The Dragon King and I (21 page)

“I’m sorry.” He said, voice muffled. “This isn’t your fault. I’m just—”

“I know.” I sounded much calmer than I actually felt. “I don’t think three days will be a problem. All we need is a genie. Everything else should fall into place. I mean, you’d consider yourself an honest man, right?”

Sam heard the challenge in my voice, the bite, and he lifted his head, eyes flashing dangerously. How he would have responded, I never knew because just then my living room window broke into a million pieces. Cursing like a sailor and operating more by instinct than thought, I went to the floor, army crawling towards the door still embedded in my far wall so that I could use it as some sort of cover while I looked outside. The broken window was right next to my hiding place but it was just one window in a long wall of them. I could peek around the edge of the door and see down into the street.

I hadn’t pulled my blinds. I rarely did. I was pretty high up and since my apartment looked out over the pier, there were no buildings across from me that I had to worry about. I hadn’t been too terribly worried about people on the street passing by and seeing me either. Mostly because I’d simply never thought about it. I was up here, they were down there, and most of the time my vantage point made me feel invincible.

I realized now that no one was invincible, especially when bullets were involved. Down below there was a crowd of people gathering together in the street. In the middle of a mob two men struggled with one another, and I could see that one of them held a gun in his hands. The second man was trying to get the gun away.

I expected the crowd to scatter, or run, when the gun went off again, the bullet biting through the passenger side door of a parked car, but they just stood there. It took me a minute but I realized with a start that they were all staring up at my apartment. At me. They were too busy looking for me, to notice the gunman and the man he struggled with and the gun went off again, this time grazing the shoulder of a man standing on the outskirts of the group.

Sirens whooped and pretty soon two police cars spun onto the scene. When the police got out of their cars, they tried pushing through the mob of men, but not, as I’d originally expected, to get to the two fighters. Instead they walked right past them to stand in frontlines of the mass, their head angling back so that they two could stare up at my window.

I noticed the lone female officer standing behind the shield of her open door, staring wide-eyed after her companions. Then she spoke into her radio, and I heard the rapid, panicked sound of her voice if not her words, echoing through the dark. Her voice and the grunts of effort of the two men fighting over the gun were the only sounds besides the distant rush of cars.

My eyes traveled beyond the mob to look off into the distance and the bottom of my stomach dropped away as I saw them. More were coming. There were hundreds of them, and while they obviously weren’t in a hurry, their determination to reach their destination was clear.

It was around this time that I started to hyperventilate.

“We,” I gasped, “Need. To find. A genie. Now.”

Sam came over to stand beside me and he sucked in a sharp breath.

“How come you never told me you were so popular?”

“Sam!”

The humor drained from his face, and he lifted his hand to rest it on the back of my neck. The warm weight centered me in the here and now, forcing some of the nausea and dizziness away.

“I don’t know how to summon a genie.”

I looked at him in a panic, but one glance at his face silenced my barrage of questions before I could start. There was something about his face…some expression. It scared me more than the sight outside could have.

“I don’t know how to summon a genie.” he repeated, then took a deep breath. “But I know someone who does.”

Chapter Eleven

“You are ugly now, on the inside, where it matters most...you are beastly.”

- Alex Flinn, Beastly

Sam made sure that we grabbed everything before we left. I packed a small bag and he grabbed a tired little rucksack that was obviously the one responsible for all his changes of clothes. We found Seraphim 1.0 in the freezer hidden behind a pack of hot pockets and a single toaster strudel. A location, that while strange, made more sense than under my bed, a point that I made very clear to an abashed Sam.

My praise of Maleficent’s common sense came to an abrupt end when we discovered a skeleton in the bathtub of the guest bathroom. The skeleton had a cigar in its mouth and was dressed in one of Maleficent’s stage costumes. All of that, combined with a bottle of Tequila and a deck of playing cards, created a lovely little mental image of the type of things that had been going on in my apartment while I’d been away.

“So.” Sam began, calm and without inflection, “Correct me if I’m wrong…but…Conric?”

“Yup.” I replied shortly, stuffing the mirror and note into my bag of clothes.

“Do I want to know?”

“Nope.”

“Ok, then.”

And that was the end of that.

By the time we’d made our way back up to the roof, four more police cars had pulled up outside and the sun had begun to make its presence known against the horizon. Almost every door we’d on our way up had opened behind us, until we were leading a train of glassy-eyed men through the building and up to the top floor. The elevator had been a bust because they kept appearing on each floor, and when some of them forced their way through the closing doors, Sam grabbed my hand and pulled me past them.

Taking the fire escape may not have been any better, but it kept us from being trapped in a tiny moving box as more and more of the residents of my apartment building began forcing their way inside. We blocked off the emergency exit door leading onto the rooftop by the simple expediency of Sam crushing the door handle. I could hear the men beating on the door, but no matter how they fought with the knob, they couldn’t get it to turn and release the automatic locking mechanism.

It would buy us some time. Admittedly, we didn’t need much.

“Now what?” I asked breathlessly. I already knew the answer, the grin Sam sent me as he tossed me Seraphim 1.0’s head was telling.

“How
do
you feel about flying?”

I caught Seraphim by the end of her ponytail and grimaced apologetically into the dead, white eyes as she groaned, mouth cracking as she knocked loose ice and bits of frozen flesh. Sam dropped his rucksack, and sighing, I shouldered that as well.

“I like it less than riding a motorcycle, but more than being mauled by a horny mob.”

“Good answer.”

He was so pleased I felt as if I’d given him a rousing endorsement complete with balloons and a marching band. Though, to be honest, I think a good bit of his excitement had to do with our situation. He seemed, electrified almost. Sizzling with power and grinning from ear to ear as he ran to the edge of the roof to hop lightly onto the raised ledge. He spread his arms and his head fell back, black hair whipping madly in the morning wind.

He was nothing but a darker shadow back dropped by a mass of gray, boiling clouds. The sun hadn’t yet reached that far, hadn’t yet fought off that stretch of darkness, and Sam seemed so at home in it that I shivered and took a step towards him.

Maybe I would have tried to pull him back, maybe I would have simply placed my hand where I could see his spine glowing like a snake made of embers through his clothes. I never knew what I would have done, because between one thought and the next his skin split down the middle.

His shirt fell away, and the air combusted on itself as he shifted forms. Dragon’s body swirling through the air like a plague and sucking up all the oxygen as it reshaped itself around the world.

To say that it displaced space, or time, or energy would be a lie. It simply changed the elements around it until they weren’t intruding on it, but made a part of whom and what it was. It was how I found myself on the beast’s back, clutching at its armor for dear life, rather than shoved off the roof by its sheer mass.

Screams from below, panicked gunfire, and exclamations of shock, surprise, and fear. Sam seemed to drink it all in because he grew larger still, wings arching behind him to make himself look broader, long neck tensing.

He roared into the heavens and the sky rained fire, and on the street the mobs dissolved into a screaming mass of chaos. His wings beat once and we took to the air like a rocket, straight up and moving with such speed that I was flattened against the warm body beneath me. Once we were hidden from sight by cloud cover, Sam abruptly straightened his wings from tight against his body, instead extending them like sails. We coasted and I nearly flipped off his back from the sudden change in speed and direction.

Note to self:

I probably should have taken my chances with the mob.

* * * *

“What are we doing here?”

I stood across the street from a set of wrought iron gates. The four story colonial seated regally beyond them seemed to mock me, and my nose wrinkled in distaste.

Sam stayed silent, and I would have turned to demand answers but knew that he was probably still trying to get dressed behind the lone tree and parked car that we’d found. If it hadn’t been so early still he would have been arrested for indecent exposure. Assuming no one shot him first for morphing from a Dragon into a man in the middle of Main Street.

For the first time I found myself grateful that my mother lived in suburbia as opposed to the middle of the city. It made the cover-ups so much easier. I hadn’t stepped foot in Greenwich since I’d graduated from high school. Preferring to run as far as possible from all the bad memories associated with this place and never look back. Why my mother stayed was a mystery. Maybe because you couldn’t find such prime acreage within city limits.

“Sam.” I tried again, this time trying to project calm rather than blind panic. “Why did you bring us here?”

Coming up to stand beside me, Sam finished buttoning his jeans and scowled down at me.

“I told you already. We need a spell to summon the genie and
I
don’t know what it is.” He pointed to the gate, “But she will. Her kind deals with magic mirrors all the time.”

“My mother,” I struggled for the right words but couldn’t find them. So instead I blew out an exasperated breath and threw up my hands. “My mother is my mother, Samuel. She’s a manipulative, psychotic, bitch but she isn’t a Maleficent.”

“Manipulative, psychotic, bitch.” He eyed me musingly. “Sure sounds like the definition of a witch.”

Making an inarticulate sound of rage, I took a step towards him, and he laughed and dodged away, heading across the street without waiting to see if I followed.

“I’m not saying she’s a witch.” He began soothingly once I’d caught up with him.

“Good.”

“But I am saying that she’s the incarnation of all things evil.”

I frowned. “You’re not really earning yourself any brownie points.”

“Agreed.”

We reached the gates, and Sam pressed the buzzer for the intercom. I tensed as the security camera’s manning the gates swung slowly in our direction, red lights blinking like eyes.

“This is a bad idea.” I warned him.

He waved cheerfully at the camera’s lens, and spoke from the corner of his mouth.

“What do you really know about your mother?”

I hesitated, but finally had to admit to myself that I knew nothing about her. Not really.

“Let me guess.” He turned to look down at me but I couldn’t bring myself to meet the steadiness of his gaze. “She’s cold, cruel, and always gets her way. All of her husband’s have died, which conveniently left her with more money than she knows what to do with. Then there’s the small matter of her children.” Each word that came out of his mouth had me drawing further and further away. I heard what he was saying but I didn’t like the path he was leading me down. He lifted my chin, and his thumb caressed my jaw.

“An estranged step-son and a daughter that’s more like property than family. Sound about right?”

“None of that means anything.” I said stubbornly, and he shrugged, his hand dropping away from my face as we heard the gate unlock behind us.

“You’re right. It doesn’t mean anything. The fact that your Godmother wants her dead and that the Fae wouldn’t have anything to do with her bloodline...” he shook his head, “
that
means something.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Remember when you asked me why we weren’t looking for graves on your mother’s side?”

Without thinking my hand rested protectively over the bulge in my bag where Seraphim 1.0 rested. The head shifted as if listening in and I nodded affirmation.

“It was because there were none. When she was banished to this plane she left all of her surviving relatives back in our realm.”

“What are you saying?”

But to be honest, I already knew where he was going with all of this before the words came out of his mouth.

“Danielle Woodrow is a Black Widow, and you need to convince her to help us.” He grinned, the expression contagious despite the words that followed. “I’d do it, but I’d probably just end up eating her. And we really need the help.”

We were screwed.

* * * *

The grounds were empty. I was so used to people moving around the place that it was strange to see it void of activity. There was no one maintaining the strict landscaping guidelines that my mother demanded, and when we went up to the front door we found it unlocked.

There wasn’t a maid in sight, and that more than anything gave me pause. There was supposed to be someone answering the door, sweeping, dusting, and getting the dining room ready for lunch. There were any number of chores that should have been getting done at this time of day, but the only sign of life was the haunting chords of the piano drifting down from the second floor.

Glancing at one another, Sam and I headed up the winding staircase that dominated most of the foyer. Placing a hand on my waist, Sam angled me behind him so that he could take point on the stairs. I let him, not liking the sense of foreboding that was slowly sapping away my courage. With every step we took a little voice in my head cried,

‘
Go back. Go Back.’

It wasn’t until we reached the second floor landing that I realized that that little voice came not from me, but from Seraphim 1.0. And she’d had damn good reason for trying to warn us away.

Growing up, this hall had always been bright and airy. An architect’s dream of vaulted ceilings and ivory framework. Highlighted by the French doors at the far end that led out onto a terrace that overlooked the side gardens. There was a music room on this floor in addition to my mother’s office and a playroom that had been converted into a library once I’d outgrown it.

Now, I could barely recognize the space. From ceiling to floor it was now a maze work of vines. Vines that were as thick as my forearm and as black as night. The thorns that sprouted from the diseased stalks were tipped red, and hanging in the middle of the hallway, the vines like hungry manacles around her neck and wrists, was-