Wing Jones(17)

CHAPTER 10


Something is nudging me. No, not nudging me, headbutting me. I open my eyes and gasp.

My lioness is gently pressing her head against mine. Purring as she does. I can feel her hot breath on my cheek.

And I can sense something else behind me. Slowly, so slowly, I turn my head until I’m looking at my dragon. Her eyes are glowing amber almonds, slit pupils, green lightning snaking through the fire. My lioness’s eyes are round and yellow as the sun, with warm brown pupils. She blinks at me and I swear her mouth turns up in a smile.

I sit up and the lioness repositions herself so she is lying under my arm, supporting me, keeping me up. Her purr rumbles through her, warming me. I tentatively rest my palm on her back, feeling her fur, simultaneously coarse and soft, under my fingers.

The dragon is staring at me, and I stare back. She isn’t smiling.

“I haven’t seen you in a long time,” I say. Because I haven’t, not even a shadow or a glimpse, since my daddy died. They were there that first night, and again at his funeral, but they didn’t come this close. They didn’t wake me up in the middle of the night.

My dragon tilts her head and bends her long neck so her face is close to mine. She doesn’t answer, but raises a dragon eyebrow.

I don’t know if it’s the weight of my lioness or the hot breath of my dragon, but I’m suddenly overwhelmed with heat. So hot. The air in the room is so thick and heavy I can taste it.

“Why are you here?” My voice comes out in a ragged whisper, like old cloth being ripped down the middle.

The lioness growls, low in her throat, for just a second, and then pulls away from me. She pads over to the closed door of Marcus’s room.

I shouldn’t be in here, that’s what they’re telling me. I stand up and follow the lioness, feeling the dragon right behind me, hearing her claws crunching into the carpet. I pull open the door as quietly as I can, but still it creaks, the sound screaming in the empty hall. I wait a second, and another, before exhaling.

It’s just as hot out in the hall as it was in my brother’s room. I need air. Fresh air. I can’t breathe. I need to get outside.

It seems my dragon and my lioness have the same idea. The lioness is pacing back and forth next to the front door, and the dragon – she’s too big for our little kitchen – is trying to fold in on herself to make herself smaller but she can’t and that makes me smile because I’m always trying and failing to make myself smaller too.

“Move,” I whisper to the lioness, adding a belated “please” as I tug open the front door. The lioness squeezes past me and dashes down the porch into the street, then rolls around on the asphalt like a kitten.

I look back into the kitchen for the dragon but she isn’t there. She’s already outside.

“If you didn’t need me to open the door in the first place…” I mutter, but it makes me glad to see her outside, stretching her wings, waggling her tail, lengthening her neck. I go to them, wanting to be close to these old friends I haven’t seen in so long.

The night air embraces me, pulling me into itself, and I find myself stretching out my own arms, lengthening my own neck, moving just like my dragon. The sky is endless above me and looks low enough to touch. It looks like it would feel like velvet.

“Why are you here?” I ask again, and in reply the lioness comes over and nudges the back of my knees. My legs are taut and tense and weary, like the rest of me.

I wonder if anyone will wake up and look out their window and see a girl, not just any girl, the sister of the fallen Marcus Jones, out in the middle of the street with only her dragon and her lioness for company.

My dragon starts to flap her wings, the air rushing against me, and rises above me into the low, low sky. I want to join her; I want to fly. To get away. To go somewhere this hasn’t happened. Somewhere safe. Somewhere new.

My lioness nudges me again, her sandpaper tongue brushing against my hand. “You can’t fly,” I murmur, bending down to feel her warm breath against my face. I wrap my arms around her, feeling her strength. Needing her strength.

She responds with a low growl before pulling away from me and crouching low to the ground. She glances at me once, and then she is running, running, running, running, down the street after my dragon. She is beautiful to watch, her body is music in motion, and I feel my own limbs responding, my muscles tensing, wanting to join her. I watch my lioness and my dragon until I can’t see them anymore. Until I’m not sure I ever did see them.

When I slip back inside, the heat in our house is still stifling; I feel like I’m in a coffin. I go back into my brother’s room because there is nowhere else for me to go.





CHAPTER 11


“Wing? Wing!”

I start. I’m lying on Marcus’s bed, over the covers, and sunlight is streaming in through the open window, making the dust in the air shimmer like gold. The pillow is damp beneath my cheek.

“Wing?” My LaoLao is getting louder, which for her means more anxious. She must have gone to my room and seen that I wasn’t there.

I clamber out of my brother’s bed and pull open the door.

“Wing?” LaoLao’s tone is incredulous. She stares at me, her eyes wide and round, her mouth open, the rolls under her chin tucking into her neck. For a moment I think I see a dragon’s tail behind her, but then I blink and it’s gone, and there is only my LaoLao staring at me.