by Alan Marble
The size of the home, the resort, or the compound, whichever it was most properly called, had not quite been apparent from the front of the building. Having descended more than one flight of steps as they moved through the section that was the guest wing, Jonah guessed that either the building was sunken into the ground or had been built on a slope; passing by a window that allowed some natural light inside, hints of greenery visible between the curtains, confirmed that it was the latter.
Abe had been wealthy. That much had been obvious from the man’s choice in vehicles and attire, but it was the kind of wealthy that was not all that uncommon in modern society. This Carolus, on the other hand, seemed to be in a whole other class of affluence, if his property was any indicator. He did not know why, but that fact again made the old man seem somehow less than trustworthy in spite of his overt friendliness. If nothing else, it made Jonah feel a bit uncomfortable.
Passing through the hall into another large, open room whose function Jonah could not immediately guess, the old man turned to him in response to his question. “Pardon?”
Jonah shrugged, looking around at his surroundings. “I dunno. I mean, look. For whatever else you people might think of me, what I am, I’m not some kind of action hero. I don’t know anything about this business of infiltrating compounds or rescuing kidnapped elders. Adventure for me involves two wheels and a helmet, that’s about it.”
“I see,” Carolus said, regarding him with watery blue eyes. “While your continued reticence is somewhat baffling to the clan, it is clear to me that you still have more than a few doubts regarding your identity, Jonah. I do understand how difficult this can be. It will all be clear to you shortly, please believe me.”
“To be honest, I’m not sure what to believe. You know, I still half expect someone to tell me this is all some kind of sick joke,” he muttered, glancing around again with a frown. In a way he wouldn’t be surprised to have cameras pop out from behind a hidden corner at any moment, some friend or acquaintance of his to laughingly tell him how he’d been punked.
The old man shook his head with an air of disappointment, stopping at a set of ornate French doors, resting his hand on the handle. “In a way it is largely our fault, Jonah. We should have been there to protect your parents from the Syndicate, and when we failed to do that we should have been quicker to track you down, find you and assure you were taken care of. To wait so long for your first flight, it is no wonder you are filled with doubt …”
“My parents took care of me just fine, thank you,” Jonah bristled with a scowl.
“No, please, I didn’t mean it that way,” Carolus almost sputtered, apologetic. “Your adopted parents have raised you a fine young man, and doubtless took exceedingly good care of you. I was referring to your needs as a member of the clan, as a dragon.”
“Yeah,” he replied with a vague shrug. “Sure. Anyway, even if I was sold in this dragon stuff, what makes you think I’d still be up for tagging along on your little away mission? Like I said, I’m not into danger and action and adventure.”
Carolus shrugged as well. “It is your duty as a member of this clan, just as it is the duty of each of us.” With that he pushed the door open and made his way outside.
Jonah followed, shielding his eyes briefly from the change in light, but the sight that met them was astounding to say the least. An enormous wooden deck extended outward from the building, no less than forty or fifty feet wide, before falling away in either direction with no handrail that he could see. At the sides stately pine trees rose up to frame the view of the lake, placid blue waters extending out so far that the opposing shore almost faded into the horizon. The lake itself was all but surrounded with towering mountain peaks, still shrouded in snow, a sight that in and of itself still caught him off guard.
Breathless as the scene made him, he still felt internally uncomfortable at the last statement. “So you’re saying that I don’t have a choice, that I have to go along with it.”
“Everyone has a choice, Jonah, but we are a rare breed, anymore. Our clan is dying, being killed off, and every time we lose another member of our family we feel the loss more keenly than the last. There are none among mankind who understand us, not fully. As such we are fiercely loyal to one another, loyal to the clan and its needs. I am certain that once your doubts about who you are have been eliminated that you, too, will understand why it is so important we do this.”
Jonah had walked out to the edge of the deck while the old man was growing somewhat preachy, still paying attention even if halfheartedly. The deck was built so that it nearly overhung the shore of the lake itself, a short set of stairs leading down to a private dock that was currently empty. “Yeah, sure. I guess we’ll see about that,” he muttered, turning once more to frown at the old man.
Carolus merely offered a crooked smile. “I am quite certain that you will, as a matter of fact.”
“You know, this would all be easier if you would just drop all of the mumbo jumbo and prove it to me by just turning into a dragon, or something,” he responded with a slightly impatient shrug.
The smile on the old man’s face widened fractionally as his eyes seemed to take on a bit of a twinkle. “Do be careful what you wish for, my boy.”
It was the kind of expression that Jonah somehow did not expect to see on the man’s face, and he found himself a bit caught off guard. He was about to ask what he was getting at when a sound echoed from across the lake behind him, a sound like a deep, sonorous horn that thrummed and grated through the air. A sound that made his skin suddenly prickle, the hairs rising at the back of his neck.
Whipping around, he faced the direction of the lake again. Just as before it was every bit as placid and undisturbed as it was, before. In the distance he could see a few boats skimming along the surface of the water, and he almost convinced himself that the sound must have been one of the boats. Another part of him, however, was convinced that the sound was more of a growl; that it was more organic in nature than a simple boat horn.
Aside from the boats floating in the distance, as well as a few feathery clouds that were beginning to take on vaguely ruddy hues from the sun as it was dipping low in the west, there was nothing that seemed amiss or otherwise unusual that he could see, and the sound did not repeat itself. Still, it had been so real, so visceral that he could still hear it echoing in his mind, the hairs on the back of his neck still stood and prickled at his skin. It was enough to make him shiver.
Just as he felt his mind beginning to calm a little at the serene view, an unexpected gust of wind buffeted him from the side, accompanied by a distinctive sound of something heavy flapping in the breeze. Wheeling around on his heel again, he caught sight of treetops swaying lightly at his side, but aside from the way the branches rustled as they moved there was no more sound that he could make out, no sign of what had caused the momentary gust.
Incredulously, he looked at where the old man Carolus stood, unmoving and apparently unmoved, hands resting lightly at his sides as he continued to smile. Working his jaw slowly, Jonah shook his head back and forth. “What was that?”
“I think you know, Jonah.”
“No, there’s no such … it’s not possible,” he stammered, half in response to that statement, half as a sort of reassurance to himself. Memories of the other night, falling off the bridge and soaring over the river, came rushing back to the forefront of his mind. None of that was possible, none of that could have happened but everything he had experienced seemed to insist on just the opposite.
The strange man who had killed Sam, who had punched through bulletproof glass, who had picked up a five hundred pound motorcycle and thrown it at them, he too came to mind. All things that should have been impossible. Rebekah should have been killed when she was thrown through a windshield but she escaped with hardly a scratch. That damned coin that should have been lost ages ago.
Experimentally he reached down and brushed his fingers against the pocket of the pants that he now wo
re, his fingertips tracing over the obvious circular shape. He didn’t remember ever having put it there. “Not possible,” he repeated, demanding somewhat weakly.
It was at that moment that reality would defy him in a bold, unequivocal manner.
A shape, silhouetted black against the darkening hues of the sky, rose abruptly from beyond the massive resort home and shot high up into the air. Lack of a good perspective made it hard for him to gauge the size of the creature, and the contrast between light and shadow made the details vague and indistinct. Still, the shape of it was fairly obvious; a long, slender body, a pair of massive wings cutting through the air on either side. A fairly sinuous neck and an equally long tail ending in what looked like a spade were all obvious from this distance.
He could not have imagined something that looked more stereotypically like a dragon if he tried.
Jonah faltered a little as the beast bellowed out another sonorous, trumpeting roar, the sound reverberating in his ears and setting his nerves on edge. With an incredulous expression, his jaw agape, he watched as it wheeled overhead, cutting gracefully through the air in a series of progressively more acrobatic maneuvers. In other circumstances, he might be impressed; it was not unlike watching an air show.
The fear rising in the pit of his stomach, however, kept him from doing much more than staring in open disbelief. It did not help when the creature pushed its way through the air to circle briefly over the lake, dipping down low and practically skimming the surface of the water before turning and heading straight in his direction. For a brief moment he was afraid that it was going to come right at him, and then the fear transformed into certainty as the dragon lifted away from the lake just enough to come level to him, bearing down on the deck with frightening speed.
Almost too late, Jonah turned to flee from the beast with a frightened, strangled sounding yelp. Just when he was sure that the creature was going to be upon him, images of razor sharp talons clutching for him to pull him away from the deck he dived to the wood, crashing against it rather heavily. A heartbeat later there was a powerful gust of wind and the rush of the dragon passing mere feet overhead, cutting through the air with an audible whisper.
There was a sound of laughter lost in the rush of wind, and as he rolled himself around and scooted up to a sitting position, he realized it was the old man, Carolus, standing unperturbed and apparently amused. Before he could protest he caught sight of the dragon again, arcing through a graceful loop before landing on the edge of the deck with a rush of wings, flapping hard, buffeting him once more with a surprisingly powerful gust of air.
Jonah could feel the deck shudder beneath the weight of the creature, the wood groaning lightly before settling in. It only took a second for the dragon to come to a rest, massive wings folding neatly at its back as it craned its graceful, serpentine neck in his direction, a pair of brilliant green eyes regarding him with an expression that seemed frightfully disdainful.
The dark color that he had seen before wasn’t just an illusion of light, for the dragon was, indeed, dark as night, covered in glossy black scales of varying sizes. Up close he realized it was not as large as it had seemed in the air, not much bigger than a horse, perhaps, but still seemed every bit as deadly. A pair of ivory white horns grew out from the back of its skull, a stark contrast to the black of its body, matching the color of its talons that splintered the wood where it had landed.
He realized that he could hear its breathing, a heavy rushing sound timed to the swell of its flanks. He also realized that he was beginning to shake where he was, pushing back against the deck, away from the dragon unsteadily. “Holy shit,” he whispered, eyes wide, as it continued to stare him down.
“Don’t worry, Jonah.” He remembered Carolus again as the old man spoke up, calmly. “Regardless of what she might think of you, she will not harm you. Come, stand.”
As much as his mind was reeling at the impossible sight that was now staring him right in the face, there was some small part that retained enough clarity to deduce that the dragon must have been Jenna, the woman who scowled at him at the table earlier. Though he still shook with fear he managed to pull himself to his feet, staring wide eyed at the dragon, repeating his breathless curse. “Holy shit.”
The dragon’s disdainful look, if that was indeed what it was, seemed to soften a little as she settled down on the deck, snorting and shaking her tail out behind her. Carolus took a few steps forward to stand at her side, resting a hand lightly on her flank before turning his attention back to where Jonah practically cowered. “Well, come along. Come closer, Jonah. I understand this cannot be easy for you, but please, you must confront your doubts and your fears before you can continue.”
He had not heard such a severe understatement in quite some time. A large part of his mind continued to rebel against what he was seeing, tried to find some way to rationalize what he was seeing. A hallucination, perhaps, a product of the stress and fatigue that he had been made to endure over the last several days. But this was no mean hallucination, no simple figment of his imagination. A dragon was there, ten feet in front of him, living and breathing and watching him all the while.
The strain that the reality caused on his brain was so intense that it almost hurt.
Jonah forced himself to take an unsteady step forward, followed by another. The dragon made no move other than to watch him, and Carolus continued to look on expectantly. An intense curiosity began to rise up, compete with the fear and the uncertainty and incredulity. He reached a hand out, flinched when the dragon’s gaze shifted to look at it, and then reached out once again.
His breath caught in his throat as his hand neared, reaching out to the dragon’s snout, only a few feet away, then inches away, then close enough he could feel a slight heat radiating from those scales. As his fingers finally made contact there his mind reminded him of how they were mere inches away from what must have been massive, sharp teeth lining her now closed mouth. He almost pulled his hand away.
“Holy shit.” Jonah felt a bit like a broken record but no other words would come. The scales beneath his palm were surprisingly smooth and supple, and the heat that he felt radiating from them was more poignant against his skin. He felt himself shuddering in spite of the fact that the dragon was relaxed, breathing slowly, showing no outward hostility. It wasn’t all that different from the first time he’d touched a horse, when he was a child, if the emotions were magnified a hundredfold.
He felt a hand on his shoulder. He had been so focused on the dragon so intently that he did not notice when Carolus had walked over, the old man smiling at him crookedly once again. “Now you see,” the old man said, quietly, almost reverently. “I am sorry that it had to be this abrupt, this difficult for you. If there were some way to turn back the clock and make this easier on you I would, but it is now time for you to accept the truth as you see it.”
Again it came across as a massive understatement. Jonah merely shook his head, letting his palm gently run against the dragon’s snout, his fingers gingerly touching against her scales, his eyes going wider all the while. “It’s … it’s really real,” he finally muttered, his voice croaking a little as he gawked. “This … this Syndicate. Your clan. This whole business of running off to rescue some elder … bull drakes … this goddamned coin in my pocket.”
“It is,” came the quiet, calm response.
Then the real truth of the matter hit him. His hand falling away from the dragon’s snout, hanging limply at his head, he whispered quietly with his lip quivering. “Then that means … that me, I’m …”
Carolus responded in that quiet, almost reverent voice, barely enough to compete with the smooth and even sound of the dragon’s breathing. “Yes, Jonah. You are a dragon, too.”
Jonah did not need to hear the words for the enormity of the statement to come crashing down on his head. Psychological though it might be it did, indeed, feel entirely physical to him, his knees beginning to buckle slightly under the weight, sending
him down to a kneeling position with his hands on either side of his head. He felt dizzy, short on breath, an angry buzzing sound starting to ring in his ears as he felt dangerously close to fainting.
Once again he felt the rather gentle touch of a hand on his head, barely made out Carolus’ voice through the ringing in his ears. “Calm yourself, Jonah. It may be difficult but you are not alone in this.”
It was not the thought that he was alone that was sending his mind reeling, of course. It wasn’t the first time that Jonah had encountered a radical shift in his life, learned to see it through and come out on the other side relatively unscathed. There had been the moves all throughout childhood, getting his own apartment after college, changes in his job duties and the like. Events that forced some kind of major adjustment, sometimes right on down to the way he thought.
This, however, was entirely different. Everything he thought he understood about life, the world, everything he thought he knew about himself was turning out to be a fraud - or, at least, an illusion. Grasping feebly at the reality slipping around him, he managed to mutter “Everything … everything I thought I knew …”
“Is still true. Mostly,” Carolus spoke through the ringing once again, his voice distant and thin. “The sun still rises in the east. You still enjoy the occasional meal of a burger and fries. You’re still Jonah, the person that you have known since childhood. Who you are is unchanged. What you are is still unchanged. You have just discovered something about yourself that was previously hidden.”
“It’s not that simple,” he managed to protest, shaking his head as some semblance of calm was slowly beginning to settle back upon him. “This isn’t … this isn’t just like learning that you’re actually German when you thought all along you were English.”
“As I told you, your life has changed forever. You will always have the burden of this knowledge to carry until the day that you die. How you handle this knowledge is up to you,” the old man intoned.