by Faye, Amy
Alex could feel something in his gut, something that he couldn't place. Something was near, something with an air of power to it. Someone had put a lot of thought, a lot of feeling, into this place. He followed it; there was nothing else to follow. To keep the desperation at bay, he had to follow, or risk allowing himself to imagine she'd been taken away by someone or something else.
His gut told him to head sideways, transverse to the slope. He followed a line of trees, his eyes scanning far, wide, and near as well. When he found a boot print, near enough to fresh, and clearly pressed into dewy mud, that was sign enough for him.
Alex took off running, his eyes darting up and down the mountain until he found something, anything along the slope. There was something here, something nearby. If he didn't know any better, and strictly speaking he didn't, then he would think that it was a lair. Perhaps, he dared to hope, the same lair that they'd hoped to find initially.
When a Dragon sets down roots, even if it's only temporary, they can't help themselves. They'll find someplace to call home, someplace that they can own and control. If Keleth had abandoned the lair he'd kept near the edge of the city, then a new one would have had to crop up somewhere. He could only avoid it so long.
Avoiding it wasn't impossible, of course; it could be done, but you had to be conscious of it. Constantly aware, constantly vigilant. The problem being, of course, that nobody is constantly vigilant. There are always times that are distracting, times where energy levels are so low that they find themselves halfway to sleep and not really thinking about their actions.
In those moments, it's easy to slip. Dangerously easy. If you want to avoid a lair entirely, for some reason, then you need someone around to keep you sane. Keep you from doing it, even in your moments of weakness. Alex had spent twenty years avoiding a proper lair, and even then, he'd started to horde things. He allowed himself that little indulgence. A small horde, a small territory.
It seemed that Keleth, for all of his dedication to remaining human, at least on the outside, had no horde. If he managed to avoid it, if he managed to avoid keeping any territory of his own, if he managed to renounce his dragonhood in its entirety...
It was impossible, Alex thought. But if it were possible, and if he had managed, somehow, to do it, then he was a stronger man than Alex had been. Something in the billionaire's gut told him that Keleth hadn't been that strong.
He was almost into the pit in the ground before he noticed it, and it was only with a great deal of pain that he managed to deflect himself from pitching in headfirst. Even still, he slid along the earth, feet first, and ended up with a raw feeling in his ass and a tear in his suit. He considered expending the mental energy to knit it back together, or to dismiss it entirely and replace it with something new. Perhaps something more adequate for a mountain hike.
He decided against it. If the need arose, then he would rather have that energy in reserve, rather than running around feeling half-dead and in desperate need of a cup of coffee. The entire act of remaining in this body made it that much more taxing, that much more tiring, to try to stay awake and focused. If he had to deal with much more of it, he wasn't sure how he would be able to focus if there was more trouble, and he didn't feel confident enough to imagine that they'd made it out of the woods just yet.
When he'd stood and dusted himself off, he looked down. It was a sinkhole, he supposed, or something. The pit below was large, expansive. Perhaps twenty feet across, though the hole in the ground was only perhaps five feet across. It let down a shaft of light, but there were other lights below, as well. No easy, convenient way down for a man, but for one with the relatively enhanced body of a dragon, it wasn't such a bad drop. He took a gamble and leapt down, landing hard on his legs, which bowed out from under him and pitched him to the floor again.
The place hummed in his mind. Someone had spent years building this place up. Someone had cared about this place a lot. Someone with a very reasonable amount of power. Someone very familiar.
Alex took in a breath and closed his eyes, took a moment to remember his rival. There had been the funeral for Alvin Kramer, the man, but that wasn't who Alex knew. He'd never even seen him in his flesh; ever since they'd both sworn to abandon their previous lives, they had been separate, and whatever rivalry had been between them was wiped away.
What was left behind was something else, something perhaps a little bit raw even after all this time. Twenty-five years was a blink of an eye in the life of a dragon, but it was still a long time. Still long enough for him to wonder what life must have been like, up here on this mountain. What life must have been like with only one living soul to keep you company.
The size of the place defied sense, but it wasn't dug out, not by human hands nor likely by a dragons'. Heavy timbers framed up the sides, keeping the ceiling from collapsing on itself, except in the one hole. It would have been relatively easy to repair, if the man who'd made it were still around to talk to about it.
Alex sucked in another breath of Keleth's essence and started moving. If there were a place like this, and Diana hadn't been taken, then she would have come here. He took a long look around, at the surroundings. The big room had only one exit, but books lined the walls, stuffed into shelves suspended between the timber frames. There must have been a hundred thousand of them, ranging from heavy, leather-bound volumes down to paper pamphlets, crammed in with no particular order. He pulled one off the wall and examined the cover.
It was an oil painting, at one point; someone had likely photographed it and then printed it on the cover, and it was an oil painting that bordered on lewdness. The name on the cover belonged to a romance author who he had a vague recollection of seeing before, though there was a certain similarity between so many of them that made it hard to distinguish one from another without being a reader himself.
There was a noise from behind him, through the hall. Something else was here. He knew it for certain, now, and his hopes started to surge up in his throat. He pulled open the heavy wooden door that separated the library from the rest of the complex, and took a guess about which way the voice had come from.
He guessed right, he supposed, because on the other side of the door was another large chamber, shrouded in darkness, and from the dim came the sound again, clearer this time. Louder. The sound of someone crying.
22
Diana Kramer wanted to be alone, more than anything else, and she thought for a long time that she'd managed it. Better to go insane in peace, at least, rather than have to pretend that she was feeling alright about all of it.
There was a noise somewhere in her place, somewhere far away. The noise of something falling. There was a big hole in the roof of her library, but Dad wasn't around to fix it any more. She supposed something had fallen through. Diana dared to hope for a minute that it wasn't a deer or something, nothing that would hurt itself. But then again, if it was something else, then that would mean that something had found her, and whatever it was, it wasn't there to help her.
Nothing would be, not much more. She was on her own, and had been for a long time, but the idea that Dad was always going to be around for her had been a comfort, at least until old age started to take him. At least until he'd finally decided that he was sick of her, too, and he didn't want her to come back. She had told herself it would happen eventually, because it had certainly happened with the rest of the world. Was she that special? Not likely.
But it hadn't happened, not as far as she could tell. And that was a comfort all on its own. Eventually, there would be a world outside the little cave and the little hole that she'd found for herself, once upon a time big enough that she felt like even the tiny cubby were big enough to stay in forever. Now it was cramped and small and she had to force herself into the corner, but it was her corner, and she could still just about force herself in.
Whatever it was continued making noises. It wasn't dead, she decided. When it worked the door, she decided further that it wasn't an animal at all. It w
as a person, or something that looked remarkably like a person. Diana rubbed at her eyes and took a deep breath, committed to at least pretending to be in control of herself. But it wasn't going to last, and she knew it.
The door opened, and she felt the eyes of whoever it was searching the room, but it was dark in here. There were electric lights strung around the edges of the little cave, but she hadn't turned them on. She hadn't wanted to turn them on. She wanted to be alone here in the dark and the dank, to sit in the soft, cool earth and feel like everything was going to be alright eventually.
She could feel Dad here, at least a little bit. He'd spent so much time making sure that everything here was perfect, since she was a little girl. His project, his gift to her. A place all of her own, where she could go. A place where she could put her stuff, when she didn't want to be rid of it.
The thought caught in her throat again and pulled the tears practically bodily out of her. She didn't know what she was supposed to be feeling, didn't know how she was supposed to react to any of this, but it didn't change what she did feel, and what she felt was empty and wanting to be alone.
Alex stepped into the room, and headed towards her. He didn't flick the light switch as he did, so he left the light behind him and let what little of it bounced around the room from the open door provide whatever light he needed, but he headed, near as she could tell, straight for her.
"Go away," she said. There wasn't any fire in it, but only because she didn't have the energy to be more forceful. Only because she hoped dimly that he would listen, even though she knew that he wouldn't.
"Diana?"
"I said, 'go away,'" she repeated. As if he might not have heard. His silhouette stopped cold, in the middle of the room. It wasn't a very large chamber, not like her library. Not like the other chambers. But it was her favorite. It smelled damp and mossy and cozy in here.
"Are you alright?"
"I said, 'go away,'" she repeated, a third time. She wasn't going to repeat herself again. "Just leave me be."
"You're not hurt, though?"
"I'm fine," she told him. She hoped that with that, he would understand. That he would leave her in peace.
Instead, he slipped onto the ground. The shape of a man standing in the darkness, framed by the light behind him, became a small pile of what might have been anything. The only thing that made him a man was that she knew what he'd been before he was the sad lump on the floor.
"I was worried," he said finally.
"This is my place," she told him. She sounded childish, sounded like she'd sounded when she was a nine-year-old mad at her father and telling him to get out. "Leave me be."
He stood and started out the door. "I'll find my way out," he said, turning over his shoulder to look into the darkness. "I'll wait for you. I won't let anyone else come."
Diana laid her head back against the earthen wall, pressed flat from all of the times she'd done it before, and her face twisted up in the dark and she cried again. There was a lot of history on this mountain, she knew. A great deal of it wasn't even tied up with her, but most of her life was history, now, and most of it was right here on this mountain.
There were new trees down, and new saplings that had taken the place of trees that had fallen when she was a girl. Everything around her was changing, everything becoming different. Everything but this little cave, with its stone and soil walls and the strung-up electric lights. That, and the cabin.
The cabin hadn't changed enough, she thought sourly. It should have been different, somehow. There should have been dishes in the sink, because to the best of her knowledge, Dad had never done them. There should have been a pile of dirty laundry, where Dad hadn't bothered to put it away.
There should have been beer bottles laid out, where he'd spent a night reading and drinking them and thinking about things. There should have been a computer, where he'd been using it to interface with the world, at least a little bit. But there was nothing. It was as if, the moment that she'd left, he'd stopped doing anything there at all. As if she'd left him in stasis until she'd come back, and the house had experienced the years as only a few moments.
Her gut twisted up and she knocked a fist against the wall as hard as the cramped position and her bad angle would allow. It was a disappointing sensation, but she accepted it, because she had no real choice in the matter. She swung again, trying harder. It bounced off the wall ineffectually again and she growled out her anger.
She slipped herself out of the hole with some difficulty, wriggling around in the dirt and clawing her way out. There was a rug, one that she used as often as a blanket as she used it as a floor covering, and it was warm and plush compared to the cool, mushy earth. She appreciated the feeling on her face, and she lay on it in the dark.
Eventually, she would have to leave. Eventually, there was going to be something to pull her out, whether it was food or an intruder that she couldn't keep away on her own. But until then, this was where she wanted to be. Classes be damned. Work be damned. She didn't need money; she just needed this place, and her memories. There was food enough on the mountain, there was water enough on the mountain.
There was a hand generator, in one of these rooms, attached to a bicycle. She could cycle for her own power, no need to pay an electric bill. She could do anything she wanted, she didn't need the outside world. Dad hadn't needed it.
Diana closed her eyes and started taking slow, even breaths and realized exactly how exhausted she really was. The day had taken more out of her than she'd realized, more than she'd thought was possible, and the rug was so soft, so comfortable. So warm.
The room was dark, and with the door closed there was only a thin sliver of light that came through the bottom. That thin sliver went black again as her eyes drifted shut and stayed that way, and she let the dreams come to her.
Everything else could wait just a little longer. After all, there was someone right outside. Someone who had promised that she could be alone, even if it was just for now.
23
There was someone waiting outside for her, Diana knew, and as she finally stirred from her rest she realized that there wasn't going to be any way to escape him forever, even if he might let her. Eventually, there would be a moment where she had to make a decision, and the only two choices were:
First, she could go outside, where she'd inevitably run into Alex, or worse, she wouldn't; or,
Second, she could stay in here, and starve to death.
There really wasn't another option, and even the option of starving to death was such an obviously bad choice that there may as well have not been another option. She pushed herself up from the rug. The room was almost impossibly dark; there were no windows in her hidey-hole, and though there were electric lights, she hadn't bothered to turn them on, not in this room.
There had been maybe ten minutes of a tour around, ten minutes in which she'd looked around and seen what sort of state the place was in, and spent at least a couple of those minutes lamenting how much she'd missed the place, and how badly it had fallen apart.
Then she'd crawled in here, left the lights off and the door closed, and crawled into the nook in the wall. The only light now came from the sliver of a gap between the door and the floor of the cave, which made an ill fit to the heavy, rectangular door. That they'd managed to get it as close as they had was a testament to the work that she and Dad had done. Mostly Dad, of course.
Diana's role in building the place had been largely supervisory, since she was barely seven when the excavation began, but it felt as if she'd had the place as long as she could remember, even if those memories were partly the first expansions of the natural caverns.
Her eyes had adjusted at some point in her sleep to the darkness, and when she rose, that thin shard of light was enough to illuminate the whole chamber, at least enough to make out shapes and locations. She stood up. She'd tried painting once, like Dad. It hung on the far wall, covered in a heavy cloth. There was no reason that anyone woul
d want to see it. She wasn't going to be Kramer the Younger. Her best hope was to carry on the legacy by having other people's things.
There was a bed, too, though she'd never bothered to sleep on it. The ground was hard and soft in all the right ways, when she wanted to stay down here. Another shelf, as if the library didn't have enough space. She thought of it as the 'currently reading' shelf, though there were dozens of books that still sat on that shelf years after the last time she'd been in this part of the complex.
There was the door, a basin that was supposed to be filled with water from the nearby spring, but was currently empty, there was the door. Beside it, she knew, was a light switch that would flip on the lights in the room, but it was too dark, the light not quite managing to reach up from the ground to the switch. She ignored it and headed for the door.
The place was as familiar as the cabin had been, and she recounted the rooms as she walked. There was the library to her left, the deepest room of the cave structure. The hall twisted on itself, though there was a gap in the rock wall where she could just about spy the door to the front part of the cave. It had a heavy door, one that had a heavy bolt on it to match the ones in the cabin.
Beyond it, there was a front room, lightly furnished with a table and some chairs, and a sofa with a broken spring that had to be replaced, so it was moved down to the cave. It was comfortable; she could have lived down here all by herself, without the cabin at all, if she were careful. In the side of the front room was the exercise bike, hooked up to a generator that was tucked away behind a wooden barrier that she could move, if she had to, but she had no special intention of doing so.
She stepped out into the main room, which looked the same as it always had. Alex wasn't there, which she supposed was what she'd expected, though she didn't quite know precisely what it was that she did expect. Was he going to be contrite and apologetic after she'd run off? Was he going to be angry with her? Was he going to pretend none of it had ever happened?