The disciplined chaos dragons feast every twenty to twenty-two months, which gives them two to four months leeway should the earlier feeding go wrong. And the disciplined chaos dragon also has a cover story for why she’s near so many horrible homicides.
She needs the cover story because the real story is more sordid. The real story is that the actual homicide itself is triggered by the chaos dragon’s presence.
In fact, she’s probably triggering someone right now. I watch her work, see her make eye contact with half a dozen people in the room, including—not surprisingly—my triumvirate. She doesn’t make eye contact with me, for which I am grateful.
Then Margarite smiles. She’s seen what she wanted to see. I know this because the reptile within smiles as well. She says, in a voice I’m already beginning to hate, “I just wanted to say hello and envision all of you before I go to my hotel room for my beauty nap.”
(She’s the only instructor who insisted on a hotel room. Even the bestselling discord thriller writer, from week two, had no trouble staying in graduate student housing for the duration of his instructorly duties.)
Then Margarite waggles her fingers at us, says, “Toodles,” and goes out the door into the courtyard. We watch her walk away, except Raj, who scurries after her.
He catches her arm, which makes me wince, and then gestures as he talks to her, probably telling her he needs to come with her to check her into that hotel.
Poor guy. He’s always been good and fair to me whenever I’ve had issues with the workshop (and I’ve had a few). I don’t envy him that moment of contact, which probably sent a small shock through his already-overburdened system.
They disappear through the courtyard’s main door. Our sad sack western writer, still nominally our instructor for the week, sighs, and somehow refrains from commenting. Instead, she holds up the three manuscripts we’re to critique today and asks who wants to go first.
Class ends a half an hour late, what with book signings and hugs and heartfelt cries of I thought you were the best instructor so far (which the other instructors also heard on their Fridays). I go back to my room and make myself a bologna and cheese sandwich, then carry it to the kitchen table where I bring out my other laptop, so I can catch up on industry news while I eat.
I probably should be with the group, eating lunch and gossiping. They’d be surprised, though, because it’s not my thing. I have to do my job—my real job—but I can’t be obvious about it either.
I figure the murder won’t take place until tonight. That gives me most of the afternoon to finish a story and probably the early evening to make sure my weaponry is in the proper state.
I bring a kit with me wherever I go. Different evil magical creatures must be killed by different real-world tools. But you already know that. You’ve seen it in a variety of stories.
The stories get various elements right, but not all of them. For example, the wooden stake that kills vampires must be made out of the no-longer existing cedar of Lebanon. The silver that kills werewolves must be old-fashioned European silver, not the purer, prettier stuff from the Americas.
Chaos dragons are a modern phenomenon, so they die in more modern ways. First, you have to touch the thing with an authentic bowie knife, preferably one from the nineteenth century. That makes the human form dissipate. Then you have render the thing immobile, which is a lot more difficult than it sounds because, at this point, you’re fighting with a small alligator. It has alligator claws and alligator teeth and in addition, really big tusks.
I’ve only killed one chaos dragon, which is one more than my colleagues, and even though my handlers like to attribute that to skill, I know that the death was simply luck.
Because there’s a third step: you have to remove the tusks or the thing will regenerate. The tusks are pretty simple to remove. You grab one and tug. The tusk comes out easily, like a fake fingernail comes off a hand. But you have to be able to get close enough to tug.
I learned my lesson the last time. I have reptile tranquilizer darts—the large kind used for crocodiles. I didn’t use this the last time. Instead, I managed to knock the chaos dragon unconscious.
But, as I said, that time, I was lucky.
This time, I doubt luck will run my way. That’s probably the other reason I’m finishing the story.
Because a part of me thinks it might be my last.
I’m finished with the bologna sandwich when someone knocks on my door. I sigh. I thought I’d discouraged knocking during the first week when I made it clear that I wasn’t into socializing or making nice.
Still, the knock’s pretty insistent. I peer through the window to the left of the door and see Raj standing there, fist up, looking frazzled. Poor guy. I actually feel sympathy for him. He probably spent the last hour with Margarite. I’ll wager he returned to a variety of errands for Hallerhaven, and one of those errands includes me.
I pull open the door—
—and dodge the giant arch of a knife.
Raj pushes his way inside, kicks the door closed with his foot, and tries to knife me again. His eyes are glazed, and spittle runs off the side of his mouth.
How had I missed that?
I grab his knife hand and shove it behind his back. He starts kicking. Then he grabs my hair and pulls my head forward. Somehow he spins me, and gets the knife out of my hand. He jabs at my neck and succeeds in sinking the knife into the flesh above my right breast.
It’s startlingly painful. I break out of his hair- hold and grab him by both sides of the face. Then I twist.
His neck breaks with an audible snap, and he crumples, clearly dead.
I’m breathing hard. I’m not bleeding much—the knife somehow managed to avoid important stuff like arteries and nerves. But I have a hunch that some muscle has been compromised.
Then I realize I’m thinking like a person in shock.
Maybe because I am a person in shock. I’m injured, but that’s not what’s causing the shock.
What’s causing the shock is that jolt you get when your perception of yourself gets turned upside down.
The goat at the workshop, the person everyone wants to kill, the one who would generate the most suspects if he/she/it died isn’t one of the triumvirate.
It’s me.
I splash cold water on my face to force myself to think clearly. Then I put my magic laptop away and call the police. I try to sound like a damsel in distress, which isn’t easy for me.
I say, “I let him in and he stabbed me.”
I say, “I think he’s dead.”
I don’t say that I used a technique I’d learned in my assassin training to snap his neck.
The campus police arrive almost immediately, look in my room, and confirm with someone on the other end of their radios that indeed I’ve been stabbed and there’s a dead man in my room. They offer me an ambulance, which I accept as part of my damsel in distress disguise (hoping the whole hospital thing won’t take long), and then the real police arrive.
They take one look and start asking questions.
Like, “How did a little thing like you break his neck?”
And “Where did you learn how to snap necks?”
And “You really snapped his neck?”
I blink a lot and make my eyes tear up, and say things like after watching many episodes of “Buffy the Vampire Slayer,” I decided I needed a self-defense class, and there they taught us to grab someone by both sides of the face to distract him and then knee him in the groin.
I say he must have turned oddly when I kneed him, because I heard his neck snap.
I say I’ve never heard that before.
In other words, I lie.
Eventually, the EMTs arrive and haul me away to the university hospital where the emergency room doc X-rays me, pronounces me lucky that nothing much was hurt, and sews me up. Then he sends me out into the wild with a prescription for enough painkillers that I could sell them on the street and still have some left over for me.
My classmates have shown up. They actually seem concerned, but more that Raj has gone off the deep end (and that concern manifests in a “who’s next?” kinda way). They try to be solicitous, offering to feed me and comfort me and give me advice on how to take care of a knife wound (as if any of them has ever done that).
Hallerhaven shows up to let me know the university will take care of everything, including my tuition (in other words, please don’t sue us) and promises me I’ll be just fine.
I thank everyone for their kindness and plead exhaustion. Slowly, I get them out of my room and sigh with relief.
Then I wait until the little clump in the middle of the courtyard is gone. While I was being questioned and poked and prodded this afternoon, I got to thinking.
I have screwed up Margarite’s plan. She isn’t going to get the chaos she wants. In fact, a straightforward stabbing /self defense probably doesn’t even register as an energy spike.
I have a few precious hours before she tries to rile up someone else to kill me.
I’m going to have to take care of her now.
And if I do it right, no one will ever blame me for her death.
Of course, doing it right means I can’t use the tried and true chaos-demon killing techniques. Doing it right means I do something no one has ever done before.
I don’t even know if it’ll work.
But I’m going to have to try.
The fanciest hotel in town isn’t all that fancy. It’s basically a mid-level hotel with a Four Seasons attitude and a Holiday Inn budget.
I slip in the front doors, and walk purposefully to the house phone near some potted plants. The nice thing about me, remember, is I’m one of those beige middle-aged women, formerly pretty, that most people see but don’t really see.
Of course, the security cameras see me, but most hotels put them in the same locations—facing the registration desk (because of the money), the offices (again, the money), and the entrances and exits. Elevators and stairwells have them too.
No one cares about the house phone, however. I use it to verify that Margarite is here (she is) and what room she’s in. I do that by asking for her direct dial phone number. Hotels always put a nine in front of the hotel room number as the direct dial, and they’re usually happy to give that out to other guests—or the person who booked the room, namely one Raj O’Driscoll acting on the part of the university.
Apparently, the hotel operator has no idea that Raj is a male name.
Which works to my advantage of course. Margarite’s room is on the top floor (as I expected) and is probably one of the few suites in the hotel.
I take the stairs, because it’s easier (and more logical) to keep your head down in a stairwell than in an elevator. I’m carrying a purse instead of my weapons kit, having already prepared my tools.
I have my standard equipment inside the purse—a pistol and a couple of knives as well as the bowie knife in its sheath. I also have the tranquilizer ready to go. Fortunately, I learned that the best way to tranquilize an alligator is to use the same tranquilizer needle that vets use on elephants. So I have a few in stock.
I’m as ready as I’ll ever be.
Except for the aching knife wound and the slowly growing exhaustion. I might be at more of a disadvantage here than I thought.
I make it to the eighth floor, find the room, and get confirmation that yes, she’s in a suite. If I had more time, I’d finesse the room next door or find a maid’s cart or something, but I don’t.
So I go the old-fashioned route.
I knock.
It only takes a moment for the door to sweep open. Margarite is standing there in a lovely pink negligee, complete with matching pink mules.
I of course see both her and the tusked alligator within, and I have to admit the pink looks a lot better with scaly green than the purple ever did.
She looks surprised to see me.
“We have a problem,” I say and walk inside as if I’ve been invited.
She has no choice except to follow me.
Here’s the moment of truth. With one quick movement, I grab the tranquilizer and shove it—not in her neck, like you’d do with most humans—but in that poochy belly of hers.
If she were a real human, that just might kill her, but she’s not. And my aim has to be perfect, because I’m trying to drill through the fake human skin into the soft spot where the alligator’s jaw meets its neck.
If I miss and survive, I have to go to plan B, where I try to get rid of the human form (which’ll be tough because now she’s prepared) and then go for the alligator soft spot.
She looks at me in stunned surprise, and then growls. Or roars. Or whatever it is alligators do. I feel the damn tusks clamp down on my wrist—something I hadn’t thought of at all. What if she disables my good hand? I’ll be damaged on both sides.
I push the plunger and hold it down, praying this stuff works. She starts wailing and wreathing. Her human face changes from pasty white to gold to a sickly green and back again.
Bone snaps and it’s not hers. It’s mine. My right hand is useless. The syringe falls away.
She keeps digging those tusks into my skin.
I’m not sure plan B is even possible. I’m not sure escape is possible. I’m not sure how anyone is going to explain this one to the cops.
Then her eyes roll into the back of her head (both sets of eyes in both heads) and she topples over backward.
Her tusky grip on my wrist, however, gets stronger.
I probably only have a few minutes. I’m trapped by those damn tusks, but I still have one hand free. That it’s the hand with the damaged arm is less important than it would have been, say, half an hour ago.
I grab a regular knife, the closest thing I have to the knife Raj used on me, and proceed to use it to slit the alligator within from gullet to gizzard. Then I pull out the tusks.
They still don’t come off my wrist. It’s like they’ve adhered on.
But the alligator within has curled up and turned black, and because I’ve seen it before, I know that means only one thing.
She’s dead.
I was going to slip out the balcony and rappel down the side of the building, just like they taught us in assassin school, but with one arm disabled and one useless wrist, I’m not going anywhere—at least by rope.
I have to let myself out of the hotel room and slither unrecognizably down the hall.
Not for the first time do I wish assassins of the magical are given their own powerful magic. I have to keep my head down and my movements inconspicuous like any other hired killer.
And I can’t think about the searing pain in my wrist.
I get to the stairwell and stagger down, careful to always look away from the cameras.
All the way, I’m reevaluating my thinking. Maybe I should have killed her the prescribed way. Of course, how do you explain to university and hotel personnel that a famous writer has gone missing and in her hotel room is a dead alligator? It was hard enough to explain that the first time when the chaos demon wasn’t famous.
It’d be even tougher now.
No. I used poor Raj to my own advantage. He’ll get blamed for Margarite’s death (that’s why I used the same kind of knife) and the cops’ll decide that after killing her, he came after me. Maybe, they’ll say, he was going to kill everyone connected to the workshop.
Poor guy. If I could rehabilitate him, I would. But right now, I need a crazy version of Raj, not a brain-washed version. And I have to get back to my room before anyone sees me.
It’s not as hard as it seems. As long as I keep my tusked wrist tucked inside
my purse, no one looks at me. I walk as best I can back to campus and back to my room.
Once there, I use an all-purpose pair of pliers in my nondominant hand to try to remove the tusks. It’s so hard to do, I almost have to get help. (The question of who is what stops me.) Finally I manage to get the things off, but not before I hear my stitches rip.
The bone is broken, but I can’t do anything about that now. Tomorrow I’ll go to the hospital, say they overlooked the wrist, and I didn’t notice until morning. By then the scrapes will have bruised up nicely, and they’ll look more like something you’d get in a fight with a human than, say, a tusked alligator.
I clean the new wound, bandage it as best I can one-handed, then take as many painkillers as I can without killing myself and fall into bed.
When I wake up, it’s twenty- four hours later, and Carlotta Sternke is sitting on the edge of my bed.
“I was afraid you were dead,” she says in a tone that implies she wasn’t afraid at all but was, in fact, looking forward to it. “We cleaned up your floor.”
We, it turns out, was Hamlet Thorshov and Norman Zell. Turns out I had misjudged them. What I took for alienation was actually friendship among the most antisocial of writers.
They want to take care of me. I let them discover the wrist and insist on another hospital visit.
Where I get a splint, more stitches in the other side, and another prescription for painkillers.
Which I need, since it turns out that the triumvirate was being nice to me only because I woke up while they were stealing my pain pills. Or maybe they were being nice to me because they felt guilty about stealing my pain pills.
It doesn’t matter either way. I’m not going to report them. I want this workshop to continue.
It looked shaky for a few days, but the school psychiatrists said we’d all be better off if we finished our workshop than if we left now. We agreed. Hallerhaven found someone to take over Margarite’s week, and we tried to get back to normal.
A Girl's Guide to Guns and Monsters Page 12