The Lost Dragon Princess

Chapter 13

Back then, she’d been on the outskirts of town with a pine-tree-filled acre of land along the river. Since then, town had moved out to her and far beyond, with subdivisions full of expensive houses on tiny lots sprouting up like mushrooms after a rain. Fortunately for her sanity, her street hadn’t changed that much, other than that half the little homes had been replaced by boxy four-thousand-square-foot monstrosities with walls of windows.

She hadn’t cleared any of the trees on her lot, and a lava-rock cliff rose up behind the cabin, so it was still relatively private and unchanged by time, or at least it had been three years earlier, the last time I had visited. Now, as I drove down her road toward the end, a tingle raised the hairs on my arms, a warning of a magical being or perhaps magical artifacts. I hoped my mom didn’t have a witch or a werewolf for a neighbor.

Even though people thought that they were just myths but actually they lived amongst us and except a few characteristics which were pretty subtle like their dressing sense or their body hair percentage or maybe the pheromones that they released in the air you would never be able to understand that they were not humans. I also did not understand it until a few months ago…but after I sensed that they were not completely human I started looking at people and studying them.

I turned off the paved street and onto her long gravel driveway and frowned. There was a beat-up orange camper van parked in the dirt that didn’t look anything like her Subaru SUV. Was it hers? But after settling here, she’d seemed to give up her itchy-footed ways. I mean, sure I liked greenery and stuff but I was more like a city person unlike my mother…she could be almost said to be a druid if I did not know better.

Stranger than the van were the new lawn ornaments—stands of metal flowers, miniature windmills, bears holding fish like bazookas, and peacocks made out of rusty bicycle parts. They were all over the patches of grass that managed to thrive in the splotches of sun between the trees. Not only were the ornaments of dubious design, but they oozed magic, much like the charms on my necklace. They were what I’d sensed from up the street.

“Did she move? Without telling me?” I stared around.

The log cabin itself hadn’t changed much, with the roof still in need of pressure-washing—though the moss growing up there would surely object to such an activity—and the greenhouse and garden beds in use. There was a blue kayak mounted on the side of the one-car log garage that might have been there last time, but I couldn’t remember.

What makes you wonder that? Damas had figured out how the automatic windows worked, and his big furry silver head was hanging out from the back seat. The magic?

The magic and the, uh, flavor of the magic. I wouldn’t have been surprised if Mom was collecting elven artifacts, but it was hard to imagine an elven or even half-elven hand involved in the making of the rusty recycled art. Can you tell what those yard ornaments do?

No. Maybe your mother acquired a mate.

That’s impossible.

Is she not sexually active?

No! I mean, I don’t know. She’s forty-seven. I knew people of all ages enjoyed s*x, but this was my mom we were talking about. And she just had a divorce with my dad.

That sounds lonely.

Yeah, tell me about it. Not that I did any better in the romance department. I’d never even had a true love. My ex-husband was… a nice guy, but I’d fooled myself into believing I was passionately in love with him and wanted to settle down and lead a normal life. That delusion had worn away quickly after we’d married. But unlike another man I’d had a relationship with, he was still alive, so maybe it was for the best that I’d left.

My chest grew uncomfortably tight as I surveyed the changes to Mom’s property. The situation, or maybe the yellow juniper pollen dusting the street behind us, had me wanting to reach for that inhaler again. I felt like a d**g addict needing her daily hit.

I made myself count through some of the slow inhalations and exhalations that Mary had suggested. I couldn’t tell if it helped. What if my condition got worse instead of better? What if I ended up having some massive asthma attack while I was on a mission, and I had to go to the hospital? Or I died in front of a creature I was supposed to slay?

“Stay here and watch the cat, please,” I told Damas, giving up on activating my parasympathetic whatever.

A plaintive yowl came from Maggie’s carrier.

The small feline has no wish to stay with me.

“I won’t be long.”

Are those geese? Damas asked as I got out and walked up to the front door.

I glanced toward the river where a group of them were hanging out on the bank. Yes. I’m sure they don’t want to meet you.

Such an assumption to make. I am the equivalent of royalty in your world. They will be honored to make my acquaintance.

I really doubt that.

As I walked up to the front door, I wondered if Mom even knew I was in town. The night before, I’d left a message on her answering machine, a hulking box on the kitchen counter that was attached to the landline, the only form of communication with the outside world that she had. She wasn’t a technophobe, and I’d seen her throw down some sophisticated Google searches at the library, but she had zero interest in having technology in her house. That had been true in the 80s when I’d been growing up, and she’d refused to have a television, and I was sure it remained true.

I knocked on the sturdy wood-plank door, eyeing another piece of art mounted on it, a bulbous bronze thing that seemed a mix between a gargoyle and a shrunken head. The magic was faint, but I guessed it was the equivalent of an alarm system or maybe a doorbell camera. When had Mom decided she needed all of this stuff?

The door opened, and the pock-faced, scarred, refrigerator of a man looming inside almost had me running back to the car for Nightshade and Fezzik. He was six inches taller than my six feet, his head almost brushing the door frame, and there was no way he weighed less than two-fifty. And none of it was fat.

See? Damas observed from the car. She has found a mate.

Uh, I really doubt it.

The guy couldn’t be more than twenty-five.

He is young and virile. Good for her. Your mother must be a powerful and strong female to attract such a mate at her age.

“I’m Val.” I decided to get to the bottom of this rather than listening to Damas’s commentary. “Is my mom here? I left a message…”

Yes, I’d successfully left that message. That had to mean this was still my mom’s home. Unless she’d moved and had the number transferred…

He squinted at me. “You made the opekun go off.”

“If that means cat detector, there’s a reason.”

He glanced at the door hanging. “The guardian. It detects magic.”

“There’s a bunch of it in the car. My mom? Did she move or what?”

He went back to squinting at me. I couldn’t tell if this guy was slow or only looked slow. “You say you are Sigrid’s daughter, but I have lived here six months, and you’ve never visited. She’s spoken only rarely of you.”

“Yeah, we’re not that close.” I wasn’t about to explain to the Neanderthal why I stayed away from the people I cared about.

“The opekun tells me not to trust you. You may be a demon in disguise.”

“Does it talk to you often? I know a therapist, if you need a referral.”

The uproarious squawking of geese interrupted whatever his response was going to be. I whirled in time to see my silver jaguar bounding through the trees and springing for his prey.

“Damas!” I yelled as the birds flew away en mass, feathers fluttering down in their wake.

Only when he hit the water did I realize the geese hadn’t been his target. He could have caught one if he’d wished to. He landed in the river with a great splash, then proceeded to frolic like a kitten in the shallows.

“Is that a jaguar?” my mom’s nutty houseguest asked.

“Really more of a service animal. I’ll be right back.” I jogged toward the bank, glancing at the house visible through the trees to the right. A dog was barking through a fence at Damas.

“What are you doing?” I wrapped my fingers around the cat figurine, prepared to send him back to his realm.

Cleansing my nostrils. Damas flopped on his side below the bank, water lapping at his hips.

“What? Cats don’t like water. What are you doing?”

I am a jaguar, not a cat, and swimming is joyous. I have webbed paws. He stuck one into the air, demonstrating his soggy webbing. But I had to clean myself because that dreadful pet urinated in its cage and stank up the air. And those sitting in the air. I do not believe it is pleased to have been left in a box in the car with a jaguar.

Ugh. I dropped my forehead into my palm. When I find the crazy elf that tried to blow up Colonel Willard’s building, I’m going to slice her in half with Nightshade. I don’t care if she’s the last elf on Earth.

Leaving Damas to clean himself, I headed back to the front door. A squirrel chattered angrily at me from a tree branch. It was possible I shouldn’t have called Damas out for my road trip.

The houseguest was staring back and forth from me to the jaguar, a smart phone raised to his ear. Who was he calling? The police? Given the dubious way I’d acquired my current vehicle, I didn’t want to deal with the law.

“Could you put that down, please?” I offered my most polite smile while resisting the urge to knock the phone from his hand.

He lowered it, but I had a feeling he’d already made his call.

“Police?” I glanced toward my bathing jaguar. “Or animal control?”

The squirrel cursed me in his chatty tongue. No question which he would prefer.

“Deschutes County Search and Rescue,” he said.

I almost asked if my mom was missing, but then I remembered she’d been training her golden retriever for the program the last time I’d been here. And that it would be shocking if my mom of all people got lost in the woods.