Dragon Heat

by Allyson James

  She'd refused and run out of the house, then returned later to find a note from Philip explaining he was tired of her stuffy attitude and that he'd left her.

  Lisa had cried when she got to that part of the story. She'd rested her head against Caleb's broad forehead, while he'd woven his music around her aching heart, trying to ease it. He knew all about the betrayal and the pain of loss.

  "You do not need Greg Shaw," he said now. "I like you, and if I were human, I would mate with you. Now, sit down and stay with me. It's almost time for Cops."

  Lisa laughed, her sad look suddenly gone. "And that should be good enough for me?"

  "Yes."

  She leaned in and placed a kiss on the gold scales on his nose. "You're a sweetheart, Caleb. Thank you."

  Caleb tried to brush her thoughts again, but tonight more than ever, she shut him out. He definitely didn't like that. "Don't go, Lisa," he said softly.

  She straightened up, patted his neck, and backed away. "I have to. I've talked myself into it, now I'm going."

  She laughed again, half at herself, and spun away into her bedroom. Caleb watched her go, thinking even through his worry and pain that her laughter was worth his exile in this place.

  The date with Greg went pretty much as Lisa expected. He picked her up in a long gray Lexus with a driver in front, Greg's model good looks making him drop-dead gorgeous in his suit. At the restaurant the maitre d' fawned over them, hoping Greg's minor celebrity presence would bring good publicity. They got half the meal free, and the waiters brought them extra tidbits like sorbet between courses and mango tarts at the end of the meal.

  Throughout the evening, Lisa listened as Greg talked about Greg. How Greg got started in television, how Greg wanted to get into movies. How Greg's modeling days began and ended, how Greg had caught the eye of Hazeltine the Dressing for Dinner hostess, how reviewers praised Greg's style and delivery.

  Lisa nodded or said, "Oh, how interesting," at appropriate intervals, but she could not put aside the feeling that something was wrong, something more than Greg's overwhelming ego. Greg watched her while he pretended not to, his eyes swiveling to fix on her position almost as though someone else controlled them.

  She thought of the long argument she'd had with Caleb when she had asked him to please not be in her apartment if she brought Greg back. He could go fly around in Dragonspace or something. He'd done it before, and the slit in reality had closed, and her spare bedroom with its Murphy bed and bookcase of dusty paperbacks had reappeared.

  Caleb had resisted with more than usual Caleb stubbornness. When she'd said in exasperation, fine, she'd go to Greg's condo instead, Caleb had suddenly reversed course and told her that if she was going to be with Greg, it should be here. Li Na's apartment was lucky and filled with magic, and with Greg Lisa would need all the luck she could get.

  Caleb knew how to spoil a mood. Lisa had taken a long time to talk herself into going out with Greg, and now she was second-guessing herself like crazy. Greg went on and on, watching Lisa with an intensity that was was very un-Greg-like, and her thoughts drifted to Caleb again.

  Caleb was annoying, he was interfering and nosy as hell, but at the same time he was always interested in her and what she had to say. She admitted it was good to have a friend, even a snarky dragon.

  Lisa was careful never to tell Caleb how beautiful he was because he was already the most conceited being she'd ever met. He gleamed gold from nose to tail, shimmering like sun on water. She'd never seen him fly, but he had great golden wings that were surprisingly soft and warm, and sleek spines on his neck that narrowed into ridges across his back and down his long tail.

  His head itself was free of spines except ones that looked like eyebrows. He had a broad forehead tapering to a narrow nose and a long mouth. Each of his teeth were bigger than Lisa's hand and sharp as saw blades, and he had sarcasm to match.

  His eyes were the most beautiful part of him, blue like lapis lazuli. They could be wide with astonishment or rage, or narrow to sly blue slits when he bantered with her or said something snide about what they watched on television. She also sensed a sadness deep inside them, something he hid from her.

  She never thought she'd count a dragon as her best friend, but she had to admit that her life had taken a turn for the better when she'd moved into Li Na's apartment in January.

  "Lucky magic," Li Na had always told Lisa, when Lisa asked why she loved coming to visit her grandmother. "My apartment is filled with lucky magic." And they would laugh.

  Lucky magic, or whatever it was, Lisa hadn't felt this well in years. She remembered her sadness after Grandma Li Na's funeral six months ago, when she'd entered the apartment Li Na had left in trust to her in the converted Edwardian house on California Street. The January day had been cold and rain-soaked, the view over dull gray rooftops disappearing in a wash of fog that had lowered to bathe San Francisco.

  The others had gone with Lisa's parents, who'd come in from Hawaii where they now lived, to a restaurant to eat and talk about Li Na and the funeral, but Lisa had wanted to come here to remember her. She'd loved the small Chinese woman with wise eyes who had helped her through the worst times in her life, and she would miss her.

  Lisa had not visited the apartment in weeks, but it remained unchanged. Li Na had died unexpectedly, although her doctor revealed she'd been ill for the last year and had chosen to keep the knowledge to herself. The apartment was so much the same that Lisa thought Li Na could bustle into the room at any moment, eyes twinkling, carrying tea and her favorite cookies on a tray, smiling at Lisa standing forlornly in the middle of the room.

  Li Na had been a warm, wise woman with a strong sense of fun. She and Lisa had shared tea every afternoon at the dim sum restaurant Li Na's friend Ming Ue owned and where Lisa had waitressed, and talked about everything under the sun. No matter how bad a day Lisa had suffered, things felt so right when she faced Li Na over a steaming pot of tea.

  Li Na told stories of how her own grandfather had been a noble in the emperor's court more than a hundred years ago. In those days, gentlemen pursued art and literature and composed verses and mastered the art of calligraphy. Women were beautiful creatures who lived sheltered and protected existences. Li Na spoke of walking in gardens while unseen musicians plucked tunes, servants brought cakes and cool drinks, and pet birds colored the bushes like flowers.

  "The women in our family were always special," she'd say, leaning across the table. "They were strong and wise and beautiful. Like you."

  "Me?" Lisa would ask.

  "You, Lisa. You are one of the special ones. You will see."

  Lisa had moved back to San Francisco after her nasty divorce and taken the waitress job offered out of charity by Ming Ue to make ends meet. She didn't feel the least bit special and assumed Li Na was only trying to make her feel better.

  Li Na had decorated her flat in hues of lucky Chinese red, including sofa, chairs, and draperies. A long picture of a mountainous country painted on silk hung in the corner, and trinkets brought by Li Na's father from the court of the Tongzhi emperor decorated a cabinet.

  A television stood against the wall, but in a strange place alone and outside the cluster of furniture, where it couldn't be viewed from the couch or chairs. A brand new CD changer rested by itself on a shelf in the living room. Curiously, Lisa pressed the play button, and the overture to Mozart's Marriage of Figaro filled the room.

  She had moved slowly through the apartment to the music, touching the things she'd remembered from her infrequent visits in childhood—a beautifully shaped river rock, a small porcelain bowl, a little book containing hand-painted Chinese characters. The porcelain bowl which held an assortment of golden charms on colored ribbons had a dragon painted on the bottom of it, a golden dragon with iridescent, overlapping scales and a decided smirk on his face.

  She set down the bowl and turned to the closed door of the spare bedroom, a room Lisa had sometimes played in when she was little. Lately Li Na had been
curiously reluctant to let Lisa enter the room, smiling sagely when Lisa questioned her. "All things are revealed in time," Li Na would say. Then she'd laugh like she knew the answer to a riddle that Lisa did not.

  It had already been a day of strangeness. Li Na was gone. Li Na's closest friend, Ming Ue, who never left Chinatown, had come to the memorial service at the Episcopal church to which Li Na's long-dead husband had belonged to sorrowfully speak about their sixty-year friendship. Li Na had been cremated, her ashes scattered over the Golden Gate Bridge from a point that had a view both of the Pacific, the direction from which Li Na's grandfather had brought the family, and San Francisco, the city Li Na loved.

  When Lisa had looked at herself in the mirror that morning, she'd found a streak of pure white lacing her auburn hair at her left temple. She stared at the streak, about an inch wide, which had definitely not been there the day before. When she'd tentatively touched it, her fingers had tingled.

  Grandma Li Na had had a streak of white in her perfect black hair for as long as Lisa could remember. Now Li Na was gone, and Lisa had the streak. She'd stepped back from the mirror, troubled, then finished dressing and went to the church, ignoring the curious looks others gave her when she arrived.

  Ming Ue, her face as lined as Li Na's had been, nodded once when she saw Lisa, as though understanding something. Lisa hadn't been able to ask her about it, because after the service Ming Ue's grandson Lumi had whisked Ming Ue into a car and sped off with her.

  As the strains of Mozart swelled and filled Grandma Li Na's apartment, the silver streak burning at her temple, Lisa quietly pushed open the spare bedroom door.

  Gold flashed, and the huge, supple body of a great dragon unfolded itself, glimmering and glistening with its own light. As Lisa stood frozen, her hand on the door, two giant blue eyes swiveled to her, studying her from behind long golden lashes.

  The eyes held vast knowledge and power, and behind that conceit a glimmer that might mean a wicked sense of humor and a strange sense of sorrow. The dragon—the word dragon slid through her shocked brain—lowered his chin to stare at her more closely.

  They studied one another for a long time, as though Caleb had been as surprised at what he found on the other side of the door as she was. A few feet of the spare bedroom floor stretched beyond the opening, and beyond that a rocky ledge on which his dragon body rested. She'd felt both the chill of the San Francisco day behind her and a cool wind, a different temperature, from the darkness beyond the dragon.

  She also saw, incongruously lying next to the dragon's horned claw, the remote control to Grandma Li Na's television.

  "I was looking for that." She was surprised her voice didn't shake. No wonder, she realized, Grandma Li Na had positioned the television at such an odd angle. Li Na had moved it so it could be seen clearly from the spare bedroom door, so that Li Na's pet dragon could watch it.

  That thought broke through her initial stunned reaction, but before her mind could dissolve into panic, a strange music wove itself through her. The music picked up Mozart's harmonies and twined in others until her entire body sang. She wondered what would happen if she put her hand into that space between the worlds to touch the dragon, fifty feet of shining gold.

  The dragon rumbled, his body vibrating a deep note that harmonized with the music in her body. "Come in and take it," he said. He didn't speak through his mouth; the words floated out into empty air, his voice deep and dark like velvet.

  Lisa dreamily reached in but didn't pick up the remote. Instead she touched him, placing tentative fingers on his broad forehead, right between his blue, blue eyes. She found him surprisingly soft and warm, not the cold, metallic scales of a lizard but the hot suppleness of a living being. Heat radiated from him, warming the chilled dank air of the apartment.

  She moved her hand on the warm gold as he pressed his body closer to the door. "You're beautiful" she said softly.

  "Hello, Lisa-ling," he answered in his velvet-smooth voice. "I knew one day I'd meet you."

  * * *

  Chapter Two

  Greg was still talking. Lisa reflected that at least Caleb was interested in what she had to say.

  After her initial shock that January day, she and Caleb developed a routine. Every day after work, Lisa would sink into an armchair positioned beside Caleb's door and tell him, in minute detail, everything that happened during her day. She always felt more relaxed when she finished, and Caleb's smart-ass comments about people she encountered during her day made her laugh.

  Then they'd watch television. Caleb's need for television was insatiable. Lisa wasn't certain how he pressed the buttons of the remote so gently with the sharp edge of his tail, but he did it. She grew used to falling asleep in her dark bedroom to late-night talk shows and rumbling dragon chuckles.

  Whenever Lisa was too late getting home, like today, Caleb grumbled and growled and was more sarcastic than ever. A fifty-foot golden dragon in a snit was an experience.

  After dinner Greg's driver drove them from the restaurant, and Lisa, numb with boredom, tried to call it a night.

  "I'm so tired after all the taping today. Just have your driver drop me off."

  Smiling a smarmy smile, Greg slid across the seat and enclosed her in warm, cologne-scented embrace. "Not yet. The night is still young."

  Could he at least come up with something less cliche? Lisa tried to move from his grasp, but he held her firmly. She thought again of Caleb's admonishment to at least bring him to Li Na's apartment with its good magic and felt a little better. If Caleb were there, waiting behind his door, end of problem. Greg would take one look at him and flee.

  Lisa smiled, pretending to be coy. "All right then. Let's go to my place."

  Greg's smile deepened as though he'd given her a cue and she'd made the correct response.

  Lisa gave directions to the driver, and they sped off. Greg twined himself around her like an octopus and would not let go as they went up and down hills, heading for Arguello and California Streets. Lisa sensed in his now-strange brown eyes a deep sense of satisfaction, and it chilled her to the bone.

  Caleb focused his razor-sharp dragon magic on the circle he'd drawn on his side of the door. Above him in Dragonspace purple-tinted clouds gathered with a rush and a harsh, freezing wind sprang from them. Caleb with his thick hide and golden scales did not notice the cold, but the small witch who popped into the circle on her back did.

  It was Saba, the youngest witch who usually arrived to take Caleb's report on Lisa's activities. She was clad for San Francisco weather in narrow jeans and a cropped tank top that bared her midriff and the interlocked pattern tattoo on her arm. Rain plastered her short black hair to her face, and she hugged her arms to her chest.

  Caleb waited, but no other witches appeared. Just Saba, looking pissed and pathetic in the dirt and rocks at his feet.

  "I wanted Donna," he growled, naming the trio's high priestess. "Where is she?"

  "She's busy. I'm busy. What do you want?"

  "Magic." He spread the expanse of his wings, balancing on the rocks as the wind buffeted his body. "Witch magic so I can enter Lisa's world. I can't cross without your help."

  Saba brushed gravel from her jeans, her sloe-colored eyes wise for her age. "We already have one dragon running amok on the Earth world, we don't need two."

  "Donna told me to watch over Lisa, but I can't protect her tonight if I'm not in there with her."

  "Why tonight all the sudden? What's so important about tonight?"

  "Because Lisa has gone out with a man on her television show. The Dressing for Dinner one. You've seen it?"

  The wind whipped Saba's close-cropped hair about her face and she shivered, her lips almost blue. "You mean she's going out with Greg Shaw? Yeah, I've seen him. He's cute but not much gifted in brains as far as I can tell. So what?"

  "When I watched the show today, it screamed at me, even through the television." Caleb put his face next to Saba's. The girl smelled a little like the forest a
fter a rain, pleasant and refreshing. "Greg Shaw has the black dragon's mark. It's all over him. And Lisa is with him, right now. So give me the magic and let me go in there and rip him away from her before this minion leads her straight to the black dragon."

  Saba's brown eyes widened. "Are you sure?"

  "Very sure."

  "Crap." She pulled out her cell phone. "I have to tell Donna."

  With one swat of a talon, Caleb sent the phone spinning and clattering across the rocks. "No, you have to let me go after her, now. Witches are not strong enough to handle a dragon minion, not even the three of you together. I will get Greg away from Lisa and take the mark off him."

  "You can do that?"

  "I can do that. It takes a dragon to catch a dragon. Give me the magic, Saba."

  Saba put her hands on her slim hips. "And if I won't? You can't compel me to do anything for you or hurt me or coerce me or mark me, remember? I wield your true name."

  "If you don't help me he'll drag Lisa to the black dragon. Maybe not tonight, but he'll work on her and get her there sooner or later. Help me to help her." He bent to put his face on her level. "Please."

  Saba's eyes widened in mock surprise. "A golden dragon saying please? I never thought I'd hear it. All right, I'll do it, Caleb. Because you're right, if she's in danger we should help her. But the magic won't last forever, do you hear me? Only until Lisa is completely safe."

  "Fine," Caleb said, exhaling in relief. "I just want her away from him. Tell me what I have to do."

  By the time Greg and Lisa pulled up in front of her apartment, she'd grown thoroughly alarmed. Greg had finally released her but sat in the car with the length of his thigh touching hers, his fingers on her knee. His voice and conversation were still that of inane Greg Shaw, conscious of his own good looks, but with a strange difference, as though his mouth ran while his brain was far away. His watchful eyes and possessive hand on her leg gave her chills.