Dragon 5 Chapter 7 (Patreon)

I walked through the university, making my way to the science building, where Sabrina and I would practice that day.

Sabrina was walking in from the other direction at the same time.

I gave her a friendly wave. “Morning. How were the dragonettes?”

“Uhh…” She hesitated to find the words for whatever she was thinking. “It was interesting. They very much want more information on you.”

Holding open the door, I let her enter first.

The science lab we used was one of the older ones in the campus building. It came with a dozen dinged up lab benches and a score of scorch marks on the ceiling and floor. It was the perfect place to get away with a little damage if one of my spells we awry.

There might have been more fortified places for that, but this let me keep the illusion of going to classes. That was important to me.

Jadelyn’s father had helped convince the school to let Sabrina and I use it for my independent study. Obviously, they didn’t know I was studying magic.

“Are any of them joining us today?”

Sabrina couldn’t meet my eyes. “They got in a small fight this morning after Trina tried to assert dominance over Polydora.”

I struggled not to laugh as I pictured it, setting my bag down on a nearby table. “How’d that go?”

Sabrina pulled out an old battered tome and sat on the lab bench next to me, a sigh leaving her..

“Not well. Poly wrecked Trina, but then the others joined in and it became a whole mess. They probably won’t show up until they aren’t sporting enormous bruises.” Sabrina shrugged it off and flipped open the tome.

I watched her. Something seemed different about her.

Looking her over, I realized her sweater was a size or two smaller than normal, still a little baggy, but much more form fitting than usual. And her skirt was shorter than usual.

My dragon nose was picking up some perfume, which my beast was upset masked some of her normal scent. She smelled a little like someone the day after a bonfire.

She’d put more effort into her appearance. I coughed into my hand, trying to hide my attention. “So, what’s on today's agenda? Learning more theory? Maybe we’ll dive into the physical properties of mana and how it functions with chemistry?”

“Actually, after seeing you last night, I thought we could learn a spell.” Sabrina looked at me over the rim of her glasses. “If you had anything besides those crude blasts, you could have restrained that elf.”

I snorted.

An elf had decided to run away from a predator when we needed to question him. Really, I don’t know what he could have expected. “All I did was throw a trash can.”

“Yes, well, I’m pretty sure you could have launched it into space if you had a different trajectory. Trina had to spend twenty minutes healing him before he could talk.” Sabrina replied, putting me in my place.

When the elf had crumpled to the ground, I’d realized I had probably overdone it. But in my defense, he ran, and that triggered my instincts.

“Do you have a problem with elves?” Sabrina asked, curiosity in her eyes.

“No. I’m married to… three? Well, two of them are more like half elves. Well, at least Morgana and Yev both look like elves, but you know…” I was rambling and trailed off.

“True. I’m glad you don’t, because that would make your wedding with the Highaen sisters awkward.” She laughed a little.

It was the first time I’d heard her laugh. She had a soft, rolling chuckle.

“Wedding?” I was still stuck on her words.

“Oh! Um, I just assumed?” Sabrina started rambling. “They are high elves, and royalty at that.” She held up her hands defensively.

I rubbed the bridge of my nose. “No one has said anything about a wedding. But you are right. The girls probably all need some sort of formal celebration. To my dragon, I’ve marked them. Nothing else is needed and nobody else will ever have them.”

Sabrina didn’t say anything, but I could see her opinion that I needed to do something more as she focused down on her materials. “I want to teach you a restraining spell. It’s quite simple, actually.”

“Oh?” I perked up at that. “What are the words for it?”

She licked her finger and paged through the tome. Amira’s mother had provided it to her in hopes of winning some favor with me.

Sabrina had been excited about getting her hands on it and seemed more than able to understand it.

She shifted into her teacher's tone. “We discussed this. Words have power, but not as much as physical representations. So rather than learn the words, we are going to enchant a stick.”

“A stick?” I had hoped for something maybe a little more awe-inspiring. “Won’t that break under the strain of a few uses?”

“We will make a few; you’ll need the practice. This spell is stronger holding, but reliant on the stick staying intact.” She put the tome down in front of me. “I looked through the tome this morning. This one feels like the right place for you to start, given your needs.”

I could read the words for the spell, but I knew she wanted me to pay more attention to the enchantment listed out. It was a string of characters vaguely resembling a chain. I was glad it was relatively short and easier to memorize. “I don’t suppose you already came with sticks?”

Sabrina smiled and pulled a whole handful out of twigs out of her purse before reaching back in. “Here’s a needle to do your etching.”

I picked up the little needle. It looked like one from a sewing machine. I pulled back the twig, seeing if it would break. It seemed decently firm. “How the heck am I supposed to etch that?” I pointed at the diagram in the tome. “Onto these little sticks.” Finesse wasn’t exactly a dragon’s strong suit.

“Practice.” Sabrina smiled smugly.

“Are all succubi sadists?” I grumbled, picking up the needle and pricking the twig as a test. It worked pretty well for scraping off the bark; the wood was harder though, and my first attempt snapped the twig in two.

“No, but it is funny watching the big bad dragon king hunched over and struggling with a little twig.” Sabrina laughed before taking my hand in hers. “Here, hold it a little further back.”

“Can’t I just use my claws?” I asked.

“I have claws too, but they just don’t make as great of lines. Here, look.” Her hand turned slightly pink and her nail grew black and long. She scratched at the wood in a small arc, but it was rough, sort of like a sketch.

“Versus this.” She held the needle, and in one clean curved line, she drew the same shape.

I scratched my chin and took the needle from her, scratching out the enchantment in tiny detail on a twig. “What happens if I mess up?”

“Finish it as long as you don’t break the twig. With a little luck, you might be able to make a few working ones today, even if they are flawed.” She pushed the pile of twigs to the side. “You missed a line here.”

I grunted and noted it before continuing.

***

Sabrina patted me on the back as I swept the pile of broken twigs into the trash. “You snapped the last three before we finished, so maybe it’s best if we stop for the day. I need to get to my actual classes soon, anyway.”

I snorted, and a little smoke came out of my nostrils. “Yeah, I don’t think I’m going to make any more progress.”

The pile of errors was large, but I’d managed to make three somewhat functional twigs.

Sabrina picked up one of my successes. “Not bad. Even if you did these perfectly with the twigs, they’ll probably only last two minutes. The mana flowing through the enchantment will heat up the twig. It’ll probably either char your enchantment off or burst into flames.”

She looked at another twig. “These might last half as long with their flaws.”

I nodded. There had been no reason to use nicer materials for practice, and the utility of the spell wasn’t meant to lock someone down for days.

It certainly would have been handy on the elf the night before. “What’s the range of this?”

“Line of sight, essentially. If you wanted to leave someone locked down by this spell, you’d want to leave the twig in the room with them. Distance will also affect the time this lasts.” Sabrina handed me back the twig, and I carefully placed them in my bracer.

There they were nice and secure, and more importantly, couldn’t be used against me.

While they were not the most impressive thing, I was quite proud of the twigs. They represented progress. My first enchantment.

“You should be happy. You actually mastered that quickly.” Sabrina commented. “Most wizards take weeks to get a working enchantment with that many symbols.”

“Wait, was this a complex one?”

“Oh, no.” Sabrina gathered up the tome and stuffed it in her bag. “This is child’s play compared to what you can really do with enchantments, but it’s complex enough that a wizard would have done several easier enchantments first. Maybe it’s because you are a dragon.”

The beast preened in my chest.

The smug bastard was just a clump of instincts, but I swore he was alive.

“I’ll walk you to class.” I replied, getting up out of my chair and following her out the door.

“You don’t have to.” She replied quickly, but she didn’t move to rush away.

“Nonsense, you are helping me, and I’m a little worried that Helena will do something. You two are opposites. I guess… I’m not sure how that works. Are the celestial and the demonic planes at war?”

After she was quiet for a moment, I realized I might have stuffed my foot in my mouth.

“No, not really. I actually think we are more alike than they would ever admit. The celestial plane feeds the same way as demons, only they tend to focus on different emotions. Joy, love, devotion, and things like that. An angel could turn people into husks just like demons if they pushed. There have been more than a few cults like that.” Sabrina rolled her eyes.

“Cults?” I asked curiously.

We stepped out of the science building, and she led me across the campus sidewalk. She kept her voice down, making sure she wasn’t heard. “You know when you hear about closed door cults where people become obsessed and think they’re in a utopia? Those are often angels pushing on people’s emotions and feeding off of them. We are not that different. People just give those emotions a more positive spin, but anything to an extreme is bad.”

I nodded. What she said was interesting. And it also made me think of The Church and The Templars. Angels were likely feeding off of them, but at a low enough level that it wasn’t killing them.

“So, what’s on the schedule for tomorrow? More sticks? Or do we play with new enchantments?” Now that we had stepped into actual magic, I was like an eager child. I tried to play it cool, but the look Sabrina gave me told me she wasn’t buying it.

She squinted up at me. “Don’t think you just get to skip all the steps. But… we can look through some of the other small enchantments to see if they would help you.”

I did a little fist pump. Magic! We were doing actual practical magic!

“This is the building. I can go by myself.” She gave me a look, telling me that I wasn’t supposed to follow her any further.

“That’s fine. But be careful and call me if anything comes up.”

She laughed. “Yes, mom.” She rolled her eyes, but I could tell that she was pleased.

“You know,” she continued. “Giving someone like me that sort of privilege is going to make people say things.” She paused in her walk, seeming to pay close attention to what I’d say to her vague statement.

I shrugged. “It’s not as if they don’t already say things about me having eight mates. Let me get the door for you.” She was carrying a heavy bag.

“Thanks.” Sabrina ducked in, and someone was coming out the other way, so I kept it open.

But I regretted that decision as Agent Tills stepped out.

“Zach Pendragon, interesting seeing you here.” Tills turned as I let the door close behind her.

“Is your partner lurking around here?” I asked, looking around for Helena and wondering if I should charge in after Sabrina.

“No. She likes to disappear and do things on her own. I don’t like it, but she gets results.” Tills had a small frown on her face.

It bothered her more than she let on.

But it made sense to me. Helena would have to hide her paranormal activities from her. “It bothers you that she connects dots you can’t.” I guessed.

“Yes. Things used to be so simple, but recently…” She trailed off and motioned for me to follow her.

I didn’t have anything pressing, and it didn’t hurt to work with her more. Having friends in law enforcement would likely be useful as the king of dragons.

“Recently, things have been… strange. Everything isn’t adding up.” She started.

I nodded, letting the silence linger for her to figure out the right words.

“Take you, for example. You’re just a student. There’s nothing out of the ordinary except you are isolated because your family is dead.” She paused, realizing she was being insensitive, but I just nodded for her to continue.

“Then you got involved with the Scalewrights and a small mercenary company out of the blue. And people say weird as hell titles now about you. Dragon king? What even is that supposed to say? I thought maybe you were some kind of kingpin, but there’s no evidence of that either.”

She tried to stare at me, as if that could somehow solve her curiosity.

“You think I’m part of some secret shadowy organization?”

“Maybe. But even then, it doesn’t make sense. When people join organizations, there’s training. There is a recruitment phase. You just went from ordinary to ‘dragon king’ overnight. That doesn’t happen. Which means, either you somehow hid it all for a long time, or there’s something special about you.” Tills raised an eyebrow at me, asking for an answer.

I could only grin. “There is something very special about me. But I can’t tell you what it is. Doing so would put myself at risk, and you wouldn’t like what it meant for you.”

“Meant for me?” She asked quickly, pausing in her steps.

I decided to lay it on thick. “You’d become mine. My responsibility and mine to do with as I pleased. Never again in your life would you have an option of walking away from me.”

“I don’t know if that sounds more like marriage or slavery.” She commented dryly.

Snorting, I barely held in the laugh. “I’d like to think marriage isn’t close to slavery, if you do it right.”

“True. I’m married to my job, anyway. No time for relationships. There’s too much travel and secrecy to keep something up. But you’ve managed to pull off whatever you’re doing, plus many relationships. Helena said you were married to multiple women. But often I hear the term ‘mate’.” She showed her hand a little too much.

I was uncomfortable with how much information she had compiled on me.

Tills saw it in my face. “I have to admit that I’ve been paying special attention to you lately. After Dubai, my partner went wild trying to look into you before I got the transfer processed.”

“Is he going to be a problem?” I reined myself in, working to suppress the growl that wanted to escape my throat.

“I don’t believe so. He’s going to end up tanking his career soon in his obsession.” She shook her head. “But even if he was a problem, what would you do about it?” She turned back towards me, seeming to hope for more data points.

“Problems don’t exist if they disappear.” I gave her a wicked smile. “But he’s safe as long as he doesn’t come after me or mine.”

Tills couldn’t stop staring at me. “I don’t get it. What caused this transformation?”

Before I could answer, Maeve was walking towards us. She waved to get my attention. “Hello, Zach. Who is this?”

“Maeve. This is Agent Tills, an acquaintance of mine who works for the FBI. We were discussing some recent problems that have brought her to the city.” I tried to tell her with my eyes that they were the same problems that were cropping up for us. “A new business owner is in town. Deniz Wallachia.”

Maeve’s smile plummeted to the depths of an icy cold frown. “Yes. It seems that news of his arrival circulated last night. Given his family’s history, we should be careful. Please, if the FBI needs anything, let us know and we will assist how we can.” Maeve’s smile at Tills was tight, but it blossomed when she faced me. “I’ll see you around.”

Tills had a raised eyebrow as she watched Maeve leave. “That one is maybe even worse news than the Scalewrights. I don’t know how you attract them like honey.”

“Maeve’s not so bad. Her mother is a right bitch, though. Stiffed me pretty bad once. Maeve has worked hard to distance herself from the impression her mother gave me.”

The agent just stared at me like I was a freak of nature. I wondered just how much she knew about Maeve and her family.

My phone started ringing, and I fished it out of my pocket, holding up a finger to stop whatever Tills was about to say.

“ZACH!” Frank’s voice was panicked. “Man, I didn’t know who to call. It’s Maddie, she’s in the hospital and… and…” He was speaking so quickly that he could barely get a word out, but he’d said enough.

“Frank. Take a deep breath. Which hospital?”

Tills dangled a pair of keys in front of me, and I snatched them out of her hand.

“I’ll be right there Frank.” I said to him, hanging up the call and turning to Tills, waiting for her to point to the right car.

She held her hands out for the keys back and walked over to a car. “I’ll drive if you answer a few questions on the trip.” She stated.

This time, I did let out the lowest of growls. I didn’t like being cornered. But for Maddie, I’d do it. “There are things I can’t say, but I’ll do my best.”

AN - there were no miss chapters, I time skipped over a night with Morgana. I know how to smooth it out, but who knows, maybe I'll go back and write it.