Dragon (13 page)

I clench my eyes shut at this news. I don’t want Ion to be a spy. I want to be able to trust him. Ion offered to make me human, and I really want that to be an honest, valid option.

But no amount of wanting can make it so. Ion killed Ozzie. He would have killed me.

Ram’s words cut through my thoughts. “I don’t want to rush you, but we should probably get going.”

“Right.” I suck in a shaky breath. I’m rather glad we have practical, tangible things to think about. Steps to take. Stuff to do, rather than wallow in grief and confusion. “What happened to your clothes?”

Ram looks down at his boxer shorts—a striped blue pair that look right fit on him, but don’t tell anyone at Saint Evangeline’s I said so. He shrugs. “Clothes don’t survive the switch. My swords stay on—even my backpack would have stayed on if I’d been wearing it—because my wings come out from my shoulders. They don’t tear the straps away. But my chest and arms get too big for my shirt, and my legs get too big for my pants. The only reason my boxer shorts survive is because they have an elastic waist. To be honest, they don’t always make it.”

He’s blushing slightly, and I laugh. I’m not sure why I’m laughing, I guess just because he looks embarrassed, which is a huge improvement over apologetic.

At the same time, I know enough of what he looks like as a dragon to imagine how the boxer shorts survived. Even though he grows enormously, his dragon waist is relatively tiny, like on a greyhound, a narrow band between his barrel chest and strong legs.

Also, I might be laughing because he’s cute, and the thought of him as a dragon makes my stomach flutter in a way that’s completely unfamiliar and somewhat unsettling.

Ram picks his way past the yagi corpses to our campsite, finds his backpack, and shuffles off a safe distance from their stinking vapor to put on more clothes. I, too find something dry to wear, and duck behind some bushes to change. When I step back around the bushes, Ram has removed Ozzie’s body from among the yagi, and is using his cutlass to dig a hole a safe distance from their potentially-hallucinogenic stink.

I join him, and we dig in silence, stopping only to decide if the hole is deep enough yet. We unearth several large stones as we dig, and I set these aside. Once Ram has placed Ozzie in the hole and covered her with dirt, I put the stones on top to keep animals from disturbing her body. Ram pulls several more rocks from the lake, settling a large stone on its end near her head as a marker.

With the tip of his dagger, he carves letters into the rock.

Azi.

“Azi.” I have to say the name out loud to make the connection. Ozzie is Azi. I’ve never seen it written before—I just assumed, when Ram told me the dog’s name, that it was Ozzie.

“I named her after a friend who saved my life in the war.”

“Which war?” I ask partly out of curiosity, partly to make polite conversation instead of this heavy silence, but I realize as soon as I’ve asked the question that I probably won’t know the war, if it’s a dragon skirmish or something out of Azeri history, which I know nothing about.

But Ram surprises me. “World War Two. My friend Azi was a soldier who saved my life. It’s a good name, a heroic name.”

Ram is staring at the name on the rock, lost in thought, and I’m frantically doing math.

World War Two ended almost fifty years ago.

If Ram fought in World War Two, he would have to be, like, seventy years old. Elderly.

I look him up and down. He’s not elderly.

“World War Two?” I repeat incredulously. “Which World War Two?” All I can think is maybe the Azeris have their own accounting of the world wars. Maybe their World War Two happened more recently. Maybe that’s how they refer to the breakup of the Soviet Union, or something. Yeah, that would make sense. Not a lot of sense, but a blooming bit more sense than the idea that Ram is elderly.

Maybe I breathed in too much of the yagi vapor after all.

Ram chuckles. “The only one.” He tucks his dagger back into the scabbard on his thigh and looks around, as though checking to make sure we’ve got everything we need.

Faint light colors the eastern horizon. The sun will be rising soon.

“The one that ended in 1945?” I clarify.

“Yes.” He’s walking back toward the lake, circling the bank.

I hurry to keep up. “And what year is it now?” This may seem like a stupid question, but it’s occurred to me that maybe this whole dragon-changing stuff might have plunged us into a completely different decade, or something. Far-fetched, yes, but what other explanation is there? And that wouldn’t be the weirdest revelation he’s made in the last few days.

“It’s 1993.”

“That’s what I thought. So World War Two ended, what, forty-eight years ago?”

“Yes.” Ram pauses. “When I was in the air, I saw another stream feeding into the lake from the east. It probably originates in the mountains. We should be able to follow it into the mountains, then find another stream on the other side to follow to the Danube.”

“The Danube?” I repeat, not because I’ve never heard of the longest river in Europe, but because most of my intellectual faculties are still trying to harmonize Ram’s age with the date of the war he claims to have fought in.

Ram explains, “The Danube swings sharply north from the Bulgarian border to the southern tip of Moldova. We won’t be able to reach the Black Sea—or get you home—without crossing it. We can fly over it, of course, but for now we’ll have to walk. Sun’s coming up.”

I nod, understanding the geography well enough, still focused on what he said about fighting in World War Two. But at the same time, something else has caught my attention. Steam is rising from the heap of dead yagi. And they’re making a rustling sound, almost as though they’re coming back to life. “What’s up with the yagi?” I point to the nearest corpses just visible in the woods beyond us.

“They’re diffusing.” Ram must see the questions on my face, because he explains, “They’re not stable. It’s only the dark magic that makes them live at all. By the time they get to this stage most of the neurotoxin in their vapor has dissipated—unless they’re in an enclosed room. Their insides evaporate quickly once they die, and their exoskeletons wither to nothing.”

“To nothing?”

“Kind of like when you burn paper in a fireplace.” He leads me past the pile in a wide circle, towards the stream he talked about following. “If it burns under the right conditions, you can still see the charred form of the paper, even read the print from the page, but if you touch it, it turns to dust. Same thing with the yagi. They’ve never been scientifically classified because no one has ever been able to study a dead one.”

I can see the exoskeletons curling and shriveling as we move past the dead yagi. Interesting as Ram’s explanation may be, it doesn’t distract me from what we were talking about moments before—something I want to know more about, even if I’m a bit scared to hear the answer.

“How old are you?”

“I’m mature.” Ram reaches the stream and begins to follow it.

“A number.” I tromp along beside him. “Mature is not a number. For example, I’m eighteen.”

“How old do I look?”

“Twenty-ish.”

Ram nods. “Let’s go with that, then.”

“But you said you fought in World War Two?”

“I’ve fought in many wars. Not all of them have names.”

He is obviously trying to evade my real question, which is irritating, and only makes me more determined to learn the real answer.

I deliberately over-enunciate. “What year were you born?”

Ram makes a face. “Dragons don’t age like humans. We don’t grow old and weak and die. Dragons live forever—unless they’re killed. Do you know what year your father was born?”

I try to recall if I’ve ever heard anything that would give me a clue about my dad’s age. He looks pretty young, for a dad. Dark hair. No gray that I’ve ever noticed. Nor have I ever spotted any wrinkles, though much of his face is hidden by his neatly-trimmed beard. I remember once when I was a little girl, somebody wishing my father a happy birthday, but he waved it off and said he’d had too many birthdays to bother celebrating anymore. At the time, I’d figured too many birthdays was thirty or forty.

Now I’m not so sure. “What year?”

“Let’s see—was it 1784, or 1786? I can never quite remember.”

“That’s over two hundred years ago.”

“He’s still young. Your mother was older than your father, you know. She was born in the sixteen hundreds, I don’t know exactly when. I don’t even know if she knew.”

“But she was still young enough to…lay an egg?”

“Female dragons lay one or more eggs every year or so until they’re about six or seven hundred years old.”

“Seriously?”

Ram shrugs, still walking at a fairly brisk pace, but not so fast I can’t keep up. “That’s what I’ve been told, at least. I haven’t known any egg-laying females personally. But I’ve heard Eudora is past egg-laying age.”

“What year were you born?” I’m not going to lie, my pulse is kind of pounding by this point. I’m not even sure why—I guess just because the things we’re talking about are so beyond my experience, and yet so intricately bound to me.

“I was born in 1925.” Ram is picking a path for us along the grassy bank. The trees grow tight to the stream, and Ram takes my hand so I can walk just behind him, and we help each other keep our balance.

“So you’re sixty-eight years old?”

“Sixty-seven. My birthday’s in November. But I’m not sixty-seven like you think of sixty-seven year-olds. Think of it this way: Azi was twelve. In human years, she’d be a pre-teen. In dog years, that makes her eighty-four. She was very, very old for a dog of her size, but compared to a human being, she was just a kid.”

“So, what then? You’re saying in human years you’re fifteen or something? What does that make me? Three?” I’m not actually doing math, here, in case you’re wondering. I’m just trying to play it cool like my heart isn’t slamming inside my ribcage for reasons I don’t understand. I don’t even know why I care how old Ram is, or how our ages match up. But judging by the way my blood is screaming through my veins, it’s important to me.

“I’m an adult. You’re an adult.”

“I’m an adult?” I have to stop walking. I about didn’t get all those words out, even though there were only three of them. My face is probably red. I try to bluff past it. “Why have I never laid an egg, then?”

“You can only lay an egg as a dragon. And the egg won’t develop unless you,” Ram coughs, inexplicably tongue-tied, “have a mate.” He’s stopped walking, too, and dropped my hand. Now he crouches down by the stream. “Why don’t we get a drink? I’m thirsty.”

“Great idea.”

The stream is cold, the water refreshing. I scoop it up by handfuls, my thoughts mostly consumed with everything Ram has told me. From the way he tells it, I could live a very long time. My dad is crazy old. My mom—well, now I know why I never found her picture at Saint Evangeline’s. If she attended when she was my age, photographs hadn’t been invented yet. And I wasn’t looking nearly far enough back in the yearbooks.

My thirst quenched, I stand and stretch, yawning. “I didn’t get much sleep last night.”

“We’ve had a couple nights like that now.” He turns and faces me.

Part of me wishes he’d turn back around, so I wouldn’t have to face him as we talk. His eyes are so blue, so piercing, as though they can see right through me to the jumbled thoughts inside.

But part of me is also curious to look at him, to think about how long he’s been around and how much longer he’ll live, and wonder what he’d look like without the beard.

Ram balances his hands on the hilts of the swords at his hips. “I don’t know how much longer we should go on like this.”

“Like what?” My face feels warm, and I wonder if he can read my thoughts after all.

“Walking. It could take us months to get you home at this rate, and we’d have to go around the Black Sea.”

“What’s the other option? Fly over it?”

Ram nods. “I can teach you to fly, a little bit tonight, a little further tomorrow night, so by the time we reach the sea, you’ll be able to fly across.”

“It’s a big sea.”

“It is. I don’t think you could make it on your first flight. Changing into a dragon is enormously draining, especially when you’re not used to it.”

He’d said something like that before, so I’m not surprised. At the same time, though, I feel slightly panicked. I don’t want to change into a dragon. I don’t want to be a dragon. In fact, I’m pretty sure I don’t even want dragons to exist, except that my father and Ram are both dragons, and they’re two of my favorite people in the world.

This is tricky.

“So, what are you saying?” I ask, kicking myself when my voice trembles, betraying my fear.

Ram’s expression is kind. Maybe even understanding, though I doubt he really gets where I’m coming from. He’s changed into a dragon flawlessly before my eyes. And he seems perfectly cool with his reptilian alter-ego. “I think we should eat a big meal to help build your strength up, then rest for a while so you can try flying tonight.”

I nod silently, not trusting my voice. Food sounds good. Rest would be welcome. But the dragon-changing thing? I’m not ready.

So.

Not.

Ready.

Still, that’s not until tonight. And as the last couple days have proven, anything could happen before tonight.

Chapter Fourteen

The weird thing about making camp is that it’s just the two of us now. No Ozzie, no Ion. And I’m not used to falling asleep in the daylight, never mind that I’m exhausted and singlehandedly ate a roast goose (Ram caught one for each of us). So we stretch out on our leaf beds in the shade, with our heads sort of together and our feet on opposite sides of a clump of flowers, like a triangle missing its side because I can’t quite bring myself to lie down alongside this guy (is that weird? I just can’t).

I ask Ram about the dragon-changing thing. “How do you change into a dragon, anyway? Do you just blow yourself up like a balloon?” I saw more of Ion than Ram, and Ion did that laughing bit like he was sucking in air.