Comprehension and fear widened Guan Feng’s eyes, and she jumped to her feet. “I was careful. I didn’t tell anyone where I was going. I swear on my father’s grave.”
“He probably forced Bi Wei to tell him where you were.” I shoved the gun into my pocket, pulled on my jacket, and grabbed the rest of my books. “It’s all right. He would have found us anyway. I’m a little surprised the destruction of Nymphs of Neptune didn’t attract his swarm, but it sounds like he was busy practicing horticulture.”
Lena untwisted her cane into two sharpened swords and strode toward the door.
“How many?”
“Only one. But you might want to make sure you’ve got a change of underwear before you see this thing.”
Alex came around the desk to intercept me. “Isaac, tell your girlfriend she can’t bring weapons into holy-shit-your-spider’s-on-fire!”
I clapped him on the shoulder. “Alex, this would be a very good time for you to go on break. Somewhere else.”
Jeff had joined Lena by the door. Neither one of them moved. Not a good sign.
The scream of tearing metal filled the street, followed by silence. I shoved past Alex toward the back and hurried to see what we were up against.
“All right,” I whispered. “I admit it. I’m impressed.”
I had been expecting to see Harrison, Bi Wei, and the dryad at a minimum, along with his insects. Possibly wendigos as well, depending on whether or not he was ready to announce his presence to the world.
I hadn’t expected a six-legged dragon made of old mining and construction equipment.
The thing was roughly the size of a bus. The yellow legs looked like they had come from mismatched backhoes. The mouth was a pair of toothed bulldozer blades. Heavy steel wings folded over the body to form an additional layer of armor.
The tail was perhaps the most terrifying. Imagine Paul Bunyan’s chainsaw. Disengage the chain and make it prehensile, then start whipping it through the streets of Copper River. As I watched, it peeled the roof from a parked car and gouged brick from the building beyond.
“Go on break,” whispered Alex. “Right.”
“I promise I’ll explain later.” Not that it would matter. If this thing didn’t kill us all, the Porters would be by to erase Alex’s memories, along with everyone else in town. So far, people were keeping off the street, but I saw faces pressed against windows, and at least two phones filming the carnage.
A gun went off from across the road, but the dragon didn’t appear to notice. Standing in the doorway of the barbershop, Lizzie Pascoe raised her hunting rifle to her shoulder and squeezed off another shot.
The dragon was more interested in the library. Thick steel cables flexed and tightened within its body as it charged.
The entire building shook, and a good chunk of the front wall crumbled away. I yanked out my shock-gun, switched it to maximum, and sent lightning crackling into the dragon’s mouth. The attack left a glowing orange patch of metal the size of a dinner plate, but the dragon didn’t even slow down. The tail swiped through the wall, destroying windows, books, and the Back-to-School book display I had spent two hours putting together. Books and debris battered us all, and the shock-gun fell from my hand.
Lena hauled me toward the back of the library. Once there, I snatched The Complete Short Stories of H. G. Wells from my jacket and turned to “The New Accelerator.” I had been meaning to try this story for a while.
I struggled to focus on the words as enormous jaws ripped away part of the roof like it was made of cardboard. I kept remembering the ruins of the MSU library, reduced to a heap of crumbled brick and twisted metal. I was not going to let Harrison’s latest pet do that to my library. I reached into the story and pulled out a small, green phial of thick liquid.
“If Bi Wei and the others are here, they’ll be able to counter any magic you use,” Guan Feng warned.
“Sure,” I said. “If they’re fast enough.”
I transferred Smudge to the drinking fountain where he’d be less likely to set anything alight, then downed the potion and closed my eyes while I waited for the magic to take effect.
The sounds of battle slowed, then died completely. I opened my eyes again and strode carefully past my seemingly-motionless companions, releasing the phial over the trash can on my way out. It hovered in the air, its downward motion invisible to my hyperaccelerated eye.
Beneath the anger and, if I were honest, the overwhelming terror, a part of me was looking forward to this. It was the same part that cheered for every David-and-Goliath tale of underdogs triumphing over impossible odds and unbeatable foes.
It was time to slay a dragon.
17
Plato once said that human beings were created with two heads, four arms, and four legs, until Zeus split them in half. Ever since, humans have spent their lives searching for their other half, the one person who could complete them.
What a narrow-minded, messed-up, asinine system.
Do the math. There are more than seven billion people on this planet. Say you do a lot of traveling, and manage to meet a million of those people in your lifetime. That gives you a mere 1 in 7000 chance of finding “the one.”
Maybe that’s why they created me. To be their other half, the answer to the myth. Easier than scouring the planet for an impossible dream. Easier, too, than learning to set aside the dream and embrace a human being who is as flawed and imperfect as you.
Humans are so obsessed with true love, the perfect relationship. They imagine that one elusive person who fits their quirks and foibles and desires like a puzzle piece. And of course, when a potential mate falls short of that perfection, they reject them. They were too old, too young, too silly, too serious, too fat, too thin. They liked the wrong TV shows. They hated chocolate. They voted for the other guy. They didn’t put the toilet seat down.
They invent a million excuses for rejection, a million ways to find others unattractive. Their skill at seeing ugliness in others is matched only by their ability to see it in the mirror, to punish themselves for every imagined flaw. No matter who I’ve become, I never understood that facet of humanity.
I remember when Isaac introduced me to Doctor Who. In one episode, the Doctor met a man who said he wasn’t important. The Doctor replied, “I’ve never met anyone who wasn’t important before.”
I’ve never met anyone who wasn’t beautiful. People have simply forgotten how to see.
Frank Dearing was a selfish, petty, controlling bastard, but when he was working in the field, the hard muscles of his body shining with sweat as he coaxed life from the dirt…the man was an asshole, but he was a hot asshole.
Nidhi Shah was softer. She dressed to minimize the physical. Age and stress had mapped faint lines onto her face. And she was gorgeous. Even before you stripped off her clothes and kissed your way down her neck…
Then there was Isaac Vainio, a skinny geek of a man who lugged his pet spider around everywhere he went. But he had such passion, such raw joy and excitement. That passion transformed him into something sexier than any rock star.
The more we narrow the definition of beauty, the more beauty we shut out of our lives.
IT WAS AS IF I had put the entire universe on pause. Time hadn’t stopped; I had simply sped myself up by a factor of a hundred thousand or so. If all went well, I’d have taken care of the dragon before the phial had fallen more than an inch.