by Faye, Amy
She stopped dead still and rested a hand on one of her chairs, feeling the wood under her fingers. It was comforting to have something like this, something to remind her that at least so far, she wasn't quite insane just yet. There was history here, and as strange as that history might have been compared to some other people, it was her history. She was the one who had to decide how to feel about it, not someone else. Nobody got to decide what they were going to permit her to think.
Diana missed it, but it was a relic, in a way. It was part of a past that she should have let go a long time ago. If she wasn't prepared to be done with it, then she shouldn't have left the mountain. She should have stayed, even if it meant that she was there when Dad's number got punched. Even if it meant that she was the second victim.
She closed her mouth, forced herself to calm down as much as she could, and walked out the front; the bar was set aside, still, but she made no move to reset it into place, as if it mattered. Nobody would break in here. Nobody but her even knew it existed. At least, nobody outside of Alex, now, it seemed.
He looked up when she opened the door from a perch on top of a fallen log, laid halfway back with his jacket folded under his head.
"Hey," he said. "Still alive, huh?"
"Sorry," she said, not really feeling particularly sorry at all, except perhaps for herself.
"It's, uh, a nice place," he offered. There was some uncertainty in his voice. "Good library. Lots of books."
"Whatever," she said, unsure of what he was trying to do except that she knew he was trying to do something. "It doesn't matter any more."
"Sure it does. You probably put a lot of work into collecting all that stuff."
She had, in a certain sense. It would have been easy to amass a collection like that, if they were in the city. They'd have a used book store maybe ten miles away, tops, and she could just sift through it and grab whatever she wanted.
Living out in the sticks like they did, though, it was a rare thing to have a specimen come along, and it was rarer still that there was anything worth actually keeping. When she was younger, it was practically all she thought about, for months or years. Every new find was a big deal, even if she managed to get four or five a week most weeks.
She shrugged and he rose to his feet.
"Do you want to talk about it?"
"No," she told him. She wanted to be firm. This was a piece of her history, but it wasn't something that she was ready to share. Not with him, and not with anyone. But her voice sounded anything but firm. She felt weak and afraid.
"Alright, then. Come on. We need to find Cyanora. I can't imagine that she's not worrying at this point. We've been gone for hours."
"I'm sorry," she said again. "I didn't mean to cause trouble, I just..."
"Hey, come on. I get it. You needed to go back to roost, right? Most normal thing in the world."
"Is it?"
"Well, I mean, sure."
"Thanks, I guess," she said. She didn't really feel thankful, but then again she didn't feel much of anything really. Just empty, unhappy, and alone. She leaned into him with her head and he wrapped an arm around her shoulder unconsciously, pressed his lips into her forehead and pulled tight with his arm.
"We've got to think about our next move before trouble hits," he said softly.
But there was something wrong. A smell. It hit her right away, and must have only hit him a moment later. She looked up into the sky at the black, billowing cloud and knew that whatever it was, it was bad, and it was coming from right around the area where the cabin should be.
Diana cursed and started moving, but not half as fast or as soon as Alex.
24
Whenever she'd heard anything about fire safety, Diana had been told never to go inside for anything after you were out of a burning building; all of that went out the window so fast that she never once considered what it meant that the woman-dragon was standing outside, watching it burn. She also didn't stop to consider what it might have meant that Alex was way ahead of her, and he wasn't outside.
He grabbed her arm as she rose up the steps, moving the other way, a bundle under his arms. A large bundle, she thought. His eyes were wild and barely managed to stay on her face long enough to spit out the words 'the painting,' as if it were supposed to mean something.
She pulled free and took the stairs up two at a time, around the corner and up, then took the first door on the right, throwing her weight back and yanking the heavy, hardwood door open. The heat all around her blazed, as hot as anything she could imagine, but it was almost familiar, now. She'd experienced the hottest that flames could be without boiling your skin right off your bones, and she'd lived through it. There wasn't much else she had to worry about, she thought.
The doll that sat on the bed hadn't been singed, yet. She grabbed it and made for the opposite side of the hall, grabbed Dad's notebook and his glasses from the bedside table, and started back out. The problem came when she hit the stairs. The flames had spread, already heavy enough to consume more than it had left untouched, and the heat was like she was stuck inside of an oven. Smoke filled the air, leaving a greasy feeling on her skin and tickling her throat in an attempt to get her to start a coughing fit that she wouldn't stop again.
The stairs were engulfed, and worse, she could see that what had previously been overbuilt, heavy steps were already beginning to lose their structural integrity, flames licking through from the bottom of the stairs. She'd left the painting in the front room, propped up against the back of the couch; it wasn't there now. But there was no way out that way, anyways, not unless something very big changed. The door stood open, wreathed in flame, and she had to make a decision, and had to make it now.
Diana turned and looked over at the studio door. That door was engulfed almost entirely, and starting to fall apart, the way that the rest of the house was soon going to be. She knew without needing to wonder that if she put her body through it, then no amount of bolting the door would keep her from going right through it. It also happened, she knew, that the house's slope was the highest there.
With her options caught between 'die here' and 'die on the other side of the house,' and even then, the doors starting to close around her, she took a deep breath, dropped her shoulder, and ran hard through the door. It crashed and smacked hard against the wall behind, blown back by the force of her charge, and leaving her with thankfully few burns. Once her clothes caught, it would be the end.
The painting was there again, back where they'd first found it. Originally, it had been on the floor, propped against the legs of the easel; now it was up, on the stand, and placed, as if Dad were going to start working on it again any minute.
That was, of course, assuming that he didn't have to come through a burning building to get it. Diana grabbed it and shifted it into her overloaded left arm, grabbed the easel with her right, and heaved it with as much strength as her small body would allow. The window shattered in a noise almost entirely swallowed up by the sound of the roaring flames all around her, and she followed it out a moment later.
The feeling of falling was familiar, now. The feeling of landing, on the other hand, was something that she would have rather continued not knowing as she landed hard on her right arm, trying and ultimately failing to roll out of the landing. She stared back up at the house behind her, engulfed in flames. A mighty crack came from inside, and the gable sunk in on itself as the house started to lose whatever structure it still had, and the weight started to pull on the rest unevenly.
Her breath came hard and every movement of her lungs served as a stark reminder of the shape her arm was in, which was as worrying as the cough that suddenly overtook her as she started to breathe normally again. She tried to move her arm, and it did what she asked, with a great deal of hemming and hawing and an even greater deal of pain.
She forced her left hand to pick up all of the various things that had slipped out of her arms when she'd landed, carried them a hundred yards or so away, and
then started examining each in turn.
A plush doll, a pair of glasses, a notebook, and a painting. It was a sorry haul for something that had almost cost her life and had almost certainly dislocated her shoulder at the very least. The glasses had cracked but she'd managed to avoid shattering them in the fall, for which she was grateful.
The notebook was singed badly, but as she flipped through, none of it was quite destroyed. She held it to her chest with her good arm a minute, felt the hot leather against her face and set it aside.
The last of the things that she'd been able to grab, the first that she'd searched for, was a gift. It was from her mother, one of the few reminders that Diana had of the woman, and it was hand-made. The stitching had come apart in places, over the years, and Diana had done her best to repair it from the diagrams and explanations in her books, which resulted in repairs of varying quality from 'not great' to 'very alright.'
The last thing was the painting, and she had no idea why she'd grabbed it at all. It was easy to imagine that if she were someone else, looking at her actions from outside, it would have been because Alex had made her responsible for the painting, but it wasn't.
It had been important to Dad, even if he wouldn't have admitted it. It was the last thing he'd done before he died, and it had been left in his studio. Everything else about the house seemed wrong. The lack of clutter. The cleanliness all around. It didn't look lived-in at all.
But the painting? The painting was all Dad. It had his unhurried brush-strokes, his use of color. It had his ill-defined details, before he went back over it and finished it. The painting was still in early stages, probably a week out of being finished. Even by this point, there would have been hours of work put into it to get it this far.
All of that meant something. It meant something to him, even if it was just a paycheck. It meant something to the people who bought his paintings. Which meant that it meant something to Alex, too. And more than any of those people, it meant something to Diana.
She'd watched him complete a hundred paintings like these, sitting in the room with him while he painted, as much from his imagination and his memory as from any reference photo that might have been tacked up on the wall.
There had been no such photo tacked up on the wall of the studio this time. No reference at all, really, which was a little bit of an oddity. Even his most bizarre landscapes always started as someplace real. Even places that he had seen, landscapes visible from the mountain, he had photographs. But not this time.
She wondered if that meant that it was someplace that was very important to him, someplace completely unimportant, or if it wasn't a real place at all. But the early stages of this one looked as real as anything he'd ever painted. It looked like, if she could just undo the rough blocked-out shapes into their real life selves, she might just be able to see where it was, step right into the painting. It wasn't bizarre, wasn't surreal, wasn't even hard to believe.
The one hard thing to understand, out of all of it, was a little brown smudge in the corner of the verdant field. It wasn't the central image. Hell, most people would barely even look at it. It was just a detail, and in this stage, it was barely even that. A single stroke of brown in a sea of green, topped off by the ocean of pinks and reds and oranges that made up the evening sky, reflected off the clouds.
But there was no photo, and that seemed wrong, because Dad had always worked from a photo. She frowned. That was one thing that was wrong, but there was something else. Someone had put the painting back there. Someone had decided it shouldn't be on the ground floor, by the couch. And that same someone had started the fire right beside it.
25
Alex Blume had been a dragon for a little bit over a thousand years; in that time, he'd been human whenever it was necessary or convenient, but it wasn't something he was committed to. The change to being human, day in and day out, was something very recent, in the grand scheme of his life, an effort to turn over a new leaf. But he was never going to really be human, not the way that Diana was. Not the way that his driver had been, before he became a red stain on the asphalt.
He didn't dwell on it. There was a lot of loss in a human being's life. There were a great many things that they never really came to understand, things like the scale of centuries. They never really understood how quickly things could move, and how slowly. How things tended not to happen at all, as tension built and built, and then all at once history snapped like a rubber band pulled too tight and went flying off into the distance.
The last hundred years had been quite a lot of that, as the stretching came quicker and the snapping got stronger. As they developed new weapons, weapons that could very nearly counter anything that dragons had access to. The youngest dragons probably didn't understand the change. Even though Cyanora was young, compared to him, compared to Keleth, she had been around long enough to get a taste for the kind of power that people could be subjected to, if you squeezed them.
But now, it was all completely different. There was no more of that. You couldn't afford to really terrorize an area, not when they could decide to drop a nuke right on your head and then, no more dragon. It didn't much matter how old you were. The only thing was that younger ones, less than fifty, the real newborns, they had never lived in a world where there was literally nothing that humans, aside from the blood-drunk hunters, could do to stop them.
He took in a deep breath. Diana had gone in, but she wasn't out yet. He lamented that it was taking her so long, but humans had their own motivations. There was a crash, on the other side of the house. A thud. Then a scream, and a second thud. The scream ended exactly where the second thud began.
In that moment, Alex felt a little bit of the humanity that he'd learned to imitate nearly to perfection call out inside his chest unhappily. He looked at Cyanora, looked at her hard expression, looked at her emotionless face, and he decided that he wasn't going to change anything by being there or not. She was closed off to him, and there was nothing that he could do to change things for her, except maybe to make things worse. He wasn't going to do that, not if he could help it. But he could change something, just maybe, for Diana.
He made his way around slowly. Someone had set that fire, as sure as anything. And whoever it was, they were likely still around. The possibilities ran through his mind one after the other. The idea that it was an outside attack, perhaps by the red, was unlikely. They'd backed off.
But it was possible, and that meant that he ought to be extra careful. There wasn't going to be anything good coming out of getting himself killed, and it was more likely than it might have seemed. Everything that was dangerous needed to be treated like it was more likely than it initially seemed. It was easier to take the time now, rather than to let himself slack off, only to find out in the end that if he'd only taken the time he might not have gotten himself killed for nothing.
There was nothing, though. No waiting ancient drake, about to come down and pull them all up into the sky, to pick the meat from their bones before they even knew to transform into something that fought a little bit better in the air. No assassin waiting in the dark. Nothing but a big, blazing house, its timbers beginning to crack and pop loudly inside.
The middle of the house seemed to collapse in on itself all at once, the central support apparently dropping out first, and the rest of it moving in where the timbers no longer had any support, and now served only to weigh down other parts of the house.
It occurred to him as he walked around, giving the house a wide berth, that there was something else to notice. Or, perhaps more accurate, something not to notice. The smell that had been inside was being eaten up by the flame. Now all he smelled was the chalky, rough, unpleasant scent of smoke that had filled his chest.
For a human, it might have been unthinkably unpleasant; for a dragon, it was no different than cigarette smoke to a smoker. Even for an ex-dragon, there was something a little bit appealing about it.
"Diana?" His voice called out loud. He repea
ted her name again. "Diana?"
There was no reply, not right away. He continued heading around, until she appeared on the horizon, just at the same time that she shouted out her location.
He wanted to run, wanted to go up and grab her and whisk her away from all this. If he was tired, if he was emotionally spent, then he could only imagine how it was for her. But he didn't. His muscles relayed back to his brain that he was too tired, too weak. He wasn't going to be going anywhere fast, not today.
He took a breath and trudged. It was the best he could do, in spite of himself. He would have gone faster, if he could, but he couldn't.
There were two things that gave him energy. The first was the painting, propped up against a tree beside Diana. His prize from the cabin, and she'd saved it for him. He could about kiss her.
The second, the one that it took him a little bit longer to notice, was the way that her arm hung limp at her side. With her reclining back in the grass, it wasn't immediately obvious until she pushed herself up to a seated position, and very noticeably used only her left hand to do it.
"You're hurt," he said. It wasn't a question, and though he had intended for it to be, it wasn't quite sympathetic, either.
"I didn't fall very well."
"You jumped? From up there?"
"The stairs were burning," she told him, as if it were the answer to his question.
"You could have killed yourself."
"I saved the painting," she told him. She turned to look at it. He turned to look at it, too. He'd seen hundreds of Kramers. The style had clearly developed over the years; in the beginning, it was hardly worth the canvas it was painted on, but he had them. Within a year or so, he had developed some small talent, and in recent months, he'd been commanding a very respectable price on the market, when he had something new come along.