29. Escape
Fred hefted up a suitcase in each hand and waited impatiently for Bob to take all the spells off the door to The Rock Tavern. Shandy clung to one of his arms.
“We will be watched all the way from one door to the other,” Bob warned them one more time before he unlocked the last spell, “so nothing out of character, no questions, nothing. We have to look like we really do intend to hand Fred over to his Father.”
He raised his eye brows and insured Shandy and Fred had given nods of agreement, before he finally opened the doors.
A huge man walking as if to the gallows, with a pretty, excited bubbly blonde on his arm, followed by a tiny, stern, aggressive man, and his tall, well-built, effortlessly cool friend, would have drawn attention anywhere else but Camden.
Fred trod heavily. He needed the dragons to believe that he had accepted his fate, but his heart soared at the thought of finally facing his father.
Two hundred years of acquiescence, and now, finally, he would fight back.
He kept his eyes on the ground, determined not to let his confidence and eagerness be his undoing.
“I can’t wait to see your palace,” Shandy giggled. “I never thought I’d actually get to visit. Oh Fred! I’m so excited!”
Fred grunted in response. They had agreed that it would make more sense to let Shandy play the ditzy, over-excited tourist role than have her walk along in silence. But equally, when Fred continued to refuse to respond, she eventually fell silent too.
When they finally reached the bottom of the steps, Dina was ready waiting for them, sitting on the stairs, her wings spread wide as if there was nothing to fear from taking her magical form in broad daylight.
“So you made it then?” she scoffed. “All those protection spells on The Rock Tavern and you just walk on up like you’re checking in for a trip to Ibiza?”
“I didn’t trust you not to murder us in our sleep,” Bob answered, with a no-nonsense glare.
“Suit yourselves! At least Little Miss Sunshine here is in a good mood,” Dina added, smirking.
Shandy bounced up the stairs.
“This is incredible,” she cooed, rushing ahead. “All this gold and these sculptures! It’s like stepping into a story book!”
“Says the woman who works for an elf,” Dina scoffed.
Shandy’s bubbly exuberance and Dina’s haughty aloofness stirred feelings in Fred even now. He was happy to bask in Shandy’s cotton-candy love, but there was something about Dina that still called to him too. He shook his head to clear his mind, then turned to Bob and Chester.
“You two okay?” he asked.
“Let’s get this over and done with,” Bob answered, grimly, while Chester merely nodded.
“It’s like Spirited Away!” Shandy gasped as they reached the elevator, making Dina roll her eyes.
“Well, don’t expect any of the dragons here to save you! I don’t know what they’ve brought you along for anyway!”
“I’m going home with Fred, aren’t I Fred?” Shandy said, waiting for Fred to catch up and latching onto his arm again. “He won’t leave without me, will you, Fred?”
“Ugh!” Dina shuddered. “How do you put up with that saccharine sweetness? How could a man of your age and experience opt for that?” She grimaced.
“Jealousy’s so ugly,” Bob chipped in. “I can’t see what you saw in her, Fred. Hopefully you’ll learn to keep your fingers to yourself in future!”
Fred grunted again, but smirked on the inside. He couldn’t see himself actually passing up pussy in the future, but Bob being Bob, even in a moment like this, cheered him.
Shandy’s incessant cheerfulness finally stilled when Dina opened the doors to the throne room and her mouth dropped open.
Foxy and Cara were suspended from the ceiling, bound together back to back.
Foxy was in her half-way form, with her human breasts bulging out through the ropes, her foxy tail poking out between them, and pointed, foxy ears turning eagerly to listen to their arrival.
Cara’s head hung down as they walked in, but as Shandy ran towards her, her head shot up.
“Cara! Cara! What have they done to you?” Shandy wailed, her pretence at naive excitement instantly dropped. “How could you?” she hissed, her eyes ablaze with anger.
The Dragon Lord’s laughter filled their ears once again.
“Charming!” he chortled. “Have you brought another treasure for my collection?”
“Don’t touch her!” Fred ordered. “She’s coming back with me.”
“We’ll see about that,” the Dragon Lord answered. “Let me open the portal to your father.”
Again, with a swish of his tail, Fred’s father appeared.
“So you’ve decided to come home then?” his father asked. “I knew you’d come to your senses.”
His father’s smug, confident smile made Fred’s chest lurch with disgust. He took a few paces forward, to join Shandy, letting Chester collect the suitcases he left behind.
“As I said before, there are conditions,” Fred answered. “Shandy and Cara are coming with me or I’m not leaving at all!”
Fred’s father rested his head on his hand and shook it gently.
“Fred, Fred, Fred, Fred, Fred…” he sighed. “If you intend to take my place you will have to learn to think with your mind. A cock can’t rule a country. And you can’t bring two women home and expect everyone to be okay with it! What would your mother say?”
“I don’t care what anyone says, and my connection with both of them is so much more than sex.
Until the dragons used their magic to break it, Cara and I had the strongest psychic link you can imagine.
When she was in danger, I felt it run right through my body.
In two hundred years I had never felt anything close. I am never going to let that go!”
“Just bring Cara then!” the elven King said, spreading his arms wide in a gesture of magnanimous acceptance. “Any offspring she gives you will probably die before you even take the throne, and then you can take your pick of the elvish nobility to continue our line!”
“She’s mostly elf now,” Fred returned. “Something magical happened when I fucked her and her humanity is wound round with Elven blood. For all I know she will live into her hundreds too.”
“Is this true?” Fred’s dad asked, looking around at the Dragon Lord, and Bob, both of whom he clearly trusted more than his own son.
“It seems so,” Bob answered. “I have no idea how it worked, but when your son fucked Cara and Shandy they both absorbed his Elvish powers, AND some draconic powers for good measure, thanks to a short dalliance with Dina here.”
“Both of these girls have his powers now? What? Has he lost them? Transferred them to these unworthy vessels?” The King’s rage bubbled to the surface, his nostrils flaring. “Will you return to me a worthless, lovesick weakling?”
“Ha!” Fred spat out. “You’d like that wouldn’t you? You’d like to think I was finally worthy of the distaste you’ve always had for me. In fact, the girls have made me more powerful, too powerful. Thanks to them, you will never contain me!”
Fred felt a rush of power streaming through him, shooting up through the ground and pulsing through his whole body. He closed his eyes a moment, and felt his future sight engage.
When he opened his eyes, he watched the unfolding scene in slow motion, as if his future sight had received a sudden, and highly effective, upgrade. His father had risen to his feet and was roaring “Gggguuuuuuaaaaarrrrrrddddsss!”
Fred looked around him. The guards were not throwing themselves at him as they had before.
They had learnt their lesson. While he and his supporters had been plotting in the Rock Tavern, the Dragon Lord clearly had too.
Dragons dropped in slow motion from the rafters, others fell to the ground, and some stood still, but they all opened their mouths wide.
Fred flinched, expecting fire, even though he knew he was not really in this moment. Not yet. Instead, smoke billowed from the dragon men’s mouths, rapidly filling the lungs of each hapless humanoid.
He watched as Bob, Chester and Shandy fell to their knees and then slumped on the ground. His heart pounded. There was no time to react. If he returned to the point where his future sight had started, it would be far too late to prevent this from happening. There was no saving any of them now.
He had felt so confident, so sure that he could defeat his father and save the girls somehow, and now grief and his loss of hope came crashing in on him.
Nothing has changed, even though I have changed, he thought. This was all pointless.
To his surprise he felt his fists clench and his brow furrow…
which shouldn’t have been possible while using future sight.
In fact, how was his heart even pounding?
His body should be back in a different time from his mind, so how could he feel these things so physically?
A glimmer of hope ran through his mind and right round his body.
Just as rapidly as it had appeared, the smoke cleared, seemingly sucked back into the lungs of the dragons.
The order from his father that had triggered the attack was swallowed back into his mouth too.
The conversation preceding it, his fathers insults, his demands, it all played backwards until he was back to the moment when Shandy had run over to where Cara and Foxy were suspended from the ceiling.
Now there was time. Now something could be done. It would still have to be done fast, but Fred could feel so much energy flooding through him that optimism seeped back in too.
His mind raced. He felt calculations of distance, speed and force falling into place around him. There was Cara. There was Shandy. There was freedom.
Yet still time stood still! Fred had only played with psychic links before, but with this newfound, magical strength, he sent his thoughts out into Shandy, Bob and Chester’s minds, confident they would hear them.
Listen carefully! I tried talking to them, but they never intended to negotiate.
They’re about to smoke out the room! Chester and Bob - send out those weapons as planned.
Shandy, leave Cara and Foxy to me, and fire straight up!
There are dragons waiting in the rafters who will swoop down to smoke us out the very second they sense trouble.
With a flash, he was back in the moment.
He ripped the portal pill from his wrist, where Bob had ingeniously bound it, with his teeth, and pushed it to the roof of his mouth with his tongue.
Out of the corner of his eye he saw Chester and Bob reach for a suitcase each, just as planned.
They ripped the suitcases open, sweeping the contents towards the many Dragon Warriors lining each side of the hall.
Magic-infused tennis balls, ball-bearings and marbles scattered and skittered across the ice-smooth floor, immobilising each soldier they made contact with, as the magic liquified whatever body part it touched.
Chester and Bob took a side of the room each, and sent stunning blasts of magic at any soldiers who had been missed by their bouncing, hectic, rolling missiles.
Shandy raised her hands to the sky. As the predicted dragons began to descend, her magic was already streaming from her fingers.
When it made contact with their wings, they froze a moment in midair, before whole sections of their wings came undone, sending them plummeting to the ground.
Fred bounded towards her, sweeping her up and tucking her under one arm, just as he had that day at the pill box, but she still kept firing.
He leapt into the air, simultaneously swinging from, and destroying, the chain that held Foxy and Cara aloft.
Now he had Foxy and Cara bundled under one arm and Shandy under the other.
Just as he had calculated in the moments before time turned back on again, swinging from the captive girls’ chain landed him with a foot straight in the Dragon Lord’s face, and he heard the satisfying squelch of his bulbous, amber eyeball as it caved-in under their combined weight.
His momentum carried him forward and he pushed up to launch himself through the stained-glass window, holding the three girls tight against him.
He gulped down the pill, tucking in his head and shoulders so that the four of them were sent spinning through the resulting portal.
The last Fred saw of London was Dina’s screaming face, right in the middle of the closing portal.
So much for freedom! Fred thought, as her fiery eyes disappeared from sight. Hopefully this portal takes me to understanding!