by Amy Star
“You tried to kill Mitch that first night,” Melissa pointed out, since that did make it seem a bit less like he cared from the depths of his heart.
Jasper scoffed bitterly. “I wouldn’t really,” he huffed. “He’d basically called vampires murderers by default, and honestly, proving him right even posthumously is way down at the bottom of my to-do list. It’s not even on the list. But beating the tar out of him for being a shithead was
cathartic.”
Melissa snorted out a brief laugh. “I guess I can understand that,” she sighed. And it was nice to know that she had been right about the fight happening because Mitch was being an asshole.
*
Meeting with Sabine happened as it usually did, driving to the campground and meeting her in the burned remains of the woods. Fireweed was beginning to crop up in every direction, and soon it would turn the entire site of the fire into a sea of purple. Melissa was looking forward to it.
Sabine’s information was much the same as the information the others had collected, though it was slightly more specific in one aspect. Sabine had spotted the dragon herself, while flying.
“He’s big,” she stated simply. “I mean, I’ve seen bigger—ages ago—and dragons way bigger have been recorded, but he still makes me look tiny.”
It wasn’t good news, but at least it offered a better idea of what they were all up against.
Melissa tried to change the subject, only for Sabine to clear her throat sharply, cutting her off.
“No touching last words,” Sabine insisted. “We’re not doing that.”
Melissa rolled her eyes and opened her mouth to object, only for Sabine to make another sharp noise to cut her off, followed by a too loud, “No, nope!” She folded her arms. “We’re all going to be fine. Alright? Because I said so. That’s that.”
Slowly, Melissa held her hands up, conceding the point.
*
When it finally came time to deal with their looming problem, despite the time that had passed while they all searched, it still felt as if no time had passed at all. As if that final confrontation was lunging at them to catch them unawares.
Sabine and Jasper showed up together to let them know that it was time, and once Sabine transformed, she ushered Mitch and Melissa onto her back and took to the air.
Melissa packed a fire extinguisher on a whim, shoving it into Sabine’s bag to keep it out of the way. It seemed a little childish, considering how quickly dragon fire could spread, but it seemed like the least she could do.
*
Melissa had always just assumed that the culprit would turn up one day, especially as more and more help poured in. She wasn’t surprised about that when they found him. Instead, she had simply been expecting someone a bit…well, more. She had been expecting someone Mitch’s height or taller. She had been expecting someone built like a concrete wall. She had been expecting someone almost too large and imposing to exist.
Instead, when they found him—standing in one of the burned-out fields, surrounded by fireweed in all directions—he looked sulky, staring at the fuchsia flowers on all sides as if they had
personally offended him. As if it was the flowers’ fault that the fires hadn’t been worse. As if it was the flowers’ fault that the fires had been wrestled back under control.
He was tall, true, but a more normal sort of tall. Only around 6’0”, rather than Mitch’s towering height. And he was narrow, made up of lean, toned muscles and long limbs. His skin was pale, as if he hadn’t seen sunlight in weeks, and his hair was such a pale shade of blond it was almost white, pulled back into a short, slightly scraggly ponytail with a short length of twine. His clothing was tattered and fraying at the seams, and it looked as if it was more patch than original
fabric at that point. Even his shoes were scuffed and tattered almost to the point of being unrecognizable.
It took a few moments before he turned to look at all of them, facing them slowly, and when he did, he looked a bit haggard, with a few days’ worth of stubble on his face and dark circles under his eyes. Even so, he looked like he couldn’t have been more than a few years older than Mitch. His eyes were a bright, piercing shade of blue.
“You’ve been looking for me for a while,” he observed quietly in a voice like gravel over glass. “I was wondering how long it would take you to find me.”
“I think that means you at least owe us your name,” Mitch returned dryly. “I mean, we’ve worked so hard. You could at least throw us a bone.”
The were-dragon sighed slowly, shoulders rising and then falling as he did. “You can call me Genos,” he replied. “Not a real name, I grant you, but a name seems unimportant in the grander scheme of things.” Whatever that grander scheme was, though, he felt no need to elaborate on it just then.
“If you knew we were looking,” Melissa wondered carefully, “especially since it sounds like you knew we would catch up, then why did you pretty much stay in the area?”
He scowled down at the ground for a few seconds, his hands closing into fists at his sides. “Big plans need to have small starts,” he bit out, his fists flexing and relaxing. “I’m only one man,
after all. But I guess this means I’ll need to move things along a bit.”
He offered nothing else before he transformed, his clothing shredding around him as he did.
Melissa expected him to be somewhere around Sabine’s size once he transformed, even if she
already knew he would be bigger. She should have learned not to judge by appearances when she watched scrawny, diminutive Jasper put up a fight against a bear and then a dragon, though.
When the man finished transforming, he was enormous. Where Sabine only had two legs as a dragon, the man had four, meaning his torso was a full two yards longer than Sabine’s, and his shoulders were a full yard higher off of the ground. His head was bulkier, his chest was broader, his neck was less serpentine, and his horns were broader, curling around the sides of his head like a ram’s horns might. His tail was long and gradually tapered until it was as thin as a whip at the end, with a bony, needle-like spike.
He spread his wings, casting a shadow over all of them, and when he leapt into the air and started pumping his wings to carry him higher, he scattered grass and leaves and flower petals in every direction with each pump of his wings, in much the same way a helicopter might, until with a few wing beats, he was far enough off of the ground to start flying, angling upwards as he went.
Sabine crouched, urging Mitch onto her back once again. He clambered up and held on tight as she threw herself into the air, taking chase before the larger dragon could disappear into the
distance.
“This isn’t going to be fun,” Jasper remarked, as he dropped to a knee and motioned with his head for Melissa to come closer. She approached him cautiously, until he made another impatient gesture and she climbed onto his back. He adjusted his hold on her and straightened up with
surprising ease.
(It probably shouldn’t have been surprising. He was still a few inches taller than her, and he wasn’t human. She had already seen that he was stronger than Mitch.)
Jasper rolled his shoulders once and then took off at a sprint, flowers rustling on either side of him as he ran at a pace no human would ever be able to match while Melissa clung to his shoulders like a limpet.
Melissa wasn’t sure how long they followed the larger dragon. It was probably no longer than a half an hour—forty minutes at the very most—but it felt like hours from Melissa’s position. Jasper didn’t seem to have any issue carrying her, but that didn’t change the fact that his gait was not the smoothest.
And when at last he came to a halt, he did so all at once, so Melissa very nearly smacked her nose against the back of his head.
“Sorry,” he offered off-handedly, not sounding particularly apologetic, as he let her hastily climb down from his back once again.
No longer were they in the regrowing field. Instead, they stood
at the edge of a forest that
gradually climbed its way up a mountain. A mountain that Melissa knew very well, in fact, as her house was nestled within the trees somewhere higher up.
“That fucker is going to try to burn my house down,” Melissa breathed, staring with wide eyes as Genos circled once through the air before he landed all at once, all four of his feet hitting the ground with enough impact to leave a crater, and Melissa could feel the way the ground shook even from where she was standing several yards away.
Sabine landed considerably more gracefully several yards away, but already Genos’s mouth was opening to spit fire into the air, and Melissa knew that the trees would erupt like dry toothpicks as soon as he did.
CHAPTER NINE
Jasper picked up a rock that was bigger than his hand, brought his arm back in nearly perfect pitching form, and whipped the rock at Genos like the most intense fastball Melissa had ever seen. With near pinpoint accuracy, the rock smacked into the side of Genos’s head with an
audible thump, and Genos rocked to the side, stumbling with the impact. He tripped sideways, and by the time he was on the ground, he was shaped like a human again, staring dazedly at the sky.
“Nice pitch,” Melissa offered after a moment of gawking, eyebrows rising. Of all the ways she expected the confrontation to start, that had not been one of them, but she wasn’t going to object.
Jasper seemed to preen at the praise. “I’ve got a few decades of practice under my belt.”
Mitch bolted forwards, towards Genos, and hauled him up off the ground. As a dragon, Genos was far more powerful than any of them, that was true enough. As a man, though, that was where Mitch had the upper hand. He hooked his elbows beneath Genos’s armpits and linked his hands together around the back of Genos’s neck, forcing him to bend forward at an awkward
angle.
Sabine prowled forward, still shaped like a dragon just in case Genos tried anything spontaneous. She would have no complaints about leaping straight for his face or his throat, and no one would argue with her if she tried it. In fact, she would have the full support of everyone there. But first, they at least had to try to figure out why Genos was doing it, for their own peace of mind and closure if for no other reason.
“If we ask why you’re doing all of this,” Mitch began blandly, “will we actually get an answer?”
“You should know,” Genos spat, squirming fitfully in Mitch’s hold, only to slow down and still as Sabine growled warningly. “But maybe I shouldn’t be surprised that you don’t,” Genos carried on, voice lower as he darted a glance towards Melissa. “Considering the company you’ve opted to keep.”
“Hey!” Melissa protested sharply, only to instead scowl at Jasper as he flicked her shoulder reprovingly. Because really, out of all of them, she was probably the last one who should be yelling at an angry, malevolent were-dragon who had genocidal ideations. She could acknowledge that, but his attitude still rankled her.
“She is a human,” Genos snarled. “Ordinary and weak, like all the rest of them. And yet all of them are so determined to prove themselves the best, even if it means wiping people like you and me off of the face of the planet.”
They were silent for a moment, turning his words over and over as they all tried to make the pieces of the puzzle fit together.
Melissa could see the logic, she supposed. It wasn’t pleasant logic, and she still didn’t understand how he had convinced himself to act on it, but she could see how it made sense all the same. True dragons were already gone, hunted to death by each other to some extent, but also by humans.
Other inhuman creatures seemed uncommon enough that staying hidden was still entirely
Possible, and the idea of true extinction wasn’t off the table. Just going by the fact that the coterie was migratory and living out of a brewery at that moment and Mitch’s immediate
assumption had been that Melissa was going to extort him for money, it seemed safe to assume that just casually telling people they weren’t actually human was nearly unheard of.
“So, you’re…burning forests down because you don’t like humans,” Jasper stated slowly, and the look on his face reminded Melissa of every ninth grader who had ever decided their teachers were crazy. “I’m sorry, but did your first transformation knock a few screws loose or something? Did you fall out of the sky and land on your head when you were a tiny lizard? Because that makes no sense.”
Genos scoffed, like he was dealing with a particularly dim child that had been thrust upon him against his wishes. “Ideally, the fire would spread farther, but I have limited control over that once I set the fire. As I said, big plans must have small starts. And eventually, I will have more impact. Eventually, I will have help.”
He intended to burn things until there was no choice but for people to die in droves, Melissa
realized with a sickening twist in her gut. Like he was herding cattle into a slaughterhouse. And he intended to convince other people to help him with that sick goal. She didn’t know how much luck he would have with that plan, if indeed he got the chance to carry it out, but she could
picture it in her head, and that was bad enough.
“They will know how it feels,” he carried on, voice low and dangerous, “to be hunted just for
being what they are. They will know that pain and agony, and they will repent, only to find that it is too late.”
“The people you plan on killing haven’t done anything to you!” Melissa snapped. She recoiled slightly as Genos looked up at her sharply.
“You think the scores of dead inhuman creatures did anything to the humans who killed them?” he demanded. “Are you a child, to be so naive?”
“This isn’t going to fix anything,” Mitch pointed out, his grip on Genos tightening.
Genos scoffed. “Fixing anything isn’t the goal. The goal is just to make them hurt. As much as we have all hurt in the past. I don’t expect anyone to learn any lessons. If I thought they were
capable of that, then perhaps things would be different, but we all know humans aren’t capable of learning or changing.
They live with their heads up their asses, convinced that they are the greatest gift to be bestowed upon the planet; that it is their right to take and destroy and kill and maim as they please because it pleases them. That is a human.” He snorted out a bitter laugh. “I’m not trying to teach any sort of lesson. I’m not fixing any past wrongs. I’m simply making it so there are fewer wrongs in the future, and wiping out some vermin along the way.”
For a moment, Melissa felt sick, imagining people suffering such a horrible, painful, violent death for things they had never had a part in or even known about. The back of her throat burned, and she swallowed thickly. “That’s psychotic,” she started, but Genos barked out a laugh, cutting her off.
“That is justice,” he snapped, and he squirmed harder in Mitch’s hold, but Mitch held fast. “I wouldn’t expect you to understand,” Genos carried on, his voice turning sickeningly sweet.
“Humans can’t make sense of what they don’t like. They can’t make sense of what doesn’t
directly benefit them. You may as well stop trying; no one here wants you to strain yourself.”
“And what about everything else you kill with your bonfires?” Jasper asked blandly, waving one hand vaguely in the direction of the trees. “Other shit lives in there, too, and none of them ever did anything to you or any other inhuman creatures.”
Genos made a dismissive noise. “There will always be sacrifice,” he replied, and he sounded so uncaring as he said it. “It is regrettable, I suppose, but it’s a small loss in the grand scheme of things, and they’ll be able to repopulate afterwards. They’ll most likely even be better off without them,” he looked sharply at Melissa as he said it, “around to hunt them for sport. Because that’s all killing is to any of them.
A game where the winner is the one who spills the most blood.” He was glaring right at Melissa as he spoke,
as if she had personally caused every single trouble, problem, or heartache he had ever encountered in his life. As if she had personally made it her duty to make him unhappy purely because she thought it might be fun.
She didn’t deign to offer him a response after that. Clearly, nothing she had to say was going to impact what he thought or what he planned on doing. Slowly, as surreptitiously as she could, Melissa reached into Sabine’s bag, feeling around in it carefully. Mitch still had a hold on Genos. If they could just find something sturdy to tie him up with, then maybe they could be done with this before it even got started.
“We aren’t human,” Mitch stated after a moment, saying it slowly, in much the same way as a kindergarten teacher might explain the concept of the letter B to twenty-six-year-old children. “And no one is helping you,” he added plainly. “Doesn’t that make you think that you’re in the wrong?” he asked. “You don’t have inhuman creatures pouring out of the walls to help you burn the world down. The only other ones around are trying to keep you from doing just that.”