Chapter Ten #2
They sat there for a while, Frida stroking his scales, mesmerised by the thousands of purples that shimmered under the surface.
He played absently with a trail of smoke with one of his coal-black talons.
He was so cold, his proximity made her muscles tremble, but she didn’t move away.
‘Well, at least you’re here, little stink,’ he chirped finally, looking down at her fondly.
The streaks in his left eye turned warm and fiery like a hot clay pot.
‘Dada said you would be lovely. I think the fairy will be just as lovely as you are. I can’t wait to meet them as well.
’ He waggled his tail with an excited chirp, the venomous fork glinting in the mist.
Frida’s hand froze. ‘The fairy?’
Lucky nodded proudly. ‘The fairy.’
Frida stood up very slowly, her legs like jelly. ‘What fairy?’
Lucky looked confused. ‘The one in the tree. You were right next to them.’ Lucky started flapping his wings in his excitement.
‘Poor fairy. They were so deep inside the tree, it was really hard to get them out. I could hear them crying. Trapped in the roots like that. Hiding and stuck. It’s not nice, even if it was a clever hiding place. I was so sad for them.’
Frida felt like someone had tipped a bucket of ice water over her. Fairies had been extinct for centuries. Was Lucky saying one had been hiding in the Hawthorn?
Was Lucky saying one had been hiding in the Hawthorn? That was impossible! When she said as much though, Lucky looked surprised and hurt. He shifted nervously, making the mist creak.
‘It not impossible. It’s true. Dada said to free the fairy, and I did.’
It came rushing back then. All of it. The shattered Coffin, the fallen Hawthorn.
The figure curled up on the burning earth, their hair as green as an emerald city.
Frida dragged her hands over her clammy face.
Fairies had been nightmares incarnate, intrinsically violent, capricious and cruel.
People said they used to steal babies in the night, dance with ghouls, drink blood in their halls carved of the bones of their slaves!
Before they’d disappeared, they’d sometimes cropped up in backwater unregulated zoos.
She’d heard tales of a Hungarian meadow fairy who could blow fire out of their fifteen eyeholes, a Chinese ice fairy who’d cracked generations of hearts clean out of their chests, a Columbian tree fairy who’d killed half a town with deadly flying thorns.
She worried at her cap, taking it off then putting it back on again as if her cap was the only thing keeping her tethered to reality.
If what Lucky said was true, then this was a Code Red: the LEZ equivalent of Freddie Kruger meets Frankenstein meets the Walking Dead.
She could only imagine the panic. Melody evacuated. Forest condemned. The LEZ shut down.
This sent the sharpest bullet of fear through her.
The LEZ. Her LEZ. She instinctively gasped.
Lucky’s eyes had started to well. ‘Was I bad? I didn’t mean to do anything wrong. I did exactly what Dada said. I want to be a good dragon.’
‘You are a good dragon!’ she exclaimed. Although it was hard to keep the tremor out of her voice as she added, ‘It’s just I’m a bit worried about this fairy.
’ Even saying it out loud was unreal. She softened her tone to reassure him, but the words tumbled out of her in her panic.
‘You know how you feel scared? Well, maybe this fairy is scared too. I think I just need to go and check up on them, just to make sure they’re ok.
’ And make sure everyone else isn’t in danger of being thorned through the heart! ‘Do you understand?’
Lucky deliberated, agonisingly slowly, looking down at his paws and scrunching up his snout. ‘I think so.’
She quickly scanned the smoky incorporeal nothingness for an exit. ‘I promise I’ll come back as soon as I can! You’ll meet Cliff and Antony, Hamish and Sora and Zuzka and have so many friends. But right now, I just really need to get back to where we were. Can you help me?’
Lucky perked up. ‘Oh, that’s easy, I can do that. But,’ he hesitated, nervous again, ‘Dada made me promise to ask you something before you go.’
She nodded, still scanning the mist for an exit sign. ‘Anything, honey.’
‘Well,’ he said shyly, ‘you have to promise to keep me safe. Because if you don’t, my dada will come back from the fiery pits of molten eternity and roast you up, until you have no brains left, no bones, no eyes, no feet, no little stink hands.
You’ll be a pile of dust, which will blow away in the wind, destined to be tormented for the rest of times. ’ Then he grinned at her, delighted.
‘I see,’ she croaked.
‘You have to promise!’
She tilted a bit. She was quite sure promises made to baby dragons in misty nothing-realms were binding.
But in the end, it probably didn’t matter.
She knew she’d do whatever she could to keep him safe.
She was a dragon keeper, wasn’t she? Solemnly, she took off her cap and gave him a deep bow. He let out a high-pitched giggle-chirp.
‘I promise,’ she whispered.
With a relieved exclamation of smoke, he thrust his snout into her chest, almost knocking her over.
Thankfully, he’d turned the heat down, otherwise she’d already be that pile of dust, blowing to the four winds.
Gently, she touched the edges of his trembling head, right where his leathery frill began, stroking the smooth ridges between his scales.
He nuzzled her. ‘Frida Rose, Dada said you’d be nice. The little stink who came to dinner.’ His belly radiated, like shining amethyst. Frida furrowed her brow, a tingle of foreboding running up her spine.
‘What did you–’ But she didn’t get a chance to ask what he meant, or how he knew her name.
The next heartbeat, her arms had dissolved into the mist. When she blinked, she was standing again in a dense green jungle.
All in a rush, the harsh noises of the world flooded back.
The clatter of vets packing up their supplies.
The buzz of insects. The whispered conversations of the keepers.
Lucky’s snores. Suddenly she was a zookeeper again, and everything was normal.
No talking dragons, no fairies.
‘What the actual fuck?’ she rasped.
Then Zuzka was in front of her, signing urgently. ‘Fri, it’s time to go.’
Frida’s throat was dry. She tried to speak, but she couldn’t form words. Finally, she was able to lift her hands and sign weakly, ‘It’s over?’
Zuzka looked at her like she’d grown two heads.
‘Yes, it’s over.’ She gently took Frida’s arm and started to guide her out of the enclosure.
They passed through the doors, and Frida had a lurch of sickness, a familiar jolt between her temples, but it was gone the moment they stepped outside.
Everyone was talking and signing, bustling about, patting each other on the back for a job well done.
She looked at Lucky, prone through the glass, and tried to get her thoughts together. He’d spoken to her.
He’d said he’d done something to her, made her a little bit dragon.
Raz had affirmed it. You are different. Frida was halfway across the tarmac, tripping over her feet, halfway to Cliff with the impossible words bursting off her tongue, when she stopped dead.
Lucky had said he’d woken up a fairy. A heart-cracking, blood-sucking, baby-stealing fairy.
Her blood seemed to thicken, congealing like glue around her bones.
Her feet, suddenly, wouldn’t move as another terrible truth slid into place inside her.
Not of the fairy, but of the look of disbelief on Cliff’s face.
For months, it’d felt as if she was just another insomnia-induced fuck-up away from falling off a cliff, the bottom littered with the bones of ex-keepers.
The idea of Raz speaking in technicolour, the Noz pounding his stick and greeting her as if he came from the craggy depths of the trees themselves, Lucky taking her to a land of mist and releasing an extinct fairy from the Hawthorn of fucking Higgleton?
She could only imagine what Cliff would think.
She broke into a cold sweat at the very thought.
But would he have to shut down Forest anyway?
Probably. And what if she was wrong? She thought about Cliff asking Antony what had really happened last night, and her poor hapless friend, incapable of lying, caving quicker than a sand worm.
Telling their boss, who cared so much about his keepers’ mental health, about her most recent fall, her fresh head tomato, the fact that she’d thought she’d been purple . . .
Her heart thundering in her ears, she started to inch towards the door. And then she began to run, typing into her phone as she fled.