Sleeping Dragons

by Phoebe Ravencraft

  “You’re late,” Ben said.

  “By, like, three minutes,” I retorted.

  “Ten.”

  “Sorry,” I said. “I had trouble picking out an outfit.”

  Ben’s gaze trailed down my body, taking in my look. I wore a red-and-blue muffler, a blue Pink letterman’s jacket that was really not warm enough for the weather, black leggings that showed off my ass, and blue Doc Martens. As usual, I had my backpack and katana with me. Ben’s face said he did not approve.

  “Yes, I can see you put a lot of effort into it,” he said.

  “Ooh, the sarcasm is strong in this one,” I teased.

  “Planning on fighting off ninjas at Mama’s grave?” he asked.

  “I hope not,” I said. “But I don’t go anywhere without my self-defense.”

  “For God’s sake, Sassy, we are not going to get attacked at the graveyard.”

  I hoped that was true. But frankly, I couldn’t take any chances. The Guild of the Blade still had a hit out on me. And my life had gotten pretty fucking strange in the last few days.

  “The sword comes with me, Ben,” I said.

  He scowled. Then he sighed and shook his head.

  “Come on,” he said. “My car’s over here.”

  We walked half a block to where he’d parked. A black Toyota Camry awaited us.

  “Still no Lexus, huh?” I said.

  He shot me another irritated look.

  “I’ve only been with the firm two years,” he said. “I’ve still got a ton of student debt from law school. I’ll get a fancy car when I make partner.”

  Part of me felt bad. There was no need to needle him like this. Ben was hardworking, and he was living his dream. It was really assholic of me to piss on it.

  And frankly, I wasn’t sure why I was doing it. Maybe it was because I was falling into familiar banter. Maybe it was because I didn’t want to go out to Mama’s grave. Maybe it was because I was still angry about finding out who my dad was right after he was brutally murdered. Whatever the reason, I was taking it out on Ben. I told myself to stop.

  We drove in relative silence to the graveyard. I didn’t know what to say to him. He wasn’t really interested in my job at The Dragon’s Lair, and I couldn’t tell him about what I was doing with The Order. First of all, a lawyer did not need to know that I was planning to assassinate a rich guy contemplating a run for Congress. Secondly, Ben had always thought my interest in sci-fi and fantasy was silly. If I told him I was a magical badass training to slay a dragon, well, he’d probably think I’d finally gone full-on crazy and have me committed.

  “What happened to your hand?” he asked.

  “Oh,” I said, looking at the Ace bandage protruding from the sleeve of my jacket. “Nothing. I messed up at the donjon. I didn’t have my wrist straight when I was punching the Wavemaster, and I sprained it a little.”

  “How does one sprain a wrist ‘a little’?” he asked.

  “When one has a mild sprain instead of a severe one,” I answered, trying and failing to keep the bile out of my words. “It’s no big deal, Ben. I’ve got it wrapped. It’s getting better. It doesn’t even hurt that much anymore.”

  He didn’t say anything for a few seconds. Then he went where I’d known he would.

  “Sassy, you need to be more careful,” he said.

  “Ben—”

  “No, I’m serious. You need to find some direction. You’re wasting your time teaching karate and selling games. This isn’t what Mama wanted for you.”

  “Ben, don’t do this today,” I said, barely controlling my anger.

  “Sassy, I’m just trying to—”

  “Yeah, yeah. You’re just trying to help. Well, I don’t want your ‘help,’ okay? And I don’t care what Mama wanted for me. She’s dead. I don’t owe her a God-damned thing. It’s my life. I get to live it the way I see fit.

  “Look, you did what you wanted. You went to school. You became a lawyer. You got a job at a big-time law firm. Congratulations. I’m sure Mama would be proud.

  “But that doesn’t work for me. It’s not what I want. And if Mama can’t be proud of me after she’s in the ground, then to hell with her!”

  Ben’s eyes popped open wide, and he turned to look at me despite the fact that the car was in motion.

  “Watch the road,” I snapped.

  He turned back front and drove. I could tell he was pissed at me. I shouldn’t have said that.

  I wasn’t even sure why I had. It just came out.

  “Sorry,” I said. “I didn’t mean it.”

  He didn’t reply right away. He just drove in silence for, like, two or three blocks.

  “It’s okay,” he finally said. “This is a hard day for me too.”

  Yeah. A hard day. Now that I knew the truth about my father, they were all hard days for me. I knew I shouldn’t be such a bitch to Ben.

  But I just couldn’t stand the Mama-Knew-Best Act. Not anymore.

  We arrived at the graveyard twenty minutes later. It wasn’t very nice. Mama was a single mom, who raised two kids, got cancer, and died a year later, since she couldn’t really afford treatment. It wasn’t even one of those cool, gothic graveyards with lots of old tombs and stuff. It was just a poor person’s final resting place.

  Mama’s gravestone was only about two feet wide. It had her name, the year she was born, and the year she died. Ben had paid a little extra to have “Beloved Mother” inscribed on it. That was it.

  The two of us stood over it, staring down and trying to figure out what to say. Despite this being a tradition, it was awkward.

  “Happy birthday, Mama,” Ben said. “Hope you’re enjoying yourself in Heaven.”

  It sounded stupid to my ears, but what else was he supposed to say? She was dead, and that made everything weird.

  “I still haven’t made partner at the firm yet,” Ben went on. “But I’ve only been there a couple years. Mr. Anderson respects my work. I just need a good case to really prove what I can do.”

  I stuffed my hands into my jacket pocket while Ben continued to talk to Mama’s gravestone. I didn’t know what to say. I didn’t know what I was doing here. I didn’t really believe in life after death. Despite my recent discovery of the existence of magical creatures, the whole concept of an immortal soul that lives on after you die just didn’t hold any appeal to me.

  “I miss you,” Ben said.

  He fell silent. I looked sideways at him. He wasn’t crying, but he looked weak, depressed, not the strong, reliable man I knew him to be. It was funny how Mama’s death just knocked the core right out of both of us.

  And standing here at her grave, I was suddenly overcome with anger. Why had she hidden me from my father? Why had she punished me whenever I asked about him? I’d spent my whole life trying to figure out who I was. Why had she deliberately made it hard?

  “Ben?” I said.

  “Yes?”

  “Do you remember your dad?”

  He turned and stared incredulously at me. Whatever he’d thought I would ask, that wasn’t it.

  “Sassy,” he said, “it’s Mama’s birthday today. Can we talk about my dad another time?”

  I frowned. I knew I’d made this awkward situation worse, but I needed answers.

  “Please, Ben,” I said. “It’s important.”

  He sighed. Then he looked at the gravestone again.

  “I remember him in his Army uniform,” he said. “But I was really young when he died. I can’t be sure if those are actual memories, or if I made them up from seeing photos of him. Remember that picture Mama kept of him on the mantle?”

  “Yeah.”

  “That’s how I remember him. But is it a memory of him, or am I just remembering the photo?”

  I thought about that. What a terrible question to have to ask yourself. I mean, until I saw a police photo of him lying dead in a pool of his own blood, I had no idea what my dad even looked like. Ben at least had a picture, but he didn’t know if he actually re
membered. I sympathized in a way I hadn’t before.

  “It’s funny,” he said. “There are so many single moms, so many kids without fathers. I can’t help but think how unfair it is. I was supposed to be one of the lucky ones. I was supposed to be one of the kids who did grow up with a father, a male role model. But instead, he died stupidly when I was so young I can barely remember him. It’s like I’m cursed, like my whole generation is cursed.”

  Tears formed in my eyes. God, I knew exactly how he felt. My whole life, I’d been taught my dad was an asshole, that he’d knocked up my mom and disappeared. Mama hated him and tried to teach me to do the same. And she’d get so mad at me when I wouldn’t.

  But it turned out, Eli had been searching for me for twenty-five years. He’d been looking, and he hadn’t been able to find me. Mama had made sure he couldn’t.

  Ben and I were very much alike. We wanted our dads, and our dads wanted us. But Fate kept them away. His dad was killed. I was hidden from mine. And then he was murdered right before he found me.

  I loved Ben. He was my big brother. Of course I loved him. But I’d never felt closer to him than I did at that moment at Mama’s grave. It helped to know that we were basically in the exact same situation – missing a father who was taken from us.

  “Thanks, Ben,” I said.

  “For what?”

  “For being a brother I could look up to,” I said. “I never knew my dad, and you barely knew yours. But you grew up to be a good man and helped take care of me. We probably both would have been better off if our dads had been in the picture. But you did a damn fine job of being the man of the house.”

  He looked at me with wet eyes. He searched me to see if I was bullshitting him. I wasn’t. I called him Obi-Wan because I liked Star Wars, but also because I saw an older man I could rely on the way Luke Skywalker did with Kenobi. Obi-Wan was Luke’s mentor. Ben was mine.

  He drew me into a hug, and I wrapped my arms tightly around him. Then I started crying. All the pain of not knowing my father, of learning he’d been searching for me, of finding out I had another brother who hated me, of discovering I was special but Mama had hidden it, drilled me in the gut like Kai’s best sidekick. The oxygen went out of my soul. My strength drained away.

  “It’s okay, Sassy,” Ben soothed. “It’s okay.”

  It wasn’t okay. I was pissed at Mama for keeping me secret from Eli Silverman. I was pissed at her for fucking him when he was married to someone else.

  But Ben holding me and getting to grow up with him made some of it right. At least I had a big brother, who, despite being an overbearing pain in my ass, loved me and cared for me.

  “Come on,” he said, letting me go at last. “I’ll buy you a coffee.”

  He took my hand and led me back to his car. I wished I could tell him what I was going to do for The Order. But if he found out, it would be the end of our relationship. He wouldn’t be able to keep treating me like a misguided little sister that he still loved. He’d only see me as an insane criminal. And frankly, if I hadn’t seen all the shit I had in the last few days, I’d have thought the same thing.

  So I said nothing. I kept the moment as perfect as I could. I needed it if I was going to go through with The Order’s mad plan to assassinate a dragon.

  Eighteen

  T he next several days weren’t any better. As Felicia had predicted, Ron punished me for telling Dave the Creeper to step off. I had to deep-clean the bathroom. Then I had to clean the windows, which probably hadn’t been done since The Dragon’s Lair opened twelve years ago. I had to pull out every last one of those damned Games Workshop models and inventory them. If there was a gross or tedious task that hadn’t been done in years, I had to do it. It was petty and stupid. But it was better than getting fired, if only a little.

  Meanwhile, as soon as Kai saw I’d injured my hand, he forced me to take a break from teaching.

  “You can’t demonstrate the techniques properly with only one hand, Sassy,” he’d said.

  As right as he was, that was going to cost me almost a week’s pay. I made a mental note to kick Big Bro in the nuts before he could turn them to blue steel. Asshole.

  Of course, since we were on a tight timetable, The Order made few accommodations for the injury Ephraim had inflicted on me. In addition to training me to use the decharmer, they forced me to practice the actual assassination. I had to alternate between being unable to disarm the box and the monotony of pretending Erin was Dirk McCray, while she barked instructions at me.

  “D’Krisch Mk’Rai has a lot of magic at his disposal, even in his human form,” Erin cautioned me. “He will be able to defend himself if you don’t surprise him, and given his disrespect for The Veil, he may choose to assume his true form if he feels threatened.”

  “In his bedroom?” I’d asked.

  “Possibly,” she answered. “If you scare him, he will do what he thinks is necessary to protect himself. That could include dropping his disguise. And since a mature dragon will not fit in a bedroom – even one as large and ostentatious as McCray’s – that will rip apart the building and potentially reveal what he really is to the world.”

  “That seems bad,” I commented.

  “Yes. So, you will need to strike quickly to get him. Knifing him in the heart is the surest way to take him out, but there is a problem with that strategy. The Jeweled Dagger of Constantinople is over nine hundred years old. Despite any curses that may be associated with it, it is not magical.”

  I was slightly relieved to hear that. Since I hadn’t been able to work the decharmer, knowing the knife was mundane was comforting. At least I couldn’t fuck that up.

  “And since it is a collector’s item, it pretty much just sits in a display case in Mk’Rai’s vault. So it won’t be sharp. You’d have to be awfully strong to force a dull blade through his sternum.”

  That was a good point. Jesus, this plan just kept getting stupider.

  “So, you’ll want to come up behind him, and stab him in the neck,” Erin went on. “Ordinarily, I wouldn’t recommend that, since if he transforms into dragon form, it won’t be nearly enough of a fatal blow.

  “But if you get him in the side of the neck, his first reaction is going to be fear and to put his hand to the wound. While, he’s confused, and before he can react to the danger, stab him in the back. You’ll be able to get to the heart more easily, and he’ll be dead before he knows what happened to him.”

  I shook my head. The plan had merit, but it was decidedly unheroic. I didn’t see this making me the champion of goodness and light Felicia thought I was.

  Regardless, we practiced. Erin handed me one of those collapsible-blade stage knives and turned her back on me.

  “Okay,” she said, “here we go.”

  “You sure I won’t hurt you?”

  “You shouldn’t,” she said. “But try not to hit me too hard.”

  Sure.

  Okay.

  Great.

  I took up a fighting stance. As if to try to talk me out of this, my wrist throbbed. I told it to shut up; it wasn’t the one holding the knife.

  Taking a deep breath, I launched myself at Erin, slipping to her left to try to stab her with a back-thrust. She whirled in my direction and brought up a perfect windmill block with her right hand, slapping the knife away.

  “Hey!” I complained. “What kind of test is this? McCray won’t know what I’m doing. You can’t react as though he will.”

  Erin smiled at me.

  “You’re right,” she said. “It’s not exactly fair.

  “But the dragon has lightning-fast reflexes and magic I can’t simulate. The best way to teach you to move swiftly enough, is for me to anticipate your attack and try to thwart it.”

  I frowned. That sounded a little like bullshit to me. But I supposed she had a point.

  “Fine,” I said. “But just so you know, you’re cheating.”

  We reset in our positions. I tried the same maneuver, and Erin whirle
d to stop me. This time, I got the knife to her neck before she knocked it away with her left ulna and drove a reverse punch into my gut. I barely saw it in time to tighten my muscles.

  “Oh, I see,” I said. “So now you gonna hit back?”

  “I’m just trying to make it as hard as possible for you, Sassy. No matter how well I do here, Mk’Rai is going to be better. Get so you can kick my ass. Then you’ll have a chance against him.”

  I threw her another scowl. She was definitely upping the ante on this. All right, woman. You want my best? Here it comes.

  She turned her back, and I went for it again. Despite my natural speed, I couldn’t get the knife on target before she blocked it and counterpunched. I instinctively low-blocked with my left arm, crying out when my sprained wrist protested being used as a shield. Before she could take advantage, I got my left leg up and snap-kicked her in the gut to double her over, then drove a front thrust kick into her sternum.

  Erin went staggering backward and fell on her ass. I dropped the knife and rubbed my wrist.

  “No!” Erin cried. “Damn, Sassy, you had me, but you didn’t follow up. If it goes down like that for real, you need to get on top of him and bury that knife in his throat before he can react.”

  “God damn it, Erin, I hurt my wrist! It’s still sprained.”

  “Well, you’re gonna have to work through that if it happens during the mission,” she said as she got up. “But let’s get you some padding for it, so you can keep training without making it worse.”

  I wasn’t sure whether to be mad or grateful. On the one hand, I didn’t think she should be driving me like this when I was injured. On the other hand, at least she was making an accommodation.

  And fighting with her was a lot more pleasurable than working with Ash on the decharmer. The endorphins from the exercise and the familiarity of practicing a combat maneuver at least made me feel comfortable, even though she was getting the better of me more than I was of her. Sparring was fun.