From my WIP I didn’t need him. I didn’t need anyone. Yeah, I was lying to myself as I had since I’d been chased out of California. I hadn’t been this alone since I was fifteen and my older sister had caught the eye of one of the local gangsters. Just a low level boss, barely more than a Fagan himself, now that I thought of it. He’d sent two of his hounds to kick in our front door. It happened so fast. A crash, a hoarse shout, and the explosion of gunshots. My father flew back into his chair, a gaping hole in his chest. One of them kicked my mother in the gut so hard it ruptured several organs. I, being little more than knees and elbows, was slapped to the ground and left there, half conscious, watching my mother gasp out her last breaths on the floor beside me. I swore in that moment that it would never happen again. And I knew exactly what I was doing in the as I spread my legs for every freak I ran across for the next three days. I hurled myself into a grand orgy of flesh for the next two years of my life. So I slept with the worst scum on the planet, hoping I’d catch one of the nanoviruses going around. I wanted power. I wanted power so bad I would sacrifice my so-called ‘virtue,’ any shred of self-respect, and even my life to get it. It’s about being so weak that nothing matters but finding strength. Two weeks after my seventeenth birthday I finally caught the bug. I lay still as death for nearly a week, tended by my only living relative. My little brother, only twelve, became quite the little thief working for the local gangs. He’d been a ‘runner, one of those kids who treated common features of the city as a combination obstacle course and free form gym. No one could catch him. No cop, no thug. No one. Except me, after the bug had taken hold. I can’t begin to describe what it was like to go into that fever a scrawny child and wake up nearly a week later as an intensely hungry but far more powerful woman. I’d finally caught the para virus, I realized. I had slept with a para recently, hadn’t I? I must have. I’d stopped keeping track. It wasn’t until later that I found out exactly how suited we were for one another, the para virus and I. I’d gotten the power I’d wanted. And it changed everything. “We’re here,” he said, pulling me out of my reverie. He’d left my mind to wander while he’d navigated to the place he was seeking. I pulled myself back to myself and snarled at myself. What the hell? I couldn’t afford to let my mind wander like that, I rebuked myself. Then I caught a faint odor in the air and blinked. I’d forgotten what my dragon—when had he become my dragon?—was composed of. He was a gaseous dragon, his true form nothing more than something we perceived as vapor. And what was that vapor? Ether. Damn. I needed to be more careful. He could have a literally intoxicating effect on me, and that was something I couldn’t afford to forget.
Posted on: Tue, 13 Aug 2013 18:12:42 +0000
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