In the Realm of Dragons

Illustration by Darryl Elliott

The bus from Philly to New York was hot as hell. The air conditioning had broken down thirty miles out of the city. Not the best turn of events on a late September day that felt more like high August. Ryan Lundberg sat back limp in his seat without so much as a silent curse to spare for the sweltering air or the stink of urine from the tiny onboard bathroom. He had strength to save, a calling to heed. His eyes closed, dragged down by a weight of scales.

The little clay dragon in his hand smoldered and pulsed with the heat. He held it to his heart and told it to lie cool and still. Time enough for fire when they found Uncle Graham’s murderers. Plenty of time for fire then. He drowsed, lapped in thoughts of flame. He was not even a little startled when his head nodded forward and he felt the sting of spiny barbels as his chin touched his chest.

He had not brought the dragon with him on the bus—he knew that with the same certainty that he knew his own name—yet here it was. Here. Not where his hands had placed it, tucked away safe in his top drawer at school, keeping watch over photographs, condoms, dryer-orphaned socks he never got around to throwing away. He’d found it in his wasn’t-it-empty pocket after the bus left the rest stop on the turnpike. He did not try to understand how it had come to be there; that was to invite madness.

“I just draw the castles,” Uncle Graham used to say. “People who ask me when they can move into them and if the rent includes unicorns, they’re the ones who’ve got problems.” And he would laugh.

Problems… The echo of the long-since spoken word faded into the far-and-far behind Ryan’s eyes. Yeah, Uncle Graham, there’s more than a few of us around with problems now. He flexed his hand and felt claws gouge deep chasms into the cheap plastic armrests. Insanity is not what you see, but what you admit to seeing. The litany he’d composed to hold onto some sliver of control warmed his mind. Craziness is the compulsion to explain. The dragon that’s suddenly, solidly here when I know I never brought—Let it be here unchallenged. And what I feel closing over me… let that come for me unchallenged too. Just accept the apparitions and no one needs to question if I’m numbered among the sane.

You must do more than accept, the thin, sharp voice hissed in his head. If you would have the reward I’ve promised, you know you must do more.

A reward? Ryan repeated, wasting irony on the echoes in his skull. A world!

The key to Uncle Graham’s apartment was also in his pocket, but at least he knew there was no magic connected with its presence. He had taken it himself, stolen it from Mom’s dressing table last night, while she and Dad lay sleeping, after he awoke from the dream. The key had arrived with Uncle Graham’s body, in a small envelope entrusted to the funeral director’s care by his uncle’s landlady. Included with the key was a friendly note urging Ryan’s mother to come to New York as soon as possible to see about the disposal of Uncle Graham’s possessions. That was the word she used: disposal. When Ryan read it, he thought of a hungry hole in the universe, devouring even the memory of a life that had been—honestly, now—an inconvenience and an embarrassment to so many, even to those who owed it love.

Ryan leaned his head against the window, feeling a film of sweat form between flesh and glass. The black kid in the seat ahead of him lost another battle with the window catch and cursed it out with a fluency one of Uncle Graham’s graybeard wizards might have envied, stolen, but never improved. Ryan sighed, a hot gust of breath that only added to the bus’s burden of muggy air.

He hadn’t known deceit could be so exhausting. His parents had no idea where he was, what he intended to do once he got there. They thought he was back at college. The day after Uncle Graham’s funeral, back home in Clayborn, Ryan’s father had put him on the bus almost before it was light. When it reached Philadelphia he had only stayed in the city long enough to get some things from his dorm and give his folks a call to tell them that he had arrived safely. Then he went right back to the terminal and took the next bus to New York.

What would they say if they knew? Mom would have a cat-fit, most likely, and Dad… Dad would look at him that way again. Why does Uncle Graham matter so to you? He’s dead now, safely dead, but you—Why, Ryan? Why care? You’re not—?

And the question, even in thought, would die away, withered by the chill fear Ryan saw in his father’s eyes, the fear should his only son give him the answer he could not stand to hear.

No, Dad, Ryan responded to his father’s phantom face as the heat drank him further into sleep. I’m not, don’t worry, I’m not like him. Remember last year, the time old man Pitt showed up on our porch, mad as hell, yelling for you to keep me off his daughter? God, I don’t think I ever did anything in my life that made you happier, not even the scholarship. Just the hint that I was screwing a girl, some girl, any girl—! He shifted his shoulders against the rough fabric of the seat back. So now is it okay with you if I care about Uncle Graham? If I’m not gay, is it safe for me to love him now that he’s dead?

In his cupped hands, the little clay dragon stretched out a single paw and dug into his flesh with the talons of dreams.

So you’re Ryan. Graham’s told me all about you.

Slim and dark and exotic looking, only just into the beauty of his twenties, Uncle Graham’s lover offered a hand that closed around the little clay dragon and cupped it in transparent flesh long since returned to earth. Through the milky prison of those ghostly fingers, Ryan could still see the dragon swirled roundabout with Christmas snow.

Ryan patted the last handful of snow into the dragon’s side and smoothed it down, embedding jagged holly leaves for teeth, clusters of the bright red berries for eyes. His hands were damp and cold, even through his mittens. Mom was on the porch, holding her sweater tight around her, calling him home. Uncle Graham stood beside her, laughing at what his eleven-year-old nephew had done.

You know, most kids make snowmen.

Ryan shrugged. I like dragons.

Uncle Graham put his arm around Ryan’s shoulders. Watch out, kid. If you’re any good at it, you get to leave this town.

Ryan grinned. Eleven years old, he was just waking up to the possibility that he might want to live out his life somewhere else besides Clayborn.

Christmas in Clayborn. Christmas in a place where there were still things like corner drugstores with real working soda fountains, and big autumn bonfires down by the lakeshore, and pep rallies, and church bake sales where everyone knew how each housewife’s brownies were going to taste even before they bit into one. There were still such things as high school sweethearts here, and special pools of warm, sweet, private darkness, down the shady orchard lanes, between the rolling Pennsylvania farmlands, where a boy could take his best girl and see how far she’d let him go.

And this was where Uncle Graham brought his New York lover. Even without people knowing, Bill would have drawn stares. On Christmas morning he sat right up close beside Uncle Graham, resting his chin on Uncle Graham’s shoulder while the presents were unwrapped, softly exclaiming the proper oohs and aahs of wonder and feigned envy as each gift was brought to hght.

Ryan watched, fascinated. Whatever Mom had said about Uncle Graham’s way of life, the reality was infinitely stranger. He sat on the floor, like Uncle Graham and Bill, and felt as if he were peering through an overgrowth of jungle vines at bizarre creatures never before seen by the eyes of civilized man. Bill’s low laugh sent peculiar chills coursing over Ryan’s bones. His mind blew a glass bell jar over Uncle Graham’s lover and held him there, safely sealed away for observation.

Outside there was snow, crusted over, hugging blue shadows to every curve of the slumbering land. It threw back the brilliant sunlight in harsh assaults of dazzling whiteness. Ryan sat at his father’s feet and looked up to see a taut jawline, a gaze fixed and fastened on Uncle Graham and Bill. Ryan felt his father’s hands come to rest on his shoulders many times that morning—more times than felt right, when right means usual. The sunlight struck a wall of darkness cast by the shadow of the wings that Ryan’s father called up out of empty air to mantle over his son. This is mine; you won’t touch him hung across the room like a fortified castle wall that Ryan’s father made and maintained and walked guard on from that moment until the day Uncle Graham and his lover left to go back to the city.

Ryan’s father was not invisible and Uncle Graham was not blind.

There were no letters from Uncle Graham the rest of the winter, no calls, no more news than if New York were really a cloud kingdom full of so many sweet, glorious pastimes and amusements that the souls lucky enough to live there lost all track of time as it was reckoned on the earth. No one said anything, not even when Ryan’s birthday came and went without a card from Uncle Graham, without a word.

And then, in late November, the telephone shrilled. Ryan answered. “Hello?”

“Chessie?” The voice was broken, shattered, and around the shards it sobbed the nickname Uncle Graham had always used for his beloved sister.

“Uncle Graham?” Ryan’s cheeks flamed. His voice was changing. It was a sharp humiliation every time someone mistook him for his mother on the telephone. “It’s me, Ryan.”

“For God’s sakes, Ryan, get your mom!” Uncle Graham’s words stumbled through tears, his breath rags of sound torn out of his chest.

“What’s the matter?”

“Just get her. Please.”

So Ryan did as he was told, and when his mother got over the surprise of hearing from her brother after so long, there was worse to come. “How are you?” was slashed off into, “Oh, my God! Oh, Graham, I’m so sorry! When did he—?”

The little dragon shuddered in Ryan’s hand, breaking the spell. His mother’s face froze, then crackled into void, the shattering of ice over black water. Bill’s death seized Ryan and roughly shoved him from the haven of his home, sending him lurching forward through the gateway of the hours, bright and dark. Bill’s hand faded from ghostly essence to purest air, a cool breath across hot clay that shivered like an egg about to bring forth monsters, mysteries. Ryan’s eyelids fluttered, but when he shifted his weight again, instead of the rasp of cheap seatcovering against his jeans he heard the genteel creak of fine leather as he settled onto the green couch in Uncle Graham’s apartment.

Bill’s funeral was over. Ryan didn’t remember too much about it. Mostly he recalled the hot, angry eyes of hard-faced strangers in black. They scowled at him and Mom and Uncle Graham where the three of them stood huddled together on the far side of the open grave. He never found out who they were. The minister read through the service for the dead and Uncle Graham cried. Ryan saw one of the hot-eyed people—an old woman with blue-rinsed hair—writhe her red mouth around an ugly word before pressing a wadded lace handkerchief to her wrinkled lips and bursting into tears.

Mom drove Uncle Graham back to his place in Manhattan, a downtown loft in what had once been an old factory. It was like having one big room for everything—eating and sleeping and watching TV. The only fully cut-off spaces were the bathroom and the kitchen.

There was also a space where Uncle Graham worked, a drafting board and an easel, the floor beneath both liberally freckled with paint. Some men left Clayborn on their wits, some on their brawn. Uncle Graham had soared free of the town on dreams of fantastic beings given life by brush and pen. The loft walls were hung with Uncle Graham’s paintings, commissioned illustrations for books—wonderful, terrible, entrancing books, the kind of books that people back in Clayborn pronounced cute and bought, if they bought them at all, for their children.

The couch creaked again.

She’s making tea.

Uncle Graham’s ghost sat at the far end of the couch, head cradled back against the butter-soft upholstery, arms outflung, eyes fixed on the ceiling. He had his feet up on a coffee table that looked as if it had calved from a glacier.

“What?” Ryan’s voice barely scaled above a whisper.

“I said your mother’s in the kitchen, making tea.” And Uncle Graham was suddenly no more a ghost than the twelve-year-old self through whose eyes Ryan now saw everything.

“Oh.” Ryan rested his palms on the couch and felt perspiration seep between flesh and leather. They sat there that way for a long time. Ryan heard the shrilling of the kettle and the sound of traffic from outside and the familiar, comforting clanks and clinks of Mom fumbling about in a kitchen not her own. He knew she would sooner die than ask Uncle Graham where he kept things. Dad called it the female equivalent of how a man refuses to ask directions when he’s lost on the road.

“Ryan?” Uncle Graham’s voice came so loud, so abruptly, that Ryan jumped at the sound of his own name. “Come here, Ryan.” Uncle Graham was sitting slumped forward now, his big hands linked and dangling between his knees. Ryan hesitated, fearing the great grief he saw in his uncle’s eyes. Uncle Graham could see only that Ryan remained where he was. “Don’t worry; I won’t touch you,” he said.

Ryan did not move.

“I’m clean, you know,” Uncle Graham said. “Negative. Bill used to make fun of me, call me paranoid, but—” Some phantom sound escaped his chest, laugh or sob or cough quickly forced back down. “Anyway, like I said, I won’t touch you. I promise. Your father wouldn’t like that.”

Suddenly Ryan wore his father’s absence like horns. “ ’Couldn’t get off work to come up here with us for the fun’ral,” he mumbled.

“Of course not.” Uncle Graham was too done out, too indifferent to challenge the he.

Ryan…

Ryan saw the green glow cupped in Uncle Graham’s palm, the sheen of a perfectly applied glaze, the ripple of tiny, incised scales like feathers lying sleek on a bird’s wing. He sidled nearer on the couch, the cushions squeaking and whispering under his thighs. He craned his neck to see what wonder his uncle held out as an offering.

“It’s a dragon,” Uncle Graham said, letting the small clay figurine tumble from his palm. Ryan’s hands shot out automatically, catching it in midair. Uncle Graham laughed. “Nice fielding. You must be a star with the Little League.”

A shrug was Ryan’s answer. He was too busy rolling the dragon from hand to hand, feeling its weight, its slick finish, the cold beauty of its eyes.

“Hematite,” Uncle Graham said, pointing out the gleaming shapes like silvered almonds imbedded beneath the creature’s brow ridges. “It’s supposed to center you, keep you calm, let you see all things with tranquility.” He closed his eyes and passed one hand over his forehead, brushing away a flutter of black wings.

“It’s beautiful,” Ryan said. Here, alone with his uncle, he could say such things. At home, with Dad watching—so closely now, so carefully—he would have limited his comments to “Cool.”

“It’s yours. I made it for—I want you to have it.” He opened his eyes and managed a weak smile. “Late birthday gift. Sorry I missed it.”

“ ’S okay.” Ryan stroked the dragon’s back. The beast was curled in around itself as if for sleep, wings folded back, forepaws demurely resting beneath the barbelled chin. The scaly hps were closed, except where the two most prominent fangs could not possibly be contained. But the eyes were open and saw all.

“Here we are!” Mom burst from the kitchen, triumphant, an assortment of steaming mugs on the tray she carried before her. She sandwiched Ryan in between herself and Uncle Graham, weaving her own spells of strength and militant normalcy from the clatter of teaspoons and the hush of sugar crystals cascading into tea. There were even some cookies on a plate.

“Mom, look what Uncle Graham gave me,” Ryan said, holding out the dragon for inspection. “He made it himself.”

“It’s wonderful, Graham,” Mom said sincerely. “Is this something new for you? Are you branching out from painting?”

“I am definitely making some changes,” Uncle Graham said. They drank their tea. That was the last time Ryan saw his uncle alive.

That year at Christmastime Uncle Graham didn’t come to visit. He never came to visit them again. There were no letters and no telephone calls, although once, on Ryan’s thirteenth birthday, a flat, oblong package arrived for him from New York City.

It was a book, a book enclosed between boards embossed with swirling gold and silver letters that eddied over depths of royal blue and green. “In the Realm of Dragons” he read aloud, wondering why his uncle had sent him a picture book clearly meant for httle kids. Then he saw the artist’s byline and understood: Uncle Graham had done the illustrations. He let the book fall open in his lap.

Page after page of dragons mounted the purple skies of evening, beating wings of gold and green and scarlet. (“The dragon is a nocturnal beast. He loves the hours of darkness.”) Youngling dragons peeped from shattered eggshells, stripling worms engaged in mock battles to establish territory and dominion. (“The dragon when it is grown chooses its company with care.”) Maidens wreathed with flowers were led forth from villages paved with mud and manure to be offered up to the magnificent beasts, only to be spurned, or simply overlooked. (“It is a false tale that claims dragons desire the flesh of fair maidens, for what mere mortal beauty could hope to equal their own?”)

And in the end, there were the pictures of knights—so proud, so arrogant in armor—swords bloodied with the lives of dragons. Here a warrior lurked like the meanest footpad to slay a dragon when it came to drink at a twilight stream. There the severed heads of many worms dangled as obscene trophies from the rafters of a great hall where lords and ladies swilled wine and grew brutish in revelry. The unseeing eyes of the dead were mirrors that hung in silent judgment over their supposed conquerors, each silvery globe giving back an image of man to make the skin crawl and the soul weep. (“Men slay dragons because they fear them, or do not understand them, or because other men tell them that this is what men do. And some destroy them because of how they see themselves captured in the dragon’s eyes.”)

The last page was an enchantment of art. A single dragon’s eye filled it, infusing mere paper with a silver splendor reflecting Ryan’s awestruck face. The boy reached out, fingers hovering a hairsbreadth above the sheen that pulled him heartfirst into the dragon’s all-knowing gaze.

That night he dreamed dragons.

He woke into dreams, rising naked from a pool of waters silvered by twin moons burning low in a verdant sky. Drops of water fell from his wingtips, trembled at the points of his claws. Far away, over the hills where golden grasses nodded and bent beneath the wind’s kiss, came the sound of hoarse voices mangling music.

He climbed the hills, his wings dragging the ground behind him. The air was sweet, heavy as honey. He shook away the last vestiges of human thought and opened his dragon mind to a universe unfolding its most secret mysteries. That was when he knew at last that he could fly.

The air was his realm; he laid claim to it with the first surge of his emerald-keeled breastbone against the sky. Its warmth bore him up from beneath with the steady love of his father’s hands. His great head swerved slowly from left to right, his breath glittering with frost in the higher atmospheres, showering the bosom of the land with diamonds.

Below him he saw them, the villagers with their mockery of musical instruments, their faces upturned like so many oxen startled by lightning. The maiden was among them. They had dressed her in white, though even from this height he could see the thin cloth of her gown dappled brown with mud at the hem. Her arms were smooth and bare, her golden hafr almost obscured by roses.

He felt hunger burn the pit of his cavernous belly. He stooped to the earth, wings artfully angled to ride the edges of only those air currents that would bring him spiraling down to his waiting prize. His mouth gaped, and licks of flame caressed his scaly cheeks like the kiss of mist off the sea.

And then air before him turned from native element and ally to enemy. The crystalline road solidified, a giant’s hands molding themselves from emptiness. He slammed into the immobile lattice of their interlaced fingers, and the impact exploded into a sheet of dazzling pain, an echoing wave of light that hurled him back down the sky, back into the waters of the lake, back into the shuddering boy’s body waking in its bed to the dark and loneliness and loss.

All that was left was a whisper: Not yet. I give you this power, but you must earn its reward.

Ryan hugged the sheet and blanket to his chest, cold with sweat, and asked the shadows for meaning. Then he became aware of something more than sweat making his pajamas chng to the skin between his legs. In silence, face burning, he stripped them off and stuffed them down the laundry chute, some part of his mind pretending that the gaping black slide into the basement would really send them falling into oblivion.

He did not like to think of the dream after that. He took the book from Uncle Graham and put it away in the attic.

The pulldown ladder to the attic’s trove of dust and willfully forgotten memory was springloaded tight. The dangling rope that raised and lowered the hatch, improperly released, closed with a bang to jerk Ryan awake in time to bark his shins against the packing-crate coffee table in a friend’s dorm room. He was waiting for someone. He had nothing to do while he waited. He glanced down at the table and picked up a magazine.

He didn’t notice that it was a gay men’s magazine at first. It was folded open to a beer ad. He picked it up out of boredom and thumbed through it out of curiosity. Uncle Graham’s name leaped to his eyes from a photo spread covering the most recent Gay Pride march in Manhattan.

It was not Uncle Graham. Not with that face paint, not with that gaunt, ferocious grin hke a wolf’s skull. He wore clothing that was ill-considered plumage, meant to startle. It only put Ryan in mind of how old whores were typed in older movies: spotty, papery, raddled skin beneath the monster’s pathetic mask of carnival. Uncle Graham marched with arms around two other men, one in amateurish drag, the other sheathed in neon pink hotpants and a T-shirt cropped to leave his midriff bare. Across his forehead he had painted the letters H.I.V.

When Ryan went home for Christmas, he told Mom about the photograph. All she said was, “I know.” She showed him the letters she’d written to her brother, every one returned unopened, refused. Only once had he sent her words back accompanied by his own, a piece of lined paper torn from a spiral-bound notebook and stuffed into a manila envelope with the rejected letter. You never liked cemeteries, Chessie, it said. Why hang on the gate pretending you understand the business of the dead? You need magic to look through my eyes, and you were born fettered to the world. But there is magic, Chessie. It lives and walks at our backs, beautiful and deadly, and when it gets hungry it takes its sacrifice. If one of us had to make that payment, to have our heart betrayed, I’m glad it was me. Leave it so.

Mom asked Ryan if he remembered Bill; he nodded. “He’s trying to die,” she said. “He’s running after his own death. Even after what Bill did to him—How the hell do you argue with that kind of proof you’ve been cheated on?—even now he still loves him.” Mom sighed. “If he finds what he’s looking for, do you think he’d call to let us know? I can’t bear the thought of him dying like that, without—” She began to cry.

Her tears were for nothing and for everything.

The little clay dragon sighed in dreams, rumbled with ill-banked fires. The rumbling rose up, but by the time it reached Ryan’s ears it had become the urgent ringing of a telephone.

He was only half awake when he answered it, a towel swaddling his waist, up at a godawful hour of the morning because he’d had to sign up for godawful-hour courses in this, his second year of study. The toothbrush was still dripping in his hand while he heard his father’s voice telling him that Uncle Graham was dead. Uncle Graham’s head was shattered on the pavement in front of the old factory where he hved. The cops had called Mom even earlier that morning with the news. There was more that the police had told Ryan’s father because they didn’t think Mom could stand to know the other things that had been done to her brother. He shared it all willingly with Ryan because he thought his son was man enough to know, and because it was too much horror for one man to bear knowing alone.

And maybe too he shared it as a warning.

The closed casket under its blanket of roses blocked most of the aisle on the bus. Everyone from church was there, saying over and over again how talented Graham was and how wonderful his paintings were and how sad, how very sad that he was dead so young. Mrs. Baumann from the drugstore perched on the armrest of the black kid’s seat and told Mom that at least Graham was at peace now. Comfort cloyed the air worse than the mingled reek of all the flower arrangements people had sent. Everyone was there, saying all the right things, leaving all mention of murder outside, with the dogs.

The black kid finally managed to jimmy the window enough so that it dragged in its track but slid open. The inrush of fresh air blew away Mrs. Baumann, the roses, the closed black box, blew Ryan all the way back into his old bed at home, the night after the funeral.

He lay there unsleeping, painting the ceiling with endless fantasies of should-have-told-thems. Drowsing at last, he rolled over onto his side and felt something jab him in the hip. He reached between the mattress and the box spring and pulled out Uncle Graham’s book.

“I thought I put this away, up in the attic,” he said aloud. The silver and gold letters on the cover glowed with their own light. Ryan licked his lips and tasted lake water. He opened the book and read it again, after all the years.

There was a page he found that might have slipped from memory, if memory could ever lose hold of images that clamored to be recalled. Two young men—squires, not knights—laid up a snare of marvelous cunning and cruelty outside a dragon’s vine-hung lair. One peered from ambush, knotted club in hand, while the other stood at the cave mouth holding out a sapphire of untellable purity and fire. He was fair, the one who played the lure, his eyes the rival of the sapphire meant to cozen the venerable worm from sanctuary. Already a single green-scaled paw crept into the, dappled sunlight. The lure smiled, cold and exquisite as a lord of elven. Behind a fall of rocks, his confederate readied the dragon’s death.

Both their faces were plain to see. Not a line could be forgotten. Ryan closed his eyes, and still their faces were outlined against his sightlessness as if with wires burning white-hot. He threw the book across the room and bolted for his bedroom door.

He stepped from bare wood onto naked air. His wings snapped open without the need for any conscious command to reach them. His headlong fall became a naturally graceful glide that carried him down, down to the vast sea of forest and the piteous, defiant roars of a dying dragon and the face of a maiden, lovelier than any girl he had ever known, wreathed with roses.

I give you this power, but you must earn its reward.

He awoke knowing what he must do.

He awoke half choked by the stink of exhaust fumes as the bus pulled into the Port Authority terminal in New York.

Ryan did not have enough money for a cab so he took the bus downtown. He got off at the wrong stop, got lost, wandered in sullen pilgrimage through streets where crumpled newspapers blew like tumbleweeds. Finally he broke down and asked directions.

It was sunset when he found Uncle Graham’s address. A flimsy strip of black-and-yellow tape flapped wearily from the hinges of the big entry door to Uncle Graham’s building. Ryan’s taloned paws moved grandly, daintily overstepping the dull red-brown stains spattering the threshold and the sidewalk before it. Silence sang a hymn of welcome as he entered the loft, the last of the sunlight adding its own wash of color to the row of paintings Uncle Graham had left behind.

The girl from upstairs came down to see what was going on, alerted by the noise of a slamming door. Ryan told her, “I’m here to dispose of my uncle’s things.” He showed her the key and told her enough about Uncle Graham to convince her of his legitimate right to be there.

She shrugged, thin shoulders sheathed in stretch jersey glimpsed through thin brown hair. “Save it, okay? I couldn’t tell if you’re making it up or not anyway. I hardly knew anything about the guy. I mean, sure, I knew he was, hke, gay, and he painted. I was scared for awhile after he got killed, but—”

“I really am his nephew,” Ryan insisted, clutching the doorpost until he imagined he must have driven his talons inches deep into the wood.

“Hey, no argument. You got the key.” Another shrug, welcoming him to help himself to the apartment and all found so long as he did not trespass on her well cultivated indifference.

She wasn’t pretty. She was what the fashion world would call a waif. Ryan was more attracted to girls whose breasts were larger than orange pips. Still he invited her in. At first she declined, but she called herself an artist too. She had never had the chance to study Uncle Graham’s work up close before. She might have come downstairs anytime while Uncle Graham was still alive and asked to see his paintings; she never did. She admitted to Ryan that the idea had never crossed her mind.

“Why not?” he asked.

Again that shifting of the shoulders to let a person slide safely out from beneath uncomfortable questions. “I didn’t want to intrude. I thought, you know, what if he’s got someone over?”

He found tea to serve her. She drank in short, dull slurps, her eyes forever darting sideways to keep him under surveillance. She wasn’t pretty and she wasn’t his type and he wasn’t attracted to her at all.

What’samatter, Lundberg, doncha like girls?

He gave her all the charm he had, the way he’d done with Karen Pitt, the way he’d perfected with all the college girls he’d ever sweet-talked into bed, the way that proved to everyone who never asked for proof that he wasn’t like his uncle. Before she left, he got to kiss her and buy back his peace.

Uncle Graham’s bed was made of pale pine with a bowed headboard, the kind you order from L.L. Bean catalogs. One of great-grandma Ruth’s handsewn quilts lay across it, a bearpaw design in red and blue. Ryan lay down on the bed, quilt and all, fully clothed, and rested the little clay dragon on his chest. He gazed into its silvery eyes until he felt the lake waters rolling off his flanks and the alien moons of the dragons’ realm welcomed him home.

He circled the skybowl once, his scent marking air as his hunting ground and his alone. Below, he dreamed the peasants singing for him to descend and accept the sacrifice. Later, he thought, and the power of his mind rumbled across the sky like thunder. When I have earned it.

The thunder of his thoughts rolled back to overwhelm him, knocking him sideways into a spin. When he righted himself he saw that the green land had vanished, the crude songs of the rustics thinned into the braying of traffic, the shriek of sirens. The stone forest of the city stood stark against the moon. He dipped into the canyons, following a trail of vision.

It was easy hunting; he knew the prey. He found them with his mind, not with his eyes. They were in a bar, drinking beer, laughing and talking and sometimes trying to get the attention of the women. The lure was loudest, telling the women what he’d like to do to them, telling them how grateful they’d be, telling them they were frigid, bitches, bull-dykes when they turned away. The killer with the club only smiled, and sometimes one of the women would smile back. That made the lure scowl and call her a whore.

“Hey! What you starin’ at?”

Ryan gasped with surprise as the lure’s hand shot out and closed around the collar of his shirt, yanking him forward. Stale beer stank in his nostrils and sprayed saliva dotted his cheeks as the lure shouted, “What, you see something you like, faggot?”

“Get your fucking hands off me!” Teeth like steak knives ground against each other as Ryan smacked the lure’s grip away. By chance one talon scored the skin of the lure’s forearm, a long, shallow cut. Sapphire eyes widened in childlike awe to see the blood go trickling down.

“Shit, he pulled a knife on me!” he yelled.

“What knife? Where?” the killer drawled, glancing at Ryan’s empty hands. “You’re crazy, Ted, you know that?”

“Stinking fag knifed me,” the lure insisted. “Goddamn it, this whole neighborhood’s crawling with ’em, like roaches.”

“Who are you calling a fag?” Ryan asked quietly. Being what he was, he did not need to raise his voice to make the menace heard.

The killer gave Ryan a slow and easy grin. “Don’t pay attention to him. He’s been drinking. He don’t know what he’s saying.”

“No shit.” Ryan readjusted the lay of his shirt, sounding so calm he astonished himself. He had no idea of how he had become real in this place, how these two, his quarry, had gone from being part of a dragon’s vision to tangibility. He did not know why he felt the dragon’s body on him so surely that he wanted to grab these men, shake them, and demand, Can’t you see what I am?

“What the hell are you doing, talking to this guy?” the lure cried stridently, tugging at the killer’s sleeve. “You see what he did to me?” He stuck his bloodied arm out for inspection.

“With what?” the dark one replied. He sounded bored. “A fuckin’ fingernail? You see he don’t got a knife, so with what? Jesus, grow up. You probably did it to yourself.”

“With what?” the lure mimicked, spreading empty hands.

“Asshole,” the other muttered and turned his back.

Ryan walked out of the bar. The air was cooler than it had been all day and there was the promise of rain. He walked to the corner to check the street signs. The bar was only two blocks away from Uncle Graham’s apartment. This is where it began, he thought. He wondered which way they would walk when they finally left the bar. He hoped they would walk together at least part of the way. He needed them to be in the same place at the same time. Then, one fiery breath, one slash of his claws, one short snap of jaws that could sever the body of a full grown stag—

It is a well-known fact that dragons do not forget those they love. Their love is always loyal, sometimes blind. This is perhaps a failing.

He took to the sky again to scout his place of ambush. He was fortunate: The area was rich in alleyways. He landed lightly on the roof of the building across the street from the bar, warm tar underfoot making his paws itch, his toes curl. He set his silver eyes high, telling the hours by the slow journey of the moon.

His prey emerged when midnight was two hours gone. A woman was with them, holding fast to the arm of the killer while the lure tagged along behind, head down, shoulders hunched forward. Her hair was the color of lemon-yellow paint and just as lifeless, her face crumpled with rude laughter. She clung to the killer’s broad shoulders, her stumbling feet scraping the sidewalk. The lure stared at her, disgust very plain on his face.

The three of them wove their way across the street, tracing the pattern of the drunkards’ pavane. High on his perch, the dragon could still snuff up the reek of beer, sour wine, sweat, and old perfume. He flapped his wings once to lift himself into flight, taking care to do it so that the sound remained as muffled as possible. He wondered whether the men intended to share the woman and whether the woman wanted that. He knew that if they desired it, her wants would be nothing.

He hovered over them as they walked, a shadow on the pavement in their wake, a dark shape gliding over rooftops, safe from detection in a city whose inhabitants so seldom raised their eyes to heaven. He watched them stop at street corners to laugh; he saw them stop in the middle of the street to argue.

“What the hell you doin’, Ted?” The dark one glanced over his shoulder, the woman wrapped around him like a cape. “You still here? You wanna take a left back there on that last block if you wanna get home.”

“I know how to get home.” The lure’s chin rose, daring his companion to contradict him. “I thought maybe you could use some help with her. You know, in case she pukes all over you before you get her back to your place.”

The killer laughed. “Okay, come on.”

“I’m not gonna puke,” the woman objected. Her eyes narrowed as she glared at the lure. “You’re just pissed ’cause you couldn’t find someone to go home with you.”

“Like I’d want to screw what comes into that bar,” the lure replied loftily.

“Yeah?” The woman looked canny. “What kind of bars do you like, baby?” She made it mean things.

“Shut up, bitch,” he snapped. He would have hit her if his friend were not there. The dragon knew this. As it was, the woman turned to the dark one, squawking indignantly.

“Hey, baby, it’s okay, that’s just him, he’s a little nuts, you know?” the killer said. “Don’t push his buttons, okay? And don’t go saying shit like that about my buddy.” Something in his voice tightened by an almost imperceptible degree. Drunk as she was, the woman sensed it. The dragon saw her cringe.

“I didn’t mean nothing,” she said.

“Like hell,” the lure snarled. ‘“What kind of bars?’ Like I don’t know! Stupid damn—”

“She don’t know you, Ted, that’s all,” the killer said. “If she did, she’d never even think of saying something like that about you.” He showed his teeth, and the lure returned the gesture, a look too sharp to be just a smile. The dragon saw them exchange the secret of a crime in a single glance.

The dragon came to earth. By rights, the walls of the alley it chose should have been too narrow to accommodate its wingspan, yet they did. This place was perfect, only a few yards ahead on the prey’s path, on a street whose emptiness was a gift. It waited. The argument was over. They would all continue down the street in this direction now. The dragon had decided on fire. Fire was quick and clean, if indiscriminate. It was too bad about the woman.

Footsteps rang on the pavement. The dragon’s eyelids, smooth as shell for all their scales, drew back until the darkness filled with the silver light of its eyes. It heard the woman say, “What the hell’s that in there?” and the killer answer, “Who gives a—?”

Then he had them. No deer was ever so transfixed by the headlights’ glare. The brilliance of his gaze washed over them, a stark light to shear away everything but the truth. He gathered his breath for the flame.

And in a distant room a dreamer held a book open to its last page, falling into the silver eye of a dragon and seeing only truth.

I can’t.

The fire died in his throat. He felt the dragon’s form, the dragon’s power slip from him. The image of the rose-wreathed maiden blew away like dust. The splendor of his eyes dimmed and vanished, leaving the alley lit only by the spill of the streetlamp. Rain began to fall, mizzling, penetrating. He felt cold.

“Who’s in there? Come out!” the killer shouted. The spell was broken. Ryan crept forward because he didn’t know what else he could do. “It’s the kid from the bar!” The dark one sounded genuinely surprised.

Not too surprised to seize Ryan’s arm and squeeze it hard as he jerked him forward. “What d’you think you’re doing, following us?” The fingers drove deeper into soft flesh. “You some kinda pervert?”

“I told you what he is!” the lure cried stridently. “I can smell ’em.”

‘Yeah, maybe you can,” the killer muttered. His grip shifted to Ryan’s shirtfront. “You were right the last time.”

“Honey, let him go; he’s just a kid,” the woman pleaded.

“This kid—” he gave Ryan a shake to make his teeth clatter “—was in the bar before, trying to start something. What d’you wanna start, kid?”

“Watch out for him; he’s got a knife on him,” the lure piped up.

“Big deal.” The killer reached into the pocket of his jeans. “So do I.”

The blade snicked silver in the shadows. Ryan saw the reflection of his eyes along the shining edge. He remembered all the things that had been done to Uncle Graham, the things the police told Dad, the things Dad only hinted at to him, shaking. These two had only smashed his uncle’s skull after they had done everything else they wanted. He heard a plaintive voice inside him say, They killed me without a moment’s hesitation, Ryan. I know I was looking to die, but like that? As less than a man, less than an animal, just a toy for willful, sadistic children? They’ll kill you without a single regret. It will shatter Chessie’s heart. Why didn’t you destroy them when you had the power?

And Ryan’s heart answered, Because that would make me one of them.

“Jesus, let him go,” the woman whined. “You’re not gonna cut him, are you?

“You don’t wanna see, close your eyes,” the killer instructed her.

“Oh, shit, you’re crazy too.” With a shake of her head she tried to bolt, but the lure grabbed her and held her fast.

“You don’t wanna go running for the cops, do you?” he hissed in her ear. “Nah, I bet you don’t.” He seized her straggly hair and punched her hard in the face before she could scream. She groaned and folded to the ground.

“Hey! What’d you do to the bitch?” The killer spoke with the same heat reserved for street punks caught putting scratches on a new car.

“Ah, so what?” The lure shrugged. “Like you can’t do what you want with her now?”

The knife rose, a straight line of cold blue across Ryan’s sight. He shut his eyes. A fist slammed into his shoulder.

“Uh-uh, pervert,” the killer told him. “You gotta see it coming. I wanna see you see. Open ’em.” Another violent shake of Ryan’s shirtfront. “Open ’em!”

So Ryan opened his eyes.

Screams.

Screams not his, screams that battered his ears as the pure white light flooded the alleyway again. They jarred him free of his captive body, throwing him skywards into the rain. He gasped to feel chill droplets pattering over skin still human, then turn d in wingless mid-flight to look down at what this release had left behind.

He expected to see the two men staring up after him, mouths agape like the lowest wonderstruck peasant of the dragons’ realm. Instead he saw them crouching in the alleyway, on their knees in filth, hands trembling before their faces. He realized that they were trying not to look, trying to shield their eyes from the assault of sight. He let go his tenuous hold on the air and touched the ground behind them, beside the fallen woman.

He saw the dragon’s eyes.

It was a great beast, huge, splendid, grander by far than the youngling worm that once housed Ryan’s soul. The alley walls strained, bricks and mortar crumbling under the pressure of containing it. It lay with paws folded under its jagged chin, its gleaming eyes regarding the two men almost casually, in afterthought. There was no intent of a killing in its attitude. It only looked at them, slumbrous, steadily.

They tried to look away and could not, tried to close their eyes and found the lids frozen wide, tried to make screens of their hands and knew a strange paralysis that withheld that mercy. They had to look. They had no choice but to see.

And some destroy them because of how they see themselves in the dragon’s eyes.

In one eye’s curved and shining surface, the killer crouched in a dark place, jabbing sticks at phantoms, wailing with fear. His naked body was covered with lesions, his limbs skeletal, his face all blades of bone beneath a patchwork of bare, purple-veined scalp and pitiful tufts of hair.

In the other eye, the lure clung to the killer’s arm, pressed himself against that towering, healthy body. He let his mouth wander at will, his eyes holding all the ecstasy of long-deferred fulfillment. His hands were everywhere, touching, caressing, claiming all he desired for his own. I want this, his image mouthed in the monster’s mirrored gaze. I’ve always wanted this… I’ve always wanted you.

The dragon raised his head and bhnked once, shuttering away the vision. When he opened them again, he disappeared.

The two men turned to stare at each other, the rain running down their faces. The woman stirred and whimpered, waking. They did not hear her. Ryan stooped to murmur in her ear, “Get up. We’ve got to get out of here.” She cursed and shoved him aside.

So he ran away. He ran alone, stumbling down the rainwashed street, wondering how far he would be allowed to go before the spell of the dragon’s gaze broke, before the others came after him. He thought he could hear them behind him. coming up fast. His breath burned in his chest. He did not dare to look over his shoulder. His hunters were as certain a presence as the night. He could almost feel the icy breath of the knife on his flesh.

He ran harder, and the harder he ran, the thicker the air around him became. He needed to fight a passage through it. His feet were weights instead of wing? The wet pavement turned to tar, sucking him down, holding him back against his will, keeping him prisoner. There were more enchantments loose in this world than the magic of dragons. Dark things commanded more servants here than things of light. Ryan opened his mouth to scream for help and no sound came. Again and again he filled his lungs, again and again only black silence packed his chest and throat and mouth hke wool. The tar hardened to stone, holding his feet; he could not move at all. He gathered his breath for a last cry before the hunters had him—

—and woke screaming in his uncle’s bed.

He was sitting upright, stiff as a doll. His clothes stuck to his skin. The waterlight that came before the dawn whitened the windows. He swung his feet out of bed and heard a crunch underfoot when they touched the floor.

Beside the bed, the little clay dragon lay shattered. He picked up all the pieces, glad to see that they were fairly large. Some glue should fix it. He assembled it dry on the coffee table and studied the results. All that was missing was the eyes.

He made himself some instant coffee and locked up the apartment when he left. The street was damp and cool from the rain. Puddles of oil in the gutter gave back rainbows. He stood in the doorway, looking down. The threshold stains did not stand out at all now that the concrete was wet. Soon who would know what had happened here? He fingered the tattered end of black and yellow tape still caught in the door hinge and tore off as much of it as he could.

He wondered whether he should call the police when he reached Penn Station and give them an anonymous tip about who had killed his uncle and where to find them. He could describe them exactly, send the police to the bar that was their hangout—

—if the police would take the time to listen to a caller who refused to admit how he knew so much. And if he explained? They’d believe it when the sky between worlds split open. But he had to do something. This was all he could think of to do.

He decided that the first thing he should do, even before he made the call, was to go and see whether there really was a bar where his vision had placed it. He began to walk.

The police cars were there when he turned the corner. Two of them were pulled up at the curb in front of the alleyway, blue and red lights flashing. The ambulance was sandwiched in between them. It wouldn’t be going anywhere in a hurry, but there was no need for speed. The stretcher slipping away into the back held a zippered bag.

The killer glowered and shouted obscenities at the yellow-haired woman talking to the cops. His hands were manacled behind his back, but there was nothing to stop his mouth. Passersby on their way to work or homeward bound from a life between sunset and dawn stopped to listen. The man did not care for the rights he had been read, it seemed. He was willing to tell the world what he’d done. He didn’t think of it as crime, but a service. He had cleansed, purified, rescued society from a monster. He was a hero, a knight, a slayer of unnatural horrors! How dare they call it murder, even when the victim had once been his friend?

“Honest, I don’t know why,” the yellow-haired woman was saying as the man was forced into one of the police cars. “We was all going along here, real late, and all of a sudden—”

She turned and saw Ryan. For an instant her bruised face flushed, then bloomed, its unmarred beauty embraced by roses.

Then the policeman said, “Ma’am?” She shuddered and shook off all seeming. She went back to telling the officer what she had witnessed.

Ryan stooped at the barricade of black-and-yellow tape. The rose was red without holding memories of blood or fire. It had no thorns. He breathed its fragrance all the way to the train station, all the way home.

—In loving memory of my grandma Cora