, but it didn't hurt enough to get her weight to slacken.
Diana decided that she'd heard enough to start jumping to conclusions, reached her long neck down and with a quick snap of her teeth, almost too quick and too easy, the leather of his jacket started to turn red and slick with blood pouring out of his shoulder.
Diana could hear, rather than see, the gun slip to the ground. It made a dull thump as it landed in the dirt, and she kicked it away with her front legs. Then she pulled back and tried to become herself again. Her body hurt bad and she just wanted to be herself for a little while.
The feeling was sudden and only lasted a moment before she recoiled back from it. The magic felt weird. Wrong. For an instant, though, the rest of her body felt exactly right, for the first time in what felt like hours.
If Alex or Jeremy were surprised by her transformation, they didn't show it. They both reacted immediately, like they'd been waiting for it. Like they knew it was coming any moment, and they'd been waiting for it.
The man she'd known her entire life looked like a completely different person. Like he was a hard killer. She wasn't ready to go after him, but apparently he didn't have the same compunctions about her. He scrambled for the gun with his good arm and turned from the ground to point it up at Alex.
Alex, though, was faster. She supposed that he had less to do.
And instant later, there was a green dragon completely filling the hallway, and he put one great big hand down and smacked the gun down. Jeremy's arm seemed to collapse in on itself and then a loud 'pop' went off anyways as he continued pulling the trigger on momentum alone.
Then Alex pulled back, and when he was finished there was a man on the floor, bleeding and trying desperately to hold up a gun that was clearly becoming heavier and heavier for him by the second.
"I'm going to get you," he said. "No matter what it takes. For what you did."
The words came out labored and slow, but they came out. The gun fired again, pointing at nothing in particular and thumping into the earthen wall, and then the hallway fell silent and left Diana with a lot more questions than answers.
37
Alex could feel Diana's eyes on him. Burning a hole in him. She didn't say anything for a while, but she didn't need to. The billionaire shifted himself back into the human body that had been his home for the past two decades, and let her look at him.
The dying words weren't much, as they went. There were plenty of better ways to go. The past thirty years of film had taught him, and all of humanity, really, that there's a terrible amount of value to be had in one-line witty comments when you killed a guy, or when someone killed you. There was a whole industry of the stuff.
Still, swearing to get revenge for some secret misdeed wasn't all that bad, either. You could go out whispering the name of your sled, for example.
Diana looked at him hard, and looked like she was about ready to start shouting at him. He would deserve it if she did, but he wasn't about to volunteer the information, just because she was looking at him.
Then she took a deep breath and he watched her scaly face as she closed her eyes and flickered back into her usual body again. She wasn't wearing any clothing. It was a comfort for him, in its own way. One less thing to think about.
"How did I do?"
He looked at her with an expression as if he were weighing his options of how to respond. Then he put one hand on her breast as if he were testing its weight in his palm, and then nodded.
"It'll do. If you wanted it to be a little bit bigger, though..."
She slapped him, but there was no force behind it. It was an amusing response for her, and not totally inappropriate. So he let it go, and smiled at her, and gave one little wink.
"What's next?"
She looked down at herself, and seemed to realize all of a sudden that she wasn't wearing anything. Her face flushed red, and the flush went down her neck and into the top of her chest, where it reddened the whole thing and made her look not just embarrassed but overheated while she was at it.
"You're going to tell me what the hell just happened, first. Then, you tell me."
"You're aware that there have been people, throughout history, who didn't exactly like my kind... our kind."
"Is that right?"
"It is. Of course, who can blame them? Dragons have not historically been humanitarians. They're carnivores, for the most part, and even the friendliest ones tend to go hunting for prey that's a little more annoying to local communities than rabbits."
"What, people?"
"Sometimes, but I meant more like cows. Horses. Big game."
"I guess, when you're some poor farmer, losing a cow isn't exactly spilled milk."
"Not exactly, no."
"So he was just, what? Hunting you because you stole his cow?"
Alex felt the smile slip from his face in spite of his better judgment. It was practically an admission of guilt, but then again, maybe he ought to admit guilt.
"No," he said finally. His voice was low and soft. "I didn't just steal his cow."
"I don't guess you want to talk about it?"
"There's something you should know. It's not just my secret to tell, alright?"
"Secret?"
"Your father's tied up in this, and if I don't miss my guess, there's a little of you in this, as well."
"Then you have to tell me."
"There's almost certainly a reason that your father didn't tell you already, you know."
"Yeah, and I want to know. So you'd better tell me."
Alex took a deep breath. "I'll tell you later. Right now, we need to get you dressed. Those things are distracting."
Diana didn't move so he pushed past her. There was an armoire in the little bedroom, and if she was lucky, she might find something in it. If it fit, all that much better.
"I'm not playing this game, Alex. You can't avoid telling me forever."
"I can avoid it for a few more minutes," he said, distractedly. There was clothing, but it had a smell that he didn't like. They'd been in there too long and had started to take on an acidic smell. It probably wasn't all that safe, but then again it wasn't going to matter a whole hell of a lot if the only available alternative was to go out in the winter air without a scrap on. "Here, try this."
She slipped the shirt on. It was hard to know for sure, without any pants on, but he suspected it would leave some midriff hanging out. But it was the best that he could do in a hurry.
"Get out of my clothes. I'll do this. Which, by the way, now that I think about it, means that you can start talking. How about that."
"I don't want to upset you," he said. His mouth was suddenly very dry, and all of this seemed like a remarkably bad idea. Why was it that she absolutely refused to listen to reason on this?
"You're going to upset me if you tr
y to play this 'keeping secrets' game much longer. Now tell me what the hell you and my father did."
Alex set down on the bed. It was sized for a child, and he dwarfed it. He could only imagine what it had been like for Keleth, who even in his human form was perhaps a foot taller and had fifty pounds on him or more.
"Are you sure we can't wait? There's still a red running around, one who's apparently quite committed to taking me out. Probably to taking you out, too. I wonder if he knows you're his, I don't know, grand-daughter. Wonder if that would put things into perspective."
"You think it would?"
He didn't answer that. It was just another train of thought that he didn't want to explore, and another thing that he had to pretend he wasn't thinking about for as long as possible, until she moved on. Hopefully, with time, she would.
"It would be easier, if we moved along. Found someplace else to hide. Made a plan for how we were going to deal with this big dragon. We could run. You're alive. I'd like it if things stayed that way."
"Staying alive yourself doesn't feature into it, huh?"
"It hadn't crossed my mind," he lied. He didn't work to make it sound believable. It didn't matter if he lived, but if it didn't matter then he'd prefer it if he did.
"I'm sure it hadn't."
Diana started pulling on a pair of stretch pants that might have been a comfortable fit when she was four or five years younger, but as she pulled them up over her hips, it pulled tight and framed her ass in a way that was very appealing. More appealing than being killed by a dragon three hundred years or more his senior.
"I don't want you to get hurt," he said again.
"Then tell me what this is about. Why's he after you?"
"Revenge," Alex told her.
"A human and a dragon working together for revenge?"
"I guess," he said. Then he shrugged. "It's an old story."
"Old how?"
"Older than you, that's for sure."
"How old do dragons tend to grow?"
"How long does it take to kill it?"
Diana didn't seem to have an answer to that. But she got the idea of what he was saying, and he hoped that was enough to answer the question even if it wasn't a direct response.
"Okay, so I'm young, then."
"One of the youngest I've seen," Alex agreed. "But you've got time."
"You're... how old?"
"Didn't your father ever tell you it was impolite to ask people their age?"
"Point taken," she said, and then rolled her eyes. "So, you're still avoiding the question. Revenge for what?"
He let out a long breath. "Revenge for what we did."
"Thanks," she said, the sarcasm dripping from her voice. "That still wasn't clear."
"I'm really not keen on talking about this, in case it's not clear. You want to hear it, you're going to have to deal with the delays."
"Fine. Get along with it, though. We don't have all day."
"No, we don't. If anything, we've got to get the fuck out of here. Which is why we should talk about this later, when everything is taken care of."
"No. You got me into this, and you're going to tell me what the hell I'm neck-deep in now."
"Would you believe me if I told you that there was more to this than you had realized?"
"Yeah, I probably would," she said. She probably didn't realize what sort of scale she was in for, and that was understandable.
She'd been human all her life. Nobody had ever told her that she was supposed to be anything else. There was probably a block in her mind, something stopping her from ever realizing that she wasn't entirely human, just like everyone else.
Dragon society was just a bad joke to her, and there was no way to bring her up to speed in the next five minutes, so what was going to come next was going to be a little ugly.
38
"I'd rather not say," Alex told her first, which was not totally untrue. He further knew that it wasn't going to cut it, and she wasn't going to accept it. But that didn't mean he wasn't going to try. That was the best way to go. At least, he hoped.
"I'd rather a lot of things," she said. She turned, finally wearing something approaching clothing. Anyone who looked would have known that she wasn't exactly clothed; the way that her chest jiggled pleasantly would have told them immediately that something was a little off about the entire outfit. "But I want to make something very clear here. You tell me now, or I will do everything in my limited power to make sure that you are destroyed.
"My father is dead. I'm all alone in this world, and I've just watched his only friend in this world killed, and you're telling me to believe that he is the one who killed my father, after knowing him for more than twenty years. And all that after the first person to have been accused of anything was you, yourself.
"So I have two suspects, and one of them is dead. The other one is telling me that it's the dead one, and he says that it'd all make sense if I understood something that had happened before I was born, and that would make it all clear to me. But now you want to try to tell me that you don't want to tell me what that thing is? I don't think so."
Alex swallowed hard and leaned away from her. She was in his face, her voice low and hard and none of that did a remotely decent job of explaining exactly how furious she seemed to him. There was a moment where he thought that he might not be able to speak when he opened his mouth.
"From the beginning, then?"
"Go right ahead," she said. "Don't leave anything out."
"I knew your father. I knew him for a long time; at times, by reputation, but as often as not, I knew him."
"You make it sound like he was several different people over time."
"A thousand years is a long time. You make it that long, and you'll be several different people yourself. Imagine it, for a minute. Living fifteen lifetimes. A human being could have children, and their children have children, and those children's children have children of their own. Fifty times."
"But not literally a different person?"
"Not literally a different person, no. So the only constant between us is... uh... you know how they say 'opposites attract?'"
"Yeah, I'm aware of that. You're not trying to avoid answering my questions, are you?"
"I'm trying to answer it. From the beginning. But there's a lot of history that's not immediately relevant."
"Okay. So yes. I'm aware of opposites attracting."
"The opposite is also more-or-less true. There were differences between your father and I, but there was more that was the same than was different. More than most dragons, before you think to answer that. You'd think we would have made good friends."
"Not the case, though?"
"Exactly right. But I respected the hell out of him. And apparently, they tell me, he felt similarly about me. Like we were on the same team, competing for the same position. You get me?"
"Okay, well, let's move it forward a little. Preferably within the last fifty years, if possible."
"So you understand the position we're in. I... it was my fault, I guess. Politics are complicated, and in our world, they're a little more complicated, still. Things get personal real fast, and they stay trouble for longer than it's worth."
"That doesn't sound that different from politics for everyone else," Diana told him; she said it like she was saying it more to herself than to him.
"I was in trouble. Or, I guess, a little more accurate, I was in a fight I wasn't going to win."
"With the red?"
"No," Alex said. "That's still a puzzle to me. Not with the red. That's new. But I was in over my head, put out word on the down-low that I needed help, I needed it bad, and I needed it yesterday."
"Okay?"
"And who should answer but Keleth – your father."
"Is that, what, his dragon name?"
"More or less," Alex answered, purposefully ignoring the tone of her voice that was as dismissive as it could possibly have been.
"And do I have one nobo
dy told me about?"
Alex closed his eyes. "Not that I know of. Not that anyone knows of. You're given it at birth, same as any other name. Dragon language stuff. Nobody learns it any more, and I haven't spoken it since I was a boy. But you get a sense for the sounds, at least."
"And so, since I was raised as a human..."
"You're getting off track, I think, but yeah. You've more or less got it. If you'd like to keep up with the distraction, though, I wouldn't mind one bit."
"Oh, please. Do continue. So you're in over your head, and you decide... what?"
"Your dad shows up, and we go work together. Two working in tandem can take out almost anything, if they try hard enough, and they work well enough together."
The thought that she could work as his partner in the attack on the giant red had crossed his mind before, but the words as they came out made it sound like a better idea than it was. She wasn't experienced enough to know it, but she heard the implication. An implication he regretted almost immediately.
"And then?"
"We got this guy, big ol' black, off my back."
"That doesn't sound that bad."
"It wasn't," Alex said, hoping she'd leave it there. Diana had always been relatively sharp, but if he could have just one thing, he hoped that she wouldn't push it.
"But you're telling me that there are people out there actively looking for revenge. People who have spent twenty years looking to kill you. And all because you roughed up a dragon and said 'and don't you forget it'?"
"No, there's more to it."
"Go on then. I'm not enjoying this twenty-questions game of yours."
He laid back and looked at the ceiling. It wasn't a place that people thought a lot about, when they were excavating. You don't look at it very often, except when you're lying on your back. Even then, most people just close their eyes when they're on their back like that.
The floor is important. You see it all the time. Practically nonstop. The walls are even more important. That's where your eyes naturally track, on four legs or on two, it's all the same. But the ceiling isn't.
"Your dad build you this place?"