Chapter 7 – Charlie/Dralie
CHAPTER 7
CHARLIE/DRALIE
I ’m flying.
The red mist of anger that clouded our mind as we escaped the island drifted away, and as it faded, my thoughts and feelings became unstuck from the dragon’s.
He was having a great time stretching his wings. I, however, was terrified.
Coming to and finding yourself midair, cruising through the clouds, was like the end of a nightmare. But I wasn’t waking up. Giant golden wings flapped, pushing us higher before gliding along the gust of wind.
Even the birds looked at me with wide eyes as they dived away. Birds. Birds that take joy in shitting on me. Birds that have attacked me in Pigeon Park for a bite of my Greggs sausage roll. Now they were squawking and flapping to get away from me.
How the turned have tabled.
Suddenly my body (Dralie’s body?) twisted and we did a loop-de-loop.
I screamed, but no sound came out. Probably because Dralie was the current captain of our ship and I was the seasick passenger.
If I pushed past my fear, I could see why he was enjoying himself. The trees looked like broccoli florets. The lakes sparkled with the reflection of the sun and shimmered with ripples caused by the wind. And the view of the hills made me feel like I was watching never-before-seen drone footage from The Sound of Music . It was beautiful.
But I was still a scaly beast flapping around Sweden, and that definitely didn’t happen in the film.
“Are you feeling better, Charlie?” Dralie’s accented voice rang in my mind. “You mentioned a hurt, but I cannot feel one. I’m flying just as expertly as I always have.”
He demonstrated by throwing us into another spin, and I moaned. “Stop with the spinning, Dralie. It’s making me sick.”
“You cannot be sick. You are drakorian and have no way of expressing your illness while inside my mind.”
“It’s a turn of phrase, but if I could be sick, I really would.”
“Your fear ails you? You are a hatchling.” He chortled, and our nose blew out steam.
“Oh, fuck, do we breathe fire?”
“Yes.” His tone felt like an eye roll.
I immediately thought about all the people in my past that I wished I could have barbecued. There was this one kid at school that could have really used a fire up his arse. “I won’t lie. That is pretty fucking great.”
“We will be very powerful now that I am awake,” Dralie replied. I couldn’t tell if he saw the vengeful thoughts rattling my brain, or maybe he was just replying to my enthusiasm for our new powers.
Sharing a body with a dragon was fucked.
“Have you been inside me all this time? Asleep? Or watching?” I asked.
“No. My soul lay dormant next to yours until now.” Dralie took another sharp turn with the wind, and this time, my stomach didn’t roll. I felt like I was on a rollercoaster.
“So why now? You kind of came out of nowhere.”
“Because our life was in danger. Magic surrounded us and awoke me enough for us to change and survive the threat.”
In the silence, I thought about that. Flashes of a witch attacking me and Elizabeth, my birth mother, walking into the shed and also hurting me felt like fog, but it was the pinch of betrayal that made me turn my attention elsewhere. I didn’t want to know any more. Not when I was just starting to enjoy the flight.
“Where are we going?” I asked the dragon.
“We do not need a destination. We are drakorian.”
I laughed. “You keep saying that like it means anything.”
“I only mean we can fly, so why do we need to follow a path or head toward a destination?”
“How poetic.”
I let Dralie enjoy his time floating about in the clouds. I wasn’t in any rush to be human again. But it nagged at me, the feeling that I was missing something.
Is it just my memories? I remember feeling hurt. Dralie asked if I was well …
Past the fear of flying, there was something else, something deep down, which ached and pulsated like a wound. But what could that be?
I searched my mind as I admired the view of the clouds. One of them looked like a cat jumping onto a desk, and it made me laugh. And sparked a memory.
A cat.
Clawdia.
Clawdia!
Memories flooded my mind, our mind, of the island, of Karin trying to kill me and take my magic, of Elizabeth attacking us, but more importantly, of Clawdia. She’s what I’ve been missing. My bond with her is gone.
Missing. But how?
She can’t be dead. She can’t be.
Pain struck my heart at the thought of her death, and the memories of my life spilled over into Dralie’s mind. It must have been too much for him to cope with and fly at the same time. He roared as his wings failed and we spiraled down into the thick green of the trees on a tiny island.
I didn’t feel the collision with the branches on the way down. I didn’t know if that was because of Dralie’s takeover or because of the thickness of our new scaly skin, but either way, I was grateful. Yet I cringed when we hit the ground like a ton of bricks, and dry dirt flew into the sky as we created a new dragon-shaped hole.
“Well, fuck. We crashed,” I said in a dazed shock when we could lift our head from the hole.
Dralie coughed or sneezed, huffing a cloud of dust around us. “You … I—I wasn’t expecting to see such memories. Or feel such pain.”
“Clawdia,” I reminded him. The dust settled again, and I tried to get him moving, jumping around in his mind like I could puppeteer him or get his brain cells doing a Zumba class with me. “I—We need to go. Back to the island. We need to find her. She can’t be dead. Get up, Dralie. Fly.”
“Why do you assume she is dead?” Dralie asked but didn’t move.
I answered quickly, “She’s my—our familiar. She dies without us.”
He scoffed. “Drakorians don’t have familiars.”
“Drakorians that are also witches do. I can’t find our bond.”
Usually, I could feel it, feel her, her emotions, and that assured me she was fine—sometimes more than fine depending if Zaide was with her. Usually, I could hear her thoughts as clear as I could hear my own and this dragon’s. Usually, when I closed my eyes, I could see it. The bond was like a bright, pulsating golden string that wiggled between us.
Yet all I could feel was darkness. I couldn’t hear or feel anything from her, and the light of our bond was gone.
“Bond’s do not go missing,” Dralie replied easily.
“Maybe you sat on it when you popped out of nowhere,” I snarked, not understanding how he still wasn’t moving. If he saw what I remembered, then he knew how important she was to me. How important they all are.
“I wasn’t nowhere. I was dormant inside you.”
“Stop saying ‘inside you.’ And get out of this hole. We need to find Clawdia.” The panic I felt was seeping into my voice. How do I get this big bastard to go? Now.
Even though I was practically a ghost in the head of a dragon, my ghost heart raced, and if I thought I felt sick before, it was nothing on the nausea rolling through me at the thought of Clawdia dead.
Did Dralie’s arrival cause the bond to break? Have I killed her? Is Zaide dead too? A flash of gold in my memory made me freeze.
“Dralie, did we see Zaide? Was he the gold thing on the floor? Did we drop him?” My voice rose to a squeak as my stomach churched.
If she didn’t die from our bond breaking, I could have killed her by dropping her soul pair through my claws. Fuck! Please tell me I haven’t just caused the death of the best thing that happened to me.
“There was a shiny object, and I thought it would be an excellent start to our hoard, but it was a titan. Although it has been a while since I saw one last. I thought the human realm barred them.”
I ignored the additional titan lore and asked, “Was he breathing? Alive?”
“I believe so.” I exhaled a sharp, relieved breath. If he was alive, Clawdia was, too. Dralie added, “There were some humans fighting for him, and they attacked us, so I gave him up. He wouldn’t have made a suitable object for a hoard. A mate wouldn’t have been impressed with him.”
Humans? On a witch-only island? What happened?
I ignored the “mate” comment. He clearly wasn’t understanding the bond I had with Clawdia, and that was fine … for now. “I’m going to need more details on the humans. What did they look like? Where did they come from?”
“I did not see exactly where they came from. However, there were large boats in the harbor and small black carriages that looked like beetles. What are they called?”
“Cars.” I moved the conversation back to the important details. “Okay, and the humans, were they in uniform?”
“They wore black too. Their clothing had the detail of a small bow and arrow. They had weapons and shot at us. It’s a very inhospitable place that you live, Charlie.”
Hunters. It had to be hunters. And they took Zaide. Daithi’s vision was coming true, and I was stuck inside the head of a know-it-all dragon.
“We need to go back. Right now, Dralie. We need to find Clawdia, then Zaide, and then Baelen. In that order. Come on, Dralie, move.”
But still he did nothing. Was he enjoying being in this hole? Did he need a plan before he moved? What was keeping him here? Did he not know the way?
My frustration was reaching boiling point, but I couldn’t be angry at Dralie for existing. He saved me. But if his existence just caused the death of my family, would life even be worth living? What use is breathing fire if your love can’t be there to see you defeat her evil ex? What use is flying if we can’t fly to nice places on vacation? Go on adventures where we aren’t in danger all the time? Wouldn’t that be a novel idea?
But, skeptic through and through, I wouldn’t believe she was dead until I saw it with my own eyes. Because if our bond had broken and she had died, didn’t that mean I had died?
I had to ask. “Dralie? Did we die? When you appeared, was it because I died? Was it like a Phoenix rebirth thing?”
“I suppose, in a sense, we died,” he replied with a thoughtful hum. “I don’t understand. This familiar, her loss hurts you. Why would you want to see her body? Do you enjoy pain?”
“She might be alive! Please, Dralie.” My voice broke. I didn’t want to fight him for control of our body. I didn’t know how to drive a dragon body. And besides that, he was a good dragon and saved my life. But fuck, I needed him to listen to me, or my whole life was going to be fucked beyond belief.
Thankfully, my begging finally seemed to persuade him, and he attempted to wriggle out of the hole we were in. Using our legs, we pushed up and shifted some of the mud we were buried under, but as we tried to flap our wings, we discovered a problem.
“Winds, that hurts,” Dralie exclaimed. “It’s been a long time since I found myself in such a predicament.”
“What’s wrong? Why can’t we move?”
“I’m sorry, Charlie. Our wing appears to be stuck under a fallen tree. If I move it, we will tear the wing and won’t be able to fly until we heal.”
“Stuck?” I squeaked. “Shitting hell! So the options are stuck under a tree or stuck on an island with a ripped wing? What are we going to do?”
“Do not fear. I sense others. Perhaps they can assist us,” Dralie said positively. I wondered if the souls that got stuck together as drakorian were opposites, because being positive wasn’t my norm.
“What? Who?” I hadn’t noticed anything, but then again, I was just the panicking human voice in a dragon’s head. What the fuck could I notice? “People are more likely to take pictures with us and put it on their Instagram than to help us. Dragons aren’t native here, and humans are generally bad, so let’s think of a new plan before they find us.”
“These others feel … powerful. They will know our kind.”
“Power doesn’t mean good, Dralie. Please try to get out of here before we are noticed.”
“It is too late for that. Trust me, Charlie. I know what is best for us.”
“You do?” I asked sardonically, but Dralie didn’t seem to notice. We both stayed quiet, listening as the sounds of people reached our ears.
“Something fell,” an eager voice said. It sounded familiar. But again, with my past, familiar wasn’t good either. “It was large with wings! What kind of creature could that have been, Laurence?”
“I don’t think I’ve ever seen a bird that big,” another voice replied dubiously.
“I do not think it is a bird. If I didn’t know better, I’d think it was a dragon crashing into this island,” a bored voice announced. Also familiar.
But my racing mind didn’t mull over the owner of the voice since. Instead, I attempted to spur the dragon to do something, anything.
“Oh, fuck. We’ve been rumbled. On three, Dralie, use your big dragon body and hide under as much dirt as you can.”
Footsteps hurried closer. “I think there’s really something here.”
“Hide?” Dralie scoffed. “I am drakorian. We do not hide. We face our fears.”
Was it wrong that I wanted to strangle the bastard? “Just listen to me and hide before—”
But it was too late. A cacophony of gasps echoed around our little mud cave. We were spotted.
We are fucked.
I braced myself for what came next, but when they came into view, all the tension and fear evaporated. Sigurd, the protector of the realms, charged toward us. While I was glad to see someone I recognized, I also didn’t know how he was there.
Did I crash-land on the island? The hunters took witches and Zaide, and yet Sigurd escaped?
“Dralie, this is Sigurd. We know—”
But Sigurd interrupted me and shouted, “You will die here and now, Fafnir. Your tyranny will end.”
“Fafnir? Where?” I tried to turn around but only got the darkness of Dralie’s mind.
“Who is this Fafnir he speaks of?” Dralie asked, insulted he was being misidentified.
“My evil grandad dragon.”
“Dragons are not evil.”
But I didn’t reply to him, because a large stone smacked into our face. We paused our conversation and directed our attention to Sigurd.
“You know this being?” Dralie asked.
“Unfortunately.”
“And the others?”
Laurence, Savida, and Daithi made their way out of the tree line, following Sigurd as he came closer. But I wasn’t sure how much help they’d be since they hadn’t seen Fafnir either and wouldn’t recognize me unless I turned back to human. Laurence screamed, the girly screech someone only made when genuinely terrified, and stumbled back to hide behind a tree.
I rolled my eyes. What a chicken. “Dralie, I think you should let me take over here.”
“I cannot. If we turn back to your human form, this tree will crush you.”
Well, that threw a spanner in the works. “Unless I say something, they really might try to kill us because they think we are Fafnir. Are you sure we can’t move?”
“I’m certain.” Dralie sighed but didn’t seem too concerned about the threat to our life. He seemed to think we were invincible, despite being stuck.
Savida tiptoed toward me, as if I wouldn’t notice him in my peripheral, and whisper-shouted, “Sigurd, I don’t think throwing stones is going to do anything but make him angry.”
“I’m ensuring he is truly stuck and it is not a trick.”
“He seems injured. Perhaps we can trap him as we wait for help.”
“Wait? Why should we wait? It’s my duty to end him,” Sigurd announced proudly as he glared at me.
“Savida, stay away from him,” Daithi hissed and pulled his daemon soul mate behind him.
I couldn’t blame Sigurd for the confusion. There weren’t a lot of dragons. It was an easy assumption to make.
“Come on. My coloring is completely different! I’m golden, and he’s green. You’re supposed to have battled him. You should know. And maybe I’m a bit dirty right now, but gold and brown still don’t make green.” I sneered at Sigurd. “It’s your duty to recognize that I’m not Fafnir, you idiot. Can you believe we’re related to this guy, Dralie?”
“You are related to him, yet he thinks to harm you.”
“Honestly, I’m getting a complex about all the family members who want to maim me.” I sighed and watched as Sigurd mumbled something. I braced myself for whatever he planned.
“That is unfortunate, indeed. Perhaps you need to discuss your differences,” Dralie continued, oblivious to all the dangers. There was no explaining it to him. He’d see. I just hoped we survived it.
“You sound like Zaide.” I sighed. Trust me to get the peaceful and positive dragon. With my options limited, I made a last-ditch attempt to save us. “If talking will save us, I really should be human.”
“Unless humans can survive the weight of a tree, I do not think it is our best course of action.”
Humans can’t survive the weight of a tree, especially ones this big, so he probably made the right call. But as I watched Sigurd mumble and Daithi raise his hands, I wasn’t sure lying down and taking it was going to help us survive either.
Sigurd never killed Fafnir for good. Maybe I could hope it was an impenetrable dragon skin thing and pray we made it through.
Either way, I was stuck under a tree and in a hard place in all ways, so I couldn’t do anything, couldn’t control anything, and if Clawdia and Zaide were dead, then death seemed like a good option. I didn’t want to be the reason they died when they were going to be the reason I really started living.
With my thoughts dark and my hope dwindling, I did what I did best … pretended it was all okay and made jokes.
“The protector and I will deal with the beast,” Daithi continued, and I rolled my eyes.
“Oh, big man. Protect your soul mate from the beast. I’d rather be a beast than an arsehole, Daithi.”
I was too busy making my witty and cutting (if anyone other than my dragon could hear me) remarks to notice that Sigurd’s spell was ready. He raised his hands, and lightning came flying from him and jabbed at us. We flinched and roared. But we weren’t dead. We weren’t avada-cadabra’ed. Just injured.
“Are we bleeding?” I asked Dralie. “I feel like we’re bleeding.”
But Dralie didn’t reply. He was pissed. So pissed that his emotions bled into mine. The relief I felt at surviving the blow morphed into a red-hot pile of rage. So hot and so consuming that I forgot these were friends, allies, and that I shouldn’t want to murder them for hurting me.
Dralie and I merged into one furious consciousness. Fire burned in our belly, and we roared, spitting flames in huge plumes that scattered across the landscape. Our enemies dove out of the way, but we were still trapped and wriggling under the lumber. With another gust of fire from deep within us, we burned the tree to ashes and freed our wing.
Now they will pay.
We stood, shaking free of the debris, and turned to face them, steam billowing from our nose and a murderous rage clear in our eyes, seen from the reflection in their fearful gazes.
Just as we inhaled, magic enveloped us. Caged us in a box of shimmering blue. It stopped us in our tracks, and as we swung our tail, agitated, the magic zapped us.
We roared and battered against the barrier, ignoring the magic that continued to inflict us with zaps that increased with each touch, until we weren’t roaring with rage anymore. We were crying out in pain.
Eventually, we slumped down and curled up away from the cruel blue barrier. Trapped. Alone. Scared. We waited for our enemies to do as they planned. Our fight was over.