When Melissa told Harry about everything involving Mitch and were-bears and were-dragons and were-whatever-other-sorts-of-animals-there-were and vampires and everything else, it was without hesitation. Either he would believe her, or he would laugh, call her crazy, and poke fun at her at work for the rest of eternity, but the odds of him mentioning it to other people seemed pretty slim from what she knew of him, and she liked to think she knew him rather well.
Besides, she was already in the habit of telling him basically everything, and she had no intentions of letting that habit go. Old habits die hard, after all.
Of course, she was something of a realist on occasion, so she was working under the assumption that he would assume she’d had too much to drink and spend the rest of their shared shifts mocking her about it.
She didn’t expect him to look so thoughtful for a few moments, cupping his chin and tapping a finger against his lips, before he nodded once and decided, “That makes sense.” As if it really did all just…make sense. As if all she did was explain to him how a combustion engine worked.
She didn’t expect him to just believe her without her even needing to put any effort into it, and when she pointed that out with quiet suspicion, Harry just shrugged and pointed out, “Basically every culture has stories of people turning into animals, and dragons look weirdly similar in all the regions that have folklore about them. Considering that, it’s not that shocking to learn that it’s not all bullshit. I mean, yeah, it’s still weird, but, just…not as weird as it could be.”
And when he put it that way, Melissa supposed it made sense. More importantly, she had someone to help her keep an ear to the ground as she listened and looked for clues. After all, Harry wanted to get to the root of the fire problem just as much as Melissa did, even if he hadn’t known it was supernatural in nature, and two pairs of ears were better than just a single pair.
Really, learning about the creature sightings in the area was easy when they knew what to expect. Every bar or bus stop had someone gushing about the enormous dog the size of a sedan that had given them a heart attack, the strange light they had seen in the middle of the night but passed off as sleep deprivation or caffeine withdrawal, or, more interestingly, the enormous ‘Komodo dragon’ that someone assumed had escaped from a private collection, or the creepy winged shadow. Both of those had been spotted in the woods near the campground that had almost been consumed by the last fire.
Either their culprit was returning to the scene of the crime or, more likely as far as Melissa was concerned, someone else was sticking their nose into the situation. Either way, whoever they were, they could probably offer some much-needed assistance, and Melissa wanted to meet them.
Harry seemed a bit skeptical of her decision.
“Aren’t dragons, you know…dangerous?” he wondered, in much the same way as one might
remind a child that fire was hot and trying to fly out of the second story window wasn’t going to go the way she wanted it to.
(Not that Melissa had any lived experience with that last one, of course. That would be absurd. Completely and utterly ridiculous.)
“Probably,” Melissa replied, unconcerned. “A lot of things about all of this are probably going to be dangerous,” she pointed out easily. “I wasn’t scared off before. I don’t really plan on getting scared off now.”
Harry groaned and pinched the bridge of his nose between two fingers. “Do you want me to come with you?” he asked, sounding resigned. He seemed slightly relieved when she shook her head.
“No,” she mused. “I don’t want it to seem like I’m trying to gang up on them. Whoever it is, I really don’t think they’re the culprit. Whoever’s been starting the fires has clearly been making some efforts to go unseen, so why would they start returning to the scene now?” Though her tone was expectant, she wasn’t waiting for an actual answer, and she carried on before Harry could begin to flounder for one. “I think it’s just someone looking for answers, in which case they’ll probably be glad to hear they aren’t the only ones looking.”
The idea made sense to her. More sense than a culprit that had taken pains to fly under the radar suddenly returning to the scene of the crime, at any rate. And apparently, it made some amount of sense to Harry too, as he didn’t try to argue after that.
*
“So, you’re just going to…go,” Mitch stated slowly, staring at Melissa as if she had grown a
second head. “You’re just going to run off to confront a dragon. On your own. Knowing it could flatten you without much trouble.”
“You did say you had to look into the vampire issue,” Melissa reminded him innocently. “We’re killing two birds with one stone.”
“A dragon could roast you,” Mitch pointed out, emphasizing his words carefully. As if Melissa wasn’t already fully aware of that detail. “You don’t see anything about that that you should be concerned about?”
Melissa shrugged broadly, her palms raised towards the ceiling. “You said you wanted my help in this,” she reminded him. “And anyway, I doubt it’s our pyromaniac dragon, or else why would it be in the same area they just burned? It’s not going to burn the area twice.”
Honestly, it wasn’t as if she hadn’t put thought into the idea. She had gone over it all in her mind. She was aware of most of the risks. They just didn’t seem like compelling enough reasons to stay at home, sitting on her hands until some sort of news fell into her lap.
Mitch groaned and dragged a hand down his face. “Just—…if I argue, is there going to be any chance of me changing your mind?”
“Nope,” Melissa informed him pleasantly. She did have to give him credit for catching on to that detail so quickly, though. People who had known her for far longer had also spent far more time learning and re-learning that lesson countless times. “Not at all. I do promise to be careful, though. If it looks like the dragon means any sort of trouble at all, I’ll turn around without
making contact. Alright?”
Finally, Mitch threw his hands up, as if to wash them of the situation entirely. “You know what?” he sighed. “Fine. You go throw yourself at this were-dragon. I need to go talk to a vampire before the coterie moves on. To my knowledge, they’re in the old Fairborn brewery, if you need to find me, assuming you don’t get toasted.”
Melissa offered him a beaming grin and flashed him a thumbs-up before she turned on her heel and swanned away.
He had a valid reason for worrying. Melissa was aware of that, and she was even willing to admit it. But that didn’t mean she was just going to sit with her thumbs up her ass and let an incredible opportunity blow past her.
*
Melissa couldn’t really say she wasn’t fazed by the idea of meeting a dragon. She was. Basically, everything she had learned lately was blowing her mind on a continual basis. But she couldn’t just stop and sit down to take it all in, because if she slowed down, then what would she miss?
She caught wind of what direction she had to go to meet a dragon, and rather than taking a moment to think, she just went. As it was, Mitch had barely even put up a fight. She was beginning to think he was realizing it was a pretty pointless endeavor.
She didn’t know where she was expecting to find a were-dragon. Maybe somewhere in the mountains, or beside a forest glade. They had the mountains covered, though they were a little short of epic forest glades.
She wasn’t sure where she expected to find a dragon, but there were a few places she wasn’t
expecting to find one. It wasn’t the highest on that list, but ‘in the middle of a public campground’ was still pretty high up on that list.
Granted, the campground was still closed to the public after the fire -- or at least as closed as it could be when Melissa could just duck under the gate -- so maybe it was the perfect place for a were-dragon to hang out.
She knew she should be subtle. It would be the best approach. But that was not how it panned out. Something about this being a dragon -- so much more exciting than a bear, even if Mitch’s ability to turn into a bear was, on its own, exciting --- seemed to make it so her self-control didn’t exist.
As soon as she spotted someone at the campground, she scurried over, wringing her hands
together as she said, “Excuse me, but I need to talk to you!” So much for subtlety and planning. But it was a bit late to worry about it; she would just have to hope it all worked out.
The person was a young woman, perhaps a handful of years older than Melissa. She was tall and gangly, with long, willowy limbs, a flat chest, and skin the color of caramel and dotted with countless freckles. Her hair was somewhere between brown and red, gleaming copper under just the right light, and curlier than anything Melissa had seen before. It was shaved on one side and gathered over one of her shoulders. Her clothing was tattered and too big, and her ears seemed to be more piercings than cartilage.
She turned to look at Melissa, blinking at her slowly, her expression bemused. Her eyes were bright blue, and she had an elaborate septum hoop.
“Yeah…?” she wondered slowly, her tone cautious. She sounded as if she was getting ready to run at the slightest movement, and Melissa couldn’t really blame her.
“Are you the dragon?” Melissa blurted out, and immediately she regretted it, as the woman
already looked like she was getting ready to sprint into the woods. Melissa’s hands fluttered for a moment as she debated grabbing the woman’s arm, only to think better of it, and instead she clasped her hands together in front of her chest, as if in prayer or as if she was pleading for the woman to just give her a moment of her time.
“I promise, I’m not going to tell anyone or anything like that. I just really need to talk to you,” Melissa spat out in a rush. “There isn’t anyone else with me. You can go check if you want.”
The woman’s nostrils flared, and she breathed in, deep and slow, before she observed, “No, you’re telling the truth.”
For a moment, Melissa couldn’t help but wonder if Mitch could do anything like that, but she pushed the thought away for the time being. She had more important things at hand.
“What do you need?” the woman asked warily, and she looked as if she was prepared to bolt at any moment if Melissa so much as breathed wrong.
“A couple of friends and I,” Melissa began, words falling out so quickly it was as if they were tripping over each other like school children, “are trying to find who has been starting the recent rash of fires, and--”
She didn’t get any further than that before the woman laughed in delight, barking out, “Oh, shit!” as she clapped her hands together once. “I thought I was the only one who noticed!”
Melissa shook her head quickly, only to need to blow a strand of hair out of her face immediately afterwards, and hurried to continue. “We have a couple ideas about what could be causing it, but no ideas on an actual who. One of my friends—he’s a bear—a were-bear, I guess? I’m just…you know, me, and one of my friends is just a regular guy, but anyway, one of my friends is checking with a vampire, since I guess vampires and fire are a thing.”
The woman snorted unattractively. “I really doubt your friend is going to get anything useful,” she returned blandly. “I’ve never met a vampire that didn’t get a woody by being a difficult schmuck.”
Slowly, Melissa tipped her head to one side. “You know,” she began carefully, “if Mitch is
having trouble with his vampire lead, the vampire might be inclined to cooperate with the proper encouragement.”
The woman’s dark eyebrows rose towards her hairline, and she grinned, broadly and toothy. “Not a bad idea,” she decided, already shrugging out of her jacket. It was nearly long enough to be a dress. “I can get us there quick as you like, if you tell me where to go.”
“The old brewery that’s not a brewery anymore,” Melissa replied. “I’m Melissa, by the way.”
“Sabine,” the woman replied, tossing her jacket to Melissa, who caught it out of reflex. “Figure the vampires go for the smelliest place in the tristate area.” She rolled her eyes, and evidently
decided that was that, before she transformed right then and there. Her clothing ripped at the seams and burst apart explosively as she abruptly expanded in size and shape.
Melissa had never seen a dragon before (obviously). She had an idea of what they looked like—considering how consistent they tended to look from one fictional story to the next, she figured there had to be some fact to those ideas—but she had, of course, never actually seen one up close. She hadn’t even known they were real until a few days ago.
When Sabine’s transformation was finished, and she was standing above Melissa, awe-inspiring didn’t seem to do her justice. She stood about twelve feet tall at the shoulders, standing on two heavily taloned feet, leaning forward slightly as her long tail acted as a counterbalance. She had no arms or front legs, and instead simply had a pair of leathery wings with two hooked claws protruding from both main joints.
Her head was triangular, tapering to an almost delicate point at the snout, save for the row of spikes along the middle of her snout. It split into two rows just above her eyes, leading back to a pair of horns that had to be a yard long apiece. Her neck was long and serpentine, and when she made a sharp, almost gleeful noise, it became apparent that her teeth were definitely designed for ripping things apart.
Her scales were primarily a dark, gleaming red, turning copper or gold or orange or black,
depending on the way the light hit them, and the leathery skin stretched between the fingers of her wings was worn and dark, grey bordering on black.
Sabine prodded Melissa’s shoulder sharply with the very tip of her snout, jarring her out of her awestruck gawking. Sabine gave herself a shake, head held high as she preened, before she
lowered herself forwards, until her neck was nearly on the ground and she was leaning on the claws on the joints of her wings.
Slowly, Melissa stepped forwards, hugging the jacket to her chest. She felt like she was moving in a daze. Like she was going to wake up at any moment and realize that she had been dreaming. She stepped over Sabine’s neck with one leg and paused, and slowly Sabine stood back up,
giving Melissa time to catch her balance and re-situate herself before she began to spread her wings.
Melissa had a split second to realize that there wasn’t going to be a slow, gentle takeoff before she flung herself forward, throwing her arms around Sabine’s neck to hang on for dear life, just before Sabine snapped her wings open to their full length and jumped, both feet leaving the ground as her wings pumped downwards. It was like a rocket taking off and a punch to the gut all at once, and Melissa stared at the ground in mesmerized terror as it rapidly got farther and
farther away with each beat of Sabine’s wings, until they were high enough to rise above the burned skeletons of the trees, and finally Sabine began to fly in earnest.
*
Melissa was intriguing. Or at least, that was the word Mitch was going to use to describe her. She was intriguing. He couldn’t say she was wholly unlike any other woman he had ever met; she was her own woman, true enough, but she wasn’t that special. Quirkiness only went so far, and Mitch wasn’t going to start exaggerating quite that much.
But still, she was intriguing.
She gave…well, less than a single shit about Mitch being what he was. Or rather, she was interested in what he was in a scientific sense, but Mitch himself seemed to be secondary to that
interest. Though maybe that wasn’t the best way to phrase it. She wasn’t callous. She liked Mitch well enough when he wasn’t being, in her words, “a raging dickhead.” But even so, she was more interested in learning about new species than she was excited about meeting someone new.
Mitch rather suspected that if he turned into something a bit less ordinary than a bear, she would be a bit more interested, but even then, he suspected her interest would still be more scientific. He couldn’t say he was especially upset about it. After all, she was intriguing. He was glad to get to know her, regardless. And it wasn’t as if they had known each other long enough to be that close.
Still, every so often, there were moments when it seemed like they could be close.
Moments when she all but blew up his phone with text messages demanding that he call her, all so she could practically squeal about everything she had read about dragon sightings that had been brushed under the rug. “And they’re real? They’re all real?”
“Well, some of them were probably fake or just imagined by drunks or people who were ill or something like that, but for the most part, yeah,” Mitch would confirm.
Or moments when they were together, usually getting a drink, and Melissa would gush about what it could mean about the world and ecology and paleontology that dragons had been real, once upon a time.
“But why haven’t we found any fossils?” she demanded one day, after one such bout of frenzied gushing. “If there really were dragon-dragons and not just were-dragons, then why haven’t we found any remains? What happened to them? They would have had to have been apex
predators. They would have been at the top of their food chain.”
“Why are you asking me?” Mitch asked, baffled. “It’s not like I was around back then. They went extinct ages ago. Maybe people killed them. Or maybe they killed each other. Maybe they burned their dead to ash. I literally have no way of knowing any more than you do. Hell, were-dragons probably don’t know any more than you do.”
She groaned and let her head thump down onto one of her arms, folded on top of the table. Mitch patted her shoulder sympathetically.
It was nice to see her excited, though. It was sort of endearing, the way she always seemed like she was fit to burst whenever something really tickled her fancy. Not quite infectious, since Mitch didn’t have quite the same passion for the world and its creatures as she did, but endearing nonetheless.
Not that he planned on telling her that. He was pretty sure she might punch him if he did, and that would make it a little awkward whenever they had to share the stories they had gathered and cross-reference information.
(“Okay, if we both hear about something weird happening in the same place, that means there’s probably something inhuman there, right?” she asked.
“Not necessarily. Regular humans are basically pack animals, so they tend to see things that aren’t there if they heard about it before,” Mitch explained with a shrug. “But it is more likely that there’s actually something inhuman there.”)
On the whole, they weren’t close yet, but the possibility for them to be close was still there. He liked her. He was willing to take a cautious bet that she liked him. And truth be told, he was willing to put up with it if he needed to navigate the occasional bout of zaniness or the occasional flash of temper. She had spirit, and he wasn’t going to complain about that, even if she still hadn’t quite gotten over looking at him like he was a science experiment or a riddle that she was itching to tease apart.
Baby steps. That was generally the best way to go, and he knew that. And while he wouldn’t say he was a patient man—the opposite was more frequently the case—he was willing to put in the effort to pretend to be one for a while.
*
“I’ll look into dragon sightings, and you can look into vampire sightings,” Melissa informed him loftily one evening. And while it sounded like she was making some effort to at least pretend she was assigning them off the top of her head, Mitch knew better; there was no way he was prying the chance to see any sort of dragon out of her hands even if he tried to use a crowbar.
He didn’t argue.
Not at that point, at any rate.
*
Though the vast majority of people would be disinclined to believe it, most counties had a
vampire coterie. Sometimes a coterie would span two or three counties in more rural areas, but on the whole, they weren’t exactly rare. Short of setting them on fire or lopping their heads off, they didn’t die, so their numbers did little other than gradually increase. But they looked human, by and large, and tended to only emerge at night, so most people weren’t inclined to assume they were anything but people who were sick or, at the very least, in stark disagreement with the sun. And they migrated with some frequency, so there typically wasn’t time to notice anything off about them.
Finding them was mostly a matter of listening for strange rumors of people disappearing. The news wasn’t particularly helpful in that regard, since it was entirely possible for people who went missing to turn back up the next day, pale and dizzy but more or less fine, and no journalist worth their salt was going to report on someone presumably getting hammered and showing up the next day with a hangover.
So, he listened at work, in the corner store, on street corners, or in the bar to catch wind of any unusual disappearances and potential reappearances.
And of course, he listened with interest at the bar when a pair of giggling women at a table in the corner started having the most fascinating conversation.
“…and he said everything just went sort of wonky on Hazel Street, and next thing he knew, he was at the old brewery and someone was attacking him, but then the next morning, some police
officer was shaking him awake on a bus stop bench like some old hobo, so I’m pretty sure he
just had a bit too much fun at his cousin’s house the night before.”
Both of them erupted in laughter after that, and Mitch promptly tuned them out. He had enough information to start with.
*
If nothing else, looking into the vampire lead gave him something to think about other than how crazy Melissa was, since she was so determined to go charging off into the wilderness to talk to a were-dragon without any sort of backup. Her logic sort of made sense, but even so, a dragon was a dragon, whether it was occasionally human-shaped or not. She wasn’t going to budge, though, and he wasn’t going to tie her up or lock her in a closet or something, and for the most part, he did trust her not to get herself killed.
He couldn’t do much other than let her go and hope for the best. Vampire coteries moved a lot. Deciding “well, I can just check it out tomorrow” could very well lead to him needing to figure out where they were all over again, and that was a bit more redundancy than he was really interested in at that point.
It would be a nice distraction, at least.
*
Though the brewery had been out of use for at least a couple decades, structurally it was still
reasonably sound. Sound enough to envision a group of people squatting in it if they didn’t want to be noticed. And it was dark; most of the doors and nearly all of the windows were boarded up, so any natural light that did make it in during the day was minimal and easily avoided.
It also smelled horrendous. Mitch knew his sense of smell wasn’t as honed as a vampire’s, and the smell was giving him a headache. He couldn’t imagine living there, and he especially couldn’t imagine living there when it had to smell even worse to the occupants. But he supposed the stench was a boon to those who needed the blood of others to survive. If nothing else, it
probably explained why vampires tended to move around with some frequency.
Spotting one of them was easy. The place was abandoned, so someone moseying along as if he owned the place stood out. He noticed Mitch as soon as he stepped through one of the side doors, grinding to a halt and staring at him, blinking slowly.
“You guys live in an old brewery, and there are kids in the group?” Mitch asked incredulously as soon as he realized he had been spotted.
True enough, the vampire he was looking at looked as if he couldn’t be any older than fourteen. He had olive-toned skin, though it looked as if it had been bled of every drop of blood, leaving him with an awkward gray pallor. His eyes were too big for his face, his mouth a bit too wide, and his nose a bit too long and pointed. He also hadn’t quite grown into his ears, and likely would never get the chance to.
He had a mop of black hair on top of his head, sticking up in random directions as if he had been running his hands through it, and his eyes were a dark, dark shade of cherry oak, rather than bright red, so he was reasonably well fed at that moment, at any rate.
He looked a bit stretched out, too tall to reasonably fit within his own skin, with limbs that were too long and skinny, and jutting collarbones and elbows. His clothing was too warm for the weather and looked as if it had been pulled out of a donation bin a few decades back.
As soon as Mitch spoke, the awkward, gangling, jangling young man bristled like an offended cat, his shoulders rounding defensively as he folded his arms over his chest. “I’m six hundred and seventy-three, you cock,” he snapped, slamming one heel impatiently against the concrete of the floor. “Who are you supposed to be?”
And then, he paused, nostrils flaring. With a groan, his head fell back so he could sulk at the ceiling. “You’re an animal.” He groaned again, more emphatically that time, as if he was being
tortured right there on the spot. “At least tell me you’re not a goddamn mutt. I don’t want to have to deal with you pissing on the floor and calling the brewery yours.”
“Are you this much of a shit to everyone?” Mitch wondered dryly, ignoring the request for
information entirely for the moment.
The vampire rolled his eyes and shifted his weight to one side. “I don’t know,” he drawled. “Are you a condescending dick to everyone old enough to have spanked your great-times-twenty-some granny’s ass?” He pitched his voice up to a ludicrous falsetto and shifted back and forth on his feet as he carried on, his hands rising to clutch together against his cheek. “Oooh, there are children in the brewery, won’t somebody think of the children?”
He snorted unattractively and let his hands fall back to his sides, his voice dropping back to its normal pitch as he groused, “Fuck all of that; you know exactly what I am. You waltzed on in here like you owned the place. You mean to be exactly where you are because you’re looking for vampires. You know full well we’re all older than we look, and you decide the best way to say ‘hi’ is by being a monumental shit heel?”
Mitch held his hands up in a pacifying motion. “Point taken,” he replied. “I just need to ask a few questions about some things that have been going on lately.”
The vampire’s eyes narrowed sharply. “Tell me who you are, and maybe I’ll talk to you.”
“You can call me Mitch.”
Again, the vampire rolled his eyes. “Ooh, that’s very descriptive. I’m Jasper. I bet that tells you loads about me.”
Mitch lifted a hand to pinch the bridge of his nose between two fingers before he rubbed his forehead to stave off the approaching headache with limited success. “I’m a were-bear and a firefighter. I’m trying to see if I can get any information on the recent forest fires. They’re weird as hell. I doubt they’re starting naturally, and I have my doubts about them being started by
regular humans. So, it’s a were-dragon or vampires. If I want to know if there are any rogue vampires in the area, asking the local coterie seems like the best bet.”
“Basically, all vampires start fires at some point or another,” Jasper replied, pitching his tone to a parody of innocence. “A lot of us predate electricity.”
Mitch swallowed down the urge to growl or, possibly, attempt to strangle Jasper. It probably wouldn’t go well. Head still in hand, he pointed out, “You know that’s not what I mean. Have any coterie members been slipping away? Or has anyone noticed any vampires that aren’t part of the coterie lurking around?”
Jasper was grinning by that point, his fangs on full display. “What, do you think I’ve got some sort of encyclopedia of vampires in my brain? You think we all just keep perfect watch on each other all the time? We come and go all the time; we need to eat, and that happens a lot more
expediently if we go get food, rather than waiting for it to just swan on into an abandoned
building.” He paused for a moment, before gesturing flippantly to Mitch with one hand as he drawled, “Present company excluded, of course.”
“I don’t decide to murder the nearest convenient person on a lark whenever I get a bit peckish and want some dinner,” Mitch returned blandly, folding his arms and shifting his weight to one side. “I figure that means I’ve earned a little leeway, and I can swan on into a few places when I feel like it.”
It was a bit harsh, maybe. To his knowledge, the brewery coterie had been letting people go. That didn’t really excuse the abducting and the injuring, but even so, it still wasn’t murder. And it was, perhaps, not the best time to broach that topic.
There was a moment after Mitch said it when nothing happened. Everything was quiet. Silent almost, and the atmosphere of the abandoned building seemed to press in on them. It occurred to Mitch a bit belatedly that he should, perhaps, not have said that. Or maybe he should have at least phrased it a bit more delicately.
“I don’t think we’re going to get along,” Jasper observed finally, trying far too hard to sound
regretful when he felt no such thing.