by Chant, Zoe
Sirens wailed in the distance. He sprinted to where he remembered the line of recognizable auras and found Dennis’s group.
“There you are,” Dennis exclaimed as JP emerged from the gradually fading smoke. “JP, we’ve got ourselves a standoff. They say they’ll kill Jan if we don’t clear out, but—”
“He’s lying. She escaped.”
“What?”
“Hear the sirens? Get everyone out of here.”
In the yellow light of the overhead lamps, Dennis’s face transformed to a fierce grin. “Roger that.” He turned away, then turned back. “What are you going to do?”
“Deal with him.” JP blinked stinging raindrops out of his eyes.
“JP, wait—”
JP didn’t wait. He ran back, hearing Dennis issuing orders behind him and the sounds of a hasty retreat. Excellent. It was too much to hope for that Cockatrice’s guys would get rounded up—if they were shifters, too, they’d all just shift and run off.
JP slowed, listening ahead. The cockatrice and his minions had also heard the sirens. “Get out,” the asshole was saying. “We’ll regroup at Alpha Point.”
“No you won’t,” JP said, walking out of the fog, which the raindrops were fast dissipating.
In the distance, thunder rumbled.
The cockatrice was also naked, a big brute with rust-colored hair, taller and broader than JP. “So, come to negotiate for the woman?”
JP didn’t bother answering, just advanced on the guy, who stood easily. He had only two minions, JP was relieved to see. More than that he doubted he could take on . . .
The guy laughed as JP closed the distance—a gloating, confident laugh. That lasted two seconds as JP feinted a punch at his jaw, the first and most expected attack. The cockatrice lazily swiped his huge mitt to knock aside a fist that wasn’t there, and JP’s left, which had been held in classic fist-fighting block position, snapped out and palm-heeled the man in the solar plexus.
Cockatrice grunted in surprise and pain. One minion stepped in, and JP took him out with a piston-fast kick to the kneecap. The guy went down.
“Leave this ass clown to me,” Cockatrice roared. “You can play with him when I’m done.”
He moved in, big, strong, and over-confident. In the space of two heartbeats JP knew that this guy had been trained once, but had long since relied on his size and ferocious rep. He was slow, telegraphed his moves, but he was also solid muscle, weighing probably a hundred pounds more than JP’s 175.
JP landed three, four hard punches then the guy shouted a curse—and transformed.
Instantly JP transformed before he could be annihilated with a single blow from those mighty talons. The wind from the massive wings knocked the minions into walls. The cockatrice didn’t seem to care—all its attention was on JP, who kept head averted and mind shuttered as he darted upward.
His phoenix was far smaller against the bulk of a cockatrice: as men, they were closer to a match, one bigger, the other better trained. But as cockatrice and phoenix, the only advantage JP had was speed. He had to stay above the cockatrice. Predator birds fought downward in what was called the stoop, using the force of gravity to attack and kill.
The cockatrice shot a stream of poison fire at JP, who dodged with a flip of a wing. The fire splattered to the rooftops of the storage facility below, causing a line of flames to shoot up.
Not far away the red lights of a stream of police cars approached. JP had suppressed his glow to make it more difficult for the cockatrice to see him, but that and staying overhead was not going to defeat this deadly enemy.
And JP was tired. He had to act fast.
He shot upward and veered north, away from buildings and farms. The cockatrice pursued, working hard. Its greater strength, once up to speed, would sustain it longer. Twice JP heard the hiss of air that meant indrawn breath for a release of fire. He dropped the first time, and shot upward the second time. Both streams missed, falling to start what people below would probably assume were heat-caused wildfires. He hoped the oncoming storm would extinguish them.
JP felt his own strength taxed to the max by that flight upward. He needed a plan, and fast. But there was no plan—the cockatrice came after him with one intent: to kill.
There was no negotiation here, no civilized agreement. If he won this battle, the cockatrice would rip apart Sanluce. And Jan . . .
JP gave a last longing thought to her, and did what he had known underneath was going to happen—the only choice now left. He dodged a last shot of flame, opened his mind to the fury boiling within him.
And the phoenix vanished.
The fire dragon had emerged.
* * *
Jan had finally put on the headlights, afraid that she would crash into something, or worse, someone.
She jumped, startled, when lightning flashed somewhere, brilliant as the sun. Thunderstorms were so rare in LA, and never with lightning as bright as daylight. She waited for the crash of thunder, but didn’t hear it. Maybe this huge car was soundproofed. She’d finally found the windshield wipers (the ones on her wreck in LA had stopping working years ago) and they tick-whished steadily. The rain fell in huge summer-storm drops, slowly increasing.
Once again lightning flared. She saw it through the windshield, a fast stream of yellow light, as if the sun had shot a bit of itself across the sky.
She drove as fast as she dared, which wasn’t very fast in an unfamiliar car in unfamiliar surroundings. She was making the last turn toward the LaFleur estate when a whole slew of cars raced up on her bumper, then surrounded her. One honked its horn.
She nearly lost control and gripped the wheel white-knuckled, her heart slamming again. It could only be that creep Niklos. If so, she shouldn’t lead him to the LaFleurs, right? What should she do?
Outrun him, she thought grimly, and was about to step on the gas when a big SUV roared out from a side street and pulled ahead—then stopped. She had to stop or crash into it, as the other cars pressed in.
She slowed, but clicked the autolock, and sat there with her hands on the wheel, cursing under her breath as figures got out of the cars, silhouettes in the rain. A burly figure crossed her twin headlights—she knew him.
She rolled down the window. “Dennis?”
His grim expression changed to surprise. “Jan? I thought you were—”
“I stole it,” she said.
The surprise altered to a grin. “Nice move!”
Lightning flared again, ruddy as fire, followed by another blast of greenish light.
Once again Dennis’s expression turned grim as he looked up.
“That is the weirdest lightning I've ever seen,” Jan exclaimed.
“That isn’t lightning. That is a dragon fight.” He looked up, ignoring the rain, then back at her, as Mick came out of one of the other cars to join them. “You can’t see the actual dragons, especially in those clouds. The green light is the douchecanoe who did the snatch on you. He’s a cockatrice, one of the most dangerous of all dragons. And rare, I’m glad to say.”
“And the other one?”
Mick motioned to her, glancing to one side. Jan got out of the car, still in bare feet, ignoring the rain that hissed around them.
Mick said low-voiced, so only Jan and Dennis could hear, “Well, I guess he didn’t have time to tell you. But that’s JP.”
Jan shook her head. “He’s a phoenix. That can’t be a phoenix.”
“No, he’s also a fire dragon. It turns up very rarely in his family, like once in two or three hundred years. The fire dragon is also one of the hardest shapes to control. It forgets the human very fast. He’s only let it out twice—the first time he didn’t know what was happening, when we were kids. His grandfather did, and talked him down. The second time was in the service, when we . . . “ The two men looked at each other helplessly.
Jan sensed that this was the deepest secret yet. But need was even deeper. “Tell me,” she demanded.
To her surprise, they di
dn’t scoff, or say it wasn’t her business. Instead, they moved a little farther away from the car as rain beat down on them all, and Dennis said in a low voice, “We were in the Signal Corps, all three in the same unit.”
He glanced at Mick, who said, “We were network operators, in the field to ensure no network failure.”
“Which could lead to slow response for medical evac, or close air support,” Dennis put in.
“But things change fast in the field. What we thought was a rescue turned out to be a trap. I was concussed, half blind—you tell her.”
Dennis said, “We were facilitating a medical rescue. The attack came on so fast we hadn’t a hope. Then JP began to shift. The dragon was there long enough to shoot a flame at the enemy. They dropped their weapons and ran, and Mick and me, well, we threw ourselves on him, shouting in his ears to shift back. Before he flew. Because the thing about fire dragons is, once they get to the heights, it’s like their human self vanishes below. They might never come back.”
“He knew enough not to blast us. And seemed to hear, and just in time. He shifted back, then took a header. We had to helo him out with the wounded. It was twelve hours before he came down from whatever headspace he was in.”
The other shifters in Dennis’s team waited silently around the perimeter, their human faces pale in the criss-crossing headlights, as Jan said slowly, “What are you trying to tell me? That if he wins that fight, he loses? He’s gone?” No, no, the inner voice wailed.
Mick said, “Jan, the only person who might be able to call him back is his mate.”
“That’s me,” she said numbly, and to Dennis, “What do I do?”
He spread his hands. “I don’t know—don’t ask me. I didn’t believe in mates. Don’t want to believe in mates,” he added. “Well, except maybe now.” And he turned to Mick.
“JP might not have had time to talk to you about it—about the dangers. . . . the unknown factors. Since he’s only been the dragon briefly, he might not even know if the phoenix’s mate can also be a dragon mate. Not all the really big dragons find mates in human form. That might be why they are so rare. And dangerous.”
She blinked against a sudden sting in her eyes. “I don’t give a shit about danger,” she said fiercely. “Tell me what I need to do.”
Dennis slowly shook his head. “I dunno. Call him?”
Mick brought his chin down sharply in a nod. “Call him.”
“Here? Now?” Jan asked.
“Whichever way you can. From wherever you think best,” Mick said. “As a phoenix, he can hear people, kind of, by telepathy. Not words, but he said it’s like a GPS system, sort of. That’s how he found you.”
Jan was going to shout JP’s name, but shook her head. As good as her projection was, the rain would muffle it. She wouldn’t be heard fifty yards away much less however many miles up the sky, beyond the rainclouds those dragons were fighting in.
But if he ‘heard’ by GPS, maybe it would be better if she tried from somewhere that was not standing in the middle of a road being rained on.
Think! His house? She lifted her gaze to Mick, not bothering to wipe the rain streaming down her face. All the little stories she’d heard—it seemed that JP had in some ways been more at home with Mick and Dennis than in his big, beautiful, tragically empty house.
Go to their houses? No—not quite right. . .
And she knew where to go.
“Okay,” she said. “If he’s in that dragon, I will find him. Whatever form he’s in,” she promised. And she heard her voice coming out firm and assured, but doubt made her tremble.
Dennis turned away, and the other shifters glanced at each other, uneasy.
“Move your cars!” she added.
Dennis said, “Where are you going?”
Jan didn’t know who was aware of the grotto, so she said nothing, just climbed back into Niklos’s steel silver Mercedes. She said through the still-open window, “Can you get me to Alta Alvarado?” Where the Porsche had opened up to fly down the road . . .
Mick’s expression cleared. “Faster if you follow me.”
He retreated. She wiped her face on her wet, limp summer sleeve, and gripped the wheel, her mind racing ahead. The fear ghost wailed, but Jan gritted her teeth and ignored it. My romcom went straight into horror, and now it’s . . . what?
No answer.
The cars melted out of the way. Mick drove Shelley’s sporty new red Mercedes, leading. Jan followed, her hands moving automatically on the wheel. She paid scarce attention to Sanluce as Mick quickly wove through the quiet streets to his neighborhood. She paid scarce attention as she reached back in memory to her precious evening with JP, and how he’d driven her to his grotto.
Because she knew that if anyplace was the right one to call him down from the sky, it would be there.
Mick slowed, waving his hand out of his open window, and she flicked her lights and passed by.
She picked up speed. Alta Alvarado sped by. She remembered that . . . left turn? What had they been talking about?
She navigated by memory, all his words, and her sensations as she looked at him, listened to him, touched his hand, sniffed his scent, it came back to guide her.
Driving as fast as she dared, she leaned forward, peering out. Flashes of green and gold light glimmered, and there was a huge rocky outcropping. Oh yes, the turn that seemed to go nowhere.
She slowed, made that turn . . . and there instead of a cliff or mud was a narrow road.
Up and up and up she drove, bearing left once more. She’d gone too far? No—there was the clearing. She was there! She threw open the car door, not caring if wet got into it, and left the engine running and the lights on. She had no idea how to turn on the twinkling lights, so she groped her way up the little rocky path past the flowering shrubs. Here the headlights penetrated little, and she almost tripped and fell, stubbing one toe painfully.
Her bare toes found the moss. She was at the pool.
She lifted her head—and realized that the lightning had stopped a while ago. Good or bad?
She peered upward. She was here. Now how to call him? She remembered what she’d been told, and squeezed her eyes shut. Yelling inside her head felt like yelling inside a shoebox. And hadn’t Mick said something about a GPS? You didn’t get words with GPS. Only direction.
“I’ll sing,” she said to the waterfall.
That seemed equally stupid, because really, how far could a voice carry past all the water around her? But then so much had happened that normal people would insist made no sense.
She only knew that this was the place he loved, and she loved him, and if she truly believed what she had told poor Toby—that love was stronger than anything—it would work. It had to work. And singing was the best way she knew to truly express all that lay in her heart.
She cleared her throat, sifting her repertoire for the aria that would mean the most. Oh, yes, oh yes, the powerful, beautiful, anguished “Casta Diva” from Norma, who sings as she walks into the fire after being cast aside by her lover. But he hears, and is so heartbroken at what he has done that he follows her into the flames.
She lifted her voice and sang.
Chapter Fifteen
Through storm clouds the dragons fought, soaring upward to the icy reaches of the sky where air was too thin to breathe—too thin for fire—and then down again, swooping dangerously near the mountain peaks.
At first the cockatrice pursued this new dragon, obviously new to his powers and clumsy, but the fire dragon learned fast. The chase reversed, the fire dragon meeting each deadly stream with its own fire, and then coming after the cockatrice with teeth and claws.
The cockatrice first tried mental invasion, knowing its telepathy was far superior. But the fire dragon had its mind locked hard. The cockatrice screamed in frustration, running low on its venomous fire. It tried to trick the fire dragon into meeting its gaze, only to be slashed across the face.
The maddened cockatrice finally threw i
tself at the fire dragon, willing to die if it could lock itself hard around the foe and drag it crashing to the earth.
It was then that the fire dragon loosed the last of its fire, and the cockatrice screamed its death cry as it tumbled in a massive fireball to smash into a mountainside fifty miles from Yosemite.
The fire dragon cried its triumph to the skies, and flew above in a circle, watching its foe consumed in flames that began to spread.
The fire dragon flew away, unconcerned with the fire, with anything that crawled on the earth. It was king of the mountains, its challenger defeated. With that death cry echoing in its ears it soared high above the peaks still snow-topped, circling as it searched the vast kingdom of its mind . . .
High and faint as the stars, a sound.
The fire dragon turned its head. The sound came from there. It needed to be closer, to hear that sound, more powerful than fire, more enduring than gold. The sound rose and fell, carrying images of fire, of two figures entwined surrounded by flame.
The fire dragon lifted its wings, his wings. Thrum, thrum, the steady beat of his wings beat in syncopated rhythm, bringing him closer to arpeggios of remembered passion, and oh, the echo of loss.
No, must not lose. Faster the wings beat as the song rose, song, harmony in a golden voice. His heart thrummed and he looked below, seeking that song, home, home. Gold, and . . .
For a time the dragon nature fought, but its desire to soar among the peaks shattered against the rising tide of memory.
Home. Gold.
Grotto . . .
And her.
* * *
A sound like a jet airliner coming down roared overhead, rumbling through the rocks and causing the trees to tremble. Even the waterfall jiggled, and Jan stumbled back in a wave of hot, smoky wind.
A male figure tumbled to earth, fiery glowing eyes swept around . . .
And fixed on her.
It was JP, but not quite. He stood, cock rampant, hands reaching.
“Oh, my darling, you’re back!” She had done it, brought him home. Except he was not quite all home yet. His human form was there, but his expression, those strange, fiery eyes—His body had returned to her, but his mind was still caught somewhere between the sky realm and home.