Q had felt the dragon as soon as he’d entered the mall. After the airport had confirmed his bags, had indeed, been placed on a connecting flight to Australia without a ticket, he found himself in need of a quick shopping trip for a change of clothes. Walking to the railing, he’d lifted his head and taken a deep breath.

Oh, yeeeaaah… I know that stench anywhere, he thought. Definite dragon. Slowly dropping his head, he easily spotted the offensive source scent. He briefly wondered why the dragon was wearing a pink shirt, but took it as a sign from above that he was indeed following the orders from his ancestors.

Three floors down sat a dragon warrior. He wasn’t the leader, but where there was one, the others wouldn’t be that far away. He wanted to let his phoenix burst free, wanted desperately for his wings to rip from his flesh, causing people to scream and run in the presence of his powerful true form. Q wanted to swoop down, his outstretched talons reaching forward to sink into the fragile flesh of this unprepared dragon, while lifting him from his chair with an ease that genuinely showed his dominance. As the weak dragon struggled to pull free, Q would merely clench his blood-soaked claws harder, lodging them deeper into his ripping skin.

The dragon looked up and locked eyes with him, bringing him back from his flesh ripping fantasy. Q smiled at the beast below. He was sitting with three females. Q knew the dragon wouldn’t do anything in front of three breakable humans, let alone the mall full of witnesses.

Wait…Q thought. Not all humans. Q reached harder with his energy. Phoenix he confirmed to himself, mostly human, but somewhere very deep inside that female was a phoenix waiting to burst free. Q hadn’t seen this woman before, nor had he felt such a constrained phoenix. It was almost as if she didn’t know, or if she did know, it was only a recent discovery. Q’s head tilted. How can someone not know they were phoenix? Questioning his own mind he thought, Adopted? Perhaps. Q’s empathy for his own kind came through, as he thought of his own missing daughter. A phoenix not aligned is a danger to the whole species. Whether this woman knew of her history or not was unimportant, she wasn’t aligned, she sat with a dragon, therefore her ‘notice to terminate’ had been signed.

A group of humans drew his attention back to the dragon, as he looked closer. The phoenix was shifting in front of a gathering crowd. The gasps of horror floated up to his ears. They enraged his beast, he wasn’t something horrifying. The phoenix was a majestic and powerful bird, one that should be worshipped by all that breathe. Holding his control tight, he saw the woman run from the rest.

The prey was separating itself for him.

Perfect, he thought. She is mine.

Q took two steps back into the group of people now trying to look down upon the activity below and vanished in search of his kind.

 

 

Cinders was hoping that the maintenance crew had already finished and were well gone from her office. She was coming in late today, having had some meetings with production people in the morning. As she got off the elevator, she noticed that the hallway was void of all people. She thought it must have been a drill she missed the memo for. Cinders shrugged and walked to her office.

Pausing, she looked at Ally’s desk, it didn’t look as if she’d been there all morning either. The same paperwork laid there for her attention that Cinders had given her the previous evening. There weren’t the regular three cups of coffee in varying temperatures and stages of being drunk on her desk either.

“That’s odd,” Cinders said. She didn’t think she’d given anyone the day off. She shrugged as she pushed her door open and walked in.

That was the very moment she understood what was going on.

The moment she felt the dart hit her chest.

The blackness beginning to creep over her body like a horrifying blanket of death.

Cinders’ eyes flicked around as she stumbled from wall to the chair, grabbing hold of it in a failed attempt for stability. It toppled over in a loud crash, as her legs went out from under her. Her body crumpling to the floor with a thud that echoed around the room. Cinders’ panic-stricken mind could barely instruct her body to pant with basic survival needs, let alone get her limbs to respond to her screams to run.

As the inky black hole of reality swept across her eyes, the face of a man looked down at her. “Your daddy is looking for you.” The smile that she saw on his face made her brain scream with foreboding despair. With all her remaining strength she pushed her mind, demanded that her body get up. Run, you useless fucker, she spat venomously at herself. Run. Run. RUUUN. Aaargh, she screamed at her limp, unresponsive, numb flesh.

He’s going to kill you… was her last thought as the blackness took hold.