by Marc Secchia
Zaranna gasped, “What? But she never –”
Charles put in, “Exactly. Mom drives like an eighty year-old granny.” Susan pretended to slap him. “Simply put, sis, how do you ramp a Ford Focus over a motorway barrier designed to prevent exactly that, landing up on train tracks? Mom wasn’t drunk. It takes considerable force to make a car fly – force applied either negligently, or accidentally.”
“Or deliberately,” her dad said. “There’s a chance someone tried to kill you.”
He said it so bluntly. Spies must think like that all the time. Zaranna felt hemmed in, choked with fear. Was there something more they were holding back? Could she voice her suspicions? She remembered only snatches from that evening. The doctor said her memory would return in time. So far, her brain had opted to produce a fine imitation of an unused chalkboard.
“Zara, darling, I have amnesia too,” her mom explained. “I don’t remember a thing after I got behind the wheel that evening, until I was sitting in the ambulance, seeing you lying there so broken, so mutilated …” She began to cry softly. “I thought you were dead. I thought, ‘I’ve done this,’ and I can’t, I just can’t forgive myself … it’s my fault! Oh God, what have I done? Can you ever forgive me?”
Reaching out, Zaranna stroked her mom’s arm helplessly. “It’s not your fault. I don’t blame you.”
“It is. Must be.”
“No, Mom. What I do remember is when we were down there on the tracks, you did everything in your power to save me. This crazy-strong woman bent the dash trying to get me out.”
Susan stared at her. “I did?”
Zaranna’s laugh was more a choked-off sob. “Even when the train was about to hit us, you wouldn’t leave. Mom, if I ever wanted someone to fight for my life, it would be you. The way I saw you, in that moment – I’ll never forget. You’re my hero.”
* * * *
The faraway honking of a horn launched Zaranna into a nightmare. The night was fully dark. She and her mother drove along the highway, the car’s beams slicing the darkness like glowing swords. Soon, Zaranna slept. Her mother drove North at a steady seventy miles per hour.
Suddenly, the car juddered. Slewing onto two wheels, the tyres squealed as a monstrous force dragged the Ford Focus across the motorway, slamming it into the side of a truck. Briefly, the car bounced on the tarmac. Zaranna smelled acrid, burning rubber; her grim-faced mother wrestled with the wheel, fighting to control the skidding. Then, a terrible blow struck from above. The Ford bounced crazily on its suspension. Metal screamed as the roof peeled back in the grip of what appeared to be a giant hand, only, as Zaranna gazed beyond the scaly red knuckles it was to spy the business end of a monstrous, dinosaur-like muzzle furnished with a shark’s pride of pearly white longswords, backlit by a bonfire up there in that maw. She froze.
A ghastly, reptilian voice grated in her ears, “I am Rhenduror the Red. My master bids me return with a token of the despised one.”
What? She wanted to protest, to beg, to flee, but the beast’s monstrous presence was a hammer blow that vanquished her body’s ability to make any response whatsoever. Her mind gabbled in dread. With horrific ease, the gigantic, fire-engine-red lizard hurled the car over the edge of the motorway. They bulldozed through the undergrowth, finally crashing to a halt on the train tracks. The beast landed nearby, its tonnage trembling the ground; by the flare of its great wings and the silhouette seen against the brightening lights of the train, Zaranna realised at last what it was.
Dragon!
And then she knew mortal terror, for the Dragon reached with delicate care into the passenger footwell, and grasped her right knee between its fantastically powerful digits. It growled, “Tremble, worthless Human, as I rend your flesh.”
The talons twisted. Her knee made a sound like a chicken bone popping out of its socket, and Zaranna saw her lower leg come away. Numbness. Disbelief. She stared at the ragged flesh and wondered how it was she felt no pain.
Then, every ruptured nerve-ending screamed at once.
With a low laugh, the creature sprang into the night sky and vanished.
* * * *
She woke shrieking the houses down, thrashing her hospital blankets into a fine tangle. Her heart lurched like an exhausted runner stumbling to the finish of a race, before settling into a rattling gallop. Zaranna stared around the dimly-lit ward, before jamming her right fist against her mouth and biting her knuckles. The pain cleansed, reviving an awareness of self. Shadows moved on the wall, drawing a muffled yelp – nitwit, that was just a tree outside the window.
She whispered, “Dragons are not real. Dragons are not real.”
In the bed alongside, Mihret slept soundly, angelic in repose. She only wished for such peace.
Lights popped on in the hallway. A nurse bustled in, one Zaranna had not met before. “Alright there, duckie?”
Duckie? Zaranna smiled. Her broad Yorkshire accent turned the word into ‘dook-aye’.
“Now don’t tha be worryin’ about nuthin’, duckie. Bad dream? Tuck tha down.” Clucking like a mother hen, the nurse made Zaranna lie down. “Tha look be-spooked an’ all bothered-like. I’s got seven grown-up gals of my own. Just tha tell Aunt Martha everything.”
Her straightforward kindness conveyed such power. Such release. Nurse Martha coaxed her to talk about the accident and her loss, and seemed to think dreams about Dragons and talking horses not very peculiar at all. After a time, she fell to stroking Zaranna’s hair and telling her tales about her girls growing up in Peru and Tanzania.
In the warmth of such love, no evil could touch her at all.
Chapter 4: Storms
CRisp autumn leaves attended Zaranna’s return to her new-normal life – a normalcy of grey, anaemic hopes and experiences she would rather have done without. The gawping of kids at school; the inevitable huddles and whispers behind hands. The day she learned Byron – gentle Byron with his bottle-glasses and mincing manner – had been sent to the office for punching another boy who referred to her as ‘Legless Lizzie’. The chill, blustery autumn afternoon when she wheeled out to the paddock to see Dad returning from a ride on Misty Dawn. The mare spooked at her wheelchair and threw her father. Thankfully, the fall bruised only his dignity.
She was disconsolate.
Her parents were beyond wonderful. She arrived home to find they had moved her bedroom downstairs and had built on a small en suite bathroom with the right aids. The back door now sported a wheelchair ramp and they had asphalted the driveway so that her wheels would not slip and slither on the small round stones which had been laid previously. Her family gave her more support and love than she could have asked for. Yet Zaranna caught herself staring out of the window at the so-green, misty hills of the Yorkshire Dales far too often rather than focussing on her homework, and the tears she feared, did not flood forth. Instead, she moped.
It started each morning. She would wake and look down. Her feet were still absent, yet she often felt them. Cramps in the calves were an especial favourite. She looked at the meadows between their quaint grey-stone walls, and knew she would never again feel the grass between her toes. And when her parents turned the horses out into the paddock, such a longing would grow in her breast; such a deep, devastating anguish-of-yearning, that she simply did not know what do with her feelings. Watch Misty? Sadness. Not watch Misty? A bluer shade of sadness. Hop into her wheelchair? Yet more sadness.
Alex? He was light and gloom. Light, for he visited unfailingly, driving hundreds of miles each weekend to visit her. Gloom, for what was such an attractive man doing with a disabled girl? Other girls could dance. Ice skate. Go for walks. Ride a horse. And her? Zaranna waited for her residual limbs to heal enough that she could have prostheses fitted. Oh yes, gloom.
One suitably dismal November morning, Zaranna woke early so that her father could drive her to Leeds for her eight o’clock Physiotherapy appointment. Last week, the doctor had cut away her cast and provided a sling. This week, they were worki
ng again with her left arm to try to restore a full range of movement and muscle function. This was the dispiriting toil Chaplain Murray had warned of, she remembered. This was the character-building, the true struggle. Zaranna gritted her teeth. All she wanted to do was huddle under her duvet and snivel. Great, Zars. She was failing. Horribly.
She was depressed.
She took her swimming costume downstairs to the pool and asked the nurse on duty to help her change and take the plunge. She thrashed out her fury and fear in two rapid-fire lengths. Well. She used to be a reasonable swimmer on the school team, not the best, but a respectable third or fourth in her division. Now, missing the weight of her legs, her backside felt as though it was floating above the water. Backstroke was a mess, for she could barely move the left arm full circle. Breaststroke, awkward. Crawl? She wallowed, swallowed and almost sank multiple times. Her muscles had no strength. To cap it all, she had to wait ten minutes for the busy nurse to be free to help her leave the pool, by which time she was pale and trembling and earned herself a proper scolding for not signalling her distress earlier.
Afterward, her father helped her downstairs and wheeled her out into the car park. The early morning had that autumnal crispness that expanded the lungs. Trying the left arm as ordered by the Physio, she helped wheel down to the disabled bay, and …
“Alex?”
“Guilty as charged.”
With that leonine casualness which came so easily to him, Alex detached himself from the bench where he had been waiting, and bent to kiss her cheek. Slim jeans. Leather jacket. Artful stubble and that sexy aftershave … oh yes, Alex.
“What are you doing here?” Zaranna almost giggled at the lilt in her voice. The crinkle of Alex’s eyes told her he had not missed her reaction, either.
“Stealing you away for a few hours, seeing as the weather’s fine.”
Zaranna caught her dad pinning Alex with the fatherly protective look he had been polishing ever since the accident. Oh? What was this? She gave Dad a private little scowl and a tilt of her chin that said, ‘If you had Alex investigated by your goons, Dad, I’m leaving and going to live in China.’
He gave her Spy-Special look number nine. Absolutely innocent.
“Sounds fun,” she said. Alex’s expression also gave nothing away. “Dad, see you later?”
“Hope it’s a blast, Zu-Zu.” Even a spy could not disguise certain things from his daughter. Zaranna knew Peter had a thousand things he wanted to say; instead, he turned abruptly and opened the car door. “Back for dinner, alright, kids?”
“Yes sir,” said Alex, ignoring the funny look she shot him.
With her wheelchair collapsed and stowed in the trailer beneath the tarp that protected his fancy-looking, metallic blue motorbike, Zaranna sat up front as Alex drove them with impeccable attention to the speed limit, east toward York.
After chatting for a while, catching up on his week, she had to ask, “So, today’s about showing off the machine?”
“Some,” he agreed, accelerating onto the A64. “Today’s about cheering you up. You wouldn’t believe the promises I had to make just to snaffle you away for a few hours. You’d think I was stealing the crown jewels. Maybe I am.”
“They’re only concerned for me,” Zaranna smiled.
“They’re concerned you’re depressive, bordering on suicidal.” She sucked in her lip. “Sorry. That was blunter than intended. But I wanted to ask – doesn’t what we have, help?”
What did they have? Zaranna stared at his knuckles, white on the steering wheel. She said, “It helps more than you know, Alex.”
“But you’re still struggling.”
“Wouldn’t you be? I’m sorry, but this isn’t something that can be fixed with a handy spanner. Sorry I’m being morose. Sorry I’m ruddy well sorry!” Sorry she did not deserve him. Sorry she had no freaking legs!
“Hey. Of course you are.”
Zaranna almost slapped him for laying a hand on her stump, but he moved it a few inches almost immediately. Ugh. Freaky. She should not be so nervy, but that sensation – she realised it was the first time someone other than a doctor or nurse, or her parents, had touched her there.
“It must be great to have a family who cares. As for me …” He sighed. “I’ll open that can of worms another day. My sister’s great, you’ll like her. And my grandfather. He’s really the one who held me together; his faith in me, I mean.”
“Do you have faith, Alex?”
He shook his head. “Not like you. I wish I did, and I know you have your doubts. That’s clear. What happened to you … where’s God in that? Perhaps in the aftermath, in your courage – I’m sorry I didn’t know you before, Zaranna, that it took such an awful circumstance for us to know each other at all. But I am thankful to know you now, even if our backgrounds are so different, and your parents and most especially your brother have made it clear that the age gap is also an issue. Ugh. Surprised they haven’t all gone out and purchased shotguns.”
That was a little more family concern than Zaranna strictly wanted. But her sweet-sixteen dreams of independence had vanished the moment their car flew off the motorway.
She said, “Uh … I feel stupid for asking this …”
“Oh, really? No, we didn’t discuss … I suppose,” said Alex. “I know your age, of course.”
“And you, old chap?”
“Twenty-two.” Heavens, that was quite a gap, Zaranna thought, kicking herself for bringing up the question with such perfect awkwardness. It explained a few odd looks her parents had cast her; a rash of probing questions. He was a qualified paramedic, after all. Alex chuckled, “Old chap, indeed?”
“Ancient. Decrepit. Do you have a license for your walking stick?”
“Hey!”
She spotted a sign. “Elvington Airfield? We’re flying?”
Alex waggled his eyebrows suggestively. He did not move his hand. She rather hoped the tingling of her skin would not betray her, because his touch felt very good indeed. She liked this surprising, mysterious, slightly possessive Alex.
“Stop smiling at me like that, or I’ll lose control,” he teased.
Wham. One carefree mood, gone. Zaranna squeezed her eyes shut, remembering. The harder she tried to forget, the more she remembered. Flying. Falling. Hurting. The way she had socked her mother, the white dress flying into the dark, impossibly; the train’s brakes screeching as it failed to stop in time …
A voice seemed to reach across an impossible distance, “Soon, Wizard-Daughter. Soon.”
She shivered in her dream.
“We’re here.”
Huh? Where had the minutes vanished?
Alex drove past a number of buildings – hangars and suchlike – to the edge of a vast strip of tarmac. He parked next to a red Citroen, which also sported a trailer with a beast of a motorbike on board. There, a gorgeous Asian girl of Alex’s age or thereabouts fussed with another, even more spectacular motorbike parked on the tarmac. She wore full biking leathers, but they could not disguise a tall, leggy figure, and as she glanced up, Zaranna caught sight of a model-perfect face framed by the kind of glossy black hair that featured in shampoo adverts, artfully tousled by a breath of wind.
“That’s Kai,” said Alex, as if her name should mean something to Zaranna. “Mad biker. So, let’s switch off the engine, and I have something for you here. Pop these on; wave when you’re ready. I’ll get the bike ready and pretend I am not even slightly tempted to peek while you’re changing. Which is a lie so disgusting, I should be shot at dawn.”
Grr. What he had for her was a pair of reinforced leather trousers which had been cut down and tailored to fit with an exactitude that told her Alex had ‘borrowed’ her medical records. What he had for Kai was a kiss smack on the lips! The brazen hussy! Zaranna struggled into the one-size-too-small trousers, growling up a nice little storm due to her weak left arm and the scene playing out before her disbelieving eyes. No-Angel Alex and Model Girl. Murder was evidently far too g
ood for him. They were so sickeningly familiar with each other. Good Lord, was this the moment when she discovered she was just a project, a hurt little sister brought out here to pet on the head and entertain? She’d have none of that!
Zaranna had never worn trousers quite this form-hugging before. Changing in a car with foreshortened legs was surprisingly easy. In a moment, she waved. Oh, Alex, come here, you filthy, conniving son of a goat!
Alex jogged over and swung the door open. “Ready, then?”
Icicles had nothing on the wintry blast that emerged from her mouth. “I suppose I am.”
“Show me. Up on those knees, girl. They promised the best and I paid for the best. I want to be sure I’m getting my money’s worth.”
Wow. Evidently she needed to lay the ice on thicker, or charge straight on to verbal evisceration. Seething, Zaranna hopped up onto her knees and turned her back on The Betrayer – not without a coquettish glance over her shoulder, she had to admit, and a cheeky flexion of her derriere. “And?”
Alex whistled jauntily. “Holy smokes!” He slapped her backside appreciatively, making Zaranna jump and squeak. “Sweee-eeet!”
“Alexander James Murray!”
“Well, it’s a Picasso of the female form. No, too abstract. Ah … what’s his name – da Vinci? Yes, definitely da Vinci, and we have a lovely blush.” If he was trying to wind her up, he had just succeeded. Before Zaranna could protest, Alex snaked his arm around her waist and swung her out of the car. “Come on, Beauty. There’s fun to be had while the morning is young.”
“Beast,” she grumbled.
Much too soon, she was seated in her wheelchair, new jacket and helmet perched on her lap, wheeling over to meet Miss Too-Gorgeous, who was about to be skewered and tossed on the barbecue, straightaway followed by Slimy Alex, the two-timing cheat.
Kai stooped to pop a kiss on her cheek. “Glad to finally meet you, Zaranna. Alex has been filling my ears for weeks with Zaranna this, Zaranna that … I finally had to come over and see what all the fuss was about. So, this is a super-secret racing Ducati and I need you to sign a waiver.”