an opioid deal gone wrong. The sirens and the flashing blue lights rushing down the street had woken me up.
Pain gripped my heart like a fist. I couldn’t breathe. I fought hard to keep the darkness that threatened to awaken in my mind, to burst through the locks on the mental vault I had sealed it in, the piles of psychic rubble I had piled on.
I couldn’t think about her couldn’t just couldn’t couldn’t.
Bright beams pierced the darkening evening, sweeping through the air above me like luminous lances. The humming of electric engines subsided; the lights went out. Slamming doors and footsteps. Urgent whispers. The Knights had arrived.
I heard the sounds of heavy objects being unloaded. The vehicles were filled with extra power cells, spools of wire, and home-defense electric prods. Their plan was to cover the lot with a net of charged wires and then wake the sleeping dragons with a few well-placed firecrackers.
The more of those nasty creatures electrocuted, the better, someone had posted in their forum.
Poetic justice to use dragon-generated electricity to kill dragons!
My cousin is a lawyer. He thinks that if we do it this way, we can argue to the judge that the dragons flew into the wires on their own, so it wouldn’t count as assault.
I got up from among the thick grass.
“You can’t do this,” I said. I was so scared and riled up that my body shook as much as my voice.
The startled Knights, lit only by the glow of a distant streetlight, stopped. After some confusion, a man stepped out from the crowd. I recognized him from his picture on the forum: Alexander.
“What are you doing?” he asked.
“Stopping a mistake,” I said.
“The dragons don’t belong here,” he said. He stepped closer so that I could see the grief and rage on his face. “They hurt people. You don’t know.”
“Not these,” I said, struggling to keep my voice calm.
“Yes, these.” I heard the pain in his voice, the helplessness of loss and the inability to explain.
I felt equally helpless. I didn’t know how to describe seeing the dragons forage over a park in late afternoon. I didn’t know how to explain why I felt like smiling and crying when I heard the dragons chirp and cheep at night.
So I picked up the whistle hanging around my neck and blew into it, as hard as I could. It was so loud I thought I was never going to stop hearing it, like the sirens in my nightmares.
Around me, the yard and ruined house disintegrated into a maelstrom. The little dragons, awakened by my shrill whistling, bolted into the air. Wings darkened the stars; claws trampled the grass. A cacophonous chorus joined my whistle, and the pungent smell of wild urine saturated the air.
Moments later, the agitation subsided, almost as quickly as it had begun. The dragons were gone. I took the whistle out of my mouth, sucking in a deep breath. Alexander stood rooted to the spot, looking stunned.
A rustling at my feet. We both looked down.
A creature was struggling among the grass. I knelt down: it was about the size of a puppy, though slenderer and a little longer. A calf-shaped head; a pair of tiny, curved horns; whiskers like those on a Maine lobster; a collar of bright, colorful feathers; silver scales over the back; leathery belly; four clawed, birdlike feet; a long, serpentine tail—it was a mutt, descended from the many dragon species that had followed the people here and adapted to life on this continent.
The batlike wings, however, were torn. It couldn’t take off. Gently, I picked it up and cradled it in my arms like a kitten. It trembled against my skin, a little whirling dynamo.
It opened its eyes hesitantly. They were a bright, shining blue. I shuddered, almost dropping the dragon. That was the last color I wanted to see.
“Drop it!” Alexander shouted. I looked up and saw that he was holding an electric prod, the kind that would kill a home invader in one wallop.
I turned to shield the dragon from him with my back. “Shhhh. It’s okay. I won’t abandon you.”
The little dragon keened like an injured rabbit, a sharp, almost unbearably painful scream. It trembled even harder against my arms. I tried to stroke its back the way I’d pet a cat, the way my mother used to stroke my hair when I was little to get me to sleep. The scales felt warm and soft to the touch, not at all what I expected.
“Listen to that!” said Alexander. He sounded horrified as he raised the prod. “It’s going to breathe fire! You’ve got to drop it now or you’ll die!”
“No! It’s screaming only because you are frightening it.” No one had ever seen the little dragons in our town breathe fire—I was sure they couldn’t. I tried to cover the dragon’s eyes with one hand, hoping to keep it from seeing the approaching Alexander, hoping I wouldn’t lose my courage from that piercing, bright blue.
He stumbled another few steps, looming over me. “You killed Joey! You killed Joey!”
I looked up into his eyes. They were wild, unreasoning, unseeing. Was that how I looked when I woke up from my nightmares and Grandmother had to hold me down?
“No! It didn’t do anything!” I shouted with all my strength. “You got the wrong dragon! The wrong—”
Alexander raised his prod. I had no doubt he was ready to plunge it into me if that was what it took to slay the dragon in his mind.
The dragon lurched in my arms. I strained to hold it down. But the diminutive dragon was too strong for me. With a quick flick of its head, it threw off my covering hand. I felt a sudden wave of heat as I instinctively leaned back. Time seemed to slow down. My vision grew hazy, indistinct.
I saw the dragon’s jaws open. I saw the prod’s tip suspended, barely inches away. I saw the dragon lock eyes with Alexander. Could I interpret what I saw in those bright blue, inhuman orbs?
Then it looked away, as though the threat of imminent death was of no more consequence than the trail of a distant shooting star. The little dragon, moving as ponderously as though it were the Three Gorges, the largest dragon ever verified, gazed up at the stars, and a blinding plume of light and fire shot up and out of the wide-open maw.
It was like watching a flowing river of liquid gold and silver, a kaleidoscope of migrating butterflies, a galaxy of dew-dappled gossamer and pearl-studded tulle unfurling across the heavens. At the apex of the superheated plasmic stream, the cooling flames ramified, arced, took on new colors: September indigo, blood-of-martyrs red, marigold yellow, dragon-whisper blue …
My mouth was agape, an unconscious imitation of the dragon’s jaw. It was the greatest fireworks display I had ever seen.
I was again in the aisles of the art supply store, a girl of six. My mother and I were racing around, laughing, throwing tubes of paint and watercolors into the shopping cart. We didn’t like the names the manufacturer gave to the colors, so we came up with our own. We were going to spend all day doing nothing but painting and being together. We were going to paint the dragon that Grandmother had seen.
“You’ll always be with me, right, Mama?”
“Of course. You’ll never be rid of me, baby drake.”
Tears drowned my eyes; everything was a blur. I had not dared to recall this memory in years.
Next to me, Alexander’s upturned face was bathed in the shifting liquid light of the magnificent display overhead. The prod lay on the ground. “I never imagined …” I heard him mutter. “So this was what you saw …”
The dragon keened again and let forth a new eruption of sparkling, fiery wonder.
Heat