by Amy Star
Her expression brightened; it looked as if she was going to have a heart attack, and she clapped a hand over her mouth before she could blurt out, “A were-dragon?” at full volume, so it instead came out as a muffled, half-formed mumble.
“Or vampires,” he answered. “I figure the dragon suspicions are pretty obvious, what with the problem at hand being fire, and vampires are…weird. There are really only two ways to permanently kill them, and one of them involves fire. Despite that, I’ve never met a vampire that wasn’t weirdly pyro-manic.”
“That’s creepy,” Melissa informed him, as if he wasn’t already fully aware of that detail. Mitch shrugged loosely, unconcerned. He had encountered numerous vampires, and made friends with none of them. What they decided to do to get their rocks off or whatever it was they were up to, he wasn’t actually that concerned about it.
She cleared her throat, evidently dragging herself back on topic. “So, vampires or a were-dragon.” She cocked her head to one side, eying him thoughtfully over her glasses. “What other sorts of creatures are there?”
“All sorts,” Mitch replied, shrugging one shoulder, though he paused before he said anything else until their food and their drinks were placed in front of them and they were once again on their own, with as much privacy as the restaurant was capable of providing them.
“I mean, you know there are vampires, were-bears, and were-dragons. There are basically were-animal versions of every animal you can think of. I guess we’re the most…standard inhuman creatures, though we do come with some bonuses to strength and endurance even when we still look like a human. Nothing compared to a vampire, but nothing to sneeze at, I guess. And I can’t just list off every type of inhuman creature that’s ever existed, but if there’s something that seems to have turned up in a very similar way in multiple cultures, then it probably actually exists.”
“What’s the weirdest experience you’ve had?” she asked, ignoring her food for the most part, though she did pick up her glass and sip it slowly. “I mean, I’m assuming you’ve actually met other inhuman creatures. Are you sure it’s not rude to call them that? I mean, it sounds pretty rude if you ask me.”
Mitch rolled his eyes, shoveled a few bites of his meal into his mouth, and took a few sips of his drink. “I’m sure,” he answered blandly. “Or at least, I’ve never thought it was particularly rude. It’s just the base facts; we aren’t really human, even if we look like it most of the time.”
She wrinkled her nose slightly, seeming a bit dissatisfied with the answer, though she didn’t question it further. Instead, she leaned over just enough to prod his shin with the toe of one shoe. “You didn’t answer the actual question,” she pointed out.
“What? Oh, right.” He lapsed into silence for a moment as he pondered that question. He hadn’t met a ton of other inhuman creatures. He had met some, sure, because they generally knew how to find each other, but he hadn’t met as many as someone who actually looked for them would. He had never felt particularly drawn to that sort of calling. Because that was what it was; anyone determined to meet as many inhuman creatures as they could was basically dooming themselves to a life as a drifter, without a steady job or a home, because they tended to be reasonably spread out. For instance, while he knew others passed through on occasion, he was reasonably sure he was the only were-animal who lived in the area permanently. Not the only inhuman creature, but the only were-animal.
“I met one of the fae folk when I was younger,” he answered after a moment. “Very minor fae, though, or else something bad probably would have happened. She was trying to get into a beehive, and even as a middle schooler, I was tall, so I gave her a boost, which meant she was content to leave without putting a curse on me or trying to bind me into servitude or something like that.”
“So, wait, fairies are actually real, then?” Melissa asked, ignoring both her meal and her drink at that point. When the bartender moseyed past, Mitch gestured to it and mouthed ‘a box.’
“They are,” he confirmed. “Not the friendliest and not very common, though. You’re more likely to run into were-animals or vampires or the occasional psychic.”
“Can you turn people into were-animals? And what about full moons?” she asked, curling her fingers around the edge of her stool between her legs and leaning closer to him. “Or is that a bunch of movie garbage?”
“Movie garbage,” Mitch confirmed flatly. “We can change or not change whenever we feel like it, and it’s a genetic thing, but it’s more complicated than that. Were-animals can pass on their…were-animalness, but all they pass on is the ability to transform and the strength boost. They don’t actually pass on the form. So, a were-wolf and a were-tiger could, theoretically, have a child that is a were-hog.”
“A were-hog,” Melissa repeated carefully. “An average warthog is already big. How big would a were-hog be?”
“Probably about my size,” Mitch replied easily, shrugging one shoulder. “All were-animals are bigger than their standard versions. I don’t actually know why, though. I don’t understand a lot of the biology behind it.”
Melissa looked at him as if that admittance was a sheer impossibility.
“What?” he demanded in turn. “That’s not that weird. Go ask an average accountant if he understands exactly how his intestines work. He probably doesn’t, even though he’s grown up with those intestines his whole life.”
“What if you need to see a doctor?” she asked pointedly. “Wouldn’t he figure out that something is off?”
Mitch waved it off. “Until I actually transform, I’m basically indistinguishable from a human. I can see a doctor just fine, and he’ll just make a note that I require an unusually high amount of anesthetic.”
“Coming from personal experience?” she asked, cocking her head to one side.
Mitch rolled his eyes. “I got my wisdom teeth yanked when I was younger,” he answered dryly. “It’s not that fascinating. I assure you, bear-ness aside, my life hasn’t actually been that exciting.”
“What were your parents?” she asked, leaning towards him again. “If a were-animal can lead to any other sort of were-animal.”
“Dad was a lynx. Mom was a swan,” he answered. “Are you this nosey about everything?”
“I am when something is interesting,” she answered primly. “Sure, I have no interest in reporting you to the news or whatever, especially when they would never believe me, but if you think that I just don’t care about you shaking the entire foundation of my understanding of the natural world, then you are a lot dumber than you look.”
“Hey, I don’t--” He closed his mouth with a click when she simply grinned at him slyly, and he dragged a hand down his face. “I have no idea what I’ve gotten myself into with you, do I?” he asked flatly, already suspecting the answer.
“Nope,” she answered cheerfully, and she pulled a pen from her pocket and scrawled a number on a drink coaster. “Thanks for dinner,” she offered, as she hopped down from her stool. “Text me your number later tonight.”
With that, she picked up her leftovers and swanned her way towards the door and out into the parking lot.
CHAPTER THREE
When Melissa told Harry about everything involving Mitch and were-bears and were-dragons and were-whatever-other-sorts-of-animals-there-were and vampires and everything else, it was without hesitation. Either he would believe her, or he would laugh, call her crazy, and poke fun at her at work for the rest of eternity, but the odds of him mentioning it to other people seemed pretty slim from what she knew of him, and she liked to think she knew him rather well.
Besides, she was already in the habit of telling him basically everything, and she had no intentions of letting that habit go. Old habits die hard, after all.
Of course, she was something of a realist on occasion, so she was working under the assumption that he would assume she’d had too much to drink and spend the rest of their shared shifts mocking her about it.
She didn’t e
xpect him to look so thoughtful for a few moments, cupping his chin and tapping a finger against his lips, before he nodded once and decided, “That makes sense.” As if it really did all just…make sense. As if all she did was explain to him how a combustion engine worked.
She didn’t expect him to just believe her without her even needing to put any effort into it, and when she pointed that out with quiet suspicion, Harry just shrugged and pointed out, “Basically every culture has stories of people turning into animals, and dragons look weirdly similar in all the regions that have folklore about them. Considering that, it’s not that shocking to learn that it’s not all bullshit. I mean, yeah, it’s still weird, but, just…not as weird as it could be.”
And when he put it that way, Melissa supposed it made sense. More importantly, she had someone to help her keep an ear to the ground as she listened and looked for clues. After all, Harry wanted to get to the root of the fire problem just as much as Melissa did, even if he hadn’t known it was supernatural in nature, and two pairs of ears were better than just a single pair.
Really, learning about the creature sightings in the area was easy when they knew what to expect. Every bar or bus stop had someone gushing about the enormous dog the size of a sedan that had given them a heart attack, the strange light they had seen in the middle of the night but passed off as sleep deprivation or caffeine withdrawal, or, more interestingly, the enormous ‘Komodo dragon’ that someone assumed had escaped from a private collection, or the creepy winged shadow. Both of those had been spotted in the woods near the campground that had almost been consumed by the last fire.
Either their culprit was returning to the scene of the crime or, more likely as far as Melissa was concerned, someone else was sticking their nose into the situation. Either way, whoever they were, they could probably offer some much-needed assistance, and Melissa wanted to meet them.
Harry seemed a bit skeptical of her decision.
“Aren’t dragons, you know…dangerous?” he wondered, in much the same way as one might
remind a child that fire was hot and trying to fly out of the second story window wasn’t going to go the way she wanted it to.
(Not that Melissa had any lived experience with that last one, of course. That would be absurd. Completely and utterly ridiculous.)
“Probably,” Melissa replied, unconcerned. “A lot of things about all of this are probably going to be dangerous,” she pointed out easily. “I wasn’t scared off before. I don’t really plan on getting scared off now.”
Harry groaned and pinched the bridge of his nose between two fingers. “Do you want me to come with you?” he asked, sounding resigned. He seemed slightly relieved when she shook her head.
“No,” she mused. “I don’t want it to seem like I’m trying to gang up on them. Whoever it is, I really don’t think they’re the culprit. Whoever’s been starting the fires has clearly been making some efforts to go unseen, so why would they start returning to the scene now?” Though her tone was expectant, she wasn’t waiting for an actual answer, and she carried on before Harry could begin to flounder for one. “I think it’s just someone looking for answers, in which case they’ll probably be glad to hear they aren’t the only ones looking.”
The idea made sense to her. More sense than a culprit that had taken pains to fly under the radar suddenly returning to the scene of the crime, at any rate. And apparently, it made some amount of sense to Harry too, as he didn’t try to argue after that.
*
“So, you’re just going to…go,” Mitch stated slowly, staring at Melissa as if she had grown a
second head. “You’re just going to run off to confront a dragon. On your own. Knowing it could flatten you without much trouble.”
“You did say you had to look into the vampire issue,” Melissa reminded him innocently. “We’re killing two birds with one stone.”
“A dragon could roast you,” Mitch pointed out, emphasizing his words carefully. As if Melissa wasn’t already fully aware of that detail. “You don’t see anything about that that you should be concerned about?”
Melissa shrugged broadly, her palms raised towards the ceiling. “You said you wanted my help in this,” she reminded him. “And anyway, I doubt it’s our pyromaniac dragon, or else why would it be in the same area they just burned? It’s not going to burn the area twice.”
Honestly, it wasn’t as if she hadn’t put thought into the idea. She had gone over it all in her mind. She was aware of most of the risks. They just didn’t seem like compelling enough reasons to stay at home, sitting on her hands until some sort of news fell into her lap.
Mitch groaned and dragged a hand down his face. “Just—…if I argue, is there going to be any chance of me changing your mind?”
“Nope,” Melissa informed him pleasantly. She did have to give him credit for catching on to that detail so quickly, though. People who had known her for far longer had also spent far more time learning and re-learning that lesson countless times. “Not at all. I do promise to be careful, though. If it looks like the dragon means any sort of trouble at all, I’ll turn around without
making contact. Alright?”
Finally, Mitch threw his hands up, as if to wash them of the situation entirely. “You know what?” he sighed. “Fine. You go throw yourself at this were-dragon. I need to go talk to a vampire before the coterie moves on. To my knowledge, they’re in the old Fairborn brewery, if you need to find me, assuming you don’t get toasted.”
Melissa offered him a beaming grin and flashed him a thumbs-up before she turned on her heel and swanned away.
He had a valid reason for worrying. Melissa was aware of that, and she was even willing to admit it. But that didn’t mean she was just going to sit with her thumbs up her ass and let an incredible opportunity blow past her.
*
Melissa couldn’t really say she wasn’t fazed by the idea of meeting a dragon. She was. Basically, everything she had learned lately was blowing her mind on a continual basis. But she couldn’t just stop and sit down to take it all in, because if she slowed down, then what would she miss?
She caught wind of what direction she had to go to meet a dragon, and rather than taking a moment to think, she just went. As it was, Mitch had barely even put up a fight. She was beginning to think he was realizing it was a pretty pointless endeavor.
She didn’t know where she was expecting to find a were-dragon. Maybe somewhere in the mountains, or beside a forest glade. They had the mountains covered, though they were a little short of epic forest glades.
She wasn’t sure where she expected to find a dragon, but there were a few places she wasn’t
expecting to find one. It wasn’t the highest on that list, but ‘in the middle of a public campground’ was still pretty high up on that list.
Granted, the campground was still closed to the public after the fire -- or at least as closed as it could be when Melissa could just duck under the gate -- so maybe it was the perfect place for a were-dragon to hang out.
She knew she should be subtle. It would be the best approach. But that was not how it panned out. Something about this being a dragon -- so much more exciting than a bear, even if Mitch’s ability to turn into a bear was, on its own, exciting --- seemed to make it so her self-control didn’t exist.
As soon as she spotted someone at the campground, she scurried over, wringing her hands
together as she said, “Excuse me, but I need to talk to you!” So much for subtlety and planning. But it was a bit late to worry about it; she would just have to hope it all worked out.
The person was a young woman, perhaps a handful of years older than Melissa. She was tall and gangly, with long, willowy limbs, a flat chest, and skin the color of caramel and dotted with countless freckles. Her hair was somewhere between brown and red, gleaming copper under just the right light, and curlier than anything Melissa had seen before. It was shaved on one side and gathered over one of her shoulders. Her clothing was tat
tered and too big, and her ears seemed to be more piercings than cartilage.
She turned to look at Melissa, blinking at her slowly, her expression bemused. Her eyes were bright blue, and she had an elaborate septum hoop.
“Yeah…?” she wondered slowly, her tone cautious. She sounded as if she was getting ready to run at the slightest movement, and Melissa couldn’t really blame her.
“Are you the dragon?” Melissa blurted out, and immediately she regretted it, as the woman
already looked like she was getting ready to sprint into the woods. Melissa’s hands fluttered for a moment as she debated grabbing the woman’s arm, only to think better of it, and instead she clasped her hands together in front of her chest, as if in prayer or as if she was pleading for the woman to just give her a moment of her time.
“I promise, I’m not going to tell anyone or anything like that. I just really need to talk to you,” Melissa spat out in a rush. “There isn’t anyone else with me. You can go check if you want.”