Ashes and Flame

by Aiden Bates

  I shifted a bit further, just shy of my scales, and pulled in all the scents around me, sifting through them for more evidence of motel soap. Here and there I found a spot where he must have stumbled, put his hand on the ground. He’d fled across the open lot and then taken a turn away on the next block over, heading up the road instead. There, the scent got a bit lost for a while. The road was in good shape, he hadn’t apparently stumbled again. The only trace at that point was the occasional scent of singed asphalt. I was probably a quarter mile from the motel, which meant that he’d still been hot when he got this far.

  If there had been a billowing column of smoke from wherever he ultimately exploded, if that was how it worked, I wouldn’t have been the first to notice. There was nothing on the horizon, no indication that he’d set something else big on fire. That was good in one sense—he must have eventually cooled off—but it did make finding him more difficult.

  Still, I kept my senses alert, and hunted down every trace of anything that smelled even a little burned. I got lucky up the road. Off in the distance, there was a copse of grain silos and a barn. Here, a steep ditch lined the road on either side, and a fence cordoned off someone’s farmland that had been recently harvested, leaving behind mostly short, stubby stalks of wheat that were beginning to grow back for the final harvest in the fall. There was a patch of ground blackened by a short-lived fire just shy of the fence, and the barbed wire had faint traces of that same soap smell mixed in with the tang of metal.

  He’d hopped the fence. Now, that was curious. Headed for the barn? But why? I sharpened my ears, closed my eyes, and tried to listen for a heartbeat or voices. I had sharp ears, but the barn and silos were too far away to pick anything up, and a light breeze sighed through the stubby wheat. No choice but to get closer.

  I hopped the fence easily, and kept eyes and ears alert for anyone who might take exception to my trespassing as I made my way toward the barn. The thing was, everything about his flight from the motel made it seem like he was just trying to get clear of anything that might burn. But running for shelter—especially with indications that he was still hot when he made his turn—felt different. Like he wasn’t just avoiding setting fires, but that he had something to hide from. Maybe local law enforcement? It was possible. Mikhail said that glitchers were hunted down if they were found out, and taken in for a procedure that had made him pale to describe. Some kind of ‘incision’ that removed the problematic energy pathways, effectively cutting a mage off from their magic.

  Most, he’d explained, didn’t live very long after that.

  So if he’d been spotted, I supposed there was plenty of incentive to run.

  There were only a few more black patches, surrounded by crushed wheat. He’d paused to stomp out little fires that had caught. It was still just his scent, though. At least, right up until I reached the edge of the field by the barn.

  Something new joined him. A scent I didn’t recognize. Not human, that was for sure. It was a strong scent of storm in a place that hadn’t seen a summer rain for a while now, but not entirely natural. There was a certain musk to it, as if it were mixed with something nearly human but sweeter and sharper. I knelt to the ground and breathed it in, then found more evidence further on—just shy of a yard, and then another. Close enough to be the stride of someone, or something with long legs. Where had it come from, though? It started there, at the edge of the field, so it hadn’t followed him on foot across the wheat, or down the road. Like it just dropped out of the sky.

  I tuned my ears toward the barn. There were voices, distant, far behind it—a house in the distance was surrounded by a stand of trees. Probably the property owners. In the barn itself, I picked up the very faint sound of a heartbeat. Just the one.

  I summoned my dragon as I approached the barn cautiously, until my scales rippled over my skin, glinting blue in the sunlight. If I had to ruin my clothes, I had another set back In the car in town. Something about all of this made my nerves itch with the warning that there was more going on here than there appeared to be.

  The barn door was ajar, and I peeked through it before I tugged it open further. Rusty hinges squealed, and someone inside gasped. I heard scraping come from above, and looked up to see a loft where bales of hay had been stored. The scent of storm and smoke was stronger in here, overwhelming, as if the place had been soaking in it overnight.

  “Daniel?” I asked. “Daniel Stroud?”

  There was no answer, but that heartbeat grew louder and faster instantly. It was him. There was a ladder on the barn’s concrete floor. I picked it up and rested it against the edge of the loft. “I’m coming up,” I called. “I’m not here to hurt you, all right? Just… keep your cool, let’s not set anything on fire. Agreed?”

  “Go away,” a timid, thready voice called. “Whoever you are, I don’t care. You can’t be here.”

  “Don’t worry about me,” I said as I ascended the ladder. “I’m fireproof. I tracked you here from the motel. I don’t think you set the fire on purpose, you—”

  “Please, go back,” he squeaked. “I… I’m not alone in here.”

  I got to the top of the ladder and looked over to see that part of the loft floor had been cleared of debris. In the middle of a makeshift circle, there was a guy who looked like he’d been awake for about a week. His eyes were wide and bloodshot, his face pale and a little sunken. Dark circles lined his eyes, and his fingers clutched at a leather bag that had seen better days. A mop of dirty blond hair was pulled to a rough-looking knot at the back of his head. Despite all of that, though, I could see that underneath the grime he was heart-stoppingly beautiful. His eyes, especially, the way they looked up at me with desperation and pleading. I had to steel myself to speak to him.

  All around him were symbols that looked decidedly arcane, scratched out in something black on the barn floor.

  I peered around the barn. “I don’t see anyone…”

  “It’s still here,” he breathed. “It won’t leave. It’s waiting me out.”

  There was every chance he was out of his mind. “Daniel… that’s your name, right?”

  He gave a weak nod, his eyes darting to every dark corner of the place.

  I climbed the rest of the way onto the loft floor. “See these?” I asked, holding my arms up to show my scales.

  Daniel blinked, and nodded again. “Y-you’re a dragon.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “My name’s Rezzek. And I’m as tough as I look. So anything that’s here, you’re safe from it now. I’m gonna come closer, okay?”

  He grew panicked. “No, no, no—you have to go. It’s waiting. If I leave the circle, if I don’t keep up the sigils, it—”

  I put my hands up as I approached him, and tried to keep my voice low and soothing. “Whatever was here before,” I said, “it’s gone now. I smell… something… but if anyone else was here, I would hear and smell them, okay? Trust me, it’s just you and me right now.”

  A plaintive groan left his throat like the mewling of a hurt kitten. “That just means that it’s hiding. Please, you have to leave. I don’t want anyone else to get hurt because of me.”

  My chest constricted. Yeah. Those weren’t the words of a person who was part of some malicious evil cult. This guy was on the run. Had been for a long time, it looked like. I moved to the edge of the circle, uncertain what it actually was and not entirely willing to test it out and see. I had some general resistance to magic—all dragons did—but that didn’t mean I was resistant to just anything. “Is this thing safe for me?”

  He swallowed. “It’s… it’s not for people like you. It’s for things like it.”

  “Okay,” I said, but didn’t cross the border yet. He definitely didn’t trust me enough to let me get close. “Well, how about I make you a deal. You come with me, and I’ll get you out of here. I’ll take the wing, fly you far away. A lot better and faster than running on foot, right? I’m real fast, and whatever it is won’t be able to follow.”

  He gave
a bitter laugh. “Trust me,” he breathed, “it will. It can follow me anywhere.”

  I held a hand out. “If it does, I’ll burn it to nothing or rip it to pieces. Ever seen a dragon in full form?”

  Daniel shook his head slowly.

  I grinned, baring my teeth. “Trust me. Nothing fucks with a dragon.”

  It was hard to say if he was convinced or not at first. His eyes never stopped moving, in a constant state of searching. Up close, he smelled like adrenaline that I hadn’t caught in his scent before. “How long have you been here?”

  He shrugged. “Don’t know. A day.”

  “A day?” I echoed. I realized there was something in his hand. A chunk of something black, probably what he’d been making the sigils with. It was worn down to almost nothing, and there was something rusty dried around his fingernails. Blood, I realized as I picked up the faint coppery notes in the air. “You haven’t slept. You’ve been on edge for a whole day. Daniel, even if I did leave, you can’t keep this up. Seems to me like you’ve got two choices. Come with me, maybe I can get you away—at least for a while. Stay here, though, and whatever is after you is definitely going to get to you, eventually. I’m guessing you don’t want that.”

  That he must have agreed with. His head dipped. His shoulders sagged. I think if he had the energy for it, he might have let out a sob, but instead it was like he deflated. His heart was still pounding hard, and he definitely hadn’t calmed down any more than when I’d first arrived—but he struggled to his feet slowly. Everything about the way he moved was like his limbs were full of sand. He was exhausted, and it was impressive he was even still awake. He’d been running on adrenaline probably since he fled the motel. He came to the edge of the circle, and looked around furtively one more time before he cautiously reached for my hand.

  I didn’t hear it, but I smelled it. That probably saved me.

  Daniel’s eyes widened as the scent of a storm grew suddenly stronger, swelling up like a roiling cloud front. I whirled in time to see something made of writhing darkness emerge from a dark corner of the barn. Clawed hands reached out from the darkness as it plowed into me. If I hadn’t turned in time, it might have gotten to my neck. As it was, I opened my mouth to gush fire as my body swelled and my dragon rose up. Before I could, the thing hit me hard in the chest. I grabbed at it as I went tumbling, and found something solid inside that I held on to as I sailed over the edge of the loft and down to the hard floor below.

  I struck with a crack that sent a shock of thunder through my bones. My head snapped back against the concrete, and if I hadn’t been half-shifted, I would have cracked my skull open. Instead, I got an instant migraine as starbursts flashed across my vision. Still, I had my claws sunk into whatever it was, and even if I couldn’t see or hear with the stars and ringing, I pulled parts of it in opposite directions with a roar.

  The solid parts grew less solid. Instead of ripping something in two, smoke and shadow burst apart and flowed around my hands to re-form a few feet away. Claws flashed again, and something else glinted in them now. A shard of darkness that shone like metal. The shadow rushed me, blade flashing. This time, I at least had enough of a chance to cough up a gout of dragonfire.

  The fire ignited in my mouth and sprayed out into the whirling darkness. It recoiled instantly, thrashing as parts of it caught fire. Dragonfire wasn’t like the fire an elementalist created, though. It was a substance, like napalm, that clung to whatever was unlucky enough to get splashed with it. The fire didn’t go out.

  An inhuman shriek that split my eardrums and shook the walls of the barn burst out of the shadow, and it exploded into a crackling storm of lightning and black smoke laced through with flickering orange fire, then shot through the barn door and up.

  I staggered to my feet, my head still pounding, my ears deafened by the ringing from both the concussion and the creature’s shrieking. But I suspected that once it put the fire out, it would be back. There was no time to gather myself or recover; that would just have to happen on the go.

  I looked up at the edge of the loft and crouched, then leapt and landed unsteadily on the upper floor, significantly larger and probably scarier than I had been moments before. I turned to Daniel, who had cringed back to the far edge of the circle, and held a hand out. “Come on,” I growled through a throat ill-suited to easy conversation. “It’ll come back. I hurt it, though. That means it can probably die. Gotta get you out of here.”

  “N-No, I c-can’t—”

  “You want a chance,” I roughed, “then it’s with me or not at all. We’re wasting time.”

  He bit his lip, and his fingers clawed at that bag for a time. He looked down at it, almost as if letting it weigh in, before he finally exhaled a sharp whine of reluctance and then scampered forward to take my hand.

  I figured I would ask forgiveness for manhandling him later, when there wasn’t some kind of living shadow-lightning-darkness-demon-thing probably figuring out the most efficient way to gut us both, and hauled him out of the circle and into my arms before I turned and dropped down from the loft to the floor again. Where I landed, the concrete cracked. The impact jarred me, but I recovered in the next labored breath and carried him to the barn door. When it looked mostly clear, I put him down and shoved both doors open wide.

  “Give me some space,” I growled.

  Daniel blinked rapidly, and took several steps back. I called my dragon up, let it slide into my skin, and gave a long groan that became a deep rumbling growl in my massive chest as my clothes tore and my wings pressed out. I barely fit in the barn, but there were moments during a shift when a particularly clever opponent might take advantage. I pressed my wings tight against my body, and craned my neck around to find Daniel cowering some distance away, pressed to the wall, his eyes and jaw wide.

  I held a paw out toward him, and gestured him closer. With a swallow and a whimper, he crept forward and gathered what I wanted when I laid the back of my paw down so that he could crawl onto it. Like a warm cage, I closed my fingers around him, and lifted him to hold him close to my chest. On three legs, I lumbered out of the barn, then pushed up to my hindlegs and took a few running paces forward as I spread my wings.

  In the next second, the thunderous beating of my wings was all I could hear, then then the rush of wind, and then we were airborne.

  I spared one look behind me, just in case, and saw that in the distance a storm had begun to brew, dark clouds heavy and lit with silent lightning that I couldn’t help but feel had the weight of a furious glare behind it.

  Whatever that thing had been… something told me I hadn’t killed it—I’d only managed to seriously piss it off.

  4

  Daniel

  “I know, officer,” a voice was saying, deep and smooth but muffled. “I promise, it won’t happen again—we were just kind of far away from anything when he got sick. He’s my mate, I couldn’t risk him, you know?”

  I felt around, opened my eyes slowly, and realized I was in the back of a car. I craned my neck to see the dragon that had grabbed me outside the window, arms folded, and a police officer who was peering in the window at me, clearly suspicious.

  “Your mate?” the officer asked.

  The dragon’s back stiffened. “Yes. My mate. I’m sorry, is there some kind of a problem with that?”

  The officer’s expression grew a little tight. “No. No problem. Look, next time just keep in mind, you can’t fly that low over a populated area.”

  “I couldn’t take him any higher,” the dragon explained. “The air gets too thin. Look, if you need to write me a ticket or something, I get it and I’ll handle it but I really have to get him—”

  “It’s fine,” the officer said quickly. “Consider it a warning. And get yourself a shift-pack, maybe? I understand it’s not always feasible to be fully clothed, but technically it is still indecent exposure in this state.”

  “I’ll do that,” the dragon rumbled. “I don’t mean to rush you, but if you’re
not going to cite me…?”

  The officer gave a nod, and tipped his hat. “Of course. Hope he feels better.”

  “Thank you, officer.”

  The cop left us, and I relaxed marginally. A second later, though, the dragon opened the driver’s side door and slipped in. He glanced back at me. “You may as well get some rest. It’s a long drive.”

  “Where are we going?” I asked. “And… I’m sorry, I can’t remember your name.”

  “Not surprising,” he said as he adjusted the rearview mirror. “How long’s it been since you slept?”

  I shook my head and rested it on the seat. “I don’t know. A while.”

  “Well,” he said as he cranked the engine, “I’m Rezzek. Call me Rez, everyone does. It’s fine if you forget again.”

  “How do you know me?” I asked.

  He put the car into gear and twisted to look out the back as he pulled out of what I guessed was a parking spot. “I’ve got a friend who spoke to a few of your friends.”

  “I don’t have any friends,” I pointed out.

  He grimaced. “Yeah… he’s a necromancer.”

  My pulse quickened. I sat up, and pulled my messenger bag and the Book into my lap to hold tight to it. “You’re with Ivan?”

  Rez’s eyes narrowed. “Can’t tell if that’s excitement or fear.”

  That definitely wasn’t an answer. Had Ivan’s people managed to convince a dragon to join them? Dragons were sort of insular, it was pretty rare that one of them turned radical. “Are you with Ivan’s people or not?”

  He put the car into drive and pulled away from the strip mall I could see through the window now. “I’m not with Ivan’s people.”

  I caught his eyes in the rearview, slightly hard and watchful, as if he were waiting to see how I reacted. I tried to make it clear that I was relieved. Dragons could smell strong emotions, right? I thought I’d heard that somewhere. So I sagged back against the seat and gave a long sigh. “That’s good. Assuming it’s true.”