by Ruby Ryan
"Yeah," was all I said. I forced my legs to move. I needed to get back to my apartment.
"Tell him about the sex!" a woman said in the background. "Did you tell him about the sex?"
"Whose that?"
"That's Jessica," Ethan said. "She's my m... girlfriend. That's the other half of all of this." He took a deep breath. "From what Sam and I have gathered, comparing our notes, so to speak, is that the totems don't just bond to us. They bond to a woman too. They have power over the totem, and the totem has power over us."
I blinked. My headache was still pounding in my skull. "I don't follow."
There was a rustling as someone took the phone, and then I heard the woman's voice again. "Sorry about Ethan--he's doing a poor job of explaining. So, yeah: the sex! You can't shapeshift into a gryphon until you've had sex with the woman the totem is bonded to. Kinky, right? For Ethan, that was me. For Sam, it was Ezra--a woman who tried to pick his pocket at the airport. Long story. Anywho. Make sense?"
"Not even a little bit."
"Sounds about right!" I heard her hand the phone back to Ethan.
"That's the gist of it. Whatever you do, it's crucial that you protect the totem from the dragons."
"Great," I spat, putting a hand to my head. "Just bloody fucken great."
"You... you don't sound like that's great."
"It's not," I said. "Because my totem is in Africa."
There was silence on the line.
"You went to Africa?"
"No! But the woman I'm with, Harriet, did. I mean, she's flying there right now. And she has the totem."
"Oh. That's not good."
"Thanks for spelling that out."
"Listen to me, Roland. Harriet's in danger. What we need--"
"She won't be in danger for long," I interrupted. "Because I'm gunna get a lead pipe and bash this fucken dragon asshole's head in."
Ethan laughed, then cut off abruptly. "Wait. That was a joke, right?"
"Why the fuck would that be a joke?" I demanded. "I meant it. Asshole already jumped me in a liquor store. I won't let him do the same to Harriet."
"Well," Ethan began. "Because. You know. A lead pipe isn't going to do much if he just shifts into a dragon and burns you alive."
I reached my apartment building and jogged up the steps. "Say that again?"
"The dragon. He'll just burn you alive."
There was something here I was missing. "Did you say fucken dragon? Like, with wings and teeth?"
"Yes, dragon! What did you think we've been talking about all this time?"
I strode through my apartment and into my room. Carter wasn't here, which was good because this wasn't the kind of conversation I wanted others to hear.
"Mate," I said. "You'd better start over from the beginning."
Ethan did exactly that: he told me everything that had happened to him, including fighting the dragon in the skies above Louisiana. And Sam doing the same in the Rockies. It sounded like a sick joke. Or the beginning of a bad movie.
And even though it was crazy, I believed every word. I felt it in my soul. I knew it as if it were a distant memory rather than something I was only now learning.
"So you're telling me I can't... shapeshift into a gryphon until I have sex with Harriet?"
"Based on what we've learned, that's right," Ethan said.
"Bloody fantastic."
"That's something we'll figure out together, "Ethan said. "We're gathering in Oklahoma. We're stronger together, trust me. Sam's already here, and Orlando's having... issues. But he's on the way by train. And I'm assuming Andy is the amethyst, although he's gone radio silent too. But that still leaves the question of the diamond on the sword. We have no idea who that is, since there were only five of us in Belize. And we still don't know why the diamond and the amethyst aren't glowing, but the other sword gems are."
"Hold on, mate," I said as I tossed clothes into a duffel bag. The same duffel bag I'd used a week ago. "There's a sword?"
"Oh, yeah. Sorry, there's been a lot to explain. The sword is key to all of this. I think. It'll make sense when you get here."
"Like bloody hell I'm going there," I said. All I could think about was Harriet, and the man who was trying to find her. "I'm going to Africa."
22
HARRIET
Even though I had my alarm set for 5:00, Arnold--it was going to be difficult calling him by his first name!--called my room at 4:30 to make sure I was awake and ready to go. I rubbed the crust from my eyes and groaned. It felt like my head had just hit the pillow.
I found Arnold in the lobby arguing with a black-skinned man wearing jeans shorts and a polo shirt.
"No, no, no," Arnold was saying. "We need the crates to go with us. We can't transport them later--that's the entire point of hiring you!"
"Sir, I am only telling you what I think," the man said in barely accented English. "I am not comfortable transporting wildlife..."
"They're bees!" Arnold cut in. "African honey bees!"
The man put his hands on his hips. "And what happens if these bees escape during the flight? Huh? Will you be able to take over when I go into anaphylactic shock?"
"That won't happen, because that's what the batteries are for," Arnold said in a tone that made it clear he'd said so already. "The batteries run the coolers. The coolers keep the bees dormant. That's it! They'll be just like any other box of equipment."
I put my bag down on the table in the lobby and looked forlornly at the dark restaurant. No breakfast for me.
"With the other crashes," the man said, "I am merely being cautious. You cannot blame me for this."
"I certainly understand it, but I expect you to put aside your concerns and do what I'm paying you to do."
The man shrugged. "I will get the shuttle."
After he left, Arnold finally turned and saw me. "Everyone is spooked."
"What was that about?"
"The pilot is allergic to bees, so he's nervous about transporting them in his plane."
"Oh," I said. Then, once my sleep-groggy brain realized what he'd said, "Wait, pilot? Plane?"
"Why yes! Of course you don't know because I haven't seen you since our dinner. Last night I made a phone call to arrange for a rental bus to drive to Mozambique. Well, it turns out chartering a private plane is almost as cheap, and will get us there in two hours. So that's what we're doing." He glanced at the front door of the hotel. "If Chidi can get over his fear of bees."
"But I thought all flights were grounded because of the volcano..."
"Oh they are," Arnold said. "All major flights. Chidi says he can fly low enough to avoid the ash cloud in the upper atmosphere. We'll fly right around it and be in Mozambique in no time!"
"And he's comfortable doing that?" I asked, remembering how hesitant he'd looked. Like he was being forced into a trip he didn't want to make.
"Of course! Chidi is the one who approached me with the offer."
I was the kind of person who liked stability. I relied on plans, and stuck to them. Having my Africa itinerary changing for the third time since landing made me anxious.
But I did my best to ignore it. My mom always said detours were opportunities. This was just a special kind of adventure. We'd get to Niassa National Reserve soon enough, even if the journey was chaotic.
"Sounds good to me!" I said with mostly-genuine enthusiasm.
We took a shuttle--which was really just a long van with torn fabric seats--across Harare. There wasn't much traffic this early in the morning, with the sun still slowly waking up to the east, but Chidi drove slowly and carefully, constantly checking his mirrors and looking over his shoulder. For several blocks I feared we'd fallen into a trap and were being kidnapped and taken somewhere to be held for ransom, another pair of dumb Americans in a foreign country, but then the buildings receded and we drove alongside soybean fields. The rolling hills and blue sky could have been New Hampshire if I squinted.
The airfield was nothing more than a dirt p
ath next to a soybean field, with a single fuel drum shaped like an enormous Tylenol pill and a shack that couldn't possibly be the control room, but was, with a single radio and an old black-and-white television in the corner playing reruns of I Love Lucy. A small private jet occupied the runway, and I knew nothing about planes but could tell it was from the 70s or 80s. Arnold took it all in stride, and oversaw the loading of our equipment from the van to the plane's minuscule cargo hold, and Chidi made sure to keep a safe distance while the workers moved the refrigerated bee boxes.
Inside the shack, the radio crackled with concerned voices. I heard the phrases, "wreckage," and, "loss of signal," more than once, and then I was being guided toward the airplane stairs.
The plane was spacious since it was just the two of us, but the air was hot. I wondered how long it'd been sitting out in the sun before their last customer. I decided it was better not to ask.
We took off like a drunk Labrador Retriever chasing a ball: wobbly bordering on out-of-control on the dirt runway, the engine high-pitched and loud. Somehow we managed to climb into the air before the runway ended, and then we were above the soybean fields and trees and with rolling hills in all directions. I smiled out the window at the sun to the east, a rising ball that was a shade of orange I'd never seen before.
"See?" Arnold said. "Chidi is an expert!"
We flew north-east for half an hour before the volcano came into view.
Monte Muambe itself wasn't terribly impressive, a shield volcano that would have been dwarfed by any of the mountains back in the United States. But the plume... I almost didn't recognize it; the volcano's smoke hung in the air motionless, a dark grey cloud connecting the earth to the sky. It was on an inappreciable scale; for it to appear motionless from here, even though the smoke was rapidly rising into the sky, it must have been miles tall. The smoke merged with the clouds like coffee poured into cream, a dark ceiling that filled me with otherworldly dread. I could see why a smaller plane would need to fly so low; down here, only a few thousand feet above the ground, we were safe beneath the smoky ceiling.
I stared at it, transfixed, for what felt like hours.
Everything darkened as the sun rose above the cloud deck, which magnified the gloom coming off the volcano. I shivered in spite of myself, and wished Arnold would distract me with a long story about his last research project in Kenya, but he was just as taken by the sight.
The sun's disappearance also made some objects on the ground stand out.
"I thought there was no lava?" I said. On the ground below us glowed an orange and yellow fire, its own tendril of smoke floating to the sky to add to the mountain's.
"There is no lava..." Arnold began, brow furrowed in confusion. And now that I'd spotted one, it was impossible to miss the second, and the third. Across the plain between us and the mountain were at least half a dozen individual fires.
Arnold unbuckled his seatbelt and walked to the cockpit, and I could hear their conversation from my seat.
"What are those?"
Chidi shook his head. "The crashes. That I spoke of."
Crashes. Now that he gave them a name I recognized them as wreckage of planes, their cylindrical fuselages coming into focus. Oh my God. How could so many planes crash in such a small area?
"I do not understand," Arnold said. "The smoke should not have affected so many..."
"This is a place we should not be," Chidi said with dread in his voice. His eyes were wide marbles as he looked over his shoulder at Arnold. "Perhaps we should turn back."
"Nonsense! We're halfway there! It's as dangerous to turn back as it is to continue. Besides, there is no danger beneath the cloud deck."
"I am not so sure, Mr. Cardiff. If there is debris flying from the volcano..."
Now that I heard them, it didn't sound like Chidi had been the one to convince Arnold to make the trip.
"Even if there were detritus launched from the volcano," Arnold offered, "the odds of it striking a moving aircraft are so low one might as well claim it's impossible. Those planes likely crashed due to human error. You must simply fly carefully! Do not let the smoke above distract you!"
He clapped his hands together as if it were that simple: sheer willpower alone. But as I stared at the wreckage below I wondered if something else was going on.
Before I knew what I was doing, I reached into my bag and gripped the gryphon carving tight in my hands. It was a comforting presence, like a small good-luck charm. And of course a reminder of Roland. Thinking of him helped dispel my fear, too.
But the carving was vibrating now, more than it had last night. Even just holding it for a few seconds made the muscles in my arm go numb.
That was weird. I kept my fingers on it, which seemed like a good compromise.
You know how you can tell when someone is in a bad mood, and they almost give off an aura of unpleasantness? That's what the gryphon reminded me of right then. It was unhappy. Or angry. Or trying to warn me of something.
I blinked. Warn me of something? I don't know where that thought came from, but it immediately seemed stupid. It was an inanimate object. It didn't have a personality, no matter how hard my brain tried to anthropomorphize it.
"What's that?"
I looked up and followed Arnold's gaze out the window. In the distance, near the rising column of smoke from the volcano, was a dark speck. It was too far to discern, but I could tell it was moving based on its position against the smoke.
Another plane? That made the most sense, but then why had it flown so close to the volcano?
"Maybe it's a helicopter," Arnold said slowly, not sounding convinced.
"No helicopters here," Chidi said. "Three are on their way from Lusaka, but will not arrive until tonight."
"Then what..."
The speck stopped moving, which made my brain insist it was a helicopter. But then it began to grow, almost imperceptibly slow, and I could sense parts of it moving.
"Whatever it is," Arnold said, "it's flying straight at us."
In the cockpit, Chidi began to moan.
23
ROLAND
My flight was torture.
I didn't mind flying, not normally. So long as I had something to watch on the TV screen or on my phone I was a happy fucken camper. Shit, that's what I did to relax. Sitting and doing nothing.
But it was pure, concentrated agony sitting on a plane knowing Harriet was in danger. I felt overwhelmingly protective of her, which meant the distance between us was an unacceptable failure. The entire time I could sense the dragon ahead of me, a bundle of cocky mirth somewhere to the east. A meteor hurtling toward the woman I cared about. The woman who I was beginning to think I loved, as crazy as that as.
And my gryphon form?
It raged inside my body. It was furious at the events, and demanded to explode from my chest and fly the rest of the way there on its own wings. Anything to reach our mate faster. There was no thought, only primal impulse. A passion that had been fueled for eons.
But there were bars that kept it back, an unseen cage that prevented me from shapeshifting. I knew that as much as I knew anything. A new sixth sense I was aware of if I turned my attention inward. Ethan's stupid information was right: I couldn't shift until I'd had sex with Harriet again.
Which probably wasn't going to happen, all things considered. Even if I somehow reached her before the dragon, I couldn't very well say, "Hey there love, I know there's a murderous beast about to kill us but can you yank down your trousers and let me have a quickie?"
And that brought me to the other torture of the plane ride: I didn't have a plan.
How could I have one? Human against human, well, that was a fight for which I was made. That was my expertise. But against a literal dragon, flying and breathing fire with jaws the size of a Volkswagen Beetle? Fuck if I knew what to do.
And as long as the flight was, 16 hours wasn't enough time to figure it out.
Ethan had insisted I meet up with them in Oklahoma
first, that we do whatever needed to be done as a group, but that was bloody stupid. There wasn't enough time to fly there, come up with a group plan, then help Harriet. I had a singular purpose, now. A drive which I'd been waiting for my entire life.
Protect my love. Protect my mate. Protect my Harriet.
The Johannesburg airport was chaos: frenzied passengers crowded around ticketing desks and television monitors. Clusters of people sat in the walkways, for there was nowhere else for them to go, and trying to move through the terminal was like getting to the front stage at a crowded concert.
I got in line at the shortest ticketing desk I saw, which wasn't saying much since it still took 2 precious hours to get halfway to the front. I tried texting and calling Harriet but my phone wouldn't work; soon I was cursing the useless piece of technology and wishing I had something to punch.
"All the circuits are jammed," said the man behind me in line. "Whole bloody country is upturned thanks to the volcano."
The woman behind him scoffed. "It's not Monte Muambe, friend. It's the plane crashes. Six of them."
"I heard it was eight!" said another woman.
"And what do you think is causing them, eh?" the original man said. "The volcano! The ash screws with the radar..."
"So all of this is caused by a volcano?" I asked.
"Right," the woman said, a phone to her ear. "I'm trying to book on Lufthansa and they're telling me they have no flights for three more days! And that's trying to go in the opposite direction!"
I let them argue and left the line. If all these people weren't going anywhere, I probably wouldn't have much more luck, no matter how much money I tried to throw at the ticketing desk.
The car rental line was easier, and I handed the man whatever identification, credit card, or other paperwork he asked for. I hardly heard anything he said until, "How many miles do you estimate using during your stay?"
"Fuck if I know."