Waking The Dragon

by Alexis Davie

Brin looked to Mollie. “Are all the residents so… uh… unique?”

  Mollie gave her another grin. “He’s harmless, just a bit stuck in the old ways. Lot of them are round here… not many other places for them to go. Just ignore them. Or indulge them. They need it.” She looked up at the final flight of stairs as if it were challenging her to a fist fight. “Shall we?” she said.

  Brin, who was trying to embody the idea of Alice Hall (short for Hallway), nodded and smiled in a way she hoped was meek.

  11

  Garrick

  Leaving the cafe-bar, Garrick’s mouth tasted of tomato juice and tiny pickles. He rubbed the sleeve of his corduroy jacket against his mouth, hoping he didn’t have Bloody Mary mix all over his face.

  The weather was getting better. The sun was out from behind the clouds. But it didn’t cheer him up. Weather came and went; seasons were a little like blinks at this point. He was filled with anger, filled with a rage like he’d scarcely before felt in his long life. It was barely dulled by the two Bloody Marys.

  He had the name of Brinley’s father’s club on a slip of paper. Around the corner from the cafe, on a side street, Garrick leaned against a bin. He pulled out the note she had scrawled the two addresses on earlier, and the other where she had drawn the sweet, ugly little maps. Her father’s club, which would be full of powerful warlocks, was just a few streets away. Garrick closed his eyes and tried to breathe steadily. Warlocks or not, he could burn the place down with dragon fire.

  His fist tightened on the small, rough-edged pages. He could kill her father. Dragon fire would do it. He could start another clearly magical fire in South London and endanger the secrecy of his people further, lose his position entirely. Make the woman he… make her, make Brinley, hate him, most probably. But he wanted to. He wanted to let this heat out, and he wanted to get revenge. He wanted her father not to be the man he was, and he didn’t want to tell her—to be the one to tell her. But if he didn’t, who would?

  Garrick was fighting against himself. But at least today he was putting up a fight. Wasn’t letting darkness and apathy win automatically.

  He let himself imagine doing it. He imagined the hot roar of the fire coming up from him, the heavy strength of being a dragon, his rough skin, claws, the power of his wings, which, even folded, felt like being something close to divine.

  Then he thought of her. Her this morning, the light from his windows coming slanted into his room and making her glow. The faces she made when they were in bed, and she was lost, she was gone, somewhere perfect. Her lovely green eyes—her warm eyes. He thought of them losing the shine they had when they looked at him. Maybe she was too young to see it… but this kind of feeling, it didn’t happen often. Or at least what he felt, and what he thought she felt.

  Garrick screwed the paper up and flung it into the large dumpster behind him. Briefly, he gave the dumpster a stupid punch with the back end of his fist. Then he came out of the side street. He so wanted to shift. It would help. It would get some of this rage out. But he couldn’t, not here, and not now. Not when he was trying to avert a disaster.

  Brinley wouldn’t be at the pub until late afternoon at the earliest. So Garrick decided to do the next best thing to shifting: he was going to walk home.

  It wasn’t often that Garrick was this side of the city, but London, as much as it changed on the surface—buildings and businesses and the clothes people wore—didn’t change at a bones and blood level. The streets had been laid out roughly like this for hundreds of years, and as he left the garden-city areas of the south and got closer to the river, the layout was much as it had been when the black death had come a-calling. When the fire (started by dragons, actually, to control the epidemic. They were smart enough to start it somewhere plausible, of course, and didn’t leave an actual baker around to take the blame. He was fine. Well, dead now… but they’d given him a settlement) had finished burning, the sentimental humans had rebuilt the city just how it had been before. Or maybe that was what the city itself had wanted. This time, they had used less wood, more stone.

  On his long, long walk, Garrick realized for the first time that he had an almost perfect map of this city preserved in his head. It was almost a straight line, if seen from a bird’s (or dragon’s) view, the walk from almost-Surrey to the industrial heart of the Eastend. But the streets got more and more winding around the Thames. Garrick had been walking three hours, with his long legs and inhuman endurance, by the time he crossed the river and found Regent’s Canal and the network that took him to where he wanted to be. The sun had come out and hidden and come out again, and now it was one of those long summer evenings that you only got in Northern Europe, the sun still warm and promising to stay for ages still, slipping down the sky like it didn’t want to go and leaving the clouds (almost burned away now) backlit.

  His anger had begun to dissipate, coming off him first in a way he could only describe as fizzing until he felt just a hum of it. It had been absorbed into him, and he was carrying it, and it wafted vaguely around him. He wasn’t giving up on sorting it out—he would let none of those men hurt Brinley or anyone else—but he wasn’t going to do anything stupid.

  About twenty minutes from The Gimlet, Garrick was forced to take more populous streets than he had been walking. There were coffee shops, bars, pizza places, record stores that were also bars, pizza places that were also barbers, a cinema in a florist’s shop, and a buzz of human activity. Human excitement.

  He didn’t mind the human excitement, though he wished it was for something better. They used to buzz like that watching lions fight elephants. Not fair on the lions or the elephants, or the front row, really, but still. Fair enough. Buzz-worthy. They used to buzz like that for Shakespeare! That was still around yet tended to be austere. No buzzing allowed.

  It was tiring him out. Well, either that or the four-hour walk had. He looked at his watch. It was almost six o’clock. He hoped Brinley would be at the bar, waiting for him. He could see her perched up there, swinging her legs, probably saying something sort of mean to Harry. He almost smiled thinking of it. Imagining it, as he had never stood at the door and seen her at the bar, clunky shoes knocking against the legs of the barstool while she fidgeted.

  Three streets away, he began to feel… and this was a sensation so unusual it almost seemed to be new. He was nervous. Would she be there? Maybe she had just been getting rid of him. What did he really know about her, anyway? It could all have been an elaborate—

  Garrick shook the thoughts from his head. He didn’t get nervous. And she would be there.

  Then the chipped sign was in front of him, and the double door, looking boarded up until he got close to it. He pushed it open. The bar was three-quarters empty as usual, just how he liked it. From across the room, Harry held up a white-blue hand. Garrick returned the gesture absentmindedly. He was scanning the room for the little red bob, the green dress from this morning…

  She wasn’t here. There was a couple in the corner with a griffin on a chain, a sad looking man with a bottle of wine to himself, a couple of old hawk-shifter women, big eyed and gossiping at a table where they could see anything, and a couple of burly wolf-shifters at the bar, leaning up against it, whiskeys in their hands and two more on the bar top.

  He felt the air leave his body, but he hoped no one else could discern the change. Harry was gesturing to him. Garrick looked at him sharply, couldn’t help his annoyance, shrugged. Harry pointed to the other end of the bar, beyond the wolf shifters. Garrick approached him, lifted his eyebrows questioningly while he was still too far from the bar to sensibly talk to the bartender.

  “Your little lady friend,” called Harry, who didn’t care for social norms, “she’s moping over there. Waiting for you, she said.” Harry then winked at Garrick, who ignored him.

  “Drink?”

  “Coming up, boss.”

  Garrick skirted around the beefy werewolves, his boots sticking to the floor. There she was, boots knocking against the bars
tool just like he’d imagined, a book open in front of her.

  “You’ve changed your clothes,” Garrick said, pulling up the stool next to her.

  “I have,” Brin said, looking up from her book. “If this is the start of an observational comedy routine, it needs some work.”

  “Still sassy, though.” He sat. Harry put a pint in front of him, and Garrick thanked him without looking at him.

  “Some things never change. Harry asked me to up the nausea charm on this place, but I’m worried I might have gone too far. Everything’s been a bit… weird with the witchy stuff lately. Were there any piles of vomit, puked up organs, or passed out humans outside when you came in?”

  Garrick tried not to laugh at this stupid joke, because he wasn’t a man who liked to allow himself to show amusement, etcetera, but he let out a chuckle. “Didn’t notice anything. I liked the green dress. You look all moody now. And it’s sunny out.”

  “Are you high? You seem… cheerful? My dress smelled of cabbage and socks. Anyway, what I wear is none of your business. And I like wearing black. I am, after all, a witch.” Garrick rolled his eyes theatrically.

  “Oh, so dark and brooding, so mysterious, so witchy!” Realizing he hadn’t even started his drink, he took a sip. “You went to Mollie’s, then? Brave move. I suppose you want another night with me?”

  She gave him a look that could cut stone. “We talked about that, and what do you mean, another? That was… a tumble.”

  “I didn’t mean… I meant another night at mine. The lounge chair is all yours if you want it. Or… I might have a blow-up mattress somewhere…”

  Brin shook her head. “No, I got a room. It’s… It has a bed. And I guess it must have a view. It’s in the attic. Would need a ladder to look out the window, though.”

  “Yeah?” He was disappointed, obviously. He wanted her close to him, even if she was in a different room. God, this was awful. He wanted to touch her now, her lovely soft skin. She was wearing a longer, baggy black dress. She really did look moody and witchy. And it was extremely attractive. It hid her figure, so he wanted to take it off her and reveal what was underneath. But how long would she last at Mollie’s?

  “Does it have a shower? Washing machine?”

  “There’s a shower. It’s just, well, sort of a dribble. And I was afraid slugs or something might come out, honestly. But I’m fine. I’m an independent woman. Now, what did you find out on your mission? Why all this chit-chat?”

  She could read him so easily, and not just his mood. He didn’t want to have to tell her any of this, because he didn’t want it to be true. His good mood ebbed from him at speed, seeping into the sticky bar floor.

  12

  Brinley

  The room had uneven floorboards and wallpapered walls. It was floral and looked ancient and perhaps even tobacco stained. Mollie had stood by the door as Brinley walked in, then she held out the key. Her upper lip had been beaded with sweat.

  “If you need anything, I’ll be in the kitchen,” Mollie had said. No asking if the room was okay, then. She clearly wanted to get back down to sea level as quickly as she could.

  When the door had swung shut, Brin sat on the edge of the iron, framed bed. She had almost expected dust to puff up when she did so, but there was just the creek of ancient springs. There was a pointed window, since she was up in the eaves. Yet another terrible smell wafted from the bathroom attached to the room. Brin had taken it all in quickly, then stripped off in front of a round mirror that topped the chest of drawers. It was flecked with discoloration that looked almost like dried petals. She had felt she couldn’t trust the reflection was her. Well, maybe it wasn’t. Maybe it was Alice…

  One look at the shower—more rust—had told Brin she wasn’t going to be able to wash. They’d… her and Garrick… they’d had sex after her shower that morning, and she still felt it on her, in her. It wasn’t that she wanted it gone, or that it felt bad. More that she liked it. She was sure she could still smell him on her skin. The thought turned her on, made her think of pressing her skin against his again. And she didn’t want to want that. But, as expected, when she had turned the tap of the shower, only a thin dribble of lukewarm water had greeted her. She had washed a little in the sink, thrown on clean clothes because she felt her favorite green dress must be impregnated with the smell of the house by now, and tucked all her other clothes deeper into her bag for protection before heading to the pub.

  It had been a couple of hours before Garrick arrived. She’d done the nausea charm for Harry and felt it well up out of her and surround the place like a forcefield. Far stronger than she had intended or been aware she could produce.

  “All right?” Harry had asked, seeing her face. “Doesn’t make you sick too, does it? I can get a bucket.”

  It had been hard to concentrate on her book, but she had tried her best, and then, eventually, there was Garrick.

  When he got to the pub, he was radiating a strange kind of… mania? A surface joy, and a storm at his center. She was getting better at this empath stuff. And she was worried about what he might have found out. All the same, they bantered, because she did like to banter with him. He was quick and a little mean, and it was hard to make him laugh, like he didn’t want to let himself. Eventually, though, she’d had to ask.

  “Well,” Garrick said, “I don’t like that cafe, or your fiancé. You said he was attractive; he looks like a pig. And so does his father—”

  “Hey!” Brin cried, and for some reason, she clapped her hands at Garrick. “Focus. Did you find out what’s going on? Any secret plans, or what my father is doing to look for me?”

  Garrick met her eyes then, and her stomach lurched. Was it because of the silver in his eyes, or was it his expression? He didn’t want to tell her. She felt it. He wanted to protect her.

  “The exposition was ridiculous,” he said. “They discussed it in a booth in the middle of the place.” Garrick was still playing for time, and Brin told him so by raising her eyebrows. “Okay, look, he’s sold you. And he’s playing for time, I guess, until he gets you back. But your boyfriend, the one with the stupid name—”

  “You know his name is Xander, and what the hell do you mean, sold?”

  Garrick took a breath. “Okay, not you, the book, your family’s book—”

  “My mother’s book!” Brinley interjected.

  “Well, yeah, but it only works for family, right? Only opens and stuff for family?”

  “Oh…” Brinley said, understanding now. She felt herself go limp, thinking she might start to cry. She’d known her dad was a bit of an asshole, but this…

  “If it’s any consolation,” Garrick said, “I think it’s a lot of money. They said another million to move the wedding up, and for a night alone with you in a hotel room first.”

  “I’ve always been under the impression he has a lot of money,” Brin said. “And that book… I looked at it today, Garrick, and you could rule the world with that book if you wanted to. Well, I mean, not you, but me, and maybe my future husband…”

  “You’re not marrying him!” came out louder than Garrick expected.

  “Of course I’m not!” Brin was indigent. “The book doesn’t seem to agree, though. There’s a family tree, and his branch is appearing… his name.”

  “Ugh, that name.” Garrick took another sip of the beer he was drinking uncharacteristically slowly.

  “Well, it’s not his name yet. Just a smudge. God, I hope the book’s wrong. But it’s older than you are—”

  “I’m wrong a lot,” Garrick said. “The book might be, too. Look, if we stop all this, then we stop Xander and his idiots, and his big fat dad, from revealing us to the humans? We stop this bloody coup?”

  Brin nodded. “Harry, can I get a double gin and tonic?”

  The barman looked over and nodded at her.

  “Caning it tonight?” Garrick asked.

  “Well,” she said, “this is dramatic. We’re in like, a romcom. We have a wedding t
o stop! Or maybe it’s a drama…”

  “Not a farce, let’s hope.”

  Harry put the drink down in front of her. She reached for her purse, but he held up his hand. “You scratch my back, I scratch yours. Drinks are on the house, and next time I need a witch, I’m calling you.”

  Brin held up her glass in silent cheers.

  “You’re a good man, Harry,” Garrick said.

  The vampire made a grumpy sort of a noise. “Yeah, well, your tab’s still running, Spyro.”

  Brin laughed. Garrick looked blank. She wondered how old Harry was. Or if he’d just spent time playing video games. He seemed like he could easily be pretty lonely, and he couldn’t go outside in the daytime without being enchanted. Her mind snapped back to the problem at hand.

  “So, I’m being bartered,” she said. “This is so fucked up. Did you hear anything about a timeline? When are they moving the wedding up to? And what am I supposed to do in this hotel room…? Is my dad, like, my pimp now as well?” She felt sick. She took a massive slug of her gin and tonic, which, courtesy of Harry’s thankfulness for the spell, was largely gin. She felt herself grimace, and her mouth tingled once she’d swallowed it down.

  “I’m sorry,” said Garrick, chewing on his lower lip. He had a lovely mouth, especially when he was sad or whatever he was now. She felt an urgent need to kiss it. She filled her own mouth with more killer gin and tonic.

  “Thanks,” Brin said. “I mean, thanks for doing that for me today.”

  Garrick shrugged. “It’s in my best interest, too, isn’t it? The delicate structure of our society is about to be destroyed by some stupid boys who think they can buy respect. And… well…”

  “Me?” Brin asked. “I don’t think I’m even part of it, really. Rather, I’m necessary to get the book, but apart from that, it’s just to piss Dad off. The hotel thing, the big wedding…”

  Garrick shook his head and swallowed his mouthful of ale. “No way. You’re crazy if you don’t think some people—bad people, mind you—would pay to have you on their arm. It’s a bonus, sure, but Xander wants everyone to know he’s marrying a beautiful woman. A beautiful, smart woman, and a witch who has no idea yet how powerful she is. But he probably isn’t betting on those bits. Those bits are what’ll scupper him, right?”