Dragon Call (15 page)

She hadn’t heard Greg in at least a couple of
minutes and began to wonder whether he’d been caught in the
crossfire between the two territorial dragons. Her fear spiked anew
when Greg screamed. It was a long sound that seemed to go on
forever. Cora tried to calculate her odds of finding some useful
tools in Greg’s bedroom—he was a witch in his own right, after
all—but his anguish dashed all hope that she had any time left.

She scrambled off the floor and stumbled into
the living room, tripping over an accent pillow that had been torn
and hurled to the floor. An enormous antique candlestick soared
past her head as she went down, missing her by mere inches, and she
decided to stay where she was. She found her purse half hidden
beneath the couch and retrieved it, stuffing the tapes inside. As
she did, horrible cold washed over her; her mother. She would
remember the awful feeling of being scryed as long as she lived.
Terrible or not, she closed her eyes a moment to say a silent
thanks for her mother’s watchfulness. Knowing Miranda could see her
and report back to Diane, even if neither of them could be with her
in person, made her feel less alone.

Cora peeked around the arm of the sofa.
Greg’s apartment wasn’t a huge space. It was nicely appointed, with
select eccentric accessories—the accent pillow, for instance, with
its scarlet tassels, and the tarnished silver candlestick holder
that bounced off the wall and rolled up to her knee—but it wasn’t
huge. Or even big, for that matter. The dragons filled the space
not taken up by furniture, and Greg was small between them where he
lay twisted on the floor.

Salim’s dragon—
Da’ar Es Saleem
—she had
seen before in his full beauty. She had never seen Greg’s, though,
had only felt its phantom touch against her skin, and its massive
presence both times it tore free of Greg. Where Salim’s dragon
glowed with the red beauty of life, Greg’s gleamed a pale ghostly
pearl and gold. The pair were locked in a strange immobile combat.
Neither dragon moved while she watched. They looked as if they were
embracing, and Salim’s dragon had nuzzled its nose up beneath the
white dragon’s head. Their wings were folded around one another in
strange, unexpected peppermint candy striping, albeit nothing so
gentle about them. They looked like art—no, like the wild. They
looked like something raw before an artist had a chance to humanize
it and make it art.

The floor shook even though the dragons
didn’t move. Their combat, Cora surmised, existed on a plane she
couldn’t access. No, she corrected herself. She could feel it, so
she could access it. She only needed to figure out how.

Trembling, she inched closer. The dragons
radiated heat. She marveled that her skin didn’t melt away before
she got close enough to jam her hands beneath Greg’s armpits and
drag him a short distance. Trusting that the red dragon would
shield her from the other, Cora straddled Greg’s waist. His face
was purpling with bruises; blood trickled from the corner of his
mouth. She didn’t care. He was breathing, and that was enough. He
deserved bruises.

She slapped him. “Wake up!”

Greg groaned. Cora snatched a fistful of his
hair and pulled hard, trying to rouse him. “Greg. Wake up. I will
not
feel sorry for you.”

He grunted and flapped a hand at her thigh.
“Stop,” he mumbled.

“Tell me its name,” she said, pinching the
inside of his elbow, hard.

Greg swore, jerking his arm away. “No. It’s
mine.”

“Not anymore.
Tell
me.”

“Weren’t supposed to take
mine
, just
his,” Greg said. His jaw was swelling; the words came out muffled.
Still, Cora heard them.

“That’s what this was. You were telling me
how to summon the dragon so I’d take Salim’s away.
Bastard
.”
She pounded her fists on his chest. Greg coughed and gasped. Cora
shoved herself up, stepped over him, and ran back to the bedroom.
She tore through the drawers of the nightstand, emptying them of
cold medicine and reading glasses, condoms and nail clippers. A
double-headed dildo—lime green latex—gave her pause. She slammed
the drawers back into place and crouched to look under his bed.
Nothing useful; shoes and a dirty balled up sock. Cora sank onto
the bed, remembered the dildo, and jerked up to her feet, thanking
the powers that be that she didn’t sleep with Greg.

Fine. He didn’t have a grimoire. She didn’t
need one. Wanting was the key, if Salim could be believed, and with
the memory of Salim and his dragon still fresh, she
wanted
.
Salim had given her want, and Greg had given her an appreciation of
the value of these two creatures. They were myth and few left to
the world, and she wanted them both in her life—yes, even in her
bed—again.

She concentrated on channeling that want
through her body and into the dragons. Greg’s dragon had been able
to come into her mind, so she pushed to get into his mind as well.
Pain exploded inside her skull as she strained to forge a
telepathic link. Tears leaked down her cheeks, and she had trouble
breathing. It was working, though. She was able to get through. The
dragon roared its rage at her violation, setting her nerves to
vibrating between her ears. The dragon thrust her out, and she had
to do it all over again.

Distantly, she heard Greg shout her name.
Arms wrapped around her waist, but she couldn’t tear herself away
from the spellbinding between herself and the dragon. It came on
too fast. She tried to penetrate, and it flung her away. She
entered some strange state of unreal, and the sequence of events
didn’t make sense—one moment she was a robed woman with a large egg
cradled in her arms, and another she was a naked woman with burning
skin, pulling a man’s burnt body from a fire. She choked on black,
billowing smoke and felt her lungs fill with water in the next
breath, and soon she found herself praying she would black out. She
lost account of the passage of time, became disoriented with
it.

Something shook her away from death, and she
struck out with a fist. Death was nice; it didn’t have that awful
headache, or the noise of fire engines. It didn’t have Greg
screaming or the dragons roaring, or Salim calling her name over
and over again. She gasped for breath, and her lungs burned.

“Salim?” she asked, trying to see through the
smoke. A hand on her head pushed her down low against the
floor.

“I’m here. Stay down where you can breathe,”
he said. She didn’t know how long she’d been unconscious, but
everything looked different—what she could see from her position on
the floor. The apartment was a blazing wreck and the dragons—she
squinted through the smoke, trying to make out details of Salim’s
features. She thought he glowed with a pearl luminescence, but she
could have been hallucinating.

“Wake up,” Salim said roughly, when she tried
to close her eyes to make the glow go away. “You have to walk out
of here. Cora—wake up.”

“I’m tired,” she mumbled. Her throat felt
raw, her eyes sticky.

“You can sleep for a week if you stay awake
now. Come on. Diane’s outside.”

She groaned and tried to roll over, to bury
her face in the accent pillow, but when she drew it up the pillow
flaked into charred ash feathers in her hands. The sight was like a
slap, and she jerked away from Salim, horrified by the inferno
blazing around them.

“We have to go,” she said, and then screamed
it. Salim said something that she couldn’t hear over her own
shrieking and pulled her away from the door when she tried to go
that way.

He held onto her wrist with a vice grip and
bent over something on the floor—Greg’s body. Cora sobbed, pulling
against his hold. She had to get out, and he wouldn’t let her
leave. She tried to grab the candlestick to drive him away, but the
silver seared her fingers. Salim straightened, wrenched her close,
and twisted her arm behind her back.

“Stop,” he commanded, holding her against his
side. “We’re going to walk out of here, but you have to wait and
come with me. And you have to let me get him out of here with us. I
need you to calm down, and count to fifteen out loud, and when
you’re done, we’ll be leaving.”

Shaking and crying, she counted down and
watched Salim haul Greg up over his shoulder. He had to let her go
to accomplish the lift. She considered running, but one look at the
determined set to Salim’s jaw and she decided that he would walk
her out of the fire. She couldn’t stop crying, though, despite her
conviction, and was ashamed of herself when Salim had to lead her
out, sobbing, by the hand.

They passed teams of firefighters in the
stairwell on their way down to the street. Cora tripped over her
own feet several times, trying to take too many stairs at once in
her panic. The fire hadn’t spread to Greg’s shop on the first
level, but the firefighters coming through had knocked over jars of
scented oils. The whole place reeked of clashing florals, spices
and smoke. She and Salim eventually emerged onto the sidewalk,
crowded and chaotic with residents of the building as well as
emergency workers. Diane exploded from the crowd and snatched Cora
into her arms. Salim dropped Greg into the care of paramedics and
pulled her away from Diane despite her sister’s protests.

“You have to go to the hospital,” Salim said,
holding her face between his hands. She couldn’t see his eyes; the
lenses of his glasses reflected fire engine lights. He pitched his
voice low, so nobody else could hear. “But when you’re out, I need
you. We have to talk about what’s happened, and I need your help
with his dragon. And I need you,” he said again. “Promise you’ll
help us.”

Diane hovered nearby. Cora saw her, saw her
mouth form an objection, and saw her silence herself before she
could interrupt. She clutched a leather bound book to her
stomach—all the secrets in the world between its pages, Cora
presumed. She decided she wanted to know what all those secrets
were.

“Don’t say you love me,” she said to Salim,
looking back to him. His face was black with smoke. Hers probably
was, too.

“I don’t need to say it.”

“And don’t say we were meant to be together.”
She coughed on the end of the fierce order, and couldn’t get her
breath again.

Salim steered her toward another EMT and
pushed Diane along as well. “I don’t need to say that, either,” he
said. “Call me.”

She couldn’t manage “I will” around the smoke
trying to evacuate her lungs, and then there was an oxygen mask
hindering her ability to answer anyway.

Chapter Fifteen

Cora spent three hours in the emergency room
waiting area staring at CNN on a small television. She couldn’t
recall a single topic of discussion. Congress’s dry old men didn’t
stand up next to the new issues in
her
life. Her purse, a
fashionable square of wool as red as holly berries, was all hard
edges on her lap; the corners of more than half a dozen cassette
tapes jabbed at the felted matte.

It’d only taken fifteen minutes for her to
match up the dates on the cassettes from Greg’s apartment with the
outgoing call records in her cell phone. Cora didn’t remember
talking to him on any of those occasions; she had no idea what
they’d talked about, either. Somehow, he’d hypnotized her without
her knowledge. That was the only explanation she could dredge up,
the only reason why she would have talked to him on repeated
occasions without remembering them. Despite her insomnia, she had
never resorted to sleeping pills or drinking.

“Violated” was a mild word and didn’t come
close to describing the way she felt. It was too clean, too PG-13.
The correct words didn’t exist in her vocabulary; she couldn’t
articulate the feeling succinctly. Sliced open, skinned, her
private self groped and picked over like so much emotional and
intellectual meat—but only if it stopped at phone calls. What else
didn’t she remember? Had Greg arranged physical encounters that she
didn’t recall?

Diana came back in from her seventh cigarette
since their arrival at the hospital. She wore her hair in a sloppy
ponytail and her makeup, under any other circumstance impeccable,
was smudged and streaked. If Diane looked like hell, Cora couldn’t
imagine what
she
looked like. Grey half moons punctuated her
fingernails, little commas of dead skin and dirt and grime from
rubbing her smoke-stained skin. She wanted a hot shower, and even
considered drug-induced sleep. At the very least, she needed
something for the headache pounding between her ears.

“Still haven’t called you back?” Diane
dropped onto the next chair over. The waiting room furniture was
hard plastic and dreadful, dirty wilted-lemon yellow.

“I’m the least of their worries. I haven’t
died of oxygen deprivation yet, so no hurry to get to me. I think
it’s a game of out-waiting. If they leave me here long enough, I’ll
decide I don’t need treatment and remove myself from the
queue.”

“I’ll see if I can hurry them up.” Diane
started to stand. Cora waved her back down.

“Don’t. I’m not dying. I don’t need oxygen
treatment; I need a shower and some sleep. Let’s just go.”

“The last time I let you do something against
my better judgment, we ended up here.”

“That’s dangerously close to ‘I told you
so.’”

“Well, I
did
suggest just giving Greg
a call instead of going over in person.”

“We’re not discussing Greg right now. And I’m
not going to sit here all night.” Cora stood, pulling her wrinkled
and dirty skirt into place over her stockings, which she discovered
were torn. She’d have to soak in a hot bath to make sure she got
rid of any glass that might have imbedded itself in her skin while
she crawled around on Greg’s carpet.

“You’d better make sure Ma knows it’s your
fault and not mine if you wake up dead.”