The Elementalists

by C Sharp

  Chloe tried not to eat beef that often, but her mom had a borderline unhealthy appetite for “the good stuff” and would have eaten steak every day if Chloe let her. This time, Audrey had come home with twenty or so pounds of NY strip, another ten of filets, and a bag full of pork tenderloins with some homemade sausage on top. With Audrey’s appetite, it was meant to last until spring…

  By Tuesday, Chloe had stolen it all and she hadn’t even put a dent in Uktena’s hunger. Still, the dragon began to improve noticeably by midweek. He spent most of his time in a state of torpor, and the dam of silence between them held back the endless flood of questions that Chloe was waiting to ask. The dragon even seemed to eat in a weird sleep state as Chloe tossed hunks of semifrozen meat into his open, stinking jaws before they snapped shut with a loud CLACK.

  Chloe wanted to keep the process as clinical and scientific as she could, needing to bury her thoughts in a practical approach to the undertaking rather than get swept away by the impossibility or implications of it all. She noted changes in his appearance and tracked the feeding schedule on a piece of graph paper; she pretended it was just research for yet another ‘A’ report in science class. But more than once, she’d found herself walking the length of the unresponsive beast, tempted to reach out and touch it again.

  On Wednesday night, as she stood beside the dragon and monitored the improvement in his breathing, she closed her eyes to listen as a shiver ran through her, and for a moment, she envisioned herself climbing up to straddle Uktena’s wide neck. She was stunned to find that she’d taken an involuntary step in that direction before opening her eyes again. A dragon breath later and she’d fled back toward the relative safety of her room.

  By Thursday morning, the reek of death was gone, though the smell of dragon had permeated the barn in its place. It reminded Chloe of the reptile house at the zoo—not unpleasant, just off-putting and alien. She was glad to discover, however, that Uktena was not by nature grizzly and gore-strewn in his personal hygiene. He had cleaned up quite nicely, the silvery shine to his scales returned, and any trace of filmy translucence changed back to an almost metallic solidity.

  In an attempt to divert Audrey’s lingering curiosity surrounding the big stink, Chloe had supplied a dramatic cringeworthy story of finding an entire squirrel colony that had come under Shipwreck’s bloody claw. For the remainder of that week, she felt pangs of guilt every time Audrey shot the cat angry looks or swatted his butt off the counter with a little extra judgment. All the while, Shipwreck kept his distance from Chloe, watching her with what seemed like a knowing sense of betrayal, or perhaps fear.

  After Audrey had gone to bed on Thursday night, Chloe rose from the couch and put down her book. She’d read the same paragraph four times before finally succumbing to the insuppressible impulse to go see the dragon again…as if to prove to herself, once again, that it really was there.

  She slid into the kitchen and removed a tightly wrapped paper package from beneath the lettuce in the bottom of the vegetable drawer. Clutching it to her side, she stepped lightly across the creaking living room floor and put on her running shoes.

  She opened the back door as quietly as she could and slipped out before gently easing it closed on creaking hinges. There was a dusting of fallen leaves about the yard, and her steps across the lawn seemed to crunch much louder at night than they had during the day. As she approached the barn, she looked back to check her mom’s bedroom window—still shuttered and dark.

  Despite the tight schedule after practice, Chloe had been making dinners all week to keep Audrey from sniffing around the meat freezer in the basement. Earlier that night, she’d even cooked a couple of fine steaks that she’d blown her own saved money on in hopes of both passing it off as the farm-raised original and sating her mom’s meat craving for the week. She had no idea what excuse she would give when Audrey finally noticed the theft, and after their recent heart-to-heart, she knew it was only a matter of time before she would have to tell…the truth?

  She’d bought four hormone- and antibiotic-free steaks in total, hoping that the measly offering of the remaining two might keep the dragon satisfied with their arrangement for another night.

  She slid into the barn and shut the door behind her, remaining in total darkness until she found the flashlight by the door. She clicked on the freshly battery-powered beam and waved it in a slow arc around her. She still wasn’t sure how the sickly dragon had done it, but Uktena had held up his end of the bargain and had continued to clean and straighten as the week had progressed. The barn was cleaner than it had been in Chloe’s lifetime, with all the junk in neatly arranged stacks, rows, and piles and no trace of the gore that had temporarily infested the back corner.

  The paint cans were tightly arranged to block the nearest window, and the farm tools were leaning against the opposite window in a straight line. It was the work of someone with a fastidious attention to detail, and the anal-retentiveness of it all made Chloe almost as uncomfortable as knowing who/what was responsible for it. She realized, as the light flashed across the dragon’s handiwork, that there was no way Audrey would ever believe that she had done this. The sense of order that had been imposed on the space was in its way more conspicuous than the dead cows that had been there in the first place.

  Chloe started to unwrap the meat as she moved to the back, noticing how the dragon had constructed a wall from the tire towers and a couple giant spools of moldy hay so there was no direct line of sight to where he slept until she was practically on top of him. She forced a little cough to announce her arrival before swinging her foot past the barricade. She froze as the light in her hand danced around the space with jerky ticks… Uktena wasn’t there.

  For a moment, she panicked. What if he’s left for good? What if someone else has found him? But then she reassured herself that he wouldn’t have bothered with the wall if he wasn’t looking to stay. She stepped further into the clearing and continued the search for some sign of his recent activities.

  Even the blood stains had been cleaned from the floor, and aside from the odd, animal undertones to the musk of the barn, there was no indication that a giant, winged monster might be residing there. In the back corner, where she’d first found him blended among the shadows, there was now a little pyramid of antlers and horns. It was stacked deliberately—like the rock cairns that Chloe had sometimes found along the Appalachian Trail—though this small monument was clearly meant for no one but the builder: a homey touch comprised of the trophies from recent kills.

  A shiver ran down Chloe’s spine as she sensed someone behind her. She spun around, and the flashlight caught the silver-white hair of Uktena in man form a few paces away. He was standing utterly still as he watched her with rapt interest.

  “I went to hunt,” he said without emotion. “It seemed safer to consume my meat where none would find the remains.”

  Chloe noticed that he held another, even larger, set of antlers in his hand. He stepped past her and reverently placed them on top of the pile before turning back to face her hushed stare.

  “I honor those who have died for my hunger,” he explained. He sniffed the air, and his eyes moved down to the half-wrapped steaks in Chloe’s hand.

  Chloe suddenly felt insecure. “I wasn’t sure if you were getting enough. Sorry, I couldn’t afford much,” she shrugged. “I guess you’ve probably had your fill—”

  “No,” Uktena cut in. “Deer meat is too salty and stringy for my taste; I much prefer the flavor of the cow you have brought me.”

  “Oh, good,” said Chloe with a little smile. “This might not be as fine as the stuff before, but it isn’t frozen.” She held up the meat as a bit of blood dripped from the paper.

  Uktena’s gaze tracked the droplet as it fell to the hay at Chloe’s feet. Now it was the dragon-man’s turn to look uncomfortable. “I cannot feed in this form, and I still lack the strength to maintain it for long,” he said, as if trying to formulate what he would next say. “I must ask
you to look away as I change.”

  Chloe was momentarily confused about what he was asking; his clothes looked like they were knit from the deep grey of the surrounding shadows. Then her eyes went wide and she turned around. “Of course,” she called back as she stepped across the open space that had previously been scattered with carcasses.

  Behind her there was a sound of indistinct movement followed by the heavy creaking of floorboards. She wanted to peek, but willed herself to remain still. How the hell does a man change into a hundred-foot-long winged creature? It defies the laws of physics!

  The voice that answered was that of the beast. “My kind was born to this universe long before the age of your science,” he said at Chloe’s ear.

  She whipped back around with a yelp, but the dragon’s horned head moved out from the shadows, still in the far corner.

  “There are truths of the natural world still well beyond human grasp,” Uktena added as his front claws scraped across the floor and drew the powerful mass of body from the darkness behind it.

  Still, she had to check her impulse to bolt. Do not run. Do not run.

  The head came closer as the slits in his eyes focused again on the meat in her hand. “I would taste that meat now if you still offer it?”

  Chloe raised the bloody handful a bit too eagerly as the monstrous jaws scissored open before her. She tossed the first steak with sloppy haste, and the jaws moved at a speed Chloe could barely register before clamping together with an echoing clack over the place where the meat had been. The gust of wind from the movement whipped against her face, and she stumbled back a step with shaky knees.

  Uktena tilted his head back and swallowed the steak the way a pelican would swallow a fish. His expectant gaze settled back on Chloe, and the fang-lined mouth opened again. The long, forked serpent’s tongue curled away from his teeth; Chloe gripped the butcher’s paper and tossed the second steak straight in.

  This time, his bite closed more gently around it, and he cocked his head to the side and started sawing on the meat with the ridged teeth at the back of his maw. As he worked the mouthful, a dribble of blood slipped out and fell to the hay, and a contented grumble climbed from the back of his throat.

  The deep, gravelly hum sounded to Chloe a little like Shipwreck’s purring.

  Finally he swallowed with a little jerk of his head, and for a moment afterward, it almost looked like he was smiling. “For all of humanity’s clever gadgets and bold invention, it is the cultivation of flavors such as this that must be your greatest addition to the world.”

  Chloe fumbled a folded piece of paper from her pocket and opened it before him. On it was a rough, pencil-drawn map of streets and pictorial landmarks that she’d sketched in homeroom class that morning. It showed the path, as she remembered it, to finding Richard Roberts’s private herd of five-time, County-Fair-winning, grass-fed cattle. “I told you I would show you where to find some of the best meat you’d ever tasted,” she stammered. “Well, if you follow the dotted line west from the barn, it will lead you to a pasture with the best cows in the state.”

  Uktena came closer until his head hovered only a foot away from the upheld paper. One of his powerful five-clawed hands rose to pluck the map from Chloe with two of his sword-length talons skewering the top corner in a surprisingly delicate grip.

  It looked to Chloe the way a stereotypical British royal might hold a teacup, though in this case it was a hooked ebony talon rather than a pinky that was extended for balance. The dragon studied the drawing a moment longer before lowering the paper to the hay.

  “But if you don’t want to be spotted by anyone else, there are rules you’ll need to follow,” Chloe added nervously, hoping she didn’t overstep her bounds. “You should only take one at a time, and don’t go too many days in a row… The Daedalus Group suspects something weird already, and I think that some of them are looking for you.”

  The dragon’s smile faded, and the electricity flashed again within his gaze. “In ages past, some of your kind sought me out in the high or deep places of the world, warriors looking to test their manhood or shamans looking for forbidden wisdom.”

  Chloe straightened. “How did that turn out for them?”

  “Most became trophies for my pile,” he gestured back to the cairn of antlers and bone. “But some few found what they were searching for.”

  Chloe felt the tickle of his will at the edge of her mind, but he restrained from entering. No longer was there an air of threat at the forefront of their interaction. Instead, there was a current through the air between them, and the diamond plate on his forehead began to pulse again with an internal radiance. Chloe’s gaze was drawn to the mesmerizing rhythm of it as if with a magnetic pull.

  “What are you searching for, Chloe McClellan?” he asked. “You who talk to the world, are a witch without intending it, and were queen for a night—what knowledge would you ask for if any answer could be yours?”

  Chloe shrugged. “I don’t know.”

  The dragon’s head slithered closer. “Do you seek the key to riches or the riddle of power?” Uktena slowly circled as the diamond began to pulse brighter. “Would you ask for fame, or the secret of immortality, or perhaps the return of a loved one cruelly taken from you?”

  Chloe felt a tremble in her legs, but she refused to react as the rows of teeth slid behind her.

  “I could gift you the love from any and all who you desire and punish those who seek to tear you down or stand in your way.”

  His words crawled through Chloe’s thoughts, insidious and impossible to resist. She closed her eyes and tried to block them out, but imagined instead what it would be like to have Kirin as her own and know that he loved her. Then she fantasized about breaking Kendra and leaving her in whimpering public humiliation.

  Chloe shook the tempting images from her head and opened her eyes. “No, I would only ask you if the Tipping Point Prophecy is true,” she said. “What is going to happen to the world when the others wake up? You called it the day of the Ascension; I would ask what I can do to stop it.”

  Suddenly one of the dragon’s giant blue eyes was beside her, and the black slit thinned as the internal spark flared again. “You could have anything you desire, and you would ask instead what you can do for your world?” he asked in challenge.

  Chloe swallowed hard. A part of her longed to reach out and touch the glow of the diamond—needed it—but she kept her arms locked at her side. “If the prophecy is true and the world ends soon, what good would anything else I wished for be then?”

  Uktena’s neck retracted back toward the shadows that still obscured the bulk of his form, and the diamond light in his forehead dimmed and went out. For a long moment, he stared at Chloe with a mixture of confusion and fascination. “Some knowledge proves to be a curse to those who grasp it—wisdom that leaves no room for happiness.”

  “Is there even such a thing as happiness in high school?” Chloe mumbled. “I just want to understand what all of this means,” she said. “I need to know what will happen. What am I supposed to do?”

  “None can truly know what will happen,” the dragon answered, “or fully understand what their role is in life until after it has passed.” He sunk back further into the darkened corner as his voice took on a melancholy tone. “Even I am too small to change the events that direct the world… Perhaps the greatest gift I could give you is the continued security of ignorance.”

  “Wait,” protested Chloe. “You said—”

  “Leave me, Chloe McClellan. I am weary,” Uktena cut her off and turned away. Somehow, as he tucked his head under his wing, his massive form all but vanished into the gloom of the barn. “Sleep and dream of the pond in the summer sunlight,” his muffled voice grumbled from the shadows. “Wake tomorrow and live your day with all the spirit you have to give it.”

  Chloe turned around and marched out of the barn in a huff, wondering why the thousand-year-old dragon was starting to sound more and more like her mother.
/>
  • • •

  That was it! Chloe couldn’t keep this secret to herself any longer. She did not have pretty dreams of summer days or wake with a newfound zest for life. She was tormented instead by hazy nightmares of riding on Uktena’s back though smoke-filled air over a dying planet. She woke with a pit in her stomach and a hunger to fight.

  Plans were solidified during Friday’s lunch period for her and Stan to finally put Operation Bovine Justice into practice. Chloe reminded Stan that NO ONE else could know about what they were up to. The following Saturday night, Chloe’s latest grounding would be over, and they would convene for the video stakeout at the original site she had suggested—but now with the unspoken insurance that the Cow Thief would actually show up, as if on cue.

  Chloe figured that if she could prove to Stan that the dragon was real, then she could ease him into the rest of her secret and elicit his help with how best to proceed. If Uktena wasn’t giving her answers and signs continued to point to some sort of looming apocalypse, she was damned sure not going to sit back and pretend everything was life as normal.

  It didn’t matter that Kirin had gone the full week without so much as a text or an e-mail to her or that her friendship with Ezra had all but evaporated since Kendra had gotten her poisoned claws into him. The pitfalls and failures of her adolescent social life were meaningless in the face of a pending global crisis and a possible extinction level event for the human race. At least that’s what she repeatedly told herself right up until her phone rang at 5 p.m. on Saturday afternoon.

  “Chloe, it’s Kirin,” he said as if no time had passed since their last conversation.

  She couldn’t keep her voice from spiking. “Oh! Hi, welcome back… Was China cool?” God! What a stupid thing to say!

  “Eye-opening,” he answered, holding something back. “I can’t tell if I’m supposed to be getting ready for dinner or breakfast, but I’ve been told to try and reacclimate to Eastern Standard Time and stay up until I would normally go to bed.”