Dragon

by Finley Aaron

  The day has worn on Mom, as well, and she finishes her steak quickly, excusing herself to return to our rooms. Since my sisters are lingering, spending more time chatting up Magnus and Angus than eating, I figure this is my chance to find out what Mom’s up to. She’s more likely to confess if it’s just me, especially if she’s already given up on hooking me up with anyone.

  Between the two of us, we find our way back through the halls and up the stairs to the warm light that shines from the open door of our suite. I close the door behind us and, not knowing how much time we’ll have before my sisters return, I waste no time asking questions.

  I try the indirect approach first. “Nattertinny Castle seems really cool. How did you find it?”

  “They have a website. You saw it.”

  “But how did you find the website?”

  Silence. And utter lack of eye contact as my mom suddenly becomes absorbed in rooting through her bag.

  I press further. “Do you know the Sheehys?”

  “Hmm?” Mom picks up the bag and all but sticks her head inside, muttering something about her contact lens case.

  “Isn’t it with your other toiletries? Did you put it in the bathroom?” I’m reminded that my eyes are pretty itchy, too, after long plane rides with my contacts in. We dragons have startling jewel-toned eyes, so when we’re out among other people, we wear color-dulling contacts to keep our true identities a secret. I slept in mine on the last plane.

  Itchy, indeed.

  “Oh, that’s right. Thanks.” My mom heads through one of the bedrooms to a bathroom, which is spacious and sparkling white with Carrera marble, and well-lit with chrome fixtures, which gives the room a much brighter feel than the other parts of the castle we’ve ventured through.

  Mom plucks out her contacts while I stand behind her, jealous of the relief her eyes must feel, but unwilling to abandon this conversation until I’ve gotten answers.

  Considering how much my eyes itch, I’m no longer willing to take the indirect approach. “Are the Sheehys dragons?”

  Mom fumbles the contact case, spilling lenses and lens solution onto the marble floor. “Oh, bloody hell. Wren?”

  “What?” I crouch down beside her to find the fallen lenses.

  Her amethyst eyes look guilty. “Why would you think…”

  “Why else would you bring us here? We’re turning twenty this summer. Older than you were when you married dad.”

  “That was a long time ago.” She plucks up a lens and rinses it carefully over the sink.

  “Not yet twenty-two years,” I note matter-of-factly, finding the other lens and holding it out to her, standing patiently behind her, meeting her eyes in the mirror. “So, are they?”

  “I dunno,” her Scottish accent is plenty strong. “They’re contenders. The strongest contenders I know of in the world. But I don’t know if they’re dragons and I can’t figure out how to ask, without, you know—”

  “Giving away that we’re dragons?”

  “Aye.”

  Chapter Four

  “So, what makes you think they’re dragons? And how sure can we be?” I’ve got my own suspicions, but I want to hear my mother’s side.

  “It’s a long story.” Her contacts out, she follows me back to the sitting room where my bags still sit, untouched, where Ed left them.

  “Tell it to me. I’ve got time.” I search for my contact lens case.

  “If I tell you, you’ve got to promise not to let on to your sisters.”

  “Why not?”

  “For one thing, I don’t want them disappointed if I’m wrong. You know how much Zilpha wants to marry. She’s a romantic at heart, but more than that, she wants a family of her own and children. If she thought these Sheehy boys were dragons, and then found out they weren’t, she’d be heartbroken. Rilla, too, but less so. I don’t mind telling you, because we all know…” she gestures emphatically with her hands, but doesn’t speak the words aloud, as though saying them might somehow bind me to a fate she’d rather I avoid.

  I have no such qualms. In fact, I’d love to be bound to this fate. “I don’t want to get married.” I announce aloud. I’ve found my contact lens stuff, and pull the itchy things from my eyes. Ah, sweet relief. We can see just fine without them—in fact, we dragons have exceptional eyesight. If anything, they make our eyesight worse, especially when we’ve had them in too long, which is my excuse for not seeing the sign to the castle earlier. My bright red irises look back at me from the mirror above the mantle, glowing with vibrant color.

  My mom makes an exasperated face. “Why don’t you want to marry?”

  I sigh. She’s asked me this question before, and I’ve thought about it. I can almost put it into words, but I don’t want to offend her. “I want to be me.”

  “You don’t stop being yourself when you marry.”

  “But I want to be me. Wren. Alone. Master of my fate, hero of my own story. Ever notice how many movies, when they get married, that’s it? The story ends when they get married, or fall in love, or whatever. I don’t want my story to end.”

  “It doesn’t end. You just live happily ever after.”

  “As someone else. Your name changes. You change. I don’t want to change.” I scowl. She’s gotten out of telling me her story. Time to fix that, and quickly, before my sisters show up and she refuses to tell it at all. “Enough about me. The Sheehys. What makes you think they’re dragons?”

  There’s a fireplace at one end of the sitting room, and a handy stack of wood beside it. Still cold in my damp clothes, I head toward the stone mantle, while Mom settles into one of the two sofas that flank the hearth.

  I pile wood in the fireplace, check to be sure the damper’s open, and open my mouth as though to yawn, instead letting loose a torrent of flames onto the dry wood, starting a crackling, cheery fire.

  Sometimes I love being a dragon.

  “Mom?” I turn to find her looking sheepish. “The Sheehys?”

  She begins reluctantly. “You know how my mother and father met, right? My mother, your grandmother, Faye Goodwin, is from Scotland. She was a dragon, one of the last of her kind. She saw her friends and family hunted nearly to extinction, and she began to despise what she was. So when Eudora, a dragon from Siberia, sent a rumor through the dragon world that she could change dragons into humans, my mother went to her.”

  I settle into the sofa opposite my mom, cringing slightly, because I hate this part of the story. My grandmother was tricked by Eudora and nearly killed. Fortunately my mom spares me the details.

  “My father, Elmir, had spies watching Eudora. He learned Faye was there and went to rescue her. Until that time, he’d never met her. Didn’t know anything about her, hadn’t even realized there was a female dragon anywhere in the world until it was almost too late. But as he tried to nurse her back to health from her injuries, they got to know each other and fell in love. I am their only child, hatched from the lone egg she laid before Eudora attacked again and the yagi killed my mother.”

  I nod, knowing well the story from this point forward. Mom had no idea she was a dragon until she was eighteen, almost nineteen, and the yagi hunted her down. My father protected her and brought her back to her father, Elmir, her only living parent.

  Mom continues, “At the time when my father and mother met, my father only knew of very few remaining dragons, nearly all of them male. He asked my mother if she knew any other dragons.”

  This is new. I’ve never heard this part of the story, and I’m instantly intrigued. “Did she?”

  “She said there was a dragon who lived near Loch Ness, a male dragon. Long before, they’d discussed marriage, but since she didn’t want to be a dragon anymore, she didn’t want to marry him. She wanted to be something else. She rebuffed his advances and refused him.”

  I’m on the edge of the sofa now, riveted. There is another dragon in this world? We’re not alone? It’s the most amazing feeling. Incredible, really. And since dragons don’t grow any older
once they’ve reached the age of maturity, there’s every chance the dragon is still around, an eligible mate for one of my sisters. “What’s his name?”

  “She didn’t say.”

  “She didn’t say?” I’m gob smacked. This is the most important information anyone could have told me, perhaps ever, and my grandmother simply failed to mention it?

  “She was injured. Dying. They had a lot on their minds. It didn’t seem important then. Besides that, you know how it is—we don’t reveal our identities to anyone, especially back then, when dragons were actively being hunted to extinction. Sharing his name meant putting a mark on him, targeting him for death.”

  “But grandpa wouldn’t have hurt him.”

  “True, true. But when you’re in the habit of keeping a secret, you don’t spill it the first chance you get.”

  “But we need to know his name. Zilpha wants so much to marry. She wants it more than anything. If dragons are going to continue to exist for another generation, we need to know the identity of the man—”

  “I know, I know. That’s why we’re here. We’re going to try to find him. If he’s still alive he should be around here somewhere. Dragons don’t leave their treasure hoards unprotected.” Her words remind me of the advantage we have of being a family, instead of one dragon all alone. My father and brothers are watching over our village, our treasure and our people. In the same way, when my father made the perilous journey home with my mother nearly twenty-two years ago, her father, my grandfather Elmir, watched over both his and my father’s villages, which are neighboring kingdoms among the Caucasus Mountains of northern Azerbaijan.

  If my mother’s suspicions are right, there’s a dragon around here somewhere. Maybe even in the same building with us. “And Nattertinny Castle? Why’d you pick this place?”

  “It’s the oldest castle in the region that’s been continuously occupied by the same family. On top of that, in the old Scots Gaelic, the nat prefix was associated with dragonflies and a feminine variant of the word dragon. And teine, which transliterates into the suffix tinny, means fire.”

  I put the words together. “Dragon-fire castle?”

  My mom smiles. “And conveniently, they let out rooms.”

  For a few seconds, I study the fire, my very own dragon fire in the dragon fire castle. I’m thinking Mom is pretty savvy, after all, for bringing us here. But then I realize something troubling. “Mom?”

  “Hmm?”

  “You said Grandma Faye knew of one other dragon, but there are four Sheehys, and two sons.” I’m trying to rectify what she’s told me with what I know. See, dragons are immortal creatures, insofar as they live forever, unless you kill them. When we’re in dragon form we’re pretty tricky to kill. When we’re in human form, we’re nearly as vulnerable as anyone else. But no matter which form we’re in, we only age until we’re young adults, and then we just hang out looking twenty or so for centuries.

  So if my grandma knew another dragon, even three hundred years ago, he’d still look like he was my age today. He’d still be a perfectly viable romantic partner, even if he was hundreds of years old. I know that may seem strange to people who are only humans, but it’s perfectly normal for dragons.

  Mom frowns. “I’ve thought about that. It’s possible she only knew of one of the sons. One may have been born since. Or she might have known Malcolm. Perhaps he found Blair later and married her and had the two sons.”

  I mull these possibilities. “How old do you think Malcolm looks?”

  “He looked younger on the website than he does in real life.” She sighs.

  “I’m not going to argue, he’s in great shape, plenty handsome, but I don’t know that I’d say he looks forever twenty. His sons look twenty, but they also look younger than he looks.”

  Mom throws her hands into the air. “Who knows? We can’t say. Perhaps, if you get to be hundreds and hundreds of years old, perhaps it starts to show. Perhaps he wears makeup to look more appropriate to his age.”

  “Perhaps.” It is a possibility. My mother is guilty of reading articles about ‘make-up mistakes that age you,’ just so she can make those same ‘mistakes’ in an effort to keep people from thinking she’s one of my sisters. And I can tell the difference when she uses them.

  Mom rises to her feet. “Why don’t you change out of your damp clothes and get to bed? We won’t solve all the mysteries of the universe tonight.”

  I rise as well. “Indeed, we won’t.” But tomorrow is another day, and perhaps, with Ed’s help, I might solve a mystery or two.

  *

  In spite of my jet lag, I awake early the next morning, eager to learn whatever I can about the questions that have been plaguing me. Are sea monsters real? Are the Sheehys dragons, or is there some other dragon somewhere in the vicinity who’s been stealthily hiding out for centuries, ever since my grandmother rebuffed his advances?

  I follow the scent of bacon downstairs and find Blair cooking up breakfast in the vast kitchen that adjoins a smallish dining hall.

  “What can I get for you?” She asks with a smile.

  “Is there any more of that beef left over from last night?”

  She dismisses my question with a wave of her hand. “Oh, no. Ed took care of that. I’ve got fresh bacon, though, and blueberry scones coming out of the oven in three minutes.”

  “Scones and bacon sound great.” I smile, even though I can’t help wondering what Ed did with the meat. It was good meat. I hate to think it may have gone to waste.

  “Coffee until then?”

  “I’d love some.”

  My sisters arrive as I’m eating. They’re excited about spending the day with Magnus and Angus, and they don’t mind that I won’t be joining them. I can’t help wondering if they suspect who Magnus and Angus might really be, or if they’re just keen on romping through the highlands with a couple of handsome fellows. Knowing Rilla and Zilpha, it could be either.

  Finishing my breakfast, I grab my jacket and camera from my room and follow the back hall shortcut to the courtyard. I’m early, but Ed is already there, shoveling the coals from last evening’s fire into a metal tub. When he sees me, he self-consciously grabs a t-shirt and tugs it on before greeting me.

  “Lemme just finish this here, and we’ll be off.”

  “Take your time. I’m early.”

  With a few more hefty scoops he clears the fire pit, then hefts the ash tub. “Follow me.”

  I follow, grateful he’s not the chatty type, glad he’s invited me on this excursion in the first place. The Sheehys seemed surprised by this offer, which makes me feel like I’m being given an exclusive glimpse of the loch most tourists would never get to see. At the same time, I can’t help wondering about the breadth of his knowledge of local monster lore. Last night, he made it sound as though he knows some things about the Loch Ness Monster.

  Maybe, just maybe, if there’s a dragon in the area, maybe he knows a bit about that, too.

  But I can’t think how to bring up the subject. I’m not a chatty person and neither is he, so we make our way in mostly silence to an old pickup, and rumble down the rutted path of Broadbottom Road, which is not nearly so broad as the name suggests.

  When we reach the gate I offer to hop out and open it so Ed can drive on through, and he accepts my offer with gratitude, and then we’re through and away, in a matter of minutes efficiently covering in reverse the path it took me and my mother and sisters so long to decipher in the rain the day before.

  And before I’m quite sure I’m even ready to be at the lake, I catch glimpses of its mirror-like surface reflecting the morning light, and then Ed turns off the main road onto a pair of ruts I wouldn’t have thought passable by vehicle—which, even driving upon them, I am still not convinced are passable by vehicle.

  And then he rolls to a stop by a small wharf with a handful of fishing boats docked alongside it, none more than sixteen feet in length, most hardly more than rowboats. These are private recreational vessels, not
tour boats. Ed leads me to a dinghy equipped with both oars and an outboard motor.

  I hesitate, looking first at the tiny craft, then at the vast loch. To be honest, when I was floating on my back in a vessel made of my own wings, last summer when I was attacked on the Caspian Sea, I was bigger than this dinghy. We grow in size when we take our dragon shape.

  Ed hops into the boat, which lurches from his weight, sloshing in a less than reassuring manner. He extends one gnarled hand up to me. “Come aboard?”

  I glance back the way we came. Along the shore the water seemed clear, with rounded rocks protruding up from the surface, and submerged rocks still visible through the water amongst them. But here, where the water is only slightly deeper, I look down into darkness, a kind of blackness that could hide anything, darker than the halls of Nattertinny Castle at night.

  “The water is dark. I can’t see the bottom,” I inform Ed while I clutch my camera close to my body, not taking his proffered hand, not moving any closer to the boat.

  “Aye,” he acknowledges. “’Tis the peat content. Loch’s thick with it. Can’t see more than five feet down. Black as night down there, ‘tis.”

  His words are not reassuring, but something about his matter-of-fact tone and the transparency of his admission remind me of what Malcolm said the previous evening—that Ed was one of the safest guys a person could venture onto the Loch with.

  Ignoring the dark, bottomless water, my eyes fixed on Ed’s face, I take his waiting hand and step into the boat.

  Chapter Five

  The tiny vessel lurches, rocking unsteadily, and I hold tight to Ed’s hand, my eyes pinched shut.

  “Ye goin’ to be all right, then?”

  “Yes. Fine.” I chirp, forcing my eyes open. I paste a tight smile to my lips and give him an impatient look, as though he should get on with casting off. Like I’m not the one holding us up.

  “I’m goin’ to need me hand then.”