The next morning dawned, as mornings tended to do. Melissa grumbled into her pillow and pulled her blanket over her head to block out the light spilling across her face from the window. She was still half asleep, so it took a moment for her to realize there was a warm mass against her back and that she wasn’t alone in her bed, and she opened her eyes, staring into the blanket-induced darkness.
The previous morning, she reflected to herself, she had been a virgin. And that morning, she no longer was. Despite that, she felt very much the same as she had the day before. Not in a bad way, though. She just felt like herself, and considering she had heard horror stories about what sex could do to a woman, she was more than okay with just feeling like herself.
She didn’t feel dirty and defiled, like her high school teachers had tried to convince the girls they would be. Nor did she feel like it had been some transcendent experience, though it had been
undeniably enjoyable, and she was definitely looking forward to it happening again. She felt
remarkably similar to the way she had felt the day before.
Mostly, she felt a little sore. It was a good sort of sore, though. Or at least not a bad sort of sore, which more or less boiled down to the same thing at the end of the day.
She was pretty sure she wasn’t going to be getting back to sleep at that point, though, so she carefully sat up and got out of bed, leaving Mitch to sleep. She gathered some clothes for the day and made her way into the bathroom.
Maybe the more romantic thing to do would be to wake him up to share a shower or something like that, but Melissa always looked forward to that brief period of time in the morning when it was just her and the warm water, and the rest of the world disappeared for a little while. Besides, she had never been a huge romantic.
She preferred just saying and acting on what she felt rather than trying to make a huge production out of it, and so much of typical romance always seemed like it was there more to inform other people that the romantically entangled duo were, indeed, romantically entangled.
(Granted, romance involving the shower didn’t really fall into that category, but the fact
remained that she appreciated her private time.)
On the whole, her attitude was tending towards “thanks but no thanks,” and they could always share a shower on a different morning.
Her shower was warm, and the pounding water eased some of the soreness from her muscles. She stood under the spray to enjoy it until the mirror on the wall and the glass of the shower door were so foggy they were nearly entirely opaque. Only then did she turn off the water and step out of the shower. She dressed slowly and wrapped her hair in a towel on top of her head, and from there, she made her way to the kitchen.
She set the coffee pot to brew and stepped out the front door, stepping into a pair of sandals that had been left on the porch for just such a purpose. She moseyed down the driveway to where the gravel met the road and picked up the newspaper, and she was already browsing over the front page by the time she reached her front door, kicked the sandals off once again, and stepped back inside.
Maybe there was an argument that newspapers were a bit primitive, but she liked to read the news over breakfast, and she also preferred not to eat breakfast on top of her laptop. Besides, it wasn’t as if the subscription was expensive.
It wasn’t long before she heard Mitch begin to stir in the bedroom, and a moment later, she heard the shower turn back on.
She got through her first cup of coffee and half a bowl of cereal, and she was halfway through a second mug before Mitch emerged from her bedroom, with his hair still wet and sticking to his face. He was wearing just his pants and looking confused about his place in the universe.
“Morning,” Melissa greeted, only glancing up from her newspaper fleetingly before she continued reading. She downed the last of her coffee. “Coffee pot’s still warm,” she added, when it seemed like Mitch was just going to stare at her like she was some sort of anomaly.
“Morning,” Mitch offered in return, sounding slightly dazed, as if Melissa had been replaced by a tiny (well, tinier) green alien at some point during the night.
“Something wrong?” she asked slowly, finally looking up from her paper as she turned a page and carefully re-folded it. “Do you not drink coffee?”
“I do,” he replied, jerking back into motion to head towards the coffee maker.
“Mugs are in the cupboard right above it,” Melissa informed him, once again looking down at the paper. She listened to the rattling of ceramic and glass and the sound of liquid pouring for a few seconds before Mitch cautiously joined her at the table.
They sat in silence for a moment, save for the sounds of Mitch drinking his coffee and Melissa periodically turning the page. Until finally she asked, “There any particular reason you’re acting like a nervous bunny rabbit?”
Mitch’s expression wrinkled slightly as he scowled at her. “I’m not,” he protested flatly.
Melissa rolled her eyes. “You so totally are,” she returned blandly. “Don’t pretend.” She stretched a leg out to kick his shin. “Now, spill.”
“Are you alright?” Mitch asked, and at first, Melissa thought that he was trying to change the
subject, until she realized that no, he wasn’t. That was just what was bothering him.
“Mmhmmmm,” she hummed pleasantly. “Perfectly fine.”
At Mitch’s slightly dubious look, she rolled her eyes and prodded him with her foot again. “You’re the one who got your ass kicked by an immortal teenager. I got laid. For the first time, I grant you, but it was basically on the opposite end of the spectrum from ‘traumatic.’” She prodded his leg with her foot again. “Stop worrying.”
Mitch continued to eye her dubiously for a moment before he slowly sighed. If he was hoping for an argument, Melissa wasn’t sure why, and if he really expected her to either be broken up over losing her virginity or feeling transcendent for it, then she was pretty sure he had been reading too many Harlequin romance novels.
(Honestly, was that even a thing? Most of Melissa’s friends in high school had lost their virginity in high school. It struck her as a little strange to assume she was going to have some sort of a fit about it. If it was supposed to have been that big of a deal, she would have demanded roses or candles or something like that.)
“Anyway!” She pushed her mug away and set her newspaper down after flipping through it in a slightly perfunctory manner. “Drink your coffee. Eat something, if you’re going to eat something. We need to get you home to put real clothes on and pick up my poor, abandoned car.”
“You’re the one who decided to abandon it,” Mitch pointed out dryly.
Melissa sniffed and stuck her nose in the air. “Extenuating circumstances,” she returned primly. “It’s not like I chose to ride a dragon to the brewery. Sabine just sort of decided that was what we were doing, and honestly, why would I say no? Besides, flying on Sabine was faster, which means we got there before you completely got your ass kicked.” There was a beat of silence before she added cheerfully, “By a teenager.”
“You’re never going to stop saying it like that, are you?” Mitch asked, sighing slowly. He sounded as if he already very clearly knew the answer to his own question.
“Never ever,” Melissa returned pleasantly. “It’s my trump card. The time you got your ass kicked by a teenager. I’m never letting it go.”
Mitch sighed, slow and overwrought, before he asked with as much melodrama as he could likely reasonably muster up, “Why do you hate me?”
“I’m ornery,” Melissa replied as she patted him on the shoulder with one hand, and her tone turned almost reassuring as she added, “Don’t worry, it’s not just you. I hate everyone. The whole world. Except animals and plants that I’m not allergic to.” She hummed thoughtfully for a moment, as if she was leaving someone off of that list, before she shook her head slowly. “No, no, I think that covers everything,” she settled on, nodding her head once, decisively. “Now, chop chop; hurry up. We have things to get done today.”
Mitch held a hand up in surrender before she could go after him with a wooden spoon or some other kitchen utensil. Not that she would ever actually do such a thing, of course.
They lapsed back into silence after that, until they were both ready to go. However, almost as an afterthought, Melissa did pull Mitch down into a kiss before they left the house. He seemed more than a little taken off-guard by the gesture, and Melissa couldn’t help but feel a little pleased by that. If she could still take a were-bear by surprise, then she could only assume she was doing something right, and she needed to keep doing it.
*
When they left the house to get the day started, Mitch looked like he was going to object when Melissa automatically headed for the driver’s seat of his car, but he closed his mouth with an
audible click of teeth when she hardly even acknowledged his potential protest. He would live, and he could have his keys back soon enough anyway.
At the top of the list of things they needed to do, picking up Melissa’s truck was first and foremost. It was still parked at the campground. Considering Melissa had never actually camped at an organized, groomed campground—if she was going to go camping, then she was going to go camping, and that didn’t involve grooming the terrain beforehand—her truck was certainly spending a lot of time at one. The poor old beast was going to get confused eventually.
Once Mitch’s car was parked at the campground’s still largely abandoned lot, to Melissa’s
Confusion, he hopped out and moseyed over to open her car door for her. She offered him a bemused look, before she shrugged one shoulder and let the moment pass. She was more than capable of opening a car door for herself, but far be it from her to tell him to stop if that was what helped him get his jollies.
(Now, if he started running ahead of her to open doors or pull out chairs even when it would make no sense to do so, then she might bring it up.)
“At least this time, it’s not coated in half a foot of ash,” Melissa sighed, thumping a hand on her truck’s hood with a loud, affectionate bang. “Harry had to sweep it all off with a full-sized broom.”
“He just carries a broom around with him?” Mitch wondered dryly, as if that was the strangest thing he had ever heard.
Rolling her eyes, Melissa swatted at him lightly with the back of one hand. “Considering where I was parked and he knew he would need to drop me off to get my truck after he picked me up from the hospital, I’m pretty sure he could intuit on his own that my car might be a little bit dusty.” She paused for a moment, looking thoughtful, before she shrugged one shoulder in a careless manner.
“Or maybe he just keeps a broom in his truck. Who knows? Maybe it’s convenient. Like me keeping an ice scraper in my truck even in the middle of summer.” She waved the topic off and peered into the bed of her truck to make sure she hadn’t left anything in there, satisfied when she saw that it was empty.
She pulled her truck’s keys out of her pocket and tossed Mitch’s keys back to him, and she didn’t bother to question it when he opened her car door for her again. “I guess I’ll follow you to your place,” she mused, hefting herself into the driver’s seat. “So, you can find an actual outfit, and then we can figure out everything else we need to do.”
“You say that like it’s so much,” Mitch groused, though it was hard to say he truly sounded
annoyed. Melissa had to assume he had known what he was getting himself into when he
decided to make it his mission to track down who or what was causing the fires.
Melissa shrugged. “I don’t know how much work it will be,” she answered simply, sliding her key into the ignition and turning it. The engine rumbled to life, and finally Mitch began backing off towards his car once again. “I’ll follow you out of the parking lot,” she offered as he got into his car, before she pulled her truck’s door closed once again.
*
Melissa wandered aimlessly around Mitch’s living room and his kitchen as he got dressed
upstairs. It was all sort of minimalist, but it did at least still look lived-in, which was a relief. Melissa always found it strangely creepy whenever someone’s living space didn’t actually look like anyone lived in it, as if they were just existing there without any sort of purpose. It always seemed so sad and listless.
There were a few photos on the wall, some of them what she presumed to be family photos and some of him and his coworkers. There were knick-knacks on the tables and some on the shelves. The appliances in the kitchen hadn’t been replaced in several years.
She was running her fingers along the shell of a wooden turtle when Mitch made his reappearance, fully dressed and properly groomed once again.
“So, what are the first of the grand plans on the docket?” he asked, and he seemed to be lingering around her like he was waiting for something to happen. Melissa wasn’t sure what he was
waiting for, but he had an air about him like he was waiting for her to do an elaborate trust fall into his arms, as if he was waiting to prove himself.
Finally, Melissa rolled her eyes and sighed. “Can you please chill?” she asked, folding her arms. When he blinked at her slowly in response, she pointed out, “Just act normal. We fucked. We kissed. I will be completely happy if we do both of those things again, repeatedly. But that doesn’t mean you need to get all…weird. Things were working out just fine before, when you were all…not weird.” Alright, so the ending lacked a bit of gravitas, but she was pretty sure he got the gist of her point.
Mitch huffed out a breath of laughter and held his hands up as if in surrender. “Point taken,” he replied, relaxing incrementally as he sat down on the nearest chair. “I’ll keep all chivalrous
notions to myself from now on.”
Melissa nodded once in satisfaction and sat down across from him, folding her arms on his kitchen table. “So,” she started, after pausing for thought for a moment, “we have an idea of what we’re looking for finally. Since the local vampires seem pretty convinced it’s not another vampire, and it’s all been suspicious enough to arouse the attention of another were-dragon.”
“How do we know that your new dragon friend isn’t actually the dragon we’re looking for?” Mitch asked pointedly, and Melissa supposed it was a point that did need to be addressed.
“Would it make sense for her to return to the last place that was set on fire if she was the one to do it?” she asked, and then she waved the question off before he could answer it. “Besides, if we plan on getting rid of the culprit, then we can just get rid of Sabine later if it turns out she was the one to set the fires.”
“How very ruthless of you,” Mitch deadpanned in return.
Melissa shrugged broadly, her palms raised towards the ceiling. “I like to be pragmatic,” she
returned. “Anyway, like I said, I doubt it’s Sabine, but if it is, we can just deal with that later. She saved your ass last night, so I think she’s earned the benefit of the doubt for now.”
Mitch scowled at her at yet another reminder of the previous night’s events, but he didn’t actually put up a fight about it.
*
Mitch had…some adjustments to make in his life and his expectations. Every conversation with Melissa was proving, again and again, that he couldn’t get comfortable and expect any sort of normalcy from her, because she was always going to rip the rug out from under his feet like she was trying to take him on a magic carpet ride.
He could say he had mixed feelings, but if he was being honest, he was excited. She wasn’t quite like anyone he had dated in the past, and he wanted more of that energy in his life, even if it meant he needed to do a tightrope act to stay on his feet.
Though he suspected that when Melissa was standing on the other side of that tightrope, it could be a very long walk indeed.
*
There was something very strange about the idea of his…girlfriend? (Was Melissa his girlfriend? They hadn’t really discussed it) having a were-dragon’s phone number in her contacts list. He wasn’t even sure why he found it odd. Probably because of just how quickly Melissa had adapted to the idea that humans were not the only humanoids on the planet. He had expected there to be a larger adjustment period.
It was convenient, though. It was very simple for her to just whip her phone out of her pocket and ask Sabine to meet them at the last fire site, as easily as she might ask someone to meet her for lunch.
When they met up with Sabine at the campground, she was fully dressed and wearing the same jacket as the day before, but she had the added bonus of a messenger bag. She greeted Melissa and Mitch with a cheerful wave, and she hardly even waited for them to wave back
before she promptly began stripping her clothes off, shoving them into the messenger bag. She shoved the jacket in last and tossed the bag to Melissa, who seemed entirely unfazed by the spontaneous nudity, while Mitch cleared his throat and looked anywhere but at Sabine.
She transformed without any pomp and circumstance, but it was a bit of a novelty for Mitch to have someone towering over him like that regardless. He tipped his head back to stare up at her, and she huffed a warm breath of air over his face as she looked back at him. He couldn’t say dragons had facial expressions—no more than any other animal could be said to have facial expressions—but she seemed smug, regardless.
If she had anything resembling plans for how the investigation was supposed to go,
evidently, she had no plans on actually sharing them. Instead, she simply craned her head this way and that, her nostrils flaring as she scented the air.
It wasn’t that Mitch’s sense of smell as a bear was lacking. If it was, he wouldn’t have been able to find Melissa in the smoke to begin with. But trying to pick out a dragon’s smell was not so straightforward, when dragons tended to smell like little more than smoke to him.
A were-dragon, however, would have a keen enough sense of smell to pick out the scent of
another were-dragon. And to pick out if it was truly dragon fire or not. Mitch had never been able to smell the difference himself, but apparently the starting point of a fire caused by a dragon smelled more chemical than a standard fire, due to the biological mechanisms a dragon used to breathe fire.
It was a smell that Mitch himself wouldn’t be able to recognize, but Sabine? That was another story.
She straightened up, her wings tensing against her back as she caught a scent. She made a sharp, reptilian chirping noise and took off at a trot into the woods, with Melissa and Mitch jogging to keep up with her as she wove her way through burned out trees. Already, plants were beginning to regrow, and Mitch knew some of the older wildfire sites had already turned into fields of fireweed, as if the ground had been turned into vibrantly fuchsia seas. It still seemed too quiet, but he knew it would bounce back eventually, and it was comforting knowledge to have.
He didn’t have much time to think on it, though, as Sabine made no efforts to slow her pace, and Mitch and Melissa had to practically run to keep up with her long strides.
Chasing a dragon through the woods and flowers was not how he expected to spend his afternoon, but at the same time, he couldn’t say he regretted it. Because honestly, when was he ever going to get to say that again? It was like winning a snipe hunt.
Or at least, that was what Mitch thought at first, but the novelty of the situation started to stretch a bit thin as they kept moving. It seemed as if Sabine was determined not to leave a single patch of the forest untouched, and if that was the case, then he could admire her ambition, but as the sun slowly began to sink towards the horizon as sunset approached, he was getting hungry, and the smell of burned-out wood and dirt wasn’t exactly pleasant.
Besides, considering reasonably little had started regrowing and reasonably few creatures had moved back into the area at that point, it left the entire ordeal feeling dark and oppressive, as if they were sprinting through haunted lands, and whatever was haunting it was going to leap out of thin air and try to devour them without any warning.
When at last Sabine calmed down, she jabbed her nose expectantly at her bag still draped across Melissa’s chest and shoulders. Melissa pulled her jacket out of it with a questioning look on her face, and Sabine nodded her head once before she abruptly transformed. She was hardly even
human-shaped again before she held a hand out, Melissa handed her jacket over, and she shrugged it on and buttoned it.
She turned in a circle, her arms outspread around her. “Pretty sure you guessed that there was
another dragon around,” she stated, “but this is where the fire started. It smells like a meth lab. I mean, to me, it smells like a meth lab. I guess, to you, it probably doesn’t.”
“Why do you know what a meth lab smells like?” Melissa wondered dryly.
Folding her arms across her chest, Sabine stuck her nose in the air and returned as primly as she could, “I was very well-rounded in college.” As if that explained so much.
Mitch rolled his eyes. “So, other dragon in the area, definitely started the fire,” he summarized. “Can you figure out where this other dragon went?”
Sabine shrugged, an unenthusiastic, slightly helpless gesture. “Nope,” she supplied. “The smell’s too old. I mean, the smell of the fire itself is still pretty strong, but when it comes to the smell of the actual dragon, I can only barely tell that there was a dragon other than me in the area.
Following the smell would be something else entirely. I mean, yeah, my nose is good, but it’s not that good.”
Mitch sighed and pinched the bridge of his nose for a moment, before he dragged his hand down his face. He didn’t get a chance to say anything else before Melissa pointed out, “It’s still more information than we had this morning.”
It was a fair point, and at least it prevented Mitch from spitting out whatever first occurred to him to a were-dragon who was fully capable of stomping on him or setting his hair on fire if he offended her.
“True,” he sighed, and he shoved his hands into his pockets. “You think the dragon would stick around?”
“To some extent, maybe?” Sabine replied, though it sounded more like she was guessing. “I mean, they wouldn’t really have a reason to return to this exact spot—it’s charred already—but they’ve been focusing on this area, clearly.”
“But why have the fires been so spread out?” Melissa wondered, shifting the bag’s strap on her shoulder. “If a dragon wants to burn an area down, then why not just…do that?” she asked. “Don’t get me wrong, I’m glad that hasn’t happened, but it still begs the question all the same.”
Sabine waved it off. “We only have so much of the chemicals in our system at one time. If we burn through it all in one go, then we need to stop until we build it back up again. That can take a while, especially if we’re going from an empty tank and waiting until we have a full tank again.”
She began following a line of burned and cracking trees, each of which had shattered with the heat of the fire, so the broken trunks clawed at the air like greedy, blackened hands. It looked as if each tree had simply exploded with the intensity of the heat. She carried on walking for several moments, until finally she stopped a few yards away.
She held her hands up, gesturing grandly to the tree beside her. “This is where the starting point stops,” she shouted back, and as she jogged back in their direction, she added, “and I’m willing to bet it continues at least somewhat in that direction, too,” as she pointed a finger in the opposite direction along the line of trees.
“So, this other dragon wasn’t holding back,” Mitch supplied.
“Not at all,” Sabine confirmed, coming to a halt in front of them again. “Whoever they were, they wanted to burn this place down. Like, they could have coated the area in napalm and started blaring heavy metal music, and it would probably have been more subtle.” She snorted. “I mean, if they were being any more blatant about it, they would have stayed here to do a dance for you.” She wrinkled her nose slightly. “Honestly, you should be glad you can’t really smell it. It smells gross when it’s this concentrated, and that’s even after it’s had time to dissipate.”
Melissa sighed slowly. “Well, I guess that rules out a were-dragon accidentally starting the fires,” she sighed, though it sounded very much like it had simply been wishful thinking. If she had ever actually been under the impression that the fires weren’t deliberate arson, she had kept those thoughts very firmly to herself.
Sabine shrugged apologetically. “Sorry,” she offered, though it was a flippant apology, and it didn’t actually sound particularly apologetic. “I would offer good news if I had any, but so far, everything points towards another were-dragon deliberately trying to burn the area down.”
“At least now we have some idea of what we’re after,” Mitch sighed, running a hand through his hair. “That’s better than what we had this morning.”
Sabine offered two thumbs up in reply. “Now we’re looking on the bright side.”
“Will you let us know if you find anything out about this other dragon?” Melissa asked, dragging both of them back on topic in much the same way a parent might drag a child away from a toy by their ear. “I mean, we aren’t the only two looking, but you would probably hear more—or at least recognize more relevant details—than we would.”
Mitch was confused for a moment as he tried to recall who else was looking, before he remembered the friend Melissa had mentioned. She had assured him that Harry was harmless and wouldn’t mention anything to anyone, so Mitch had sort of let his existence slip from his head. He almost missed Sabine’s reply.
“Yeah, sure,” she offered simply, waving the question off with a flippant gesture. “I want to find this asshole just as much as you two, and more eyes and ears are always better.”
It seemed a bit odd to think that they were forming a miniature coalition to track down their wayward fire starter, but that appeared to be exactly what was going on. Not that Mitch was going to complain—it certainly made his life easier than if he was stuck working on his own—but when he had decided he was going to become a firefighter, he had envisioned a very different type of firefighting.
It was a better way to end the evening than he had expected, and soon enough, Mitch and Melissa were piling back into the car and heading away from the campground once again.
“How did you manage to instantly befriend the first were-dragon you’ve ever met?” Mitch asked finally, glancing at her sidelong.
Melissa shrugged pleasantly. “I have my ways,” was all she offered in answer.
Yeah, she was definitely going to make life interesting.