I fell again while thinking about it.
“Damn it,” I said. It came out in a husky growl.
Stopping, I stood up, and inspected myself to see if I’d done any damage. My scales were shiny and showed no sign that I’d fallen twice in the last five minutes.
Okay. So I could sort of run. I liked sitting back on my haunches but that wouldn’t help me if I had to hustle.
Hustling would need to wait. I took a breath, feeling the scratch of wanting to do something in the back of my throat. Dragons breathed fire, right? I could feel my heart beat faster. This would be so cool if—
I exhaled, and a decent cloud of smoke blew out. I coughed, and the strength of my coughing made my eyes burn.
Not so great at the fire then. But it had to be possible—why else would I feel like a cigarette all the time?
Maybe more concentration was needed? I closed my eyes, but opened them again because I wanted to make sure if I did breathe fire, I didn’t set my clothes on fire.
That would suck.
My clothes were safely piled up far away from me. So I closed my eyes again and thought about breathing fire. I had no idea why or how this would work, or even whether it should but I had to try.
This time, I felt a burn come out when I blew out my breath, and a warmth in my chest. It didn’t burn me, but I could feel the warmth.
A bit of trash about ten feet from me was on fire when I opened my eyes.
“Holy hell.”
I concentrated again, this time keeping my eyes open, and aiming for a pile of trash to my left.
Fire shot from my mouth, almost just as you’d expect it to, and hit the trash, catching it on fire.
While I felt the tickle or the itch from the smoke, the fire didn’t burn me. I had to see if it would. I took a breath and carefully breathed onto my own hand. Claw. Whatever. I needed to know if any part of me could catch fire.
Fire shot out although not as strongly as before. It passed over my claw like water. I didn’t even feel it.
So I tried to set my back claw on fire.
Didn’t notice anything with that, either. Then I leaned down and slowly stood back up, breathing fire all along my body.
Nothing.
Well, this was pretty fucking fantastic. I could burn things, but I wouldn’t burn.
What I did notice was that I could control the intensity of the flame by how hard I exhaled. Good to know.
A movement behind me caused me to whip around, crouching down on all fours. My mouth opened and I was ready to flame broil anything or one who came near me. I scanned around, seeking out movement, smells—and I didn’t sense anyone but the rats. Or mice.
Wow. Dragon-me had faster reflexes than I realized. I hadn’t even thought about it, but I moved without thinking.
I took a deep breath through my nose and nearly choked.
This place stank. Badly. There were a lot of dead things around, and it made my stomach swim for a moment.
Okay. So I could do this, but how to get back to me?
I sat back on my haunches and closed my eyes. There had to be a better way to do this, but until I spoke to Grandpa Asshat, and got some tips and tricks of the trade, this would have to do.
As long as I didn’t have to do it in a hurry.
“Okay, let’s go back to the human,” I said quietly.
I felt, rather than heard, my dragon laughing.
That broke all concentration. Not that it was stellar but what the hell?
“Are there two of us in here?” I asked out loud.
There wasn’t a reply, not even in the crazy-person-voice-in-the-head way I’d become accustomed to.
But something in me heard my question, and I felt my dragon shift.
I fell backward and something hard hit me right in the butt.
“Ow!” I yelled.
My voice was mine. My non-dragon voice.
“What was that?” I asked.
Then I got myself up because one, I was naked and needed to remedy that immediately. Two, I needed to make sure I wasn’t bleeding. Looking around, I saw that I’d fallen on a rock.
But I wasn’t bleeding. I’d probably bruise, though.
Great.
I moved to where I’d left my clothes. Taking a deep breath, I realized that I couldn’t smell all the rank nastiness I’d been able to smell as a dragon. That was a good thing. The heightened sense of smell would take some getting used to.
But as I dressed, looking around to make sure no one had snuck up on me in the middle of my dragon problems, I couldn’t help but feel pleased.
I’d done it. I’d shifted into a dragon and then back to myself. There were problems. No speed, even though my dragon was wicked fast. There was also what to do with clothes. If I needed to shift quickly—and part of me wondered what sort of occasion would call for that, even as my mind worked on the logistics—I couldn’t really stop and say, Hang on, let me get naked.
Yeah. No. That wouldn’t work. Maybe Margrite would have some ideas. She was the planner after all.
I’d always said I have gifts. Now I could add ‘dragon’ to that list, and boy, was it awesome.
Scary, but awesome.
It was time to go home and plan some more.
For that, I’d definitely need Margrite. I didn’t trust Grandpa, not at this point. He was too all over the place.
And we still needed to figure out what was up with the people wanting to burn down our building.
It had to be us because no one else lived there.
That was on top of how to get out of here.
I sighed as I left the building. For a moment, I’d been able to forget my problems, and just enjoy being me, checking out the new me.
Back to real life.
11
With all my concerns over the group of people who seemed to want to kill me, or us—I took a long way home, and kept to the shadows. I hoped no one had been able to follow us, but we’d been found twice in a day by people with definitely bad intentions.
I went past our building, and I spotted two different people hanging around, watching.
That wasn’t good.
It also meant that I wasn’t just being paranoid. Thankfully, these guys seemed bored, and weren’t paying attention, because they should have spotted me.
They didn’t—at least, I hoped not—and I kept going, heading back to the motel.
Margrite was waiting when I shut the door behind me.
“Where have you been?”
“I was looking for a place to meet up with Grandpa Asshat.”
“You find something?”
I nodded. “I did. I want you to be there, too. We’re meeting tomorrow night. I also went by the apartment. People are watching it.”
Her brows furrowed. “Which people?”
“Looks like the guys who were there the day we left, but I don’t really know. Who else would be watching it?”
“Are these Caleb’s guys?”
I shook my head. “I don’t know. It’s not a good sign that I haven’t heard anything about him and haven’t seen him around. He’s always around.”
Margrite rolled her eyes at me. “We haven’t been around, Aodan. We’re hiding out, remember?”
“Oh. Yeah,” I said, not wanting to admit that I’d completely forgotten that. The hiding out piece was kind of further down my list of important shit at the moment.
“So what’s the plan?” She asked.
“What do you mean?”
“What do you need help with tomorrow night?”
“I don’t trust him. I’m not going to tell him you’re there, but I want you there in case something goes sideways.”
Margrite didn’t answer.
“What?” I asked.
“Normally, I’d say no problem, and not worry about it. But I don’t know what this guy is, what he might do. I don’t even know what you might do, Aodan!”
“You’re just going to let me go it alone?”
&nbs
p; “No. But I’m worried. There are a lot of unknowns here.”
Margrite hated the unknown. She liked to have a reasonable probability of how things would go. I felt like she overdid it with planning for the worst, but I hadn’t gotten shot or killed in the five years we’d been on our own, working together.
“You’re good at improvising,” I said, smiling at her. “That’s why I want you there.”
“You could just tell him you don’t want to meet,” she said with a frown.
“What? Are you kidding? I don’t think this dragon thing is going away,” I said. “Even if he is an ass, I’d like to at least know what I’m dealing with. I can shut him out when I want to, for the most part,” I added, more to myself than her.
“What do you mean?”
“What are you talking about?” I looked up.
“You can shut him out?” Her hands were on her hips.
“I hear him in my head, you know?”
She nodded.
“So when I don’t want to talk, I think about closing a door, and putting him on the other side. I know he’s there, but I don’t have to listen.”
“That sounds… annoying,” Margrite said.
I shrugged. “It is, but it’s nice to be able to turn him off. He likes to go on,” I thought about how when he got into jerk mode. Yeah, it was really nice to be able to shut the door on his rambling. Or snotty commentary. I wasn’t going to mention to Margrite that he didn’t seem to think much of her, or any humans. It would piss her off.
“Good thing you have skills, huh?” Margrite asked with a small grin.
I smiled. “You know it.” It was an ongoing joke with us, but I did have mad skills at the things I wanted to.
Margrite accused me of picking and choosing what I wanted to be good at. She wasn’t wrong.
“Okay, so what do you want me to do at this meeting?”
I didn’t answer right away. “This is going to sound crazy, and I don’t want to hear any woo-woo stuff, but I don’t have a great feeling—”
“Then why are you meeting him?” She threw up her arms in frustration.
“Didn’t we just go over this? He has info. I need it. Not meeting him is not an option. When he’s being nice, he’s good, but he gets a lot less nice at times, and I don’t like it. I don’t trust it. He’s going to have to show me that he’s not going to screw me over and…” I stopped. Took a breath.
“I don’t have enough control of the dragon. He has a lot of control, and I’m worried he’ll be able to control me.”
Ever since Tina died, I’d been vigilant about not allowing anyone to take control of my life, of my choices. No one but her had ever shown me where it would be a good idea, and even Tina didn’t try to tell me what to do. She knew it would be like hitting her head against a brick wall. Instead, she focused on helping me to make a good choice, with all the information possible. She always said that information was what gave someone control.
That was certainly the case here.
With my grandfather, I didn’t always get warm and fuzzies that he’d help me do the same thing. Well, sometimes I did—but not recently. He’d been in full-on ass mode.
Margrite nodded. I didn’t have to explain to her.
“What do you want me to do?”
“As far as I can tell, he’s going to show up. Like, in the flesh, not just the crazy voice in my head. So watch him. I’m not going to tell him you’re there. It’s better he think that it’s just the two of us. And if he tries anything, tackle him.”
“What? Have you lost your mind?”
“What?”
“This guy is a full-grown man, and a dragon? And I’m supposed to just tackle him? And do what? Use bad language?”
“I don’t expect you to do anything other than distract him, so that we can get away.”
“Oh, nice to know that I’m part of the getaway plan.”
“Don’t be stupid. We’ll go over tomorrow before we meet him, and you can get an idea of where to run to if you need to.”
She made me draw a picture of the warehouse from what I could remember, and then we finally went to bed.
I dreamed of a battle. There were dragons—bigger than me, and fierce looking—flying through the skies. Men were on the ground, with spears, and bows and arrows, but bows and arrows that were out of some kind of sci-fi movie. They were glowing, and when they hit a dragon, there was an explosion of light. Sometimes the dragon fell, sometimes it didn’t.
I could feel my heart beating and I wanted to be up in the sky with them, shooting fire and killing the men who were killing the dragons—killing the creatures like me.
In spite of the magic, or whatever it was, the dragons were doing well. They seemed to have some kind of magic of their own, you know, outside of the breathing fire. I thought the dragons were going to win until a man showed up and stood on a hill a ways back from the battle area.
He had a shining pendant on a thick gold chain around his neck. It hung down to his chest. It was a bright, reddish-yellow, and reminded me of looking into the sun. It was hard to see the man with the brilliance from his necklace.
He held up his hands, and while I couldn’t hear what he said, I could tell he was shouting. His hands began to glow the same shade as the pendant, and the light got brighter and brighter.
There was a moment when everything seemed to stop, like someone took a picture. The dragons were swooping and diving, breathing fire with every breath. There were men that got hit with the fire on the ground, and they flew backward and forward with great force when the fire hit them. I could tell that they screamed, but I couldn’t hear that either.
Then the man back on the hill disappeared in a ball of light.
And the dragons fell from the sky.
“NO!” I shouted as I sat up in bed. I was covered in sweat and my heart raced.
As I looked around the darkened room, the sounds that hadn’t been clear in my dream echoed in my head. The cries of wounded and dying men, and the roars of dragons.
So much death, so many hurt and in pain.
I wiped my face and felt the tears mingled with the sweat.
What the hell had I seen? It was like I’d been there.
What was that? I thought.
You saw our end, came the immediate response. We dream of it still. You see what we see.
They’re all gone?
Not all. There are ele-twelve of us left. Perhaps thirteen, now.
I stopped, realizing that he was referring to me.
That’s it? Thirteen? There were so many—
No more, his voice cut me off, and I could hear the anger and pain in it. We are but thirteen. There are no more.
I’m sorry.
This is not the present, Aodan. It was long ago. You have nothing to be sorry for. You must keep yourself safe until I can get to you.
I wanted to talk to you about that, I thought. I had the nice Grandpa at the moment. I wanted to keep him.
Yes?
I found a place. Let’s meet tomorrow around six.
What? I do not understand your time.
Around dark, I thought. It was nearly spring, but it was still dark by six-thirty.
Sunset, then?
Yes.
You have only to call me, and I will be able to—he stopped.
I waited, but he didn’t continue.
You’ll be able to what? I asked.
No answer.
Hey!
I am sorry, his tone was more formal. You were saying?
Great. Asshat was back. What happened to this guy?
I’ll call you when I get there. It’ll be just getting dark here.
I will wait for your call.
He was gone. I don’t know how I knew, but I could tell that he’d stopped the connection.
That was so strange.
I listened, letting my breathing relax, and my heart return to normal.
He had a door, too. I could hear a lot of things behind the
door, multiple voices.
Why was he shutting me off from them? From the other eleven dragons?
There had to be a reason. I was going to find out, since he’d been pretty careful not to talk about them, or mention meeting them.
Was I a secret?
I was glad that Margrite would be with me tomorrow.
Something told me that I’d need the help.
I rolled over, closing my eyes, and thought about how amazing it had been to see the dragons in the sky, rolling and swooping. They were both frightening and beautiful to watch.
I wanted to be one of them.
12
When I woke, my eyes flew open, and my heart beat faster. I lay still, listening. Margrite was sleeping still, her breath light and steady in the other bed.
There was a smell I hadn’t noticed before, one of damp and decay. This was an old motel, and I didn’t even want to think what was making the room smell like that.
I didn’t notice any smell when we checked in so that must be part of my dragon.
Now it was invading me? The non-dragon me?
I sat up, stretching. I could feel my muscles protest as I kept stretching, and my bones felt like they were popping as I moved.
The people next door were fighting. I could hear every other word. She was accusing him of trying to flirt with the waitress from dinner last night.
I shook my head and rubbed at my ears. How was I hearing this? If they were really this loud, wouldn’t it wake up Margrite? She was a light sleeper. I looked over, and she didn’t stir.
Sliding from bed, I pulled on my pants and a tee shirt. I walked to the door, and unbolted it, sticking my head out a little.
Nothing. No noise, even though now the fighting of the couple next door was joined by all sorts of underlying noises.
It wasn’t that the world had all decided to yell. I closed the door, leaning against it after I locked it.
It was me.
I could hear better than I’d ever been able to. I glanced at Margrite again.
Nothing.
I’d never get back to sleep now. I headed for the shower and took my time getting ready. It was nice to have a shower that didn’t run out of hot water.
When I came out of the bathroom, Margrite was sitting up in her bed.
“What happened? You’re never up early.”
I toweled off my hair. “I woke up, and I was wide awake. So I decided to do the thing right. You know, get up, and take a shower. You hungry?”
Dragon Lost (Dragon Thief Book 1) Page 11