They all knew what they were looking for. They knew what it might entail. There could be
injuries. There could be casualties. While it was entirely possible that the were-dragon would be the same size as Sabine or maybe even smaller, it was just as likely that they would be even
bigger than her. None of them had any way of knowing what they were actually going up against. All they could do was gather whatever information they could and prepare for the worst.
“Preparing for the worst” was probably supposed to involve carefully saying goodbye to people, so that it didn’t actually sound like a goodbye. None of them wanted to worry anyone, after all. But Mitch had no one to say goodbye to who wasn’t already involved in the mess.
He couldn’t decide if he was grateful for that, or if it was mostly just sad. Or maybe he should just take it as a sign that after everything with the mystery were-dragon was done, he should put some effort into actually putting down roots and living in the place he called home, rather than just existing in it.
It felt like a daunting thought, but he had more incentive than ever before to give it a go. Enough incentive that he wasn’t even worried that he would get bored or eventually start stagnating.
Besides, he doubted Melissa would ever let him get bored. It seemed entirely against her nature.
Of course, that probably meant he should say something to her, even if not to anyone else. (Oh, sure, his coworkers would notice if he disappeared, in much the same way he would notice if any of them disappeared, but beyond some melancholic curiosity, he doubted any of them would
actually care all that much after the first few days.)
But what? How was one supposed to go about that sort of conversation? Wouldn’t it just make it seem like he thought the worst was going to happen? Granted, he knew that planning for the worst just in case was typically a good idea, but even so, what if it was a step too far? What if she thought he was giving up before anything even happened, or what if he scared her?
All of those thoughts churned in swirling circles in his head as he tried to figure out the best way to go about it. Should it be simple? Should it be grand? As it was, it had already been well-established that he wasn’t exactly an expert when it came to matters of romance, and telling Melissa how he felt about her and what she meant to him definitely seemed like it counted as a matter of romance.
He hadn’t expected it to be quite as complicated as it proved to be.
All of his fretting and pondering and wondering, and then Melissa went and beat him to the punch. It seemed like a pretty ordinary evening until she talked to him.
“Hey, Mitch?” Melissa’s voice rose up out of nowhere, unprompted.
He couldn’t quite place Melissa’s tone when she called him. He poked his head over the loft’s railing to look down at where she was sitting in the den right below. “Everything alright?”
“I love you.” She offered the words without preamble, as if she was afraid they would vanish if she didn’t say them quickly enough. “Just…figured I should say that.”
Mitch blinked slowly, quiet for a moment, as he was positive that he had misheard her, and he had to turn her words over in his mind. Granted, there weren’t exactly tons of other things she could have said, so he didn’t need to ponder for long before deciding that yes, he had heard her properly.
I’m supposed to reply, he reminded himself. He was supposed to say something back. It took a moment, though, before his brain connected to his mouth, and the words, “I love you, too,” tripped out, each word falling inelegantly over the last one. He felt like he was back in middle school, confessing to his first crush all over again.
It wasn’t that he had never said it before. He had. It had just always been to family members. His mother and father. Even in his previous relationships, he couldn’t remember saying it. They had said it to him, but he had always said, “you, too” or something along those lines. It was hard to say, “I love you” to someone who didn’t even know what he was, after all, and until Melissa, he had never been in a relationship with someone who knew that part of him.
Slowly, Melissa smiled, before she turned her attention back to the computer on her lap.
Evidently, that had been all she needed to tell him, and slowly, Mitch stopped leaning over the loft’s railing, returning to the recliner. He leaned back in the chair, staring up at the ceiling.
He had meant the words. He knew that. In a sense, he had known his feelings for her already, though he hadn’t expected to put them into words quite so bluntly.
Leave it to Melissa to yank the rug out from under his feet. If she ever stopped doing that, Mitch would be amazed. And maybe a little disappointed. He liked the fact that she could catch him off-guard without even trying particularly hard.
*
If Mitch thought about it, there was probably more to say about their relationship and everything else that was going on between them. But all things considered, his relationship with Melissa was moving fairly smoothly, especially considering everything else that was going on at the same time that offered the possibility of throwing a wrench into the workings, and he didn’t want to rock the boat if he didn’t have to, least of all when they were getting ready to crest a tsunami.
Besides, he didn’t know what that “more to say” was. They knew how they felt about each other. They had stated it. It seemed like that was the most important thing to say, just to make sure they both knew.
Maybe if he just tried not to think too hard about it, it would come to him. And it wasn’t as if it was hard to be distracted. Even without were-dragon shenanigans, he still had a job and his own life to live.
Once again, he should have expected her to take matters into her own hands. Maybe eventually, she would stop catching him off-guard, but he was beginning to sincerely doubt it. And he was alright with that.
“You should move in, once all of this pans out,” Melissa informed him one day, as they got a drink at their usual bar. The bar wasn’t exactly special, but it was a decent place to relax in the evening and to keep an ear open for any strange stories. Drunk townies were always prone to gossip.
That evening, though, there wasn’t much gossip. It seemed that Melissa was intent on filling that gap herself.
“Isn’t that supposed to be my line?” he wondered wryly in return. “I’m pretty sure the guy is
supposed to ask that sort of thing.” Not that Melissa had been particularly receptive to basically anything traditionally romantic. Whether it was because she didn’t like romance or because Mitch was just not good at romance, he wasn’t sure yet, but he supposed it wasn’t a particularly important distinction for the time being.
She shrugged, shameless and utterly unapologetic. “My house is nicer than yours,” she pointed out easily. “And bigger. And it has a better view and more of a yard, and no one would question seeing a bear around it. If you transformed near town, you would get shot for being a potential menace. If you transform near my house, it’s just ‘oh look, there’s a bear on the mountain.’ And you spend a lot of time there already, anyway. It wouldn’t really make any sense if I moved in with you.” She snorted as she pondered the idea. “We would be cramped, and I would be redecorating within the first two weeks, and we would probably be at each other’s throats within two months.”
“You’ve put a lot of thought into this,” he observed, faintly bewildered. He wasn’t even sure how long she had been thinking about it, considering she hadn’t exactly let him in on whatever was going through her mind until that moment. While it was true enough that Melissa could be easy to read, it was generally because she wanted to be.
“Duh,” she returned blandly. “I’m asking because I mean it, not because I’m putting on some sort of weird performance.” Melissa shrugged one shoulder, and though her tone still seemed just as casual, there was something somber in her expression and the way she traced a finger in aimless patterns on the bar. “I mean, I love you,” she stated, “and I kind of figure I should do something to prove it before everything comes to a head, since there’s at least a possibility that I won’t get the chance to say it later.”
“Hey,” Mitch protested, reaching over to take her hand, his palm dwarfing hers. “No one’s
dying,” he insisted. “Except for the dragon jackass that’s been causing all the problems.”
“Can you prove that?” she asked, though it sounded less like she was unsure and more like she was challenging him just because she could. It seemed to be her preferred reason to disagree with him.
“Yes,” he returned tartly. “I’m not sure how, right off the top of my head, but I’m sure I can.”
Melissa rolled her eyes and swatted his arm with the back of one hand, but the somber tone seemed to have passed, so Mitch was happy to take it as a victory.
She had a good point when it came to living together, at least. And he didn’t have enough of a real attachment to his house to argue. It was nice, sure, and he had no complaints about it, but it was still less of a home and more just a place he lived in. The important parts of it could be moved.
*
He didn’t move in right away. It felt a little presumptuous to start going through the effort if one or both of them might end up dead, even if neither of them wanted to think about that. (And
besides, if one of them did die, it would leave the other to deal with all of their stuff alone.
It just seemed better to wait until everything smoothed over. It wouldn’t be too long, after all. And they could be almost patient.) And while Mitch spent most of his time at Melissa’s house at that point, there were still nights where he slept at his own house, in his own bed.
Those nights always seemed so quiet. Sometimes, the quiet was nice, giving him time to let his brain wind down as he tried to fall asleep. But sometimes, the quiet seemed claustrophobic. On nights when he had too much to think about and he couldn’t get his thoughts to stop turning in circles long enough to fall asleep.
On one of those nights, as he stared at his ceiling and the sliver of orange light shining across it from the lamp post in his yard, his thoughts wandered no matter how he tried to will himself to go to sleep.
What would happen if the worst happened?
He supposed if he died, then it wasn’t really his concern anymore, and he knew that Melissa would mourn, but she would move on. He wasn’t so sure he could say the same about himself if she died. They hadn’t known each other for particularly long, and already she had come to fill up such a large space in his life. Ironic, considering she didn’t actually take up much physical space herself.
Already thinking about what it would mean to lose her was an uncomfortable thought, bordering on painful.
There was a very large part of him that wanted to convince her to stay behind when the time for confrontation came. But he knew it would be a lost cause already. If Melissa wanted to do something, even if it was foolhardy, there wasn’t really any stopping her.
He brushed the thought aside for the time being. Dwelling on it certainly wasn’t helping him get to sleep any faster. It was just guaranteeing that by the time he did manage to fall asleep, his dreams would be unpleasant.
And what about the others? Sabine had a family, presumably. Maybe they were also were-dragons; maybe they weren’t. Maybe they weren’t even all were-animals. But whether or not they could retaliate if Sabine was killed wasn’t really the important part. Mitch didn’t know who her family was. He didn’t know where they lived or if they were on good terms with her. If something happened to her, how were any of them supposed to get word to her family to let them know? How long would they have to wait before they realized they weren’t going to see her again if the worst happened?
And that wasn’t even getting into the complication that was Jasper. Vampires tended not to have traditional families. They were immortal; their families died if they weren’t also turned into vampires. As a consequence, coteries tended to be very close, because a coterie was the only family a vampire was likely to have.
If Jasper died—if he was set ablaze—then Mitch had no doubts that the rest of the coterie would know who else was involved, and he had no doubts that they would take action. If they were feeling generous, they might listen to what Mitch had to say, but if not, they could very well just grab him and the others off the street and gut them in retaliation.
So really, he supposed it wasn’t any wonder that he was having trouble falling asleep. Maybe it just meant he had to give up on sleeping in his own house. It wasn’t an unpleasant thought, at any rate.
But that was a thought for another time. It was after midnight; it was far too late for him to go showing up at Melissa’s door, complaining that he couldn’t sleep. He rolled over in bed and pulled his pillow over his head, though it wasn’t particularly helpful.
Eventually, sleep crept over him, far later than he would have liked. And just as he had predicted, his dreams were not peaceful or pleasant, though he couldn’t actually remember what most of them were about. He was glad for that, at any rate. From the flashes—brief glimpses and tidbits of detail—that he remembered, he didn’t want to recall any more of it than he did.
Frankly, he would be beyond happy when the entire mess was over, and he could get on with his life again.
*
Periodically, Harry, Sabine, and even Jasper offered their own insight on the situation, and gradually their pool of knowledge on the fire starter grew, slowly but steadily. Until one day they managed to put it all together and piece together where the most likely next site for a fire would be.
Which meant it was time to finally track down their culprits and deal with them and with whatever the fallout for that course of action would be.
*
There were things they all needed to do as they waited for more information on their target to surface. Things they needed to say to people while they still had the chance.
It was easy to decide what she needed to say to Mitch, and surprisingly easy to just spit the words out once she decided she was going to. When it came to everyone else, it was a bit more…complicated. But Melissa knew it was important. She wasn’t just going to pretend there was no chance of them ever losing, or of anything bad happening when the time came to face the were-dragon. She wasn’t naive enough for that.
At work, she didn’t actually mention anything to anyone except for Harry. She simply threw her all into her job. She was one person, and maybe her mark on the world would be too small to be noticed, but she could pour herself into it anyway without regrets.
With her parents, she spun a tale about wanting them all to meet up for a vacation again, just like they used to, because it offered an excuse to tell them what they meant to her. She said that staying in their vacation home was making her nostalgic, and they were quick to accept that reasoning.
That, at least, was simple enough. They didn’t know what was coming, and to some extent, that made it easier. She could pretend there was no ulterior motive to what she was saying, and it wasn’t as if she had lied; she would appreciate the chance to have a trip together just like they used to.
*
Melissa didn’t go out of her way to meet up with anyone specifically to talk to them about it. She contemplated it, but it felt a bit too much like she was preparing for a funeral when she thought about it.
When she talked to Harry, she waited until he texted her to let her know that he had heard something, and he met her at her house to explain it. A flying shape, too big to be a bird or a bat, but too high in the sky and for too short of a period for anyone to get a proper look at it. Proof that their culprit was in the area and probably scoping out the next site.
After he made his report, Harry lingered in silence, until Melissa sighed and said, “You want any of my shit if this all goes pear shaped?”
Startled, Harry barked out a laugh. “You expecting that to happen?” he asked.
Melissa shrugged. “I’m aware it’s a possibility. And since you won’t be joining us, you’re the only one guaranteed not to get eaten by a dragon.”
“Considering you also aren’t an inhuman creature,” Harry returned slowly, “I’m pretty sure you would be justified in not going either.”
Melissa snorted, as if the idea itself was ridiculous. “If I can help, I’m going to,” she insisted simply. “If there’s something I can do and someone else gets hurt because I wasn’t there to do it, then it’s sort of my fault, isn’t it?”
“I’m going to go out on a limb and say, ‘actually, it’s the fault of the dragon that hurt them,’” Harry returned levelly. “You’re responsible for your actions. Not someone else’s.”
“Which means I’m responsible for actions that I don’t take, too,” she argued in return. “Anyway, you’re not going to change my mind,” she carried on. “I just wanted to say that you’re my best friend, and that’s meant a lot. In case I don’t get a chance to say it later.”
Harry looked distinctly uncomfortable for a moment, before he sighed and slung an arm around her shoulders. “You’re going to give me a heart attack one of these days,” he groused. “You never should have discovered bogeymen. It gave you an entire new arsenal of ways to make me try to tear my hair out.”
Grinning, Melissa punched his shoulder. “At least I’m never boring,” she offered innocently, batting her eyelashes at him.
“I would appreciate boring for a little while,” he sighed. “It sounds like it would be a nice vacation, if you ask me.”
*
Meeting with Jasper was a bit unexpected. His offer to help track the dragon menace down had been surprising enough. When it came to actually sharing information, he had been rather lowkey at first, and Melissa had sort of expected him to just spend the entire time slipping messages under doorways or leaving them in tree hollows.
So, when he simply knocked on the door, Melissa was more than a little surprised, and she stared at him blankly until he said, “You need to actually, like, invite me in? Otherwise, I’m stuck on your doormat.”
“Oh, right, yeah. Come on in.” Melissa backed up a few steps and ushered him inside. She could vaguely recall that tidbit of vampire lore from a book in the past, though she was still never sure what lore was factual and what had been made up to make a story more interesting. “Does that mean the counting thing is true, too?”
“Different undead creature,” Jasper answered blandly, sounding as if it was a question he had
answered too many times in his life. Melissa supposed vampires didn’t become vampires with a full stock of knowledge, though, so maybe he really had answered it that often. “And yes, I can cross running water.”
Sightings of a flying creature were getting more common, though they were always just far enough away and just quick enough to be passed off as nothing. Nothing that would warrant any sort of outside investigation had happened, though Melissa was sure if she went digging online, she would find pages upon pages of conspiracy theories on it, because basically everything would eventually get blamed on aliens if someone was willing to dig deep enough.
They lapsed into silence after he delivered his brief report, though calling it a report made it sound so much more formal than it was, when in reality they were simply sitting in her living room. Finally, before the silence could get uncomfortable, Melissa mused, “You never really said why you were helping.”
Jasper cocked his head to one side. “Is the reason actually important?” he wondered, folding his arms over his chest and sliding lower in his seat. He sounded faintly suspicious.
Melissa shrugged. “I don’t know. Maybe not in general, but I do want to know. I mean, people could die during this mess. I sort of want to know what’s spurring everyone on to do it despite that.”
Jasper scowled down at his lap. “We aren’t actually monsters,” he mumbled eventually. “‘Inhuman’ doesn’t automatically mean ‘inhumane.’ If you tell us ‘a lot of people could die,’ plenty of us will still give a shit.”
“You tried to kill Mitch that first night,” Melissa pointed out, since that did make it seem a bit less like he cared from the depths of his heart.
Jasper scoffed bitterly. “I wouldn’t really,” he huffed. “He’d basically called vampires murderers by default, and honestly, proving him right even posthumously is way down at the bottom of my to-do list. It’s not even on the list. But beating the tar out of him for being a shithead was
cathartic.”
Melissa snorted out a brief laugh. “I guess I can understand that,” she sighed. And it was nice to know that she had been right about the fight happening because Mitch was being an asshole.
*
Meeting with Sabine happened as it usually did, driving to the campground and meeting her in the burned remains of the woods. Fireweed was beginning to crop up in every direction, and soon it would turn the entire site of the fire into a sea of purple. Melissa was looking forward to it.
Sabine’s information was much the same as the information the others had collected, though it was slightly more specific in one aspect. Sabine had spotted the dragon herself, while flying.
“He’s big,” she stated simply. “I mean, I’ve seen bigger—ages ago—and dragons way bigger have been recorded, but he still makes me look tiny.”
It wasn’t good news, but at least it offered a better idea of what they were all up against.
Melissa tried to change the subject, only for Sabine to clear her throat sharply, cutting her off.
“No touching last words,” Sabine insisted. “We’re not doing that.”
Melissa rolled her eyes and opened her mouth to object, only for Sabine to make another sharp noise to cut her off, followed by a too loud, “No, nope!” She folded her arms. “We’re all going to be fine. Alright? Because I said so. That’s that.”
Slowly, Melissa held her hands up, conceding the point.
*
When it finally came time to deal with their looming problem, despite the time that had passed while they all searched, it still felt as if no time had passed at all. As if that final confrontation was lunging at them to catch them unawares.
Sabine and Jasper showed up together to let them know that it was time, and once Sabine transformed, she ushered Mitch and Melissa onto her back and took to the air.
Melissa packed a fire extinguisher on a whim, shoving it into Sabine’s bag to keep it out of the way. It seemed a little childish, considering how quickly dragon fire could spread, but it seemed like the least she could do.
*
Melissa had always just assumed that the culprit would turn up one day, especially as more and more help poured in. She wasn’t surprised about that when they found him. Instead, she had simply been expecting someone a bit…well, more. She had been expecting someone Mitch’s height or taller. She had been expecting someone built like a concrete wall. She had been expecting someone almost too large and imposing to exist.
Instead, when they found him—standing in one of the burned-out fields, surrounded by fireweed in all directions—he looked sulky, staring at the fuchsia flowers on all sides as if they had
personally offended him. As if it was the flowers’ fault that the fires hadn’t been worse. As if it was the flowers’ fault that the fires had been wrestled back under control.
He was tall, true, but a more normal sort of tall. Only around 6’0”, rather than Mitch’s towering height. And he was narrow, made up of lean, toned muscles and long limbs. His skin was pale, as if he hadn’t seen sunlight in weeks, and his hair was such a pale shade of blond it was almost white, pulled back into a short, slightly scraggly ponytail with a short length of twine. His clothing was tattered and fraying at the seams, and it looked as if it was more patch than original
fabric at that point. Even his shoes were scuffed and tattered almost to the point of being unrecognizable.
It took a few moments before he turned to look at all of them, facing them slowly, and when he did, he looked a bit haggard, with a few days’ worth of stubble on his face and dark circles under his eyes. Even so, he looked like he couldn’t have been more than a few years older than Mitch. His eyes were a bright, piercing shade of blue.
“You’ve been looking for me for a while,” he observed quietly in a voice like gravel over glass. “I was wondering how long it would take you to find me.”
“I think that means you at least owe us your name,” Mitch returned dryly. “I mean, we’ve worked so hard. You could at least throw us a bone.”
The were-dragon sighed slowly, shoulders rising and then falling as he did. “You can call me Genos,” he replied. “Not a real name, I grant you, but a name seems unimportant in the grander scheme of things.” Whatever that grander scheme was, though, he felt no need to elaborate on it just then.
“If you knew we were looking,” Melissa wondered carefully, “especially since it sounds like you knew we would catch up, then why did you pretty much stay in the area?”
He scowled down at the ground for a few seconds, his hands closing into fists at his sides. “Big plans need to have small starts,” he bit out, his fists flexing and relaxing. “I’m only one man,
after all. But I guess this means I’ll need to move things along a bit.”
He offered nothing else before he transformed, his clothing shredding around him as he did.
Melissa expected him to be somewhere around Sabine’s size once he transformed, even if she
already knew he would be bigger. She should have learned not to judge by appearances when she watched scrawny, diminutive Jasper put up a fight against a bear and then a dragon, though.
When the man finished transforming, he was enormous. Where Sabine only had two legs as a dragon, the man had four, meaning his torso was a full two yards longer than Sabine’s, and his shoulders were a full yard higher off of the ground. His head was bulkier, his chest was broader, his neck was less serpentine, and his horns were broader, curling around the sides of his head like a ram’s horns might. His tail was long and gradually tapered until it was as thin as a whip at the end, with a bony, needle-like spike.
He spread his wings, casting a shadow over all of them, and when he leapt into the air and started pumping his wings to carry him higher, he scattered grass and leaves and flower petals in every direction with each pump of his wings, in much the same way a helicopter might, until with a few wing beats, he was far enough off of the ground to start flying, angling upwards as he went.
Sabine crouched, urging Mitch onto her back once again. He clambered up and held on tight as she threw herself into the air, taking chase before the larger dragon could disappear into the
distance.
“This isn’t going to be fun,” Jasper remarked, as he dropped to a knee and motioned with his head for Melissa to come closer. She approached him cautiously, until he made another impatient gesture and she climbed onto his back. He adjusted his hold on her and straightened up with
surprising ease.
(It probably shouldn’t have been surprising. He was still a few inches taller than her, and he wasn’t human. She had already seen that he was stronger than Mitch.)
Jasper rolled his shoulders once and then took off at a sprint, flowers rustling on either side of him as he ran at a pace no human would ever be able to match while Melissa clung to his shoulders like a limpet.
Melissa wasn’t sure how long they followed the larger dragon. It was probably no longer than a half an hour—forty minutes at the very most—but it felt like hours from Melissa’s position. Jasper didn’t seem to have any issue carrying her, but that didn’t change the fact that his gait was not the smoothest.
And when at last he came to a halt, he did so all at once, so Melissa very nearly smacked her nose against the back of his head.
“Sorry,” he offered off-handedly, not sounding particularly apologetic, as he let her hastily climb down from his back once again.
No longer were they in the regrowing field. Instead, they stood at the edge of a forest that
gradually climbed its way up a mountain. A mountain that Melissa knew very well, in fact, as her house was nestled within the trees somewhere higher up.
“That fucker is going to try to burn my house down,” Melissa breathed, staring with wide eyes as Genos circled once through the air before he landed all at once, all four of his feet hitting the ground with enough impact to leave a crater, and Melissa could feel the way the ground shook even from where she was standing several yards away.
Sabine landed considerably more gracefully several yards away, but already Genos’s mouth was opening to spit fire into the air, and Melissa knew that the trees would erupt like dry toothpicks as soon as he did.