The Witch's Dragon

by Melania Tolan

  Zara had hidden this encounter from Evelina all these months. This had been her first chance to contact the dragon.

  She held on to the black dragon with all her might—the first of her kind she’d encountered in her entire life. He did not let up his fight to free himself.

  “Release me!” he roared and slammed her against the wall again.

  “Not until you calm yourself and listen,” she replied, then added heat to her mouth as she sank her teeth deeper.

  He thrashed about a few more times and then lowered his head. His body followed in submission. Slowly, he turned his body, and she moved over him until she stood on top of his belly. Zara released his neck.

  He let out a puff of green smoke. “You have quite a bite, but I can still kill you,” he said.

  “I am Zara.” She flashed her teeth at him.

  “I know.”

  “How?”

  “We’ve been watching you for years.”

  Zara nodded. “This I know, but who is we?”

  “My master,” he answered. His eyes darkened. “He would kill me if he knew about this.”

  “He will never know, but we must be quick.”

  They locked eyes. Zara opened her mind to him and showed him the future—her death, and his role in her demise. He opened his mind and showed her how his master controlled him. Between them passed knowledge only a dragon could understand. He was the only one left and their species would end with them.

  “I only have a few moments before he calls for me.”

  “Then we must not waste time.”

  Zara jumped back and spread her wings, opening herself to him. He followed suit. They circled each other in the mating dance before coming together, their bodies intertwining into one. Energy crackled around the two powerful creatures, displaying red and green sparks of light.

  Zara absorbed every moment of their union. She’d never felt so alive, so free, so powerful.

  The moment ended too quickly, but she would cherish it forever.

  Limb by limb, they separated their bodies. The light darkened in the cave as the energy faded. Zara noted the new sensation inside her body—a pulsing energy. Their union had been successful… now she held the great responsibility of keeping the seed within her safe.

  He nudged her gently. “I wish we had more time, but the lord of death controls me.”

  “I know. That is why I came.”

  “I must go. Night approaches, and he awakens. But before I leave, you must take a bite out of my side. He will smell you on me, and he must think we fought.”

  Zara smiled. “With pleasure. But first I must know the name of my child’s father.”

  “Nostafaru.”

  “Until we meet again, Nostafaru.”

  She lashed out and took a sizable chunk of black scales and dragon meat from the side of his neck. He roared in pain, but turned around and disappeared through the tunnel leading out of the cavern.

  Zara stood alone in the vast room. She spat the piece of Nostafaru from her mouth, but one of his scales lodged between her teeth. Using her tongue, she freed the scale and then swallowed it. Within its fibers were imprinted thousands of magical events from the past. Each memory, she transferred to the seed inside her body. When it was done, she carefully wove a magic shell surrounding the seed, shielding it from the world and inquiring minds.

  The next moment, she felt a familiar presence and sighed in relief. With a mighty roar, she escaped the tunnel to reunite with her companion, Evelina.

  Chapter 7

  I fell back, panting as the energy inside my body subsided. That was not what I had expected to see, but it all made sense now. This dragon was a mix of my father’s evil steed and Zara, Evelina’s companion—he was like me.

  I recalled the ethereal woman that Zara had seen. It was Eva. She had traveled through time and left clues, hidden from my father’s eyes, planting seeds to take him down thousands of years before he would know anything about me.

  Warm elf hands touched my face, and I opened my eyes to find Padrick hovering over me with brows furrowed.

  “Are you okay? What did you see?” He ran a hand over my forehead before helping me sit up.

  “You didn’t see it? You didn’t see Zara?”

  He shook his head.

  “Huh.” I looked around the cavern and closed my eyes as I touched the bone under me.

  Again, I snapped back five thousand years. There she lay—Zara—her massive body encircling an egg the size of a football at the center of the cave. I watched as she took her last breath. Her body disintegrated. These bones were hers, left to guard the seed.

  When I opened my eyes, returning to present day. I felt like I stood on sacred ground. While I had never met Zara, I had the utmost respect for her. She had fought bravely to protect a small human village from destruction, and when she failed there, the dragon mama protected the last seed of hope for humanity. She owed us anything, but she had done everything she could, anyway.

  “We need to hatch the egg,” I said. “I saw his parentage. He was created like me, another part of Eva’s plans. He’s been waiting for me.”

  Padrick took my hands. “Let us try again.”

  He went back to the opposite side of the nest and knelt. Once again, we both placed our hands on the egg, and he murmured the spell. This time, however, I didn’t have a vision—the dragon inside had already communicated his importance.

  My hands warmed, the fire building inside my palms. That’s it, I realized. He needed my warmth and Padrick’s magic to break the protective seal placed around him thousands of years before.

  I allowed the heat and fire from my hands to flow into the egg. I blocked out all the pain I still felt from Traian’s torture and focused all my attention on the small being awakening before me.

  Padrick continued whispering the spell with his eyes closed. I had opened mine because I wanted to see what was about to happen, but quickly understood why he’d kept his eyes closed. The light from inside the egg’s shell shone brighter than the noonday sun.

  I closed mine again and maintained the flow of energy I was putting out. The power it took drained my body. This required more of my essence than dream walking to Traian or taking a trip to the underworld. I was running out of energy. I didn’t know how long I could keep this up.

  Maybe I’m not meant for this kind of thing. Maybe this was a terrible mistake.

  But I continued to pour everything inside me into the creature waiting to hatch. I could feel my body shaking. My muscles burned, my bones felt like gelatin.

  Come on. Hatch already.

  More and more, I gave of myself. And then I realized the one thing I hadn’t given: my blood.

  I took one hand off the egg and bit into my wrist. I rubbed my wound on the shell. The silver surface absorbed the crimson fluid instantly. Since the skin on my hand had already mended itself, I ripped a deeper hole in my vein and squeezed as much of my blood as I could onto the egg.

  Between the energy from my body and the blood from my veins, I gave everything to this being. I wanted this baby to be born right now. I didn’t know if I had enough blood in me to see it through, though. My strength waned. I couldn’t hold my body up anymore, so I rested my forehead on the egg, not minding the burning sensation against my skin. Tears of exhaustion fell from my eyes.

  I couldn’t do it anymore. I was done. Depleted. Darkness gathered around my mind, and I welcomed it. Silence followed, and blackness surrounded me.

  I didn’t know how long I stayed there. Eventually, I felt hot breath on my face and then a rough, wet tongue on my cheek. I swallowed, noticing the burn in my throat.

  “Ah, she awakens. Finally.”

  I heard Padrick’s voice echo around me so much so I couldn’t tell where it originated from. A soft keening captured my attention the next second. I hadn’t heard this sound before. It came from next to my right ear and was followed by more hot breath and licks. I wanted to swat away whatever it was, but I c
ouldn’t move. Then I felt a small furry paw touch my forehead.

  Oh, my throat hurt. The rabid thirst made me want to scream, but I had no energy. I felt like I had just come out of surgery, and my body hadn’t burned off the anesthesia yet, except in that scenario, the burn in my throat came from the plastic tube the doctor had shoved in to keep me breathing while unconscious—not bloodthirst.

  “Open up, buttercup.” Padrick’s voice sounded closer than before.

  When I didn’t follow his order, I felt warm fingers pry my lips open. Drops of warm, metallic liquid poured into my mouth in a steady stream, taming the fire.

  As I gulped down the blood, each cell in my body awakened, like a desert getting its first rain after a long drought. I found enough strength to open my eyes.

  “Ah, there she is.” Padrick smiled down at me. “One more bag should do the trick.”

  A second face appeared next to him, one unlike anything I’d seen before. I tried to focus on its long shape, but my vision kept blurring it out—except for the crimson eyes.

  Ever so slowly, the image became clearer as I consumed more blood. White, scaly face with silver outlines, a snout with fiery nostrils, and red eyes. When the creature smiled at me, its small, sharp teeth glistened, and a long, snake-like tongue danced from its mouth.

  The dragon.

  I finished draining the bag of blood and tried to sit up. The room spun around.

  “Oh, no, you need to rest longer.” Padrick placed a hand on my chest. “Give it a few more minutes.”

  I again felt a soft paw on my cheek and turned my head in its direction. A gray, furry face came into focus.

  “Storm.” My voice cracked. “How did you get here?”

  She head-butted my nose and curled up under my chin.

  “She showed up right before you passed out,” Padrick said. “Guess you can’t keep a familiar away from her witch.”

  Familiar. There was that word again. Traian had used it before. I guess I really am a witch.

  A hot tongue licked the other side of my face. I raised my hand to scratch the dragon’s head, my mind reeling from the fact that my cat had showed up hundreds of miles away from the last place I’d seen her. And now I had a dragon.

  “What do we do now?” My question was for Padrick. “What do we do with him?”

  Storm stood up, jumped on my chest, and then leapt up on top of the dragon’s head, as if she’d been friends with him all her life. He didn’t seem to mind her sitting between his ears.

  “We train him.” Padrick stood up. “You also need to bond with him and form the sacred connection.”

  “Sacred what?” I sat up, grateful the room didn’t spin again.

  “Although, I think you two have already bonded,” Padrick continued over his shoulder. “He went directly to you when he came out of his shell.”

  “Is there, like, a manual on how to do this thing? Maybe some ancient Viking book that talks about how to train a dragon?” Now that I sat up, I got a good look at my newest friend.

  He had silvery, white scales covering his body, tiny horns sprouting from behind his ears, and little spikes lining his spine from the base of his neck down to the tip of his tail. He was three times as large as the egg had been.

  How did he grow this big so fast?

  “There is no book or manual, unfortunately,” Padrick answered.

  “Darn. All the other fairy tales seem to come true. Why couldn’t this one be true?” I rubbed forehead.

  “Long ago, my people hunted and killed dragons to extinction. The king of Transpatia believed that dragons were another mutation that the Atlanteans had created in their labs.”

  I glanced back at the dragon. “Are strigoi one of those mutations, as well?”

  Padrick dug for something inside his pack before he answered. “Yes.”

  “So all magical creatures were actually science experiments?”

  The baby dragon jumped into my lap with Storm still on top of his head. He looked up, locking his red eyes on me. He seemed like such a sweet creature until he burped, and flames shot out of his mouth into my face, singeing my eyebrows and a few stray hairs that had come loose from my ponytail.

  I wasn’t worried about that—my hair would grow back—but what would I do with a dragon? What did he eat? He obviously would not stay this small for long.

  Padrick came over and crouched down next to me. “Here, feed him this.” He handed me a slab of steak.

  “You didn’t answer my question.” I took the red meat, but didn’t have it in my hands two seconds before the baby dragon snatched it from me.

  “The answer is tricky. Yes, vampires resulted from lab tests, but what your species has become has nothing to do with what happened twelve thousand years ago.” He rocked back on his heels. “And you are even more of an enigma, but you already knew that.”

  The dragon licked the bit of meat juice left on my fingers, while Storm jumped up on my shoulder.

  “Sometimes, I feel like I’m in a strange dream. Three months ago, I just wanted to pass my midterms and be free of your classes.” I laughed. “God, you were a pain in the ass.”

  Padrick chuckled and held his hand out to the dragon. “I hated being so mean, but I had to keep up the pretenses.”

  The dragon pressed his head to Padrick’s palm.

  “I know, but still…”

  My voice trailed off as my attention focused on the beast in my lap, who seemed to get heavier by the moment.

  “We need to give him a name. Any suggestions?” I asked.

  “He’s your dragon, Everly. You get to name him.” Padrick scratched the beast’s chin. “I will let you two, I mean three, have some time to yourselves and figure this out.” He stood up and grabbed his pack. “I’ll be chatting with the king of the mountain if you need me. Don’t take too long. Your new friend will get hungry soon.”

  I listened to Padrick’s footsteps until they faded away. Storm curled her tail around the back of my neck as she perched on my shoulder, her eyes twinkling with excitement.

  “I don’t know what I’m doing,” I said to no one in particular.

  The dragon nipped my hand and let out a purr-like sound that bordered on a low growl.

  “What is that supposed to mean?” I stared down at him.

  He sat up, placing both front feet on my chest, and smelled my face with his hot snout. I rested my forehead against his scaly one. The leather on his face felt soft and warm.

  “You are so sweet,” I mumbled.

  Storm stayed put the entire time, watching and waiting.

  I sighed and closed my eyes. But another one opened—my third eye.

  Chapter 8

  I could see as though my physical eyes were open. It wasn’t through my heightened strigoi senses, though. Everything around me had a purplish hue, but I could also see other colors around certain objects. The surrounding bones that belonged to Zara had a reddish tinge with a black outline to them, but the dragon before me glowed in silver and lavender. I peered past his scales into his mind. His brain lit up, thousands of sparks dashing across the neurons.

  “Hello,” a young, male voice spoke. “You can finally see me.”

  This was the voice that called to me in my visions. Before, it sounded disembodied… now it rang clear. I didn’t know how to respond, because he had spoken using his mind.

  How do I do that? I thought.

  “It will take practice,” he answered my question.

  “You can hear my thoughts?”

  “Yes.”

  His answer sent shivers down my spine.

  “But why can’t I hear yours?”

  “Because you haven’t tried yet. You’ve just opened your third eye, now you must look past the physical. You can see my mind, but what else can you see?”

  I thought about his words and let them roll around my head for a moment before focusing my third eye on his mind again. I tracked a spark through the neural pathways of his brain and followed its rhyt
hm as it traveled across the synapses. With each beat, I heard the sound. It started like a faint buzzing noise but the more I paid attention the clearer it got.

  “You’re doing it. There you go. Pink applejacks. Did you hear that?”

  “Holy shit! I heard it. ‘Pink applejacks’? Where on Earth did you come up with that?”

  Laughter filled my mind in response. “I was just picking random words from your brain. Pink was the color of the lipstick you wore once. Probably when you were human, because you haven’t worn any makeup since you died. Except at your funeral.”

  “Hey, those are my personal thoughts. You can’t go looking around in them without permission.” I didn’t know how to stop him from probing my mind. Shit, did Octavian do this when I was in Africa?

  “Good question. Sorry, you must learn how to guard your mind. You and I are connected, though. I sensed your presence the moment you were born and waited until you were ready to hear my call.”

  I watched the sparks in his brain moving about. The more I tracked them, the more I could see and hear his thoughts. I could see his memories. Most of them were of him curled up in his egg, but there were also a few that had been passed down from his mother, Zara.

  “How did you know it was me? And why me?”

  The dragon pressed his forehead against mine a little harder. “Because we were meant for each other. We are bonded. Don’t you feel it in your hand? In your soul? In your heart?”

  “Finally, she’s using her brain.” A new, sultry, female voice joined our conversation.

  I focused my third eye in the voice's direction and realized it belonged to Storm, who still sat on my shoulder. Her brain fired at a different rate than the dragon’s. I tracked the sparks jumping at different rhythms and could hear her thoughts too.

  “Oh, there you are. You can finally hear me. This will make things soooooo much more convenient.”

  “Storm? You can communicate like this, too? Here I thought you were just a cat.”

  “Witch, you know I’m not just a cat.” Storm purred. “Took me forever to find you. But just like you and the little lizard here are destined to be together, so are you and I.”