Solatium (Emanations, an urban fantasy series Book 2)

by Becca Mills

  It was tough to keep putting one foot in front of another, knowing that we were increasingly exposed to whatever might fly overhead. Reminding myself that we had come here in order to be found didn’t help. Something hardwired deep into my brain kept screeching, Hide!

  After the constant, nagging terror, our first sighting of a dragon was sort of anticlimactic. We were trudging along when Ghosteater pointed his nose to the south and said, “There.”

  Williams and I stopped and looked. Eventually I picked out a dark dot weaving among the clouds.

  “Is that a dragon?”

  The wolf chuffed.

  “It’s so far away. How do you know?”

  “The wind says.”

  I shot Williams a mystified look.

  He shot me a this-is-the-creature-you-know-nothing-about-but-trust-anyway look.

  I made a concerted effort not to roll my eyes and turned back to watch the dragon as it disappeared over the horizon.

  “Do you think it saw us?” I asked Ghosteater.

  “No.”

  “What do we do when one does see us?”

  “As I say.”

  Williams grunted in approval. The wolf was speaking his language.

  The next day, in the late afternoon, Ghosteater stopped mid-step and twisted his head like a listening dog. “A dragon is coming.”

  I followed his gaze. Directly to the west of us, a large herd of tusked, beaked herbivores were grazing on ferns. They looked like a cross between a rhino, a hippo, and a potbellied pig. Beyond them, I could see something in the air — a small, dark shape.

  Ghosteater said, “Barrier-maker.”

  Williams nodded. “No problem.” He turned to me. “Dragon’s probably going to stampede those things. They come our way, lie down and be still.”

  I nodded and eased my pack to the ground.

  A light breeze blew over my face, and I blinked. When my eyes opened, the shape that was the dragon was quite a bit larger. It seemed to be coming right at us. The breeze stiffened. All around, the low vegetation bent eastwards.

  The rhino-pig things lifted their heads and looked around, making quizzical lowing calls. After a moment, they started moving. The movement became a stampede, slow but relentless. They were headed right for us.

  Oh shit. Each one of those things probably weighed a thousand pounds.

  “Williams …”

  “Lie down and stay still. I’ll take care of it.”

  I sat down. Then I took a deep breath and lowered myself onto my back. Williams lay on one side of me and Ghosteater on the other. Williams put his arm over me, pressing me down.

  The ground was vibrating.

  I lifted my head, and my eyes went right to the dragon. It banked to the north, and I saw its shape — a huge, rectangular head; short, thick neck; stout, tubular body; powerful hind legs; and shorter, more delicate forelimbs. Its tail made up more than half its length. There were no wings. It seemed to be swimming through the air like a crocodile, with great, serpentine sweeps of its tail. It was dark gray, like a storm cloud.

  Every cell in my body started screaming at me to run away. If Williams hadn’t been holding me down, I would’ve made a panicked dash for it.

  The wind streamed over us more strongly, blowing dust into my eyes. I blinked and realized the rhino-pigs were on us, grunting and bawling. A weight pressed me to the ground, and the stampede passed right over us. It went on and on. My senses were overwhelmed by thunderous noise. Then they were past.

  I saw bright sunlight, red behind my closed lids, and opened my eyes. The wind increased to a gale, and there was a sudden darkness as something huge swept over us. I heard an impact, and seconds later, the earth bucked, bouncing me an inch off the ground. The impact must’ve dislodged the barrier Williams had used to shield us from the rhino-pigs, because a storm of dust and pebbles and shredded ferns enveloped us, blotting out everything. I buried my face in my sleeve, trying not to cough.

  As soon as I could breathe, I rolled over and pushed up onto my hands and knees. I was shaking so hard I could barely manage it.

  Beside me, Williams was kneeling, looking east. Ghosteater rose up behind me.

  The dragon was on the ground. It appeared to have landed right atop the fleeing herd. When it rose, I saw that many rhino-pigs — dozens, maybe — lay crushed beneath it.

  The dragon turned, surprisingly light on its feet, and began methodically gulping squashed rhino-pigs down whole. After fourteen, it paused. Numbers fifteen and sixteen were consumed more slowly. It surveyed the remaining carcasses and chose one more. After swallowing, it stretched its head out, working its massive jaw this way and that, as though its last morsel wouldn’t quite go down.

  Then its head swung our way.

  I felt Ghosteater brush past me. He advanced a few paces, lay down, and rolled onto his back, showing his belly and stretching his head back to expose his throat.

  For a good minute, the dragon looked at us.

  Then the wind picked up. The dragon shifted its weight onto its hind legs and rose up, holding its body just a few degrees above the horizontal. It started swaying slowly back and forth, almost like it was dancing. After a few more seconds, it pushed off with its hind legs and, with a lash of its tail, shot into the air.

  I watched as it gained height and headed west, the clouds swirling violently as it passed.

  Then it was gone.

  An odd silence descended.

  I turned to Williams and was struck by the awed look on his face. He glanced at me and then looked away.

  I couldn’t think of anything to say. My mind was too busy trying to find a way to grasp what it had just seen.

  Ghosteater stood and shook himself vigorously. Then he licked his lips and trotted off in the direction of the remaining rhino-pig carcasses. No reason to look a gift horse in the mouth, I guess.

  I licked my fingers and looked remorsefully at the last few bites of roasted meat on my plate. I was too full to finish.

  Williams had cut a few big steaks off the unsquished portion of a dead rhino-pig before we traveled on. I didn’t know if the species was reptile or mammal or something older than those groupings, but it was definitely tastier than the dinosaurs we’d eaten.

  Ghosteater lay next to me, staring into the fire. He’d eaten his fill at the site of the kill.

  Williams had already asked him if the dragon we’d seen was the right one. The wolf had said he didn’t recognize it but that it smelled like kin to the she-dragon we wanted. He said she would probably come looking for us within a few days. In the meantime, we should move on. Juveniles would show up to feed on the dead rhino-pigs, and being discovered by a rival faction wouldn’t be good.

  Dragon politics. Of all the world’s most wretched thoughts.

  After that, we hadn’t found much to say. Frankly, the dragon had overwhelmed me. It wasn’t just terrifying. I mean, that was part of it, but it was also just … incomprehensible.

  The closest analogue I could find was a moment in my freshman year of high school. I’d been sitting in my biology class, and the teacher had gotten into how big the universe is. He’d shown us a picture of an apparently dark spot in the sky that turned out to contain ten thousand galaxies. Some of those galaxies were thirteen billion years old. He’d said their light had been traveling all that time to reach us, so we were seeing what they looked like thirteen billion years ago, not what they looked like now. They might not even exist anymore. I remembered him saying, “You’re looking back in time, back to not long after the Big Bang. Your eyes are time-machines right now.”

  As a fourteen-year-old, I’d wrestled with the idea that the sky showed us the past. Even glancing up at the sun meant “time-traveling” back eight minutes. I knew it made sense, but it was still disturbing. For several weeks, I’d find myself feeling weird at random moments, and when I’d try to figure out why, I’d realize my mind had been poking at the ideas of time and space again.

  The dragon was like t
hat. Its age could be figured in geological epochs. Its size in blue-whale-lengths. Its power in … I don’t know what. Kilotons? And its mind — what kind of mind would something like that have?

  And that had been a smaller one, according to Ghosteater.

  That thought made the hair on my arms stand up. I shivered.

  “Pup. You are troubled.”

  I reached out and stroked his fur. I didn’t know how to put my feelings into words for him.

  “The dragons — they’re not like us.”

  Funny how Ghosteater had joined the “us” camp, in my mind.

  “They are other,” he said.

  “Are there even older things?”

  He looked at me in silence for a long while. Finally, he turned his head back toward the fire. “Things from before the time of beasts. Roots of beasts. Centerless things.”

  “Gods?”

  The skin on his shoulders twitched. “Your kind has called me god.”

  “Are you one?”

  He laid his head down on his forelegs and closed his eyes. “I am a beast.”

  “No delusions,” Williams said.

  I started. “What?”

  He hadn’t spoken to me unnecessarily in quite a while.

  “Only human powers claim godhood. Never heard of a beast doing it.”

  I’d never heard Cordus make such a claim.

  “Do most human powers do it?”

  “Not now. Used to do it all the time — ran around playing Zeus or Astarte.”

  His tone suggested such behavior was ridiculous.

  It wasn’t. Repugnant, yes, but not ridiculous. Plenty of people would choose to be worshipped, if they could get away with it. And there had to be many powers who could do everything Zeus was supposed to have done, from tossing lightning bolts to becoming a swan.

  “So a lot of the figures in mythology were actually powers goofing off in the F-Em?”

  Williams shrugged and looked away.

  I guess the détente was over.

  Too bad, because I had one more question: What about dragons?

  There were plenty of those in myths and legends too.

  Three days later, Ghosteater came to attention in the lee of a rock-strewn hill.

  A dragon had come for us.

  Williams made a barrier against the wind-borne debris, and we crouched down, watching it approach.

  It came on straight, then banked and descended in a series of vast loops. Instead of crashing to the ground, it slowed to a hover and set its feet down — first the heavy rear quarters, then the shorter, lighter front limbs. Like the one that had discovered us, it was built downhill — shoulders well lower than rump. Its hide was a paler gray, mottled with black, and it was half again as big.

  It turned toward us, moving as fluidly as the other one, despite its greater bulk.

  Its head was the size of a couple mobile homes stacked on top of each other. Its mouth opened. The inside was whitish and lined with teeth designed to puncture and tear. The biggest were longer than I was tall.

  It gave a long, bubbling roar, have hiss, half raspberry.

  “Wrong dragon,” Ghosteater said.

  Uh-oh.

  One of Williams’s hands closed around mine. The other moved slowly toward the stock of his shotgun, above his left shoulder.

  “Wait,” Ghosteater said.

  He did the same thing he’d done before — flopped over and presented his throat and belly.

  The dragon advanced, coming to a halt a hundred feet away. Slowly, it lowered its head and swung it to the side, training an eye on us. It studied us for a good minute.

  Without warning, the air closed around me like a fist. I couldn’t move. Terror engulfed me.

  Ghosteater rolled to his feet, shaking himself and snarling.

  The dragon crouched, hissing.

  The wolf’s strange coat stiffened into a pattern of spikes and armor. His feet appeared, each toe a metallic, scythelike claw as long as my hand. He snapped teeth that looked longer and sharper.

  Williams drew on me, pulling out a huge chunk of power, and slid an atom-thin barrier around us. The barrier expanded explosively, bursting the dragon’s working. He hauled me to my feet, and we ran. Twenty strides, forty, sixty. Then Williams looked over his shoulder, gave my hand a hard jerk, and let go. I stumbled and fell. My head hit something, and I lost my grip on consciousness.

  I remember flashes — the roar of the dragon’s tail swinging through the air above me; its rear foot, the size of a school bus and flat like a bear’s, pummeling the ground; the vertical slit of pupil in its dark gold eye.

  Slowly, I regained my senses. I was lying on my stomach. My head hurt, but it wasn’t bleeding. Maybe it’d just hit the parched ground.

  Williams wasn’t there. I couldn’t see Ghosteater either.

  The dragon was circling, towering over me, practically on top of me. It was behaving strangely. I watched, head still swimming, as it went bipedal, blocking out the sun, and then lunged around and tried to bite itself.

  Its tail swung over me as it spun, blasting the ground with air.

  Through the clouds of dust, on the back of its left hind leg, just above the foot, I saw white.

  Ghosteater.

  The wolf was gripping the dragon’s flesh with his front claws and teeth and ripping away with his hind claws, like a cat disemboweling a rabbit.

  The dragon roared and snapped, but it wasn’t limber enough to reach its tormentor.

  It crouched, trying to scrape the wolf off on the ground. Ghosteater winked out of existence at the last moment, then reappeared, still digging away.

  The dragon spun again, and the ground shook. It was only a matter of time before it stepped on me.

  I struggled to my hands and knees and looked again for Williams. This time, I saw him. He was far away — well up the hill we’d been heading for.

  How’d he get up there?

  He was down. Not moving.

  The dragon’s tail thundered overhead again, low enough to make me dive flat.

  A horrible, sick feeling came over me, and I headed up the hill as fast as I could.

  When I reached Williams, he was alive, but unconscious. He didn’t look good — pale and sweaty.

  The ground shook around us, sending boulders bounding down the hill. The dragon had rolled onto its back. It began kicking violently, trying to fling Ghosteater off. I forced myself to look away. I couldn’t help the wolf.

  “Williams?”

  I felt his head. There was a wound at the back — his hair was all bloody. I couldn’t tell how bad it was. I put my ear to his chest. I could hear his heart beating fast. His breathing sounded awful — wet and raspy, with a faint grinding noise on each breath.

  Not good.

  “Williams? Hey, wake up.”

  I touched his face, smearing red on it.

  “Hey.”

  He stirred a little.

  Hardened air seized me, and I was jerked away, high into the air.

  For a confused second, I thought Williams was doing it. Then I remembered the dragon.

  Before I could form the thought that the thing was about to eat me, I’d flown past its head and neck and been dropped on its back.

  I came down hard. For several long moments, I lay there gasping, trying to get my lungs to inflate. Then I struggled out of my backpack and rifle and pushed myself up on trembling arms.

  I was in a gully between rough, reddish walls dusted with green moss. Above them, there was only sky.

  I panicked and started clawing my way up the wall to my left. It was twice my height and cold, hard — more like rock than skin. Weird flat bugs the size of bottle caps skittered away from my hands. I only got a couple feet off the ground before everything tilted. I fell, hitting the floor of the gully and tumbling to the far wall. Then the lurch of sudden acceleration pressed me down, and the clouds over head began flowing by, first slowly, then faster. They started getting closer, too.

 
; It’s flying.

  A strange, heavy silence descended, sort of like being underwater.

  Calm down. Calm down. Calm down.

  There was no getting off, now. Panic wasn’t going to help.

  Once the dragon reached a steady speed, I peeled myself away from the wall.

  The vast body beneath me had a subtle side-to-side undulation.

  Where’s it taking me? What should I do?

  Unsurprisingly, the universe provided no answer.

  Williams. Ghosteater.

  I needed to find them.

  If they’re here.

  I thought of Ghosteater being launched off the dragon’s back leg like a bug flicked off someone’s arm.

  But no, I hadn’t seen that. Last I saw, he’d been dug in like a tick, half-buried in its flesh.

  What about Williams? Was he still back there, dying on that ancient hillside?

  No, surely the dragon hadn’t grabbed only me. They must be here. Both of them. I had to find them.

  I stood and promptly lost my balance. I grabbed for the wall and put my hand squarely on one of the bottle-cap bugs, which squished with a loud pop.

  Yuck.

  I wiped my hand on my pants and started walking slowly, trying to adjust to the dragon’s movement.

  The gully was fairly straight and intersected regularly by smaller passages. It ran level for about thirty feet and then began sloping downwards — gently, at first, and then more sharply. My foot slipped, and I realized I was close to sliding down the dragon’s side.

  I backtracked, examining the cross passages. They were about a foot wide and full of bottle-cap bugs. They widened and narrowed with the dragon’s movement.

  There was no sign of my companions.

  Damn.

  I’d need to climb. Hopefully the dragon would stay level.

  I waved my hands over the wall, making the bottle-cap bugs scatter, and started up.

  Five minutes later, I stuck my hand over the top of the wall. Something thick grabbed at it, and I jerked back.

  Heart pounding, I clutched the wall. Then I looked up.

  Nothing.

  Cautiously, I stuck up just my fingertips. The feeling was there again — more of a pushing than a grabbing, really.