by Bryan Fields
Thankfully, Rose has learned enough about passing for Human that she didn’t say anything about killing Mavis and eating her. Instead, she snarled. “Move your hand or learn to eat with a hook!”
Officer Mixon stepped between them. “Hey, no name calling. Ma’am, keep your hands to yourself.” He turned to Rose. “Miss, would it really be too much trouble to wear a bathing suit or something while you sunbathe?”
“I’ve sunbathed this way all my life. I’m not changing now, and I’m not changing for her!” Rose crossed her arms. “I wear a robe until I lie down and then I take it off. I put it on before I get up. David asked me to wear it because of the children behind us. No one can see me when I’m lying down except David. She had to climb on her roof to take those pictures!”
“Pictures?” I took a step toward Mavis. “What pictures?” It took a bit of will to keep my hands relaxed, because the person who throws the first punch while standing in front of a cop usually loses. Besides, it’s against my religion to hit a woman.
“These!” She pulled several folded sheets of paper out of her designer purse and handed them to Officer Mixon. “I took these an hour ago as evidence of her pornographic activities. Now, arrest her!” It may be against my religion to hit a woman, but in that moment, I could have decked that self-righteous ostrich.
Mixon handed the papers to Rose without looking at them. “Are these pictures of you, miss?”
Rose flipped through them. “Yes.” She handed the pictures to me. They were a bit blurry and overexposed, but Rose was recognizable and the goods were on display.
Mixon took a notebook out of his pocket and jotted down a few notes. He looked up at Rose. “Were they taken with your prior knowledge and consent?”
“They were not! I mean, I knew she was taking them because I saw her do it. I yelled at her to stop and she took them anyway.” Rose looked ready to trash the whole passing-for-Human thing. Her eyes were brown and starting to go black. People would accept that, but glowing red with cat pupils was another matter. I refolded the pictures and put my arm around her, trying to calm her down.
“Thank you, miss.” Mixon took the pictures back and tucked them into his notebook. He pulled out his handcuffs and turned to Mavis. “Ma’am, you are under arrest for violation of Colorado statute 18-7-801 covering criminal invasion of privacy. Please turn around and put your hands on your head.”
Mavis stared at him. “You wouldn’t dare.” Her eyes bugged out enough to uncross and she started stumbling backward. “I called you here to arrest her, not me!”
“She didn’t break the law.” Mixon pointed to the ground where Mavis was standing. “Now, stop right there and I won’t add resisting arrest. Don’t make it worse for yourself.” Mixon might look a lot like a nerd, but I had a feeling he was just about out of mild manners.
Mavis bolted. Given her sheath skirt and Italian flats, I never would have expected her to get up to a sprint, much less leap the decorative stone wall at the edge of our property, but she cleared it with the ease of an Olympic steeplechase runner.
Mixon was after her at once, grabbing the radio mike at his shoulder and yelling directions for backup. Rose and I walked down to the sidewalk for a better view. I would have loved to have had a bowl of popcorn, but there was no time to make one.
Mavis reached the end of the block and hung a hard right, bolting across the street in front of a school bus. The bus driver hit the brakes, stopping the bus right in front of Mixon. He rounded the front of the bus and spotted Mavis in the park across the street, trying to hide behind a cottonwood tree.
Two more officers pulled up and spread out, trying to convince Mavis to surrender. She was having none of it at this point. She tried to take a sudden left, but found her way blocked by an expanse of cattails bordering the lake.
One of the officers shouted at her to surrender. Mavis took off again, saw Mixon closing on her, and doubled back, right into a cloud of pepper spray. Even that didn’t stop her; she ran blind, cursing and screaming all the way. Mixon changed direction just in time and tackled her for a twenty-yard loss and a safety.
It may not have been chivalrous, but damn, I was cheering. Schadenfreude doesn’t stain the soul nearly as much as people claim.
As a result of her bad decisions, Mavis wound up earning two additional resisting arrest charges and a failure to obey a lawful order. An EMT showed up to check her for injuries and issues from the pepper spray. Once she was cleared, Mixon carefully loaded Mavis into the back seat of his cruiser. She was still screaming at us. “You think this is over? It’s just getting started! I will destroy you!”
Officer Mixon shut the cruiser door and handed Rose his card. “The district attorney will be in touch, miss, as will a member of our victim/witness program. This is my number if you need anything. Have a nice day.” He drove off with Mavis trying to kick the side window out. I guess she never learned the first rule of holes: when you find yourself in one, stop digging.
I gave Rose a long hug. “You realize, of course, that this means war. She’s a petty, small-minded person who has a tiny amount of power over our lives. She’ll try to use it against us. Hopefully, she and her husband have a lawyer who can talk them out of doing anything stupid.”
“Does that mean I can burn her house down?”
“No,” I said. “We’re going to have to take the high road on this one.”
Rose thought for a moment and gave a brisk nod. “I can do that. Dragons always take the high road. Walking sucks.”
It might seem like a simple issue, this whole sunbathing thing, but as usual, it gets a lot more complicated when you get into the details. The root of the problem wasn’t just that Dragons don’t wear clothes; it’s that they also need sunlight to make vitamin D. The process is one of the very few commonalities to Human and Draconic biology. We use it differently (Dragons convert it to a compound resembling white phosphorus in order to use their fire breath), but we produce it the same way. Rose might have a Human body, but, like a certain blue box, she was bigger on the inside.
The majority of her mass was tucked into a dimensional pocket that has a fairly small opening. Only so much stuff can be shifted between our dimension and the storage dimension at a given time—usually a little more than the mass of her Human form. Cosmetic changes take no time at all, while increasing her muscle mass, armoring her skin, or growing wings could take a few seconds.
Further, the body mass she carried in this dimension limited the amount of magical energy she could produce and store. Rose needed to spend several minutes building up enough magic to cast spells that a full-size Dragon could trigger at will. It was another reason they didn’t mingle with the Humans at home; if they were discovered, they’d be killed before they could change form.
Which brings us back to the sunbathing. Back home, Dragons spend hours basking in the sun and chatting. Large flat rocks or beds carved out of obsidian are their version of a neighborhood coffeehouse. A full-size Dragon gets all the sunlight they need in an hour or so. Rose had less skin area, so it took her more time to absorb and transfer the vitamin D to the rest of her body.
Vitamin supplements and fortified milk aren’t an option, as Rose still possessed a Dragon’s biology behind the Human façade. Her digestive system could absorb chemical precursors needed to create vitamin D, but not the finished product. The bottom line was that Rose had to sunbathe to live, and that fact took precedence over the moral outrage of one ignorant tight-ass with a charter membership in the ‘big hair brings you closer to Jesus’ club. But I still couldn’t let Rose burn her house down. Civilized people don’t behave that way.
Of course, at the time I still thought we were dealing with civilized people.
Chapter Two
Shoot ‘Em in the Head
“I could make it look like a tornado,” Rose offered.
“We can’t do things like that, Rose. The police would eventually notice if things just keep happening to people we have disagreements
with. And we are on the police radar with this issue.” I added some guacamole to my fajitas. “I don’t like being on the police radar. I’m sure you can see the benefits of a stealthy flight pattern.”
“Then I will allow your city guards to deal with her.” Rose pushed her second empty serving plate to the side and reached for her third. This time, she picked up the entire five-pound burrito and slid it into her mouth, swallowing it in a single bite. The restaurant’s owner watched her and turned pale.
“Scary, I know,” I told him. “She’s half chupacabra on her mother’s side.”
“I guess,” he said. “Damn, you need to get that girl into professional eating.” He scribbled a web address onto a takeout menu and handed it to me. “My son is into that stuff. Check that site out. Making money and staying fed is a good combination.”
“What’s a chuppie-car-bra?” Rose asked.
“It means ‘goat-sucker’,” I told her. “Nasty little creatures that attack and feed off of farm animals. Supposed to look like a small kangaroo with porcupine quills.”
Rose’s eyes lit up. “So, they’re a nuisance to farmers and ranchers? Are people allowed to kill them? Do they taste good?”
“I’m sorry, Rose, but they aren’t exactly real. At least, nobody has ever caught one and proved they exist. They’re a cryptid, a mystery creature.” I refilled her beer and signaled for another pitcher to get us some privacy. I lowered my voice. “Most people consider them to be as real as Dragons.”
“Then how do you know what they look like? Not that your people have any idea what Dragons look like.” She took a drink and nodded at me. “I’m sorry. I meant that your people have too many ideas what Dragons look like.”
I shook my head. “People believe all kinds of crazy stuff. Yeti, Bigfoot, the Loch Ness Monster, mermaids, sea serpents, who knows what else. Some people have even taken pictures of cloud formations and claimed they were Dragons.”
“Ah, I understand.” Rose nodded and swallowed her fourth burrito. “Your people crave Mystery. You want to have the unknown out there, always. That quality is what brings my people here. Humans back home are…smaller. Not in form, but in spirit. They spurn change, and fear difference. They fear Mystery more than they fear death.”
“That sounds like the opening to a joke,” the restaurant owner said as he dropped off the new pitcher. “If you’d rather die than change your ways…”
“Someone should oblige you,” Rose interjected.
I decided we should pick up some fudge for dessert. The healing power of chocolate is another thing both races have in common. Thankfully, it didn’t have to be administered in Draconic quantities to be effective.
After we ate, we headed off for archery practice. I had started shooting in preparation for deer season, only to discover that some of the folks I knew in the science fiction, gaming, and alternative religions communities already had a regular biweekly practice session set up. The Boulder Area Deathmatch, Apocalypse, and Zombie Survival Society (BADASSES, for short) was nominally a regular archery league, but we rarely got involved with any competitive, interleague events. Partly it was because we don’t care about winning trophies, and partly it was because the other leagues wouldn’t let us use human silhouette targets the way we normally do. After all, you gotta’ shoot ‘em in the head, right?
And, okay, fine, technically it is ‘Denver Area’, not ‘Boulder Area’, but who wants to be known as ‘Dad Asses’?
Ahem. Onward. I’m sorry for any brain damage that image caused.
When we arrived, Miranda was showing another Denver cop, a fellow named Jake, around the range. He was as tall and Roman-looking as she was small and Greek. I could picture him parading around in toga or lorica segmentata while declaiming, ‘Mater tua criceta fuit, et pater tuo redoluit bacarum sambucus!’
That’s the Latin for, ‘Your mother was a hamster and your father smelt of elderberries’. I had to memorize it to win a bet at a convention once. Yes, there was a girl, and yes, tequila was involved. Move along.
We made introductions and got our bows out for a little show and tell. Mine is a new Bear Carnage compound (my old compound had a cable failure a few weeks back and had to be replaced), while Rose used a handmade Mongol-style reflex bow. It cost twice what mine did, and looked the part.
I had Jake pegged for a newcomer, both to archery and to the different groups gathered here, but I was wrong. He pulled out an English longbow and a quiver full of hand-fletched traditional wooden arrows. I’ve seen people launch multiple arrows off their strings before, but not three times in succession.
After the first round, I tagged Jake. “How long did it take you to get consistency on that loaded string shot?”
He shrugged. “Six months or so. I had a good teacher. He makes traditional Japanese bows and teaches archery on a little ranch outside Santa Barbara. If I had any skill with wood working, I would have quit my job and begged to become one of his apprentices.”
“I wouldn’t blame you if you did.”
Rose and Miranda returned from the ladies, deep in conversation. Miranda was flushed with the deep anger of righteous indignation, while Rose was radiating the slow burn of frustration. It was a safe bet they’d been discussing the Mavis situation.
I gave Miranda a grim smile as I nocked my first arrow. “Any advice on the issue of the day, officer?”
“Keep doing what you’re doing, but you know that already.” She nocked and released two arrows in rapid succession, both solid head shots. She fired off two more, starting a nice, tight grouping. “Keep the police informed, get a good paper trail, let them do the stupid thing and come at you. It’s hard and it’s frustrating, but in the end, the only way to win is play by the rules.”
“Or change the game,” Rose added. Instead of going for our standard head shots, she started placing arrows in the target’s shoulders and arms, followed by one through each ear. She continued to staple an imaginary Mavis to the wall, saving her last arrow to go between the eyes, all to the cheers of the other shooters.
This was why other leagues didn’t like to play with us.
“What do you mean, ‘change the game’?” Miranda set her bow on the padded rack behind the line and sat down to wait for the remaining shooters. “It isn’t a good idea to just go flying by the seat of your pants.”
Ember set her bow down and added, “Change is inevitable. You should embrace it. Use it to your advantage.” Ember is an orange-haired suicide girl with crimson dragon scales and wings tattooed down her back. She ran a therapeutic massage clinic and designed her own religion around the dragons in her favorite online game. Now, I don’t sit in judgment on the validity of anyone’s eschatology. As a Whovian, my moral code is inspired by a madman in a blue box. Still, I just couldn’t see turning control of my spirituality over to a game designer in southern California.
Ember sat down next to Miranda and popped open her third energy drink. “Changing the game means you set the rules. It’s a classic strategy. Sun Tzu calls it ‘holding a pillow down on the enemy’. The wabbit does it all the time.”
“I’ve never thought of the wabbit as being a master tactician,” I said as I racked my bow.
Ember raised her eyebrow at me. “You ever see him lose?”
We started walking down to the targets to retrieve our arrows. “You’ve got a point,” I said. “However, the bunny always has the writer backing him up. That’s a big advantage.”
“No kidding,” Jake snorted. “Why do you think everyone who goes to war says God is on their side?”
“God can’t be everywhere,” Miranda answered. “That’s why police officers were created.”
Rose finished pulling her arrows and stepped away from the targets. “I don’t need any gods on my side. I’m on my side, and that’s enough. Asking a god to do something you can take care of yourself is just being lazy.”
“Rawr,” said Ember, clawing the air in front of her. “The dragon is strong with this one.”
Rose slid her arrows back into her quiver. “Ember, what would you do if you saw a news report that a live Dragon had appeared somewhere? The real thing. Big as a house and twice as scaly.”
“I’d assume the news crew was rockin’ the ganja.” Ember waved her hand to dismiss the idea. “Or that it was a set-up and anyone who responded would find themselves on an involuntary three-day hold and observe.”
“Ganja would definitely be involved,” Miranda muttered. She looked at Rose for a moment and added, “Unless you mean lizard-like space aliens?” It wasn’t my imagination—there was a hopeful note to her voice. She’s still convinced Rose is a space alien, and we’ve done nothing to change her mind.
“I mean a Dragon.” Rose shook her head. “That’s what you would do if you thought the report was false. Assume the report satisfied you it was true. What would you do, Ember?”
Ember took careful aim and released her first arrow, striking the target’s right eye. “I’d do whatever I had to do. If I couldn’t go home with it, I’d beg for it to kill me, because I couldn’t live knowing they existed on a world I’d never see. Sometimes the only thing that gets me through the day is believing that my belief is keeping them alive somewhere.” She dropped two more arrows into the target’s left eye. “Does that answer your question?”
Rose nodded. “Yes. Thank you very much.” She turned back to her target and fired off her arrows as fast as she could, stapling the silhouette once more. She retired to the back wall of the range and pretended to examine the snack machine for something edible. I was on my last two arrows when I felt Rose building up power to work a spell. I stepped back and racked my bow, waiting to see what Rose was working on.
She built the energy up to a much higher level than I’d seen her use before. Everything in the area slowed down. The arrows in the air came crawling to a stop. The people in the room froze in place, and all the color washed out of everything. Rose placed her hands on Ember’s temples and held them there. When she removed her hands, Ember began glowing, well, like you were blowing on an ember at a campfire. Rose sat down, and everything surged into full forward motion, full of sound and color.