by Finley Aaron
Now it sounds utterly naïve.
Because I haven’t decapitated anything. My blades deflected their horns, which is helpful insofar as I have not been impaled, but that’s all I’ve accomplished.
I’m not even sure where the yagis’ heads are, or if they even have heads, or just those rapier-like spears sticking out from the bulge of their shoulders. I just know, in spite of the darkness, that I have not decapitated them, because I know how my blades feel in my hands when I’ve sliced through something, or when I’ve missed entirely and gone swinging around in a circle, nearly tripping over myself in the darkness, which would very nearly have been what happened now, had it not been for the twanging ping against their antennae spears.
Not that I really missed. I mean, I swung in the direction I wanted to swing. It’s just that, unlike dead cow carcasses, yagi can duck.
Okay, learning curve. I can do this.
I have to. It’s not as though I have any choice.
I face the nearest grating noises and swing my blades again. If nothing else, I’ll just keep swinging so the creepy creatures stay at arms’ length, because I do not want them touching me, or running me through with their antennae, or making me freeze up again with that grating noise (they’re still making the grating noise, it’s just that as long as I keep moving, it doesn’t seem to overpower me).
With this swing, I make contact, but instead of a satisfying slicing sensation resonating through my swords, I feel the wrenching twist of a glancing blow.
What, are these guys armored? Seriously, it’s like they’re steel-plated, or something.
“Ion!” I scream his name again, desperate for him to help me, and angry at him for not keeping me safe.
Ram always kept me safe.
Maybe I shouldn’t have left Ram.
The thought of Ram reminds me, not so much on a conscious level, but in a muscle-memory sort of way, of the butterfly stroke maneuver he taught me—could that have only been yesterday?
I pull my shoulders back and straighten, executing the move, both blades simultaneously, just as he taught me.
I’m not really aiming, just trying to keep my swords moving to keep the yagi away, to deflect their horns, but they’re close enough now, practically swarming me, that my sword hits one somewhere about the shoulder.
The blade glances against the armor, but not like before. No, this time the movement—drawing both blades in, together and toward me—pulls the blade flat and swift alongside the armor, inward, toward the yagi’s neck, slicing his head clean off.
The fact that I actually got something right is a shock to me, and might have been enough to make me stand still and stare, except thankfully, that muscle memory thing has combined with the serious levels of adrenaline that are searing through me right now, and I don’t pause or falter or anything. I just keep swinging.
Which is probably good because I have a sense that if I stop moving for too long, that dreadful sound they’re making will freeze my muscles rigid and lock my joints in place, which in addition to being a ghastly feeling, would also make me easy prey for their horns and talons.
So I swing my swords like I’m cutting an endless supply of ribeyes.
Yagi heads are falling everywhere. I bound forward, past two bodies as they fall, trying to get away from the slippery, smooth-domed heads that are rolling near my feet. They’re kind of greasy, too. Instead of blood they’re giving off this oily gunk that evaporates into a vapor that stings my eyes.
I’m moving backward, like I’m doing a backward butterfly stroke, escaping a step or two further with every head I decapitate.
I step free, spin, swing. For one thrilling moment, I think maybe I’ve got this.
And then I realize there’s someone else in the woods with me, crashing through the trees. It’s not Ion—last I saw him, he was standing off in the other direction, watching me with that hungry, mocking grin.
Whatever it is that’s coming toward me, it’s bigger than Ion, bigger than the yagi. Silver moonlight glints off two swords, and an unnatural cry cuts through the darkness, louder even than the wailing yagi, as something huge and angry bounds toward me.
Chapter Eight
I leap away from the screaming swordsman in the direction of more yagi, coming at them before they come at me. I have no choice but to keep slicing, using the move Ram taught me, decapitating yagi as fast as I can, spinning as I go to make sure none of them sneak up behind me and spear me through. Their horns have got to be two feet long, maybe longer—which, granted, isn’t quite as long as my swords, and certainly not as long as my reach, arms and swords combined, but they’re still insanely sharp and wicked looking.
Amazingly enough, although there had to be a least a dozen of these things, the ones left standing are beginning to be seriously outnumbered by the twitching corpses on the ground.
Now if I can just finish off the rest without tripping and accidentally impaling myself on my own sword.
This would be a lot easier if I had any light to see by. The wailing hiss of the living yagi is getting drowned out by the clatter of the fallen, but I can still hear Ion’s laughter. I turn toward it.
The screaming swordsman has stopped screaming and is beheading the last of the yagi. For one disoriented moment, in the darkness, I think it must be Ion, finally helping me.
But it almost looks like Ram. Could he have awakened and tracked us down and come to my aid? I suppose it’s possible.
Even as these thoughts register, I lower my exhausted arms and zero in on Ion’s laughter.
And something exceedingly freakish is happening. I mean more exceedingly freakish than decapitating yagi in the darkness of the Romanian woods.
Ion’s laughter is making him grow, almost like blowing up a balloon. Except, instead of being a bigger, rounder form of Ion, he’s changing shape, too.
And sprouting wings.
All of this is suddenly surprisingly visible because that kind of glowing gray-green-silveriness of his eyes is now emanating out of the rest of his body, which has a sort of shiny scaly appearance like a fish—like a lake trout or salmon. Except glowing. With wings.
Ion is turning into a dragon.
By the time I realize it, he’s done. He’s huge. Two, maybe three times bigger than he was before, but with a longer neck so that if he stretched out, he’d be longer still.
And then his wings, which have so far been poised above his shoulders, unfurl like an opening umbrella. Like a huge, bat-winged umbrella that glows with a silvery sheen, stretching through the woods, higher than the trees.
I’m not dreaming. I promise. It would be a nightmare, anyway, but I’m not asleep. Seriously, my subconscious never comes up with anything this vivid.
The air around me churns as Ion extends himself, straining upward with those massive wings far higher than the trees, beating the hair once, twice, three times, and lifting off the ground.
I’m standing there gaping, open mouthed (in my defense, I was sucking in air after an exhausting fight) when I realize Ion is flying toward me. But in the time it takes me to realize it, he’s there, his body so big that even as I dive away, all he has to do is extend one taloned leg to reach me. He wraps his clawed toes tight around my torso and plucks me from the ground.
The dragon Ion beats his mighty wings and lifts me up past the trees, high into the air toward the clouds. The woods and fallen yagi disappear from sight in the darkness, and I turn my attention to my predicament, able to think clearly for the first time now that we’re free of the sound of wailing yagi and the numbing gas of their vaporous slime.
Okay, I know that it wasn’t so very long ago, maybe half an hour at most, that I trusted Ion and followed him willingly through the woods. And I know it’s theoretically possible that he is somehow rescuing me, whisking me away to safety, or whatever.
But I really don’t believe that’s what’s happening. Sometime in the last half hour, between his mocking smile, his lack of willingness to help me wh
en I screamed his name, and the way he stayed back while the yagi nearly overwhelmed me, I realized that Ion is not on my side. I shouldn’t trust him. And I don’t want to go wherever he’s taking me.
Besides which, I’ve been afraid of dragons ever since I thought I saw them in the sky the night my village was attacked. So being picked up by a dragon and carried off against my will?
No. I’m not going.
I still have my swords. Maybe I could stab at Ion, or saw through his talons and cut myself free, but we are seriously high in the air right now, probably thousands of feet high, and it doesn’t seem prudent to free myself from his grip only to fall to my death.
So I’m looking around frantically, trying to figure out what to do, when I notice a blue streak rising up from the woods, shooting toward us like a bolt from the proverbial blue, whatever that is.
The speeding bolt shoots toward us, growing in size until I can see it’s another dragon, similar to the one that’s holding me, only with scaly skin that glows sapphire blue. Its wingspan is about the same an Ion’s but it’s burlier and kind of studly, insofar as a dragon can be studly.
The blue dragon doesn’t slow down as he nears us, but barrels into Ion with enough force to knock him off his flight trajectory. We’re tumbling through the air, out of control, and even though I don’t really want Ion to carry me off through the sky, I’m holding on to his claws for dear life.
The talons around me tighten their grip as Ion and the blue dragon wrestle in the sky. Ion’s scraping at the blue dragon with his free talons, holding me up close to his body as he beats at his enemy’s face with his wings, screaming like an eagle and spitting fire.
Yes, fire.
Okay, I know mythological dragons were often said to breathe fire, and all, but honestly, the fire takes me more by surprise than flying, never mind that I saw it in the sky above my village a decade ago. That, and the fire is blasted hot, the flame white hot as it emerges from his mouth.
And the blue dragon, of course, breathes fire right back, but he seems to be taking care to avoid hitting me. I appreciate that.
The blue dragon swipes at Ion with his taloned claws and then, without even so much as a twitch of warning to tell me to hang on tight again (I’d let go since he was squeezing me so hard), Ion whirls forward, snapping his talons toward the ground and flinging me toward the earth.
I am plummeting toward the trees below at a speed that’s much faster than a simple drop from the sky. Ion flung me with enough force I might worry about whiplash, if I wasn’t vastly more concerned about how fast I’m heading toward the hard ground.
My body spins as it falls, and for an instant I look up. The blue dragon is trying to fly downward toward me, but Ion is fighting him, pulling him back, blowing fire in his face as he strains to fly downward, towing Ion through the sky.
Then my body spins again, and I can see the woods, the trees, the path of the creek we were following. I wonder if it would do me any good to angle my body toward the creek, to try to land in the water. But it wasn’t that deep, and it had rocks in the bottom. Maybe I could fall in a pile of leaves, but I don’t know how to maneuver as I fall through the sky, and the treetops are zooming closer, a blink away.
The air whooshes from my lungs as talons suddenly grip me, gliding with me, forward instead of down, and then swooping slightly upward before sinking again, depositing me gently among boulders so big I can hide between them, out of Ion’s reach.
The blue dragon barely pauses before swooping off to the sky again, but he glances back, the briefest of glances, and yet his eyes lock on mine.
Blue. Sapphire blue and glowing.
And then he’s gone, shooting toward Ion, meeting him in the sky, continuing the fight.
In that tiny glance, millisecond though it was, I recognized him.
The blue dragon is Ram.
Don’t ask me how I know this. It’s not like I could possibly recognize him. I’ve never even seen Ram’s eyes before, and obviously the rest of him is completely different. But he looked at me, and the same way I could read his expressions from the twitch of his nose or the angle of his head, I could read this look. He was saying, “Stay hidden. Stay safe.”
So I shrink down between the boulders, tucking myself into a rocky nest of safety, leaning back so I can watch the battle in the sky.
They’re breathing some serious fire now, Ram especially, and I feel proud of him, and worried for his safety, and guilty about running away, all at once. Not that he should really blame me for running away. Obviously he was keeping some right hefty secrets from me, like the fact that those slicing moves were more about killing yagi than cutting steaks.
And, oh yeah, that he’s a dragon.
Ram and Ion tumble through the sky, clawing at each other, pulling back and barreling into each other, breathing searing fire and snapping with sharp teeth. I’m so focused on watching them, rooting for Ram, that I don’t hear the approaching noise until it’s really close.
Something is out there, in the woods just beyond my boulder. I sniff the air. Yagi? It’s hard to say. Their smell is still clinging to me from the battle, but I don’t hear the wailing sound from before. Then again, they didn’t make that sound until they were upon me, ready to pounce. I almost hope it is yagi, because I at least know how to fight them. Otherwise it could be a dragon, or some other fearsome creature I haven’t yet encountered.
I grip my swords—yes, I still have them—I got that much right—and peer past the boulders, trying to catch a glimpse of whatever is headed my way. But it’s dark down here, particularly dark. There is only shadow and deeper shadow.
The fighting dragons swoop low, breathing fire, and the glow of their flames illumine the woods for an instant.
“Ozzie!” I reach for her, and guided by the flash of dragon fire, she bounds toward me, barreling her shoulders into my legs in a hug that protects her face.
I crumple toward the ground, hugging her, holding her so tight, so grateful for the comfort of her warm furriness, so glad she’s okay, and that she found me.
How long I hold her, burying my face in her fur and choking out post-traumatic sobs, I’m not sure, but when I look up again and blink skyward, I can no longer see the dragons.
Where did they go? Did they fly off fighting? Did they kill each other off? Is Ram lying in the woods somewhere, hurting and bleeding and dying?
I really hope not.
“What should we do?” I ask Ozzie. “Should we find Ram?”
Ozzie only lowers herself down into the narrow stretch of soft earth between the boulders. I crouch beside her, and she places her head on my knee.
“What about Ram? Do you think he’s going to be okay?”
Ozzie exhales audibly, is if in answer to my question, but I don’t speak mastiff, and I don’t know what she means. Is she reminding me that Ram is pretty close to invincible, and a dragon besides? Or is she saying she’s tired, and we’re not going to gain anything by tromping through the woods in the darkness looking for him?
Or is she reminding me of what Ram’s look said? Stay hidden, stay safe.
Maybe she’s trying to suggest, in her gentle, patient way, that I’ve already rebelled from Ram’s instructions enough, and that maybe I should actually trust him, since my father told me to trust him, and since I nearly got us all killed by running away.
So I slump down on the dirt beside her and try to get comfortable, with my legs stretched out in front of me and my back against a boulder—which thankfully, in spite of being hard, is at least sloped at an angle that makes it decent to lean against. And Ozzie puts her head on my lap, kind of like she did in the car, a little like a blanket, which is nice because I need the warmth.
And I close my eyes and wonder. Does my dad know Ram is a dragon? Is that why my dad hired Ram to keep me safe? He must know, right? That dragons are real, that they might come after me, that the only way to keep me safe was to give me a bodyguard every bit as strong and scary as the blok
es who are after me.
Obviously Ion isn’t trustworthy. The way he flung me down like we wanted to smash me into infinite bits, and then dragged Ram backward to keep him from rescuing me, is a strong indicator that Ion is not trustworthy.
Did my father know that? Or did my father even send Ion?
Years ago, when I was about twelve years old, some of the other girls at Saint Evangeline’s were putting pictures of their mothers above their beds, and I wrote to my dad asking for a picture of my mother.
He told me he didn’t have one.
I’d forgotten that. Maybe, if I hadn’t been so swept away by finally seeing a picture of my mother, and so surprised that she actually looked like me, I would have remembered. My dad keeps a lot of secrets from me, yes, but he doesn’t lie to me. Not that I know of, anyway.
In retrospect, I don’t think my dad sent Ion. And I think Ram suspected that, but couldn’t prove it. He obviously knew Ion and probably knew they were both dragons.
Which bring up the next obvious question: why is a dragon after me, anyway?
Chapter Nine
When the sun rises high enough in the sky to reach past the boulders and warm my face, I awaken, sore and disoriented.
Ozzie is on my lap. The bandages around her nose have worked themselves loose at some point, and I can peek at some of the injuries below. They’re scabbed over, not actively bleeding. I might be able to remove the gauze, but I’ll wait until she wakes up. She needs her rest.
I lift my head slowly, easing out the kinks from sleeping in an awkward, slumped position. For the first time I realize we’re not alone. There’s a hand on Ozzie’s back, half-buried in her fur, and I look up, past the arm, the leather jacket, the thick black beard, to the face.
Ram’s face.
He’s sleeping. His eyes are closed, but his goggles are gone.
I have never seen him without his goggles.
Maybe it’s because everybody looks angelic when they sleep, even massive bearded swordsmen, but I can’t help thinking, bloody bollocks, who knew? Ram is a good looking guy. At least the top half of his face, the part not covered by the beard, is good looking. With his eyes closed, anyway.