Burn(62)

My goodness, she felt fine.

She rested in a field, though rested wasn’t the right word. There was so much energy coursing through her that she found it impossible to stay still. She veritably romped through the snow, digging deep divots with her three legs, still holding her left foreleg up.

But then, why? She stretched it out in front of her. It felt good. It felt more than good. The energy that buzzed through her buzzed down it as well. She placed it on the ground, slowly settling her weight onto it.

It held. Without pain. It was already healed. In only a few hours, it was already healed.

Dragons were even more magnificent than she had ever suspected. She dug through the frozen ground with it, gripping a clump of sod in her claw and throwing it to the side. It flew a hundred feet easily.

She raised her long neck, blew out a stream of fire just for the hell of it and roared so loud it echoed down the canyons of the mountain. She lifted her body up into the sky again against the flow of snowflakes. The winds were tougher here, whipping down the glacier, but she navigated them easily, making the elements accommodate her rather than the other way around.

She found the lodge unexpectedly. She had smelled humans in the area, isolated, distant, and there was a small town a few miles further down the mountainside where a couple hundred humans made the most unexpected stench in her nostrils. But the lodge was just suddenly there, in a steep field among some trees.

She landed in front of it.

She smelled the man inside.

The wind had been blowing away from it, was the only explanation she could find, because his smell was there now, filling her nose like a living perfume. Then it changed, became charged with a tang, a metallic base note. Fear. That’s what it was, she realized. He had seen her, peeking out one of the rudimentary windows on either side of the front door.

The man must have just arrived; he didn’t even have a fire going. Yes, there they were, his footprints through the snow, fresh. He had come to hunt the deer she had done exceptionally well in eating or chasing away.

Poor man. She almost felt sorry for him. He would find only surprising quarry here.

She moved closer to the front door, unsure of her motives, but then she reached out the four-fingered claw and, amusing herself deeply, she simply knocked.

The man burst out the door shouting, holding a rifle, screaming at her as he aimed it. She ate him in one gulp, the rifle going off in her throat, though it felt like little more than the scratch of an under-chewed potato chip.

She flapped her great wings, filled her great lungs, and blew fire hotter than lava onto the lodge. It didn’t so much burn as disintegrate, blasting in blazing pieces into the forest behind it, catching a few trees but mostly doused by the snow.

I have just eaten a man, she thought to herself, finding no way of putting it that didn’t sound filthy. She laughed again, almost light-headed. Still the energy coursed in her. This learning of herself, this leaping of taboos—sure, she had killed before, but she had never consumed—was dizzying.

Why didn’t dragons rule the earth she had come from? Why had they put up with their exile to the Wastes for generation upon generation? How could they live day by day with this, this power, and not use it?

Because men and dragons had made an accommodation. A wicked one that made her angry even now.

She turned in the field and looked in the direction where she had smelled the distant town.

A child saw her coming. A child who should have been asleep, but who had grown bored of the long, cold nights that were only just starting to shorten. A child with a father who was pretty strict about bedtimes for eight-year-olds, but who wasn’t so strict if she wanted to sneak a book under the covers by the old army flashlight he’d given her from his days back in the war.

She was reading Little House in the Big Woods. “You should feel right at home with it,” her father had said, ruffling her hair as she opened it at Christmas. It was the first in a boxed set of books, and by now—early February—she’d already read the whole thing through, including the ones at the end that got stranger and angrier and less good. Her favorite was called The Long Winter, which made the winters here in this mountain town seem even more disappointing because no one ever got trapped inside anywhere. There was always Mr. Bagshot with his plow to get you out before snow even reached your windows.

But for now, she was back to the beginning, having finished These Happy Golden Years just last weekend. Her father had turned out her light promptly at 8:30 (which was late, she knew from her friends in the third grade, so she tried very hard not to moan about it), and she had promptly turned on his flashlight at 8:31. She opened the cover, found her name written there in her father’s hand—her father had told her her mother was on a long trip visiting family in Florida; she’d heard the real story from Mr. Bagshot’s daughter Janet, who no one really liked—and turned to the first chapter.

She hadn’t even read the first sentence when a movement at the window, up the white of the mountain—it was never truly dark with this much snow around—caught her eye. The clouds were low. She shouldn’t have seen a bird flying, not this late, not in winter, and if it was a plane, it must be in trouble—

It wasn’t a plane. Some kind of bat? She got out of bed, still holding her book, and went over to the window. They lived outside the center of Pinedale; her father having built this little house himself as a gift to her mother for having a job that took him away so often. It didn’t work. Now it was just her and her father, who didn’t go away all that often anymore.