I could only stare for those few seconds, watching the shrinking and reconfiguring bones and muscles. Their joints reversed direction with a sickening-looking jerk, and within a matter of seconds, two men stood where the erensyi had been, stark naked, bleeding, and swaying on trembling muscles.
"Holy...”
I turned again sharply, once more startled when I remembered the golfers.
The four men all stood there now, looking like they might be going into shock.
The angry guy in the middle had gone completely blank-faced, like some part of him had just shut off.
“What the hell was that?” the dark-haired one excitedly shrieked.
Deciding I really couldn’t do much with these jokers, I looked back at Nik.
As I did, I felt... something.
Whatever it was, it was intense enough to scare me, and to cause me to take a step towards him and Razmun, almost without knowing I’d done it. I was still staring at the two of them, lost somewhere between shock at the transformation I'd just witnessed, and fear about what might be about to happen next... when Nik collapsed on the grass.
He fell like dead weight, without making a sound.
Reminded of what he’d done after I’d taken that shrapnel out of him, I thought he was out cold at first.
Then I saw him laying there, clutching a series of deep, red lines in his chest with a blood-covered hand, his eyes open, a pale blue.
I didn't think that time.
I just ran.
I reached Nik’s side even as the first of the police cars pulled up to the road at the edge of the golf course lawn, about a hundred yards from where Nik lay on the grass.
Throwing myself to the ground beside him, I took his hand, reaching for his face even as his eyes fluttered under my touch. I was aware, somewhere, of a commotion around us. I heard Razmun shouting commands, found myself thinking somewhere in the background that they were all running, that they would leave us here to take the fall.
And they did.
By the time I looked away from Nik's face, the lawn was mostly emptied of morph.
I saw the last of them running, scattered in a wide arc through the trees, their Vilandt rain gear flapping behind their legs. A few must have recovered from the gate-shift, because I saw at least three transform in mid-run. I saw one leap into the air and begin flying away, too.
Seeing the German shepherd-sized bird-thing wing up into the Seattle sky––over a somewhat beat-up and blood-spattered private golf course, heading north towards an all-too-familiar freeway––was almost more than my brain could absorb.
But I didn’t have time to freak out.
I found the view of the cops approaching from our right, weapons drawn, particularly motivating.
The sight was also familiar enough to get my brain moving again.
"Nik!" Gripping his shoulders, I shook him, forcing his eyes to flicker open, to stare up at me. "Nik!" I said. "We have to go... now!"
“Is he gone?” he said.
“Who?” I gave him a confused look. “Razmun?”
“Yes.”
“He’s gone,” I confirmed, before glancing back at the police. “But we’ve got other problems, Nik. Like... big ones.”
His eyes followed mine to the approaching cops, who proceeded to stalk us from their parked police cruisers across the grass. I saw Nik look up, at the sky maybe, or maybe at the sun.
Either way, that dazed expression in his eyes finally cleared.
He pushed my hands off his chest and away from his face.
"Stand back," he said.
I didn't argue.
Pulling myself abruptly to my feet, I stepped back as quickly as I could, glancing nervously at the cops. I saw some of them aiming their guns at me now, pretty much the second I got back to my feet.
“Don’t move!” one of them yelled. “Hands where we can see them!”
I raised my hands slowly above my head.
Really, what choice did I have?
In that half-second I looked away, though, Nik had already begun to change.
By the time I looked back at him, my jaw dropped, just like the old cliché. I found I literally could not close my mouth as I stared at the thing that used to be my boyfriend.
A dragon stood there.
It was huge, just like I'd imagined all those times through the windows and domes on Palarine. Its iridescent black and red scales shimmered in the sunlight, blinding me.
The creature turned to look at me, its yellow eyes the only part of him I still recognized.
Nik the dragon let out a low roar as I watched, shaking the canopy of the nearby trees, making my hair stand on end. He looked down at the cops from his nearly two-story height, and roared again. That time, I lost my balance, nearly falling over backwards.
Flinching back a few feet instead, I stared up at him in awe, unable to breathe as I took in the size of him.
When he roared a third time, I found myself looking at the police.
They'd stopped dead in their tracks.
I watched as they gaped up at the giant lizard, a lot of them with mouths open, like me.
Their eyes rounded uniformly from their different positions around the manicured lawn. Some held their guns like they'd forgotten what they were for, aiming them towards the grass or at other officers or even at their own feet. All of them gaped up at the scaled animal that looked like something from a fairytale.
And yeah, it pretty much was.
Even so, something about seeing them there spurred my own mind back into life.
We had to get out of here. Now.
Before these guys snapped out of their trance.
Lurching forward, I leapt for the dragon before I thought about whether that was such a great idea. Nik clearly approved, however, since he immediately crouched down, presumably to make it easier for me to climb up his muscular and scale-covered side.
I fought to get up as quickly as possible, and to let him help me, using the wing he stretched out to give me leverage. Still, even the leathery skin of his wing was difficult to grasp without using my nails, and the scales slipped out from under my hands like glass.
After a few more seconds of me trying to get up and failing, Nik moved forward one clawed foreleg so I could climb up on that, instead.
After huffing and sweating my way from the foreleg to the wing and then his back, I finally managed to get my leg over the bones making up the middle part of his spine, gripping the hard, rock-like scales with both hands and cutting myself on their sharp edges in the process.
Below me, Nik emitted another guttural roar, trembling my body where I sat.
Even so, I heard the near question that time, and kicked into his sides sharply.
As I did it, I found myself staring down at the line of police in fear.
A few of them had regained enough presence of mind to have their guns roughly aimed in our direction again. None had fired yet, and none seemed anxious to get any closer, but I knew that would likely change pretty quickly, too.
"Go! Go! Go!" I yelled in English. "Step on it, Nik!"
He didn't need any more prompting.
Before it occurred to me to hold my breath, or to prepare myself in any way other than to hold on for dear life, the enormous creature gave a hard beat to its leathery wings...
... and we lifted up into the air.
EPILOGUE
Ordinary
LATER, I WOULD hear on the news confused reports about some kind of break-out of exotic animals.
None of the reports would make a lot of sense.
None even specified where the animals had come from exactly, or even what kind of animals they were... details that didn’t go entirely unnoticed by those repeating the reports.
That didn’t seem to alarm anyone, though.
Instead, newscasters chuckled amongst themselves, speculating about private circuses, a zoo owned by some kind of rich eccentric, animals that had been drugged and went into some kind
of frenzy on a private golf course.
I heard a further report that the deed might have been done by a ring of endangered and rare animal smugglers whose product managed to break free, briefly terrorizing some early-morning golfers in the north-eastern edge of the city.
In any case, no one I saw seemed to settle on a definitive explanation. Overall, the tone of the newscasts focused on the lighter, more human-interest side of things.
A day later, they dropped the story altogether.
Which was a relief. I guess.
The story had a heck of a lot of holes in it, though.
I had to assume I wasn’t the only one who noticed. I figured the police must be keeping a fair few details from that day to themselves.
No one came knocking on my door during that time, though, which was all I really cared about.
Well, Irene’s door, to be precise. Although, since Nik and I had taken up residence in her living room, I guess it was our place as well. Temporarily, at least.
I hadn’t yet gotten around to that long talk I’d envisioned with Irene at her lime green kitchen table. Nor had I gotten to drink much coffee yet, come to think of it... certainly not as much as I would have liked.
Even so, I could tell the time for that talk was fast approaching.
Irene had been incredibly cool about taking in me and Nik, no questions asked. But now that a little time had passed, I saw her looking at Nik a lot where he lay on the couch, her eyes thoughtful at times, even speculative.
Irene might be quirky in her way, but she was by no means stupid.
I had to wonder if she’d already noticed that Nik wasn’t your average weirdo from the West Coast, or that the color of his eyes had a tendency to shift a little too dramatically every now and then. She seemed to like Nik well enough, and even babied him pretty extensively once she got a look at the injuries he’d sustained from his fight with Razmun.
But yeah, that was different.
She had to know something was up with him, whatever she thought of him as a person.
Still, it was a relief that she had liked him... and that she’d prioritized his health over getting straight answers out of either of us.
At that point, I’d really needed the space to figure out what next, before I had to start dealing with everyone else’s reactions to my being back in town.
In that sense, putting off “the talk” with Irene felt more like a survival tactic.
I also hadn’t stopped worrying about the cops.
Or, more realistically, whoever the cops had likely handed the investigation off to at this point... assuming there even was an investigation, and they hadn’t just filed it away in some administrative black hole, chalking it up to a mass hallucination of some kind.
I couldn’t help hoping they had filed it in the police equivalent of the X-Files.
But yeah... I highly, highly doubted it.
I really couldn’t tell what the cops actually knew, though... which, yeah, had started to stress me out. I certainly couldn’t know what they might have guessed, given what twenty or so of them saw on the golf course that morning.
I also didn’t know if the cops managed to pick up any of the other morph stragglers. If they had, I wondered how long it would take them to figure out that they weren’t, strictly speaking, human.
Heck, for all I knew, they had instruments that picked up the gate-shift itself, even before all the wackiness ensued with fleeing morph and people turning into giant dragons.
Realistically, if even half of what I feared had come to pass, by now, the local Seattle PD would no longer be in charge of the investigation. They certainly wouldn’t be the ones detaining and questioning aliens, or even designing the cover stories for the public around whatever it was the witnesses thought they’d seen on that stretch of golf course that morning.
I mean, just every mobile phone on the planet had a built-in camera these days.
I didn’t see any of the cops or those golfer guys filming me and Nik riding off into the sunset, but that didn’t mean it hadn’t happened. I still had no idea who even called it in, whether it had been the golfers or someone else.
I also wondered who might have interviewed those golfers in the aftermath of our escape, and what they thought they’d actually seen.
Then again, given how that blond guy reacted to seeing two giant erensyi trying to rip one another apart in broad daylight, they might not have been particularly difficult to persuade that they hadn’t seen anything extraordinary.
I’d seen one reporter interview them on the local news, but the clips had been short and pretty generic, and they never surfaced again, so I figured either their testimony had been pulled, or the story was such a non-starter they’d been ignored once the novelty wore off.
It helped that, even in his television interview, the blond one still seemed convinced it was some kind of elaborate hoax, designed to cheat him out of what had been promising to be his best golf score to date.
I listened and watched for other clues in the news, anything that implied Razmun and his people could have been spotted. Chances were, they were still figuring out how to blend and take Earth-appropriate forms... likely from either an abandoned warehouse somewhere, or maybe in one of the wilder areas at the foot of the Cascades.
Either way, if anyone did see anything, I couldn’t find any hint of it in the local news.
On our second day back, when Nik informed me that the point of no return had come and gone on the current gate-shift loop, it really hit me, though.
I’d been responsible for the introduction of a few hundred inter-dimensional aliens into the ecosystem of my home world.
I’d brought a whole new species to Earth.
A few hundred morph lived here now.
They would probably start breeding here in not too long a time, too. Eventually, their numbers would increase to the point where someone was bound to notice.
I did my best not to think about all of the possible ramifications of those facts, but didn’t have much success.
Already, I’d had visions of Razmun as president of some obscure foreign country, building nuclear weapons to wipe out the planetary infestation of humans to make it “safe” for his morph and hybrid pals. I also had at least one nightmare of Razmun showing up at Irene’s apartment in Chinatown, holding a knife to my throat while he demanded that I return him and his friends to Vilandt, where he would make Nik his slave and force me to breed with his morph pals to create more supernaturals.
And yeah, supernaturals.
I hadn’t forgotten that morph and human hybrids generally created a certain percentage of those, too.
I knew that, whatever their ideological beliefs to the contrary, it would only be a matter of time before some of Razmun’s people hooked up with and started impregnating humans.
Morph didn’t seem all that different from humans in that respect, really.
Heck, they might even breed with other animals, if what Nik told me on the ship that day was true. After all, beings that could reproduce generally did, sooner or later. I’d just thrown approximately three hundred wildcards into the genetic mix of my species... as well as that of every other species on the planet... another thing I didn’t particularly want to think about, at least not yet.
So yeah, I knew we weren’t finished with Razmun and his merry band of dimension-hopping, shape-shifting transplants.
I also knew I likely never would be.
But truthfully, I didn’t want to go there yet.
Anyway, returning to my own life had its own set of complications.
There was Irene, who nearly had a heart attack when I showed up at her door with a shivering and half-dead Nik, who wore clothes I’d yanked out of a dryer in one of the dingier laundromats in Chinatown.
An hour later, Irene was bandaging Nik up, just like she had done for me, time and again, after one crap job or another, serving him tea and chatting to him about whether or not she should dye her hair green again, or
go for a platinum blond look.
Nik had borne her ministrations patiently, and even with some amount of amusement, although mostly he’d looked on the verge of passing out. He crashed on the couch pretty much the instant Irene pointed him there, barely keeping his eyes open long enough for her to tuck her mom’s old patchwork quilt around his half-naked form.
Irene, luckily, was pretty good with weird.
She also wasn’t the type to need lengthy explanations, at least not right off... especially with someone bleeding on the wooden stairs below her stoop.
She might have spent a little more time staring at Nik’s bare chest than I would have liked, all things considered... but really, I had zero complaints.
Then there was my brother, Jake, who I’d reluctantly called, if only out of some sense of familial duty.
Jake had done the usual Jake thing, and gone all dramatic on me.
He announced he was coming back to Seattle on the first available plane, until I assured him in no uncertain terms that his presence would not be required, and that he should remain in his current lady friend’s private enclave on the Italian beaches.
Truthfully, even if I hadn’t let him off the hook, I might have died of shock if Jake actually had shown up, whatever his professions of brotherly concern.
I knew Jake.
He would come back at some point, sure, but I highly doubted my “time of need” would have anything to do with it. He’d wait until I was working again, and had a place big enough where he could crash and a refrigerator he would feel comfortable abusing as his own.
I'd talked to Gantry, too. Briefly.
He came by a few hours after Nik and I showed up at Irene's.
Irene confessed she’d called him, not long after she put Nik to bed. She said they’d spent so much time looking for me that she’d felt obligated.
Gantry didn't ask me a lot of questions about where I'd been or what I'd been doing all that time, either. More than anything, I got the sense he’d come to see that I was in one piece with his own eyes. Even so, I couldn't help but wince when Gantry stared down at the sleeping Nik, a noticeable frown on his tanned face.
The Morph (Gate Shifter Book One) Page 46