by Faye, Amy
She found the cave the way she'd left it. Hidden a little, behind a copse of trees. The log of one of them fallen, blocked the path so she had to walk around it. But that wasn't so bad. After all, the walk had been long already, and a dozen more steps was hardly a big deal.
She barred the door behind her. There were people on this mountain. People she had to be afraid of. Maybe things would be fine, but Diana knew instinctively that there was no way Alex would leave her if he could have stopped it. She'd survived by some kind of freak accident, and that was good, but he would have saved her for sure, if the option were open to him.
The fact that he hadn't was all the proof she needed that he couldn't save her. Probably couldn't save anyone. That was fine. She understood it, at least, and that was as much as she could ask for under the circumstances.
If he wanted in, then he would get in somehow. Anyone else who wanted in, she'd put as many obstacles between herself and them as she could manage. Then she slogged the distance between the door and her room feeling like she might still just about die after all. The pain receded, though, as she moved. In its place was a feeling of absolute lethargy. Every step was so hard.
With a fall like that, if she'd somehow survived, she was almost certainly concussed. She was in extreme shock and running on adrenaline. Falling asleep was as good as dying right on the spot, regardless of whether there was someone with her or not. But if there wasn't, that would be even worse.
But there was a reason that people knew all about it; they knew because people have trouble staying awake. And most people had slightly less damage than she had. Car accidents where the seat belt caught around their chest was common, for example. As opposed to 'flying at a speed near mach one and then being dropped from the height of a city block.' That seemed extreme.
She laid down in the middle of the room. It was so tiring. She just wanted to sleep. She was supposed to be dead already; if she didn't wake up again, it would be like a net-zero. If she did, then she'd feel better. At least, she hoped so. She'd better feel good.
Diana closed her eyes, and laid her head down in the soft soil and let herself fall asleep. There wasn't any stopping it, after all. She might as well just accept it. Enjoy it for what it was.
Something in the blackness of a sleep that might have been death stirred and made a noise. Diana wanted it to go away. She was here in her place, surrounded by her books. Feeling comfortable. There was nothing to worry about here. She rolled away from the door. Her body was heavy, but it didn't matter. She was still asleep, for the most part. Nothing to worry about.
A voice called out, in her sleep. "Diana?"
She ignored it. She was good at ignoring things she didn't want to hear. Alex would have been welcome any other time, but she was too tired for him right now. Maybe later. She'd been sleeping so much, but she just needed another hour, maybe two. Then she'd be alright again. The cool felt so good, too. Once she got up, she'd have to face something else. The rest of the world, she guessed. The dangers that were waiting outside for her. There were so many.
His voice was closer when he spoke again. More insistent. "Diana, is that you?"
Couldn't he see her? That was a stupid question. Of course she was her. If he'd said, 'can you hear me,' or 'are you alright,' it would have made sense. But she was obviously herself. She was just sleeping. She wasn't even bundled up in her blankets. She thought for a minute about rolling over and telling him all of this. Or any of it at all. But that would mean admitting that she was awake. It would mean getting up.
That would mean facing the world of stupid dragons and their stupid, petty fights. She'd have to try to avoid getting herself killed, which wasn't even possible.
So she stayed silent longer, just curled herself up a little tighter, stretched one long leg out and let herself lay. Go away, she thought. Hoped that he'd hear her with the same telepathy that they'd used before. But she knew he wouldn't.
"Diana," he insisted again. "Look at me."
She stood up. Her legs wobbled under her, but she did. She felt wrong and tired and everything felt strange. But she was awake, with everything that brought with it.
"What," she said. The words came out wrong. Odd. Alex didn't seem surprised by it.
"You need to look in a mirror," he said simply. She made a dismissive wave at the wall switch, and Alex turned and flipped it. The lights came on, searing into her eyes. It hurt. Everything hurt. She needed to go back to sleep, but she was up now, and she was going to have to deal with that. In a little while, she hoped, she would feel better. More able to deal with the world around her.
She looked into the big mirror over her armoire, and a dragon looked back. A red dragon, small. If Alex was the size of an SUV, the red dragon in the mirror couldn't have been larger than a sports car. She moved her head, and it moved its head.
"What did you do to me," she asked. But she already knew the answer to that question. He hadn't done anything. Someone else had, when she was born. Twenty-one years ago.
35
Diana fought to restrain her anger, but it was a losing battle, and she knew it. "What did you do to me?"
She was angry at everything. Angry at him, for dropping her. Angry at her father, for not explaining any of this when he was apparently so tightly interwoven. Angry at everyone who had put her into this tiny box where she was apparently never going to get out of, and now she was in the wrong body and it hurt bad. Everything felt like it might be broken and she wanted nothing more than to stop moving. Maybe make her way to a hospital. Not like this, though.
"You're alive," he said. His voice held a note of surprise, like he'd expected her to be dead.
"No, I'm a lizard!"
His face, a very terribly human face, drew a thin line across. "That does seem to be the case. And terribly young for your age, I might add."
"Oh, good. How do I turn back?"
Every word out of her mouth came out as a little, mumbled version of the roars she'd heard from the other dragons. But Alex seemed to understand them regardless, and answered her as if she'd spoken clearly.
"Uh... shit," he said. "It's not going to be that easy."
"No?"
"You know what they say about running and walking?"
"You mean, 'You have to walk before you can run?'"
"That's the one. Well, you know, you have to know a little magic before you magic yourself into a human shape. Good news being, of course, that you already know what you look like. Bad news being, you don't know anything about magic. Like, not even a little bit."
"And you were perfectly satisfied to leave me that way."
Alex looked at her nervously, and then nodded slowly. "That's true."
"So now help me! What am I supposed to do?"
The billionaire slash dragon took a deep breath. "Okay, I need you to breathe in very deep for me, okay? Now, hold it." She did as she was told. Watched his face for signs that he was going to tell her what was next.
"Okay, now, very slowly, I want you to breathe out. Easy. Calm. Try your best not to blow fire out."
The air burst out of her lungs all at once at the last words and she turned, blinking, her strange, long neck whipping around. "Fire?"
"No," he said, his voice mockingly stoic. "No fire."
"God damn it, you know what I meant."
"Calm down. Just stay very calm, okay?"
"I'm calm!" The last part came out as a proper roar, with maybe a little growl mixed in. A little puff of smoke came along with it.
"Just breathe with me, okay? And point it over there if you don't mind. No use in letting an accident burn up your nice little area here."
She did as she was told. Breathe in, breathe out. With every breath her body felt a little bit better. A little bit less hurt. A little bit less strange, too, thankfully.
"Okay, now, I want you to be very careful with this, okay?"
"Careful with what?"
"Careful with this next part."
"What's the
next part?"
"I'm getting to that," he said. Alex rubbed his hands on his head for a minute. "It'd be so much easier if this were even remotely neutral territory. Uh. Okay. I want you to breathe in, and then... breathe in more. Just try it, okay? It's going to feel weird."
She breathed in. The wide set dragon chest, the chest of a body that was only hers in theory, expanded with breath. Then she tried to pull in more. Like she was told. It was gibberish, of course; there was no way to breathe in more, once she'd breathed in all the way.
Then, right when she thought she was going to be able to confirm what she'd already decided, she felt something else expand, between her gut and her chest. Like a third pocket of air. It felt odd, and it used completely different muscles than she was used to, but by God it did work.
"Good," he said. "Now, very slowly, I want you to let it all out. Very. Slowly. Are we clear?"
She nodded, pursed her lips and started to blow out. A needle-thin lance of flame flicked out and diffused itself on the far earthen wall of the room. She stopped after a moment, taken aback. What the fuck was that? She was a human being. Breathing fire was not only a 'dragon thing,' dragons weren't real. So none of this made a single bit of sense. But there she was, in spite of all that.
There she was, breathing the stuff, regardless of what could possibly exist. Her first instinct was to let all the air out at once, in surprise. She caught herself before she let it out too quickly and kept that little needle of flame coming out until, a moment later, her lungs were empty.
Then she took another breath, a normal breath this time, she hoped. Then another. Then, with a great force of effort, she tried to pull just the other part of her lungs open, fill it with air, and blow out. A moment later, nothing at all came out.
She took another breath. Both sets of 'lungs' or whatever at once. Another little gout of flame. It was small, but the breath had been small.
Then she turned back to Alex.
"Is that...?"
"Very good," he said. He wasn't smiling, though. He still looked worried. She still wasn't out of the woods just yet, she thought. There was still plenty of room for trouble to start brewing.
"What next?"
There was a noise. Something she hadn't expected. Outside, somewhere, someone was driving by in an old truck. The springs creaked and squeaked as they drove.
Alex looked at her hard. "Okay, I want you to imagine yourself. What do you look like, when you look in the mirror? What's your body feel like? What's 'right' for you?"
She blinked. An image flashed through her mind, what she thought she looked like, no hesitation at all. Then she tried to change it, to fit what she imagined she was 'supposed' to look like, but it wasn't working. It wasn't going to work. She frowned and tried again.
"We don't exactly have a ton of time here," Alex said.
"Then what do I do next?"
"Next, I want you to feel it and mean it."
"What's that supposed to mean?"
"It means do your God damn best, Diana. Just do it, okay? We don't exactly have a ton of time here."
The springs outside creaked a little more, and then a door slammed. Something else put its weight into the door. Diana hoped it was just Cyanora, driving the old pickup that they'd taken to the house. But she knew it wasn't.
She let the image flash through her again, and then she tried harder. She wanted it more. Applied it more strongly to herself. Then she squeezed her stomach tight and screwed her eyes shut and let out a loud "grrrrr!"
Nothing at all, she knew. Only one look at Alex's face, sympathetic but overwhelmingly worried, told her all she needed to know.
"Um. Okay. You need to hide."
She looked over at her little cubby. There was no way she'd fit in it.
"Hide where?"
"I don't know," he said. "Just hide!"
She grabbed a blanket from the bed, threw it into the corner, and wrapped herself up. It barely covered half of her, but it was better than nothing, right? Then she curled up into a ball and hoped to hell.
The thump against the door repeated itself. Harder this time. Impossibly loud. Then it took on a rhythm. Every couple of seconds, another BAN. Until the fifth or sixth time. When the 'Bam' was followed with a loud 'CRACK.'
Diana wanted to feel right again. Wanted it more than anything she'd ever wanted her entire life. There was another BAN., and another CRACK. The sound of wood splintering continued on for another moment, as the wood decided that maybe it would rather break after all. Tensions in the wood relieved and popped.
She curled up tighter. Another BAN. This time, the crack came loud and stopped suddenly. The sound of the hinges, creaking on themselves, filled the entire cave.
Alex put a finger to his lips. Diana strained her ears and wished she could disappear. Wished she were able to get everything back to normal. Whoever was coming in, it wasn't Cyanora. Those weren't her heavy footsteps. That wasn't the sound of her walking. She wasn't covered in buckles and buttons and metal things that rasped against each other when she walked.
That was a man. A man twice her size at least, and dressed for things that weren't particularly friendly.
Alex had closed the door behind him, when the lights came on, and now she could feel someone just outside, like the hairs on the back of her neck standing up. And then, with a gentle push on the door, the man came in.
36
With all the straps and buckles and the hard expression, Diana almost didn't recognize him. But after a second, recognition flashed through her mind, and she couldn't keep quiet in spite of the heavy hammer that the man kept balanced between his two hands.
"Jeremy?"
The man let the hammer slip from one hand and reached for something on his hip. A gun came away with that hand and fired in the same instant. The bullet grazed her shoulder, which should have hurt. But it didn't. It felt like someone tapping her on the shoulder to get past in a crowded grocery. Right beside her ear, the bullet 'thump'ed as it went into the wall.
"Jeremy?"
Her father's agent frowned and looked at her hard. Then he fired another shot. He took his time with this one, which gave her plenty of time to see it coming, and plenty of time to panic. In Diana's specific case, that meant curling up into a little ball and hoping to high heaven that he didn't just kill her right where she lay. But one thing was imminently clear: hiding hadn't worked, and he was planning on killing her.
The bullet smacked into her back, hard. It felt like she imagined being stabbed felt, and she let out a yelp of pain.
"Please," she moaned. The noise behind her made her turn. Alex had an arm around Jeremy's throat, and he squeezed, hard. The agent turned and writhed in Alex's grasp, trying to turn around, trying to find any way at all to get face-to-face. Trying, most of all, to force the gun around and into Alex's gut.
"Jeremy, what's going on?"
Her father's agent, covered in hunting gear and with a gun in his hands, didn't answer. He was too busy squirming.
"This is the guy who killed your father," Alex said. It sounded remarkably like he believed it, but it made no sense.
Jeremy made no reply, just twisted and writhed and reached with the pistol to try to jam it in anywhere that it would fit.
"Jump on him. Now."
She wasn't ready to kill the man. Not on Alex's word. Not on anyone's. They'd already made at least one false accusation, though that had been the blue dragon's doing. She was gone off, now, somewhere else, and all that was left was her, Jeremy, and Alex. And killing someone based on nothing at all didn't jive.
But knocking someone over? Holding down a man with a gun? She could do that. The blanket let out a rip as she started to move. Part of her wanted to throw a little tiny hissy fit over it, but she stifled that part. There were more important things, and besides, she'd accepted the risk of it.
She met the two men with the not insignificant brunt of her shoulder. She wasn't as big as the other dragons she'd seen. If anything, sh
e was the smallest, though compared to the black dragon that had taken Alex out of the sky, she wasn't that much smaller.
But compared to a man? She was three times their weight. Almost double even taken together. And Jeremy was already preoccupied with Alex's headlock, so he didn't have time to really set himself against the blow, which he certainly would have had to if he wanted to resist her.
They slammed hard into the door, and kept going. They did finally stop when Diana had the two men pressed front-to-back into the wall behind it, the cave making a dull 'thump' as she hit into solid earth.
Diana let out a yelp of surprise. Surprise that she could do something like that. It made perfect sense, but she'd always been petite; to imagine that she could tackle two large, adult men without difficulty? It strained credulity.
Alex tried to slip free, but she didn't let him go, either. Someone was going to give her answers, and they were going to do it now.
"What did you do to my father," she shouted. The roar came out loud and sonorous and pure. It echoed in the space of the little cave, and for an instant, Jeremy looked shaken. Then he squirmed inside her grasp and she put her shoulder into him again, hard.
He looked like he wanted to vomit. She didn't let him slip, regardless of whether or not she might have felt bad. He didn't deserve her sympathy. Not until he'd answered some very basic questions at least, about why he'd been shooting at her, at the very least.
"Tell her," Alex said. "Go on."
His own voice was strained, probably from the pressure of her body weight pressed against him.
"I'm not telling you anything, you scaly fucking freaks!"
A loud 'pop' went off as he fired another shot. The bullet pinged into her chest, between her front legs, but it didn't hurt enough to get her weight to slacken.
Diana decided that she'd heard enough to start jumping to conclusions, reached her long neck down and with a quick snap of her teeth, almost too quick and too easy, the leather of his jacket started to turn red and slick with blood pouring out of his shoulder.