Chapter 9 Training
Training
He looked at me.
I looked at him.
He looked at me.
And I stared right back at him with an old Weird Al Yankovic parody song going off in my head.
The picture on the digital wall blinked out, along with the writing, and the wall turned black.
He was massive, even with his wings tucked in neatly against his shoulders. His tail was so long, it extended nearly to where I stood.
It scraped against the stone floor when he turned fully around to face me.
Twenty feet of emerald-green dragon peering down his long snout at one extremely underprepared she-wolf.
I recognized the white shimmering scales on his underbelly. They were the same ones I’d noted earlier on his torso—right before he knocked me out with that black disc.
They rippled in the bright sunlight streaming down from an opening in the ceiling. Other than his chest and underbelly, he was entirely shades of iridescent green that sparkled like gemstones. Even the horns crowning his head were a deeper shade of green.
He took a step toward me, and the sunlight disappeared, his form casting me in shadow.
As my wolf vision adjusted to losing the light he’d blocked out, I thought, He’s magnificent.
And possibly dangerous, a small voice pointed out in the back of my head. Probably my sense of self-preservation.
I, personally, had zero control in shifted form.
A late bloomer who’d grown up toothless—as my kind called wolves who couldn’t yet shift—I’d been so relieved when my first turn finally came after moving to Scotland.
Less stoked as an adult with the nightmare of full moon scheduling and having to cage up in my teeny Toronto mini-studio.
Some of the more ancient cultures, like the Norwegian Wolves and the Irish Bears, could hold on to their humanity while shifted. But I had never encountered, or even heard of, a dragon shifter outside of romance holos.
And I was not the kind of waify starlet they put in romance holos.
“Hi,” I squeaked since I’d just spent a week in a kingdom where I’d been warned several times: “If you see a bear, don’t run.”
I really, really should have let Aengus stick around long enough to answer that third question.
The emerald dragon made a loud breathing sound. Like a sigh. That released smoke. The residual heat of it waved over my skin.
Then he collapsed back into his navel-less, nipple-free version of a human.
And there was something else missing. I glanced, then double-took, then full out stared at the V between his hips. It was sharp and well-defined, but it extended into nothing. No genitalia of any kind. He was a total Ken Doll down there.
“Hello… Dorie.”
I dragged my eyes back up to his face when he spoke.
His smoke-and-glass voice had a tightness to it. I sensed irritation behind it. But hey, he called me by my preferred name. And a stiff hello was way better than, “You shouldn’t be here!” and holding a knife to my throat.
Or a fireball that could burn me to ash.
“Sooo…”
Kiwi screamed in the back of my head about not freaking out as I worked to keep my voice casual. “You’re a dragon.”
He dipped his head, jaw working as if he maybe didn’t want to answer. “Our kind is called Drakkon.”
“Drakkon,” I repeated. “Thanks for the correction. I’m always down for a pronunciation guide.”
He regarded me a long, unblinking time. “You are the same… but different.”
I winced. “Yeah, falling into an ice age will change a person, for sure.”
“You have found our room. We thought we would have longer to reprogram the door.” He let out another sound. Not quite a sigh. Closer to a grunt. “You are too clever.”
Too clever could be taken as a compliment. But it did not feel like one.
“I’d call it more curious than clever.” I glanced back at the door I’d come through, still glowing in the wall. “Speaking of curious things, the wooden doors leading into my room from the castle interior refuse to open.”
I squinted up at him accusingly. “Do you have something to do with that?”
“Those doors are only programmed to open for our kind.”
“Then it’s just a programming thing.” I let my face relax. “Phew. I thought you’d imprisoned me or something.”
“We have not imprisoned you,” he assured me.
“Oh great.” True relief filled my chest like a balloon. I hitched my thumb over my shoulder in the general direction of the door. “Could you come use your drakkon nature to open the door for me, then? I’d like to take a look around. You know, get my bearings.”
“No.”
I waited for an explanation, but that was the only word that came.
And, eventually, it was on me to ask, “Why not?”
“You are not a prisoner, Dorie. But you are under our protection.”
Under his protection. I turned the words over in my head. They had a sour taste to them. Like “protection” rhymed with “prisoner.”
“How about if I don’t want to be under your protection?”
He didn’t blink, but his eyes narrowed like I’d asked him a most confusing question. “It is impossible for you not to be. It is our honor to protect you.”
“Really?” I scrunched my nose and tilted my chin. “Because yesterday I woke up to a guy yelling at me for being here and putting a knife to my throat.”
“Yes, we regret that….” He looked embarrassed for two whole seconds before his large shoulders lifted into a shrug. “But you survived the attack. You are alive. You are talking to us now after finding the door we should have reprogrammed. This is a good thing.”
“You and I have two very different definitions of ‘good thing.’” I put those last two words in air quotes.
“Can I have a digital wall, then?” I indicated the black one behind him. “So I can watch you like you’re creepily watching me?”
He actually seemed to consider the request before answering this time. “No. It is not safe. You are too clever.”
“Why isn’t it safe? What are you afraid I’ll see?”
This time, he did not answer. I waited, counting to one hundred like I’d been taught in journalism school. I was good at silence.
Turned out he was better.
“Fine.” I threw my hands up after I lost track of my fifth count to one hundred. “What am I supposed to do all day?”
“You may take long baths in your facilities. You like those, correct?”
I did like long baths, actually. I could stay in them for hours. But there wasn’t any way I was going to confirm my imprisoner’s guess.
“I have several more questions.” I folded my arms over my chest. “Questions that need answers.”
He regarded me with a wary look. “Questions such as…?”
“Like, how is there god tech in the Pleistocene Age? Why does your human form have pecs but no belly button or…?”
I glanced down at the blank V between his legs, then back up.
“Drakkon are not like you, Dorie.” His voice had a weary quality to it, like a frustrated teacher who was having to explain something for the umpteenth time.
“You are a hybrid. A human who shifts into an animal by the pull of the full moon. Our original nature is drakkon, and we fold ourselves into this form. What you see is merely a shell.”
My hand itched for anything to start taking notes, but with my bullet journal out of commission, I had to settle for recording all this info in my brain. “And your really good modern-my-time English?”
His expression softened. “We have had many rotations of practice.”
I frowned. “That doesn’t really answer my question.”
Another smoky grunt. “Perhaps we are not the drakkon to ask these questions at this time.”
“But—”
“You may go now,” he said, indicating the door with one of those ungodly large hands. “Retreat into your bath.”
I kept my feet planted where they were, and this time it was my turn to say, “No.”
“Dorie…” His voice held a smoky threat.
But I didn’t care. “You might as well slit my throat now. That’s better than whatever sanitized word you want to call keeping me in a cavern against my will.”
“Rev—Dorie, you are being dramatic.”
“I am not,” I promised him. “I will lose my mind if you don’t let me out of that cavern, so I’m sorry, but you are going to have to figure out something better than ‘go take a long bath, Dorie.’”
Another long silence stretched between us, but I refused to back down. Mostly because I had nothing better to do than stand my ground.
His jaw worked. “If you wish, we can train you.”
I jerked my head back. I hadn’t expected him to give in. Or make me such a strange offer.
“Train me to what?” I asked.
“Protect yourself. Also, we would like your heart and muscle condition to be optimal, just in case…”
He didn’t finish.
But holoscribe. I had to ask, “Just in case what?”
He didn’t say anything for so long, I thought he might not answer. But then he replied, “Just in case we get to keep you.”
His faintly glowing eyes raised to meet mine, and for just a moment, the careful, hard blankness he’d worn like armor since I’d walked into his private space slipped. The look he gave me… I wouldn’t call it tender. But it was soft-adjacent.
Like maybe he, too, was deeply aware of the elephant in the cavern that we had yet to talk about.
I didn’t believe in fated mates. Not really. I didn’t want to be here in the Pleistocene age stuck with him for the rest of my life.
But that never-before feeling tugged at my lower belly. Again.
“Actually, I’d been meaning to start taking better care of myself.” A strange compulsion came over me to agree to his offer. “Maybe getting one of those community gym memberships you can pay for with volunteer shifts. But then I got laid off from my job as a holoscribe.”
His eyes flared wide. “You are a holoscribe?”
“Yes.” I was a little taken aback by his response. “You know what a holoscribe is? And why do you look so surprised?”
“It is pleasant for us.” His mouth hitched into something resembling a smile. “To think of you in this endeavor. It suits you.”
“It does?”