Shana Abe - The Sweetest Dark

“See those?” Armand gestured to the clouds, sloshing some of the champagne out into the channel.

I nodded.

“And see all the boats still docked? Even the fishing boats?”

I nodded again, uneasy.

“I believe it might rain,” he said.

I had to keep a hand on my hat; all my pins were giving. “Why are we still heading out?”

“Oh, because it’s such ripping good fun.” He took a long gulp of champagne. “Being trapped at sea during a gale because Reggie wants to. What could be better?”

“Armand—”

“Don’t worry. If we sink, we’ll swim back together to shore. We’ll use your bewitching chapeau as a float.”

The nose of the yacht dipped hard, then rose. The wind began a low howl around us.

“I’m not blotto,” he said, in response to my expression. He turned to the railing and chucked the empty flute to the waves. “Not yet, in any case.”

I went to stand beside him. The flute had sunk beneath the surface already, on its way to an eternity of sand and tide.

“That’s good. Because I can’t swim.”

“Why did you go swimming in the grotto, then,” he asked too pleasantly, “if you can’t swim?”

“I wasn’t swimming there. I was smoke, at the ceiling, when you came in. Falling into the water was an accident.”

“You’re welcome,” Armand said.

I refused to ask for what. We both knew.

The clouds built. The yacht nudged farther into the sweep of blue.

“Jesse thought you might have questions,” I said at last.

His smile came sardonic. “Jesse.”

“He thought you might like asking me better than him.”

“Why does he call you Lora?”

I hadn’t expected that, and angled a glance up at him. He was facing the distance still, his profile sharp, his jaw set. The color of his irises exactly matched the far waters.

“It’s just my name.”

“Not the way I heard it.”

I pulled at some loose hair that had blown into my lashes, nettled. “Is that really what you want to know?”

“No, not really. I want to know if you’ve slept with him.”

Oh, if I could be any girl but me. A thousand responses flitted through me, a thousand different things to say, ways to behave. And from the thousand, all I could capture was:

“Why?”

He faced me. He said nothing.

I found, to my dismay, that I could not hold that burning look. I ducked my head and began to remove my hatpins, and when I finally spoke, I made certain my words remained beneath the wind.

“Did you locate Rue?”

“There was no marchioness named Rue listed anywhere in the history of the peerage,” he said tonelessly. “There was no name that even sounded like that.”

Without my hat on, the world seemed abruptly much brighter, and much louder, too. I took hold of one of the brass-fire rails as the yacht gave another dip.

“Have you ever wondered,” Armand said, “if anything around you is really real? What if it’s all made up? What if all this is just my mind playing tricks? Dragons and smoke and bloody gold stars. What if you’re an illusion, Eleanore? Wishful thinking?”

I couldn’t help my laugh. “Do you truly suppose you’d wish for me?”

His lips tightened. He shook his head, squinting out, and I knew I’d said the wrong thing. His knuckles had gone white on the railing.

“I want to show you something.” Still clutching my hat and pins, I pushed back the cuff of my sleeve, lifted my arm before him so that my wrist showed. “Do you see that? That scar?”

Armand tossed the other champagne glass overboard—it whistled end over end before making its splash—then used both hands to bring my arm closer. “No … wait. Yes.” He looked up. “What’s it from?”

I said, very steady, “That’s what happens when you tell other people about the foolish things that live in your head. When you begin to wonder aloud about illusions and reality to those around you, when you have none of the power and they have it all. You become dangerous to them. You’re a threat, even if you’re only a child. We hear the songs. They don’t. But they’re right and we’re wrong, and when they strap you into the electrical-shock machine, they use these leather restraints, see, and they strap you in hard because they know that when the lightning shoots through your body, you’re going to buck and scream. So they gag you, a special gag so you don’t bite off your tongue. And you jolt against the board, and the leather binding your wrists and ankles cuts into you until it’s actually red with blood. Red red, always stiff. And that is why, Armand, you should shut the hell up about the nature of illusions. Forever.”

His face had gone, if possible, even paler than before. There was none of the horror I’d expected to see; I’d been trying to provoke it, because horror was more tolerable than compassion. But, once again, Armand did the unexpected. He bent his head and pressed his lips to the inside of my wrist, right up against the scar and my hammering pulse.

My fingers opened. The pins clattered to the deck and my hat floated free. Out to sea.

“I hope the Germans get them,” I said. “I hope they blow that place to hell along with everyone in it.”

“I hope it, too,” he said.

...

The rains did catch up with us, but not before a group of the linen gentlemen had a chance to cast their lines off the back of the yacht. That was about all they did with them, too. They stood in the shade with their drinks and laughed and told jokes while three of the servants sweated and baited the hooks and minded the nets and everything else, calling, “Here, sir, if you please,” should any of the strings hitch.

Then the gentleman in question would come up, grab the pole, and reel in his fish. Easy as pie—for them, at least.

The sky began to lower upon us. The clouds simmered black and grim. From a place that seemed not all that remote, lightning flashed and the thunder that accompanied it rolled in a deafening boom! across the waves.

The yacht started turning about. Everyone was packing it in, but then one of the lines snapped hard, lifting up from its dragging angle.

“Sir! Sir!” summoned the servant, and a man bustled up to take over the rod.

He couldn’t spin the reel against it, whatever it was. Even with the manservant struggling to help, it wasn’t working. In the white wake of the boat, the creature fought ferociously for its life, thrashing and twisting, trying to break free.

It took three men and a brace to reel it in. Two men to net it. There were cries of excitement and hands thumping backs in congratulations, and all the cheery fellows shouting, “A shark! A shark, by gad!” as it spasmed on the deck and gradually bled to death in the confusion of netting. Before it was completely lifeless, they hoisted it up by its tail on a hook and let it hang upside down while they all postured by it, still grinning.

I stood far back from the commotion; Armand had become swallowed in the crowd. I don’t know how, I don’t even know if it was true, but I felt that shark’s dying gaze, its cold flat eye fixed on me.

I couldn’t look away from it, all the blood and silver skin. An unspeakable thought had entered my mind and it would not leave.

This is what they do to monsters. This is what they’d do to me.

Try thinking about something else after witnessing that.

I couldn’t.

We’d landed back at the wharf in the pouring rain. I’d been driven back to Iverson in the pouring rain. I’d dragged myself out of the motorcar, along the driveway, wrenched open the castle doors, all through the pouring rain, and all I could see the entire time was the gasping death of that fish.

I’d bet that someone was eating it by now. I’d bet they sautéed it in chunks. Chopped off its fins, stewed its head. Tossed its guts to the cats. Hacked free its jaws to mount on a wall, good for drunken reminiscences for years to come.

I buried my face in my pillow. A scream was building within me, but instead of freeing it I dug my fingers into the sheets and pushed it lower and lower into my chest, until it came out as a rasping moan.

Why did you think there aren’t any dragons around anymore? whispered a voice inside me—not the old voice, the familiar fiend, but one of plain ordinary common sense. What did you think happened to them? That they all died off of old age?

I hadn’t thought of it. I hadn’t considered it once, to be honest.

But the history of Europe had always included dragons. And knights. And lances. And lots and lots of stabbings through hearts.

I remembered what Rue had written about a drákon council and their rules about secrecy. Despite her obvious disdain for them, perhaps those rules had worked somewhere. Perhaps somewhere what was left of her tribe still existed, huddled and human-looking, like me.

But in a bottomless-pit-fearful part of me, I knew it wasn’t true.

Don’t worry about it. You’re not really even a dragon, are you? All you are is a girl who’s sometimes smoke. No one’s going to stab that.

I sat up. I dragged the pillow to my lap and bit my lip and stared hard into the darkness of my room. I hadn’t lit my lamp or candles.

Rain pelted the diamond window.

Just a girl. Just smoke.

It pelted my hands, then my arms as I opened the hinge.

Just an orphan. Just a guttersnipe. A nobody.

“No,” I said out loud. “I’m a dragon.”

For the second time ever, I Turned in the tower and flowed out the window, but I wasn’t headed for the stars or even Jesse’s cottage. I was going to the far woods, the ones that ended at the cliffs overlooking the sea, where no one lived, and no one worked, and no one would be.

Raindrops shot through me, but they didn’t hurt. I might well have been part of the mist that curled up from the ferns and grass, that reached wraithlike arms up through the boughs. I skimmed lower and lower until I was the same, except that the mist was wet and I was not. Smoke is always dry.

I didn’t really choose a place to Turn back. I was simply going until I wasn’t any longer, vapor until I wasn’t, and then I was standing in a small clearing. I was skin now. Definitely getting wet.

I looked up, blinking at the sting of the shower. I took in the clouds and the black crowns of trees encircling me, so much taller than I was. Branches shivered; water plopped to peat. Drenched bark gave off the scent of pungent wet wood. Mud and grass squelched soft between my toes.

I stretched my arms above my head. I tipped back my face to the elements and opened my mouth to drink in the storm.

Now, I thought, washed clean and cold. I’m ready now.

Since it was true, it happened.

Smoke came first, but only for a wink of a second, too quick for me to register anything like disappointment. Then smoke transformed into solid shape, and it was not my human one.

I was still standing in the clearing in the grass-threaded mud. Yet I was on four legs, not two. I blinked again at the rain beginning to bead upon my lashes, which had gone thick and were faintly shining. Looking around the clearing, I could tell that I stood higher up than before. Much higher. My neck was slender and long and I could bend it nearly all the way about to take in my body: also slender, also shining.

I was a dragon of gold, as if Jesse had touched me and transmuted me but not taken my life. I was sinuous and covered in lustrous golden scales, all the way almost to the tip of my tail, until they faded into purple.

I had a mane, too, mapping a line down my back. It looked like a ruff of silk or cut velvet. I folded my neck around almost double so that I could rub my chin on it. Silken, yes, but also jagged. Combing my chin through it sent quivers of pleasure down my spine.

Then I saw my wings. They were folded against my back, metallic. Without knowing how I did it, I opened them, using muscles I didn’t even have as a person. The ache of moving them for the first time felt delicious; I did it again to fully bask in it.

I had wings.

I don’t know how to describe what I felt then. I was amazed and afraid and boiling feral inside. I slashed my tail through the rain and realized that it was barbed only when I hit an oak tree and got stuck.

No problem. I pulled it out and danced around, delighted at the fresh, gaping hole in the trunk.