The Dragon King and I (7 page)

Abruptly he turned on his heel and moved into the living room. I had no choice but to follow.

“Look at this way,” he began, “You’re new to all this?”

“Yeah.” I admitted voice ripe with suspicion.

“Well then consider me your guide to all things magical. I’m sort of like a cheat sheet. Fairytales for Dummies.” he looked at me apologetically and spoke as if revealing some great conspiracy, “You, of course, being the dummy.”

“I gathered as much, thank you.”

I watched him wander into the middle of the room and stand in front of my television, hands folded at the small of his back and posture rigid as he looked at each piece of furniture. He eyed the couches with an odd mixture of longing and suspicion and seemed unsure of the function of an ottoman if the way he finally wandered over to it and crouched on its surface like a gargoyle on a church steeple was any indication.

He looked at me and between eyebrows and head motion, I got the impression that he wanted me to take a seat as well and wasn’t sure why I was still dallying in the entranceway.

“You’re not too used to playing human are you?”

I don’t know what prompted me to say such a thing. It just slipped out. It did produce a fascinating result however. Sam’s cheekbones darkened in what I could only assume was a blush and he ducked his head like a little boy caught in the midst of some mischief.

“Is it really that obvious?”

“Of course not.” I hurried to assure him, and while most people wouldn’t have taken my words as anything but a bald-faced lie, Sam grinned and let some of that reckless confidence cloak him once more.

“I know how to be a monster.” he admitted cheerfully, “It’s playing human that’s hard.”

Obviously.

I suppose that it was right around then that I decided to play a little game with myself entitled: Guess That Preternatural Being. I could have simply asked him, but I suspected that doing so would be the height of rudeness. Plus it was just more fun to figure it out on my own.

“Do you have the list?”

I started guiltily, and shook my head. I’d been so eager to leave the club last night that I hadn’t bothered to copy anything that Seraphim had written down. I told him as much and he gave me a slow blink that told me what he thought of my overall intelligence.

“What the hell are you supposed to do if you don’t know the ingredients?”

Confused now, I rubbed at the side of my nose and shook my head. “But I do know the ingredients.”

“You just said—”

“—that I didn’t write them down.” I tapped the side of my head, “That isn’t the same as not knowing what they are.”

To demonstrate I spouted off the ingredients with all the ease and speed of a child reciting a favored nursery rhyme:

- A lock of fairy’s hair

- An item bought from the goblin’s market

- A mirror (preferably magic)

- A genie’s tongue

- The final breath of an honest man

- A dragon’s heart

He straightened on his perch, going perfectly still, and briefly I was put in mind of a hawk that had just spotted a particular juicy rodent to eat. It only lasted for a second or two, and then he allowed the animal to bleed out of his demeanor. I’m not sure what I’d done or said to bring forth that reaction, but I made a mental note anyway:

Stop antagonizing beings with magical powers and little to no self constraint.

“Is that it?” he asked, thankfully, sounding completely normal.

“That’s it.”

“Huh.”

I sighed. That hadn’t been a very promising, ‘huh’.

“What now?”

“Nothing, it’s just that I didn’t expect it to be so...complicated.”

“Seraphim said you’d know what to do.” She’d actually said that the Knight would know what to do, and Sam had already admitted that he was no knight.

Damn.

“Ok. Fine. No big deal. How hard can this be anyway? ‘A lock of Fairy’s hair’ should be simple enough to find. We’ll just go to the club tonight and get some from Seraphim. I’m not sure why I didn’t think of it last night, though admittedly she was in a bit of a hurry.”

Sam had been shaking his head with increasing vigor as I spoke and I finally fell silent as I caught sight of the look of horror on his face.

“Will that not work?”

“Gawd, no.”

“Why not?” my nose wrinkled, “Is this another ambiguous ‘rule’ designed to make my life more complicated?”

“Not really. It’s just that the spell calls for the hair of a Fairy.”

“Yeah?” I said, my voice dripping derision. “Fairy Godmother = Fairy.”

He smothered a grin. “No. Fairy Godmother = a witch whose been given dominion over an individual or family line.”

I cursed, “So Seraphim’s a witch?”

“Afraid so.”

“That would explain a lot.” I muttered and he chuckled.

“It just so happens that I do know where we can go to get the first ingredient.” I gasped, pleased as punch and he held up a hand before I could shower him with thanks. “You may want to hold off on the praise for the time being.”

 Suspicious.

“O-k.” I said slowly, “But in the meantime, what about the rest of it?”

Sam’s eyes darkened and he turned away. “Seraphim laid things out real neat and pretty for you. Most likely we’ll be able to buy the magic mirror from the Goblin’s market, and with the right spell we can summon the Genie forth by way of that same mirror.”

“And the last two?”

Sam’s mouth was twisted with bitterness when he finally turned back to look at me.

“The final breath of an honest man and a Dragon’s heart? If you haven’t found your Knight in shining armor by then, we’ll just play the rest of it by ear.”

It wasn’t a great plan, but it was a start and I found myself relaxing fully for the first time since...since before I dropped my umbrella. To be honest I was almost eager to get started. There were, however, a few more points we needed to cover if we were going to be spending any extended length of time together.

“You know about my curse don’t you?” there was no point in beating around the bush; I got the feeling that Sam was a pretty straightforward guy and to be anything but would be an insult.

“Of course I know.” He said, confirming my suspicions. “In fact I may know more about your ‘curse’ than you do. Seraphim was pretty thorough.”

I wish she could have been half as forthcoming when it had to do with dealing with me. My lips tightened in annoyance, not just at Seraphim but at Sam as well, and I crossed my legs and waved an imperious hand.

“Then by all means. Enlighten me.”

He sighed happily at my obvious upset and shook his head, “But where to begin?”

“How about why she cursed me in the first place?” I, not quite, snapped.

His face fell into lines of mock solemnity, “Well that’s the easy part. I think I mentioned before that a Fairy Godmother, is in reality, only a witch.” for the first time he settled enough to stop crouching on the ottoman long enough to sit on it. I saw with some amusement that he aped my current posture by crossing one leg over the other. He seemed pleased with the results, though not impressed.

“The Fairy Godmother Society, or the FGS, was established to give witches something to do other than cause general havoc and mayhem. The other beings in our realm were growing tired of their interference and if they hadn’t changed their ways then they would have been exterminated.”

He spoke about the destruction of an entire race with such casual disregard that it was almost chilling. I tried to remind myself that the events he spoke of must have taken place a long, long time ago, which would explain his antipathy but I couldn’t seem to make that line of thinking ring true.

“The Fairies were the ones who came up with the idea. The witches who couldn’t seem to find redemption on their own were placed under a
geas
, or magical binding. For every one person they’d harmed, they must help three times as many. Between the hours of 12 and 12 they would be allowed beyond the veil into this world to work their magic on a single man or woman. Once the time was up, their magic would be stripped away and they’d be forced back home to await release once more. Twixt and Twain and back again.”

“You have a bunch of evil witches doing community service?”

His smile stretched from ear to ear and made his eyes sparkle. “Yes.”

It would have been funny if I hadn’t been a byproduct of all of this. “I thought you said that they were supposed to help people? Seraphim’s little gift has made my life hell. Evidenced by the fact that we’re even having this conversation.”

He shrugged, “Like I said, that’s the easy part. Seraphim didn’t mean to curse you at all. She was trying to do standard Fairy magic to help you find true love once you came of age and it sort of…”

“Backfired all to shit?”

“In a nutshell.”

Exasperated, a blew a curl out of my eyes and collapsed back into my sofa, grabbing blindly for my favorite pillow so I could crush it against my abdomen in a weak attempt at self-comfort. I was thinking; or pouting really. I was grateful that Sam was keeping his mouth shut and giving me time to indulge in one while I pretended at the other.

“All right,” I said finally. “If my curse is just Fairy magic gone wrong, why don’t we just get a Fairy to fix it?”

You know the face people make when they see a guy get struck in the
cajones
? It’s usually followed by an, “Ooh,” as they cringe and turn their heads away. Well, that was the reaction my question generated from Sam, though he tried his best to play it off.

“You keep coming up with such great ideas.”

“I sense a ‘but’.”

“But,” he said obligingly, “all the Fairies are dead. Don’t bring them up around others of my kind. We don’t take the reminder well.”

“Dead?” I squeaked, “As in dead dead?”

He nodded, “Unfortunately. It’s why they formed the FGS in the first place. The Witches were the only ones who had the power, and lifespan, to take care of their charges once they no longer could.”

“But,” This news broke something small and fragile in me that I hadn’t even known was there. I suppose that when I thought of magic, Fairies had always been a part of the fantasy. They were essential to any child’s make-believe world and here I was finding out that they were extinct. It was like being told that there was a Santa Clause and that he was every bit as awesome as you’d always thought he would be…but that he had terminal cancer and would be gone by the end of the month.

My inner child just got raped by reality.

“How did they die?”

“The Black Widows.”

“Spiders?”  This alarmed me. I was prepared to deal with a lot, but magical spiders were an entirely different story.

“No. Women.”

“Oh.” He was talking about dem hoes. I could handle me some hoes.