Dragonsapien (14 page)

He had been
wrapped, many tines, within the comforting embrace of those wings.
Sometimes, with that cocoon, it had been cool, sometimes heated, a
hot house of growing love, flowering longing.

He had kissed
that body. Tasted it. Touched it.

Sensed it, in
every way he could.

Everywhere.

Made it, as far
as possible, a part of him. Moulded himself alongside it, his
curves, his arcs, fitting perfectly against hers, as if it were all
preordained, as if they had been made for each other.

He had shared in
its beauty, its shape. Its softness. Its malleability. And, in
places, its hardness, where a muscle tightened, or a bone just
beneath the surface whitened the skin, tautened it.

He would press
lightly on all these area, wondering at the similarities, the
differences, the differences, too, that lay just below the surface.
The differences that, strangely, brought them together, each
wanting to share and understand more of the other.

Then her skin
had glittered like a river bed of gold, silver and jewels. It still
shone, but now it was the red-gold of fire, of blood, of
war.

‘Celly, I can’t
believe that you think the whole human race needs wiping out
because of what happened to your–’

‘Stop! Don’t
make a fool of yourself any more, Jake! You know
nothing
of–’

‘Incoming!’ the
dragon wearing the headphones suddenly screamed. ‘Incoming
missiles!’

‘I told you we
couldn’t trust him!’ Leon growled as he soared into the
air.

Celly glared at
Jake every bit as hatefully as Leon did.

‘I didn’t know,
honestly!’

‘There’s so much
you don’t know, isn’t there Jake?’ Celly sneered. ‘Bring him!’ she
snapped commandingly at the dragon nearest to him as she began to
rise off the ground.

Even as the
dragon grabbed him firmly around the waist and rose into the air
after Celly and the other dragoons, Leon protested that it was
stupid to bring him along.

‘They’ve
obviously implanted a tracker; that’s how they found
us.’

‘You know why we
need him,’ Celly retorted dismissively.

*

‘We could start
ripping him apart; find out where they implanted it,’ the dragon
holding Jake calmly suggested.

‘No one
implanted anything!’ Jake insisted vehemently, trying to hold back
from being sick. His stomach had lurched violently when they had
rapidly climbed into the air and, airborne one more, he suffered
once again all the nausea of seeing the earth far below him. To
make matters worse, they were flying so fast that the agonisingly
cold air battered against his face and penetrated what little
clothing he still had left.

‘Did you sleep
on the plane?’ Leon asked him bluntly.

‘Of course; it
was a long journey.’ He had to shout to be heard over the incessant
pressure of the pummelling wind.

‘You were
probably drugged and given painkillers to make sure you stayed
asleep as they implanted a tracker–’

He was drowned
out by the crack of a number of large explosions that momentarily
lit up the sky far behind them.

‘Cruise
missiles,’ the headphone wearing dragon yelled out. ‘They think
three got through our anti-missile screen.’

‘Spread out,’
Celly ordered. ‘No, he stays with me,’ she quickly added when she
saw that the dragon holding Jake was about to veer off.

‘He’s the one
bringing them towards us,’ Leon pointed out.

‘If the second
screening doesn’t work, it they get any closer, we can drop him,’
Celly cried back. ‘You know why we need him.’

It would have
been bad enough hearing Leon suggest that they should drop him,
Jake thought. It was even worse hearing it coming so nonchalantly
from Celly.

There were two
more bright, thunderous eruptions behind them.

‘They missed
one,’ Leon said, spinning around in mid-air, indicating to another
dragon to follow him. ‘For the child, right?’ he added as he
started heading back towards the oncoming missile, swiftly
unfurling a net between himself and the other dragon.

A
child?

Jake wondered,
hoped, that he’d misheard Leon.

Did that mean
that Celly was pregnant? With Leon’s child?

‘Make it work
Celly, make it work!’ Leon cried over his shoulder as he vanished
into the darkness.

Determinedly
tightening her lips, Celly flew on without looking back, the dragon
holding Jake obediently and silently taking up position alongside
her. Jake wasn’t sure –it was hard to tell in the darkness,
particularly with the cold wind making his own eyes stream – but
Celly appeared to be crying.

A few minutes
later, the missile exploded close behind them, so close the blast
pounded hard against their backs, so close it clearly illuminated
everything around them.

And Jake now
knew for sure that, yes, Celly was weeping.

*

When they
landed, the dragon holding Jake simply let him fall the last few
feet, such that he ended up rolling through the dust and mud. He
rose to his knees, shivering from the cold and the fear he’d
experienced as they had swooped towards the ground.

Celly glanced
back towards him.

He looked a
mess.

Was this the boy
she had fallen in love with back on the island?

For her, it
seemed so long ago.

So incredibly
long ago.

So much had
happened to her, changing her in ways that no one could possibly
understand.

She stepped
towards Jake, offering him her hand.

He looked at her
doubtfully at first, as if he were wondering whether to trust her
or not, wondering if a change had taken place in her since her
order to drop him if he continued to endanger them.

‘I’m sorry,’ he
said, gratefully taking her hand and stiffly, painfully rising to
his feet. ‘Sorry about Leon.’

Feeling his hand
in hers, Celly remembered how that simple touch would – not
really
so long ago, in a more
normal
timescale – have
sent her whole body quivering with wonder, with anticipation of
more wonderful sensations to follow.

Then, his breath
alone would have set her skin tingling. It touched her with its
warmth, its softness, its moistness, its sense of eagerness. It was
a sensation in its own right, spiritual, ever changing, a fleeting
passing that nevertheless probed deeply with its emotional
need.

His lips, too –
so delicate one moment, so hard and probing the next – made her
conscious as never before of the delightful sensations lying within
her own skin, her own undulating form. Lips that narrowed, pouted,
kissed lightly. Lips that opened, savoured, swallowed. Lips from
between which a mischievous tongue would dart, delivering its own
pleasures.

I want you so so
much, those lips would unmistakably declare, without a single word
leaving them.

A year
ago.

That’s all it
really was.

But, for her, it
was
a long long time ago.

A time of
immense changes in her life.

Immense
hurts.

‘I’m sorry too,
Jake,’ she said in reply to his concern at Leon’s loss. ‘Sorry I
ever met you.’

If her bitter
retort had stung him, he didn’t show it.

‘He must have
loved you,’ he said instead. ‘To give his life like that for
you.’

‘Not for me,
Jake; not in the way you mean anyway. We’ve avoided cruise missiles
easily enough before.’

‘That’s why he
wanted you to drop me? Because I was the target?’

Celly
nodded.

‘So he gave his
life because I wanted you saved. Because I want you to have
this.’

Producing a
memory stick from an internal pocket of her grubby armour, she
handed it to him.

‘Because you
need to know, Jake.’

Jake rolled the
memory stick in his hand, eyeing it curiously.

‘He died for
this
?’ he asked incredulously. He looked Celly directly in
the eye. ‘What about the child, Celly? Isn’t that what he really
gave his life for?’

‘Ultimately,
yes, of course,’ Celly admitted unapologetically. ‘I would hope
that one of the things you did learn about us on the island was
that dragons will always protect the child; the child is the
future. Without the child, we are ultimately nothing.’

‘Yet he betrayed
you Kelly. I was told that it was Leon who pointed the authorities
to the island.’

‘He hoped his
father, Dr Frobisher, would be given preferences. I understand why
he did it. I think he paid for his mistake a few times over, don’t
you?’

As Jake nodded
in agreement, he heard the lightest of fluttering around him, like
the landing of nothing more than a sparrow. But two dragons now
stood either side of him, their skin darkened, their armour as
black as the night they had seemed to appear from.

‘Why you Celly?’
he asked. ‘Why are you the one leading them?’

‘You mean why do
they follow me, the silly little girl you remember from the
island?’

‘No, no; I mean,
I could never have seen you being responsible for anything like
this.’

With a glance to
either side, he indicated the surrounding landscape of death and
destruction.

‘Both questions
have the same answer anyway,’ Celly replied acidly. ‘My parents
were their natural leaders in Hong Kong; and when they died, there
was no one angrier than me!’

*

‘I take it you
can drive?’ the dragon said, pulling out the dead driver of a car
and starting it up with a quick punch of his fist and a slicing and
twisting of the bared wires. ‘You played a lot of computer games,
Celly said?’

‘Sure,’ Jake
said, shivering once again after a flight that had taken in a
precarious journey across land still being contested by forces on
either side. ‘I’ve driven real cars a few times too,
thanks.’

‘Straight up
this road is where you want to be heading,’ the other dragon said,
pointing up a road littered here and there with damaged or
abandoned vehicles. ‘This isn’t an important section for either us
or your side. Celly said you’ll be picked up soon enough, once the
guys tracking you realise you’re no longer in our area.’

‘Pick me up?’
Jake replied bitterly. ‘They tried to kill me earlier!’

‘Only because
you were with Celly.’ The dragon slipped out of the driving seat,
making way for Jake. ‘She says they’ll want to talk to you, just in
case you’ve picked up any info they could use.’

‘Only, don’t
give them the stick until you’ve watched it yourself,’ the other
dragon said, turning and already beginning to ascend into the air.
‘Oh, and lock your doors and keep your windows up.’

‘Are there any
maps in her–’

Having switched
on the car’s interior light to familiarise himself with the
dashboard controls, Jake looked back out of the door towards where
the dragons had been standing. But they had both vanished, fading
into the darkness without even the sound that a butterfly might
make.

Jake switched on
the main beams, swinging the car back onto the road.

He wasn’t sure
where he was heading.

But as long as
he kept the thunderous roars and bright flashes of explosions
behind him, then it was obviously in the right
direction.

*

It wasn’t long
before Jake came across a number of weary, bedraggled people
heading in the same direction that he was, their most precious
belongings or what they had deemed as essentials haphazardly piled
on their backs. Cars and trucks lay wrecked, abandoned or even
ablaze at the sides of the road.

Realising that
he had seats to spare, Jake slowed, winding down his window to
shout out, ‘I can give a lift to three or fo–’

Before he knew
what was happening, and as if he had suddenly drawn their attention
to his presence, he was suddenly surrounded by people who seemed to
have appeared from nowhere, crowding around his car, pushing hard
against its sides, banging frenziedly on the windows, even
clambering over the hood. They were all yelling out in a language
he didn’t understand, Chinese probably he reasoned, yet it was
obvious they were angry, frightened, aggressive.

One of the
windows shattered under the incessant blows, a back door was
wrenched open. People scrambled onto the back seat, only to be
instantly pulled out by someone who briefly took their
place.

Jake’s own
window exploded in his face. A hand followed, grabbing him
violently by the throat, jarring his head again and again against
the roof.