she’d take cash, but she said she’d come for it later.’”
I rubbed Moonfire’s scales hard with the scale brush she likes. She coughed bits of roasted sheep at me, then purred.
“Four months later the mommy had a baby girl, with nutmeg hair and blue eyes. And in the tired haze she named it Camellia after her mother and Anna after his mother and Stella because she wanted her little girl to be a star.
“And when an ugly old woman picked Camellia Anna Stella Hendrix out of the baby room and took her away forever and ever? Well, nobody lived happily ever after. The end.”
The dragon purred some more and rolled so I could reach her belly. Dragons don’t talk, but they’re not animals. They’re elementals, and all three elementals are smart, even if the dragons don’t communicate in the same way humans do. If you get close to dragons you can pick up their emotional vibrations, and sometimes even pictures. It’s usually nostalgia for the old days mixed with I miss my dragon sisters , but when I’m there, she sends me extra thrums of comfort, almost like I’m her kit.
I stroked the dragon’s neck, then flicked messy bits of sheep back into the roasting pan. “Think to me of the old days,” I said, warm against her hide. “Think to me what you miss.”
The dragon’s pictures are like dreams. The more you try to focus on them, the quicker they fade. This story was the one she’d told me the most, so I’d pieced it together over all our years together. I saw it more clearly because I could practically tell it to myself.
She showed me an old world, a world with no paved roads, no buildings, no radar to mark the passage of unidentified flying dragons. Hills and hills of rolling green and gold, and here and there the passage of people, the smoke of campfires. She soared high, with a daughter behind her, and their sky-blue bellies reflected light. Their translucent limbs disappeared in the atmosphere. From below, they looked like bits of glittering sky, invisible unless you knew how to look. They landed in the plains and ate buffalo; they landed in the mountains and ate nuggets of gold. Male dragons were uncamouflaged. They were bright: reds and oranges. They fought each other, and then there was flame, and forest fires.
“Why can’t female dragons spit fire?” I said. “Doesn’t that make you mad?”
She thought of a male dragon, searing a female who would not mate. She thought of herself and her sisters, surrounding him, tearing him to bits. She thought of more and more male dragons dying in their own wars, until they had all gone. She thought of her sisters, caught and destroyed one by one by men in green and brown, all over the world. She used to think she caught a wavelength, a rumble of Draconis late at night … but even this had faded in recent years. Hard to know if they were all truly gone, or merely impossible to hear in the modern crush of sound and radio waves.
Dragon milk welled in her eyes and dripped into the glass jam jars that hung around her head to catch the excretions. Her neck sagged and she coughed, her wheeze shaking the jam jars against her side with clink-clinks . “We’ll get your chest looked at, I promise,” I said. I leaned my head into her rough scales and sent back images of one of my plane trips. I’d been sent to Brazil at thirteen to courier ingredients home for the witch. I showed her our plane flying through gold-lit clouds, I showed her tops of textured green trees, and I felt her warm rumble of enjoyment beneath me.
Spending time with her almost made up for the fact that when I finally made it inside, I found that the werewolf pup had been so upset with himself for his part in the demon disaster that he’d chewed up my feather pillow and my left toe-loop sandal. Then hid under the bed, his tail wagging the dust ruffle like mad. Short tufts of werewolf hair floated out, silver in the lamplight.
“Come on out, Wulfie,” I said. “It wasn’t really your
I rubbed Moonfire’s scales hard with the scale brush she likes. She coughed bits of roasted sheep at me, then purred.
“Four months later the mommy had a baby girl, with nutmeg hair and blue eyes. And in the tired haze she named it Camellia after her mother and Anna after his mother and Stella because she wanted her little girl to be a star.
“And when an ugly old woman picked Camellia Anna Stella Hendrix out of the baby room and took her away forever and ever? Well, nobody lived happily ever after. The end.”
The dragon purred some more and rolled so I could reach her belly. Dragons don’t talk, but they’re not animals. They’re elementals, and all three elementals are smart, even if the dragons don’t communicate in the same way humans do. If you get close to dragons you can pick up their emotional vibrations, and sometimes even pictures. It’s usually nostalgia for the old days mixed with I miss my dragon sisters , but when I’m there, she sends me extra thrums of comfort, almost like I’m her kit.
I stroked the dragon’s neck, then flicked messy bits of sheep back into the roasting pan. “Think to me of the old days,” I said, warm against her hide. “Think to me what you miss.”
The dragon’s pictures are like dreams. The more you try to focus on them, the quicker they fade. This story was the one she’d told me the most, so I’d pieced it together over all our years together. I saw it more clearly because I could practically tell it to myself.
She showed me an old world, a world with no paved roads, no buildings, no radar to mark the passage of unidentified flying dragons. Hills and hills of rolling green and gold, and here and there the passage of people, the smoke of campfires. She soared high, with a daughter behind her, and their sky-blue bellies reflected light. Their translucent limbs disappeared in the atmosphere. From below, they looked like bits of glittering sky, invisible unless you knew how to look. They landed in the plains and ate buffalo; they landed in the mountains and ate nuggets of gold. Male dragons were uncamouflaged. They were bright: reds and oranges. They fought each other, and then there was flame, and forest fires.
“Why can’t female dragons spit fire?” I said. “Doesn’t that make you mad?”
She thought of a male dragon, searing a female who would not mate. She thought of herself and her sisters, surrounding him, tearing him to bits. She thought of more and more male dragons dying in their own wars, until they had all gone. She thought of her sisters, caught and destroyed one by one by men in green and brown, all over the world. She used to think she caught a wavelength, a rumble of Draconis late at night … but even this had faded in recent years. Hard to know if they were all truly gone, or merely impossible to hear in the modern crush of sound and radio waves.
Dragon milk welled in her eyes and dripped into the glass jam jars that hung around her head to catch the excretions. Her neck sagged and she coughed, her wheeze shaking the jam jars against her side with clink-clinks . “We’ll get your chest looked at, I promise,” I said. I leaned my head into her rough scales and sent back images of one of my plane trips. I’d been sent to Brazil at thirteen to courier ingredients home for the witch. I showed her our plane flying through gold-lit clouds, I showed her tops of textured green trees, and I felt her warm rumble of enjoyment beneath me.
Spending time with her almost made up for the fact that when I finally made it inside, I found that the werewolf pup had been so upset with himself for his part in the demon disaster that he’d chewed up my feather pillow and my left toe-loop sandal. Then hid under the bed, his tail wagging the dust ruffle like mad. Short tufts of werewolf hair floated out, silver in the lamplight.
“Come on out, Wulfie,” I said. “It wasn’t really your
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