Chapter 8
EIGHT
Hyphens led to inevitable darkness.
Downtown
Casper, Wyoming
Once upon a time, back when I had chased my dreams with relentless drive, I’d attended a young woman’s therapy session at her request. In the months following her rape by someone she’d trusted, her life had devolved into a chaotic mess.
The breaking point had been her curling iron, and she’d lived in a state of terror that she’d left it on and plugged in at home.
The therapist’s recommendation, so beautiful in its simplicity, had stuck with me—and had led us to Casper, where we could patch the holes in our lives until we could live day to day without the past haunting us.
Going into a courthouse, acquiring a marriage license, and taking the final step and marrying was the equivalent of stashing the curling iron in my purse, much like that woman had done until she could conquer the demons tormenting her.
Rather than carrying the problematic device around with us, we’d haul around the promise of a future together.
As Erik had a sense of humor, he asked if our carbunclo and my hummingbird could also sign the paperwork in addition to the witnesses the courthouse provided.
There was something perfect about the smudged ink prints of two confused kittens and a hummingbird who enjoyed the idea of walking all over a sheet of paper with messy feet.
Fortunately for us, they hadn’t destroyed the important parts of the document, allowing us to obtain our copies to take home with us.
For the moment, we’d keep our names as they were. In the future, we’d have the discussion of if one of us would take the other’s name.
We both had more pride than we knew what to do with, and we loved our families. One thing we agreed on, however: we would not be hyphenating our names.
Hyphens led to inevitable darkness.
Once we had our certified copies and escaped the courthouse, I asked, “Is that better?”
Erik grinned at me and nodded. “Much. Now if you run, I know you just want me chasing after you.”
“I draw the line at you carrying the marriage certificate around with you. We’ll hide our copies in a safe where our parents can’t find them, and we’ll only dig them out when we’re confessing our sins to the officiator at the formal wedding where you get to strut around like the yellow dragon peacock you are. I’ll suffer through somehow.”
I couldn’t blame him for laughing at me.
Once he recovered, he caught my hand in his. “It won’t be that much suffering. The only time I’ll ask for you to actually suffer is if you’re the one forced to propose, and I’m willing to do the proposing if you’re cracking a whip while wearing leathers.”
As Erik would do something as evil as mean literal whip cracking, I made a mental note to take lessons on how to use a whip in addition to expanding my wardrobe to include a few extra pieces of leather apparel. “Noted. Now, what are we going to do for the rest of the day?”
“We’re going to take our pets on an adventure, tire them out, and then go to our hotel to indulge.
Then we will complain bitterly when we need to get up offensively early to head to work in the morning.
With a little luck, we’ll be mentally rested and can start making good progress on this case.
We can’t bring back the dead, but we can try to get all those ghosts laid to rest, and that means we need to uncover all their stories and learn the truth of their deaths.
And if there are living victims, we find them before their time runs out. ”
“Do you think there are any living victims, Erik?”
“That spirit you spoke to in Death Mile certainly seems to think so. And if that mercury clan was looking to exchange a life for a life, there very well might be children out there needing us to find them. But I admit, I fear that we would be finding them to bring them out of the darkness and into tragedy.”
“You think she killed their parents.”
Speaking my fears helped a little. Facing the bitter truths of hard cases early on always helped a little. In the rare times things worked out for the better, it came as a relief rather than the sinking sense of horror over the dismal realities of what we investigated.
“I think she did. I think she broke families into millions of pieces in the faint hope of the impossible.” Erik sighed. “I think grief shattered her mind so much that she was willing to do anything if only she could go back to the past where her son still lived.”
And her husband, although she had not yet progressed to working with his body, at least as far as we knew.
I regarded him with a solemn expression, and I couldn’t help but wonder how his family would have handled it had he not survived his haphazard entry into the world.
I couldn’t see any one of them opting to dip their toes into necromancy to bring him back, but the evidence of how deeply his situation had cut his family lingered.
His parents hadn’t had another clutch since. His sister had chased after the secrets only science could teach her.
The rest of them worked to give him the bright future he had been so close to missing out on.
We headed to the SUV, and during the walk, I petted Garnet, lost in my thoughts.
“I’d offer a penny, but I think I’m going to have to whip out a twenty if I want to pay the bill for your thoughts,” Erik stated, and he used his bulk to bar me from taking the driver’s seat. “You are a passenger princess today.”
I accepted his decree, went around my vehicle, and climbed in. “What separates your family from Madam Merorie? What lengths would your family have gone to bring you back?”
“I think I’m going to need a fifty, at a minimum, to pay for those thoughts.
” Erik took care of settling the kittens and hummingbird in the back before claiming the driver’s seat.
“I would have been given a most glorious funeral, they would have cried, and my older siblings would have been asking many difficult questions—and my clutch siblings wouldn’t have known much about me, as I had been immediately escorted to an ICU.
Much to her dismay, my mother didn’t actually get to hold me after I’d been born, and while she provided milk for me, I’d been fragile enough nobody was permitted to handle me until I was better developed.
I’ve heard the story plenty of times. My father’s purple dragon friends pulled me aside when I was twelve and answered all my questions.
My family would have gone into therapy and let me go.
I feel my death would have been a little easier than what Madam Merorie faced.
I was a wanted child, but none of them actually knew me.
That makes a difference. Madam Merorie had the weight of her son’s life factoring into her descent into madness.
Don’t get me wrong. My parents grieved for my siblings who didn’t make it, but their eggs hadn’t developed much; the largest of them was smaller than a chicken’s egg.
They just didn’t realize I needed more time compared to my siblings.
My situation did lead to dragons having clutches taking precautionary measures to make certain little ones aren’t hatched prematurely.
A lot of good came because I barely survived.
Now look at me. I’m perfectly aged, happily married, and ready to give my parents gray hairs for many years to come. ”
I eyed my newly fledged husband. “Perfectly aged?”
“I refuse to call myself old, I refuse to call you old, and as I value my life, I am not making the mistake of calling our parents old despite their status as ancient wyrms worth worrying about,” he informed me in a solemn voice.
“And once my ancient wyrms of parents learn I eloped, my lifespan will likely be counted in seconds or minutes, and my wife might be the only being capable of saving me.”
“How do you expect me to save you?” I blurted.
“You can tell them you need me for reproductive purposes.”
He made an excellent point, and I could see the ploy preventing his demise.
“I’ll also tell them your death would make our kittens cry, and that is unacceptable.
” The twin mews from the back seat cracked me up, and I twisted around to regard our furred and feathered children.
“You can protect your daddy through pouncing on the feet of our parents should they become upset we opted to save money on our taxes this year. Since we’re saving money on our taxes, we’re going to take you rock hunting next week. ”
A chorus of chirps, mews, and clicks answered me.
“I will look for good places for us to hunt stones while you catch a nap in a puddle of sunlight. As you will be taking me with you this time, you won’t even need an alarm. I’ll get you up when it’s time to partake of meals. I’ll even make sure you have a chance to hunt for sparkly gems.”
I laughed at the reminder I’d failed at collecting sparkly gems while succeeding at taking a nap. “And we won’t tell my parents we’re going so we don’t have an audience.”
“I approve of your desire to show them we are independent hatchlings capable of planning how best to use our time off.”
“Just make sure you remind my parents that if they kill me, they will have a severe delay in any potential grandchildren.”
“It’s a deal. We will use our ability to procreate to control our parents and prevent our demise at their claws for doing unacceptable things like displaying independence.
” Erik snickered and started the SUV. “There is a place we can hunt for beryl nearby, and there’s a store on the way that will sell us everything we need to search for rocks.
I vote we pay our furry and feathered children for their patience in hunting for gemstones before we get to the wining, dining, and indulging phase of our day. ”
I pointed ahead of us. “Take us to the rock store, Erik. We must acquire sparklies for our babies.”
“Don’t forget the sparklies for us.”