Persephone Alcmedi 00 - Wicked Circle

blinking, stunned that he’d let me go, and stunned by that sound, until I noticed movement in my yard.
    The rest of the dragons were slithering across the rear lawn.
    I ran for the front, where Ivanka was getting to her feet. I shoved the screen door open. On the porch, however, my gait slowed, and I arrived in the yard flabbergasted at the not-so-small dragon. Zoltan’s smooth skin now rippled with scales. He had a gleaming spinal ridge and a crown of ebony horns upon his head. He sat on his haunches, his tail wrapped around him. His neck was curled down, his snout snuffling his new claws. “No wings,” I said.
    “Five claws,” Zhan mumbled beside me, adjusting her robe. “He has five claws!”
    “Does that mean something?” Mountain asked.
    “In Chinese legend, the five-clawed dragon is the symbol of an emperor. Being a black dragon, he is a king of deep, numinous waters.” Her teeth were chattering. Mountain put an arm around her and pulled her to him.
    The other dragons slithered around Zoltan and released cheerful bellows.
    From directly behind me, Creepy whispered, “I can help you, Persephone. More than you can imagine.” He then advanced on Zoltan. Reaching up, he boldly seized the rhinolike horn that had sprouted from the dragon’s snout. “I charge you with the safety of this estate and the woman Persephone. Your life will be forfeit to me if she is harmed during the hours that Menessos is absent. Do you agree to this, dragon?”
    “Wait a minute,” I tromped off the porch. “We don’t even know who the hell you are!”
    Creepy released Zoltan and spun toward me, laughing. “You dubbed me Creepy. That is who I am.”
    “There will be no deal-making—”
    Zoltan lunged forward and shoved his head between me and Creepy. Using his long neck like a restraining arm, Zoltan kept me back as he nodded at Creepy and warbled.
    “No!” I protested, ducking under Zoltan’s neck and coming up right into Creepy’s hands.
    He held my face tenderly in his palms as he said, “It is difficult for me to find time to be away from home . . . so much to do, you know, but I have provided you with protection as I said I would. Now I must go.” Creepy strolled away, toward the grove where the ley line crossed my property.
    I crossed my arms and glared after him. Maybe he could feel it; he put his hood up.
    Letting my arms fall loose at my sides, I asked the dragon, “What have you done?”
    He blinked big green eyes at me and flicked the gill fins at his throat.
    “Get inside before you freeze,” I said to Zhan.
    “I have to check the perimeter guards first.”
    Mountain led the dragons back to the barn. The eel-ones slithered readily away. Zoltan walked. I couldn’t help laughing as he tried to figure out in which order his legs were supposed to lift. He tried one at a time. He tried front two, stretch, back two. He tried left side, right side. By the time he made it to the barn he’d figured out that right front and left rear, followed by left front and right rear, worked best.
    I found Ivanka sitting at the dinette in a cold sweat and murmuring about “vahnting votka.” She had splinted her own arm with wooden cooking spoons and duct tape. I didn’t have any vodka, so I found the ibuprofen and sat four pills and a glass of water in front of her. “Double dose.”
    She frowned at the little pills. “Votka better.”
    “Probably,” I agreed.
    She jostled the pills into a pile in her cupped palm. “Bullet not much bigger.”
    “Ivanka.”
    “I pulled trigger.” Still staring at the pills, she shook her head. “I shot him.”
    “You did the right thing.”
    “I know,” she said unremittingly. “But I miss.”
    After she swallowed the ibuprofen I said, “You need to go to the hospital.”
    “ Da. ”
    Heading upstairs, Zhan called out, “The perimeter guards were unconscious but are waking up and appear unhurt.”
    “Could have been much worse,” Ivanka murmured.
    Minutes later, as Zhan came downstairs dressed in her usual casual suiting, Mountain entered, too. He said, “Zoltan now fills up what spare room the dragon barn had to offer—which wasn’t much.”
    Zhan added, “That man better not feed any other animals on this property or we’ll need more barns.”
    “If he comes back and even so much as tries to feed one of the animals,” Mountain said, “I’m tackling him. Ghost thing or no.”
    “What was he?” Zhan directed her question at me.
    “I don’t know.”