Her recovery was progressing. She could move her head all the way now and she struggled to roll over off her back, onto her belly.
I wanted to help her. But she was, like all supernaturals, a force of nature. Supernatural was a misnomer—the reality was they were as natural as humans, as apes, as dogs, and cats. And I didn’t want to get in the way of that force. I respected its power … most of the time. I definitely did, right then, as I stood so close to her, moving, waking up, a titan with boundless power that could snuff me out with the slightest breath.
If she didn’t understand what was happening to her, or why, she might turn me into toast.
Still, I stared at her, wanting to communicate across the species gap between us. Dragons weren’t my specialty. In fact, I’d never had so much to do with them as I had in the past day.
“You staying right here, then, Dred?” Hank asked, beginning to back away. “No offense, but I don’t want to be here when she decides to pay us back. But, I totally respect your right to choose to experience dragon fire. So listen, I’ll wait for you out front.”
I felt his presence vanish as I continued to observe Blue waking all the way up.
“Wimp!” I shouted after him. His laugh in response drifted toward me on the dry breeze.
Blue’s arm was moving now. She let out a bellow of frustration, the sound of it making my teeth chatter with the repercussion trembling through the air.
There were some creatures I worked around that I really disliked. Vampires. Demons—actually, yeah, despite how much I resisted hurting them. Trolls. Goblins. Certain sprites and fae.
Depending on the situation, I could easily pull the trigger on my Colt or, these days, cast a spell that wiped them out.
But damn if I still didn’t carry that sense of awe and respect that I’d felt from the time I was a kid, reading The Hobbit and detesting Tolkien for making Smaug a villain. I still hadn’t forgiven the bastard for what he did to Smaug—it was just a fact.
Dragons were smart. They didn’t speak our language, but they weren’t the treasure-hoarding weirdos that currently permeated modern culture. They weren’t rats with wings. Birds with scales. Or ancient magic that could rule the skies if it had the desire.
I knew about as much as the average paranormal human, maybe a bit more. But standing there with Blue’s eye looking deep into my soul, I felt like I was on the verge of cracking a mystery, or breaking open the vault of silence on what dragons really were. It was like that feeling of discovery when you met someone interesting and wanted to talk to them all night. Talk till your eyes were gritty with lack of sleep, until you’d exhausted every subject—from their life story to the tiny anecdotes covering their teen years and the minutia of every passion they experienced as a kid.
Blue was about to tell me everything, in her language (which I unfortunately didn’t understand).
I could feel it.
She roared again. When the bellow ceased, I shivered.
“What a glorious beast she is,” an unfamiliar male voice said from beside me.
I jumped.
“Oh, pardon me. I didn’t mean to sneak up on you.”
I breathed, recovering as my heart slowed. “Except you did. So I’m calling that intentional. You’re lucky I left my gun in Hank’s car.”
The stranger laughed. “I feel lucky.”
“You are lucky. You don’t know how lucky you are.” My voice was sharper than I meant it to be, due to a combination of reasons—one being that he’d snuck up on me and I was annoyed I’d let that happen. Adrenaline still flamed through my veins. “You have three seconds to tell me who you are. After that I’ll either go grab that gun I mentioned, or I’ll just throw a spell at your face.”
He had me on edge, what can I say?
“Of course, of course,” he said, offering me his hand. “I’m Bradford Bennion, Ford, to my friends. The consulting doctor. I attend to the dragons that come to live at the sanctuary.”
“OK. A vet. I’ve heard of you, Bennion. Your reputation precedes you.”
He gave me a mock bow.
“Thanks. But, not a vet. A medical doctor.”
I cocked my head and pursed my lips. “Is there a difference really? Vet. Doctor. Same thing. Besides. Dragons are animals. Vet was probably right.”
“Dragons aren’t animals, well, not in the sense that say a pig is an animal. Dragons are more intelligent than dolphins. If they could speak English, I’m sure you’d find that their intelligence is almost the equivalent of human intelligence.”
“That’s not comforting—it means that keeping her here,” I said, gesturing toward Blue who was beginning to move her legs, “in this cage, so to speak, is inhumane.”
“As I understand it, about as inhumane as putting a human in the witness protection program. She’s being hunted, and you’re the one who brought her here?”
I turned and put my back against the fence, realizing even as I did it how I was placing a goddamn lot of trust in the waking dragon behind me.
I sighed. The Universe clearly had it in for me.
Why? Because Dr. Bradford Bennion was gorgeous. He wore country garb—tan Carhartt pants, work boots, and a short-sleeve plain t-shirt—and he exuded that obnoxious sense that he had everything under control, including the wild dragons in front of us. I noticed his forearms, roped with muscle and veins, as he ran his hand through his hair. He pulled his gaze from mine, and looked at Blue.
I’d heard of the good doctor because there weren’t many options when it came to doctors who worked on supernatural animals, and so any time anyone needed one, Bennion popped up.
“Well,” I said, stalling, trying to clear my thoughts from the assault on my feminine desire. Was I ovulating? Freya’s left ovary, I’d never felt so attracted to every man in my life. “Not hunted, I hope.” I wanted to fill him in on the history, but I didn’t, since I only knew of this man by reputation. I’d never worked with him myself.
“What, then?”
I looked at him, the intensity of his green eyes smacking me square in the face and the nether region, where a fire ignited like a gas stove starting up.
“Whatever happens after this, the idea will be to keep her and her baby alive.”
The doctor turned his penetrating gaze away from me again and focused on the dragon, who had successfully rolled onto her stomach. She was trying to stand.
“Yes, she’s big—definitely has one in the oven. Her due date can’t be far off, but I’d need to consult my charts and take her vitals and measurements. It would be an honor to assist in her delivery.”
He said it with such sincerity that my heart melted a bit. Nevertheless, my true nature crept out and delivered a slight smackdown—come back to Earth, bro.
“Providing you can earn her trust fast enough to make sure she’s cool with a stranger being around for the most vulnerable position I imagine she’ll have ever found herself in.”
The doctor looked at me again. “You’re right, of course. Dragons are just as likely to breathe flames on you as they are to welcome a stranger to sit by their fire and get warm. You never can tell.”
Blue was now trying to fly away, but her wings weren’t responding. The visual of her attempting to get into the air while her wings continued to drag along behind her, limp and unresponsive, was tragic.
I hated what I’d done to her. Of course I was supposed to be mature and see past the tragedy of doing something against her will to her, and know that what I did for her was the best thing.
“I can’t watch this anymore,” I muttered and began heading toward the building where the other employees ate lunch and gathered for meetings.
The doctor accompanied me, babbling incessantly about his respect for dragons.
I didn’t care that he insisted on the medical doctor honorific over vet, but I did find it telling about his personality. Sure he was handsome as hell, but more important was, what was he like as a person?
That’s always what
it came down to, for me: the inner world over the outer.
I stopped in my tracks and held up my finger, indicating he needed to pause for a moment.
“I’ve got to leave, doc, but I do wonder if you’d be able to notify me or my partner the moment she’s had her baby? I’m hoping what I did was save her. From who, I don’t know. But it was someone who doesn’t give a shit about dragons and their desire to live their lives.”
He smiled, but it was a hesitant smile like he was hiding an insecurity. “I will of course be happy to phone you the moment I’m out of the fire and her baby is alive and breathing.”
“Thanks. Now then, let me explain a bit more about why she’s here and what I do know. If you don’t mind joining me and my partner in a small, private room in the guest services section of the building, we can get started.”
I kept it general, just in case he turned out to be the worst dragon doctor of all time. I still wanted to find out more about his insistence on being called a medical doctor and not a vet. They were essentially the same, with humans so self-righteous in their views of what it meant to be human that they warranted a fresh term just for them.
After that, I touched base with the other docents, and then Hank and I hit the road. Maybe we could still make it back to the Salt Lake valley before it was too late. If not, there was always my grandmother’s house.
19
Even with the windows rolled down in the late evening, the Karmann Ghia was too hot.
But I still wasn’t ready to get out and head into the house. We were parked beneath the giant Englemann spruces outside my grandmother’s house. She lived quite close to the dragon sanctuary, though I doubted she knew that.
“She’s not expecting us, but she’s never cared about ceremony like that before. She’s very chill, my grandma.”
“So the exact opposite of you? Nah, come on, I’m sorry. It’s just so fun to tease you, Dred.” He grinned at me. He removed his sunglasses, and I was struck by the shadows that accentuated his eyes, the length of his black eyelashes, the inviting soft glow in his pupils.
For a second I kind of wanted to slap him—he was an ideal predator, pulling victims in with his looks, coaxing them into a sense of security with his open nature. But, there was a bite there that could surprise a person, which only endeared him more.
He was such a jerk for having gotten too close to me physically, earlier. Who did he think he was?
“As long as you can take it when I bring the heat. Because I will. And I won’t be merciful.”
His smile faded slightly as though he wondered what I meant by “the heat,” and his eyes flicked to the lengthening shadows outside and the failing sunlight breaking through the cottonwoods in the neighbor’s yard.
“There’s nothing I love more than a grandmother. In New York, there are grandmothers everywhere. Where I grew up, everyone was a grandmother, and they were all grabbing your cheeks incessantly and shoving food into your hands for later, telling you that you can’t survive on cigarettes and alcohol. I disagree, that’s all anyone needs to survive.”
I laughed. “Don’t expect that exact treatment from my grams. She’s a stereotypical grandma, just switch out the cheek grabbing and leftovers, and substitute in Victorian indifference and a stiff pat on the back. That’s a hug, if there’s any question about it.”
“You make her sound like a dream.”
I shrugged. “In her own way, she is.”
“Why don’t we go in?” he asked.
I sighed. “Still regrouping, I guess. Today’s been a bit exciting and I haven’t had a chance to sort through the chaos.”
We stared out the windows. Spring City was quiet. There was no background roar of industry or whatever romantic term someone wanted to give that nonstop noise that ran permanently beneath the threshold of our senses. We tuned it out just to survive in such an unnatural environment, I believed. Even the sound of a lawnmower, running in the distance, had a unique serenity to it that calmed me.
“This place has a charm to it, doesn’t it?” Hank observed.
I nodded. I didn’t want to hear my own voice breaking the bubble yet.
This pause was the decline of the day’s excitement. If I didn’t address it before bedtime, I’d never sleep. But it was so easy to avoid as the day pressed on. Getting wrapped up in the whirlwind and letting it carry me along, or get down into my bones. I’d never asked if any of the other Flameheart paranormals had experienced it—I imagined they did. It was one of the hazards of the job, but it floated along beneath the surface, reaching ghostly fingers up and pulling us under if we didn’t find a way to deal with it. Like trauma.
Hawaiian shirt guy. The dragons on Hidden Peak. Blue, on the Mormon temple. The village of Gingerbread. Greta the oracular llama. Hank practically sitting in my lap, turning me on in a surprise twist I hadn’t seen coming. At all. I wanted to seethe about it, but the day’s stimulation had numbed me. I was buried in the landslide of life.
My grandma’s was actually just what I needed.
“What a day,” Hank sighed.
Maybe he understood? “Yeah, it’s been a crazy one.”
He ran his hands over his face, ending with his fingers in his hair, which he pulled straight up into a mohawk. “Sometimes I just have to sit and stare at a blank wall and let it all pass through me. Like a kind of meditation.”
He got it. I let out another sigh.
I shook my head, realizing that my senses were buzzing as the effects of the day wore off. “I don’t know about you, but I wasn’t even aware of the supernatural world, really, till I was almost twenty.”
“For me it was twenty-three. Just after college.”
“Where did you go?”
“Columbia.”
“Prestigious,” I said with a whistle.
“I know. I’m amazing like that. Where did you go?”
“Oh, I didn’t. I was too smart to go to college. I read everything, knew that higher education was a racket, and that I could just learn everything I wanted by reading. So, didn’t waste my money on it.”
He gave me a sidelong glance. “Education is never a waste of money.”
“That’s, like, your opinion, man,” I said.
“Big Lebowski.”
“Someday I’ll stump you.” This was one of our games—throwing movie quotes into conversation to see if the other person caught the reference. It was a favorite, and it was something I dug about working with Hank. It wasn’t for everyone, but it was comforting that this guy who’d entered my sphere from what sometimes felt like another universe—New York City, right? Like that place was surely populated by aliens or something—met me on a familiar level and connected with me over film quotes. It was relatable. It was a way to connect that didn’t feel forced or fake.
“But not today, Dred, I’m sorry. And someday I’ll stump you.”
“Probably. And if that day does come, I’ll do all the paperwork for a month. But that day isn’t today. So when we get back to the city, you get to do the paperwork.” I let out a guffaw.
He groaned. “How long must this newbie hazing go on?”
“Probably a year. That seems like a safe length of time.”
“You’re merciless, Dred Dixon,” he said, his eyes flashing, a playful smile touching his lips.
I inhaled. Damn. The look he gave me. My heart skipped a beat.
There was nothing to do about it but give him more of a smackdown.
“Yeah, what can I say. I plan to get even less merciful, so don’t hold your breath.”
“We’ve been spotted,” Hank craned his neck to look past me.
I turned. My grandma had apparently seen us out her kitchen window and was crossing the lawn, passing between the towering spruces to reach the car. The sight of her, the way she walked, her familiar polyester pants and patchwork button down, struck a chord in me that disarmed all my defenses. I couldn’t have suppressed the smile breaking my face in two if I’d wanted to.
&nb
sp; “Grams!” I shouted, opening the door and spilling out of the tiny car. I ran to her and hugged her till I swear I could hear her bones breaking.
I was sweet like that, breaking the bodies of the people I loved with my love.
“Dreddie! What are you doing out here? I saw you through the window and wondered, well who the hell? Came to see if it was someone who needed help or was having car troubles. But no, it’s my Dred!”
My grandma. My hero for always calling me Dred, even though she knew plenty of Mildreds around town and thought it was a great name. I did not, however, and she never treated me like I should.
Hank came up behind me and held out his hand when I was done crushing grams in two with my embrace.
“Well, hello there,” Grams said, brushing his hand aside and putting one arm around him as she began to lead him up to her front porch.
“This is Hank, Grandma. My partner.”
“Come on in, Hank. I was just making dinner.”
I sighed and followed them. She was the best grandma, but she was also a total chauvinist, favoring men, just like all the women in my family. It was the family curse.
Make no mistake. It was truly a curse.
20
“Have a slice of cheese with your dinner,” my grandma said, handing Hank a Kraft single.
I wanted to cover my face with my palm as it happened, as my grandmother called a Kraft single, cheese, but I fought the urge.
Besides, it was one of the cutest things in the universe. My grams, talking like Kraft processed singles were cheese.
“We’re Welsh. That’s why we like cheese with our dinner,” she added, as Hank politely accepted it and unwrapped the cellophane. He curled the cheese into a tube and began eating it.
Dinner was canned corned beef and creamed corn, and slices of Kraft like the one that Hank was polishing off.
Flames to Free (Dred Dixon Chronicles Book 1) Page 11