Elliot, page 5
part #3 of Anarock Shifters Series
A few rooms away—if she could call them rooms—what looked at first like a gator glided through the water. It whipped its spine back and forth and its long tail wavered to and fro with its movements.
When it got closer, Aria saw wings tucked against its back. It entered one of the transparent rooms and landed on its feet. She couldn’t tell where the water began and ended. The creature didn’t break any noticeable surface. The wall didn’t offer any barrier. When the creature landed, water droplets drained off its scales and soaked into the floor. It unruffled its wings and she found herself looking at a dragon.
It strutted around the room doing something or other. It turned its back to her. Then it turned side on where she could see its whole form again. All at once, it darted out its long neck, clapped its jaws together, and plucked a fish out of the water. It gulped down its meal in one swallow and went back to whatever it was doing.
She blinked. When she swept her gaze the other way, she discovered Elliot watching her. He smiled again. “Elliot? Where the fuck are we?”
He lowered his voice to a subtle murmur. “We’re under the Quag. We’re in a hidden kingdom populated by these strange dragons. They’re shifters, as best I can make out, but they never shift. They stay in their dragon forms all the time. They call themselves the Blood Kin and this place is the Halcyon Coast. Don’t ask me how it can exist down here, but it does.”
She gulped, but that did nothing to settle her nerves. “How did we get down here?”
“You fell through the ground up in the Quag. I don’t know how it happened. One minute, you were standing there. You were walking away from me to find Victor so you could report me for going over to NightRage. Don’t you remember? The next second, you fell through the ground. I didn’t know what happened to you, but the next thing I knew, it spat you out again. You were out cold, but you were okay. Then one of them, one of the Blood Kin came along. He said you saw the Halcyon Coast under the water, which made no sense to me because you didn’t fall into the water. Anyway, he said you had to come down here to keep the secret or die. That’s their law. Anyone who finds out about them has to come down here or die. I said if they were going to take you, to take me, too. That’s how we got here. They brought us here.”
“How…..?” She stared at her surroundings one more time, but she couldn’t understand the evidence of her own senses. “How long have we been here?”
“It’s hard to tell. The light comes through the water from above. That surface up there gets dark at night, but it never gets really dark down here. I don’t know where the light comes from, but it’s always pretty light. That must be part of the magic.”
Aria surveyed the place one more time. Countless of these transparent rooms covered a wide, flat plane extending out of view. The longer she spent down here, the more she could accept what she was seeing. She never in her wildest dreams imagined what living under the Quag would be like, but maybe this was it.
“This is just the upper entrance area,” Elliot went on. “The Coast extends for thousands of miles underground. Most of it is so far underground they can’t see the upper surface of the water. They tell some pretty wild tales about it, but I guess we’ll have to see it to believe it.”
She rounded on him. “Are you seriously suggesting we have to stay down here? Can’t we get out of here?”
His eyes darted left and right. He bowed close and whispered under his breath. “Don’t talk like that. Don’t let anyone hear you say anything about leaving. We’re here to survive. If they think we’re even considering leaving, they’ll kill us both. According to Malfie—he’s the one who first brought us here—according to him, they’ve been living down here for centuries—way longer than the New Breed of Anarock has been living on the surface.”
Aria gasped out loud. “That’s impossible! The toxic spill mutated us into New Breed. That’s how we became shifters. If these dragons aren’t New Breed, then they must be…..” She broke off.
Elliot nodded. The same glowing brilliance lit up his features. “I know. They must have evolved long before the New Breed. They’re certainly stronger and bigger and far, far more intelligent. They can speak in their dragon forms and they have an advanced society. Don’t ever underestimate them. They can kill us with no effort. They’re doing us a favor by letting us live here. Don’t talk about leaving. Don’t even think about it.”
She lowered her voice to match his. “I have to think about it. We can’t stay here. We have…. We have families up in Anarock. What will they think?”
He shook his head, but he never stopped smiling. “Just keep it to yourself. We have enough to worry about just trying to live here.”
She couldn’t think. All of this was too much for her to take in. Everywhere she looked, another wonder assaulted her senses. Dragons swam around the water, entered the many rooms and chambers, left them, and went somewhere else. They conversed with each other in regular speech as well as shrieks and screeches. Mothers herded their young into rooms, grabbed prey out of the water, and fed it to their babies.
Elliot’s voice drifted into her ear from behind. “They have written histories and even arts. They’re a strange people, but as far as I can make out, they’re even more advanced than the New Breed. All this time, we’ve been trying to copy humans. The Blood Kin don’t try. They don’t copy anyone but themselves. I think they might have magic as well as being dragons. I don’t see how they can do all this without it.”
Aria opened her mouth, but no sound would come out. She drank in the view struggling to orient herself in space. She was underneath the Quag. God only knew what amazement she would find down here, but only one thought occupied her attention. She wanted to get back to Anarock. She wanted to see her family again. She wanted to go on with the life she had before. She couldn’t do that here.
“Here he comes,” Elliot whispered. “Whatever you do, be polite to him. Don’t give him any attitude. He’s dangerous.”
Before she could respond, a massive coal-black dragon slithered through the water. It created a wake of ripples under the upper surface when its back spikes cut the silver mirror where the sun played on the current.
Without warning, it dived. It trained its nose right at Aria and Elliot. It punctured an invisible barrier and thumped its wings to an impossible width.
It rotated forward and extended its claws. It pounced onto its feet and stretched its neck. It screamed a deafening challenge and bobbed its neck in all directions. Water droplets sailed from its wingtips before it folded them and paced back and forth in front of Aria.
It spoke in a deep rumble that seemed to come from the center of the Earth. “You’re conscious again, I see. I trust your companion has explained the situation to you. You are our guest for now.”
Aria bowed from the waist and closed her eyes. “He did explain it to me and I’m grateful for the chance to join you. I never intended to discover your secret. You have my word that I will never reveal your existence to anyone.”
“You will never reveal it because you will never leave here to tell anyone,” the dragon returned. “You will remain here. When you are comfortable doing so, you may travel deeper down the Halcyon Coast to build lives for yourselves among our people. You will never return to the upper world.”
She bit her tongue not to argue with him. As Elliot mentioned, he was far bigger than any dragon shifter of Anarock she had ever seen. He radiated power and menace in ways she’d never seen in any other dragon.
Then again, the dragon shifters of Anarock always took their human forms to interact even with their own kind. They didn’t want to intimidate anyone whereas this creature did it deliberately.
He craned his neck around to examine her. “You are not dragon like your companion.”
“No, I’m not. I’m a bear.”
He made another horrible grumble under his breath, but this one didn’t sound like the usual purr of thinking. It sounded disgusting and threatening. “We have seen those. You will remain here until the Kin decide whether to allow you to travel deeper.”
Aria stiffened. “Why wouldn’t they allow it when you just said we could travel deeper when we were ready?”
The dragon wheeled away and flexed his mighty wings. “We will inform you of our decision. We will decide whether we are willing to keep you or not.”
Elliot rushed forward. “Wait, Malfie! You said….”
Before Elliot finished speaking, the dragon leaped. He dove upward and, in a second, he swam off into the water. The walls didn’t hide him. He dwindled to a speck before he vanished.
Aria stared after him. What did that all mean? Elliot woke her from her shock. “Fuck!”
She rounded on him. “What did he mean—they’ll decide whether they’re willing to keep me.”
He chopped his hand through the air. “I was worried this would happen. These dragons have a strange prejudice against anyone other than their own kind. They’ve been living under the water like this for so long that they shun contact with everyone else. They’ve made some strange comments to me about outsiders before, but I didn’t think it would go as far as this.”
“This?” she repeated. “What do you mean—this?”
“Don’t you see? They don’t like you because you’re a bear. If they decide not to keep you, they’ll kill you. It’s that simple. You either join them or you die. Everybody who finds out about the Halcyon Coast does one or the other.”
Aria did her best to gulp down her rising alarm. “What about you?”
“Don’t worry about me. They’ll keep me because I’m a dragon. They don’t exactly consider me one of their Kin, but at least I’m a dragon. You’re…. you’re not.”
She looked around her for the thousandth time. All of a sudden, the magical nature of this underwater world seemed a lot less beautiful and appealing. It made her skin crawl. She wanted to be in Anarock where she knew everyone and everyone knew her.
In Anarock, everybody accepted everybody else. They had to. No one could afford to discriminate against anyone. If someone was a shifter or a magic-user or just some random mutated freak who couldn’t show their ugly face in public—none of that mattered. All the New Breed were in this together.
Aria never dreamed any mutant anywhere could shun or discriminate against any other. New Breed—or any other kind of mutants—had enough to worry about with the humans trying to wipe them off the face of the planet. The whole notion of mutant fighting mutant would have been laughable if she wasn’t facing death right now.
She rotated in a complete circle and surveyed the bizarre scenery one more time. “What are we going to do? Where should we go?”
“There’s nowhere to go,” Elliot murmured. “We’ll stay here. We have to.”
“We can’t stay here!” She stopped herself from shrieking at the top of her lungs. “We’d be prisoners.”
“We’re prisoners anyway,” he replied. “We can move from one room to another and even from one level to another. No one will stop us from moving around or catching our food or doing anything we want to, but we can’t leave. We have to stay here and wait for their decision.”
“And if they decide to….” She couldn’t say the words out loud.
“We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it.” He eased a step closer to her. His eyes sparkled, but she didn’t stiffen against him this time. She wanted him close. She wanted to be near him. She didn’t feel safe anywhere else.
He slipped his hand into hers. “Come on. I want to show you something.”
He drew her away. She couldn’t see any exit or entrance to this chamber in which they found themselves. From what she saw so far, anybody could just move straight through the wall whenever they wanted to go anywhere.
He took a few steps when another dragon streaked up from directly underneath them. He jetted straight through the floor and pounced in front of Elliot. Elliot reared back to stumble away. “Damn it, Chimo! Do you really have to do that all that time?”
The dragon cocked his head to one side. Then he shook himself and splashed water all over the room just like a dog. His wet green scales flashed iridescent in the curious light. He spoke in a high, piping voice so unlike Malfie’s that Aria’s head spun. “Do what all the time?”
“Can’t you just come straight at a person instead of shooting up out of nowhere?” Elliot demanded. “You startled both of us.”
Chimo moved his head from side to side and his gaze darted around the chamber like a bird’s. “I do not understand what you mean. What is the difference between flying up and flying straight? I see no direction that could make such a distinction.”
Elliot waved his hand and smacked his lips. “Just try not to make such sudden entrances, all right? It’s not good manners?”
“What is this word you use—manners?” Chimo asked. “I do not know it.”
“It means it’s disturbing to other people,” Elliot explained. “It means it puts them off and makes them uneasy.”
“You it makes uneasy,” the dragon replied. “My Kin do it all the time. I imitate my elders. They jump and dash and startle. That is the way they move from one level to another, Elliot. It is the way of all Blood Kin.”
Elliot growled under his breath and turned away. “Fine. Do whatever you want.”
“I shall.” The dragon lunged, shot out its long neck, and seized a full-grown gator drifting on the water’s upper surface.
Chimo wrestled the animal down, down, down, until he pulled it by main force into the room. He slammed the thrashing beast onto the floor and pinned it under one enormous foot. Then Chimo drew back his pointed head and stabbed it down hard on the gator’s chest. He crushed the creature’s ribcage four or five times until the animal lay flattened, bloody, and dead before Aria’s shocked gaze.
Chimo straightened up licking his lips. “You must join me for a meal. You must be hungry.”
His eyes darted to Aria, but he didn’t address her directly. He spoke only to Elliot. Aria started to recognize a pattern here, but she said nothing.
Chimo coiled his neck in one more time. When he shot it toward the gator, he snapped his jaws and ripped off one of the animal’s forelegs. He tossed it into the air and caught it before he gulped it down in one swallow.
Aria gaped at him in shock. This was a shifter. This strange dragon could shift into a man—or a boy. What would he look like then? She found herself pre-judging these Blood Kin the same way they pre-judged her.
All her life, she considered shifters equivalent to human. She considered their human forms, their upright, two-legged forms, to be their true forms. She didn’t really consider their animal forms a real manifestation of the person.
She didn’t consider her own bear form to be really her. She remembered her parents and her sisters. They could all change into bears, but when they did, they ceased to be themselves. They only really became the people she knew and loved in their human forms.
Even calling their other forms ‘human’ forms belied the reality. They weren’t human and never would be. Why should a dragon shifter be any less himself or herself in dragon form than in human form? Maybe these Blood Kin didn’t consider their human forms really them, either. Maybe that’s why they kept to their dragon forms all the time the way the New Breed kept their human forms whenever possible.
Watching Chimo eat, she couldn’t begin to imagine him as a person. She found it difficult to believe he even was one. He was a dragon through and through. For all she knew, he never shifted into a person. He was this mythical beast shredding a gator for his food.
Elliot glanced her way. “What do you say? Are you hungry?”
She eyed the gator. “How do we….?”
“You’ll have to shift. Don’t worry. Everything tastes good down here.”
She already knew that. She ate gator in her bear form plenty of times and liked it. Still, she didn’t want to shift in front of this dragon. She looked away. “You go ahead.”
Elliot didn’t hesitate. He reared back and shifted. He spread his wings and rocketed into a huge dragon—at least, Aria would have considered him huge before they came to the Halcyon Coast. He wasn’t much different in size than Chimo and he was noticeably smaller than Malfie.
He let out a shriek and descended on the gator. He and Chimo ripped it to pieces and wolfed down the chunks. They devoured it in a few minutes. Then Chimo plucked up the gory skeleton and flung what remained into the water. The current caught the carcass and floated it away. Scraps of torn meat and skin undulated on the ripple and a few fish and other creatures came over to pick the bones.
Chimo sat back on his haunches and licked his lips. “That is all for today, my friends. I only came to make sure you had enough to eat. If you need anything more, all you have to do is call. Have a pleasant evening.”
He launched into the water and skated away. Aria watched him go, but she didn’t experience the same startled disbelief as before. In a few minutes, she got that much more used to her new environment.
Elliot rotated around and ran his sleeve across his chin. “Are you sure you’re not hungry? We can get you something else if you don’t want gator.”
She arched an eyebrow at him. “I would still have to shift to eat it, though, wouldn’t I?”
“Yeah? So?”
She faced him. “Did you notice that neither Malfie nor Chimo asked me my name? Chimo called you by your name, but neither of them even asked mine.”
“I told you. They have a thing about anyone from another species. They don’t like you being a bear.”
“What you mean is,” she countered, “they don’t like me because I’m a bear. They wouldn’t take kindly to me shifting into one in order to eat.”
“So what? You’re not going to eat while you’re down here? Is that what you’re saying? You said upstairs that I would get hungry if I didn’t eat your mushrooms. Now it’s your turn. You have to eat and this is the only way you can do it. So what if they don’t like you for being a bear? They don’t like me much, either.”
