Hydra (6 page)

That my fear overpowered my good sense.

That I was wrong.

Instead he asks, “Can you remember the place in the lake where you were attacked?”

“Yes. Vividly.” I can picture myself rising up from the water like a shot, hovering there above the sea for a few seconds, gasping for breath and staring down for some visual confirmation of the enemy I’d just fought. But there was nothing more than a swirl of water in turmoil, a few bubbles, and then still, lapping waves.

Then I’d looked to shore, spotted my family, and flown like a streak back to them, only to receive a lecture about flying too high in dragon form before it was fully dark out, my glow too bright and boats too close, risking that I might be seen. I think it was perhaps their need to justify their lecture, their anger at my overreaction, that kept them predisposed against my story once they failed to find any sign of the monsters I described.

But Ed gives me no lecture and shows no predisposition against my theory. Instead, he seems ravenously curious about these water monsters. “Can you take me there?”

I’m completely thrown by Ed’s request. “You want to go to the Caspian Sea?”

He nods. “To the spot where you were attacked.”

“It’s a long way from here. My father and brothers searched and found nothing.”

Ed doesn’t even blink. “I study sea monsters, livin’ close to the Loch, as I do,” he explains. “Ye might even call me a sea monster expert. If there’s anythin’ down there, I want the chance to look.”

I’m panting a little from the excitement of telling my story, from the fear it roused in me. Much as I’d love a sea monster expert to validate my story and tell me what really happened, it’s a long journey. I don’t want to waste Ed’s time. “The creatures probably swam away. It’s a huge body of water. A sea, not a lake. They could have gone anywhere. I don’t know how you’d ever find them. It could take years.”

“Years I have in abundance.” He tells me solemnly. “What I don’t have is answers or evidence. Do you think you got tangled up in seaweed?”

“I know I didn’t.”

“Then take me there, and I will find the monsters that attacked ye.”

Tiny waves, the wake of a distant boat, lap against our dinghy as I stare at Ed, pondering my response. On the one hand, I’m grateful, so very overwhelmingly, wordlessly grateful, that he believes me. His simple acceptance of my story has restored a part of my heart that was crushed by my family’s disbelief.

I could hug this man.

But there is also the simple fact that the monsters that attacked me, if they are real (of course they are real—do you honestly think I, a dragon, was nearly drowned and defeated by
seaweed
?) are dangerous on a level Ed, for all his sea monster expertise, cannot begin to understand. To put it in perspective: the Caspian Sea monsters nearly killed me when I was in dragon form, thirty feet long with horns and talons and armored scales.

Ed is just a guy. He’s a pretty big guy who can carry headless bulls on his shoulders at a running clip, and tote precarious stacks of luggage up stairs without getting winded, but he is still. Just. A. Guy.

The Caspian Sea monsters will obliterate him.

There are few things I am sure about in this world, but this I know: I do
not
want someone as nice as Ed, a guy who saved me from a charging bull, the only person on earth who believes me about the monsters—a guy I could hug—obliterated by ruthless sea monsters.

On the other hand (and the lapping waves die down to nothing, returning the lake’s surface to its usual mirrored self while I ponder it) I could fly Ed there on my back over the course of a couple of days, he could search the sea, and we could be back in under a week. Logistics-wise, this could happen.

There’s just that whole part about Ed getting obliterated by sea monsters. That’s my sticking point.

So finally, after Ed’s been more than patient, waiting for me to respond, I explain to him, with a gravity in my tone that I hope captures the danger of his proposal, “The sea monsters tried to kill me.”

“Aye,” Ed acknowledges, his tone almost apologetic.

“I mean, they almost
did
kill me.”

“Are ye worried for me safety?” Ed looks surprised, maybe even amused by this notion, as though no one has ever been worried for his safety before. Considering his skill with the broadsword last night, probably no one has. Still, I can’t imagine him fighting the sea monsters with a broadsword.

“Yes. I’m worried for your safety. It’s dangerous.”

“I’m a mite bigger and stronger than ye are.”

I have to turn my head away to hide my laughter. Ed may think he’s big and bad, but I’m a freaking dragon. I am so much bigger and badder than he is.

“What’s that?” He peers around me toward where I’ve hidden my face. “Have ye been tellin’ a joke?”

I sober quickly, because it occurs to me that, with his knock knees and funny hands, he might have been teased as a child. And I don’t want him to think, even for a second, that I’m laughing at him. “No, not a joke. I’m just trying to think. How do you intend to find the monsters?”

“Well, ye don’t seem keen on me goin’ in the water. I have a set of underwater cameras, see, on account of me bein’ a sea monster expert livin’ near Loch Ness, and all. Sea monster investigatin’s a major local industry, ye might say. So I could use the cameras to look, first, if it would make ye feel better.”

“Cameras. Okay. Cameras seem safe.” I’m slightly appeased by his plan, except that he said
first.
“And then what?”

“Then, depending on what I find, I’d go underwater.”

“You’d go underwater?” I repeat, my lungs constricting with fear. “That’s the part of the plan I don’t like. It’s dangerous.”

“Yer afeared I’ll be pulled under?”

I nod.

“I can hold me breath a good long while. Does that help?”

“It depends. How long can you hold your breath?”

His eyes twinkle with something like mischief. “Wanna test me and see?”

“Sure.”

To my surprise, Ed stands, peels off his shirt and starts unbuckling his boots. He is taking this challenge to his big strong manliness very seriously.

I’m confused. “You can’t hold your breath with boots on?”

“I’m goin’ in the loch.”

“You can’t go in the loch. It’s freezing cold.”

“It’s nay so bad.” He’s got his boots off now, as well as his socks, so that he’s stripped down to just his kilt. Honestly, if I’d have known I’d see this much fine shirtless kiltedness on this trip, I’d have been more eager to visit Scotland. Then he stands on the bench and executes a graceful dive into the loch, surfacing a few seconds later with water sparkling on his red hair. “Okay, got a timer?”

“I’ll count off seconds.”

“Ready then?”

I nod, trying not to think about the depths of blackness swirling down for hundreds of feet below Ed. And below me.

“Start counting!” Ed calls out, before pulling his head under the water.

“One-one-thousand, two-one-thousand,” I start to count, watching a ripple of wake as Ed swims closer to the boat. He flips some sort of underwater somersault, followed by a sideways spin, and then he’s on his back, underwater, looking up at me and smiling, his face visible through a few inches of water.

“Twelve-one-thousand, thirteen-thousand,” I’m counting, not really paying attention to the number I’m counting off, as he swirls in the water and dives deeper, so deep he starts to fade from sight while swimming toward the boat.

For an instant, I’m afraid he might be going to rock the boat or something unsettling, but then I see him through the glass panel, waving and smiling up at me.

I can’t help smiling back. “Twenty-two-thousand, twenty-three-thousand,” the thousands, you know, are to pace myself, to make each number approximately a full second. I wave and Ed swims back over to the other side. I look that direction, fully expecting him to stick his head up from the water and ask how he did.

“Thirty-three-thousand, thirty-four-thousand.”

But he doesn’t come up for air. He stays underwater, smiling and waving and occasionally letting a tiny bubble escape through his nose, but otherwise staying well below the surface. He swims back and forth under the boat, waving to me through the glass panel three more times.

“One-hundred-ninety-eight, one-hundred-ninety-nine,” I keep counting, unsure whether I should be worried or suspicious. He hasn’t got an oxygen tank under the boat or something, has he?

As I think I may have said before, few things surprise me. Perhaps it’s because I carry a huge secret myself—of that fact that I’m a dragon, that I can fly and breathe fire—that I go through the world half expecting that most people have a secret. Maybe their secrets are about something not so unusual, such as secret dance skills or martial arts training, or surviving something that might have killed a weaker person. Not to diminish those accomplishments, but they’re at least
human
.

But knowing, as I do, that not all who walk among us are strictly human, and being surrounded, as I am, with a family who most certainly is
not
merely human, there’s a part of me that’s not surprised that Ed doesn’t surface for a full six minutes.

Or that even when he does, he’s still not panting.

He looks up at me almost sheepishly, as though he’s afraid he might have gone too far and frightened me. He climbs into the boat over the side, tipping it precariously so that I throw myself against the other edge, not so much to balance it, but at least to keep it from capsizing.

I study Ed awhile, watching the water roll in rivulets down his shoulders and drip from the hem of his kilt.

He can hold his breath a long time underwater. A crazy long time. Maybe even an
inhuman
long time.

So, theoretically at least, if someone wanted to search the Caspian Sea for whatever it was that attacked me, Ed would be an excellent candidate for the job. Unlike a diver with an air tank, he wouldn’t have to worry about the death-bent attackers pulling out his mouthpiece, cutting off his air supply. In that respect, Ed could do for me something no one else could do. He could find the creatures that attacked me and finally put a face to my fear.

But—and this is such a huge exception I feel guilty for even considering it—if I were to fly Ed to the Caspian Sea on my back, he’d have to know I was a dragon. To even consider making the journey would require me to first break the cardinal rule of our existence, and let on to someone what I truly am.

But we know, or at least suspect, that someone at Nattertinny Castle is a dragon. And if the Sheehys are dragons, maybe Ed isn’t completely human, either? Such a possibility might explain a lot.

“How long?” he asks when I’ve been silent for a while.

“Six minutes.”

He makes a face. “I could have gone longer, but I was afeared ye might be worried.”

“How long can you go?”

He shrugs. “Never pushed my own limits.”

“How long have you stayed under?”

He meets my eyes. I can see him debating his answer. There is more, more he could say, more he could tell me. I know this look too well because I’ve felt it from the inside. Wanting to say something that would give away a clue to who you really are, wanting to scream a blast of fire just to let everyone who’s ever underestimated you know there is more to you than they can see, and you’re not someone to be casually dismissed.

And vying with that longing to be known, the simple reality that if we are to survive, we must keep our true selves hidden.

The world would destroy us if they knew who we are.

I reach for his hand. He doesn’t flinch away as I lift his hand closer to my eyes. His fingers are cold from the lake, and still wet, their gnarled tips swollen like raisins from the water.

In so many ways, it’s a human hand. But his joints are stiff, his fingers bent inward, his skin thick, calloused, hardened. His nails are nubby and malformed, like the toenails of some people’s smallest toe, like the body didn’t feel a real nail was necessary, and only bothered to sprout a bit of cuticle waste.

“I was born that way,” Ed explains as I study his hand. I press my fingertips to his. They are large and dense, but as I press against them, they press back, an affirmation of contact, a yearning to be known.

“Ed?”

“My name’s not
Ed
. It’s
Eed
.” He pronounces it with a long
E
so that it rhymes with
feed
and
seed
. “It’s short for Edan.” The name retains the long
E
in its full form.

“Is that a Gaelic word?” I don’t know much Gaelic. I only knew Cruikshank meant knob-kneed because I met someone with the name back in the states. But like his last name, which identifies a true fact about him, I can’t help thinking his first name might also yield a clue to his identity.

“’Tis.”

“What’s it mean?”

The look is back, gentled now, but still a battle. To speak or not to speak? To reveal or to hide?

Perhaps he knows I can find a Gaelic-English dictionary easily enough, because revelation wins.

“It means
fire
.”

My heart is thumping crazy hard now, maybe even harder than it did when I first stepped in the boat. Okay, fire. No big deal, right? I mean, his hair is fiery red. Maybe he was named after his hair.

But he lives in dragon-fire castle, of all places. And my grandmother knew a dragon around here once.

And Ed said he had days in abundance.

I have to know. My throat has gone dry and I lick my lips, trying to summon moisture from somewhere, but there is none inside me. My voice is raspy as I ask, “Why
fire
?”

He meets my eyes for only a second more, before turning his head away with a shrug, shutting me out.

I’ve pushed too far, and I haven’t asked any of the questions I came to have answered. I still don’t know anything about sea monsters or the Sheehys.

But Ed surprises me by wrapping his fingers around mine (I have been holding his hand this whole time). He whispers, “Are ye afeared of sea monsters?”

“I am afraid,” I clarify slowly, trying to identify just what it is I am scared of, and keeping in mind that climbing into this boat was nearly more than I could handle, “of being attacked by something I can’t see and don’t know how to fight. I’m afraid of the enemy I don’t understand.”

“Who is yer enemy?” Ed asks.

“I don’t know.”

“Why did they attack ye?”

I startle at his question, flinching at its sharpness as it strikes so close to home. I don’t know what attacked me, but I can guess why. Whatever it was attacked me because I was a dragon. But I can’t tell Ed that. I can’t even speak right now, my throat has gone so dry.

“Ye know?” His voice is filled with wonder, maybe even awe. Somehow he’s read the answer on my face. “Why?” He turns his hand over so that mine is on top, and now he’s studying it like it’s not the most normal-looking hand in the world. My skin is on the brownish side, and my nails are clean, trimmed longish but not polished.