Chapter Sixteen: Desmond
It was weird how easy it was to have Claire in his space. Desmond was usually the ‘love them and leave them’ type. He didn’t like women in his space and almost never invited women to his apartment. The only women who knew where he lived were his mother, his sister, and Katherine. And the only reason Katherine knew where he lived was because they had been carpooling to a dragon party and he had stopped by his apartment to get a specific kind of cheese Frank liked.
But Claire fit right in, almost like she’d been there before, except she hadn’t. She felt like an extension of himself, and that was strange. Better yet, unexplainable, and he shifted before he let his mind go too far in panic.
His dragon seemed to rip out of his skin, and he took to the skies before he was fully invisible. Since he was flying just around the edges of his land first, he wasn’t worried. When he was sure he was invisible and clear-headed, he rose higher, looking over the town for nothing in particular.
Everything seemed to be in place, and he was just about to go higher when he noticed an unfamiliar truck in the town center. It was the kind of truck Violet called kidnapper trucks. She insisted that those vans looked like the kind people drove to throw someone into the back.
At the time, Frank told her she watched too many thriller movies, but now Desmond found a chill running down his spine. He extended his psychic senses to see if he could find out who the truck belonged to, but instead of sensing a person or a dragon, he found blank spaces. Which is weird because nothing created blank space. Everything emitted energy. Worried, he turned around, carefully checking that nothing was following him before landing and shifting into his human form.
He dressed and went into town. He needed to see what was going on and get an answer for his blindness. He put his hands into his pockets, attempting to appear casual as he strolled past the town center. There he saw the two men Frank had encountered. He was sure it was the same men because Frank had paid Violet’s friend, Maurice, to do a sketch based off his descriptions. The third male was someone he recognized from Claire’s store. If he wasn’t looking for them, he might not have noticed the way the way they were looking around and knocking into stuff, but since he was paying attention, he could tell how weird it was.
They were standing inside the open back of the van. One was looking back and forth as if he was a lookout, and the other was peering through some kind of weird telescope pointed to the sky. Desmond couldn’t see the third man, but he occasionally popped into view to say something to the others, then receding back into the van before Desmond could catch a good view of his face.
The town didn’t get a lot of visitors because, technically, the dragon town was on private property, so he knew he wasn’t overreacting to the strange men. He continued walking past, wondering if the men recognized him. Just as he finished the thought, the guy he recognized from the store nudged the man next to him and nodded his way. So, they did know who he was.
He waited, walking even slower to see if they would say anything to him, but they didn’t. Instead, they started to pack up. Desmond walked around the corner and watched them from behind a building. From here, he could see they had a lot of good telescopes with cameras and some radar equipment. One guy slammed the door shut, and the other walked around to the front door, showing the rifle he held in his arms.
That alarmed Desmond even more than the weird behavior or their presence in the dragon town. He didn’t think of Claire’s warning as he shifted into his invisible dragon form and followed them out of town.
His alarm increased when they started driving as if they knew they were being followed, slowing way down at traffic lights and speeding through the yellow light at the last minute, taking twists and turns that made him have to double back to find them. No human should know that he was following them, not in his invisible form.
He couldn’t tell if they thought there was a car following them, too, but they clearly suspected aerial pursuit. At least once he only found them again by looking for the blank spaces inside the van, and he wondered if they realized that it was as good as a sign for someone with his abilities. He might not be able to read their minds, but he could sure tell where those minds should be. His heart raced as they turned into the city where Desmond knew he would need to fly lower. Flying this high up put him at risk of being detected by radar in military fly zones and in danger of being hit by airplanes or other objects.
He looked for the nearest open space or parking lot and shifted. He only considered how unprepared he was when he felt the coolness of air on his skin. He was naked and without a car. He glanced around for the nearest store and, while still invisible, ran to the door. He sighed in relief at seeing the saleswoman in the back talking to a customer and opened the door slowly.
Again, he thanked the universe that the door didn’t chime letting anyone know he was in the front. As quickly as he could, he ran inside, snatched a pair of jeans and a t-shirt from the first rack he saw, barely checking the size labels before leaving and walking around back to change into the clothes.
He made a mental note to return with money and purchase what he stole and more, then ran to Claire’s store. He hoped the men in the van didn’t see him because it would be very suspicious that he wasn’t in the same town they had left him in. It wasn’t like him to rush into something without even a little bit of planning, and he was kicking himself for all the ways he hadn’t been as careful as he normally would have been.