by Alexis Davie
Sophie didn’t bring it up. She’d said a grand total of maybe thirty words to the guy. The last thing she wanted to do was ask him about his manhood. Back in middle school, she’d learned that when people ran around with swords and shields, dragons were worshiped sexually by throes of wives. They were the undisputed champions of the ancient days. When you had ridiculous healing powers, were strong as a hundred men, and could turn into a bulletproof, flying creature the size of an eighteen-wheeler capable of breathing fire or ice, someone with a pointy stick didn’t stand much of a chance. So, at least theoretically, dragons could mix with humans, but she couldn’t remember any stories of dragon halflings. That just didn’t seem physically possible. Of course, nobody in the ancient days had come along with a tape measure and been like, “Okay, let’s see what you got here,” but the thirteen-year-old Sophie could never shake the mental image of it.
She kept stealing tiny glances at him, now curious about him for the sheer shock factor of seeing a dragon up close. The huge majority of people might never see one in person, and here she was, sitting next to one. There, sitting across in the other seat from her, was an alpha predator, the climax of all evolution into one being.
Huh. He was shorter than she’d expected.
3
Hidden Personalities
Magnus noticed the exact moment that Sophie figured out that he was a dragon.
It always happened the same way: they’d get to looking at him, generally notice his eyes, and realize that he wasn’t human. Every now and then, they’d have to see his teeth, and that was the end of it. So when Sophie’s eyes darted to his teeth and her eyes widened for a split second, he knew what had happened. She’d pieced it together.
He braced himself for the bullshit that inevitably followed. He’d heard all the stupid stuff, from just amazement to horror to gushing. Most people, when they realized what he was, fell apart at least somewhat. He’d seen grown people who ought to know better suck up or make a fool of themselves trying to look cool in front of a dragon. Sometimes, people freaked out. They often would try to hide it, but he could see in their eyes that they saw him as a threat, as a big, scary, brutish monster, like how a rabbit would see the hawk circling overhead.
Sophie, though, did none of these things. She obviously realized what he was, and he could see that she wanted to ask a question or two, but she didn’t. She stayed in her corner of the car and acted the same way, like she didn’t much care about his genetics or his wealth. He waited, confident that sooner or later, the irritating mess would start, but it simply didn’t. She didn’t even mention it, like he’d noticed that she was a halfling and didn’t say anything about it—a rare example of politeness in conversation.
Everywhere Magnus went, people felt the need to inform him in shock that he was a dragon, like he didn’t know that already. Some people liked to take pictures, which was irritating, but not nearly as irritating as the ones who couldn’t care less about him personally and instantly defaulted to “threat, threat, scary, big scary thing.”
He frowned, intrigued despite himself at the cute half-elf beside him. He hadn’t meant to do anything other than do a good deed to someone who clearly needed help. Now, he was starting to like the spunky young woman. She’d been presented with two big facts: he was very wealthy, and he was a dragon, and she was treating him like anyone else. Him being a dragon was no more interesting to her than if he had a big mustache, which he found to be indescribably refreshing.
As had become increasingly common, he coughed softly into his shoulder. A slight sensation of pain shot through him, but it was gone before he could pay it any mind.
At that moment, Sophie raised a hand and pointed to an obscure gate off the side of the highway. “That’s me!”
“That’s a road,” he corrected her playfully, surprised to find that he was comfortable enough to be goofy. A grin came over her lips, and for a second, he saw her beauty shine through in her infectious smile.
“Ha-ha,” she replied teasingly as he turned on the blinker and went off the side of the road to find himself looking at a muddy, twisting road that would absolutely obliterate anything other than a truck. His low-riding car couldn’t even look at it without breaking something. Though most of the rain had stopped, other than the occasional drip or two, the road was full of mud puddles, and the greenery around it glistened with the fresh rainfall.
Sophie delicately removed herself from the seat, brushed off the seat, and stood up outside. She gave him a smile.
“Thanks for the ride.” She lightly tapped the door shut and made her way around the back of the car towards the locked gate.
This was where their journey should end. This, according to all social rules, was where their paths would split. Magnus had done his nice thing by driving her there, but now, it was time for him to leave, to ease back onto the road and get back to his wealthy, business life full of high living, and leave behind this backwoods country alone. But, for some reason that he couldn’t fully explain, he couldn’t get his foot to press on the pedal. His brain told him to go, but his gut asked him to wait. Acting off his instinct, he rolled down the window to look at Sophie as she unlocked the gate.
“If you want, I can give you a ride back?”
She turned to look at him, eyebrow cocked curiously. “Yeah? You don’t need to do that. I think you already did your good deed for the day.”
He shrugged, wondering why he wanted to spend more time with her. “Maybe I’ve got nothing better to do.”
She seemed to think about it and put a hand on her wet hip. “Well, I mean, of course I’m not going to turn that down, but there’s zero chance your car’s gonna survive my road.”
Sophie played it cool, but in her mind, she wondered why in the blazes he was looking to spend more time with her. It was nice of him to give her a ride, but past that was just too nice. If some strange man that she’d barely talked to wanted to go to her house alone with her, she’d say no. More than that, she’d say hell no. She almost did the same thing here, but she hesitated in a way that was unlike her.
She watched the dragon carefully. On one hand, she could definitely use the ride so she wouldn’t have to lug the equipment up there by foot. On the other hand, she didn’t know how comfortable she was with it, but she didn’t get a creepy vibe off Magnus—not that she could trust that alone, since plenty of bad people looked nice up front. What was he going to do, rob her? Break in with his million-dollar car and steal the 87 dollars on her nightstand? Of course, there were other things he might try to do, but if he was into that, he would have already done it. He was a dragon, and she was not. Game over. If he wanted to, he could’ve done pretty well anything he wanted while in the car, and she wouldn’t have been able to do a damn thing about it.
Sophie relied a lot on her gut, and her gut told her yes.
So, that was how she found herself ten minutes later: picking her way around the mud puddles in her boots with a finely dressed dragon beside her. She was prepared for the occasion, but he was not even close to it. An expensive black dress shirt covered his torso, complimented with the same for his pants, a bright red tie, and luxurious dress shoes that matched his eyes. In other words, the worst possible clothes to wear in the mud.
She cleared her throat as they walked. “So, what brings you all the way out here? You’re obviously not from these parts.”
“A funeral,” he said in a funny tone of voice, distantly but with some emotion she couldn’t quite distinguish.
“Oh.” She winced. Nice one. “Sorry about that.” She tried to come up with a good change of subject. “By the way, I think you may be wearing the incorrect clothes for this.”
As if on cue, Magnus slipped on a patch of mud and caught himself before he wiped out with a laugh. “I think you’re right.”
Sophie smirked, amused despite herself. This was a dragon, a being capable of immense destruction and with power beyond her wildest imagination, a creature that people had feared
and worshipped for centuries, and here he was, slipping in the mud like a ten-year-old kid. For someone with that much sheer strength and God-given ability, he came across like a friendly enough, ordinary guy. Maybe taller than most, and maybe better looking than the vast majority of men, and maybe he was at least ridiculously wealthy, but the way he interacted wasn’t something otherworldly.
“Is this your farm?” he asked, delicately flinging some mud off his dress shoes.
“Ranch,” Sophie corrected instinctively.
“What’s the difference?”
“Farms grow crops.” She jumped over a puddle. “Ranchers grow animals.”
A cow appeared around the corner of the road, sticking its fat head through the trees and lazily observing them, chewing its cud with slobbery dripping every which way. It regarded them with mild interest, like they were nothing more than a passing distraction unless they had food. When it became tragically clear to it that they did not, in fact, possess any food, it let out a grumbly moo before waddling away.
“Beautiful creatures,” Magnus offered, watching it walk away.
Sophie smiled.
They got to the house, where they made their way around the old stone fence, up the slick and wet road, and up to the garages. Magnus waited by the front gate as Sophie opened up the garage doors and looked around for the tool that she needed. Every time she went to the back areas, she remembered how much of a mess it was in there. Many of them were her grandfather’s old tools, and he hadn’t cared whatsoever about the organization, making it a convoluted maze of tools, paper, and machinery. Someday, she’d have to clean it up, but someday never came, not when every day was so busy already.
She found the tool she was looking for nestled behind some wooden shelves: a small, handheld welder that could patch up the hole enough for a single trip and back. It wasn’t the best-case scenario, but the proper tool for the job weighed a thousand pounds, and there was a zero percent chance she was going to lug that big iron monstrosity up there and back. She emerged from the back area to discover her dragon companion wandering around the rest of the shop, eyeing various pieces of machinery curiously. He looked wildly out of place. Some of the tools were a decade old and covered in dust, but he was all dressed up and handsome and looked straight out of a “most eligible billionaire” magazine. It just didn’t fit the image. Nevertheless, she found it amusing.
His attention fell to her bike project that stood nestled away in the corner, covered by a blue plastic tarp. “What’s this thing?”
“It’s a project.” Sophie picked her way over, trying to decide if she should show him or not. “It’s a bike I’m making.”
“You make bikes?”
“No, but I’m making this one.” She, for whatever reason, whipped the tarp off to show him her beauty, all chrome and beautiful and sexy. She found herself grinning even looking at it.
“Exquisite,” he declared in instant approval, crouching and taking a look at it. “Where are the wheels?”
Though she knew she probably shouldn’t, she couldn’t resist turning it on. She pressed a finger into chrome chassis and indented the hidden button, causing a mechanical hum as it fired up. Glowing, semi-translucent white energy formed around all the pieces, separating them and holding all the tangible parts together like someone had stuck a bunch of Legos into Play Doh. The wheels, both a single thread of metal with the same magical energy coating it, emerged from the body of the bike and settled on the ground, giving them a full, wonderful view of the glowing, futuristic bike.
“What’cha think?” Sophie asked, startled that she’d do that and wondering why she cared.
“Sophie, this…” Magnus ran his hand over the body and surveyed it for something. “I’m a very old man, and I have never seen anything like this.”
A bolt of joy shot through her hearing those words. It was one thing to have a high-school dropout whose greatest achievement was raising pretty good cattle tell her that it was impressive. It was another thing having someone like Magnus praise it—someone who knew what he was talking about, someone with a lot of money, someone who would have seen everything known to man.
“Really?” For just a split second, she felt vulnerable. She instantly pulled it back. “Cool.” Magnus kept looking at it.
“How did you do this?” He checked underneath. “There isn’t an engine. Does it run?”
“Hell yeah, it runs,” she declared proudly. “I’m still working out some bugs, but it’ll get going.”
He shook his head in amazement before straightening. “You got what you need?”
Magnus couldn’t believe what he’d just seen.
From the second he’d laid his eyes on this half elf, she’d confused him. She didn’t act normally, she didn’t look normal, she didn’t do normal things, and now, she apparently had created something in her redneck shop that was unlike anything he’d ever seen. Redneck engineering was a thing. When he was younger and poorer, he’d realized that some country people could be astonishingly gifted at their practices, even without formal education. Sometimes, a little bit of “shit, let’s try it and see how it goes” worked better than investments with official, licensed contractors.
This was on a whole new level.
He’d seen cheap imitations of things like that. Gas engines, diesel engines, they’d been around forever. Only recently did people start successfully mixing magic in there, and with very limited success. A lot of ingenuity went into creating a hybrid engine, a lot of ingenuity and a lot of skill. What he’d just seen in her shop was among the better ones that he’d ever come across. To fit that kind of hybrid in such a beautiful way, inside of a tiny chassis, was something that he’d never seen before. Whether Sophie knew it or not, she was sitting on a goldmine. More importantly, whether she knew it or not, she had an extraordinary gift to be able to figure something like that out.
As Magnus walked back to his car with her holding her tiny tool for whatever she was planning to do to her truck engine, he couldn’t help but marvel at her. Respect. That was the only thing that he could think of. Respect, and curiosity of knowing what other things she might surprise him with. Nothing about her made sense. She was clearly gorgeous under there, and with a brain like that, with enough confidence to not care that he was a dragon and wilt, what the hell was she doing out in the middle of nowhere, wearing shitty old work clothes and slogging around in the mud?
She noticed him staring at her and gave him a scowl. Then she kept walking. “Go ahead and take a picture. It’ll last longer.”
What a bizarre, fascinating young woman. He found himself compelled to know more about her. Everything that he’d seen defied expectations. He’d met women who looked like her physically, and although it was hard to tell exactly what she looked like thanks to the baggy, dirty work clothes, it was obvious that her body was feminine and sensual beneath the rough exterior. Not a single one of them thought as freely as she already had in the past ten minutes of talking with her. He’d met people who could probably come up with the idea of the bike and put together how to make it, but they were highly educated people working in high-end facilities. She was certainly a peculiar package, and for reasons he couldn’t begin to explain, he wanted to spend more time with her. It was rare that he found someone who caught his attention. After a few centuries, most people tended to sort of become boring and dull, especially the ones that tried too hard for his affections.
But Sophie didn’t give two shits about his opinion of her, and that was worth its weight in gold. She was content doing her own thing, and if he was around, fine, but if he wasn’t, the world wasn’t over. He didn’t even get the impression that she’d tell anyone that she’d met a dragon because she had her own business to be taking care of. The only time that she seemed to really take to heart what he said was when he’d complimented her bike, and for a split second, he’d seen her as truly excited. She’d since reigned it in, like he was about to pull the rug out from under her and say, “Ha! Fooled
ya! It actually sucks!”
When they loaded back into his car and he drove her back to her truck across the drying roadways, he couldn’t help but bring up one way that he could easily stay in contact with her without being weird: land. The area itself was beautiful, and on his way through before he’d met the sparky little half elf, he’d considered trying to find some land for sale to come out and relax at, and he couldn’t think of a bad reason not to bring it up.
“It’s a beautiful area out here,” he declared. “Any land for sale out in these parts?”
Instantly, he knew he’d said something wrong. Everything switched, from her being relaxed to instantly tightening up, from a casual, content look to a suspicious eye.
“Not anymore. Someone bought up a ranch near here when the owners defaulted. Turning it into some millionaire’s play mansion.” She kept going, apparently now on a train of thought. “Why the fuck do city people always come out here and screw it up? He put this giant, gaudy gate with a big sign that says Paradise Ranch and makes the whole area look stupid, coming in and out of there with a seventy-thousand-dollar truck and playing at being country.”
Magnus glanced over at her direction. “The sign’s over the top, but why so much hatred about the guy?”
“Because he’s so irritating!” He’d clearly struck a nerve there. “I see him all the time, driving around with a city boy cowboy hat, owning longhorns that endlessly get into his neighbors’ herds and screw stuff up. The Johnsons ended up having to replace their bull after a longhorn jumped the fence and got in a fight with him, gored the poor thing half to death. And what did Mr. Rich do? Nothing. Absolutely nothing. Just drives around, thinking he’s cool, irritating the shit out of everyone.”