The Lost Dragon Princess

Chapter 14

“Are she and Boogie out volunteering?” I asked, hoping to prove to this guy that I wasn’t some trickster trying to pass as my mother’s daughter with plans to do nefarious things to the cabin. Or the yard art.

His shoulders did grow a little less hunched when I used the dog’s name. “Yeah. They found the guy. Some i***t who flipped his ATV on an old logging road in the mountains.”

“It wasn’t found twenty feet up in the trees, was it?” I remembered the dragon flying past the rest stop.

“What? No.” There was that squint again. This guy was positive I was shifty.

“Don’t take this the wrong way, but who are you, and why are you hanging out in my mom’s house?”

“Diavan, my name, and I live in the van, but she lets me come in for showers and to use the kitchen.”

“Do you pay her?” I couldn’t imagine my mom letting some charity case intrude on her life. She’d risk her a*s in a snowstorm to rescue a drunken i***t in the mountains, but that wasn’t the same as having someone in her personal space.

“Three hundred a month. It’s less than an RV park, she lets me use the shop for my projects, and it’s got a great view—usually not as weird of a view as now.” He pointed at the river. Damas was now sunning himself in a sunny patch of grass, hopefully one devoid of goose droppings.

I wished I could let Lily out to explore here, but she would probably take off and get eaten by a mountain lion or a coyote.

I have excellent hearing, Damas informed me without looking over. I heard you call me a service animal and that man call me weird. You’re both in danger of having your feet gnawed off.

Will that be before or after you dry off while napping in the sun?

After.

“I’m saving up for my own place,” the guy—Diavan—went on, “so it’s good not to spend money on an apartment. I do some work for a landscaping company and sell my art at the farmers market.”

“Does my mom need the money?” I cared less about his life aspirations than the fact that my mom had felt compelled to take on a renter. “She didn’t have to get rid of her apartments, did she?”

Was I a bad daughter because I hadn’t been sending money home? I already knew I was a bad daughter for other reasons, but guilt tramped into my heart. I’d assumed Mom did fine with finances. She’d won a settlement back in the nineties and used the money to buy an eight-unit apartment building. The last she’d told me, the rents had gone up enough to pay off the mortgage and give her enough to live on.

“I don’t know anything about apartments, but she said the property taxes have gone up a lot.” Diavan scratched his cheek with the corner of his phone. “Maybe if I take a picture of the deadly jaguar on the bank and send it to the county, they’ll adjust the land value down a few hundred thousand dollars.”

“He’s a guard jaguar. He would add to the value, not detract from it.”

For that astute comment, I’ll spare your foot, Damas told me.

Thank you.

“He does look really cool. Is it legal to have a jaguar?”

The rumble of a vehicle turning onto the gravel driveway saved me from having to come up with an answer. Ah ha, there was Mom’s old green Subaru. The cat yowled as it drove past. The car was parked in the shade, and it wasn’t that hot, so I was sure Lily wasn’t in distress—especially with Damas out of the vehicle—but I felt bad about her being cooped up. I hoped my mom would let her out in the house.

A furry dog head thrust out of the car window and barked. Damas sat up.

You may want to head back to your realm for a while, I told him, hoping he was listening. I had no power to project my thoughts, so he had to be monitoring me through our link for him to hear me.

It is getting tediously crowded here.

I think the geese and the squirrels feel that way, yes. I touched the charm and whispered the word to dismiss him.

Mom parked, got out of the car, and let the dog out while giving me a peculiar look. Probably a what-are-you-doing-here look. If she’d been off on her volunteer mission for more than a day, she wouldn’t have heard my phone message.

Boogie, a handsome golden retriever of four or five, shot into the trees to investigate the place Damas had been lounging. I had no idea if Damas smelled like a real jaguar or not. He was warm when I petted him, and he felt real, but maybe to a creature with a better-than-human nose, he smelled like fire and brimstone. But not, thanks to his bath, like cat pee.

“Hey, Mom.” I lifted a hand as she approached, a backpack slung over one shoulder.

She wore faded blue hiking pants, a camp shirt, and nothing but dirt on her feet. Tall and rangy with blonde hair gone to gray and bound back in a braid, she was how I imagined I would look in twenty years—though I had a fondness for shoes. I’d been told my eyes were a more emerald green than was typical and that my facial features were finer, but it was hard for me to see my father’s influence. As I now knew, human genes were dominant, at least to mixed-species children born on Earth, and usually won out. That was good, I supposed. I’d seen the time-travel-to-historical-Earth Star Trek episodes where Kirk had to explain Spock’s ears.

“Sig.” She stopped in front of me, and we stared at each other. “It’s good to see you.”

“You too.”

This was the part when normal mothers and daughters hugged, but as Mom had told me long ago, there was no need to hug when a handshake would do. She always said Norwegians weren’t touchy-feely. I’d stopped pointing out that her mother had been the real Norwegian and that we had both grown up in the States.

“I don’t know if you’ve heard my message—” I pointed a thumb toward her open door, “—but I have a problem and was hoping you could help.”

“You don’t need money, do you?”

“No.” Not unless Colonel Pariah didn’t make it and the snotty lieutenant talked the army into cancelling my contract… No, even if that happened, I could get work as an independent. I was sure of it. But I liked my gig with the army, and I liked working for Pariah. I had to figure out how to heal her. “Just your elven expertise.”

Her eyebrows arched.

Instead of saying more, I tilted my head toward Diavan, hoping Mom would take a hint and send him off to his van or her shop. He was watching our exchange with a curious expression—or maybe a puzzled one. Maybe his mother hugged him when they saw each other, though he looked like someone who would be easy not to hug.

“Diavan is a quarter dwarf,” Mom said. “He knows about things.” She waved a hand.

“Dwarf?” I looked him up and down. “Are you sure?”

“Grandpa was a big dwarf, I hear,” Diavan said.

“Either that or the rest of your family were giants.” That put a strange image in my head, as far as how copulation would go. I pushed it aside and dug out the vial, painstakingly wrapped in papers so it wouldn’t break.

“What happened to your Jeep?” Mom asked.

“A dragon.”

This time, her eyebrows flew upward instead of merely arching.

I took out my phone, flipped to the pictures of the wreck, and handed it to her while I unwrapped the vial.

“A dragon did this? Is this what you’re here about?”

“No. As crazy as it seems, the dragon is the least of my problems this week.” I glanced upward, half-expecting to see him flying over the trees. “This vial may have held a potion that was dumped into my boss’s coffee or juice or something in her house. There’s a sigil on the bottom that appears when it’s heated up. I think it’s elven, and I’m hoping you can identify it.”

She held the vial up to the sun, then shrugged off her pack, pulled out a lighter, and used the flame to heat the bottom.

“You’ve given up on flint and steel and embraced modern technology?” I asked.

“I still practice making fires from scratch, but this is easier if you’re stuck out looking for someone. It gets dark fast in the mountains.”

Loud snuffles came from Mood’s car—Boogie had followed his nose back to it and had his feet up on the rear passenger window that Damas had opened. Lily, no doubt alarmed by the appearance of another predator, yowled a complaint.

Mom held the vial up to the sky.

“Can you see the sigil?” I asked.

“Yes.”

“Is it Elvish?”

“No.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes.” She lowered the vial and handed it back to me.

I looked at Diavan. “Do you enjoy similarly monosyllabic conversations with my mother, or am I special?”

“I just met you, but I think you might be.” He glanced to where Damas had been before he disappeared back into his realm.

“Guess the therapist was right.” I stared down at the vial in disappointment.

Mom might be wrong—she wasn’t a scholar of the subject, just an obsessed and abandoned lover of an elf. But either way, it looked like I’d wasted my time coming all the way down here.

“I’ve got some language books we can check,” Mom said. “Just to be sure. But if you’re trying to figure out more about that symbol, I might know someone who can help. If you don’t mind a short walk in the woods.”

I almost answered immediately that I didn’t mind, but past experience made me give her a wary squint. “How short is short? Will we be crossing a state line on foot?” I waved at her dusty bare toes.

I hadn’t forgotten the summer vacation I’d spent hiking the Pacific Crest Trail with her. A rite of passage, she’d assured me, while speaking about how her parents had taken her on days-long hikes through the mountains. I mostly remembered being bored out of my gourd and trying to hide my face behind my hair to protect against mosquitoes.

“Just a few miles,” she said. “Shoes are optional.”

Lily yowled in the car, reminding me that she needed attending. Or that she didn’t like the big yellow furry head sticking in the window.

“Is that a cat?” Mom asked.

“Colonel Pariah has assured me she is, though it’s possible she’s a demon or nefarious shapeshifter in disguise. Can you watch her for a while? Pariah is… in the hospital. And her apartment building burned down.”

“Burned down?”

Boogie, having finished sniffing every part of the vehicle and ground that Damas had touched, came over and nosed my hand in greeting before giving Diavan a vigorous tail wag. He squatted down to pet the dog.

“I don’t know that for sure,” I admitted, “but the entire side of the building was heartily on fire when last I saw it. An elf threw a Molotov cocktail at it.”

“An elf? Elves all left the world decades ago.”

“And dragons left centuries ago, and yet…” I pointed to my phone full of crash photos.

“Huh. The world is getting interesting again.”

Before I could debate what that meant, Mom added, “Get the cat, and let’s see what we can find.”