Life With A Fire-Breathing Girlfriend

by Bryan Fields

  Chapter Seven

  A Little Night Music

  Dealing with a house full of kids all day didn’t leave Mary a lot of ‘me time’, so she made a point of rising early and doing her jogging while the milk trucks are making their morning rounds, even on Saturday. I’ve never understood people who can be up and functional well before the local raccoon population calls it a night, but today it was a blessing to have one of those people on our side.

  I was half awake when I answered the phone, but her news worked better than a double espresso. “David, you and Rose need to call the cops. Someone put up flyers with pictures of Rose on them. They’re accusing her of being a child molester.”

  “Oh, man. Rat bastards must pay. We’re up, I’m calling the cops.”

  “Go ahead. I’m going to call a few people I know and get some help collecting all these.” Mary hung up, leaving me shaking my head at the phone.

  I was going to have to buy her an ice cream cake or something for this. I called the cops while Rose got dressed. I tugged yesterday’s clothes on and we headed out.

  The flyers were everywhere. They had pictures of Rose on the balcony, nude, along with a picture taken yesterday of her talking to Martin (both fully clothed). The text of the flyer accused her of being a sexual predator and of molesting Martin. The flyers were taped to doors, stuffed in mailboxes, and taped to signs all over our neighborhood.

  Mary’s friends showed up and we headed out again to collect flyers in other parts of the neighborhood. The ruckus woke up some of the kids camping in the park. Once they heard the details, the folks from Crystalville and Occupy the Dragon (I shit you not) fanned out to help us out as well. As one fellow told Rose, “You got an awesome rack, but this isn’t right.” It made me glad we hadn’t plopped down any fewmets last night.

  At least we knew where the picture of Rose had come from; it was one of the ones Mavis had taken. Passing the pictures to someone else meant additional charges. As soon as the police showed up, I showed them our paperwork and the order prohibiting further distribution of the pictures. They asked us to wait until a detective came out, which we were glad to do.

  The detective asked us to go over everything one more time, just to make sure she had the details right. She went to talk to the Brundles and show them the flyers. As soon as she asked Wilbur Brundle about the pictures, he caved in and fingered our buddy, Ralph Tennyson. Mavis had gotten the flyers made at a local print shop using the HOA’s account, trying to keep anyone from tying the flyers back to her. Armed with Mavis & Wilbur’s statements, the detective made some phone calls and took care of whatever arrangements she needed in order to bring Tennyson in.

  While all this was happening, Rose and I made a donut run as a way of thanking all the folks who had helped out with collecting the flyers. When we got back, the detective let us know they were getting ready to take Tennyson into custody.

  There was a news crew setting up across the street talking to more kids about Azul. I snagged the producer and asked, “Are you all interested in covering another story besides the talking baby Dragon?”

  She shrugged. “Depends on the story. What do you have going on?”

  I handed her one of the flyers, folded in half. “The President of our HOA is going to be arrested for papering the neighborhood with these. They’re nude pictures of my girlfriend that he obtained illegally from another HOA member who has been harassing us. The accusations printed on the flyer are untrue, and the child mentioned is the son of some friends of ours, who are also being harassed by the HOA. How does that sound?”

  She looked at the flyer and tucked it into a leather folder she was carrying. “What’s his address?”

  Half an hour later, we had front-row seats as Tennyson was hauled out of his house in handcuffs, accompanied by the cheers and jeers of the Occupy kids. The reporter snagged him as he left the house. “Do you have anything you’d like to say to Miss Drake?”

  Tennyson shook his head, but as the cop started to load him into the cruiser, he looked at Rose and spit. “You’re still a whore.”

  For a moment, Rose’s eyes turned red. She opened her mouth, but the hissing, growling, guttural sounds that emerged weren’t fashioned by Human tongue and lips.

  Tennyson’s eyes lost focus. He sagged back into the seat with a glazed look and vacant smile. Rose smiled and waved her fingers at him as the cops drove him away.

  I looked at the producer. “You might want to bleep that out. It wasn’t very ladylike.” We did a short interview and got the producer’s contact information to give Charles & Vicki. As we started walking back to the house, I asked Rose, “What did you say to him?”

  She laughed. “I said, ‘Relax, have no fear, and speak only the truth.’ I just used the imperative form. It’ll last a day or two.”

  “Check me if I’m wrong, but he doesn’t speak Draconic. How did he know what you said?”

  Rose shrugged. “He doesn’t need to understand a spell to be affected by it. The words don’t matter. It’s saying them with authority that counts.”

  I put my arm around Rose and pulled her close. “All this and influence over the weak-minded too.”

  As we passed the lake, the Division of Wildlife was setting up what I assumed was bear trap: a steel cylinder the size of a car, with some fresh fish as bait at the far end. Mavis Brundle was talking to one of the DoW guys who looked like a supervisor. She seemed to be interested in the bear trap, but if she thought that would be enough to catch Azul, she was due to be sorely disappointed.

  Back at our house, I opened a beer and asked, “Have any Dragons even been caught by the authorities here? These guys are acting more like your basic Men in Black than park rangers or whatever they’re supposed to be. Maybe we attracted too much attention too quickly.”

  Rose shook her head. “I don’t know of anyone ever being captured. My mother was examined in a hospital the last time she was here, but the injury was minor and none of the examinations could have revealed the truth about her.”

  “What was your mother doing in the hospital?”

  “She said she took a bad trip and someone sprayed her with brown acid.”

  I put my beer down. “Did your mother ever mention a place called Woodstock?”

  “I don’t know. Is that near Berkley? I know she had friends who were members of the LSD and they took lots of SDS.”

  “Sounds like she was at Berkley, all right.” I started to have a drink, then put my beer down again. “Rose, you told me you were close to a thousand years old. How could your mother have been here only forty years ago?”

  Rose shrugged. “Time passes differently between the worlds. It’s not consistent, but roughly an hour passes here for each day back home.”

  “So, a reproductive dragon could be coming here every ten years? That could still be hundreds of Dragons here at any given time. Yeah, that would be enough for someone to notice.” I pulled her to me. “Tonight has to be Azul’s last appearance. Just make some more tracks tonight and tomorrow, let Martin see Azul and her mommy head home. He’ll be able the keep the legend alive.”

  “I like that idea. Can we go get burritos now? I can’t perform on an empty stomach.”

  She had a point. Breakfast had been pretty skimpy even by Human standards. I poured my unconsumed beer out as a libation to Squat and we headed for our favorite burrito shack. It turned out to be a good plan, as it was the only peace and quiet we were going to get until evening.

  Our lawyer called while we were having breakfast and insisted on hearing a full recounting of the events so far. I brought him up to speed and asked, “So, did we do something wrong?”

  “No, not at all. But I think we should have a prepared statement for the press. You should also be careful what media outlets you speak to. I can have one of our newer associates handle that for you if you’d like. It would be much less than my rate and we can make sure that you only speak to reputable individuals who won’t try to take advantage of your situ
ation.”

  “That would be great. We have no problem with talking to the media, but I don’t want to wind up talking to the wrong people for the wrong reasons.” I got a name and number from him, and in an hour we had three good interviews set up.

  Even sticking to the prepared statement our lawyer got us and staying on message, as they say, the interviews took until dinner time. Thankfully, a few of our neighbors had come to our assistance in grand American tradition: they brought us casseroles. There was enough food to make Rose happy and have a few burritos left over for breakfast. We had just finished washing dishes when Rose looked up and started sniffing the air. “We have company,” she called out.

  I opened the door and found Ember and The Terminatrix on the porch. Ember waved and said, “Ummm, hi. I wasn’t sure we could find you but Harmony said it would be no problem. She just seemed to know where you were. I guess Dragons have something like radar.”

  I held the door open for them. “Yeah, I think there’s an app for that. Come on in.” I offered my hand to The Teminatrix and added, “Harmony, was it? I’m David, and this is Rose.”

  She started to hold her hand out for me to kiss, but stopped in mid-motion and gave me a firm-but-not-quite-bone crushing handshake. “Yes. Harmony Clementine Angelsy. It is my very great pleasure to meet you, sir.”

  Rose dropped to one knee and bowed her head for a moment. “Wind to your wings, ancient one. Our home is elevated by your presence.”

  Harmony tapped her hand on Rose’s shoulder. “Fly free, youngling, Thank you, but there’s no need to adhere to ceremony while we visit this fair land. Please speak with me as you would any Human in the same circumstance. You may call me Harmony.”

  Rose stared at her. “Thank you. This is an unexpected honor. It will take me some time to get used to it.”

  Harmony smiled and helped Rose to her feet. “The formality of our social customs passed unnoticed in earlier ages, but in this era it attracts far too much attention. I am attempting to modernize my speech patterns, no matter how vexing an effort it is, as it makes me far too memorable.”

  I nodded and gestured for everyone to head for the kitchen table. “Well, I’m sure it’ll get easier as time goes on. How many times have you been here?”

  Harmony grinned at me. “Si ego certiorem faciam mihi tu delendus eris. If I tell you, I will have to kill you. Haven’t you ever been told not to ask a lady’s age?”

  I actually blushed. “I’m sorry. I didn’t think of it that way.”

  She waved it off. “Age is a Human conceit. We take pride in it. Age brings us power and prestige. My first Human bonding was with a Minoan bull-leaping instructor, in the city you know as Knossos. That was around four thousand years ago, in your time reckoning. My last bonding was in 1870, with a writer in San Francisco.”

  “Blessed Mother…” I shook my head. “Every historian on the planet would sacrifice body parts to get to talk to you.”

  “This is why I don’t speak of the past. I have no desire to be chained up in a museum and endlessly interrogated by armchair scholars.”

  The math circuit in my head finally engaged, leaving me staring at Harmony. “I’m sorry, but if you’ve been coming here for the past four thousand Earth years, doesn’t that mean you’re over one hundred thousand years old?”

  She blinked at me. “Yes.”

  Ember stared at Harmony and shook her head. “Wow... Are Dragons immortal?”

  “No. Even for us there is a time of ending. When the Final Dreaming comes upon us, we withdraw to a place of solace and surrender to time. We feel the weight of years, and they become stone to us. Our bones are the roots of mountains.”

  A long silence settled over the table. Ember stood up and went to stare out at the moon through the patio door. “All my life I’ve believed I didn’t matter. I thought I would die alone and be forgotten.”

  Harmony pulled her into a hug. “No. You will be remembered when all you see around you has become dust, and the flame of your spirit will live on in my children. Your name will live forever, as long as there are wings in the sky.”

  I took Rose’s hand and met her gaze, giving Ember and Harmony some privacy. Truth be told, I felt a bit of what Ember was going through. Next to Rose and Harmony, we were little more than mayflies.

  I stood up and started some water boiling. “I think it’s time for some mint tea and chocolate. So, what brings you two up to this neck of the woods?”

  “Some friends invited us up for a bardic jam tonight,” Ember said. “They’re camped across the street hoping to catch a glimpse of a little blue baby Dragon that seems to be living in that lake. You two wouldn’t know anything about that, would you?”

  I poured the tea and we filled our guests in on the issues we’d been having. Some of it they knew, thanks to the news coverage of Tennyson’s arrest, but the details filled both with outrage.

  “So why the baby Dragon?” Ember asked. “Most people would go with the ‘flaming bag of crap on the doorstep’ routine, or sugar in the gas tank. My personal favorite is seeding the offender’s lawn with a mix of catnip, mint, and salad dandelions. Dragon eating the roses seems a little complicated.”

  “I guess I didn’t think it through,” Rose said. “It sounded like a way to get back at Mavis while awakening wonder in more people. I didn’t think they would stoop so low or say such horrible things. Sometimes I think I should have just burned their house down.”

  “We’ll get through it,” I added. “Tonight is Azul’s last appearance. We’ll leave some more physical evidence and then tomorrow she and her mommy head home.”

  “Perhaps we can be of assistance with that,” Harmony said. “Did you want to do the departure as flesh, or illusion?”

  “Flesh,” Rose replied. “I’d like there to be some mystery left behind that cannot be explained away.”

  Harmony nodded. “I will assist you any way I can. We can talk later, as I believe the dancing will be starting soon. I hear drummers warming up.”

  Ember stood up. “I need to get back to our tent. I have to get my dancing clothes on.”

  I asked, “What kind of dancing do you do?”

  Ember smiled and took Harmony’s hand. “Fire, of course. You really should come, and invite anyone you know. We’ve been working on something you just have to see.”

  While Rose was getting her dancing clothes on, I called Charles and let him know about the party in the park. I wasn’t sure it was an environment they would be comfortable in, but I didn’t want Martin to miss any potential hatchie sightings.

  Charles said, “Hmm,” and was silent for a few seconds before calling out to Vicki. “Honey, David and Rose want to know if we’d like to go to the park so Martin can watch naked hippie chicks jumping over bonfires. What do you think?”

  Over the phone I heard Vicki affecting a British accent. “Of course they’re naked. It’s much too dangerous to jump through a fire with your clothes on.” The two of them started laughing and Charles covered up the phone for a moment.

  When he came back, Charles said, “We’ll meet you there, but if I see any wicker-work bigger than a chair, we’re leaving.” I agreed with him and hung up, chuckling. They weren’t quite as mundane as I had taken them for. Serves me right for not checking out their bumper stickers when I had a chance.

  Rose came downstairs wrapped in an emerald-green Kinsale cloak embroidered with gold knotwork. I have no doubt that it wasn’t in our closet this morning, but at this point I’m no longer surprised by the spectrum of sartorial eccentricity her extra-dimensional wardrobe is capable of producing. Me, I stuck with a light jacket.

  The park doesn’t have fire rings, so the Occupy kids built their bonfire in a lidless portable grill with chopped-down legs. They also had two fire extinguishers and half a dozen buckets of sand nearby, along with a very clearly defined ring around the fire for people to dance in. They were a scruffy lot, but damn, were they organized.

  Most of the musicians came fro
m the crystals and patchouli crowd camped next door. I looked them over and spotted more than a few familiar faces. What can I say—I belong to a lot of different groups that share a common interest in how to get wine stains and candle wax out of the carpet.

  Miranda and Jake were among the musicians, he on the doumbek and she on the bodhran. We sat nearby, and made introductions all around when Charles, Vicki, and Martin arrived. Charles was packing another bodhran and Vicki was holding a harp case. She sat down on a small stool and pulled her harp out of the case. The harp was Irish willow, intricately carved with knotwork and strung with brass wire. Her fingernails danced over the strings, striking out a crystalline glissando that silenced the crowd in an instant. All of a sudden, the shape of her manicure made perfect sense.

  Harmony produced a set of bellows-powered uilleann pipes from Dragon Mini Storage and bowed to Vicki. “Lead the way, mistress bard.”

  Vicki blushed, but called out, “Brian Boru!” in strong, steady voice. Charles called out a four-count and they were off to the races. Rose dropped her cloak and stepped into the dancing ring. Her outfit showed a vast expanse of jade-green skin, bringing a round of applause and appreciative ululations from the other dancers. I stood back and clapped; her belly dance lessons were well learned and she was getting high off the crowd’s energy. I just let her enjoy the moment.

  The bardic group performed five or six songs then stepped back and let the drum line have some fun. A police cruiser pulled up while they were playing, but Miranda and Jake had a quiet word with the responding officers and the cruiser went on its way. Being on the right side of the universal fraternity of police officers is a boon without price, and the drums thundered on.

  When the drummers tired, Ember entered the dance ring holding a set of weighted chains. Harmony took hold of the fire extinguisher and set it between her legs. Ember had a brief word with Charles and Vicki, and then whistled for everyone’s attention.