by Max Andren
My husky laughter trailed off and stopped altogether, blushing.
“What a beautiful sound,” Cipriano said, “I never thought to hear you speak or laugh for that matter,” he continued, his voice raw with emotion.
“I…I didn’t think about it,” I said, my voice sounding unusual to my ears. Husky from years of disuse.
“Sister, I truly hate to point this out to you, especially as we are all having such a wonderful moment laughing at Cip’s expense,” Isabella began, her sweet voice hesitant, “but when you shifted you…um…you forgot to shift yourself into…” she trailed off, clearly not wanting to say it aloud and twirled her finger in a circle in my direction.
At first I was confused, why was she pointing at me all shy like? But then I looked down at myself.
“Well, hell!”
Nope, no clothes at all. I was as naked as the day I was born. I burst out laughing because honestly it was just too funny. I didn’t know how to do anything! Though I did manage to shift to my dragon-form and back for the first time and without too much trouble. And I lived to laugh about it.
I felt Ian place his jacket around my shoulders again and clear his throat. He turned away and chuckled under his breath. The twins had a sudden interest in the fireplace and Cipriano was looking down at his hands.
“I’m sure that I’m not the only one to screw up while shifting for the first time,” I said.
I put my arms into the jacket and zipped it up. Luckily, since I was only about five foot seven and Ian was well over six foot, his jacket was long enough to cover all my lady bits.
“Actually, Charani, you’ve done remarkably well. You’re a true Phoenix, just as we thought,” he said as he walked over to me and placed his hands on my shoulders. “Welcome to our dragon clan—your new dragon family.”
I was mute as I processed all that had occurred this evening. I shifted for the first time and lived. I was a true Phoenix and had the red section of hair to prove it. I had family now, including my Mia.
It was that concept that was the hardest to believe and to process.
Family.
I would test the strength of that bond repeatedly and what it meant to be a family, but especially a family of Phoenix Dragons.
12
I had transitioned through and survived my first shift to dragon. I felt like celebrating, but I was too tired to contemplate it. I said goodnight and walked back to my bedroom with as much dignity as I could manage—considering they had all just seen me naked. I laughed, shaking my head at myself and my little dragon hatchling.
Exhausted, yet wide awake, I snuggled under the covers, still warm from my shower and thought back over the night. I could have died again—yet didn’t. Why was my life spared when others weren’t?
I was nothing special and felt like a complete fraud. I had nothing to offer and could hardly help myself, let alone anyone else.
Unable to form a plausible explanation as to why, I put it aside and played with the weaving of my protective shield. Music danced through my mind and I found that it was much easier to create and maintain now that I had shifted.
I could open and close the shield at random—allowing the voices of the lost and their accompanying pain to penetrate the shimmering notes. Or, I could keep them muted and at a distance.
I would need to remain vigilant to avoid being blindsided by incapacitating pain and noise that accompanied the voices of the lost.
The missing piece had indeed been my dragon. I could feel the difference now that we were one—blended and indistinguishable.
Cipriano thought that I might be a soul seeker and attuned to the lost and dying souls of dragons and our brethren. They were normals that had the essence of our dragon running through their veins, though dilute.
My heart ached for these strangers who were dying lost and alone. Were they mute, like I had been? Crying for help and begging for mercy didn’t worked. No one could hear, no one cared, and no one would come to their rescue. They were forlorn and forsaken.
I knew the feeling all too well and felt the same way until Cipriano rescued me. I was consumed by hopelessness and had accepted the inevitable—my imminent death. I had just died when Cipriano had found me. He pulled me back through the veil with his dragon essence to make me Renascent.
I still struggled with these feelings. They would sneak in and catch me unawares, sabotaging all my progress with their need to consume me.
Why was I allowed to be risen? Why did I survive that first shift? Was it so that I might rescue these others? Perhaps.
I had been hearing and feeling voices since I was a little girl. I wanted to shut them off and never hear them again, but they’d been with me for so long that the total lack of noise might be intolerable and deafening.
The individual voices had changed over the years, but they echoed the same refrain—pain, hopelessness, and despair. I could feel them, but not necessarily understand what they were trying to tell me.
Sleep finally pulled me under and my mind wandered as it contemplated the ultimate question of why?
Why had I been saved?
Why could I hear these people, but more importantly, what was I supposed to do about it, if anything?
I was drifting in the dreaming when Mia and the others found me. There’d be no rest for me tonight!
It was an odd, disorienting sensation to rise up as a shadow and not as a body of substance. Cipriano and the others had shifted to mere shadows when they rescued me from that hellhole of an asylum. I had no idea that I’d be capable of doing the same.
I decided to let the shadow-me go wherever it wanted—neither directing nor fighting the current I found myself drifting upon. Opening the shield that surrounded me, I let Mia and the others all the way in. I could hear one distinct voice vying for my attention, but not the one that I wanted to hear and help most of all—Mia.
She was quiet, saying absolutely nothing. It felt as if she’d given up on everything and everyone, including me.
I was failing her.
Why speak when no one would listen. I tried connecting with her, I wanted her to know that I could hear and feel her, but I couldn’t tell if I was reaching her.
I hated this feeling of ineptitude, but I was a neophyte in my new world. I needed instruction and time to assimilate, but those were the very things I lacked, although Cipriano was teaching me all that he could.
As I floated along, one voice became more insistent and felt more desperate. I was pulled in the direction of his pain. Perhaps if I could release this man from whatever was tormenting him, he would release me in turn. With one less voice demanding my attention, I could focus on Mia.
I couldn’t understand what Ralph, I decided to name him, was trying to tell me, so I followed his distinct pain signal instead. The strength of it made made focusing incredibly difficult and it resonated through me in stabbing waves of agony. If my shadow self could have wept, I might have let the tears flow. I didn’t like to lose control, so I doubted it.
I arrived at an old building and hovered outside. Black and green mold clung to the old bricks. A light mist hung in the air and coated the broken and cracked windows.
I knew I was at the correct location because dark magic surrounded the building and acted as a repellent for normals.
From what Cipriano had taught me, drampires liked to move into areas that were in desperate need of gentrification like this one. Older buildings that had been abandoned and neglected were perfect for drampires’ dark magic activities.
They chose to inhabit areas that were rife with criminals. These were normals that would look the other way and mind their own illegal business. Perhaps if the cities paid more attention and took some responsibility for these areas, the criminal activities would decrease.
Drampires thrived on manipulating the minds of normals and especially criminal normals. Propaganda and rhetoric properly worded and presented in the correct light, were a powerful tool in the drampires’ arsenal. And
normals could be easily swayed and deterred.
There were numerous cases throughout history to support this point. Various leaders who had abused their position of power to catastrophic social results. Drampirey at work in the background to serve their own nefarious purposes—that of harnessing the physical and emotional suffering of normals and feeding off of that powerful energy.
This was a short term fix because it took dragon blood, a ceremonial knife of Damascus steel, and glyphs to have any kind of longevity. Drampires preferred dragons and their brethren, but in a pinch, mass pain would work for the emotional reaping it would provide.
I could feel Ralph inside the old building, but I could no longer hear him. I made my way through one of the broken windows. I had no way to prepare myself for what I found inside.
I floated towards Ralph and made a circle around his body. He was secured to a chair that had been bolted to the concrete floor. His arms were pulled tight behind his back.
His right shoulder was grossly deformed—dislocated or broken, I couldn’t tell through the dark-purple mottling. His wrists were bound with grey duct tape, as were his mouth and ankles.
His dark head hung listlessly against his motionless, bloody chest.
He was covered in strange tattoo-like carvings—words and symbols that glowed with a greenish light and felt like pure evil.
Glyphs!
I would have shivered if I had the body to do so, but my shadow form did waver.
I shifted, remembering clothes this time. My senses were immediately assaulted by a stinging, burning sensation. I ran my hand under my nose in an attempt to relieve the feeling. Looking for the source of the irritation, I found nothing and no one, except Ralph.
Eventually, I came to associate that stinging sensation with either fear or dark magic. It reminded me of the fear and the accompanying stinging sensation I had felt from my adoptive mother, but lower on the intensity scale.
The strength and force of his agony lingered in the warehouse—permeating the entire space. His pain moved through me in nauseating waves. It was as if he were still being tormented, but looking at Ralph, I could see he was well beyond pain and suffering.
I was too late, I thought with sadness.
There was no residual dragon essence that I could detect—only his pain remained. I wondered if I should attempt to revive him, like Cipriano had revived me. Could I offer him the sustenance of my essence—the healing of my aura if he was already dead, like I had been? How would he accept it, if he was well on his way to the other side.
Lifting my hand, I was astonished to see that it glowed with a mixture of colors that looked just like my aura. The white light of healing had blended with the blue and red iridescence of my Phoenix Dragon.
I reached out my trembling hand to touch the place on Ralph’s neck where his pulse should beat and my legs collapsed under me with the force of his pain. I vomited the contents of my stomach onto the dirty floor.
My mind was instantaneously captured and assaulted.
13
Visions of Ralph’s torture flashed through my mind in rapid succession and they left me in a tangled, chaotic mess—the echo of his memories felt as if they were mine and experienced in truth.
Just like that little boy when I was eight years old.
Weak from the continuous stream of memories and the residual pain, I remained on my hands and knees awaiting the next expulsion from my queasy stomach. I hated throwing up!
Once I finished weaving my musical notes, the pain started to subside and would hopefully arrest the need to vomit again.
Sitting back on my heels, I wiped the vomit from my mouth with the back of my hand and concentrated on reinforcing the mental barrier I had haphazardly created.
What in the hell was I supposed to do now?
While immersed in Ralph’s memories, I’d seen a man who had to be a drampire. It was the only explanation that made sense. He’d been torturing Ralph and reveling in the pain he inflicted.
The drampire’s features had remained distorted through the haze of pain consuming Ralph’s mind—except for his eyes. They were glowing green just like the words and symbols carved into Ralph’s skin.
Oh God! I did not want to touch Ralph again, but I had to if I wanted to know more about his killer. As I reached out, I noticed my hand no longer glowed with healing light. But before I could touch him, Cipriano materialized before me and prevented me from doing so.
I fell flat on to my ass—heart racing and startled spitless at his sudden appearance and booming voice, “No, Charani! You mustn’t touch him,” Cipriano admonished, “once was enough,” he finished in a more temperate voice.
“A little warning next time…if you please!” I rasped with a show of bravado I didn’t feel.
“I do apologize, but I didn’t want you to be become trapped in a memory-loop tainted by dark magic,” he explained.
“A what?”
“See how he’s been marked with multiple dark magic glyphs?”
“Yes.”
“Unfortunately, as you know, those ancient symbols and archaic language are used as part of the reaping ritual to hijack emotional energy and acquire immortality for the drampire.”
Yes, I did know. I thought about my glyph, the one that had been carved between my shoulder blades, like a tattoo—courtesy of the deceased Dr. Hanley. Luckily, mine didn’t glow with dark magic, not anymore at least, despite the druid blood I wiped across it.
Cipriano continued, “When they are used in tandem, they capture and syphon painful emotions created during the torture of our brethren. That energy is funneled directly into an object infused with dark magic, like Hulbetto’s Amulet of the Dead.”
“Is that what happened to your brother?” I asked, sensing that it had. “He was captured and locked into something?” I finished with mind-speak because abject horror had closed off my airway and stolen what was left of my raspy voice.
“Yes, Hulbetto used dark magic to trap Aiden within the Sword of Dramascus.”
My stomach dropped again, as the realization as to what could have happened just now. I could have been captured in a drampire trap.
“Yes, and I didn’t want you to be likewise captured and cursed to such a fate. During the reaping, the drampire use a ceremonial knife made of Damascus to perform the carvings and the torture. It’s toxic and incapacitating to dragons and dragon brethren. It can be paralyzing, which is why we are so vulnerable to it. Also, a small amount of blood is needed to complete the process for trapping the dragon’s essence and their energies into the amulet or whatever object is being used to house the stolen essence.”
“Do you think Aiden is still trapped?”
“Yes. I believe he still lives sentient and aware in the Sword of Dramascus, so named for being made of Damascus and infused with potent dark magic. I think he must be soul-tortured, as he’s forced to take the life of our dragon brethren. I will not rest until I have found and freed him from the enemy!”
Cipriano’s pain and angst slammed against my shield and I felt it waver under the force. No doubt I would have ended up prostrate and curled-up into a fetal position from the strength of it, but luckily I had just reinforced the shield moments before.
“Pray forgive me, Sister. But the emotional trauma that Aiden must feel as he’s been forced to kill dragons and our brethren is more than I can tolerate. I must find him!”
“It seems we both have people to find. My Mia and your Aiden—my brother as well, as of right now. I will help you as best I can, Cipriano. Your quest will be mine. We will find them both and bring them home.”
“Yes, we’ll find them eventually. Did I ever tell you that Aiden was named after the Celtic sun god? His name means, “fiery.” It fit his Phoenix Dragon and his temperament perfectly. We must take care of Ralph and his continued postmortem torment.”
I had no idea what to expect or what to do and so I followed Cipriano’s lead. He shifted to his dragon form and I did so as well
—and ended up as a small hatchling—again.
“Dammit! Why is it so difficult?” I said, frustrated that I couldn’t get this one thing right.
“You’ll get there. Be patient,” he responded before instructing me to move to his side.
He opened his jaws and let loose a stream of dragon fire that engulfed poor Ralph. Horrified, yet compelled beyond reason, I did the same. But my little hatchling’s dragon fire was nothing compared to his. Mine would hardly light a bonfire let alone incinerate a body—which his had done with alacrity.
“Why did you do that?” I assumed it must be for the same reason they had used their dragon fire at the asylum.
“We needed to stop the cycle of pain to prevent the drampire who had created those glyphs from using them to fuel his immortality. But, we also needed to prevent normals from finding this body—especially as it was—bound to a chair and littered with glyphs. We don’t want the normals to suspect that others exist.”
“Why did I feel the need to help you?”
“Because dragon fire is instinctual and despite your hatchling form, you still knew it, but more importantly you felt it.”
I had so much to learn about living in this new world.
Living—what a foreign concept. I had been existing before now and barely that. I didn’t know the first thing about freedom and living unrestricted.
“Do you think you can shift back to shadow?” Cipriano asked as we turned to leave the warehouse as dragons.
I shook my dragon head and added with regret, “I don’t think so. I didn’t shift into that form to begin with. It just happened when I was sleeping. Honestly, I was lucky to shift to human and then back into my hatchling form.”
“Hop up onto my back and I’ll get us home and when we get there,” he informed me in his fatherly voice, “we will sit down and have a discussion about what it means to be family. Like communicating what you’re doing and reaching out for assistance when you need it. There’s no shame in needing help.”