Hydra (11 page)

Granted, he glows. He’s glowing brightly now, probably for my benefit (we dragons do have some control over how brightly we glow—but it’s more emotional than physical. It’s complicated. I can only assume sea dragons operate on a similar principle), but he’s also swimming crazy fast, and I have to fly at a good clip just to keep up.

At the same time, I’m keeping an eye out for boats and planes and anything else that might have humans aboard who might see me or worse yet take my picture.

But even those two worries, crucial though they may be, are quickly eclipsed by a third concern.

Ed is massively outnumbered.

Never mind that he’s considerably bigger than the swarming sea yagi. Their sheer quantity is overwhelming. Taken together, they’ve got to outweigh him, possibly multiple times over. Given that we don’t know what they are, how they fight, or what they’re capable of, (regular yagi have venom in their spurs—poison venom that once killed my parents’ beloved dog. Who knows what these beasties might have?) it’s fair to say my worst nightmare is coming true, but with a horrid twist.

They’re not just after me.

They’re bent on killing Ed, too.

I’ve got to do something.

I can’t just fly up here, watching these creatures swarm over Ed. He’s whipping about with his tail and trying to use his horns, but that’s about all he’s got. It’s pretty hard to breathe fire underwater, and he doesn’t have regular arms like I do, with talons on my fingers. He’s just got those flippers, which are super great at moving him through the water quickly, but otherwise useless against his enemies.

The yagi seem intent on pulling him down, and his glow has disappeared from my sight several times now as they dogpile him, forcing him deeper, too deep for me to see his green glow.

Furious at the mongrel monsters, I dive toward the water. I don’t dare whip at the mass of yagi with my spiked tail, because Ed is down there, writhing among them as he tries to fight them off. I can’t risk hurting him.

Nor am I keen on getting in over my head among them. They pulled me down too easily before, and there weren’t nearly so many of them then.

That leaves me with little choice.

I fly at them swiftly, executing a practiced dip, skimming the surface of the water, reaching down just as I pass by the swarm, and plucking up a couple of monsters, flinging them high into the air.

In a blink, as they’re airborne, tumbling through the empty blue sky with such furious multi-arm-flailing futility it’s almost comical, I draw Ed’s broadsword and swing it at the vulnerable seam between their heads and their bodies.

I’ve been trained to defend myself against regular yagi, which have an exoskeleton that’s bulletproof. There are few effective ways to kill them. Our preferred method is to use a sharp blade to slice through the tiny seam between their bodies and their heads (they have no neck, creepy buggers).

And as I learn immediately, to my satisfaction and relief, these water yagi are much the same. I miss the mark on the first beast, the blade of the unfamiliar sword deflected by the yagi’s armor. But I’m a quick learner and I hit my target on the second monster. A startled head flies free of the body with a pitiful squeal of dismay, tumbling back into the Black Sea. Its many arms stream behind, twitching lifelessly as land yagi do when they’re beheaded, and then steaming as its soulless shell evaporates.

One down, untold masses of dozens to go.

Holding tight to the sword with my right hand (I can’t risk losing it now), I skim and dip again, plucking up a water yagi with my left hand, flinging it high, swinging the sword as the beast falls down, taking two hacks to find the tiny crevice, severing its head from its body.

Now that I know how to kill them, I just have to repeat the process several dozen more times until they’re all gone.

Preferably without losing sight of Ed.

Certainly before they overwhelm him or seriously injure him.

All without being seen, in spite of the fact that I’m a glowing, bright-red dragon flying through the clear blue sky.

I pluck up another, and as I’m swinging the sword at its neck, I try to count just how many sets of arms the creatures have.

One-two-three-four-five—

It sinks too quickly beneath the surface for me to be sure, the arms flailing so rapidly I may well have counted the same limbs over twice, and others not at all.

I pluck up another water yagi, tossing it extra high with a bit of spin, forcing the arms away from the body like a twirling hand-tipped skirt. I count both before and after I remove the head, starting at the face side so I don’t recount the same arms twice.

One-two-three-four-five-six.

Six. Plus feet.

Eudora’s bred them to an octopus, hasn’t she? That explains why I felt so many sets of grasping hands in the Caspian Sea. But they still have the exoskeleton, the fish-like, shark-like features. How many kinds of DNA did she meld to make these creatures? They’re even less human than the land yagi. Less human, more terrifying.

Determined to get the best of my enemies quickly, I set to work, dipping, flinging, hacking, killing. Soon I can smell that distinctive yagi stink rising up from the oily remnants of the carcasses in the water.

Yagi aren’t natural creatures. They’re bred in a lab (at least the land kind are—if they ever learn to breed in the wild we’ll be done for), more black magic than science, and once they’re dead, the magic that made them dissolves, and they quickly dissipate to nothing, save for the stink and the scum that’s the residue of their evil selves.

As I repeat the steps that destroy my enemy, fueled by the fear of injury to Ed, I realize a couple of things. For one, I’m making progress. The swarm is slightly smaller now, replaced by a putrid scent in the sky. Maybe I’ll get the best of these fiends…eventually. But this realization is countered by the second.

Killing yagi is hard work.

Being a dragon is exhausting (our metabolic rate jumps exponentially when we convert to dragon form), especially being a dragon after having just been a dragon flying into a headwind with a heavy hydra Scotsman on my back. But being a dragon and flying while fighting, swinging Ed’s absurdly heavy broadsword, is more exhausting still.

So it’s a battle, not just to kill the yagi before they kill Ed, but to kill them all before I’m so dead from exhaustion that I fall into the sea, unable to fight them off any more.

Dip.

Fling.

Hack.

Repeat.

Dip.

Fling.

Hack.

I can’t begin to count how many times I’ve gone through the motions. The yagi are heavy. My arms are tired, and I can’t throw them nearly as high anymore. Nor is my trembling sword arm as accurate as I’d like. Sometimes I beat them about with the sword like a piñata as they fall, and I don’t even get their heads cut off before they hit the water. In fact, my ineffective attempts are starting to outnumber my successful beheadings.

Through groggy eyes I look down at the water. My intention is to gauge how many yagi remain. But when I look down, I see something that terrifies me far more than the largest swarm of yagi ever could.

Ed is gone.

Where did he go? He was right there the last time I looked, which couldn’t have been that long ago. Granted, I’m disoriented from exhaustion, but there’s really nowhere for him to go, save for the body of water larger than the state of California, which is over two thousand feet deep in places.

This is precisely why I didn’t want to lose him—because finding him again might be impossible. Just think how many people have been looking for the Loch Ness Monster over the course of so many decades. They’ve yet to find him, even though that lake is thousands of times smaller than this one. If I lose him here, especially if he’s injured or needs my help…

No. I can’t lose him.

Concerned, I circle closer, flying lower over the water, aware that he may be traveling forward, away from me, even as I look for him in the vicinity of where I last saw him. But I can still see yagi below me. They’re not so much at the surface now as they are roiling beneath it, but they’re still there.

I never thought I’d be glad to see yagi, but as long as I can still catch a glimpse of them, I’ve got a decent idea of where Ed might be.

Just to be sure, though, I circle around low, hoping to spot a glimmer of glowing green beneath the surface.

Nothing.

Maybe then too, I should make note of where I am…just in case I don’t find him for a very long time and have to find my way back to this spot. It’s easy to get disoriented among the endless waves, each of which look the same as the last.

I survey the area. Sea. Sea. Sea. Fortunately I don’t see any boats, save for a large shipping vessel that’s little more than a speck in the distance to the north of me. Given how many times larger than me it probably is, and taking into consideration that we dragons have distance vision far superior to humans, I’m probably out of their sighting range.

To the south, though, I can see the faint dark line of the Turkish mainland. This doesn’t completely surprise me, since our intended route was to take us on a somewhat southerly course across the lake, a direct line from Romania to Azerbaijan, which is east but also a bit south of the Black Sea. Besides that, the coastline curves north for a large portion of the middle of the sea, which is probably pretty much where we are.

While it’s possible someone on land could be looking out to sea with binoculars or a zoom-lens camera, nonetheless, I’m more relieved than worried. The northerly bulge of coastline tends to be one of the more sparsely-populated parts of Turkey, save for the city of Zonguldak. But I don’t see a city and I’m assuming we’re further east than that by now. So I’m a tiny bit relieved, because the coastline gives me a landmark of sorts, and it also promises solid ground to rest upon, assuming I can muster the strength to glide there.

But that’s the full extent of my relief, because Ed has been missing for long minutes now. I mean, I know he can hold his breath for longer than that under perfect conditions, but he’s been fighting the water yagi, which probably ups his oxygen needs.

Where is he? What’s he doing? Is he okay?

He’s got to be tired. Maybe not quite as tired as I am, but still, pretty much exhausted.

Unsure what to do next, I slip the heavy sword back in the scabbard that’s crossways across my chest. I fly lower, closer to the sea, where I’m less likely to be spotted by anyone on the coast or the shipping vessel. And I scan the sea for any sign of glimmering green or even sea yagi, which have disappeared completely, save for a few distant underwater shadows that may or may not be the creatures I’ve been killing, nor do I want to dive underwater to find out.

So now I’m starting to feel a little panicked. Where is Ed? What if I’ve lost him? He came here to help me, but all I did was lead him to an enemy he neither understands nor is equipped to fight.

I am a bad friend. Ed is the first dragon of any sort I’ve ever met outside of my own family, and the very first thing I’ve done is drag him off to the enemy.

I suck.

I am a horrible person. I’m a horrible dragon.

Maybe I
should
dive underwater and go look for him.

But if I do that, I’ll be easy prey for the water yagi, exhausted and outnumbered as I am, and no one will ever know what happened to either of us. They won’t even know where to look for us because we were so behind schedule already and should have reached Azerbaijan by now.

But if I don’t go underwater, I may never see Ed again.

I may never see Ed again anyway.

So I’m circling, searching for any sign of Ed and wondering what to do, when suddenly something shoots out of the water far to the east of me.

I fly toward it like a shot, in time to see Ed, in full sea-dragon form, breaching into the air kind of like a whale, only much higher, so maybe more like a dolphin, only of course he’s bigger than a dolphin and glowing green and I have never been so relieved to see anyone in my entire life because I was sincerely starting to think he was dead or lost forever.

I zip through the air toward him, studying him as well as I can from this distance to see if he’s injured. A dragon’s scales are pretty much bulletproof, save for our underbellies which are slightly softer and can be punctured by another dragon’s horns or talons. But just because regular dragons are that way, doesn’t mean Ed is equally impervious. I’ve still never nailed down how he’s the same as I am and how he’s different, mostly because I’m nervous about what I might learn and its implications for our friendship.

But this is a life-or-death question that’s bigger than friendship, so it’s a conversation we should probably have before too long.

He doesn’t look injured, but he does have a distinctly panicked look on his face, like maybe he was getting as worried down there as I was feeling up here.

This is not encouraging.

Okay, so remember how I said before that my mom is really bad at keeping secrets? That’s largely because we dragons tend to have pretty expressive faces. We’re able to communicate nonverbally with just a look, which is helpful because when we’re in dragon form, we pretty much can’t talk at all.

So right now, as Ed is breaching through the air and I’m flying toward him, he gives me this look which shouts
get me out of here!

Which makes plenty of sense considering I can see the swarm of yagi surfacing beneath him, and I would want out of there if I was there.

I fly toward him as fast as I can.

But then he splashes back down into the water and the yagi pounce on him and I don’t know what to do. I mean, if he was in human form I’d fly over there and pick him up, but he’s a freaking hydra right now, so in addition to being nearly as big around as I am and considerably longer, he’s got to weigh, I don’t know, more than I could probably carry on a good day. Enough to drag me down into the depths after him in my current state.

Not that I wouldn’t be willing to risk that for his sake, but it’s just that it wouldn’t do either of us any good at all if I did.

I fly really, really close. I’m not losing sight of him again, not if I can help it. I’m hovering right over him, gliding with my talons actually touching the waves, keeping pace with him as he struggles to make progress through the sea with the yagi mobbing him, pulling him down.