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No matter how many times I told Urram that, as a parrot, he shouldn’t be eating bowl after bowl of red meat, he wouldn’t listen to me.
He refused his chop – tossing the silverware across my kitchen and sending a spray of green things through the air.
Then, he stood at the edge of my kitchen-counter and screamed, all hours of the day, until I opened the freezer and let him have his pick of bloody things.
After a while, I stopped trying to warn him. He was a dragon, not a child, and as such could make those decisions for himself. He was a couple millennia old – if not older – and I had better things to do than to argue with him at five-a.m. every morning over a drumstick.
Which meant that Urram regularly got sick. It took everything in me on those days to resort from scoffing at him and telling him I told you so.
Most of the time, it fell on Saturday mornings. That was only because on Friday nights I aimed to drink as much red wine as I could, until I was sure my blood was the very colour of plum, and in the process Urram would sneak to the freezer and prove that he had learned how to open it himself.
For the first time, though, Urram got sick on a Wednesday. Smack in the middle of winter.
The brief drive through the countryside without him perched on my dash, smashing his beak against the console to the beat of the radio, had filled me with such an eerie loneliness that I almost contemplated driving back home and calling in sick.
But I promised myself when I left Saoghal that I would not let my mind dive so quickly into the depths.
Just as Killian had once told me – one had to want to see the good.
There wasn’t a day that went by where I didn’t aim to live by that little mantra.
So after my car creaked to a stop in front of the clinic, my breath sending wisps of frigid, moist air into the sky, I wrapped my coat tighter around my body and slid into the building.
~
The workday was filled with the same-old, same-old.
Two neuters on dogs, one neuter on a cat that scratched me five times while trying to take bloods.
Then there was a hip-dysplasia assessment of an elderly dog, whichI definitely took longer than I should have simply because I wanted to bask in his simple joy.
After Tank came a young puppy with an ear-infection, the very thing that reminded me to grab some medication for Urram in order to stop his whiney screeching that I knew awaited me at home.
And that brought me to just past lunch-time. The clinic was busy, operating at a fast-pace that kept my mind occupied most hours.
Lunch-time was where the shadows crept in, where phantom hands reached for my body and tried to lure me back into the darkness of a deep depression.
Which was all to say – lunch-time was when I saw Raegan the most. Today, I saw his reflection in the microwave as I popped it open to slide my lunch into.
Then I saw his eyes in the ripple of water that I used to wash my hands.
Last was the faintest brush of his fingers over my chin when my colleague opened the lunch-room door and sent a breeze across the space.
My appointment after lunch was a young cat who I had spayed a few weeks prior. Her stitches had not yet broken down and the beginning of an infection was starting to rear its ugly head.
So I stood at the front counter, listening to the five receptionists as they boomed their voices down phones, across the waiting room, and down the length of the hallway that led to surgery.
I stood there, staring at them, yet my mind was far away.
I was in the depths of a moist, rotten cave on the edge of Cluaineach, my hands pressed over the oozing wound of a carmine dragon, my eyes on the broken ones of a prince.
“Olivia?” One of the receptionists, Carly, snapped at me. I whirled my focus back between my eyes and spun to face her.
There was very little to like about Carly. She was a phenomenal worker and the reason the clinic operated at a smoothness unknown to most in the industry. But, damn, she was a cow.
“What?” I snapped. It wasn’t like me to have outbursts, but every time I was torn away from those faint tickles of memory, I couldn’t help but feel like someone other than myself.
“I said your next patient is here,” she snarled, turning her focus back to the phone pressed between her cheek and shoulder, pen in hand as she began to scribble.
There were times in my life when everything around me simply froze. As if the world wanted me to listen, to pay attention, to focus on nothing else but what it was showing me.
This was one of those times.
Frowning at my patient being ten minutes early, I lifted my eyes from the scrunched face of Carly and whipped them around the waiting area. In reality, I didn’t need to do such a large sweep of the space. My eyes zoned in on him immediately.
For the first time, there was no doubt in my mind that this was real. There was no hallucination, no faint flash of a memory of Saoghal. No – what I was looking at was real.
Which is why I suddenly turned on my heel, sprinted down the hallway, and yanked at the fire-alarm.
Chaos erupted across the clinic – an array of shouting and screaming and hollering that only proved we didn’t do fire-drills nearly often enough.
Bodies tripped over bodies as both staff and patients eagerly clawed their way out of the clinic.
Before long, I was left in nothing but the ghostly silence of the waiting room. And him.
“What… What are you doing here?” I hissed, grabbing on to the nearest weapon I could manage: a pen in one hand, a scalpel in the other.
At first, he said nothing. Only craned his head to the side.
“I said, what are you doing here?” This time, I accentuated my point with a jab in the air with the scalpel.
“Easy,” he muttered, his face mostly covered with a large, dark hood. That black material spread down him, shaping itself into a cloak that left very little of his body on show.
It was… human. Everything about what he was wearing was human. Sneakers poking out of the cloak, bleach-splashed jeans beneath the material, and the faint outline of a dark hoodie.
Lifting both hands out in front of him, trying to show me he meant no harm, he slowly began to slide that hood down from his face.
At first it was the vibrant, lavender hair that nearly knocked me to my knees.
A hue so violently unnatural, yet sprouted from his head and took form around his pastel-tinted skin as if it was the most natural thing in the world.
Then came those eyes of amethyst; a petrified, fear-striking colour that homed in on me as he blinked many, many times.
The last time I saw Rory he had shot an arrow and killed Niamh, before accidentally revealing himself to me as the traitor of Saoghal – the one that had sold out Raegan’s plans to the Rachainn. He was the reason they Rachainn managed to sneak into Choilltean and kill the King.
I didn’t drop the scalpel, or the pen. If anything, I affirmed my grip on them.
“Take it easy, Olivia,” Rory said, his eyes full of softness as they flicked between my face and my hands. My hands, which were shaking, yet he still pretended to be concerned about my intention. In reality, we both knew that I had no chance if he decided to attack me. But he pretended anyway.
It was hard to see him like that. To see Rory as I had known Rory – as a friend, gentle and kind, caring and charming.
I hadn’t let myself think of him since I saw his razed-ears, the proof of his conversion into a Rachainn, proof of his desire to bring desolation to Saoghal.
I wanted to look at Rory and see the enemy, see someone that I might have been capable of fighting if I needed to.
But I didn’t – I looked at Rory and saw an old friend.
“What are you doing here, Rory?” I snarled once more.
“I’ve been… trying to speak to you for almost a year,” he sighed. “But I couldn’t. Not with that dragon around–”
Urram.
My heart beat more violently in my chest. What could Rory have wanted with me that he couldn’t appear in front of Urram?
The one time my protector – my caraid – was not at my side, and Rory leapt at the occasion.
I stared at him, the fire-alarms still blaring overhead, the red-and-white lights flashing across the clinic and contrasting his purple aura.
“What do you want, Rory–”
“Saoghal,” he breathed, his eyes full of desperation as he dared a step towards me. “Saoghal is in grave danger, Olivia.”