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 fault.” He whined and licked my fingers, but he couldn’t talk in this state. (I dunno about all werewolves, but ours is only human on the full moon. He’s three years old, so once a month is plenty, believe me.) “Tomorrow’s another day,” I said. I dumped my jeans on the floor and my cell phone fell to the carpet.
I stuffed my featherless pillow with an old sweatshirt and tossed it and the phone on the bed. The phone landed on a printout the witch had left for me. After punishments, she frequently left directions for an antidote spell in my room. Of course, since I couldn’t work the darn things, it was basically further punishment just to see them.
The anti-itching spell on the printout started, “Take pi slices of blueberry pie…”
I flicked it to the floor, scratching my arms. “I don’t do spells,” I muttered.
I put the makeshift pillow behind me and picked up my phone. The phone was still black and cold, and I hadn’t brought up any dragon milk.
I swallowed. “I don’t do spells,” I repeated. The window cleaner I spritz on for the bus driver, the disinfectant I’d flicked on the ninth grader—that magic came from the original animal or elemental. It worked regardless of who did the sprinkling.
Not so with real spells.
They required thought, patience. Intention.
Witch blood.
“And I am not a witch, no matter what she says.” Wulfie licked my foot.
Still, elementals were powerful, even if I wasn’t a witch myself. Perhaps the dragon on my skin would be enough to boost my phone up again. I rubbed my dragon-smelling fingers around the keypad. “Up we go,” I said, like the phone was Wulfie. “Up we go.” Then I pressed the “power” button one more time.
This time it came up.
“Maybe it wasn’t really dead,” I told Wulfie. He settled in on my feet and draped his head across my ankles.
Back to my demon bookmark. Ah, there it was: “The best way to stop a demon is not to summon it.”