Chapter 29 – Charlie
CHAPTER 29
CHARLIE
“ W hat’s going on, Clawdicat?” I asked as she headed to the roof door and … locked it? Why would she lock it?
“Please stop asking.” Her lip wobbled, but she bit down on it. “I’m just … waiting.”
“Waiting. Until you feel better?” She didn’t look at me, didn’t touch me, she just stared at the sky like secret answers were written in the clouds. “Until the alien spaceship comes into view? Why the fuck do you keep looking over there?”
Her distance, as well as the emptiness of our bond, made me feel cold even as we stood in the glow of a setting sun.
When she glanced in my direction, I saw a flicker of fear in her violet eyes and my heart lurched in response. Why is she scared?
She must have seen my discomfort, because she reached out and stroked my arm. “Charlie, you trust me, don’t you?”
Trust with my heart? Yes. Trust with preserving her own life? No.
When I said nothing, her lip twitched, and she nodded once. Then, as she looked back at the sky, she said, “Please shift. Dralie needs to be here.”
Dralie was as confused as I was. “Why? I cannot copulate with her.”
“What makes you think she wants to be copulated with right now?” I asked as she headed to the rail around the roof.
“Is that not what you do to calm a female?”
She gasped when she saw something and turned to me. “Charlie. What’s Dralie saying? Are you going to shift?”
You’d know if you opened your bond to us. But my anger and frustration faded when I saw her shoulders shaking. “You’re trembling.”
“P-please turn,” she begged. A quick waft of nausea washed over me. Not my own. But Clawdia’s. And then it was gone again as locked her emotions down behind a steel gate.
“Is that you? Why do you feel sick?” I shook my head and put my hand on her back to guide her downstairs. “You need to rest. Maybe a doctor. You aren’t well.”
“Charlie, you aren’t listening to me.” She shook out of my grip and glared.
“Dralie isn’t coming out right now. He’s got performance anxiety.”
“He needs to get over it. Now.” She tried to be firm, but her nervousness ruined the effect. What is going on with her?
“What do you know?” I asked, but she just shook her head and looked back at the sky. Maybe she needed us to fly somewhere?
“Regardless of our confusion, we should strive to do as our mate says if it makes her feel better.”
Suck-up. “Fine. Fine. Fuck’s sake.” I started stripping my clothes off.
“The air smells strange.” Dralie told me.
“You can smell from in there?”
He ignored my question. “I do not think it is safe. We should go somewhere else.”
“Just change and then we can fly off somewhere else. I’m freezing.”
“Such a weak, fleshy body.”
“God, I hate when you call me fleshy.”
The transformation wasn’t getting easier, but it seemed to happen faster.
“Charlie, Dralie, forgive me for this,” Clawdia said from somewhere at my side. I couldn’t even swing my head around to see her before she’d already climbed our scales up onto our back and settled down in the space between our wings.
“This isn’t the time to live out your ‘how to train your dragon’ fantasies.” But with our bond shut off, she couldn’t hear me.
“She knows we cannot copulate, correct?” Dralie asked.
“I haven’t got a clue what’s going on with her at the moment. Just don’t let her fall off.”
A roar shook the trees, and birds flew off with a squark of fear. We turned to see giant flapping wings, green wings, that bobbed over a hill on the horizon. At this distance, I couldn’t tell if it was Fafnir or the other dragon, but he was coming with the fury of someone whose plan had been foiled.
Oh fuck, oh fuck, oh fuck.
“The abomination.” Dralie hissed.
Not Fafnir? Great . But there was still a dragon charging toward us, spewing fire, setting the surrounding trees alight.
“Shake Clawdia off. We can’t defend ourselves with her on us.”
“Of course we can.”
The noise attracted the task team, and the locked roof door shook as they attempted to get through.
Clawdia patted our back. “Charlie, we need to fly now. Lead the dragon away from here before—”
The door flew off its hinges, and we dodged to avoid it while everyone spilled onto the roof.
“Oh god.” I heard Clawdia moan.
We glanced around to see the dragon had disappeared into the smoke and flames it caused from the forest fires. Even if the team were able to escape the building and drive away, the smoke would be too thick to see and the fires hot enough to melt the wheels.
“Baelen, Daithi, you need to portal everyone out of here now,” Arabella called.
“We can’t leave.” Isaac protested. “We have all our equipment and documents here.”
“Do you want to die?” Clawdia yelled. “Who cares about your documents when the whole building is going to be engulfed in flames?”
Daithi saw sense and formed a portal, but just as the blue swirl formed, the air shifted as the dragon swept in from above. Screams pierced our ears, and we jumped to the edge of the building, roaring as the green beast circled us.
I felt like a seal on an ice float.
Sigurd raced to our side and threw his hands out, a spell on his lips, and the dragon stopped almost in midair to stare at the man, egging him on.
“Sigurd no.” Clawdia called. “Get away.”
But her voice was lost to the chaos of bullets, spells and curses being fired at the dragon. The dragon didn’t respond to the dangers. He continued to stare at Sigurd as he circled the roof of the building. Whatever spell Sigurd attempted failed, and the bullets missed.
How hard is it to kill something when it’s right in front of you? There’s thirty odd supernaturals on this roof and not one of them can aim? Guess it’s down to us.
I tried to tell Clawdia to get off us, but her bond was still locked down tight and she wasn’t listening to anyone. I could vaguely hear Zaide and Baelen trying to talk her down, but she wouldn’t budge, her hands clenched around scales on my back and her feet dug in.
If we were flying, she was determined to come with us.
“We need to do something. We need to lead him away from everyone while they escape.” I told Darlie, and we moved to perch on the edge, our wings spread to catch the wind, but the dragon wasn’t interested in me. Something seemed to pass between Sigurd and the dragon.
One moment Sigurd was there, yelling out yet another failing spell and the next, he was ashes as heat blew passed us in a streamlined gust, targeting only him.
“No!” Clawdia shouted.
I didn’t look. We took off after the beast as it flew away into the smoke and we roared, breathing our own gust of fire at it. The flames must have singed his tail because he cried out and turned furiously on us.
“Dodge!” I yelled as it sprayed more fire at us and we twisted away. My heart pounded loudly in my head. “Fuck me! Oh, my god that was close.”
“I’m sorry.” Dralie apologized as the green dragon dived closer to the fires to get away from us.
“Not your fault.”
It seemed focused on getting back somewhere, desperately trying to lose us through the smoke, the fires, the falling trees.
To Fafnir? If we follow, will we find out where he’s hiding again now?
We were keeping up, but we were still new to flying, and our wings strained with each new obstacle we expertly avoided.
“Great work, Dralie.” I applauded as we dodged yet another stream of flames headed toward us.
“Thank you.” He replied with a happy trill as we righted ourselves and continued surfing the clouds behind the green dragon. “I can feel familial bonds.”
“What the fuck does that mean? ” My blood went cold with the thought.
“It means we have a connection to him,” Dralie explained. “Would you like me to contact him? Perhaps we can discuss this like reasonable drakorians?"
“Like telepathically?”
“Yes.”
“Absolutely the fuck not. I don’t care if he wants a chat. We aren’t responding. Hear me? Please Dralie. We’d probably get a disease or something.”
Elizabeth always assumed Fafnir would control me because of some dragon magic. Familial bonds sound like a way that could happen and that definitely wasn’t on my calendar for the day. Fuck that.
“I don’t think that would be the case, but I have to admit this abomination unsettles me.”
“You’re telling me.”
“I am telling you, yes.”
“Okay Dralie, we’ve still got a long way to go before we’ve got the slang down, but we’ll get there.”
“Our mate is very quiet. Do you think she is awed by our flying?”
Clawdia hadn’t made a sound. If I couldn’t feel her weight between our wings, I’d have forgotten she was there. Occasionally, her legs would clench and her grip on my scales would tighten. But I didn’t think it was awe. Probably terror.
The green dragon seemed to realize that we wouldn’t lose them so easily as it glanced up to see us hovering just above the smoke, following. I wanted to know why Dralie was calling it an abomination.
Was it because he could sense that it was an unnatural hoard? Like magic? As Fafnir does? Or was there something else I was missing? It didn’t seem any different to our dragon shape? Maybe it had mixed blood?
But, I couldn’t ponder that for long. Instead of shooting flames at us, the dragon heaved its great wings and shot up toward us, claws out for the attack.
Clawdia screamed as we tumbled from the sky, smoothly avoiding the dragon’s attack and now leading the race out of the smoke.
And then I felt something slimy crawl over me. It wasn’t a physical sensation, but one over my mind. Like a sticky, slimy, slug worming around me, it distracted me and Dralie must have felt it too because he said, “Charlie, the bond … don’t touch …”
But I couldn’t hear him anymore. The slug seemed to have taken over my mind and confused me. I wanted to get away from it, but I was trapped. I could hear Clawdia’s screaming in the distance, but I could no longer see and my connection to Dralie was cut off.
Is this the familial bond from the other dragon? Why does it have to feel like a slug? Slugs are gross. I knew this fucker was diseased.
Despite the fear and the disgust, I was curious to find out who the dragon was. Dralie called it an abomination, a male, but I didn’t know any other male relatives, since the family would have killed them.
Was it just a coincidence that Fafnir found another one?
Hesitantly, I reached for the bond, and then the strange whispering started. It wasn’t words exactly, more like ideas and there were flashes of images, a dragon, Fafnir, the witches, the compound, a knife, a collar. I had no clue what any of it meant, but it consumed me. I felt hypnotized and unable to look away.
Until Clawdia’s voice cut through. “Charlie, Charlie, Charlie, come back to me. Come back, my love. Stop listening to whatever he’s saying. You aren’t like him. You and Dralie are different. You don’t have to do what he says. Just listen to me. Listen to me and come back to me.”
Like waking up, I could cling to her voice, the sound of her enough to pull me away from whatever weird spell the slimy familial bond had me under. “That’s it, Charlie. Yes. Listen to me, come back to me. You’re mine. Now, he’s going to realize you’re not under his influence anymore and then he’ll attack, but I’ll protect us. I promise. Just keep away from him and don’t listen to him.”
You’ll protect us? How? What’s the plan? I wanted to ask, but she cut our bond off again with enough force to jolt me back from the familial bond, back to Dralie, and back into the body of a dragon.
“Charlie? Are we back? Safe? What happened? Where did we go?” Dralie asked. The worry in his voice matched my own.
“I don’t know. The dragon seemed to take over our mind. Bastard.”
We looked around with slight head movements and noted the green dragon flying directly above us, looking smug. We had flown miles away from the fires and he dropped in height, ushering us to do the same. When we didn’t immediately do so, his head dropped to stare at us and fury lit his eyes when he noticed we weren’t in his control anymore.
“Let’s show this dragon how to fly.”
We scooped low, heading down, down, to the tree line, and the dragon chased after us. The slug-like bond tried to infiltrate again, but I batted it away. But then the dragon roared and shoved at us from the side, knocking Clawdia straight off our back, screaming, and falling through the sky.
“Clawdia.” My heart lurched as we quickly recovered, dodged the dragon’s claws, and dived after our mate. We caught her in our claws and her grip on us was shaky, but tight.
The green dragon was determined that either we follow under his command, or we die, and he swooped down, claws out and sharp as he dove into our back, scratching at our scales and puncturing our wings.
Fuck, that hurt.
And the puncture to our wing, as well as the heavy weight of a dragon on our back, pushed us, spinning, toward the ground at great speed. I felt sick.
We tucked Clawdia close to our chest and rolled as we hit the ground, smashing the dragon on our back into the ground as we skidded to a halt in the dirt. We released her as soon as we could and ushered her away as the dragon scrambled and clawed at our back.
One moment it was moving, we fought to get away from it, and the next we were covered in blood and the dragon collapsed back into the hole. Dead.
What the fuck? We looked back to Clawdia, and blood dripped from our snout.
“Our mate just killed that dragon? She is most fierce.” Dralie said. “Go to her.”
I shifted and dragged myself, shaking, out of the grave where the green dragon lay.
“Are you okay?” Clawdia rushed to me, her hands outstretched and seeking the wounds on my body. “Your wing and back. You’re bleeding. Just give me a moment.”
“I’m covered in blood.” I said and held her hands so they didn’t touch the dragon blood all over me. Her eyes unfocused, and I squeezed her hands hard. “Don’t you dare heal me after that. You’ll hurt yourself.” She sighed, but did as I asked. My back remained raw and open. “Thank you.”
“You’re welcome,” she whispered.
I raised a brow. “You couldn’t do that while it had its grubby paws over my mind?”
“I couldn’t be sure it wouldn’t harm you, too.” Her lip trembled and I couldn’t resist any more. I pulled her into my arms, blood be damned, and nuzzled into her hair.
She wasn't a killer, and this was the second time she’d had to take a life. And we didn’t even know who the dragon was.
After a moment’s silence, I asked quietly, “The protector?”
“He’s dead,” she replied, her face drawn. “The portals are open.”
And then, safe in my arms, she fainted.